Carnifex (Legends of the Nameless Dwarf Book 1) (27 page)

Carnifex nodded. “He told Thumil, but I think Grago already knew. I’m certain he was having you both watched. Come on, if we’re quick, we might be able to double back behind them, find some place to hide.” Their only hope was if the Black Cloaks had been delayed by the silver circle, as beguiled by its illusions as he was.

Grabbing Lucius’s arm, he started back toward the natural steps. Lucius slipped and fell on his arse. A quarrel whizzed over his head.

Before the Black Cloak could drop his crossbow and draw his sword, Carnifex barreled into him and knocked him flying. He barely noticed how, in the heat of battle, his footing grew as secure as a ravine goat’s.
 

To Lucius he shouted, “Get back!” as more Black Cloaks surged down the steps. He threw himself to the ground as they fired, and bolts skimmed off the marble beyond him. He glimpsed Lucius up on his feet, slipping and sliding toward the seethers’ pit.

If Carnifex backed off now, he knew they were both dead. The Black Cloaks would just use them for target practice. He rolled to his feet and ran up the steps. The Black Cloak he’d put down was on his knees. A kick to the head put him back down again.
 

As the other five Black Cloaks fumbled for their swords, Carnifex threw himself among them. They were quick to react and tried to grapple him to the ground. He crashed his head into a nose, felt it split. Wrenching his arm away from a grab, he lashed out, caught one of them on the jaw. Someone got him in a chokehold. Carnifex spluttered and swooned. A Black Cloak hit him in the stomach, but he tensed his abs, then kicked the shogger in the fruits. He reached behind for the Black Cloak on his back, shifted his weight, and slammed him into the ground. A fist caught him in the mouth, and he spat out blood. A flash of silver came at his heart. He caught the wrist of the dwarf holding the sword and cracked the shogger’s head round with a hook.

Lucius shrieked.

Carnifex craned his neck, glimpsed his brother backing up, slipping on the marble. The walls either side of Lucius blurred, and two assassins in concealer cloaks launched themselves at him. One grabbed him either side, and they dragged him kicking and screaming toward the seethers.

“Lucius!” Carnifex cried.

He punched, kicked, blocked, and shoved with such ferocity, he broke clear of his attackers and ran toward his brother.

The assassins glanced back at him, and one of them gave a sickening grin as they edged Lucius closer to the pit.

“No!” Carnifex cried.

He came off the steps and skated across the marble floor, perfectly balanced, perfectly in control. He could reach them. He was going to reach—

With staggering speed, the golems jerked to life and stepped into his path, forming a wall between him and the assassins dragging Lucius. He hit at full tilt. Pain lanced through his shoulder.

He screamed his frustration, hammering at a granite torso with his fists. Blood sprayed from his knuckles, but he didn’t feel a thing.

He made a dash past the golems, but one lashed out with a massive hand and caught him by the arm, lifting him from his feet. Then it took a two-handed hold, splaying his arms till he hung helpless in its grasp. It turned, forcing him to watch as the assassins flung his brother into the pit.

Carnifex’s scream joined with Lucius’s, and together they drowned out the hissing of the seethers.
 

Tendrils lashed about Lucius, caught him in midair. Where they touched, his clothing smoldered, and his skin bubbled and blistered. First the fabric of his jacket and britches was flayed, and then his flesh. His screams kept rising in pitch, till they became an endless shrill keening. He should have been dead already, but even as flesh sloughed from his bones and his head was reduced to a glistening skull, he continued to wail like the damned of the Abyss. The blue veins in the tendrils throbbed as if they drank him in, and at the same time, in some diabolical way, they drew out his suffering.

The six Black Cloaks, most of them nursing injuries, stepped past the golems to watch alongside the two assassins. They were rapt with horror, too fascinated to look away.

Carnifex kicked and thrashed, but nothing he did had the slightest effect on the golem’s hold. He slumped in despair, sobbing as his brother continued to howl, no more now than a skeleton. Carnifex forced his eyes shut. He half-expected the golem to rip his arms from their sockets. Willed it to. Longed for it to grind him into pulp and end his torment.

Then the keening stopped, and the seethers’ sibilant hissing gave way to silence. Carnifex risked a look, but of Lucius there was now no sign.

