Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  The last thing Kali heard from the Anointed Lord was, “Gentlemen, we have an appointment in Orl.”

  The wall sealed itself with a jarring thud. And the floor beneath Slowhand sank slightly with a grating sound.

  The coils in the mould began to glow.

  Slowhand took a look at the charred bodies and the reddening mould. “Oh, pits,” he said.

  “Pits?” Kali repeated. Now that the mechanism was activated there was no reason to stay perched where she was, and she jumped down, trying to find a way to reopen the wall. There was none. “That’s all you can say after betraying me?”

  “They would have killed you, Hooper, you know that. I was saving your life.”

  “Maybe,” Kali said. Now she was pulling at the panelling, trying – desperately – to find some kind of off switch. Again, none, and sweat was already breaking out thickly on her body. “Dammit!”

  She stared at the mould, at the window of the observation area and back again. That done, she moved with Slowhand to the rim of the chamber, but the heat was still intense – as intense as it would need to be to make the key molten in a matter of seconds.

  And seconds was all they had, because her hair had begun to smoke. Her double take on the mould and the windows had given her an idea of how to get out of there, though, even if it would take split-second timing. But first she needed to deal with Slowhand. She needed him but his breathing was becoming increasingly laboured – he was having a much harder time of it than her.

  Kali dug into her toolbelt and pulled out what appeared to be a small conch. The shape of it was something that could be bitten down on in the mouth, and Kali did this, testing the thing with a couple of inhalations before handing it to Slowhand.

  “Use this,” she said. “It’ll be easier.”

  Slowhand took the conch, bemused. What, she thought he’d feel better if he could listen to the sea? He looked inside, and then recoiled. There were things inside – horrible, little, pulsing, slimy things.

  “Don’t ask me,” Kali said. “But they produce oxygen. The supply’s limited but it does gradually refill. Go ahead, chomp down, it’ll make a difference.”

  Slowhand did so, reluctantly. And his eyes widened as the things did what they did, filling his lungs with cool air. “Fwer joo ged theef fings?”

  Kali shrugged. “That one? That one I bought from a pirate in a little place called Crablogger Beach.” She dug in her belt again. “This one, however, I found in an elven ruin – and I’ve had it for a long, long time.”

  Slowhand stared at her questioningly as Kali rolled the icebomb in her hand, remembering her encounter with Merrit Moon all those years ago. “Keep it because one day you might need it,” he’d said. Well, old man, guess what...

  “If this thing still works, things in this room are about to go from very, very hot to very, very cold very, very quickly. You know what happens when things do that?”

  “They blow up in your face?”

  “A-ha. So find somewhere to use as cover.”

  “Hooper, there is no cover.”

  Kali looked upwards. “Then Killiam Slowhand is going to have to be a little bit faster for once.”

  Slowhand followed her gaze. “Understood.”

  “Right, then,” Kali said. She pressed the stud on the globe and threw it towards the forge. For a second nothing happened, and then everything before their eyes exploded and turned white.

  The old man had not been exaggerating about the power of these things. It might have been tragically effective when he’d used one outside, but in these close confines it was almost elemental in its impact.

  The forge frosted, and they waited. The floor cracked beneath their feet. The very air they breathed seemed to be crystals, and still the pair of them waited. The timing had to be perfect.

  The two of them were covered in a thin sheen of ice now, and shivering violently. Their breath froze as it left their mouths.

  There was a crackling sound from above, perversely sounding as though the forge were on fire.

  The glass of the observation chamber frosted from left to right, as if something invisible had painted it white.

  “Now, Slowhand!” Kali shouted.

  The archer struggled to steady his grip. Kali could hardly blame him. She, too, was shaking like a leaf.

  “Slowhand...”

  Slowhand let fly three arrows in quick succession, the first spidering the frozen glass, the second cracking it and the third shattering it completely.

  The glass blew out at the same time the forge exploded. Sharp slices of death – glass and metal – rained and hurtled at them from above and below.

  They didn’t hang around to feel their touch. As soon as his final arrow impacted with the wall of the observation chamber behind the glass, Slowhand grabbed Kali about the waist, circling her so his hand could still grab the rope, and then launched the pair of them up towards the broken window, frozen hand alternating with frozen hand as they climbed.

  Behind and below them the forge didn’t know what to do with itself, the chunks of the mould that had landed on its floor again triggering the heating coils at the same time as they crackled with intense cold. And as Kali and Slowhand reached window level, the stark contrast between temperatures caused a renewed series of explosions, and the whole chamber blew.

  Kali and Slowhand were sent hurtling towards the observation area wall, thudded into it and landed on the floor, stunned. But as its floor subsided beneath them, they knew there was no time to waste.

  The whole place was going up.

  They ran, exiting first the observation area and then the dome itself, the whole place quaking beneath them. Makennon and her party had already left but some guards remained. They were not concerned with Kali and Slowhand, however, as they were too busy screaming and running for their lives.

