Geas of the Black Axe (Legends of the Nameless Dwarf Book 2)

by D. P. Prior

  “So, tell me, Marshal, how is your strategy?”

  Thumil took a quick glug of mead. “My Lord Corrector, our people have not fought a war in almost two-hundred years, and even then it was in defense of Arx Gravis against the goblins.”

  “I know. You told me. I think it was our last beer together, before you were made Voice. Actually, I seem to remember I drank your beer, because you had to rush off to the Dodecagon. You lost your parents in that battle. You said you were angry with the marshal, even though she’d done nothing wrong. You remember telling me that? You remember telling me that she later came to you—my mother, the marshal—and that she wept with you. You said she was a great woman.”

  “And she was,” Thumil said.

  “Then you’ll know what I have in mind, Thumil. You have your model of greatness.”

  “But Yyalla was no conqueror.”

  “She could have been, if she hadn’t been made to pay for Maldark’s betrayal. If we all hadn’t. One dwarf’s slip up, Thumil, and a slip up he did everything possible to rectify, and yet the Council would have us cower below ground in case we make the wrong choice. In case we fall prey to deception.”

  “And we still might,” Thumil said.

  “We already have. Me, when I returned to the ravine and thought it was overrun with creatures from the Abyss, and you and everybody else now, when the truth is staring you in the face and you still can’t see it. You are blinded by fear, Thumil. Fear and shame for a sin that was nothing to do with us. Maldark was his own dwarf. How long are we going to pay for what he did? We are destined for greater things. Where do you think those stories of the Dwarf Lords and Arnoch came from? If at the last there is no kernel of truth to them, don’t they at least show us what we aspire to be? What we can be, with the right leadership?”

  “But war, Corrector? Is there no other way?”

  “You know what the Senate of New Londdyr did when faced with the threat of Sektis Gandaw? They tried to appease him. They thought if they suppressed the Wayist religion he reviled, he would spare them. How long do you think you’d have lasted under that regime, Thumil? You and that book of yours? These people are not fit to govern, and New Londdyr does nothing to protect the weak and rein in the strong. What the upper-lands need is just rule, firm and impartial. The nurture of a father for those who accept governance; brutal discipline for those who do not.”

  Thumil looked like he was about to object but thought better of it.

  “What, Marshal? Nothing to say? You were always so vocal in debate?”

  “But the logistics of a war with New Londdyr,” Thumil said. “The training, equipment, our lines of supply…”

  “Tomorrow at suns up, Thumil. I want the army marching by then. Assemble every man and woman we can spare at the top of the city. It will be an unstoppable force, which you will lead. And don’t worry, I’ll see to it Cordy is well looked after.”

  THE PEOPLE’S ARMY

  Thumil wasted no time sending messengers up and down the Aorta in virtually unbroken relays. Businesses were stripped back to a skeleton staff, as those deemed fit enough to fight were summoned to platoons, which were assigned to brigades, which came together to form divisions. Put it all together, and the dwarves had an army of at least forty-thousand, even if most of them had barely touched a weapon since their mandatory training at the Ephebe. It wasn’t enough, not if they were to storm New Londdyr.

  Coalheart put the fear of shog in the councilors. He was proving a good choice. Suddenly, the prevaricating scuts were decisive and well-organized, and competing to outdo one another.

  Grago came up with the bright idea of using miners as sappers and sending them to undermine New Londdyr’s Cyclopean Walls. There were grumblings and the kindling of protest, but the Krypteia silenced the naysayers and put an end to that. Sometimes, the health of a race could only be restored by excising all traces of disease or dissent, the black axe said. Nameless saw that now, as if it should always have been patently obvious.

  Coalheart reported that folk were calling it a second butchery, and recommended a mass roundup of the most outspoken. On the black axe’s advice, Nameless ordered a string of assassinations, Councilor Konin among them. Konin had swiftly proven a disappointment. Rather than aping Nameless, or even Grago, and entering into the spirit of the cull, he’d continued with his poor imitation of Dythin Rala, and fallen asleep in the Dodecagon. While everyone accepted it had been a long day, there really was no excuse.

