Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  At least briefly. One second she could hear Flash’s comatose wheezing and the next it seemed that she had somehow timeslipped back to the Great War and Scholten was again being blitzed by elemental bombs. The noise and the thudding made her pause for a moment, until she realised its cause. The tavern nearby – the one where Blossom had taken his punter to seal the deal – was the Knotted Noose, and the Knotted Noose was the home of the Hells’ Bellies. Kali imagined the scene and cringed – the only tavern that sober people avoided bursting to life as customers entered its doors, its resident dance troupe dropping their pies and pounding gleefully to the stage to entertain the audience they never had. Great gods, she could hear the cannon-like snapping of their garters now...

  The horror that was within the Knotted Noose would, however, work to her advantage, as Kali suspected that in the next few minutes she would be making rather a lot of noise of her own. Because breaking in a bamfcat was going to be far from easy.

  A real live bamfcat, she thought. No one had ever got near one before, and whatever turn of events had led to this specimen being caught in the herders’ nets was a fluke indeed. Bamfcats were found nowhere on the peninsula other than around the higher slopes of the Drakengrat Mountains, but the sheer incongruity of their presence there, together with their utter difference to the other indigenous species, had before now led her to wonder whether they were native to those mountains at all. Had someone or something brought them from elsewhere at some point in the past? Or had they, for some reason, migrated themselves? And if so, from where?

  Wherever it was, they had evidently needed protection there. Approximately one and a half times the size of a normal horse, the bamfcat resembled such a beast in all but one very important respect – it was heavily armoured. It didn’t wear armour, it was just the way it was built. Great plates of a glistening black shell-like material curved around its flanks, haunches, back and shoulders, and where the plates did not cover, on its legs and those parts of its body that needed flexibility, its hide was composed of a shiny, hard and knobbly substance that Kali could only equate to dried and bubbled tar. But as its defences went, that was not all. On the rear of its legs, all the way up the crest of its neck and down along its nose, the bamfcat grew sharp protrusions that were and were not quite horns, by the look of their slightly layered appearance retractable or extendable as a situation might demand. One thing was sure, it would win no beauty contests, despite its big green eyes.

  “Easy, boy,” Kali said as she eased into the shed to undo the beast’s tethers. “Or should that be girl?”

  There was a low, rattling rumble of indeterminate response. It would have to do as an answer because there was no way Kali was going to check. Slowly – very slowly – she eased it out of the tackroom into the yard, whispering in its ear, “Tell you what, why don’t I call you boygirl? And boygirl, guess what? We’re going for a little ride...”

  Her statement was a little premature she knew because, before she could ride anywhere, she had two practicalities to overcome. The first was that there was no way any ordinary saddle was going to fit this thing, but she solved that by plucking two from the tackroom wall, slinging one above and below and using both sets of straps to circle the bamfcat’s girth before cutting the main parts of the lower saddle away. The second was a matter of height – it would take a ladder to climb on the bamfcat’s back – but that solved itself when she realised that she already had a ladder – the bamfcat itself.

  Kali took a deep breath, muttered more soothing words to the beast and then ran up the horns on its legs. Throwing herself onto its back, she immediately grabbed another horn on its neck – the closest thing she had to reins.

  As she’d suspected, it was the wisest thing she could do. All the accoutrements necessary for a ride might have been in place, but there was no telling that to the bamfcat. The sensation of being mounted obviously a novel one to the beast, for a second it stood there simply stunned, and then decided that it didn’t like the development at all. And then all hells broke loose.