  The reason for this was that the lava lake surrounding the dome had ceased its gentle bubbling and become now a seething, broiling mass that lurched and spat at the rock that contained it. Thick, liquid fire had even begun to spit above its lip and, as Kali and Slowhand looked on one last, unfortunate woman was engulfed in a burning tongue that fried her screeching form to a skeleton in less than a second.

  Those same lava spurts hitting them wasn’t their main problem, however.

  It was the lava spurts that had hit the suspension bridge.

  Because as they watched, their only way off the central island warped and twisted in the intense heat, and then its cabling snapped away with a sound like a whiplash.

  Almost instantly, the bridge was gone.

  “Hooper?” Slowhand said, worriedly.

  Kali looked down, her brow beetling. “We’re stuffed,” she said, succinctly.

  What she neglected to mention was what Slowhand had not yet noticed. Because she didn’t want to worry him more.

  The lava lake was rising.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  RESURRECTION WAS A second coming. Somewhat more than a second, actually, but in the circumstances Merrit Moon thought it would be churlish to complain about the delay.

  The sharp intake of breath with which he returned to life echoed around the cave of the ogur, empty now apart from the ogur themselves, gathered in a tribal huddle where, by the look of the cleanly gnawed bones around them – all of the bones of Munch’s people – they had been sitting for some time. They stared at him in silence, their expressions a mix of fascination and fear caused by what was likely the strangest occurrence they had ever seen.

  The occurrence was no less strange to Moon himself, this being the first time he had died.

  Or not – as the case seemed to be.

  That the artefact had worked – albeit in a way and on a subject he would never have anticipated – renewed his faith in the Old Races and the wonders, rather than the horrors, they had once achieved. He doubted, however, that the ogur that had triggered the amulet had found its effects wondrous in any way, and he sighed. Perhaps it was a horror after all. />
  The poor creature knelt before him, hand outstretched and touching the amulet, but it was not what it had been. Where moments before it had been indistinguishable from the rest of its tribe – solid and formidable, awesome – it was now a shadow of its brothers, wasted and drained. The same ogur that had attempted to approach Kali – likely the alpha – it had obviously been the first to approach his body and it had paid the price.

  The creature still breathed, haltingly and raspingly, and stared at him in utter helplessness and confusion, but there was nothing Moon could do to help it, and he felt deeply sorry. It had not, after all, been greed that had motivated the ogur to touch the amulet, just primitive curiosity. It had yet to learn – and he hoped it would have the chance to do so – that all that glistened was not gloob.

  Therein lay the simple beauty – and horror – of what the amulet was. Moon thought back to his hidden room in his cellar in Gargas, and the mixed emotions the sight of it had engendered in him. Sitting there on the shelves amidst other acquisitions he had deemed too dangerous for even someone such as Kali to see, its physical beauty was undeniable – a scintillating, perfectly faceted gem inlaid in gloob that could have been used to pay the ransom of a king. It was for that reason that he kept the amulet locked away, because if the wrong eyes were ever to see the gem it would be impossible to resist, taken from his possession with no knowledge of what it truly was and what it truly did. Not that he didn’t trust Kali implicitly on that level, of course. It was just that by the amulet’s very nature – the fact that in the absence of the direst circumstances it could not be tested – it was unpredictable and therefore potentially very, very dangerous.

  He had found the amulet in an elven site many years before, certain as soon as he had that it was more than it seemed, because if there was one thing he had learned in his long career it was that Old Race artefacts generally were. It had taken two years of research following the find to identify what it was, cross-referencing a dozen Old Race manuscripts, until he finally knew that what he had acquired was an example of a battlefield boobytrap that the elves called scythe-stones. Products of their science or their sorcery – or both, he still wasn’t sure – they masqueraded as spoils of war, prime to be plucked from the fallen body of an elven victim, but in actuality what they did was transfer the life essence from a victorious warrior to the defeated at the moment of death, reversing their roles and effectively turning the tide of many a battle. The psychological effect on the surrounding enemy was not to be underestimated either, because the host body fleetingly absorbed some of the features of the victim, looking almost as if its soul were being stolen from the body. In a way it was, Moon supposed, and to the enemy – the superstitious dwarves – the supernatural aspect was often far more disturbing than the truth of what had actually happened.

  Moon looked at the ogur again, and frowned. The efficacy of the amulet couldn’t be denied – he was, after all, alive – but nevertheless something seemed to be wrong. For one thing, the process was meant to be almost instantaneous, and for another he... didn’t feel quite right. Whatever was happening here wasn’t happening the way it was meant to, and apart from his own discomfort it was evidently prolonging the agony of the poor creature before him. As Moon watched, the ogur’s body and features seemed to shrink in on themselves even more than they already had, the blue wisps that were still being drawn from it by the amulet seemingly extracting its essence still. Moon was, as yet, still too weak to move, and so he had no choice but to witness the process continuing for another few minutes, at the end of which time he turned his eyes away. For the amulet had taken everything from the ogur, and now, in the end, the beast all but disintegrated before him, collapsing into a desiccated heap on the cave floor.

  The amulet snatched what wisps of it remained in the air with a sigh.

