by D. P. Prior
Shadrak came up blasting, blasting, blasting, and then, within ten feet of Nameless, first one flintlock clicked, and then the other.
Shadrak flung them to the ground with a curse.
He was out of bullets.
Nameless laughed out loud. He struck the axe head against his shield, and he advanced.
Shadrak just stood there. He’d run out of options, that was clear. It was written all over his face. To his credit, the assassin didn’t even try to run. Not that it would have done him any good. It was a rare thing for the black axe to miss when thrown. It wouldn’t happen again.
Nameless crossed the space between them with brisk, unwavering steps, raised the axe—
Shadrak reached behind. His hand came back, aiming a stubby black pistol—his Thundershot. He lunged in, pressed the barrel into the eye-slit of the great helm, and fired.
Nameless’s head exploded.
Thunderclaps rolled over him in ever-increasing echoes. He saw Droom and Lucius, Cordy and Thumil. They were laughing. Drinking.
And then he was falling. The black dog’s maw leapt up at him, engulfed him. Light swirled away into a diminishing point, but just as it was about to wink away, power surged from the axe. Everything it had, it poured into his skull. It throbbed in his grasp, bucked and kicked. Answering surges of puissance poured from the gauntlets, the armor, the shield. They wove virulence around him, braided it into a twisted lance of blackness, then drove it between his eyes.
They were as much a part of him now as his lungs, his heart, his mind. He was bound to them, but they were also bound to him. And they gave everything they had to keep him alive.
His heart pumped shadows, not blood. They swelled to an irresistible pressure that continued to build.
The Lich Lord’s armor rattled and shook. The gauntlets pulsed upon his hands. The Shield of Warding began to warp and buckle.
The Pax Nanorum throbbed. Its haft swelled in his grip. It kicked and screeched and juddered.
And then it shattered into jagged shards of obsidian that dissolved into wisps of smoke.
The giant’s gauntlets sloughed away from Nameless’s hands, as if they were made of oil. The Lich Lord’s armor melted into shadow, and the Shield of Warding crumbled into dust.
Finally, the scarolite great helm cracked down the middle, then fell away, like the shell of a husked seed.
Nameless’s eyes opened on a misty haze.
He was on his back, and as his vision came into focus, he could see a gibuna hanging from the underside of a walkway high above.
Tension bled away from him, left his limbs heavy but blissfully relaxed, like he’d soaked for an age in a hot tub.
The only thing that ruined it was the sound of someone bawling. He shut his eyes against the noise, and when he did, he saw a woman—a woman he was sure he’d seen in a painting. She was fair-haired, but had Nameless’s hazel eyes. What he could see of her torso was chiseled granite. A strong woman, a fighting one.
And he knew her then for his mother, as captured in the picture Droom had commissioned from Durgish Duffin.
Tears tracked down her cheeks, and she mouthed something to him. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought she said, “It is over.”
CITY OF BLOOD
Shadrak took aim at Nameless’s unprotected head. The dwarf’s beard was matted into clumps, and his skin was pale from being shut away from the suns.
Nameless stared up at him in shock and bewilderment.
“Laddie? Laddie, what’s going on?”
He wore only a frayed gambeson and soiled britches. His boots were scuffed, the leather wrinkled. Angry welts encircled his wrists, where the giant’s gauntlets had refused to be removed. It was the only proof they had ever existed. The Lich Lord’s armor, too, and the Shield of Warding: gone, as if they had been but conjurers’ tricks.
Without them, Nameless was just flesh and blood. Without them, he was vulnerable.
“Shadrak.”—Stupid’s voice from behind. “It is finished. Do not let them kill him.”
Shadrak whirled round but only caught a glimpse of a crooked hat sinking beneath the rocky ground.
Cordy’s sobbing drew his eyes back the other way.
White-robed councilors were coming out of the cave mouth, leading children by the hand. There were women nursing babies, too. The dwarves assembled for their last stand parted to let the newcomers through.
