Carnifex (Legends of the Nameless Dwarf Book 1)

by Prior, D. P.

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Blurb

  To Catch a Thief

  The Council of Twelve

  Black Dogs and Booze

  An Unexpected Visitor

  Remembering the Dead

  The Mines

  Incursion

  Golem

  What's in a Name?

  Kunaga's House of Ale

  Baresarks

  Droom Thane, née Screebank

  Orphans

  The Inauguration

  Changes

  The Circle

  What Friends are For

  The Big Day

  Transgression

  Gehenna

  The Seethers

  The Black Axe

  City of the Damned

  The Ravine Butcher

  The Nameless Dwarf

  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

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  CARNIFEX

  LEGENDS OF THE NAMELESS DWARF BOOK 1

  For more than a thousand years, the dwarves have hidden away from the world in their ravine city of Arx Gravis.

  Governed by an inflexible council whose sole aim is to avoid the errors of the past, the defining virtue of their society is that nothing should ever change.

  But when the Scriptorium is broken into, and Ravine Guard Carnifex Thane sees a homunculus fleeing the scene of the crime, events are set in motion that will ensure nothing will ever be the same again.

  Deception and death are coming to Arx Gravis.

  The riddles that preceded Carnifex’s birth crystalize into a horrifying fate that inexorably closes in.

  But it is in blood that legends are born, and redemption is sometimes seeded in the gravest of sins.

  For Carnifex is destined to become the Ravine Butcher, before even that grim appellation is forever lost, along with everything that once defined him.

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

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  TO CATCH A THIEF

  Carnifex Thane’s blood-washed face stared back at him. The whites of his eyes burned crimson. His hair was slick with gore. A smoldering hole punctured his forehead, smoke swirling from it in the chill dusk breeze. He tried to breathe, but the air refused him.

  About as dead as a dwarf could look, but that wasn’t what gripped his innards with talons of ice. It was the prickling walk of fate’s insects along his spine. For one brief moment, the veil that shrouded his mind from portents of the future was rent in two. He thumped his chest, gasped, and the invisible fingers throttling him relinquished their hold.

  It was the window, reflecting his image back at him; and the hole was in the glass, not his head. But knowing a fact and staring down an illusion were two different things. Someone had most definitely walked over his grave. Stomped on it. Done a shogging tap dance.

  Carnifex wrenched his eyes away from the scene of the crime, upward past the top tiers of walkways to the red-streaked skies. The scalp of one of the suns was sinking below the lip of the ravine that housed the city, its sister orb already out of sight. The monstrous head of Raphoe, largest of Aethir’s three moons, was already cresting the horizon, a gigantic silvery face come to leer down at the dwarves, to spectate at this rarest of rare incidents. For the alarm had gone out. The Scriptorium had been burgled. And the ravine city of Arx Gravis had been rousted from its languid life of inaction.

  The last light of the twin suns had the appearance of blood in the water, diluted by the stark moonshine. While it dissolved into argent, Carnifex looked back at the window. The grisly omen had been dispelled. His reflection was now a mere ghosting on the glass, no longer vivid without its taint of red.

  Through the hole—just big enough to poke a finger into—he had a clear view of the floor-to-ceiling shelves that held the Annals of Arx Gravis: leather-bound tomes with gold-embossed spines; the entire history of the dwarves, they said. He wouldn’t know. He wasn’t bookish.

  One of them was missing. Halfway along the third row up, a three-inch gap yelled theft.

  With a step back, he was able to see a wider view through the glass. A dwarf in the chainmail hauberk and red cloak of the Ravine Guard, same as Carnifex wore, lay on his back, a cavitation in his chest matching the smoking hole in the window. Whatever it was that had caused it had punched through iron as easily as glass, leaving a splash of scarlet in its wake.

  Murder on top of theft.

  No one had died in Arx Gravis for as long as Carnifex could remember, save from natural causes, or overenthusiasm in the fighting circles. And nothing had ever been stolen. What would be the point? Everyone had the same, eked out fair and square by the Council of Twelve. No one basked in riches, but no one lacked what they needed, either. And a volume of the Annals—it took an expert to read all that turgid drivel, and there was hardly a market.

  The tramp of booted feet on the walkway got the blood flowing in his veins once more. Carnifex turned to see a clutch of Ravine Guard catching up with him, panting ragged from the run. Three tiers of the city, he’d descended, when first the cry went up. Three-hundred steps that wound themselves around the Aorta, the great tower sprouting from the base of the ravine.

  “Anything, sir?” Kaldwyn Gray said, getting there just ahead of the others.

  Carnifex had taken him as a training partner these past few weeks, got him taming the iron in the barracks. Kal had moaned about the stiffness in his back, but dead lifts and squats had filled out his lungs, and given him more steam than the rest of his troop.

  Carnifex’s voice quavered when he replied. “Dead,” was all he managed, with a flick of his head toward the window.