  Nameless instructed Councilor Dorley to put the word around that it was a purification, the honing of the dwarves into a unified force capable of rising to unparalleled heights of greatness. Dorley had teams of scholars and students copy out some hastily written words, and by mid-afternoon, a stirring manifesto was in the hands of every brigade leader for the evening’s pep talk to the troops.

  Already, Nameless could see glimmerings of the Dwarf Lords in his people. Cut free of the chaff that had weighed them down and turned them into cowards with their heads in the sand, they were suddenly driven, industrious, and honed to a keen point. Within less than a day of Nameless’s arrival, Arx Gravis would have rivaled an ants’ nest for organization.

  That night, though, he didn’t sleep. He went with an escort of Black Cloaks to the greenery of the Sward on the sixteenth level, with its ledge-top forest and gardens; to the house he’d grown up in, the home he’d shared with Droom and Lucius.

  The Krypteia kept watch outside in shifts, while Coalheart was sent back to the Dodecagon to inform the councilors they were permitted home for the night, on condition that they were ready to see the troops off at dawn.

  Something about the councilors irked Nameless, and the black axe felt it, too. It advised sweeping them aside before they could conspire against the new regime. Perhaps in the morning, if they even looked at Nameless the wrong way, he’d do just that; but for now, he couldn’t see any real threat, even if he felt one. He doubted any of the councilors had the guts or imagination to flee the ravine, and even if they did, Coalheart had already tripled the number of Krypteia in concealer cloaks at the top. No one could get in or out of Arx Gravis, unless they were marching with the army.

  Nameless seated himself at the kitchen table with a steaming cup of kaffa before him. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t drink it; just having it there anchored him in some small way to the dwarf he’d once been.

  From time to time, the murmur of voices drifted to him from outside. It was the Krypteia changing shifts, he was sure. Strain as he might, he didn’t hear anything to confirm his suspicions they were talking about him.

  He felt cold beneath the Lich Lord’s armor, clammy with gooseflesh. It was odd how the invulnerability it conferred did nothing to allay fears of a dagger in the dark.

  Shadows danced in macabre patterns around the walls, coalesced in front of the hearth. Once or twice, they startled him; they took on the density and shape of dwarves, as if Droom hadn’t really died in a mining accident, and Lucius hadn’t been flayed alive by the seethers.

  Nameless stared at the darkling forms until they dispersed. His heart beat a stuttering tattoo that his teeth rattled in time to. His guts lurched, and he swooned, as if the room had just revolved around him. When he steadied himself with his hands on the table, wood splintered from the force of the giant’s gauntlets.

  Had they been ghosts, or was it just lack of sleep?

  Then a new strain of fear gripped him: What if he was the ghost, and the shadows were all he was permitted to see of the living? What if these were the scraps thrown to him by the Demiurgos as he suffered an eternity in the Abyss?

  He waited and waited for some clue to the reality of things, and the axe waited where he’d left it, leaning against the door jamb. Its whisperings were subliminal, yet its presence was palpable, a deeper opacity against the dark. The air throbbed with the empathic pulses it sent him. Muted echoes rippled out across the room. They felt every bit like the house’s very own heartbeat.

 
; The shield atop the table rocked and clattered, as if it slept fitfully. Shudders passed through the plates of the armor, and the gauntlets tightened then slackened on his hands, over and over.

  Once or twice, Nameless felt himself nodding off, but inky feelers from the axe whipped out and shocked him alert. He could feel them weaving through his brain, building networks and tracks of shadow for his thoughts to hurtle along. He came to see them as the only thing binding him together. Without the efforts of the axe and the other three artifacts, he felt he would drip away through the cracks in reality.

  When horns sounded outside, and the tramp of booted feet passed the window, he leapt from his seat to peer through the shutters. He was sure the army was coming for him, that dissent had fomented into outright rebellion.

