Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  It was the Spiral of Kos all over again, only a hells of a lot worse. There, at least, the bones of the brackan had softened her landing, but here there was nothing between her and the hard stone streets except a packed and undulant layer of the city’s jagged and sharply angular rooftops, all bedecked with a collection of chimneystacks, guttering and assorted pointy protrusions that from Kali’s unique perspective seemed to have been cruelly designed to bounce her back and forth and shatter all of her bones before the ultimate pleasure she had to come.

  She was, as Slowhand might have put it, stuffed. Actually going to die. The realisation brought with it a peculiar calm, and as time seemed to slow around her – prolonging her fall until it became almost dreamlike, relaxing even – Kali reflected that at least for this imminent demise no blame could be attached to the archer, for he had done all that he possibly could do to help her. Fine, she was still having problems getting her head around the fact that the bloody man could actually be so selfless, but the one thing she could not deny was that on the walkway he had bought her a little more time, by the look of things sacrificing his own life to give her a few more seconds on the slide. She wished – though very much doubted – that she was wrong about what she had seen, hoping for a second that even Katherine Makennon would not sanction cold-blooded murder on her holy premises, but then she remembered the way Makennon had left her to Munch, and immediately thought otherwise.

  Munch. A memory of the courtyard outside the Flagons again flashed into her mind, the blood-soaked picture turning even redder with suddenly returned rage. Horse and now Slowhand, she thought – with Merrit Moon, a man who had never harmed and would never dream of harming anyone in his life, hunted down as well. Makennon and her murderous damned lackey seemed intent not only on ruining her life but of stripping it of everything she held dear.

  Well, she wasn’t going to let them do that.

  No more, damn them both.

  No pitsing more!

  Kali’s awareness of her immediate predicament returned to her, suddenly and vitally, but also differently than before, as if every one of her senses had burst into greater life. Though she still fell in the same slow and almost dreamlike way, every facet of what was around her and, more importantly, rapidly looming beneath her, seemed more distinct, the wind, rain and approaching rooftops separate parts of a jigsaw that she suddenly thought she could piece together in order to survive.

  There was just one problem. There didn’t seem to be time to open the box the jigsaw came in.

  Time returned to normal and Kali dropped, the air above Scholten buffeting her as it whistled past at an ever-increasing rate. But then, instinctively, she turned in the updraught, angling and stiffening her body so that it sliced rather than fell through the firmament, causing her to nosedive towards – and at the same sloping angle as – the nearest and highest roof. The manoeuvre felt like suicide, and she herself figured that it very probably was, but some newly awakened part of her also figured that as reaching the ground was an inevitable given, why not do it in her own way, and in whatever style she could muster?

  Hells. What did she have to lose?

  The first roof came at her a split-second later, granted the honour of being the first to welcome her to town by the fact it appeared to cover the home of someone rich, building upwards rather than outwards in the cramped streets until the property was five storeys high. The tiles that coated it were a further sign of the owner’s affluence, expensive redslate, and recently replaced or repaired. Sadly, whoever lived beneath them would have to give the slate quarry another visit.

  Kali relaxed her body as she slammed into the roof, but the impact still sent jarring waves of agony through her and winded her severely, her loud explosion of breath drowning out the sound of shattering tiles as well as splintering timbers as the roof beneath them buckled to accommodate her form. From below came a screech of alarm and the sound of a shattering pot – perhaps some servant in the attic – but Kali could only apologise in passing as it soon became obvious she wasn’t staying there for long. Loose tiles skittered down the roof before her, and she with them, sliding forwards on her front, hands clawing at gaps in an attempt to slow her descent towards the lip of the roof, but one that was to little avail. Her momentum uncontrollable, she skidded down, tiles snagging at her vest and pants and scraping her skin so that she felt as if she’d been thrown onto some giant cheese grater, the rough surface threatening to do her more damage than the impact itself. Grunting, she rolled onto her back as she slid but then realised she was heading towards the edge of the roof backwards and upside down, which was no good at all. She quickly flung her legs around at the hips, performing a kind of half-turn, half-roll manoeuvre that righted her so that she now slid feet first and on her behind, but with only a second to spare before she reached the roof’s edge.

  A hazardous rain of broken tiles and mortaring preceded her over the lip and tumbled towards the street below, soliciting another cry of alarm, and then Kali felt the soles of her feet slam into the iron guttering that lined the lip of the roof, the bolts holding it there loosening from the stonework with her impact. She didn’t attempt to halt her descent as she was still sliding far too fast and the impact would have flipped her over and sent her flailing towards the street herself, so instead she used the disintegrating guttering to her advantage. She quickly scanned the buildings opposite, their roofs perhaps fifteen feet away and a storey or so below and, calculating the way the guttering was breaking, chose her target, the chimneystack-crowded roof of a seedy-looking boarding house called Dorweazle’s. As the bolts on the guttering sheared Kali dug in her heels and – arms outstretched for balance – stood and rode it as it came away from the roof, using it and the drainpipe it served as a giant stilt to stride the gap between buildings.

