Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Kali’s heart thudded and she hurried forwards, relief that she had at last caught up with the old man tempered by the worry that Munch’s trail appeared to be only minutes behind his, and she hoped to the gods that she wasn’t too late. But she had only taken a couple of paces when her foot crunched on something on the ground, and what she saw when she looked down made her momentarily pause.

  The icescape about her was dotted with bones, human and animal, mainly old but some not so, seemingly torn from their respective bodies and stripped utterly clean, some lying in small piles, others resting alone where they had been dragged by... something. What was the most disturbing was that the something had precisely the same odour about it that had stopped the bamfcat in its tracks far below.

  Here, the air was redolent with it, its strength almost overpowering. Kali trod cautiously in the direction of the cave, without doubt the source of the stench. She entered slowly, eyes alert for any movement or sound in the darkness. But she saw nothing, and the only sounds were those of her own feet crunching on the tinier deposits on the bone-strewn floor, along with a languid and incessant drip-plop-drip from the moisture-laden ceiling that echoed hollowly within the rock.

  There should have been no light to see by, but as Kali inched her way inwards, her knife at the ready, she saw that the cave was illuminated by a dull green glow emanating from crystalline formations in the rock. It was hardly daylight but it was bright enough to stop her stumbling blindly over the body that lay mutilated on the cave floor a few yards in.

  Merrit! she feared instantly, but quickly realised that it was not. Instead, she looked down at the body – the remains of a body – of what could only have been one of Munch’s party, the corpse lying broken and missing an arm and both legs, eyes staring blankly and mouth frozen in a rictal, agonised scream. A black and glistening trail of blood led further back into the cave, and Kali guessed that the poor woman had tried to drag what remained of herself to safety.

  Not Merrit. Merrit would not be capable of this.

  There was nothing she could do for the woman, so Kali closed her eyelids and moved on. But it wasn’t long before she came across another body, and then another, each in an equal or worse state of mutilation. Like the first, they appeared to have been trying to drag themselves to the exit but had never made it, the loss of blood from their amputations too great. Something in this cave had torn them apart like mools in a slaughterhouse, and it was beginning to look like it, not Munch’s people, was the biggest danger here.

  Kali could feel every fibre of her being warning her to get the hells out of there, but she knew she had no choice but to carry on, to find Merrit Moon, whether he was alive or dead. But as it happened, she did not have to look much further. No more than ten yards on, the cave opened out into a chamber where she found three more bodies heaped together in a small pile, almost indistinguishable from each other, they had been so badly torn. And next to them, covered in their entrails, lay Merrit Moon. The old man was face down on the floor, a staff and opened backpack scattered beside him, a dark pool of blood seeping from beneath his torso. But he was breathing shallowly. He was alive. Just.

  “Oh gods,” Kali said. She hurried to him and turned him gently over, cradling the back of his head in her palm. The old man sighed and his eyes fluttered open slowly, focusing on her with difficulty. From his complexion he had lost a lot of blood.

  It was clear nothing could be done. Merrit Moon was dying.

  Kali swallowed.

  “Hey... old man,” she whispered.

  Moon coughed. “You have the smell of Vos about you,” he said slowly, having to force the words out. “Have you ridden my faithful friend somewhere less than healthy once again, young lady?”

  “No, Merrit, Horse... I mean, yes. But don’t worry, Horse is fine... fine. He’s waiting for me.” She hesitated. “He’s waiting for you.”

  Moon smiled. “You’ve been looking after him?”

  Kali nodded briskly, trying not to let him see her tears. “Of course I have, you old fool. Bacon stew every day.” She stared at her mentor, aware that they were both avoiding the issue, and what she really wanted to say erupted out of her. “Pits, old man, I told you not to come here alone!”

  Moon shook his head, took her hand. As he spoke, his tongue clicked dryly in his mouth. “Here or elsewhere, it would not have mattered. It wasn’t the mountain’s cold embrace that finished me, Kali. It was the cold embrace of steel.”

  He slowly pulled up his tunic, wincing as the cloth tore from drying blood. Kali stared at three distinct puncture wounds in his torso – two in the gut and one near the heart – fury rising. The shape of the blade that had made them was unmistakable – a jagged-edged gutting knife. The worst thing about them was they could so easily have been killing blows but weren’t – Moon’s soon-to-be murderer had inflicted these mortal wounds and seemingly left him here to die.

  “Munch,” she hissed.

  Moon nodded. “Kali, he took the key. Knew I had it...”

  Kali sobbed. “I told Munch about you, old man. Gods help me, I didn’t mean to but I told him.”

  Moon stroked her cheek. “Hush. Whatever you did, I know you couldn’t help it. I told you, the Final Faith are zealou –”

  “Damn them!” Kali shouted, interrupting him.

  “Hush,” Moon said, again. “Hushhhhh.”

  “Don’t hush me! Damn you, Merrit Moon, stop treating me like a baby!”

  Despite his dire state, Moon chuckled, coughed, his breath rattling. “Actually, I’m trying to save your life,” he said. His eyes seemed to lose focus on her, stare beyond her. “More outbursts like that one and you’ll... arouse them.”