  A handful of Red Cloaks marched at the head of a column of civilians, each of whom was armed with whatever they could find. Some had shields, swords, axes, and hammers that had likely been handed down from generation to generation. Others had knives more suited to the kitchen, or farm implements and blacksmith’s tools. They looked either surly or grim, cowed or totally focused on the task in hand.

  When they headed across the Sward toward the Aorta, and Nameless spied the first speckles of red light on the treetops in Tranquility Park across the way, he sighed with relief. Dawn had come, and it was time to see the army off.

  ***

  Coalheart met him from the Aorta when Nameless and his bodyguard of five Krypteia reached the top level of the city.

  “All ready and waiting, my Lord Corrector,” Coalheart said with evident pride.

  Beyond him, the walkways and plazas were filled to bursting with dwarves armed for war. A smattering of Red Cloaks stood in with each platoon, and there were hundreds of platoons. Through the gaps in the walkways, Nameless could see it was the same thing on the three levels below: crowds upon crowds of dwarves ready and waiting to do as he commanded.

  A lump formed in his throat. This is what they had been born for. After so many centuries skulking within the ravine, the people of Arx Gravis were on the cusp of their true destiny.

  “There’s barely a thousand left to run the city,” Coalheart explained as they walked toward the central arch Aristodeus had set with wards against the Abyss. It was still being disassembled according to the black axe’s instructions. There was no threat from the Abyss. There never had been. It was all part of the scaremongering the Council of Twelve had used to maintain absolute control.

  The councilors themselves were on the other side of the arch, most of them bleary-eyed and barely suppressing yawns.

  Nameless scanned the group as he approached, watching for the slightest hint of betrayal. He saw none. They were either innocent, or extremely good actors, and there was no easy way of knowing.

  Grago stepped toward him and offered an obsequious bow. It wasn’t what was wanted, but at least he was making an effort. Bowing and scraping was too demeaning for a dwarf, or at least what Nameless had in mind for his people. He wanted obedience with dignity, and a society in which the strong prospered and weren’t afraid to challenge and take what lay within their grasp. So far, only Coalheart seemed to have got that in its entirety, but Grago was a close second.

  “Magnificent, is it not, my Lord Corrector?” He swept out his arm to encompass the entire level.

  Nameless nodded as he turned a slow circle, running the eye-slit over the massed troops. He rested his gaze for a moment on the tunnel mouth that led away to the scarolite mines. That was the route Droom had taken to work most mornings. He remembered taking it himself once, before he went into Gehenna after Lucius. Rugbeard had taken him, Kal, Muckman, and Ming by train to the headframe. They’d descended to the sump pit at the base of the mine. He recalled fleeting glimpses of shifting walls, hands reaching out of the stone, and then slaughter as Thumil led the Red Cloaks to contain the threat. They had been lucky that time, but it had been a presage of the massacre that was to come.

  The rush of water drew his attention away from the tunnel to the artesian well pumping its load to the top of the aqueduct that hugged the ravine wall. The flow was stained red by the rising suns, and it cascaded in bloody torrents to each successive level, until it found it resting place in the Sanguis Terrae at the bottom.

  Nameless came full circle then glared at the councilors behind Grago. Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Everything was in place just as he’d commanded. If anyone was in opposition, they were doing a good job of disguising it. He thought at first it was because he hadn’t prepared a speech, words with which to fire the troops and send them into glory.

  But then he realized what it was, and he turned the great helm on Coalheart.

  “Where is the marshal?”

  Thumil should have been there, waiting for his arrival. He was supposed to be the focal point, the strategist, the leader of the army. More than that, he should have been the one to give a speech.

  Coalheart’s eyes roved the assembled soldiers. There was a slight tightening of his cheeks.

  Grago said, “All the generals are here. I can only assume Marshal Thumil has been delayed.”

  Nameless clenched his fist around the axe haft, and Grago took a step back.

  “You will give a speech, Councilor Grago,” Nameless said. “Just make sure they understand not to return without victory, and that deserters will be eviscerated, and any family left behind will be fed to the gibunas.”