  It wasn’t going to take her all the way, she knew.

  The precarious assemblage of metal buckled beneath her when she was halfway across, and more evidence of her passage rained into the street below with a series of resounding clangs. Again, cries of alarm drifted up to her, but again she could only apologise in passing as she really had little choice but to keep moving, flailing and running through the air now as if she were some heavenly messenger who’d lost the power of flight but remained intent on delivering a missive to Dorweazle.

  With a loud cry of exertion Kali made it – just – thudding down onto the roof of the boarding house in a crouch, though she knew her problems weren’t yet over. The steep, badly maintained and rain-slicked roof offered little purchase and she found herself skidding backwards amongst streams of rainwater towards its lip, one still too far from the ground for her liking. She instinctively assessed her situation once more then quickly grabbed the edge of a passing chimneystack to brake her sliding form. The brickwork crumbled in her hands but she didn’t stay around long enough for that to matter, instead throwing herself away from the chimneystack and increasing her downward momentum while at the same time skewing herself diagonally across the roof to where another stack jinked crookedly from the tiles. As bricks from the first clattered past her and down, Kali grabbed onto the second, used it as a pivot to spin around, and then flung herself away from it as she had done with the first. The second stack collapsed behind her completely, its bulk rumbling down the roof in her wake, but though Kali suspected Dorweazle might be less than pleased with her fleeting visit she was beyond apologising now – because for the first time she was starting to think that her suicidal manoeuvres just might work.

  She was now sliding upright and face first towards the lip of the roof, in exactly the position she wanted to be. Only a couple of storeys separated her from the ground, the last leg as it were, and with luck she’d make it without breaking her own. For the final time she scanned the buildings ahead of her, decided on the way to go and then skied right off the roof of Dorweazle’s.

  She angled forwards, turning her ski-jump into a dive, and then curled into a ball. Tracing a perfect arc downwards, sh
e fell for two seconds and then impacted with a shop’s awning positioned between storeys, breaking her fall halfway. As she hit, and bounced, she uncurled herself from the ball and allowed herself to bounce again, flipping head over heels off the edge of the awning and laughing out loud as she saw her feet approach the ground. By all the gods, she’d made it. She was dow –

  Something snagged and she jerked to a halt, toes a foot above the street. She dangled there for a second and then there was an ominous tearing sound. Suddenly, she dropped, the remains of her underwear remaining behind, fluttering from the awning like a flag.

  Kali stared. She couldn’t believe it. After all she’d just been through!

  The second chimneystack, caught until now on guttering, smashed into the ground right behind her and exploded into a cloud of debris and dust. For a second she couldn’t see a thing, and then the cloud cleared, and she could.

  A small crowd of people stared, murmuring and pointing at her. The naked, ashen-white woman who’d just fallen from the sky. Oh, this is just great, she thought. It was the Curse of Slowhand, come to get her from beyond the grave. Damn him.

  “What?” she yelled, holding her arms out. “They kicked me off Kerberos, all right?”

  Bootfalls echoed suddenly, seemingly from everywhere, and Kali realised that the bells of Scholten Cathedral were still ringing, alerting everyone in the know to the fact there was a fugitive in their midst. Shadows loomed on the walls along the street, and she dashed for the nearest alleyway, double jinking and jinking again so that she emerged from another as the owners of the shadows passed it by. They could have been cathedral guard or they could have been city watch, she wasn’t sure, because it was no small measure of the Final Faith’s influence in the city that the livery they wore was almost exactly the same. But crossed circles or not, you never knew where you stood with the watch, because while some were indeed good men, others – sadly, an increasing number of others, along with a good percentage of the population – were in the expansive pocket of Makennon and her people, bribed to be their eyes and ears throughout Scholten by a regular pouch of full silvers or the promise of divine favour. It would be just her luck to run smack into the wrong ones.

  The point was, she could trust no one, and that fact became all the more disturbing when she realised that she didn’t have the faintest clue where in the city she was. She knew Scholten passably well but no one could possibly know all of its backstreets, and the rather unorthodox route she had taken to arrive here hadn’t given her much chance to look for familiar landmarks, which had left her totally disorientated.

  The only thing she did know was that she needed to find Slowhand’s stash and the stables near to it. Where had he said it was – between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly’s? Okay, the fetish house, as far as she knew, was near the eastern gate, so she’d make her way there.

  Kali glanced at the stars to orientate herself and began to move, and it was then that it hit her. She ached like the hells. More, as the chimney’s dust streaked off her in the rain so that she could see beneath, she was completely black and blue. Not to mention that she was limping like a trigon, her shoulder felt dislocated and a little finger throbbed like the pits, as if broken. One thing was clear, however. If she was somehow changing, then she was far from superhuman, and she’d been lucky that fall hadn’t killed her. It was a handy lesson to bear in mind for the future.