A hawk-faced councilor—Grago—saw Nameless was down, and yelled, “Finish him! Before it’s too late!”
A red-cloaked soldier helped a comrade to stand from beneath a battered shield.
“You two,” Grago said. “It is your duty. Do it!”
They started toward Nameless, and the mass of dwarves with tools for weapons followed like a lynch mob.
Shadrak switched his aim from Nameless to the crowd. They kept on coming. He let off a shot in the air, and they stopped. A long line fanned out across the ravine floor. Angry eyes flashed his way.
Nameless sat up and looked around dumbly.
The mob parted as Cordy came to the front with the bloody body of her baby clutched to her breast.
Realization flooded Nameless’s face.
“Oh, shog. Oh, shog. Oh, shog.” He let out a whimper that turned into a groan, that grew into a wail of inconsolable torment.
Cordy advanced on him, and Nameless stared at her child, eyes wide with the horror of what he’d done.
Through the opening in the line of dwarves, Shadrak saw Thumil’s spiked head glaring at them.
Nameless saw it, too, and he threw himself face-first on the ground, sobbing and shuddering.
Cordy knelt in front of him, grabbed his hair, and forced his head up. Made him stare at her baby.
He wailed and thrashed and screamed, but she would not let him look away.
“Enough!” Shadrak said.
But she was relentless.
Shadrak pointed the Thundershot at her. “I said enough!”
Her eyes spat fire at him. “It can never be enough,” she growled. “Never!”
She smashed Nameless’s head into the ground, then kicked him in the ribs.
“Get up!” she yelled. “Get up, you shogger! Finish what you started!”
“Cordy…” Nameless groaned. “Cordy…”
“It wasn’t him,” Shadrak said, his voice shrill and childlike. “It was the axe. It was the scutting axe.”
Cordy opened her arms, her baby hanging limply from one hand. “Kill me, shogger,” she said to Nameless. She kicked him in the head. “Kill me!”
“I’ll shogging kill you, if you don’t back off,” Shadrak said. The Thundershot wavered in his hand.
Cordy walked up until the barrel pressed against her head. “Go on, then. This scut’s already killed everything that was good about me. If he’s too pathetic to finish the job, then do it for him.”
Shadrak snapped his eyes shut. Kadee’s face was there waiting for him. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her chin trembled, and her eyes pleaded with him.
He lowered the gun.
“Fine,” Cordy said, turning away and striding back through the line of dwarves. She dropped to one knee beside her husband’s decapitated body and lay the baby on his chest. Gently, she lifted each of Thumil’s arms in turn and closed them around the tiny corpse of the child they’d had together.
“I gave you an order,” Grago yelled at the silently watching dwarves.
An elderly white-robe placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come, Grago. It is finished.”
“No, Moary. It is not finished while the Butcher still breathes.”
Moary tightened his grip on Grago’s shoulder and pressed his face up close. “I said, it is finished.”
Looks of shock passed among the other councilors. Grago opened his mouth to protest, but changed his mind and strode away.
Cordy stood and came back toward Shadrak and Nameless. This time, it wasn’t her baby she held, it was a book.
Nameless pushed him
self to his knees and watched her approach, as if she were his executioner.
She came to a halt in front of him. Her eyes were narrowed to seething slits of hatred. She struck him in the face with the book, then dropped it on the ground. A violent shudder threatened to unbalance her, but she clenched her fists and turned away. She stumbled, then walked, then ran through the crowd and headed for the ladders leading up from the base of the ravine.
The two surviving Red Cloaks looked at each other, then ran after her.
“Cordy, the baby,” one of them cried. “Thumil.”
But Cordy reached a ladder and started climbing without a single look back.
Councilor Moary cast his rheumy eyes over Nameless, closed them a moment, then said in a voice full of grief, “Councilors, dwarves of Arx Gravis, we must leave this place. Leave and never come back.”
He took a shuddering breath, then turned and started to shepherd the remnants of his people toward the ladders.
