by D. P. Prior
The barber had a hard face: wrinkles like scars, red and angry; eyes narrow and darting—the sort always seeking an opportunity. The way he held the blade was at once effeminate and clinical. His stance was both sloppy and poised, conveying weakness with a rumor of violence. As he slipped back behind, Nameless imagined the razor nicking his throat, and felt the plaster of his face crack into a smile.
“D’you get much call for barbers in Arx Gravis?” The blade glided down one cheek and came to rest by the jugular.
“Not much call for anything in Arx Gravis these days,” Nameless said, watching a rat scamper across the floor. “Place is empty. A city of ghosts.”
“Get away!” The blade scraped below Nameless’s chin, and the barber flicked hair from it with a snap of his wrist.
“News must travel slowly in Malfen,” Nameless said.
“Don’t travel at all, if you ask me. Not much call for it. We got more than one foot in Qlippoth, and that works well enough for most. Reckon Malkuthians can go shog themselves, no offense meant.”
Nameless’s face grew weary of smiling. He drew in his brows as a dark mass of memories bubbled up from his gut. “Wouldn’t describe myself as Malkuthian any longer, laddie.”
The barber stepped back in front, wiping the blade on his apron. “Think I know what you mean.” His eyes glinted like fool’s gold, his face unnaturally long and pallid in the lantern-light. “Guess that’s how we all feel. Nobody comes to Malfen unless they have to. What you do?” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Kill someone?”
Nameless shut his eyes, letting the wave of bloody faces wash over him, hearing their cries, seeing the condemnation in their eyes. His muscles stiffened. His hands gripped the chair so tight the wood began to creak.
The barber seemed to get the message and resumed his scraping, until finally he stood back and held a mirror up in front of Nameless’s face.
“Smooth as a baby’s…Well, you get my meaning.”
Nameless winced. He had to tell himself the barber couldn’t possibly have known about what he’d done. Couldn’t have been referring to baby Marla.
He focused on the mirror. He was completely hairless. Like an egg—pale and shiny. Nameless had never seen his face like this—naked, square-jawed and grim; etched with deep grooves swimming with shadow. His brow looked heavier, like the crags of Gehenna. Maybe it was the dim light, but his brown eyes seemed black, pooling with misdeeds.
He pushed out of the chair and peered through the gloom for his rucksack.
“Over there.” The barber pointed. “Oops. Seems you left it open. Now what’ve we got here?” He bent down and pulled Thumil’s Liber Via from the pack, thumbing through the pages like a connoisseur. With a look of distaste, he dropped it and rubbed his hands on his apron.
“What the Abyss are you doing reading Ancient Urddynoorian? Dead language, if you ask me.”
Nameless grabbed him by the collar and rammed his head into the wall. The barber squawked, and his eyes bulged from their sockets.
“Friend gave it to me, laddie. Reckon it’s between me and her, don’t you?”
He fished about in the barber’s apron pocket, until he was met with the clinking of coins. He made a fist around the money and raised it to the barber’s face.
“You got anything else of mine, laddie?”
“Insurance.” The barber cringed, sliding down the wall and slumping to the floor. “In case you didn’t pay.”
Nameless glowered.
The barber buried his head in his hands.
“Far as I’m concerned,” Nameless said, “a man should be given what he deserves.” He pocketed the coins and scowled about the room. “Now, where’s my shogging axe?”
The barber whimpered and gestured with one hand while shielding his eyes with the other. “Mercy!” he pleaded.
“Like that’s your middle name.” Nameless snatched up his axe. He shouldered his pack and booted the door open. “Not forgetting anything, am I?” He paused in the doorway, fingers drumming against the jamb.
“Uh?”
“Nothing I owe you?”
“Uh, no.”
“Good. Can’t be too sure these days. Memory’s not what it used to be. It’s a shogging inconvenience when you can’t even recall your own name.”
He strode from the shop into the damp streets of Malfen—and straight into two of the most vicious faces he’d seen outside of the fighting circles.
