by D. P. Prior
“I am not—”
Aristodeus waved away her response before she gave it birth. “And there are matters I would discuss with you—these contingencies I mentioned. Would you at least allow me the chance?”
Rhiannon’s eyes narrowed to slits. She snaked a venomous look at Shader. “Fine. Anything’s got to be better than this.”
Aristodeus held out his arm, and she took it. Then the philosopher produced a drawstring purse from his toga and passed it to Nameless. “In case you need money. I assume they still use the same coinage. When you get to New Londdyr, go to the Academy. Ask for Master Arecagen.”
“Arecagen?”
Aristodeus grimaced. “Just ask for him. I’ll meet you there and make sure you don’t starve. Mark my words,” he said loud enough for the councilors to hear. “The day is coming when you will thank me for preserving this kinsman of yours. He’s special, this one, and if I can only set him on the right track, he could yet prove our greatest weapon.”
“Never been called a weapon before,” Nameless said. “Except maybe once, but she was a feral lassie from the Sanguis Terrae wharfs. All hips and melons. You know the sort I mean?”
Before anyone could respond, green light swirled about Aristodeus and Rhiannon, and they vanished.
A confusion of emotions played across Shader’s face, leaving him finally blank and bewildered.
Thumil gestured toward the top of the ravine. “Go. Now. Before they come up with another objection.”
Nameless cast a look at the councilors. Some of them were muttering among themselves, and there was a palpable tension seeping into the Ravine Guard and Black Cloaks.
Thumil saw him looking. “You should leave.”
Cordy pressed up close to Thumil and took his hand. “You said you’d ask, remember?”
“Ah, yes, my dear, of course.” He coughed and gave Shader a sheepish look. “My wife does not share my spiritual views…”
You could say that again, Nameless thought.
“But she does… I mean, she…” Thumil waved his hand around, as if trying to pluck the words from the air. He glanced at Nameless, but all he would have seen was the scarolite great helm. It seemed to unnerve him.
Cordy touched her belly and sighed. She, too, glanced at Nameless, but it only seemed to stiffen her resolve. “We are trying for a baby, but the doctors say I’m barren. Either that, or Thumil’s too old.”
That called for a joke, but Nameless was suddenly not in a joking mood.
A baby—Thumil and Cordy. It should have been obvious, coming on the back of their marriage, but even so, it flattened any excitement he might have felt about leaving the ravine.
Thumil nudged his wife with an elbow. “Most likely it’s my illness.” He indicated the bald patches on his scalp and beard.
“Anyway,” Cordy continued, “we were hoping you’d give us your blessing, what with you being a holy man and all.”
Shader looked like they’d just insulted him. He chewed his lip and nodded. “Of course.”
“You know, laddie,” Nameless said to Shadrak, who was watching impatiently. “I think I like ‘Nameless’. You have a way with oxymorons.”
“Eh?” Shadrak said. “What’s that, a stupid cow? Think she just left with the bald scut.”
When Shader finished the blessing, he spoke for a minute with Thumil—religious stuff about faith and higher powers, from what Nameless could hear, and none of it particularly interesting. Thumil gripped Shader’s wrist and wished him well, but to Nameless, all he offered was a pensive frown.
Nameless led the way through the arch to the walkway beyond without a look back at the city that had been his home for as long as he’d lived. All it was to him now was a canyon of horrors, of wounds that could never heal.
The patter of feet told him Shadrak was close on his heels.
“This New Londdyr,” the homunculus said, “you know where it is?”
“Never left the ravine before, laddie.”
Shader came alongside with long, loping strides. “Then how are we going to get there?”
Nameless stopped to look up at the zigzagging pathway that led to the lip of the chasm.
“For one thing, it’s big, laddie. At least, so my brother used to say. He was a scholar of our Annals. And for another, it’s said there’s a long straight road leading east from here all the way to New Londdyr. It was built by the Founders of Arx Gravis, long before my people hid themselves away from the world above.”
“Great,” Shadrak said. “Shogging great.”
