Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Quote
Born without Memory
The Rusted Prison
Ziggurat
The Drowned Temple
The Room
Spoiler-Free Excerpt from BAMA 2
Back Matter
Connect with the Author
A Battleaxe and a Metal Arm 1:
Death without Direction
By Samuel Fleming
Copyright © 2021 by Samuel Fleming
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
Cover Art by David Leahey
“Death is not the end.”
—nameless
Born without Memory
The first thing Helesys knew was falling.
It was long enough for her heart to rise into her throat and thankfully no longer than that. She landed on both feet and crouched into a roll to spare her legs. Twice over and then sprawled out on the dusty stone floor.
The elf pushed to her feet quickly because a short step away someone else fell to the ground. He did not land as graceful but he did not need to. The man hit the ground in a crouch, catching himself through sheer strength alone. He stood easily and relaxed, finally towering shoulders above Helesys. He wore thick leather armor. A fur cloak and battleaxe sat across his shoulders, making him look like a mountain in the sharp light of the room.
His voice was cold as stone. “Who are you?”
Helesys measured the man and took him for an outlander, a barbarian nomad. Savages to some… but not to her.
This gave her pause. She sensed this man was not a danger to her, but she did not know how she knew. Helesys searched her memories and found more shroud, more void.
“Are you mute?”
“Give me silence a moment,” she replied sternly.
He grunted in response, but stood still and waited.
Helesys looked around the room. It was three stories high and barely the same across. They were clearly underground—the room was sparsely lit by threads of light from above and sconces that burned along the wall. This fact alone did not bother her, as her eyes did well enough in the dim. All around, the room was made of wide stone blocks. They were pitted and rough in spots and covered by green-red moss in others.
Wherever they were, it was ancient and worn. The air was stale and still.
No, the thing that troubled Helesys was that could remember scarcely more than her name. She knew things… but could not remember the context. She could discern things about the underground room, but could not remember where she was or why she was in this place.
Worse was that she could not see an opening above them. No telling how they got in or how they might get back out.
“My name is Helesys,” she finally said while scanning the room. “I do not remember more than that.” It was a half-truth. Her family name was Byyra.
“My name is Taunauk. My memory has been stolen as well,” he replied. “I know what I am, but I have forgotten who.”
“I do not follow.”
“I am from the forest and the fields and the mountains. I am human. I am a warrior.” He pulled the giant axe overhead and held it firmly. It was taller than Helesys and nearly as tall as the barbarian. It had twin blades on the head, razor sharp yet chipped at the points and the rest of the metal was dulled with wear. The leather wrap of the handle was worn pale at the grips.
“I know this axe,” he said. “It echoes in my hands but I cannot sense its origin.”
Helesys looked herself over as the human talked. She was an elf, tall (compared to most humans) and slender. White hair draped over her shoulder. Beneath her gray robes she felt the silken weight of elven chainmail, of mithral. Her hands and skin were noble-fair, but she felt strong and poised—which had helped her landing and tumble—
—Her right arm had felt like it was covered in a gauntlet beneath her sleeve. The metal was a bright silver with a hue of blue—the same mithral as her chainmail—but it was more: Her entire right arm was metal prosthetic from fingertip to shoulder. No skin or muscle or bone remained—yet it was as dexterous as her left hand. She looked at her arm with wonder for she could feel the supple weight and fabric of her robe upon the metal surface.
And in her forearm, embedded deep within the length of metal where a bone ought to be, was a magic wand. She knew this—felt this—because the wand wasn’t just hidden inside her arm, but connected to her arm. So she was a mage. A spellslinger.
But again her memory was a void. Helesys couldn’t remember when or how she had gotten her arm. She couldn’t remember her spells or her training or her teacher.
“Are you a weaver?” Taunauk asked, bringing her back to the tomb. “You have that look about you. Noble, fair-skinned. Cunning.” He said the words plainly and without disdain. That surprised her. If anything, there was confusion in his voice, as if the term weaver was familiar but disconnected. He did not mention her arm.
“I believe so. I know so… As you said, I know what I am, but I have forgotten who.” Helesys looked around the room and saw a passageway—a single passageway. “Since there seems to be no other exit, are you against traveling together?”
“I am not,” the barbarian replied. He walked over to the closest sconce and with a smooth pull he ripped it from the wall, sending bits of stone scattering across the floor. The quiet display of strength contrasted with the breaking of the attachment and scattering of stone fragments across the floor.
In the flickering torchlight, his face was rough with creases, and his hair and beard were cut to nothing but stubble.
“I will go first.” Taunauk said. He led the way with torch in one hand and battleaxe in the other.
Helesys offered no counterpoint and followed the hulk of a man. Meanwhile she flexed the fingers of her mechanical hand. Inside the arcane gears spun and pistons pulsed with oily silence. She felt the flow of power from the wand within, like bottled lightning.