  Despite the night hour, the city streets still had traffic, and, regardless of the fact she was naked, Kali was forced to keep to the alleyways, take liberties sneaking through the occasional house and even return to the rooftops once or twice to avoid patrols or civilian spies. Even so, her route was not without danger, and she moved cautiously and stealthily through Gizzard Yards, Red Square and Thumper’s Cross. Here and there she spotted the conical helmets, tower shields and red tabards of the watch engaged in less than official business but, in doing so, bided her time until they were done, and then moved slowly on. At last she came upon her destination, a muddy gap between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly’s, confirmed where she was by looking up to see a rope dangling limply through a ring, and then searched in nearby bushes for the stash that Slowhand had told her would be there. She found it and, somewhat chilled by now and hoping for warm garb, pulled forth a filigree shirt and pair of stripy tights. She cursed. Slowhand might have been wishing to stay in his troubadour disguise but, sometimes, she worried about him.

  There was, at least, a decent pair of boots and a considerable amount of coin also contained therein, and Kali took both. All she needed to do now was find the stables. That task – as it turned out – was relatively easy, because she would have been able to smell them a league away.

  Kali followed her nose, slipping along more alleyways, keeping to the walls and in the shadows. The area through which she now moved was less than salubrious and she had to pick her way over collapsed drunks and weave through bins overflowing with rubbish, from which the head of an occasional scavenging polerat poked out. Cries and laughter and the louder sounds of disagreement and argument coupled with the odd smashing plate or bottle leaked from the houses all around her, echoing in the night air. At last, though, she came upon a fence, a slight whinnying and clopping of hooves from beyond leaving her in no doubt that she had found that which she sought. She scrambled up and peered over, and her heart sank. She had either found the wrong stables or Slowhand’s requirement of what a horse was or could do was considerably less than hers.

  There was some kind of junkyard jammed between the backs of four surrounding tenements, accessed through a covered passage between two of them. A tilting, half-chained sign declared it to be the business premises of one Poombar Blossom, Importer and Exporter of Exotica. And sure enough, the yard was piled high with exotica – if, that was, one considered rusted hunks of metal, old beds and broken cartwheels to be the mysterious produce of distant lands.

  A ramshackle bank of three stables suggested that Poombar ran a little sideline in horse trading but, it seemed, his definition of what constituted a horse was about as accurate as his definition of the exotic. Only two of the stables were filled and then just barely, two emaciated nags who looked as if they’d snap in two if mounted chewing half-heartedly on carrots that were, themselves, thin and knackered. One of the horses – Flash, according to a sign on his stable – wheezed so badly that Kali suspected he’d drop dead at the merest mention of the word gallop. Dammit, she thought, this has been a complete waste of time.

  She was about to drop back down from the fence when three things happened. Firstly, two men exited a shed that she presumed served as some kind of office and walked towards what looked like a tackroom near the stables themselves, apparently doing business. Secondly, something in the tackroom didn’t like the sound of their approach, and suddenly the ramshackle structure all but exploded, every panel, including the roof, crashing outwards and upwards, shaken by violent impacts from within. Thirdly, Flash and his mate reared in panic, snorting so badly that they hyperventilated and, with two loud thuds, fainted to the stable floors.

  Kali guessed that, whatever was being kept in the tackroom, it was not a fellow horse. And when a moment later its door was opened and she heard a rattling rumble from within, she knew it for sure. She smiled, because if she was right about what she’d heard then these stables might indeed provide her with a mount, as it appeared that Poombar Blossom dealt in exotica after all.

  She leapt the fence and crept into the yard, hiding behind a pile of junk opposite where the men now stood. Through the open door of the tackroom she could now see its inhabitant as well as hear the exchange of the two men attempting to calm it.

  “Easy, easy,” the rotund thing that must have been Blossom said, and somewhat surprisingly the beast quietened. “There – ya see what I mean?”

  “Bloody ’ells, you wasn’t kiddin’. Where’dya find this fing?”

  “Drakengrat Mountains. Came out o’ nowhere an’ got caught in the sweepnets o’ the roob ’e
rders. Crippled five of ’em afore they managed to rope it. Me bro’ didn’t know what else to do so brought it to me.”

  “Bloody ’ell, Blossom. You know what it is?”

  “Not a clue. You?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

  “You’ve never seen anything like it?”

  “Never seen anything like it in my life.”

  “Make a nice addition to your menagerie, eh? Fifty full silver an’ it’s yours.”

  “You’re ’aving a larf. Twenty.”

  “Forty.”

  The two men might never have seen anything like it, but Kali had. Seen and heard, once, and from a distance. And she would, in fact, be doing the man who was currently offering thirty full silver a very big favour by taking it off his hands. Slowhand, unfortunately, had left her nowhere near enough money to join in the bidding and that left her only one way of acquiring it. She debated some distraction to draw the two men away – even contemplated clobbering them both with a rusty horseshoe that lay on the muddy ground – but Blossom was clearly eager to sell the only sellable thing he had and the bartering was over before she knew it. Conveniently for her, part of the price was a tankard in the local tavern and, as the men departed wiping spit-slimed hands, she suddenly found that she had the now quiet junkyard to herself.