The Ant-Man of Malfen

by Derek Prior; C. S. Marks

  Nameless groaned and tried to tear his thoughts away from the atrocities he’d committed with the axe. He removed the sundered great helm from his pack and then pulled out a heavy leather-bound book. Raphoe was half visible above the horizon now and he could just about read by her light.

  He opened Shader’s Libram at random, hoping to find some nugget of inspiration. The knight had given him the holy book as a parting gift. Shader’s eyes had been full of pity, and he’d offered the Libram with a despairing shrug, as if he were saying it couldn’t hurt, but he doubted it would do much good either. Nameless had accepted it as he’d had nowhere else to turn. So far, the Libram represented nothing more than a vague hope—a hope that never lasted beyond the opening of its first pages.

  He scanned the Aeternam words looking for some sort of guidance. His Aeternam was patchy, to say the least. He’d gleaned what he could from his brother’s writings, but he really only recognised the odd word or phrase. The language was alien to Aethir, but it nevertheless struck a familiar chord—as if it was in the blood. It had caught on in New Jerusalem and had grown to become the language of formality. The dwarves of Arx Gravis, however, had shied away from its study.

  Nameless flicked idly through the pages of the Libram but saw nothing to latch onto. It was a hopeless activity in this mood, he decided, closing the book with care and putting it away. He was about to replace the pieces of the helm, but instead picked them up and studied them by the light of the fire.

  The helm had been Aristodeus’ desperate gambit. It had isolated Nameless from the axe, but then Aristodeus had fallen prey to deception himself, sending Nameless and his companions on a quest to retrieve three artefacts that could, together, destroy the Pax Nanorum: the gauntlets of the Fire Giant, Sartis; the invulnerable armour of the Liche Lord, Otto Blightey; and the Shield of the Cynocephalus. The resulting catastrophe had proven costly to everyone, Aristodeus included.

  It was a pity the helm’s memory-stripping capacity didn’t extend to the deeds Nameless had committed whilst wearing it. Instead, he’d been bereft of a past that, for all he knew, held his childhood, his family, his accomplishments on the way to adulthood—the story of his life; his name. Surely the dwarves of Arx Gravis would remember who he’d been before. Nobody had said during his tyranny, but then nobody would have dared. Maybe if he caught up to them; maybe if he could atone for what he’d done…

  Nameless dropped the two halves of the helm into the flames. He knew they wouldn’t burn, but he didn’t really care.

  Some sins can never be atoned for. The best he could do was tell his people they were safe to go home. He should be the one to stay in Qlippoth.

  Nameless tried to drag himself away from his thoughts but his body refused to move. He sat as if he were entombed in stone, condemned to spend an eternity wallowing in misery and regret.

  He twitched some life into his fingers and slowly curled them around the handle of his sheathe-knife. With his other tremulous hand, he opened the front of his shirt and then drew the blade across his chest leaving a deep wet gouge in its wake.

  Action is what was needed. Nameless dropped the blade. Decisiveness. A course to follow.

  He lay back on the hard ground as a new warmth seeped into his veins.

  As soon as he’d rested, and morning had broken, he’d head into Malfen. There was something he needed to do before he continued with his quest: a badge that needed to be worn, a statement that he was no longer fit to be called a dwarf.

  Nameless yawned and studied the pallid face of Raphoe. Another screech sounded in the distance and something fluttered across the moon. Probably just a bird, he thought, as weariness numbed his mind and slumber overcame him.

  ***

  The milky disk of Raphoe loomed above the jagged horizon like a frosted mirror. Charos’ cratered face glowered opposite, spurned and vengeful; tiny Enoi hung lonely in the darkness between them.

  Nils shivered and hugged his damp cloak about his shoulders. To his tired eyes, the largest of the moons, Raphoe, looked like it was teetering, about to shatter across the Farfall Mountains.

  He hunkered down by the embers of the dying fire. The drizzle had petered out but the damage was done. His clothes were soaked through and his bones might as well have been made of ice.

  Perhaps he should have gone with the dwarf.