“What?” Nameless said.
Shader gave a weary sigh. “Sounds like the road we followed from Sektis Gandaw’s mountain. Only, we came from the west. I’m starting to think every move we make takes us further away from where we need to be.”
SHADOWS ON THE WALL
Shadrak led the way up the switchback pathway cut into the ravine wall. When he reached the final incline, he sprinted the last few strides, leapt, and kicked off the rock face to land lithely at the top. With a swirl of his concealer cloak, he vanished into the brilliant cobalt of the noonday sky.
“That’s Shadrak for you,” Shader said, taking a breather by the high step leading up from the penultimate level. “Always scouting ahead or following at a distance. Everyone else is an amateur to his mind. Still, given what happened down there, when Rhiannon and I got ourselves captured,”—he angled a nod below at the receding walkways and plazas of Arx Gravis—“he might have a point.”
Nameless thought he detected a certain reluctance in Shader moving onwards and upwards. Shadrak had ascended the steps and inclines like a ravine goat, but Shader had wavered on the way up. Once or twice, he’d leaned against the ravine wall, sucking in shallow gasps of air.
“Worried about what’s waiting for you up top, laddie?”
Shader glanced above, then shook his head. “You ever feel like you’re galloping on horseback and you can’t get off? The horse is taking you someplace you don’t want to go, but it doesn’t respond when you try to make it stop?”
“Laddie, I’m a dwarf. I live in a ravine. A horse to me may as well be a fairy or a unicorn.”
Shader sputtered out a laugh.
“But we do have this train thing that runs along tracks,” Nameless said. “It’s how the miners get to work. I rode that once, to the headframe and back. I could certainly imagine being stuck in a carriage as it speeds along the rails. In fact, that’s how I remember things, before I was shut in that cell: one incident heaped upon another, and me just reacting, and not always reacting wisely, either.”
“Who does in a crisis?” Shader said.
“You scuts coming, or what?” Shadrak called down from the top. His pallid face and pink eyes were there one second, gone the next.
“The little fellow’s in a hurry,” Nameless said.
“And he’s right to be.” Shader grimaced, like he was angry with himself.
He turned to take a hold of the top of the step to the last sloping pathway. It was chest-high to him, head-high to Nameless, and even higher for Shadrak. Yet it was Shader who had the most trouble climbing up to each level.
Worrying about the course of action they were taking, worrying about the Unweaving, was natural enough, but it struck Nameless that Shader’s foot-dragging as they ascended to the top of the ravine was likely due to another cause. The knight did his best to disguise it, but it was starting to become obvious: Shader was scared of heights.
Nameless grabbed hold of the step and pulled himself up until he could get his knees over the edge. All those years of chin-ups at the Ephebe made it almost effortless for him. It did make him wonder, though, how most other dwarves would cope; but then, they wouldn’t have to. Who among them left the ravine? Whatever the original purposes of the steps and pathways, it wasn’t to facilitate easy egress.
“Come on, laddie,” Nameless said. “Just this last incline and we’re there.”
Shader looked green as he came to his feet
. He swayed and threw an arm out to clutch at the wall.
“I’ll be a step behind,” Nameless said. “You’ll be fine. I’ve yet to hear of a dwarf plunging from the heights.”
One careful step after the next, they inched their way to the top. And to be honest, Nameless was glad of the slow pace. Having fantasies about leaving the ravine and actually doing it were two different things. He felt the lure of the taverns, of the Ephebe, of home calling him back down. And he would have heeded their pull had the truth been other than it was. But no matter how much he wanted his old life back, it was as gone as the name he’d been stripped of.
He hadn’t noticed when Shader climbed over the lip of the ravine without his help or support, and it came as a shock to him when the knight reached down to offer him a hand up.
Nameless felt himself teetering on the brink, literally as well as figuratively. All he’d ever known, everything that defined him, lay in the city below. How could he expect to cope in the world above? How could any dwarf? The thought flitted across his mind that he should simply back to the edge of the incline and step off into the chasm. There would be a moment’s terror as he plummeted toward an upper-tier walkway, maybe a split second’s pain, and then it would all be over.