  “Arouse them? Who?” She pointed at the bodies. “Are you talking about the things that did this? Merrit, for the gods’ sake, what happened here? What killed these people?”

  Moon sighed heavily, seemingly losing the thread. “The key. I meant to take it deeper... to where they live... but these old muscles are slow and Munch and his men weren’t far behind... they found me here before I could...”

  He took a shuddering breath, remembering. “Munch didn’t even ask for the key. He just pulled me towards him, towards his knife, and then... my blood... the smell of my blood brought them up from below.”

  Kali’s face darkened. “Where’s Munch now?”

  “I... don’t know. I... think he ran from them...”

  “Them, again,” Kali said. For the first time she thought she could make out a low rumbling in the cave. “I guess we’re not talking run-of-the-mill mountain cats here are we?”

  Moon shook his head. “Creatures as old as the Old Races, probably much more so. They’ve lived in these mountains since the world was young, since before even the Sardenne grew – they, and their no-less-legendary cousins.” His eyes flicked to the side, and he swallowed. “But I don’t have to tell you about them, you can see for yourself.”

  “They’re coming?”

  Moon shook his head. “No, Kali. They’re already here.”

  Kali felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise along with an overriding need to hunch down, to make herself small. Because even as the old man had spoken she had sensed the presences all around her, and she raised her eyes slowly and nervously from the old man to the shadows of the chamber. There were six of them, all but naked things, their flesh a green that had nothing to do with the crystalline light. Half as tall again as a human, their thickly muscled bodies and hunched shoulders made them seem shorter, especially while at that moment they squatted in what appeared to be their personal niches in the rock walls, regarding her. Not just regarding her – because as they looked on with their deep-set eyes, their hair lank about their bodies and their mouths protruding teeth, each gnawed droolingly on chunks of meat and bone identifiable as pieces of thigh, an arm, and even a head; meat recently ripped from the corpses around them.

  These things. She’d heard tales of them as a child. Tales told in the Flagons meant to
scare her but which instead intrigued her. Bogey men. She didn’t know what their true name was but she knew what humans called them.

  Ogur.

  And as she realised she was kneeling in the middle of their dining room, they sure as hells scared her now.

  Despite her fear, Kali moved to protect the old man but he held her where she was. “Don’t,” he told her. “They won’t attack.” He looked up as one of them took a tentative step towards Kali but then retreated when, much to her surprise, the old man barked at it in some unknown tongue. “At least,” he finished wearily, “while I’m alive.”

  “You can control them?” Kali said, and remembered his words on his doorstep in Gargas, what seemed an age ago. “Don’t tell me – this is your tale for another time.”

  Moon nodded, winced in pain. “I’d come here in search of Herrick’s Passage – a tunnel said to pass under the mountains – but an avalanche meant I never found it. What I found was one of these ogur trapped beneath the ice, and I helped it.”

  “You’re telling me one of these things was grateful?”

  Moon half-laughed, half-choked. “Grateful? No. Had it not been so weak, it would have torn me apart. Which is why I shared with it the contents of my backpack.”

  “A quarrel of crossbow bolts, I hope.”

  “Eight bottles of flummox.”

  Kali stared at the old man dubiously. “Are you telling me you got an ogur pissed?”

  Moon coughed. “Drank him under the table. But he wasn’t used to the stuff. The point is, theirs is an alpha society and after that I was treated with a little more respect.”

  Kali laughed, but it was strained, redolent of a joke shared for the last time. Of all the tales the old man had told her over the years, she was never sure which he exaggerated, but clearly something had happened for the ogur to defer to him as they did. Something that had made him feel confident enough to lose the key in the lower depths of their cave, where it could never be reached.

  In the odd way that these things did, it suddenly occurred to her to ask him why, now that he’d confessed to drinking flummox, he insisted on serving her that atrocious elven wine. She wanted to ask him many things, actually, but as the old man coughed again she realised there was no more time.

  There had to be something she could do!

  She dug in her saddlebag for something, anything to help, but as she did Moon placed his hand on hers, just as he had in the Warty Witch so long ago. The message now was as clear as it had been then – put your hand down.

  “It’s too late,” Moon said, coughing. “What’s important is the key. You have to get the key. But you also have to know what it is you’re dealing with.”

  “Merrit, at least let me –” Kali began, but as she spoke thought: At least let me what?

  “Listen to me, young lady.” Moon insisted. “I don’t know everything about the key, but I haven’t told you everything I know. Snippets from across the years. The key you took is one of four, part of a set that unlocks something that should never see the light of day again. Something evil – so evil it is warned against time and time again in Old Race manuscripts written by a hundred different hands.”

  “What?”

  Moon coughed again. “I never found out precisely. If I had I would have done everything in my power to find and destroy it – what the manuscripts refer to repeatedly as an abomination.” He paused. “What I do know is that it almost finished the Old Races, wreaked so much death and destruction amongst them that these bitter enemies forged their first alliance in order that they might end its threat.”

  “But you must have some idea what it is.”

