Carnifex (Legends of the Nameless Dwarf Book 1) (32 page)

The truth of those words burned in his chest. His heart responded with thunderous strokes that reverberated through his skull. His head began to throb. Even the soft blue light from the walls was an assault on his eyes.

“You’re afraid right now,” Thumil said, “but we can keep you safe.” He took hold of Carnifex’s arm again, and Cordy took the other.

Carnifex pulled free of Thumil and shoved him off. Aristodeus scuttled back to the far end of the debating table.
 

Cordy, though… Cordy still clung to the arm that held the axe. The haft seemed to writhe in Carnifex’s grasp. It seethed and twisted and bucked. Cordy met his gaze unflinchingly. He raised his free hand, clenched it into a fist.
 

Thumil cried out and stepped in, but Cordy yelled at him to keep back. She stared and stared into Carnifex’s eyes, letting him see her sincerity. Willing him to. His fist shook. She didn’t even blink. Emotions scudded like clouds across her eyes: fear, grief, sorrow, regret. There were flashes of anger, of frustration, of hurt; but behind them all came the unwavering promise that she would keep him safe, that she was his friend, that she loved him.

“I’ve got you, Carn,” she mouthed, without relinquishing her hold over his eyes. “If you let me, I will carry you through this, and I will not drop you.”

His fist snapped open. A fine tremor ran through his splayed fingers.

“Carn,” she said, imploring him to believe her. “I will not drop you.”

He lowered is arm to his side. If he could have, he’d have let the axe fall to the floor, but it was as much a part of him as the hand that held it.

“Get him to sit,” Aristodeus said.

Cordy gently led him to the head of the table. Thumil pulled out a chair for him, and almost in a trance, Carnifex lowered himself into it.

Aristodeus came round the table to stand behind him. Thumil and Cordy withdrew. Cordy’s eyes still never left Carnifex’s. She nodded imperceptibly. Reassured him it was going to be all right.

Thumil straightened his blood-spattered robe. His fingers found Cordy’s. They clasped hands.
 

Carnifex narrowed his eyes. He suppressed the image of bloodshed that sprang unbidden to mind.
He looked away, flicked his gaze left to right. Betrayal lurked behind every door. The amber light of the glowstones atop each lintel—he’d not even noticed them while standing—looked as sinister as the blood-hue that suffused the ravine walls. The embossed faces of Dwarf Lords leered in triumph.

And then he looked back at Cordy, and anchored himself on her glistening eyes.

He tensed as he heard the scuff of Aristodeus’s sandals on the floor behind him. When he looked up, it was into the dark interior of the scarolite helm. It was a gaping hole of blackness. A void.

Movement drew his eyes away from it. Thumil stretched out a hand, mouthed something. Cordy put a restraining arm around his shoulders.
 

There was a collective intake of breath, and then silence as the philosopher lowered the helm.

Carnifex’s thoughts scattered. Memories blinked. The black dog scampered out of the shadows and settled across his vision. As the last crack of light perished, he clutched at his dissolving name. It was there on the tip of his tongue. If he could give it voice… If he could just give it voice…

But it was gone.

A hammering heart. Rasping lungs. Frantic breaths. Stifling. It was stifling. Get it off. He had to get the helm off. Where it touched his shoulders, it softened, then oozed. The skin of his neck grew taut. He felt the scarolite of the helm sucking at it, tugging his flesh, interweaving with it. With a sickening dread, he realized it was enmeshing itself with his skin; that it was becoming a part of him, never to be removed.

The rest was a blur. Hands pried his fingers from the haft of the axe. In his hazy vision, he saw what looked like two homunculi encasing the axe in a block of crystal. One of them called him something as they carried the axe away:

“Nameless Dwarf.”

Was that him? Was that his name? It seemed an odd one. No, he realized with sudden lucidity: a shameful one. A fate worse than death. “Am I a nameless dwarf?” he wanted to ask, but fear of knowing the truth sealed his lips.

He responded to questions that fled his mind like water through his fingers. A song bubbled up from within. He wasn’t sure if he sang it or not.
 