  Nils blew out a jet of air and watched it roil away as white mist. In his heart he knew he wasn’t up to Malfen, not if there were any truth to the stories he’d heard about the place. It was just too darned close to Qlippoth and all the horrors that festered there.

  An eerie screech split the still night air and Nils sat bolt upright, straining his senses.

  A shadow passed across the face of Raphoe and flitted off behind the valley wall. Probably a bat, Nils thought, and was about to settle himself back down when the screech came again, softer this time, but also nearer.

  A black shape swooped down the embankment and flapped to the ground across the fire from Nils. Nils backed away on his hands and feet scrabbling for his sword. His hand closed around the hilt and he slid the blade from its scabbard. The thing opposite craned its head and stretched out its huge wings. Nils could only see a silhouette against the ivory backdrop of Raphoe, but he could tell it was a bird of some sort. A very large bird—half as tall as a man and with a neck like a shepherd’s crook. The bird-thing drew its wings around its body like a cloak, shook its head and started to grow.

  Nils stood and scurried backwards as the air rippled around the creature. There was a whiff of sulphur, a fizzing crackle, and Nils found himself gawping at the night-blackened outline of a man.

  “Well met, young traveller,” the man said in a voice both strong and amiable. “I am Silas Thrall, and I am very, very lost.”

  “Stand where I can see you,” said Nils waving his sword. His heart bounced in his ribcage and his knees were trembling.

  Silas Thrall circled the fire until he was standing in the stark light of Raphoe, half his features still in darkness. He was a tall man, lean and angular. The moonlight cast deep shadows upon his face, giving his eyes more of the look of empty sockets. It was a stern face, drawn and sallow. He had the look of a pasty scholar about him, like the academics at the Academy in New Jerusalem. He was garbed in a long black coat that came to his ankles. The frilled cuffs of a pale shirt peeked from beneath the coat sleeves and a canvass bag hung over one shoulder.

  “Are you a demon?” Nils took a two handed grip on the sword to steady it. His fingers felt numb, his legs weak and ungainly. “Have you put the curse on me?”

  Silas speared him with a look that blazed from the gloam.

  “Fiends cannot cross the mountains from Qlippoth,” he said with a sly look to the horizon. “And the last I heard, there were no demons in Malkuth—unless you count certain senators I could mention. No, my friend, I am but a simple scholar and your curse is nothing more than the fouling of your pants.”

  Nils let go of the sword with one hand so he could feel his behind.

  “What you saying? I ain’t scared. I’m a guildsman.”

  Silas sat on his haunches and gave a withering look to the failing fire.

  “That I don’t doubt,” he said waving his hand above the embers and causing them to roar back to life. “Now, my good fellow, what say you put away the sword and join me for a late supper?”

  “What we gonna eat?” said Nils. “Dirt? Maggots? I tell you, I’m starving and I’ve found nothing that will fill a rat’s belly.”

  “Then you’ve been looking in the wrong places,” said Silas, snapping his fingers and sighing with satisfaction.

  Nils gawped at the blazing fire. A haunch of lamb was turning on a spit, fat popping and sizzling in the flames. Fresh baked rolls appeared at his feet with a selection of cheeses and a glass of wine.

  “How—?”

  Silas seated himself cross-legged on the ground and lifted his glass. He took a long sniff, sipped and swilled the wine around in
his mouth before swallowing.

  “It’s not just demons who work wonders,” he said, breaking off a piece of cheese and holding it before his mouth. “There are a thousand ways to tap the occult energies surrounding us, and a thousand names for those who do so. I’ve known wizards and mages, sorcerers and shamans, prestidigitators, alchemists and necromancers.” He said the last in a hushed tone and gave Nils a sideways look. “Science, magic, dream-lore. Call it what you will. I choose ‘providence’ and, for myself, I take the name of student.”

  Nils wanted to say something but found his eyes drawn to the feast laid out before him. His lips were dripping saliva and his stomach groaned like a creaking door. He snatched up a roll and tore into it, at the same time cramming in a hunk of cheese and slurping down some wine.

  Silas watched him with eyes wreathed in shadow.