  He turned on his heel, no longer wanting to see the army process up the switchback pathway that led out of the ravine.

  “Coalheart,” he barked over his shoulder. “With me.”

  ***

  When they reached Thumil’s house on the fourteenth, the front door was locked and the window shutters all closed.

  Not waiting for the Black Cloaks that had come with them to break in, Nameless shoved the door, and it shattered into a thousand shards and splinters.

  He strode along the hall, checked the hearth room, the kitchen, the bedroom, but the house was empty.

  Sometime during the night, after delegating the assembly of the army to his generals, Thumil had fled.

  And he’d taken his wife and daughter with him.

  THE SEDITION

  The conical control room at the heart of the Perfect Peak was brimming with homunculi when Shadrak stepped through the sliding door. They lined every walkway, all the way to the truncated ceiling at the apex. It was like entering a hall of judgment, the way they all stopped whatever it is they had been doing and stared at him, most with barely disguised loathing on their faces. He was a discard, he got that. Imperfect on account of his pallid skin and pink eyes. To them, he was untouchable.

  Aristodeus stood center stage on the ground floor, his theatrical props a pipe and a steaming mug of kaffa. Mephesch stood beside him, angling looks up to the overshadowing crowd.

  “And here he is,” Aristodeus said, beckoning Shadrak over.

  Mephesch smiled warmly, but his eyes were filled with calculation.

  “This is it?” Shadrak said. “Your plan to stop Nameless? Bring in the scuts responsible for everything that’s gone wrong.”

  “This is the Sedition, Shadrak. They had nothing to do with the black axe. All they’ve ever done is try to destroy it.”

  “Yeah,” Shadrak said, with a withering look at Mephesch, “by sending us on a fool’s errand to get the three artifacts that made it possible for him to reclaim it. Face it, Baldy, you shogged up. And you, Mephesch: either your rival homunculi saw you coming and pulled the wool over your eyes, or this Sedition business is just more bullshit, and you’re all in it up to your necks.”

  “Hear us out,” Aristodeus said. “There may yet be hope. If you’d gone rushing off after Nameless like you wanted to, either he’d be dead, or you would.”

  “He would,” Shadrak said.

  “The Lich Lord’s armor renders him invulnerable,” Mephesch said.

  “Yeah, well how did that work
out for Blightey? Only pity is, Bird ain’t here to do that trick with the beetles again, is he?”

  A low moan passed among the homunculi on the walkways.

  “And besides,” Shadrak said, not wanting to dwell on Bird. Losing the shapeshifting homunculus was a blow he’d not even begun to recover from. Bird was the link between what Shadrak remembered as a child and what he didn’t. More than that, Bird had saved him. Saved him from being thrown away by a people who had no use for imperfection. “It ain’t like the armor covers his head, is it?”

  “His mother’s helm is scarolite,” Aristodeus said with a roll of his eyes. “It’s just as resistant to force.”

  “Not the eye-slit.”

  “Do you want him dead?” Aristodeus said. “I was under the impression that was the Archon. I am trying, once again, to find an alternative to killing Nameless.”

  “Tell that to the dwarves, assuming there’s any left. I take it he’s reached the ravine?”

  “He has,” came a voice from the second tier.

  The homunculi gathered at the railing parted to reveal one of the screens above the consoles dotting every walkway. It showed the face of a homunculus with olive skin and hair twisted into long gray ropes.

  “Abednago is our eyes and ears at Arx Gravis,” Mephesch said.

  “This time it’s different,” Abednago said from the screen. “At first, there were only a handful of deaths, but within hours the killings mounted. But it’s not just him doing it this time. The Black Cloaks have formed into assassination squads. And this morning, an army left the ravine to wage war on New Londdyr. Everybody who can fight has been sent, leaving barely a thousand behind to keep the city running.”

  “Sounds reckless,” Shadrak said. “Does the Senate know?”

  “They should do by now,” Mephesch said. “We sent word to the Academy wizards.”