He was surprised when he saw Thumil there, spattered with blood. Doubly surprised to see Cordy in her wedding dress, more red now than white. What had he said to her? Was she offended. Had she wept or had she smiled, or was it both?

At some point, the chamber filled with white robes.
 

“Pish,” someone said—Councilor Grago? “Never mind what was said. We are talking about the survival of our race. Risks, Councilor Thumil. The risks must not outweigh the benefits.”

Voices were raised in anger. Seethers were mentioned, and with it came another lucid moment: Lucius. Poor old Lucius screaming as the flesh was flayed from his bones.

“My husband was speaking,” Cordy said in a voice like a whiplash.
 

Her husband. Was he her husband? Had he been speaking? Another memory reasserted itself: no, that was Thumil.

A jumble of other recollections clamored for attention, got themselves twisted into a great knotted ball.
 

Conversation continued around him.
 

“Imbecile!” Aristodeus said. “Typical. Typical of you dwarves. Always throwing out the baby with the—”

“Isn’t that what you did, philosopher?”—A voice like rustling leaves. “Weren’t you once a man of faith, before you became too clever, even for the Supernal Father?”

A gale tore through the chamber, whipping up a vortex of sparks, flashes, tongues of flame. The whole coalesced into a cool conflagration then burst with the brilliance of a thousand suns.
 

He lifted his head to peer through the eye-slit. Everything behind his eyelids was white, then red, then black as the Void and dotted with pinpricks of silver. He blinked over and over. There was a figure, robed in brown, sunlight bleeding from beneath an all-enveloping cowl.

Was it happening in his head? Was he imagining it?

“So, here at last is our troublesome Nameless Dwarf,” the cowled figure said.

There it was again. That’s what he was now, to these others: the Nameless Dwarf. The only one they’d ever known. Maybe the only one there ever was, unless he’d been right about the baresarks and who they were descended from.

“A time will come…” the cowled figure was saying, and suddenly he—the Nameless Dwarf—was pulled back into the happenings in the chamber, as if by the will of the speaker, or the unnatural timbre of his voice. “… when the name that is not a name will be as cursed as the Ravine Butcher’s, should we allow him to live. About time. About time the dwarves grew a backbone.”

“Nothing is predetermined,” Aristodeus said. “You know that as well as I, Archon.”

Grago puffed up his chest and stuck his nose in the air. “Who the shog are you?”

“Silence!”
 

There was thunder in the voice that time, and Grago dropped to his belly, along with half the councilors. Thumil and Cordy remained standing, but it looked like she was holding him up.

Aristodeus shook his head and indicated the cowled figure with a hand. “This, dear dwarves, is the Archon. If you still read the scriptures, you’d get some sort of idea of the manner of being he is.”

Flames licked around the edge of the Archon’s hood. “You grow too familiar, philosopher.”

“Quite right,” Aristodeus said. “And we can’t have that, can we? We all know what familiarity breeds.”

The Archon rose into the air and started to circle Aristodeus. “You have picked up the ways of your master, it seems. That doesn’t bode well for you extricating yourself from his trap.”

“Not my master,” Aristodeus said. “And you just watch. I’ll pry open the jaws of his trap sooner or later. Have faith.”

The Archon let out a laugh like a gust of wind. “Faith is something I have never lacked. I wish you could say the same. You are too proud, philosopher, just the way he likes them.”

“Being right doesn’t make one proud. Personally, I’d be more concerned about a Supernal Being who considers himself judge, jury, and executioner, wouldn’t you, Thumil?”

Thumil looked too cowed to speak.

“Now is not the time to lose your tongue, Councilor Thumil,” Aristodeus said. “There was a vote, remember?”

Grago raised his head from the floor. “Technically, no.”

“What, your fingers were crossed?” Cordy said.
 

“Uhm, I must just say,” Old Moary said—he was still standing, a be-socked big toe curling from beneath his robe— “there was indeed a majority vote to stay execution. If you ask me—”

“Thank you, Councilor Moary,” Aristodeus said. “Age and wisdom go hand in hand like—”

“You are the Voice of this council?” the Archon said, drifting up close to Old Moary.