  He removed his helm and rubbed his sweat-drenched hair as Kal took a butcher’s through the glass. The axe slung over his shoulder felt too much to lower, let alone swing. Moments ago, it was light as a feather. He resituated the helm and raked his fingers through his beard, as if he might somehow find resolve in its bristles.

  All along the walkway, and above and below, amber glowstones set amid the bricks winked into life, as they always did at the onset of night. Clouds scudded across the silvery face of Raphoe, which had swiftly risen to cover the mouth of the ravine. Moonlight drenched the city below in silvery ripples that gave the impression of water, as if Arx Gravis had sunk beneath the waves like the mythical city of Arnoch, home of the Dwarf Lords.

  Kal was pale-faced when he turned away from the window. The five dwarves backing him up saw, and took to mumbling among themselves. Carnifex shut them up with a glare.

  “Orders, sir?” Kal said.

  “I…” Carnifex floundered, searching for a coherent thought amid the fug.
>
  Nothing like this had happened before. Nothing ever happened. That’s why the Ravine Guard were a laughing stock among the baresarks of the under city. The few times they had been goaded into the fighting circles, they had been soundly beaten by the wild dwarves.

  “Well, laddie,” he stalled. “I think… I mean, what if…” Shog, he was starting to sound like Councilor Moary. When Carnifex stood guard at the External Trade Debate last month, he’d almost fallen asleep at his post, the prevaricating old git had waffled on so much.

  Kal’s wide eyes implored him for an answer, or perhaps permission to go back, do nothing, pretend it wasn’t real.

  A fizzing rasp from below cut the air. Someone screamed.

  Carnifex looked down, but his line of sight was blocked by a flying buttress that anchored the Aorta to the distant ravine wall. He rushed to the closest of the walkways that radiated from the tower like the spokes of a wheel. This one was gently arched, but even before he reached the apex, he could easily see the commotion on the level fifty feet beneath him.

  A crowd had gathered around a woman lying on one of the circular plazas the walkways intersected with. A plume of smoke drifted up from the front of her smock. Already, Red Cloaks were swarming out of the stone doors set into the ravine walls. Stall-keepers gawped from their storefronts, and early evening shoppers just stood there, goggle-eyed, as if what they’d just witnessed couldn’t possibly have happened.

  A speck of movement caught his eye: a child, perhaps, head to foot in black, zipping through the crowd.

  Carnifex called out, “Halt!” and waved to the Ravine Guard mustering below.

  Before they spotted him, the dark shape leapt from the walkway—and vanished. There was no body plummeting to the canals coming off the Sanguis Terrae, the lake at the foot of the ravine.

  “What the shog?” Kal said, breath hot on Carnifex’s ear.

  The rest of the troop were following like obedient pups.

  Orders were yelled below. He recognized a voice among them, and swept the walkways with his gaze till he found Thumil, all business in his red cloak and golden helm. So, the Marshal had felt the need to attend in person. Things had to be serious.

  “Down there,” Carnifex said. “And be quick about it.”

  He led the way back to the Aorta and descended a winding staircase. Thumil met him at the bottom and wasted no time issuing commands to Kal and the others.

  “Get the people off the walkways. Everyone indoors.” To Carnifex, he said, “See anything?”

  Gone was the boisterous friend who’d been deep in his cups last night, singing bawdy songs till the early hours. That was the thing about Thumil: as good a friend as a dwarf could hope for, but he was all about responsibility when it came to work.

  “One dead in the Scriptorium, Marshal,” Carnifex said. He felt self-conscious using his friend’s title. Always had. “Shot through the window, I’d say, though with one shog of a crossbow. Pierced chain mail, and left a smoldering hole.”

  “Jarfy?” Thumil asked.

  “I think so, sir.” Carnifex wasn’t good with names. Thumil knew the names of all the men under him; the names of their wives and kids, too.

  The marshal shook his head. “Shog,” he muttered. It was etched into his eyes: the task of telling the dead man’s relatives.

  “A book was taken, I think,” Carnifex said. “One of the Annals. The intruder leapt from the walkway.”

  Thumil crossed to the edge of the plaza, looked over the edge.

  “He didn’t fall,” Carnifex added.

  Thumil craned his neck and stared up at the shimmering face of Raphoe. He was mulling over what he’d learned so far, Carnifex knew that, but all the same, it gave the impression he was conferring with the moon. His eyes glittered coldly, then he looked back down again.

  Carnifex followed his gaze. There were scores of Ravine Guard spattering the walkways below like bloodstains in their red cloaks. Here and there, black cloaks weaved among them: the Krypteia, the Council’s special cohort. Things were even more serious than he’d thought.

  “Intruder, you say?”

  Carnifex knew where this was going. That implied an incursion from outside. No one got into the ravine city, same as no one left. The dwarves had remained festooned in Arx Gravis since the time of Maldark the Fallen, over a thousand years ago.