  Moon nodded. “Oh, yes. Some tales describe it as a kind of giant construct – a supposed marvel of dwarven engineering that became instead a horror – a complex automaton called the Clockwork King of Orl.”

  “The Clockwork King of Orl?” Kali repeated. “What in the hells do you suppose it does – is meant to do?”

  “The important question is what the Final Faith think it can do for them. If I know those zealots, their intent will be to use the king as a figurehead, a rallying icon for the spread of their church across Twilight. But if the old warnings are even half-truths, the people of Twilight will not be rallied, they will be destroyed.”

  Kali frowned. “I don’t understand. This alliance. If they wanted the king stopped, if it was so dangerous, why not just destroy the thing, or at least destroy the keys?”

  Moon sighed. “The king itself, I don’t know – perhaps they kept it as a reminder of their folly. The keys, however... in the aftermath, when it came to it, neither side trusted the other in the matter of disposal. Even when both parties were present each suspected that magic might deceive the eye, that secretly one or other party would keep the keys for themselves. They decided instead that they should be sealed away, watched, protected by lethal countermeasures that would ensure no one could get their hands on them again.”

  “The Spiral of Kos,” Kali breathed.

  “And three similar containment areas. They each built two sites – two dwarven and two elven – and manned them with mixed representatives of their races.” There was no blame in Moon’s eyes when he added: “Kali, you have no idea what it is that you’ve unleashed.”

  “I’m beginning to get the picture.” She bit her lip. “Merrit, please, what can I do?”

  “If the Final Faith are going after the keys, you have to find them first, make them inaccessible, hide them, destroy them if you have to. If you cannot, then you must discover the location of Orl, destroy the Clockwork King before the Faith reach it.”

  “But I’ve no idea where to start!”

  “Go to Andon, to the Three Towers, its Forbidden Archive. There are papers within that will tell you more than I know. They will be difficult to get to, Kali – they are protected – but you must reach them, find out what you can. And when you have, when you know what there is to do, you must do it. Make sure the Clockwork King is not reawoken, any way you can.”

  Kali felt somewhat daunted by her burgeoning responsibility. “Old man, I’m just a... tomb raider.”

  Moon slid his hand onto hers, visibly worsening. “No,” he said, weakly, “you’re not. There’s something else you need to know. The night you were found as a baby, by the stranger –”

  Kali stroked his hand. “It was you, old man. I know. I saw you when Fitch played with my mind. You and me in the Old Race site...”

  Moon raised his eyes, surprised, then coughed, and this time there was blood. “Hells of a time for a reunion.”

  “Hells of a time,” Kali nodded, sniffed. “Merrit, I –”

  “Don’t you dare hug me when I’m down, young lady,” Moon warned, though after a second he, too, smiled. “Kali, please listen. You were my greatest ever discovery, believe that. You should know that I love you like a daughter. But that it was me who found you isn’t what I was going to say. You have to know about the site itself.”

  “What? What about the site?”

  Moon didn’t answer directly. “There are things happening to you, aren’t there? I can feel the changes, see it in the way you move, sense it in your aura. You are more than you were. It’s what I always knew, right from the start – that you’re somehow different.”

  “Different?”

  “The site where I found you wasn’t like the others, Kali. It was uncompromised.”

  “What? What do you mean uncompromised?”

  “You know what I mean. Nobody had been in or out in over a thousand years. It was completely sealed.”

  Kali stared at him for a moment, speechless.

  “It couldn’t have been,” she said at last. “I mean, how did I get in there? What would that mean?”

  “I don’t know what it means. Only that it marks you out amongst the people on the peninsula – makes you different from them – and that is something you must remember at all times.”

  “But what –”

  Merrit held up his han
d, looked around at the gathered ogur. He was suddenly racked by a spasming cough, and sprayed more blood into his palm. “No more questions,” he said. “You have to go – now.”

  “Old man, I’m not just leaving you like thi –”

  Moon grabbed her hand, squeezed it tenderly. “Kali, go. I am dying and there is nothing you can do, and as soon as the ogur sense I have passed they will tear you apart. You have to get out of here before I die.”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “You must, young lady.” Moon was struck by another fit of coughing and then laid his head back with a sigh, his hand weak around hers. Kali choked back a sob. Dammit, she had to give him a hug whether he liked it or not.

  She leaned in – gently, so as not to hurt him – and, as she did, her hand brushed an amulet resting on his chest. She could have sworn it was glowing slightly. She went to touch it but her hand was unexpectedly swatted away.

  “No!” Moon shouted with surprising vehemence for a man on his deathbed. “It’s too... near the time.”

  “Merrit, what – ?”

  He actually glared at her. The old man actually glared.

  “Go, Kali, now,” Moon shouted. And then, more weakly: “Go now... and don’t... look ba –”

  Kali knelt there a second longer, stirring only as a series of grunts from the ogur signalled what she wouldn’t, couldn’t believe – that Merrit Moon was gone. Keeping her eyes fixed on the creatures she backed slowly away, settling the old man gently to the ground as she went. Then, with a final look at her mentor’s body, she raced towards the cave mouth and safety.

  She did not see the blue glow that suddenly suffused the cave behind her.