  “Enjoy,” he said, “and when you’ve finished, perhaps there’s something you can do for me.”

  “What?” grunted Nils through a mouthful of food. His nose drew him to the roasting lamb and he dropped the roll and took up his sword so that he could cut himself a slice.

  “As I said,” Silas leaned towards him, “I am lost. I hail from the Academy at New Jerusalem and lack the practical skills necessary for such a journey as I have undertaken.”

  Nils chewed rapidly and swallowed, washing the lamb down with another gulp of wine.

  “Why come all the way out here? Don’t you know this is the borderland? There’s nothing beyond those mountains other than Qlippoth, and believe me, that’s somewhere you don’t want to go.”

  “Oh, pish,” said Silas. “Stories to scare the unenlightened. There are things hidden in Qlippoth you wouldn’t believe. But first I must find Malfen. I’ve reason to believe a certain Shent may have information that could help me in my quest.”

  “The Ant-Man?” said Nils. “You’ve got to be joking. I heard he eats travellers for breakfast.”

  Silas laughed. It was a good natured laugh, honest and straight from the belly.

  “More tales to frighten the children with. Call me an old cynic,” he said, “but I think our beloved senators put this sort of thing about to keep the slaves in their place.”

  Nils impaled another piece of meat on the tip of his sword and slid it free with his fingers.

  “What slaves? There’s no slaves in New Jerusalem. That’s why it’s the city of the free. Even when Sektis Gandaw lorded it over Malkuth, the city remained independent.”

  Silas shook his head as if Nils were a naive child.

  “We’re all slaves, my friend, penned in by those mighty Cyclopean walls. Oh, I’ll agree they were built to keep Gandaw out in the first instance, but what purpose do they serve now?”

  “The gates are always open,” Nils said. “People can come and go as they please.”

  “Ah,” said Silas with a jab of his finger. “But who does, besides intrepid travellers like you and me? My guess is that most of the citizens of New Jerusalem feel much safer holed up behind those walls, and are encouraged to feel that way by silly stories about ant-men and demons beyond the mountains. All these lands out here, all these wonders to explore, and we are kept from it by a profiteering senate that keeps a docile slave labour force.”

  “I don’t know,” said Nils. And he didn’t. Nils didn’t have the slightest interest in politics. As far as he was concerned this Silas Thrall was a woolly thinking academic with his head in the clouds. If they were back in the city he’d probably have just slit his throat and run off with whatever was in his bag. But he wasn’t in the city. He was miles from anywhere, cold and hungry, and Silas Thrall had just proven his worth ten times over.

  “OK,” said Nils. “I can find Malfen for you; but I ain’t sticking around while you meet Shent.”

  “Excellent,” said Silas, standing and weaving his hand through the air. The fire returned to cinders and the food evaporated into the night.

  “But I’m not finished,” said Nils.

  “Half now, half when we get to Malfen,” said Silas crossing his arms.

  Nils glowered but couldn’t think of anything he could do about it.

  “Fine,” he said. “Follow me.”

  ***

  Silas stumbled along cursing his lack of fitness. The dismal twilight was no help either: Raphoe might have cast a wide glow, but it smothered the landscape in a grey similitude that gave it a dreamlike quality. It reminded him very much of tales of the Void, where the disembodied wraiths roamed lost and uncomprehending, with no recollection of their former lives and no awareness of anything save their insatiable longing—for something as elusive as the ghostly lights that baited travellers to their slow, suffocating deaths in the quagmires of Sour Marsh.

  Nils looked back at him as infuriatingly spritely and cocksure as he’d been from the beginning of the trek.

  “Almost there,” his voice cut across the night like a trumpet blast. “There’s an orange glow from beyond the ridge. Probably lanterns atop the walls.”

  “Or the fiery maws of hungry devils,” Silas muttered under his breath.

  His good humour had vanished with his energy. He was beginning to wish he’d learned to ride rather than wasted away his youth picking pockets, and his adulthood in the ivory towers of academia. Physical prowess was for meatheads and morons, he’d always said; but now he was starting to see the other side of the coin.

  “Why don’t you turn into a bird again?” said Nils jogging back alongside him.