  The bamfcat ceased its rattling rumble and instead roared a roar that drowned out the thudding of the Hells’ Bellies, beginning to leap around the junkyard and spinning round and round in an attempt to throw its unwanted passenger from its back. Kali could do nothing but hang on for dear life, her hands clenched around the bamfcat’s neck horn, thighs jammed against its flanks. At first she didn’t find it too much of a challenge – the places she’d been, she was used to clinging to things – but what concerned her was how long she could maintain her grip – and how long, if at all, it would be before she succeeded in calming the beast. The bamfcat certainly didn’t make things easy, deciding, when Kali refused to budge, that if it couldn’t dislodge her with leaps and bounds, then it would do so with the aid of whatever lay around the junkyard, first impacting with and demolishing the tackroom and then having a go at the stables, where at that very moment Flash was just coming round. The emaciated nag sprang up, wheezing with terror, and began to run around the junkyard in hopeless circles, searching for an exit, before collapsing again. Kali, meanwhile, did the best impression of a circus performer she could, avoiding the bamfcat’s protestations by dodging anything that threatened to crush her, throwing her legs over one side of the beast then another, at one point slipping under and over its girth, and at another lying flat on her back without a grip to pass beneath an overhanging beam that would otherwise have decapitated her. It seemed, for what felt like an eternity, that the bamfcat was never going to surrender its independence, but then, unexpectedly, it began to slow. A few more feeble bucks and leaps followed, together with a half-hearted brush against the collapsed ruins of the tackroom walls, but finally the beast was reduced to a few spasms that were little more than afterthought, and then to a begrudging standstill.

  The thing stank overpoweringly of the sweat that oozed thickly from between its plates, but Kali knew that after what she’d just endured she was hardly in a state to win any floral competitions herself. This appeared to be no bad thing. The bamfcat turned its head towards her, eyes dolefully taking in the rider that had beaten it and, with a long and disgusting snort, sucked in the scent of its new owner.

  “Good boygirl,” Kali said, patting it heavily. She smiled as the bamfcat rattle-rumbled, because this time it sounded more like a purr. “Good, good boygirl.”

  It was time to go. Kali manoeuvred the bamfcat towards the passage out of the yard but then reined it back. On the other side of the gate she could hear the voices of two patrolling guards, who, despite the continuing thudding of the Bellies, were bemoaning the fact that it was too quiet in the backstreets, and how they’d each give coin for a little piece of the action. Especially if they could lay their eyes – and other parts of their anatomy – on the girl who was meant to have scarpered from the cathedral. She was a tasty little piece by all accounts. Running around in her drawers, too. A bit of all right. Worth a stuffing.

  Really.

  Be careful what you wish for, boys, Kali thought. She smiled and patted the bamfcat soothingly, prompting a rolling of its neck. If it was a piece of the action the guards wanted, then a piece of the action they would get.

  “Yah!” she shouted, at the same time ramming her heels into its flanks and pushing its neckhorn forwards. With a snort, the bamfcat responded, galloping forwards and through the junkyard gate.

  Through, because there was no need for Kali to bother opening it. Or rather, the bamfcat didn’t need her to – because as it galloped forwards it demolished the entranceway in much the same way it had demolished the yard, ramming the gates with its armoured head and ripping them clean away from their hinges. As a result, twin sheets of wood arced through the air of the alleyway, flipping and spinning into the path of the patrolling guards.

  “Wha – ? Oh, bloody huuurk!” one of them cried as half the gate smacked him in the face, flooring him, while the other, ducking to avoid the second half, swiftly drew his sword and advanced. But then he sa
w the bamfcat, and stopped. The bamfcat saw him, too, and roared into his face so strongly that his hair streamed back from his scalp. It was difficult to describe the colours the guard’s face went, and the only change in colour about his person that could be pinpointed with any accuracy was that of his trousers. He slopped away.

  Kali galloped the bamfcat down the alley and out, emerging onto Anclas Way, Scholten’s main thoroughfare to its eastern gate. It, too, remained busy despite the night hour – was thronged, in fact, with revellers, tradesmen and, most of all, pilgrims returning from their visits to the cathedral. But as the bamfcat galloped forth, skidding into a turn on its wet cobbles, the area did its best to empty itself as fast as it could.

  Kali ignored the screams and cries of alarm, the bodies falling through windows, the collapsed stalls and the rolling trinkets and fruit, and the bamfcat ignored the various objects thrown by some braver members of the crowd that bounced off its armour. Both of them ignored – completely – the cries of a number of startled guards that they should immediately halt.