Slowly, as if still assimilating what they had witnessed, the Black Cloaks and the assassins turned to face Carnifex, and the golems didn’t make a single move against them. Were they in league? Or was it something else? And why was he still alive? The golems could have killed him a hundred times over by now. Why did they all just stand there waiting?

“Well, that was novel,” one of the Black Cloaks said. He was an evil-looking shogger with a hooked nose and eyes so brown they were almost black. “You, though,” he said, running the edge of his shortsword along his finger. “You are going to bleed real slow for what you did to Kloon.”

The golem holding Carnifex lifted him out of reach. The other three golems stepped in front to prevent the Krypteia from following as it turned away and took long lumbering strides back toward the steps.

It carried Carnifex to the center of the silver circle. This time, there were no visions, no disorienting feelings. Instead, waiting for him within the circle was the homunculus that had broken into the Scriptorium.

The golem set Carnifex down and retreated outside the silver perimeter. One by one, the three others filed up the natural steps, and then all four turned to clay and merged with the floor.

Further down the steps, the Black Cloaks crept cautiously into view, and at their sides, the air shimmered and blurred where the assassins in concealer cloaks came with them.

The homunculus held out a slender hand for Carnifex to take.
 

Body still racked with sobbing, mind a stinging nest of insects that left him both enraged and numb, he accepted.

The homunculus led him to the hub of the circle. As the assassins reached the top of the steps, it said, “What’s bad is good; what’s good is bad,” and then it stepped away.

The floor split open beneath Carnifex’s feet, and he plunged into a well of darkness.

THE BLACK AXE

Gradually, imperceptibly at first, Carnifex’s fall began to slow, until he was no longer plummeting; he was drifting down like a feather.

He dropped interminably through blackness so complete, the only thing that told him he was still moving was the passing of air across his skin. The deeper he went, the more ragged his sobs for Lucius became, until at last they were no more than involuntary shudders accompanied by wheezing snatches of breath. By the time his feet touched solid ground, he was iced over with clenched rage.

Dark light winked on around him, a crepuscular radiance that came from within the ebon walls of a sizeable chamber. Five walls there were—just like the
Ephebe
; black mirrors that cast shadowy reflections. In each, he looked wraith-like, not fully existent. Above, an obsidian funnel flared from the ceiling. It was how he’d entered the chamber, but there was no sign of how he’d get out. A cell, then. The homunculus had set a trap for him, and he’d walked straight into it.
 

Not that it mattered now. His brother was dead. But the manner of his death: no one deserved that, least of all Lucius. Carnifex closed his eyes, as if doing so could ward off the memories. The black dog mood crept from the recesses of his mind. He called out to it, begged it smother him in a cloud of forgetting. But it wasn’t his to command, and instead, it wolfed down the images of Lucius’s flayed flesh and disgorged them in ever more terrible forms.

His eyes snapped open, scoured the room, and there before him, at the apex of the pentagon, was an axe hovering in midair.

It was no wonder he’d missed it before. It was a deeper black than the walls, no more to his sight than a particularly dense shadow. He recoiled on instinct, pressed himself up against the wall opposite. Tingles of wrongness prickled beneath his skin. His heart slowed to a torpid slosh that echoed in his ears. Tremors spread from his fingers along his arms. They entered his legs and caused his knees to buckle. He sunk down the wall to his haunches.
 

But he couldn’t take his eyes from the axe. It scared him. It fascinated him, aroused in him a preternatural dread. Occultly, he knew it wanted him.

An amorphous shape emerged from the floor, growing into a golem formed from coal. The letters on its head smoldered crimson. It stood to one side of the axe, the cavities where its eyes should have been trained on Carnifex.

The axe tugged at his attention, drew it inexorably back, until the golem was but a shadow on the periphery of his awareness. Hair-thin threads of fuligin emerged from the axe’s twin blades, quested through the intervening space toward him.

They recoiled, though, when the six Krypteia floated down from the funnel in the ceiling, followed by the two assassins in concealer cloaks that merged with the black light of the chamber.