Confidence burned within her and somehow she knew that she should feel sorry for any denizens of the underground that crossed her and Taunauk. The two of them could not have been more different, yet they were forced by circumstance to work together. Helesys wondered if they had known each other before they dropped into this place.
But it was an impossible question—one quickly replaced with the silence of the hallway.
~
Cold stone surrounded them as Taunauk led the way down the hall. The hallway was robust, nearly ten paces wide and just as tall, but with the barbarian for reference it felt cramped. Helesys only understood its size when she reached out with both hands and could not touch either wall.
The hallway stretched on straight with no deviation or change for half a mile, until they came to an opening. At first it looked as if the entire hallway disappeared into a black void, but as they approached they could see that the hallway merely stopped for a while and started again some twenty feet away.
Taunauk crouched lower as he approached, impossibly silent, like a giant cat stalking prey. Helesys followed, matching his cadence. Slowly he peered around the corner, looking both ways, and waved for her to approach.
Helesys stepped beside him and peered out across the chasm. The space between had been hollowed out into a gigantic cylinder that cut perpendicular to the hallway like an undergroun
d river had once cut across it. A hundred yards away in either direction the hollow of the river had collapsed, such that the only choice forward was down into the dry riverbed and directly across it to the counterpart hallway.
Taunauk grasped the torch with two spare fingers of his axehand, somehow holding the massive weapon and the torch in the same hand. Then reached around the edge of the stone and brought back a clump of surrounding dirt. He rubbed it together and it fell away in dry powder.
“Dry soil. Old passage,” he whispered. He slid down from the hallway to the dirt floor of the cylinder in swift silence. “Safe.”
Helesys followed. It was an easy enough drop but she could not quite match the barbarian’s cat-like grace. She knew from that point on it would be a personal challenge for herself.
“Someone with your frame should not be so silent,” she whispered.
“I am a hunter,” he replied, as if that was enough.
Helesys frowned and stooped to the dirt. The cylinder was filled with concentric rings spaced two fingers apart and each wrapped all the way around the space. The spacing was nearly perfect.
“What do you make of this?” she asked.
“Wormsign. Borehole.” Taunauk emphasized the direction with his free hand. “Old passage,” he repeated. He started across the borehole toward the other stone hallway.
Helesys shuddered. It wasn’t that the borehole was from a worm or any such factor, it was merely from the size. They were amnesiacs in a strange place and the first sign of other life was a giant beast. It did not bode well.
She flexed the mechanical fingers of her wand-arm, feeling the power course within her and most of the foreboding feeling left her.
But not all.
~
They went across and climbed up to the next stone hallway. Taunauk led and Helesys followed. The eerie silence stretched on just as the hallway did and Helesys’s mind insisted on filling it…
Again, thoughts drifted to her wand-arm and the kindled power that lay within, comforting like a campfire. Helesys knew of magic—knew that weavers twisted the latent energies of the world, harnessed them, channeled them—and that she was one of those wielders of magic. ...But so much was lost. She could think of no spells that she knew—no spells at all. Her memory loss had taken not just memories of home, but memories of how to create and destroy.
She could only hope that bits would come back to her or that she would remember them innately. So as she walked behind the barbarian down into depths unknown, she flexed the mechanics of her arm trying to will some bits of knowledge from them. But none came from such gentle teasings.
Water sloshed beneath Taunauk’s feet. It was the first sound she’d heard from the man—she’d nearly forgotten he was there.
Puddles littered the hallway. Eventually the hallway was completely flooded and water sloshed with each and every step.
Taunauk grunted in disapproval.
“What’s the matter?” Helesys whispered. She pictured him as a big cat who didn’t want to get wet.
“Hard to be quiet. Going to get deeper.”
Helesys was about to ask what the barbarian meant when she realized that the hallway was on a slight decline. They were walking deeper underground, which gave the illusion that the water level was rising.
An hour later and the water was shin-deep and sinking into Helesys’s boots—frigid—and the elf gasped quietly as it filled her shoes.
Taunauk must have heard because he said, “I will not carry you.”
“You will never need to,” she replied through gritted teeth.
Soon the water was up to her knees, but mercifully leveled off.
In the distance there were pinpricks of light. Taunauk quenched his torch in the water and set it against the wall. Again the barbarian moved in a crouch. This time even slower than before so as not to slosh water and give away their approach.
“Do you think it wise to sneak up on our first contact?” Helesys whispered.
Taunauk stalked forward without replying.
The minutes drew tense as they approached and then the stone hallway opened up again. The pair stopped at the threshold. A sprawling, flooded room lay before them.
The flooded room extended back at least one hundred paces. At first, it wasn’t readily apparent if the water deepened or not, but Helesys focused on the torches and the figures in the center. Four vaguely-Terran shapes huddled beneath the torches. The crouching posture gave the impression that the water was still shallow in the middle of the room. But as the elf looked closer she realized the figures were anything but Terran.