“Shent wants to see you,” said a hook-nosed scoundrel brandishing a long knife and sweeping a net before his feet. The man was tanned and muscular, towering above Nameless. He was naked from the waist up, save for leather pauldrons strapped to his shoulders.
“You a fighter?” Nameless said.
“We both are,” the other man said, dropping into a crouch and drawing twin daggers. He was lithe and sullen-looking, eyes like slits spitting venom. “Perhaps you’ve heard of us: Carl the Cat’s Claw.” He gave a little bow. “And that there”—he indicated hook-nose—“is Venn the Ripper.”
Nameless shook his head. “No, not ringing any bells, laddie. Suppose I could’ve forgotten. I was just saying to what’s-his-name in the barber’s thingy that I can’t even recollect my own—”
The door opened behind Nameless, and he cast his eyes over his shoulder to see the barber looming in the doorway, bashing a club against the palm of his hand.
“Not so tough now, are you?” the barber said, as the Cat’s Claw and the Ripper closed in.
“One moment, lads.” Nameless held up a hand. “A question, before we all commit ourselves.”
“What?” Venn said. The veins on his forearm stood out from where he gripped his knife too tight.
“Well, I was wondering”—Nameless turned half toward the barber—“if our friend here has an epithet to match your own.”
The barber looked blankly from Venn to Carl.
“No?” Nameless said. “What’s your name, then?” He glanced at the sign above the door—Roger’s Cuts—and shook his head. “Shame. I can just see it now. Three tombstones: ‘Here lie Venn the Ripper, Carl the Cat’s Claw, and…Roger.’ Doesn’t quite have the same panache.”
“Ain’t gonna be no tombstones, baldy,” Venn said. “Unless you don’t do as you’re told. Shent ain’t playing. No one comes to Malfen without going through him.”
Nameless did his best to stifle a laugh. He was starting to enjoy himself. He’d been wondering if the black dog mood was ever going to lift.
“You make him sound like a bowel, which I suppose he is, in a sense, when you consider the cesspool he lords it over.”
There was a whisper of movement to his right, and before he’d had chance to really register it, Nameless’s axe crunched satisfyingly against something pulpy and pliant. Pink-stained teeth clattered from the blade.
The axe-head was lodged firmly in the barber’s mouth, half way to the back of his head.
Nameless looked over his shoulder at Venn and Carl and gave an apologetic shrug. When he wrenched the axe free, the barber’s knees buckled, and he fell like a sack of rotten apples.
Carl advanced, licking his lips and weaving his daggers through the air.
Venn put a hand on his shoulder.
“What’s it going to be, laddies?” Nameless hefted his axe and gave them his broadest grin. “If it’s a fight you want, I’d suggest a little more commitment. All that sweating and creeping tells me more than you’d want me to know; and the hand on the shoulder thing is a dead giveaway.”
Venn removed his hand and squared up to Nameless. “You gonna come?”
“If you’ll lead the way. Shent’s top dog here, is he?”
A sly look passed between Carl and Venn.
“You could say that,” the Cat’s Claw said.
“In a manner of speaking.” The Ripper gave the slightest of winks.
“Good,” Nameless said. “Then show me the sights. This way?” He started down the street.
“Just follow,” Venn sa
id, striding in front and leaving Carl to bring up the rear.
Venn led them past terraces of crumbling buildings with threadbare shutters and boarded up doorways. Refuse spilled into the road, gathering in piles, through which ragged people scavenged.
They took a left turn into a narrow alleyway heaped with carrion—some of it human. There was a stench like rotting vegetables mingled with bad eggs and ordure. Nameless gagged and struggled for breath. Carl tugged a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his mouth and nose, but Venn seemed quite unaffected by the smell, and walked through the carcasses with the assurance of a man well at home.
The alleyway took them to a sprawl of streets where balconies hung overhead, blocking out the ruddy light filtering through the smog. A crash from above, followed by screaming, tightened Nameless’s grip on his axe, but he showed no alarm lest his company took any confidence from it.
Venn’s pace quickened as they came upon a sheer gradient wending downward beneath an arch and continuing into the gloom. Shadowy figures haunted the doorways as they descended the cobbled road, sometimes stepping toward them before retreating at a wave from Venn or Carl.