“Nameless,” Shader said.
Nameless craned his neck to see above through the eye-slit.
Shader nodded encouragement at him, stretched out his hand. His eyes—the eyes Nameless had thought were Aristodeus’s—had none of the philosopher’s calculation and coldness. Aristodeus was a master of saying what he thought people wanted to hear, but humor, compassion, even genuineness were never reflected in his eyes. Shader’s might have been the same piercing blue, but they were as changeable as the skies of Aethir: one minute dazzling, almost iridescent; the next clouded over with gray.
Right now, they were a mixture of both, as if a tangle of conflicting emotions bubbled just beneath the surface: fear, doubt, reluctance; barely contained anger, frustration. But in among them, Nameless detected a thread of concern for him, a chink of empathy. And that last alone was what convinced Nameless to take Shader’s hand and be helped to the top of the ravine.
The minute he stepped away from the brink, Nameless felt exposed. It was so open, and he missed the protective shadows of the ravine walls like an absent parent. If it hadn’t been for the scarolite helm enclosing his head and restricting his field of vision, it might have felt a whole lot worse.
“Well?” Shader said. “How’s it feel?”
Nameless panned the great helm left and right, piecing together the view one strip at a time through the eye-slit. Ahead, perhaps a quarter of a mile off, the rock-strewn ground rose in steps and ledges that burgeoned into a low range of hills. They looked like nothing so much as a cluster of tuberous growths above the scarolite mines.
Shader followed his gaze and said, “The road we came by skirts those hills.”
“Aye, that’ll be the one the Founders built. Follow it east, and we’ll reach New Londdyr.” With the suns directly overhead, he wasn’t sure which way that was, and he said as much.
Shader seemed as clueless as Nameless. He looked to the left. “That’s the way we came, the way to the Perfect Peak.”
“So, right, then,” Nameless said, turning to face that way.
A dense mountain range rolled away toward the horizon. At the near end, it came close to the hills above the scarolite mines, and the dwarven road entered a pass between them.
He turned again, this time to look back out across the ravine.
In the far distance, he could make out the peak of a lone mountain. At first, he thought it must be Gandaw’s, but it couldn’t have been. That stood in the Dead Lands, as far west as the old dwarven road went. In which case, the peak he was looking at had to be Mount Sartis, the volcano his people had once tried to engineer. He remembered Thumil saying that had been the last time the dwarves ventured outside of Arx Gravis, an action that confirmed them in their fear of emerging from exile. The goblins the expedition had disturbed followed them home to the ravine, and the dwarves had come close to extinction.
“Found us some eggs,” Shadrak said.
The homunculus was a blur of movement coming from the direction of the hills. His cloak billowed about his shoulders, giving a glimpse of a dark leather jerkin and twin baldrics bristling with knives. Without his hood up, he looked somewhat severe with his close-shaven white hair and clipped box beard. Black rings surrounded his pink eyes like calderas. His lips were thin and set in a permanent scowl. With his bloodless complexion, he looked an evil shogger, for sure; either that, or he was extremely unwell and dying from consumption, or the cancer that had claimed Cordy’s pa.
Shadrak held out a pouch he’d crammed full with speckled quail’s eggs. The birds were regular visitors to the ravine, and their eggs made for a hearty breakfast, along with a few rinds of bacon and doorstops of toasted bread. And kaffa, of course.
Just the thought of all those succulent smells, and the bitter aroma of freshly roasted kaffa made Nameless’s stomach rumble. And then he remembered: he couldn’t take the helm off to eat.
“I’m not hungry, laddie. But thanks anyway.”
Shadrak reattached the pouch to his belt, where half a dozen smaller ones hung.
“Suit yourself.” To Shader, the homunculus said, “We should save them, in case there’s no hunting to be had this side of New Londdyr.”
Shader nodded his agreement, and then they were off, making a beeline for the road.