  Wrong, Moon thought. That was wrong. And the other ogur in the cave obviously thought so, too, because now they were stirring from their prone positions, grunting with what sounded like growing confusion and agitation. What was happening? Now that their alpha was dead, had their deferment to him ceased? Was he now as exposed to their primal hunger as Kali would have been had she remained in the cave?

  No, Moon thought, it wasn’t that – but it made his situation no less dangerous. Something had to have changed about him during the revitalisation process – perhaps something as simple as his scent – and the reason that the ogur were no longer deferring to him was because to their senses he was no longer the man they had deferred to before. The end result, however, was the same. He was no longer welcome here amongst the ogur – not as anything but food, that was – and he had to get out of their cave before their slowly revising opinion of him resulted in his being ripped apart.

  Moon rose from the cave floor, slowly and cautiously, noting as he did that his resurrection seemed to have booned his old and tired limbs with a renewed resilience and strength that he had not felt for a good many years. This was hardly the time to celebrate the fact, however, because while the ogur’s state of confusion seemed to have passed, their agitation had grown markedly. Their grunts were becoming more frequent now, their mannerisms more threatening – and their gaze more hungry.

  Slowly, Moon bent to retrieve his staff and backpack, and then with equal slowness he eased towards the tunnel that led out of the cave. The ogur gathered about him as he moved, sniffing at him, clawing curiously at his clothes, and Moon realised that it was probably only a matter of seconds before one of them actually lunged. He was having to push his way between them now, and could feel their clawings becoming heavier, more insistent. And then one of them did what he’d been expecting and grabbed him roughly by the arm, attempting to rip the limb away.

  Moon batted the ogur off and roared.

  What? he thought. What had that just been? What had he just done? That he’d actually been able to physically repel the ogur? That he’d made that noise?

  Oh, this wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.

  It was not, however, the ideal circumstance to dwell on the matter, and for now all he could do – what he needed to do – was take advantage of it. The remaining ogur, it seemed, had been as disturbed by his unexpected actions as he had himself, and their clawings had become more hesitant, in some cases even ceased. And the ogur that had lunged for him was actually retreating submissively back into the cave.

  What is happening? Moon wondered. Were the ogur, after all, deferring to him? Or were they perhaps sensing some of the alpha whose life essence he had stolen away? Whichever of the two it was, he knew that he needed to press the issue before they changed their minds again.

  Instinctively, he roared for a second time. And this time, without even thinking about doing it, he repeatedly thumped the rock of the cave walls in warning.

  By all the gods, what was happening?

  The ogur – all of them, now – backed off into the cave, and, free from their threat, Moon turned towards the exit. A second later he emerged onto the ice plateau and, again before he knew what he was doing, began inhaling deeply of the air.

  No, he realised, he wasn’t inhaling it, he was sniffing it.

  And on it, he could smell Kali Hooper.

  Impossible. It was just impossible. He had no idea how long he had spent in the cave but it was not an inconsiderable amount of time, and yet Kali was there on the air, as if she had left him only a moment before, her scent traceable despite the stench of the ogur cave and the blizzard that still numbingly blew outside it. She was as clear as day to him, as vital as if she had remained nearby – but she hadn’t, he knew, and he realised he was smelling a scent that should long ago have become undetectable to the human nose. A human nose, but not that of a creature that survived by...

  Moon remembered the resilience and strength he had felt as he had risen from the cave floor, remembered the batting away of the ogur and his roar, remembered his hammering of the cave walls. Most of all, he remembered that he had not felt... quite right. Gods, he k
new there was meant to be a fleeting transference from a victim but was it possible the amulet had somehow – ?

  He lifted his palms to his face, feeling the features there. He half-expected to feel those of an ogur bulging beneath his fingers but, no, his face still felt like his own. He looked down at his body, and it too seemed to be the same. Only...

  He gazed at one of his own footprints, frozen in the plateau ice. The footprint was from before he had entered the ogur cave and he turned to place his foot beside it. And the footprint was smaller.

  Merrit Moon’s heart sank. So, he had changed, then. Perhaps was still changing. The only question was, to what degree and at what pace? The artefact that he had brought with him into these mountains in the hope that it – if it became necessary – would buy him more time to complete his mission had, instead, infused him with not only the ogur’s life essence but part of the ogur itself. How and why that should happen, he didn’t know – perhaps it was something to do with the ogur’s body chemistry, or perhaps the fact that their species were so different that it was the only way the amulet could cope with the transference – but whatever the cause it left him with but a single thought: Oh gods, Kali, what have I done?

  Thinking of his protégée made Moon’s heart sink even further. He had taken no pleasure in not telling her about the amulet, in fact it had pained him greatly, but how could he have told her when even he was not sure whether the artefact would work? As she had knelt over his dying form, what right had he had to build up her hopes by telling her he might yet live if there was a danger those hopes would be shattered if the artefact failed to work? No, he couldn’t have done that to her, any more than he could have let her touch the amulet at the moment of his passing. Damn Munch, he thought, because if that little thug had finished the job instead of leaving him to suffer then it would be him who would now be lying on the cave floor, as dried and as drained and as dead as he deserved to be.