  A moment later, scattering those same guards in their path like ninepins, they exited the closing city gate.

  Free at last of Scholten, Kali reined the bamfcat forwards. Towards a horizon that was tinged white and red from the glow of ice and volcanoes. Towards the mountains that formed the ridge of the world. Towards Merrit Moon.

  CHAPTER TEN

  IT TOOK KALI two days to reach the World’s Ridge Mountains, but even without rest and at the sustained and full gallop to which she subjected her seemingly inexhaustible mount, the journey should have taken longer. The bamfcat, it seemed, was something more than just an armoured horse.

  She couldn’t put her finger on how it happened, where it happened or even precisely when it happened, but now and again in their journey, the world about them seemed suddenly to blur. This was not simple acceleration on the bamfcat’s part – had it been she would have at least felt greater wind resistance – but a rather disorientating case of simply being in one place one second, another the next, as if unbeknownst to herself she had actually nodded off for part of the ride. The biggest hint that something unusual was happening was when they reached the town of Fayence, where, after such a blur, the startled faces of the locals were tantamount to what they might have been had mount and rider appeared right in front of their noses, out of thin air. Odd, that, because as far as Kali knew that was precisely what they’d just done.

  Those faces were nothing, though, compared to the looks that followed when, during the brief hiatus, the bamfcat decided to feed. One moment the worgle was happily rolling along the main street in front of them, and the next the rodent was snapped up by a lizard-like tongue the length of two men, the furry ball hooting in panic as it was sucked in and devoured in a single swallow. A dozen of its startled brethren flared like toothbrushes and bounced away, trying to avoid its fate, but the bamfcat’s lengthy tongue slipped into every nook and cranny and snapped them up in rapid succession, Fayence’s worgle population suffering a devastating blow in seconds.

  Kali didn’t question how the bamfcat did what it did or how it fuelled itself, however, because it got her where she needed to be and faster than she would have dreamt possible. But with Munch having had such a head start, they still had a lot of ground to make up. Thankfully, the journey so far had been the easy part, and the hard part was yet to come – and with some luck it would slow the bastard down. Kali looked up as they began to near the mountains, and felt the same sense of awe and insignificance that she always did when she came within riding distance of the range. Yes, if anything was going to slow Munch down, the mountains would.

  Accessible only at the southern tip of the Sardenne Forest, the World’s Ridge Mountains loomed massively ahead and above of her, a forbidding wall of rock that in places seemed to reach higher than the sky. Not just rock, either – the lower peaks of the range were dotted with live volcanic craters that belched lava onto their tortuous slopes, while the upper peaks were sheer faces of ice, glistening white in stark contrast to the orangey-reds of the fires below. Where the two met, and clashed, great steaming geysers blasted upwards, periodically disintegrating the ice and causing it and the rock behind to crumble and fall, the avalanches creating a roar that seemed to be that of the mountains themselves. No one knew what lay beyond the World’s Ridge, and if anyone had ever attempted to traverse it, they had not returned. Like the Sardenne Forest, it was a barrier to the inhabitants of the peninsula, but in this case one that daunted even Kali, and she wondered, on occasion, whether there was anything to be made of the fact that the barrier was composed of earth, air, fire and water – the four elements themselves.

  They reached the lower slopes, and the bamfcat slowed as it began to climb. It sniffed at her and then at the air, apparently picking up a human scent, and so Kali allowed the animal to lead her, negotiating gorges, precarious trails and natural rock bridges over bubbling streams and billowing pools, hot from the mountains’ insides.

  At least for part of the way. During the past few days, the bamfcat, apart from being inexhaustible, had manifested an absolute absence of reluctance to do anything it was asked, but after almost a day and a half climbing beyond the foothills there came a point at which even the bamfcat would not go further. As she watched the beast’s nostrils flaring, Kali suspected why. Wafted down to them from the higher slopes on the occasional blast of bitter, whistling wind, came a stench that could only belong to whatever denizens called these mountains home. The stench was utterly feral, bestial, so strong it was almost sickening. Of all the sights, sounds and smells that they had encountered on their journey, Kali didn’t know why this, of all things, should unnerve the bamfcat, but perhaps the inhabitants it sensed were its racial enemy, or perhaps even its natural predator in the place from where it had originally come. She wondered whether the beast that had become her new companion hailed originally not from the Drakengrats but from these mountains – or even beyond.

