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

  CONTENTS

  Copyright Page

  Blurb

  Part 1: THE END OF ALL THINGS

  Awakening

  The Doom of All Creation

  Beneath the Arch

  Farewell to Arx Gravis

  Shadows on the Wall

  Maresman Business

  New Londdyr

  The Academy

  Hunted

  Puppets that Bite

  Queenie's Fine Diner

  Glimpses of Self

  Rugbeard's Way

  The Ant Hill

  Where Time Has No Meaning

  The Way In

  Roots of the Mountain

  The Unweaving

  The Parting of Ways

  Part 2: THE THREE TASKS

  Night of the Guilds

  Last Stand of Arnk

  Bird

  The Demiurgos's Disciple

  The Next Hit

  End of the Truce

  The Nick of Time

  The Mad Mage

  Rendezvous

  Supplies

  Gauntlets, Armor, Shield

  Goblins

  The Lava Vents

  The Fire Giant's Oven

  The First Shadow

  The Lich Lord's Armor

  The Truth of Who You Are

  Verusia

  Victims of the Lich Lord

  The Mist

  The Foolishness of Old Men

  Wolfmalen Castle

  The Moat

  The Limits of Mercy

  The Lion's Maw

  The Cost of Living

  Between Friends

  A Game of Cognac

  The Final Quest

  Chapter One - Son of the Demiurgos

  The Archon's Assassin

  Part 3: GEAS OF THE BLACK AXE

  New Age of Glory

  Return to the Ravine

  A New Kind of Rule

  The Corrector

  Soul-Father

  The People's Army

  The Sedition

  Resistance

  Phantoms

  News of the War

  Doom of the Dwarves

  City of Blood

  The Garden of Tranquility

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Also by D.P. Prior

  Feedback and Special Offers

  Copyright © 2016 D.P. Prior. All rights reserved.

  The right of D.P. Prior to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be, by way of trade or otherwise, lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

  LEGENDS OF THE NAMELESS DWARF

  1. CARNIFEX

  2. GEAS OF THE BLACK AXE

  3. REVENGE OF THE LICH

  4. RETURN OF THE DWARF LORDS

  www.dpprior.com

  “A dwarf with no name is a dwarf most shamed.”

  As the lands above the ravine city of Arx Gravis face their gravest peril, the last desperate hope of Creation lies in a dwarf with a grisly past:

  The Nameless Dwarf—a pariah, untouchable, the most cursed of dwarven kind.

  But in a world plagued by deception, where no action is free from risk, the road to salvation is shadowed with portents of blood.

  You can view a large scale MAP OF AETHIR on the web.

  www.dpprior.com

  PART ONE

  THE END OF ALL THINGS

  “Because, of course, he would need to grow accustomed to the light before he could see things in the upper world outside the cave.”

  (Plato, The Republic)

  AWAKENING

  It was black as the Void.

  The air was dank, heavy with must. He could smell something rancid…

  Bad breath.

  His breath.

  There was something covering his head. He could feel its oppressive snugness.

  His heart stuttered to life, and he gasped.

  Had he been sleeping? No, he was upright. His arse was numb from sitting too long. In a fit of panic, he tried to move, but nothing worked. It could have been someone else’s body, for all the control he had over it. If only he could open his eyes, see where he was, but they were glued shut with the sleep of a thousand years. He concentrated on a finger, did his best to curl it, but it had the suppleness of a fossil.

  There was a sound—murmuring, droning. Someone uttering, reciting, praying, over and over.

  At least his ears still worked. And at least he wasn’t alone. He forced the words of a challenge into his sand-dry throat, but he couldn’t squeeze them past his lips.

  A chasm yawned within him, and what little awareness he had cascaded into its depths. From the pit of darkness at the bottom, a jagged wound screamed its wrongness at him. An unformed question floated above the void. It coagulated into words:

  Who am I?

  A ruddy haze passed behind his eyelids. Or was it a stain? His newly awakened heart juddered and almost stopped.

  Blood.

  He could smell it now.

  Enough of it to drench his skin and soak through. Rivers of blood, and him bathed in it, from hands to elbows, from feet to knees. It spattered his face, matted his beard. He remembered chopping; the rise and fall of an axe. Screams. Such screams, as if all the demons of the Abyss were thrashing and wailing about him.

  “Is it a dream?” he wanted to ask the praying voice.

  He tried to struggle, stand up and pull whatever it was from his head. He needed to see. He needed light. No, he needed to go back to sleep and stay that way.

  But something had woken him.

  Someone.

  And the murmuring voice was growing louder, the words more and more discernible.

  “Nous, eternal word, comfort me.”

  Gods of Arnoch, he was trapped in here with a lunatic. But trapped where?

  In Arnoch? Was there such a place? There must have been for him to curse by it.

  Then the thought struck him: maybe he’d had an accident, like when the mine tunnel collapsed on his pa.

  Now there was a thought. His pa? Yes. His pa was a dwarf, which meant he was, too. Ravine Guard. Red Cloaks. City of….