Despite the patches of overgrowth, there was evidence the road was still in use. A few hours out of Arx Gravis, they took a short break beside a broken wagon wheel. There was fresh dung close by, which Shader identified as coming from horses. To his trained nose, it was apparently quite recent.
When they passed the shoulder of the hills above the mines and entered a plain, Nameless was stunned by the wide open spaces, and began to realize just how shut away from the world he’d been in the ravine. His old life, the only life he’d ever known, was already starting to feel claustrophobic by comparison. Everything he’d taken for reality in Arx Gravis now seemed like the shadows cast on the ravine walls by the silvery glow of Raphoe, the largest of Aethir’s three moons.
At the end of the first day, the road brought them along the shore of an inland sea. Shadrak continued on, scouting out somewhere they could camp for the night.
The water made Nameless nervous. At first, he had no idea why, but then more cracks opened in the hard crust that covered his memories. It was the law of Arx Gravis that a mother taught her children all the skills essential for survival, but for some reason, his ma had never taught him to swim. Worse still, he had no recollection of her, save for the portrait in oil his pa kept in his room.
Suddenly acutely uncomfortable with the blood scabbing up his arms and coating his boots and britches, Nameless made his way to the water’s edge. He fought down a flutter of panic by telling himself he didn’t need to go in more than up to his waist; that there was no chance of drowning.
Seeing what he was up to, Shader helped him out of his chainmail hauberk, and Nameless walked into the water until it came up to his belt. He rubbed it into his forearms, and picked away at the worst of the scabs. After awhile, he grew more confident, and ducked down until the water came up to his neck. Finally, he came back to shore, stripped off his clothes, and plunged back in naked, save for the scarolite helm and the manacles on his wrists trailing lengths of chain.
When he emerged, Shader was wringing out his clothes for him. Nameless put them back on, still wet.
Shadrak returned, and led them to a copse of ash trees set back from the bank, where he said they should rest for the night.
Off in the distance, Shadrak claimed he could see the spires of a city. Try as they might, Shader and Nameless could see nothing but an endless expanse of scrubland. The homunculus must have had eyes as keen as an eagle’s, because there seemed no possible reason for him to lie.
Shadrak took a quail’s egg from his pouch, cracked it open on a rock, and swallowed the contents. When he saw Shader’s reaction, he said, “What? You want an omelet? Unless you can get that helm off Nameless’s head and use it as a frying pan, raw eggs is the best I can do.” He cracked open and ate another. “Course, if we was back in Sarum, my mate Albert would have cooked up something fancy. He’s a master chef. Downside is, he’s also the deadliest poisoner in the Sicarii.”
“Sicarii?” Nameless said.
“Assassin’s guild,” Shader answered. There was bitterness in his voice that betrayed he liked these Sicarii every bit as much as Nameless liked the Krypteia.
“That what you are, laddie?” Nameless asked. “An assassin?”
“So what if I am?” Shadrak was on to his third egg.
“Doesn’t matter to me. I was just wondering how a little fellow like you, a homunculus, gets mixed up in that sort of thing.”
“Size matter to you, does it?” Shadrak said.
“To the lassies, it does.”
Shadrak rolled his pink eyes and swallowed another egg. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “And I ain’t no homunculus.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“Well, I ain’t. And you ain’t the first scut to call me one, neither. But keep it up, and you’ll be the last.”
“Oh, aye?” Nameless said.
“Are those squirrels in the treetops?” Shader said, clearly seeking to break the tension. “We used to boil them up on campaign when I was with the Seventh Horse.”
Nameless started to tug his socks and boots back on.
Shadrak said, “Shog squirrels. Wait here, and I’ll see what I can find.”
With a swirl of his concealer cloak, he was lost in the foliage.
After a while, Shader said, “You want to be careful around him.” He winced and rubbed his lower back. “Before we were working together, if that’s what you can call it, Shadrak stabbed me in the back. Literally. The only reason I survived was this.” He drew his shortsword, and golden fire burst along the blade.