“See what it means to have a name here?” the Cat’s Claw whispered in Nameless’s ear. “Not just a given name, if you get my drift, but a reputation.”
“This Shent we’re off to see,”—Nameless kept his voice strident and cheerful—“does he have such a name?” He already knew the answer, but he thought one of them might say more, reveal something of the truth of Shent’s nature.
“That he does,” Carl said. “Likes to be known as the Ant-Man of Malfen.”
“It has a certain ring to it,” Nameless said.
Venn flashed a malign glare over his shoulder. “It’s a name to be feared.”
“Indeed.” Nameless looked about in an exaggerated manner. His gaze was returned by the hungry eyes of rats watching from the gutter.
“What is it?” Venn asked through clenched teeth.
“Trying to find somewhere to relieve myself.” Nameless rubbed his guts. “All this scaremongering is unsettling my stomach.”
“No time,” Venn said. “We’ve arrived.”
The path opened onto a circle of flagstones beneath the central district. A giant of a man in a hodgepodge of armor—studded leather cuirass, bronze besagews, a steel gorget, and fluted silver cuisses—stood guard over a grille set into the ground. Nameless reckoned he must have been at least seven feet tall.
“Ripper. Cat’s Claw.” The giant acknowledged them in a rumbling bass. “What’s this? A dwarf for Shent?”
Nameless craned his neck to met the giant’s gaze, smiling, as if they were old friends. “A dwarf no longer, I’m afraid.” He rubbed his shaven scalp. “But I’m sure your master will enjoy me just the same.”
Venn and Carl sniggered, and the giant let out a resounding peal of laughter.
“Maybe he’ll give you to me,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “That’d be fun.”
“I’d pay to see that fight,” Carl said. “A giant hammering a dwarf.”
“I’ve beaten bigger,” Nameless said. “The last one wasn’t so cocky when I pulped his head with my fists.”
A group of rats had encircled them, as if waiting for a show.
“Try that with me.” The giant bunched his shoulders and scowled.
“Maybe later, Arik,” Venn said, swishing his net and sounding bored. “Shent’ll have to see him first.”
Arik’s glare promised violence, but then he growled and bent down to heave open the grille.
Venn led the way into a shaft, taking hold of metal rungs set into the wall and climbing down. Nameless was next. He gave Arik his most dismissive sneer as he clambered into the darkness. Carl came last. The grille clanged shut, leaving the three descending toward a flickering orange glow from the depths.
The shaft dropped them into an earthen tunnel with guttering torches set in brackets along the walls. Distant groans wafted to meet them amid the constant background of clacking and scraping.
Venn shot Nameless an evil smile.
The passageway opened onto a vast cavern bored out of the dry earth. Shapes scuttled in the shadows by the walls, and from the high ceiling hung the bodies of humans strung up by their wrists and twirling at the ends of ropes like cocoons in the breeze. Some were close to the ceiling, thirty-odd feet above, where the ropes ran through pulleys. Others almost touched the floor.
Nameless gasped as he saw that most of the victims were mutilated, missing chunks of flesh or even entire limbs.
A withered old man came into focus, one leg severed at the knee, muscle and sinew trailing in strips, as if the limb had been torn apart—or bitten off.
There were too many bodies to count, suspended like cured meat in a butcher’s shop, some waxy and blotched with blue, others in the final stages of life, breath rattling from failing lungs. Those nearest the ceiling were long dead, little more than skeletons held together by fraying cartilage.
Someone stepped out from behind a spinning carcass and Nameless froze in astonishment.
“Hello again,” Nils said. The lad’s eyes flicked to the ceiling, where a huge black shape was hanging, about to drop. “What happened to your hair?”
Something crashed into the back of Nameless’s head, and he fell heavily. He tried to rise but was struck again. His mouth tasted mud, before he was swallowed by darkness.