  It was all there somewhere, swimming around the fringes of his mind. Little bits and pieces, snippets of identity. His pa was… His pa was… It was close, so tantalizingly close, and then it was gone. Blank as a smoker of somnificus.

  He had a brother, too. Or did he? Maybe he once did. But if he did, he couldn’t remember who it was.

  And his own name…

  It floated before him, an innominate shadow goading him to pluck it and give it form. His name… a wisp of fog on the breeze. He squeezed all his attention into a ball around it, tried to force it into submission, give it no choice but to reveal itself.

  Nameless.

  Was that his thought, or someone else’s?

  See you again, Nameless Dwarf. Who was it that said that?

  Fragments of memory fell in shards: places, people, all washed over with red.

  A time will come when the name that is not a name will be as cursed as the Ravine Butcher’s.

  His thoughts tumbled down a twisting channel in flig
ht from that grisly appellation. Torrents of blood pursued them. Crimson letters spattered across his inner vision. If he could snag them, rearrange them… But no sooner did he focus in on one than it skittered out of sight.

  A thousand voices clamored inside his head, yelled at him that his was the name that was cursed—the name that is not a name.

  But what had he done? A dwarf with no name is a dwarf most shamed. Shog, what had he done to deserve such a punishment?

  The praying voice rose in desperation. “Nous, scourge of demons, rescue me.”

  It was tinged with pent-up rage, and there was an accent: a familiar accent, but it was not dwarvish. But the words were the same as those used in Arx Gravis. The city’s name appeared out of nowhere, like a coin dropped for luck down a drainage grille in one of the walkways. One of Arx Gravis’s network of walkways that connected the central tower of the Aorta to the ravine walls all the way to the bottom. He’d grown up there; lived his life there. No dwarf had left it for a thousand years.

  “Nous, lord of the living,” the voice continued. And then the dam burst. “Hear my prayer!”

  The cry reverberated around his skull, until it finally died away. The silence left in its wake was sepulchral.

  But even that seemed to condemn him. Inaudible whispers ghosted between his ears, hammered home the truth with muted blows:

  Nameless Dwarf… Nameless Dwarf… Nameless—

  A jolt of lightning shot along his spine. His fingers twitched then splayed. He clenched them into fists. Chains rattled, clashed against stone.

  Whoever was in the room with him gasped.

  The Nameless Dwarf was shackled, manacled to an unforgiving bench. The realization struck his heart like the spike on a pickaxe. He strained, felt his thews swell with the effort. Flashes of memory swirled about his mind’s eye: scaled faces, frenzied eyes, the scratch of filthy talons. He felt once more the fear of contagion.

  He tried to stand, but the chains pulled taut. His body shook as he defied them. Why was he chained up? Why was he here?

  With sickening dread, he knew what it must be: he was fodder. No, those words of prayer he’d heard the man utter… Shog, he was a sacrifice, an oblation to some demonic god, or to the Father of the Abyss himself, the Demiurgos.

  His eyes snapped open, but all he could see was a strip of gray bordering on black. He blinked and refocused. It was the gray of the walls: finely mortared bricks. Good stonework. Dwarf stonework. But he could hardly see up or down. Something was restricting his vision.

  A helm.

  He dimly remembered it being settled over his head; relived the sensation of it meshing with the flesh of his neck, never to be removed.

  A bald human… That was it: the philosopher who had encased him in the scarolite helm. The helm that had belonged to… belonged to…

  It was there one instant, gone the next.

  But the voice that had woken him, that stayed with him clear as anything. He knew that voice. It had been the last thing he’d heard before falling into an unnatural slumber.

  It was the philosopher’s voice.

  He swiveled the helm, searching for a toga and a glistening pate. But the eye-slit came to rest on a brown coat, worn over a white surcoat with a red symbol on the front—a stick person with curves for legs and a horn-topped circle for a head, within which was a single crimson eye. Chainmail glinted beneath the surcoat.

  He craned his neck until he saw a lean, angular face beneath a broad-brimmed hat. He’d never seen this man before. Or maybe he had. In a dream: a battle atop a mesa. Above the man, there had been a figure with blazing eyes, seated upon a throne. And he’d heard the philosopher’s voice bubbling up from the depths: Not good. Not good at all.

  But this man’s eyes: they were the same as the philosopher’s. How could that be? The philosopher was twice his age, and had no hair, whereas the man seen through the slit of the great helm had dark locks that fell below his shoulders.

  Sorcery! His befuddled mind cried. Demon!

  Finally, his lips parted like the ruptured earth of the ravine that housed Arx Gravis, and he roared. He wrenched his arms together. Bolts shrieked, chains snapped, and he stood. Blood pooled toward his feet. Pinpricks of agony accompanied its descent.

  The man in his field of vision stepped back.

  With a burning rage, the Nameless Dwarf pivoted the helm to track him.