Shadrak looked to Nameless for a reaction, but there was none. Nameless remained on his knees, staring at the book Cordy had dumped in front of him.
“It was Thumil’s,” he muttered. “Thumil’s.”
“Nameless,” Shadrak said. “They’re leaving.”
“Thumil’s,” Nameless said again.
“Nameless, for shog’s sake. You can’t just stay here.”
“It was Thumil’s.”
Shadrak’s eyes found the impaled head once more. It seemed to him it shed tears of blood for the bodies heaped around it in mangled piles.
The floor of the ravine was slick with gore. Streams of crimson came together in an oozing lake. The stench was suddenly overpowering.
Shadrak gagged. No matter how many times he’d killed, how much death he’d seen, nothing could have prepared him for this, and now it was all over, now his body was starting to stand down, he was overcome with the true horror of all that had transpired.
His guts twisted, and he vomited. He staggered away from Nameless and went on heaving till nothing else would come up.
And still Nameless stared dumbly at Thumil’s book, muttering his friend’s name over and over, as if it could undo all that he’d done. He’d lost his shogging mind, and there was nothing Shadrak could do about it.
As the dwarves continued their exodus from the ravine that had housed them for untold centuries, he turned on his heel and ran toward the lake, and toward the plane ship that waited just below the surface.
As he waded out into the waters, a wailing cry echoed out across the ravine floor, and he knew without a doubt, Nameless was as lost to the world as the damned screaming away eternity in the Abyss.
THE GARDEN OF TRANQUILITY
Six levels of the city, Nameless carried baby Marla, all the way to the sixteenth he used to call home. The trees of the Sward, where he and Lucius had played as children, were no more than a brooding presence at the fringes of his awareness. The tinkling waters of Lord’s Fountain seemed to him a sonorous death knell.
He found a spot beneath a juniper bush in Tranquility Park, set Marla down, and began to dig away at the loamy earth with one of the broken halves of his ma’s scarolite helm.
An hour he dug. Maybe more. But still it was not deep enough. He climbed into the hole he’d made and scooped out loose soil with his hands, till he reached the rock beneath. Satisfied at last, he reached up for the baby and lay her gently to rest.
But he wasn’t finished yet.
He headed back to the floor of the ravine, back to the heaped and bloodied corpses. Back to Thumil’s headless body. He dragged it to the end of a rope the Krypteia had left trailing from the walkway above. He took his time securing it, then went back for the head.
Thumil stared at him with dead eyes. Gore dripped from the stump of his neck and ran down the spike it was impaled upon. Nameless licked his lips and reached for the head, drew back his hand. All he saw in his old friend’s blank gaze was accusation, and the promise that Nameless would never forget what he’d done, never be free of its stain.
He turned away and ran for one of the ladders that led up. When he made the walkway, he hauled up the body, unbound the rope, and hoisted Thumil to his shoulder.
It felt like his kneecaps were riddled with shards of glass as he climbed the steps around the Aorta. The sweat soaking his gambeson dyed the fabric pink from all the accumulated blood. But he refused to rest, even when he reached the sixteenth once more and began the long, slow walk to the grave he’d prepared.
He lowered Thumil into the hole, then climbed back in to return baby Marla to her father’s cold embrace.
By the time he’d covered the bodies with dirt, the suns were going down, leaving the ravine in a limbo of half-light.
He sat by the graveside and thumbed through the pages of the book Cordy had left him: Thumil’s Liber Via. There was very little within he understood. The death of Old Dwarvish as a language suddenly felt like a portent of the fate that awaited the survivors of his race, the few hundred who had fled from the site of the slaughter, and from the butcher they had left alive.
He closed the book and made his own wordless prayer of tears that seemed like they would never cease. But eventually, even the fullest of wells runs dry, and when he was reduced to dry sobs and heaves, he stood and made his way to Lem Starkle’s smithy.
He’d seen what the upper-lands had to offer, seen how wondrous and how terrible they could be. But the dwarves of Arx Gravis hadn’t left the ravine in a millennia. They would be prey to the people and beasts of Malkuth.