  “What dwarf would gain from stealing?” he said. Oh, people cheated and gambled, made a bit on the side, but there was no burning need for more. They generally did such things to pass the time, to alleviate the boredom. The dwarves, after all, were a race closed in on themselves. Theirs was a self-imposed exile from the world above.

  Thumil nodded, stroking his straggly beard. “And why the Annals?”

  Only scholars studied the ancient histories, people like Rugbeard, the perpetually drunk teacher and general jack-of-all-trades. The language used by the dwarves of old was too much for most folk to bother with.

  Carnifex shrugged.

  Thumil looked up at the heights. There were several levels above them, reaching toward the lip of the chasm that engulfed the city. Walkways spanned the gaps between the spires and minarets encircling the Aorta in a panoply of variegated architecture—another symptom of too much time and too little to do.

  They both knew the upper levels were the most heavily patrolled. The moment outsiders reached the topmost walkway, they would be surrounded by guards in concealer cloaks, detaching themselves from the walls. The intruder would have had to be invisible to enter from above.

  Carnifex suppressed a shudder as he looked back below; studied the play of moonlight on the surface of the Sanguis Terrae in the bowels of the ravine. Beneath its eldritch waters, a portal was said to lie: a gate to the underworld of Gehenna, and the only other way in or out of Arx Gravis.

  Thumil caught him looking and frowned. “Homunculi?”

  No one had seen a deep gnome for a very long time. Carnifex’s pa Droom had many years ago in the mines. Said the creature prophesied he’d have two sons; told him what to name them. The foreman accused him of drinking on shift, but when Yyalla fell pregnant, Droom did as he was bidden and named his firstborn Lucius. When Yyalla died giving birth to their second child, Droom still honored the deep gnome’s prophecy and gave Carnifex his name. He was superstitious like that; and part of him always believed the other thing the homunculus had told him: that through his sons, the dwarves would find themselves again. Through his sons, the age of legends would be reborn.

  Miners still reported the occasional uncorroborated sighting. But a homunculus in the city, stealing from the Scriptorium? It made no sense.

  “We should get down there, sir.”

  “You really think two more will make a difference?”

  Thumil was right. The lower levels were teeming with soldiers. Carnifex was about to ask, “Then what?” when something prickled the back of his neck. As he turned, black ghosted in his peripheral vision.

  “He didn’t fall, sir,”—he was already running toward the Aorta—“because he doubled back.”

  “What?” Thumil panted hard to keep up with him. They were going to have to talk about his drinking, and maybe a regimen with the weights.

  “He went under the walkway, sir. Must have clung to the struts like the undercity gibunas.” The lower levels were infested with the shoggers—flesh-eating primates with a taste for infant dwarves. No wonder mostly baresarks lived down there. Those nut-jobs probably ate gibunas for breakfast. “He’s heading back up.”

  Carnifex retraced his steps to the Scriptorium window, but if the intruder had come back this way, he’d moved fast. Except for Jarfy’s livid corpse, there was nothing inside but books, and no sign of movement on any of the adjoining walkways.

  He was about to turn back, when his eye caught the shelves opposite the window. Where there had been a space before, there was now a full shelf of Annals.

  Thumil came huffing and gasping alongside, bent double and wheezing for breath.
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  “It’s back,” Carnifex said. “The book is—”

  A black-garbed figure emerged from an upper window. It paused on the sill, as if shocked to see them below. Beneath the cowl of its cloak, onyx eyes glistened from a gray face, craggy and rough-textured like granite. It was small, no more than chest-high to a dwarf, and lithe as a cat. It raised a hand holding a sleek metal wand.

  Carnifex shoved Thumil back against the wall as lighting fizzed and crackled from the rod and blasted a chunk out of the walkway. He rolled back into view and hurled his axe. At the same instant, the homunculus leapt from the windowsill. The axe hit stone with a chink, and tore a chip out of the window frame. As it fell, the homunculus fell, too, but then a silver disk materialized beneath its feet. When the axe clattered to the walkway, Carnifex was already sprinting for the edge. The disk sped off, and he flung himself at it, caught its rim with the tips of his fingers.

  “Carn!” Thumil cried, but Carnifex couldn’t see him. He could spare no attention for anything but clinging on, as the disk skimmed between two parallel walkways and banked into a steep dive.

  A booted foot came down on his fingers, and the homunculus took aim over the edge with its wand. Carnifex let go with his free hand, swung aside from another blast of lightning. On the return swing, he lunged up and swiped the wand from its hand. The homunculus raised its foot to stamp, but Carnifex shuffled his fingers along the rim, and it missed. It stamped again, and once more he strafed out of the way.

  Shouts went up from the Red Cloaks milling on the walkways. A crossbow bolt zipped past his ear. Another hit the disk and clattered off.

  Down they spiraled, rocking and tilting each time the homunculus tried to tread on Carnifex’s fingers.