  I would if I could, thought Silas. He was still swamped with fatigue and nausea from the last metamorphosis. Plebs like Nils had no idea how demanding the mantic arts could be—particularly for a beginner.

  “Mustn’t squander power,” he huffed as he started up yet another scree slope. “Never know when you might need it.”

  “Soon as we see the town walls I’m out of here,” said Nils with hands on hips. “Reckon you’ve got enough power for the rest of my food?” Nils’s hand strayed to the hilt of his sword.

  Silas’ eyes narrowed and he drew his coat around him.

  “You’ll get what you deserve, boy,” he said in the coldest, most rasping voice he could manufacture.

  Nils took a step back and tripped over a rock.

  “We had a deal, remember,” he said, rolling to his feet and puffing his chest out.

  Silas found it all faintly comical, particularly the way Nils’ voice went from a shrill falsetto to a gruff baritone in the space of a few heartbeats.

  “Oh, I remember,” Silas drew himself up to his full height and glowered. “I never forget.”

  Nils blinked rapidly. He swallowed, made a show of dusting himself off, and turned back to the slope.

  Silas breathed a sigh of relief and started after him. His fingers drummed against the side of his bag and he felt the reassuring bulk of the grimoire. He unclasped the bag as he walked and let his hand creep inside to stroke the rough leather of its binding. Silas fought the overwhelming urge to sit and thumb through the ancient pages right here under the pale glare of Raphoe and the distant glow of her siblings.

  The book had called him every night since he’d stolen it from the scriptorium. The pages seemed to speak to him, urge him on. Every sentence was a promise that compelled further reading. He only stopped when his brain was burning with new concepts that threatened to split his sanity. One more word, it seemed to say, one more paragraph. If you get to the end of the chapter, what knowledge will be yours! What power!

  Poppycock, Silas had thought when Professor Gillis had lectured upon the insidious pull of Blightey’s grimoire. A grimoire of the Eleventh Degree, so its author claimed: the blackest and most esoteric of all magical writings. It was reputedly a record and an instructional manual of the occult practices of Dr Otto Blightey, the Liche Lord of Verusia. The bogey man. Silas had scoffed at Gillis’ melodramatic warning to the students. Another invention to frighten the ignorant.

  Against the most sacred prohibitions of the Academy, Silas had
used the skills he’d acquired in his youth to break into the labyrinthine scriptorium in the basement, where all the forbidden manuscripts were preserved—the records of the Technocrat, Sektis Gandaw; the Annals of the Dwarf Lords of Arnoch, the mythical lost city that had preceded Arx Gravis; the Testimonies of the Early Settlers—the people who’d been brought to Aethir from beyond the stars by Sektis Gandaw’s homunculi; and the Journals of Skeyr Magnus, the half-breed who’d stolen secrets from the Perfect Peak and sought to rival the Technocrat’s power over machines. During a confrontation with the Senate, Magnus had been killed by one of his own contraptions—

  “Told you,” Nils hollered from the top of the ridge. “Malfen.”

  Silas struggled up beside him and looked down the escarpment to where flaming torches hung from sconces around high walls running like a curtain across the pass at the foot of the Farfall Mountains. The mountains rose like gigantic steps into the receding distance, never sheer, their gradient long and gentle, as if the Farfalls had been poured like molten sludge upon the plains between Malkuth and Qlippoth.

  “Look down there,” said Nils pointing at the immense gate.

  Silas squinted. It was more of a portcullis than a gate, probably of wrought iron and virtually impregnable. Shadowy forms passed back and forth behind the grill. It seemed that Malfen never slept, and that it was going to be impossible to enter discreetly.

  “What will you do?” asked Nils.

  Silas was tempted to march right up and demand a meeting with Shent, but something told him that wasn’t such a good idea. His optimism had deserted him, and the scene below was unnerving.

  Malfen looked like a clump of warped and twisted structures that had been randomly thrown together. The alleyways between houses were narrow and winding, giving the whole place the appearance of a spider’s web. Shapes crept through the dark spaces and a reddish haze hung over the town like a cloak of blood.