The four creatures had the figures of short, squat men but with huge heads and wide eyes. Great whiskers extended off of their faces and out past their shoulders. Their skin was sleek and shiny, and rippled with scales. One of the four towered over the others, but was still no taller than Helesys. Each seemed to hold a spear and a shield, save for the large one which held only a curved staff.
“Fishmen,” Taunauk whispered. “Not good.”
The creatures took turns tearing at a carcass that lay on its side and part of the side and a large fin stuck out of the water. One at a time they would duck down and viscous sounds would echo over the water. Then they would come back up, gnashing great chunks of red meat between spiked teeth, the white of which glinted in the torchlight.
The large fishman did not eat, but seemed to be gnashing its teeth incessantly, punctuating with a gesture of the curved staff. The manner looked vaguely ceremonial to Helesys.
The elf looked over the room: The opposite side, past the fishmen, looked to be nothing more than blank stone.
To the left, the room rose up a slope of jumbled stone and rubble as if the entire side had partially collapsed. The slope rose all the way up three or four stories to the stone ceiling of the room. It was completely exposed and offered no path forward through the dungeon.
To the right, a jumbled mass of twisted, rusted metal that spanned the entire side of the room. Though the structure had long-since been compromised, grid-like spacing was still intact behind the twisted mass of bars. It looked to Helesys like the mass had once been part of a prison, long since ruined and abandoned. The rusted prison could be laden with passages, but it was impossible to say from afar and they would need to pass the fishmen to get there. Swimming in the shallow water was out of the question.
The two scanned the slope and the rusted prison until they were satisfied that no movement came from either side.
The only way across was past the fishmen to the rusted prison and Helesys shared her ally’s instinctual sentiments about the creatures.
“I’ll follow your lead,” she whispered.
The water rippled only once and Taunauk stalked forward with eerie silence, Helesys to the right and behind him. Tension overcame her as the pair descended upon the oblivious fishmen, like some great boulder at the start of an avalanche. Helesys’s heart beat faster and she forced herself to breath steady and slow in spite of it. The arcane gears and pistons in her arm hummed with menacing purpose.
Across the way, the fishmen continued ravaging the shark corpse, naive to the danger approaching just past the reach of their torch-light.
Fifty paces away in the gloom… Then forty…
The pair were thirty paces away when the largest of the fishmen ceased its incoherent chanting and turned their direction, torch-light glinting in its large eyes. Its mouth opened in a hiss that echoed through the flooded room. The three other fishmen raised shields and spears.
But Taunauk was already upon them.
He met the hiss of the fishman with a growl of his own. The barbarian pounced like a jungle cat—from standing still to his entire body soaring out over the water. He flew with axe raised overhead and came crashing down upon the closest fishman. In a splash of water and a screech of metal he brought the head of the battleaxe down through the creature and cleaved it in two.
It was an incredible display of athleticism, except that now
Taunauk’s massive frame and splashing was blocking any hope Helesys had of a ranged attack. She felt the magic spinning up in her arm like a windmill in a stormgust. She knew that all she had to do was level her hand at the creatures and a torrent of horrible violence would spring forth—yet she also had the feeling in her gut that Taunauk might get caught in the blast.
“You thundering oaf,” Helesys mumbled. She waded further out to the right, hoping that she could get a better angle.
Meanwhile, the barbarian swung in massive arcs, the axehead screeching as it deflected off the shields. The big fishman had stepped back from the fray and was hissing rhythmically and gesturing with its staff. Helesys recognized the casting of a spell, though she couldn’t understand nor fathom which one it might be. In spite of that, there was one reliable way to break a weaver’s spell.
Helesys raised her arm, palm out and fingers spread—trusting that she would know what to do in spite of her amnesia. Purple electricity crackled between her fingertips and she felt the machinations within the arm align, channeling the magic of the wand. Something akin to purple lightning erupted from her palm in a thunderclap that overshadowed all other violence.
The sound and the force surprised her, made her wince and spin. Helesys saw just enough as she lost balance and fell back into the water—enough to see the big fishman’s torso split in two.
The elf gasped and tasted brine as she sprawled into the cold water. She struggled, slipping on the stone bottom and finally got her arms under her. She felt ridges—rope—and as Helesys finally broke the surface to breathe, something pulled at her feet. A rope net, concealed below, sprung up and over her head. Gears whirred and clanked off to the right where the rusted prison lay, and the rope net yanked her off her feet, down into the water again as she was pulled through the water.
Helesys twisted in the shallow water as she was dragged. She managed to rise above the surface for only a moment—enough to grab a half breath—before plunging under and tumbling along the bottom again.
Death without Direction: A Modern Sword and Sorcery Serial (A Battleaxe and a Metal Arm Book 1) Page 1