Carnifex lacked the volition to act as they adjusted to the gloaming and took in the walls of obsidian, the golem, and the axe. It was all over for him. Lucius was gone. His pa was gone. Cordy was married to Thumil. And even if there was anything to go back for, he was a criminal now. He’d left the city. Thumil might have been the Voice, but his authority didn’t extend that far. He’d warned Carnifex what would happen if he went after Lucius, but then he’d encouraged him to go all the same. Had he wanted this to happen? Wanted Carnifex out of the way, in spite of his promise to honor their marriage? The idea sounded crazy, but it was no less crazy than what was happening all around him. Either it was true or it wasn’t. It didn’t matter anymore.

Lost. All lost. Everything he’d known and cared about and loved. When the Black Cloaks finally saw him, and the half-visible assassins stalked his way, he relaxed in resignation.

A shadow stepped behind the Krypteia. Gasps went up. The two assassins turned, and the golem reached over the top of the Black Cloaks and grabbed them both. It hoisted them into the air and cracked their heads together with such force, their brains spattered the walls.

The Krypteia sprang at it, hacking and stabbing. Blades snapped. The golem stomped, and a bloody puddle was left where a dwarf had just stood. It swept out an arm, and three Black Cloaks were flung against a wall. They hit with pulpy splats and oozed down to the floor.

The two left standing lunged for the black axe. The golem caught one by the scruff of the neck and tore him in half. The other grasped the haft of the axe, but his fingers passed straight through it. With the sickening realization he’d had his last chance written all over his face, he looked up into the empty eyes of the golem, and its fist fell like a hammer.

Once more, vaporous threads quested forth from the axe’s blades. One of them extended across the room and swayed before Carnifex’s eyes. He watched it, hypnotized, and then it darted straight at him. Where it struck, in the center of his forehead, lightning sparked, then arced away through his skull. The black dog mood scattered, and with a violent jolt, Carnifex lurched to his feet.

The golem wheeled to face him. It took a lumbering step. But Carnifex already knew what he had to do.

What’s bad is good; what’s good is bad
, the homunculus had told him. Nothing was as it seemed. How could it be, down here in the realm of the homunculi, where deception was the very fabric of reality? This was no prison, no trap: it was a treasure chamber, the stronghold that housed the axe.

The Axe of the Dwarf Lords.

He ran at the golem. It reached for him. He swayed aside from its grasping fingers. It stooped and tried to flatten him with a punch. He dived between its legs, rolled to his feet, and grasped the haft of the axe.

And everything changed.

The blades flared golden, and the walls of the chamber answered with a dazzling blaze of aureate brilliance. The golem staggered back under the glare, and Carnifex hurled the axe. Thunder cracked on impact, and the golem exploded into a million shards that clattered and crashed to the ground.

The axe flipped in midair and soared straight back into Carnifex’s waiting hand.

Lucius had been right: it was real. The
Pax Nanorum
was real. And now it was his.

Elation blasted away every last vestige of grief. Even his brother’s horrific end now seemed a worthy immolation. This was what Lucius had lived for. What he’d given his life to bring to light. And that was what his name meant, wasn’t it? “Light”. Or as Lucius had preferred, “the bringer of enlightenment.”

They were so wrong—Rugbeard and Aristodeus. As deluded as the Council, locked away in the ravine because of their fear to act. It was all so obvious now, so clear how the dwarves had been deceived in the very act of trying to avoid deception.

As his initial exultation started to wane, he became aware of the homunculus from the Scriptorium standing beneath the funnel in the ceiling. Its stony eyes watched him intently, and its lips were curled into a congratulatory smile.

“You see now?” it said. “See what I meant?”

“I see,” Carnifex said.

“Like scales falling from your eyes?”

“Like scales.”

“And where are the scales now,” the homunculus asked, gesturing at the broken bodies of the dwarves who’d come to kill Carnifex, and who had succeeded in killing his brother.

Fear gripped Carnifex’s chest, and for a moment, he struggled to breathe.

They were grotesque. Glistening black scales covered them head to foot, and tattered wings of shadow sprouted from their backs. Even in death, their eyes were putrid pits of malevolence, and they were snaggletoothed, with wicked incisors protruding from lipless mouths. Two of them had pulped heads, their splayed-out wings all but lost against the exact same color and texture from the floor.