He entered the forge and found himself a sturdy double-bladed axe, tested it for balance.
Well, he was going to make sure the last of the dwarves survived. And then he would show them it was safe to return home, even if that meant they had to kill him first.
EPILOGUE
As Raphoe disappeared below the horizon, and plunged the world into a darkness broken only by the two smaller moons and a smattering of stars, Buck Fargin parked his covered wagon in the shadow of New Londdyr’s walls. He jumped down from the driver’s seat and checked on his boy, Nils, who was lightly snoring in the back. The lad had wanted more involvement now Buck was boss of the Night Hawks, but already he was proving a shogging waste of space, no better than his useless cow of a mother.
Still, if the dwarf was as good as his word, there’d be plenty of work for the lad to do, packing the wagon with a shitload of merchandise fresh from the ravine city.
If it had been anyone else, Buck would have let Big Jake or one of the others handle the transaction; but the dwarf was a mate of Shadrak’s. Or at least he had been. No one had seen the former guild lord since he’d killed the the newly elected First Senator and fled the city. But Buck felt he owed him, all the same. It was Shadrak who’d arranged for him to take charge in the event of just such a crisis.
Bang on time, the dwarf emerged from the night, leading a heavily-laden goat.
“You got the stuff?” Buck said.
The stench that preceded the dwarf on the breeze was rank: stale sweat and blood.
The dwarf handed him the rope he led the goat with.
“Scarolite mining tools, laddie. Should fetch you a fortune in the markets.”
“You ain’t kidding,” Buck said, checking the bundles on the goat’s back to make sure it was all there.
“Did you find them?” the dwarf asked.
“It weren’t easy,” Buck said. “They’re doing everything to cover their tracks. No wonder you lost them. Couple of my boys picked up the trail past Brink. You ask me, they’re heading toward the brigand settlements. I can only imagine what sort of greeting a few hundred homeless dwarves are gonna get there.”
“Brigands?”
“All the scum that overflows from Malfen. You know, the shithole gateway to Qlippoth on the other side of the Farfalls.”
“You think that’s where they’re heading? Into the land of nightmares?”
“If they are,” Buck said, “they’re shogge
d. But look, mate, you ain’t paying me to stand about talking. You got your news, I got my scarolite tools. Nice doing business with you.”
The dwarf lurched toward him. The cloth-wrapped head of an axe poked up over one shoulder. He had on a bulging backpack that clinked when he moved.
“Take me there, laddie, to these brigand settlements.”
“That’ll cost you extra.”
The dwarf closed in on him. “I’ve already paid you more than enough.”
Buck licked his lips and took a step back, leading the goat with him. His heart was thudding in his chest, and his bladder was suddenly full to bursting.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Now,” the dwarf said.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Now.”
Buck rubbed his chin, racking his brains for a plan. There was no way he was going out to the brigand settlements. Last time he’d done that, he’d almost been given his fruits to wear as a necklace. They were hard people out there, not the kind he wanted to mess with again.
He thought about who he could send from the guild, but they’d want far too much in the way of payment. It would eat up most of his profits.
And then a thought occurred to him. He turned and looked back at the wagon, then handed the dwarf the rope that held the goat.
“Hold on. I’ll be right back.”
He scurried to the wagon bed and shook his boy awake. It was about time the good-for-nothing little runt made himself useful.
“Nils, get up, you lazy toe-rag. I got a job for you.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you especially to:
Amber Leigh, Anthony Prior, Barbara Prior, Chris Taylor, Conrad Bucsis, Dayve Walsh, Frederick Holbrook, Jared Johnson, Kenny Howell, Melinda LeBaron, Mitchell Hogan, M.R. Mathias, Paula Prior, Ray Nicholson, Roel Cisneros, Scott Morrison, Zak Reynolds, Bob Neufeld (“Voice of the Nameless Dwarf”), Anton Kokarev, Mike Nash, Patrick Stacey, Laurie McLean, and Valmore Daniels.