  There was a door in the background—an iron door with a grille at head-height to a dwarf, but chest-high to this human. The room itself was circular, the ceiling festooned with cobwebs. Dust was steeped about the floor.

  He took a lumbering step, threw a punch that struck air. He shuffled round to keep the man in view, rolled his shoulders, and brought his hands together in an almighty clap, hoping it would clear away the fug. When it didn’t work, he stomped his booted feet and shook his head within the helm.

  He was loosening up, but not fast enough. If the shogger came at him, he was done.

  His legs felt stiff, so he squatted to his haunches, growling at the pain in his joints. When he came out of the squat, he homed in on the man and closed him down, anticipating his every move around the walls of the cell.

  The man feigned one way, darted the other, but he was no circle fighter. The Nameless Dwarf slung out a hook that should have pulverized him, but his timing was off, and he struck the wall instead. Pain flared, and the skin of his knuckles split. He went for an uppercut, but the man was fast and twisted aside. He backed the shogger against the door, saw the fear in his eyes. But then he saw something else: stone manacles on the man’s wrists, connected by a short chain. This was no demon; he was a prisoner. They both were.

  “Do I know you, laddie?” The Nameless Dwarf’s voice came out a rasp. It felt like he’d swallowed shards of glass.

  “I—” the man started.

  “Thought you were that shogging philosopher, but he’s a crusty bald bastard, and you must be half his age with ten times his hair. Funny thing, that. Could have sworn I heard his voice. Must have been dreaming.”

  The man made an effort to relax, but his eyes betrayed a sense of horror. What was it he could see? Was it blood, or something worse?

  “I am Deacon Shader, a knight from—”

  “Never heard of him. Gods of Arnoch if I can remember the name of the bloke I was swinging for, but I’m sorry I mistook you for him. Can’t see shog out of this helm. What with that and the daze of sleep, dwarf’s bound to make mistakes. Am I forgiven, laddie?”

  “Of course,” Shader said. He sounded relieved. “This philosopher you mentioned, his name wouldn’t happen to be Aristodeus, now, would it?”

  “Aye, that’s the shogger. Tricked me, he did. Tricked me and trapped me.” His hands went to the sides of the great helm. Had he been tricked? It felt like he had. Someone had put him in this cell, that was for sure. He wouldn’t have come willingly.

  He dipped the helm and saw through the eye-slit the dark stains on his boots, the grisly film coating the front of his chainmail.

  He was armored. Still armored, and yet here he was in a cell. Yes, Aristodeus had led him here, said that he needed to sleep a long time.

  “It was Aristodeus who put you here?” Shader asked.

  “Aye. Him and the Council. Shoggers would’ve killed me, if they’d had their way. Can’t say I blame them, either. After what I’d done…” His voice choked away.

  But what had he done? How could he remember so much yet recall so little? He angled the helm to get a good look at his forearms. They were crusted over with dried blood, all the way to the elbows.

  “I know him,” Shader said. “I once considered him a friend and mentor, but now, I’m not so sure.”

  The Nameless Dwarf licked cracked lips and fought against the current that was dragging him down. It was a sensation that was disconcertingly familiar, like a heavy blanket smothering him, or a black dog creeping from the edges of his mind and gnawing away at his volition, at the slightest thread of int
erest in the world outside his head.

  “Ah, he means well, laddie. He might be a lying, cheating, flatulent windbag, but his heart’s in the right place. Least Thumil thinks so, and that’s good enough for… Oh, my shogging nugget-sack! Thumil and Cordy—they were in the Dodecagon when I was trapped.”

  When Shader shrugged, he explained: “The Council chamber. It’s twelve-sided and lined with scarolite, the same ore this bucket’s made of.”

  He rapped the helm with his knuckles and then raised his bloodied hand to the eye-slit. “Ouch, that smarts. Must have cut myself.” He shrugged and carried on. “They stood up for me. Shog, I wanted to die; wanted to die so much, but they still cared.” He went silent. His shoulders bunched up around the sides of the helm. And then, he remembered: the helm—it was his mother’s.

  “Thumil?”

  The Nameless Dwarf winced as Shader’s voice interrupted his vain attempt to retrieve his ma’s name from fog of forgetfulness.

  “Marshal. And good at it, too. Though I would say that, because I served under him in the Ravine Guard, and because he is… was my friend.”

  “Sounds to me like he still is.” Shader said.

  “Loyal to a fault, ol’ Thumil, but he knows. He knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “More than I do, that’s a fact. It’s like my memory’s a book telling the story of my life, but someone’s taken an inkwell and splattered every page with black splotches. Some of it’s still there, but other bits are missing. I see snippets—most of them bad—but I can’t piece it all together.”

  Shader nodded then made his way to sit on the bench. “Well, it’s not as if we’re going anywhere soon. Why don’t you tell me what you know? It could help.”

  The Nameless Dwarf sauntered over and sat beside him. “I’m not sure. I’m thinking there’s things in my noddle I don’t really want to know.”

  “Then start with just what’s necessary. Tell me your name.”