  But that was a question for another time. For now it didn’t really matter because the animal had served her well – had got her here when no other beast possibly could – and she had no right to push it any further against its will, even if such an act would be physically possible.

  Kali found a suitable spot and dismounted, stripped the bamfcat of its saddle and then slapped the beast on its flanks.

  It didn’t go anywhere.

  “What?” Kali said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to wait for me?”

  The bamfcat flipped out its tongue, perhaps searching in vain for worgles, then hung its head, saying nothing.

  “You’re not going to be here when I get back, and we both know it. So go.”

  The bamfcat snorted and lifted its head to stare dolefully at her. There was a certain insanity its eyes that she found disturbingly familiar – and quite comforting.

  “Okay, fine!” Kali relented. “Stay there – but something further up has obviously given you the spooks so don’t try to follow me, okay?”

  Kali left the saddle but flung the saddlebags over her shoulder. She started to climb, hesitated, then turned and patted the beast three times on its neck. “I’ll... see you when I get back,” she said.

  She continued on alone, the foothills behind her, the true slopes of the World’s Ridge rising precipitously before her. Snow covered the ground at her feet in increasingly larger and thicker patches, but here and there pools and rivulets of lava broke through the rocks and stained the whiteness, making it seem as if the jagged landscape was slowly haemorrhaging. She climbed higher and, despite the lava, the temperature dropped considerably, and while she had been too intent on getting here to feel the cold until now, Kali was forced to dig into Blossom’s saddlebag for an extra layer of clothing, pulling out a ragged fur coat that looked as if it had seen too many trapping expeditions. That, or its donor had been trapped on a particularly bad hair day. She slung it on. The thing stank to the high heavens but did the job.

  In
the absence of the bamfcat, Kali had to rely on her own tracking skills to keep on Merrit Moon’s trail, secure in the knowledge that as no one dared venture far up into these mountains the signs of passage indicated by dislodged rocks, broken branches and disturbed patches of scree – eliminating those caused by whichever wild animals lived on the mid-slopes – were most likely his. It was possible that as humans were such rare visitors to these heights, those same wild animals were wary of approaching for fear of their place in the food chain, and for the most part Kali managed to avoid encounters with local predators, driving off the odd pack of shnarls or curious bugbear with a wave of her knife and suitable warning noises. Only once did she pause warily, when from far above she heard the haunting echo of what sounded like prolonged screams. They could, though, equally have been the carrion calls of the strange birds that circled high above. In this place, it was difficult to tell.

  Birds or not, Kali picked up her pace. Thankfully, tracking the old man became even easier when, after a further three hours’ climb, she came across convergent tracks coming in by a different route, vaguely to the west. Seven people, six men and the smaller, slightly lighter tread of a woman – and horses – heavily equipped. It did not take her long to work out who they might be. Munch was probably using one or more shadowmages to track Merrit Moon, and, despite her fears for him, for once she was grateful for the presence of threadweavers as from there on in their talents resulted in the old man’s trail being overlaid by the footprints of his pursuers, making it as obvious to follow as a flaming torch in the dark.

  A flaming torch would have been something she’d have been very grateful for at that moment, because Kali was approaching the ice-slopes now, the snow that had become thick beneath her tread taking on the greater solidity of permafrost. A blizzard had begun to howl about her, too, and she huddled inside her furs as she tramped ever upwards, squinting to see past the needle-like flurries that threatened to white-out everything before her. Then, suddenly, she spotted something in a rockface ahead – the dark and variously shaped outlines of what could only be cave mouths. What was more, the trails of the old man and his pursuers – plain on the slight plateau that led to the caves – vanished right into one of them.