“Well, uh, no. I mean, not really. I’ve just been on the Council longer than the rest, but our primary is Councilor Thumil.”

The Archon turned on Thumil, ire suppurating from his cowl in fingers of fire. “Heed my words, Councilor Thumil. If this Nameless Dwarf lives, thousands will die. He is a pawn of the Demiurgos.”

“Not if I keep him in stasis,” Aristodeus said. “Nothing besides my own voice will be able to rouse him.”

“You know this philosopher well?” the Archon asked Thumil.

“Not well.”

“And you would trust him?”

Thumil gave a sideways look at Aristodeus. “No.”

“There!” the Archon said, turning on the philosopher.

“But no one’s killing my friend,” Thumil finished.

Cordy gave his arm a squeeze.

The Archon’s hood shimmered with pent-up flame but then settled back to a dull brown. “I cannot—will not—force compliance. Very well, but on your head be it. After all, it is your head to lose.”

“With all due respect,” Grago said, pushing himself up onto his knees, “Councilor Thumil does not speak for—”

But the Archon was gone, leaving only swirling dust motes in his wake, and then even they settled.

Reality careened once more, and the Nameless Dwarf found himself floundering amid threads and ribbons of conversation that seemed to come from a faraway place.

Thumil’s face passed in front of him. He mouthed something into his beard. It might have been, “Goodbye, old friend.”

For a moment, the Nameless Dwarf was pulled out of his head by Cordy’s
 
grief-filled eyes. He longed to drown himself in her tears.

A door ground open. Two Black Cloaks waited outside. They took his arms, led him onto the walkway.

Next thing he remembered was going down. His legs burned, and now all he had for support was Aristodeus’s arm. A door opened—an iron door with a grille. He was seated on a stone bench. Chains were fastened to his wrists.

He started to struggle, but Aristodeus held a crystal up before the eye-slit of the helm.

“It’s all right. It’s all going to be—interesting. I could have sworn there was a word inscribed on the helm—a name. But there’s nothing there now. I suppose that’s to be expected when you take a name out of time, the given name and the family name both. Shame, really. But needs must. Now, just stare into the light and listen to my voice.”

A roseate glow effused from the quartz. It was mesmerizing. Soothing.

“You must sleep,” Aristodeus said. “The Demiurgos has won the day, but not the war. I will continue to fight, and I will come for you when you are needed. Sleep now, and let no voice awaken you save mine.”

The Nameless Dwarf’s eyelids drooped shut. A reddish glow seeped through them, then rippled into a lake of blood. Faces broke the surface, cold and grisly and dead: Jarfy, Ming, Muckman. Kloon appeared, ranting in silent accusation, then a hundred more, a thousand of the butchered dead.
 

The door closed with a clang, and he was alone; alone with the horror of what he’d done.
 

This was no sleep: it was a torment. He wanted to scream, call the philosopher back and tell him to do whatever he’d done with the crystal properly, or better yet, do it for good, put him out of his misery.

Droom’s face dispelled the bloody waters. He nodded with understanding, though his eyes were rueful. Suddenly, he was whisked away amid a malign burst of cackling. It grew and grew to a skull-rattling crescendo.

Durgish Duffin’s painting drifted down to fill the scene, and the hellish laughter echoed away to nothing. Yyalla stepped from the frame. He knew there was more to her—more to her name—but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember it. He tried recalling Droom’s surname instead. Maybe that would jog his memory, but it was as gone as Yyalla’s.

You must forget in order to find the truth of who you are
, Stupid had said. Is that what he’d meant? Forget his family name, along with the name he’d been given as a child? But that can’t have been it; it still said nothing about who he was.
 

Unless… unless it was being stripped of his name that defined him. In dwarven eyes, that made him a nobody, a pariah, and accursed to all his kind. Was that who he truly was now: the Nameless Dwarf?

Yyalla reached out a hand to him, and in his mind’s eye, he took it. She was smiling, a mix of pride and approval.