SILAS
Silas saw everything, hanging by his wrists, the cords biting into his flesh and cutting close to the bone. His long legs enabled him to touch the ground with the tips of his toes but it brought scant relief. Blood oozed down his forearms, staining the once-white fabric of his shirt-sleeves.
He swayed aside from the clacking mandibles of a giant ant that pushed amongst the bodies, no doubt selecting the next morsel for its master.
Silas craned his neck, looking for another glimpse of that sniveling brat, Nils. Either the lad had set him up or he’d just acted out of self-preservation. More likely the latter, Silas thought. He doubted Nils had the intelligence to plan for something like this. If he had, and Silas had just chanced upon him out in the wilds, it was an ill fate that guided him. Maybe he should have left the grimoire alone after all. Maybe Professor Gillis had been right: no good could ever come from any work of Otto Blightey’s. Knowing Silas’s luck, the blasted book was cursed.
He looked down, suddenly aware that the weight was gone from his shoulder. The bag—and the grimoire it contained—was missing. Silas thrashed about at the end of his tether and felt the first clutch of need around his heart. A thousand shards of ice pierced his veins and sweat beaded on his forehead.
Shent’s henchmen, the brawny hook-nosed one and the lean blackguard with the daggers, hauled the dwarf into position beside Silas and started to string him up. The dwarf moaned as the ropes tightened and he was lifted from the ground. Hook-nose kicked his pack aside and slung his axe on top of it.
“Not so smug now,” the lean one said.
“Come on,” his brawny sidekick said. “Let’s tell Shent what we got for him.”
Silas waited until the two exited down one of the many tunnels leading from the cave. The ant rubbed past him again, a human hand clutched in its mandibles, dripping gore. When he was sure it had gone, he swung himself towards the newcomer and kicked him in the shin. The dwarf’s head came up, he muttered something, and then sagged back down again.
“Wake up!” Silas hissed, looking around furtively in case any ants or Shent’s thugs were coming.
He took another kick, this time catching the dwarf in the groin.
“What the shog!” the dwarf roared, eyes wide and furious. It took him a moment to realize his hands were tied and that he hung like a slaughtered lamb from the ceiling.
“Quiet,” Silas said.
“Something hit me,” the dwarf grumbled, rolling his neck. There was a swelling the size of an egg on his bald head.
“You a dwarf or just a very small
human?” Silas asked.
“Neither.”
“I see. In any case, my friend, you are the brightest hope I’ve seen since being accosted last night. I take it you had a good look at our neighbors before the skinny one hit you.”
The dwarf nodded, scanning the cave again, brows knitting darkly, eyes like black pebbles taking it all in. “You have a plan?”
“Always,” Silas said. “Only, on this occasion I required a bit of muscle to execute it. You didn’t happen to see a canvas satchel on your way in, did you? Always sleep with it beside me and couldn’t bear to lose it.”
That was the mother of all understatements. Before the dwarf could answer there was a flurry of activity from the tunnels and scores of giant ants scuttled into the cave.
“This is new,” Silas whispered. The dwarf merely frowned. “Silas Thrall, by the way. Thought you should know that, if we’re to die together.”
“That’s your plan?”
Silas tried to quell the panic welling up within him. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
The hook-nosed thug and his scrawny companion entered next, and behind them shambled the aberration that had confronted Silas at the foot of the scree slope.
“See what they mean by Ant-Man,” the dwarf muttered. “In case you’re wondering, laddie, I have no name, but friends call me Nameless.”
“Nameless?” Silas licked his lips and despised the quaver in his voice. “It has a pleasing irony.” He squirmed and wriggled, cursing his misfortune and the fact that he desperately needed to urinate.
Shent’s mandibles clacked in short bursts that were answered in kind by the monstrous ants fanning out around the room. Silas counted twenty, but more were still pouring through the openings.
The Ant-Man’s body was more visible in the flickering light of the cave—his torso a parody of a human’s, but chitinous rather than fleshy. The head was pure ant, sleek and glistening, incarnadine eyes reflecting Silas’s face back at him until they mercifully turned on the dwarf. Bulging humanoid arms terminated in long sinewy fingers, but the legs were insectoid with hooked claws.
