Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Moon caught Kali’s scent on the air once more, and he wondered where she now was. Had she succeeded in finding the information she needed, and was she on her way to protect the other keys? One thing he did know, he needed to find her, not only to help, if he could, but to let her know that he lived, even if it was not in quite the same fashion as he had lived before.

  He began to trudge down the mountain, his legs feeling strangely powerful beneath him, and he drew a deep breath into his lungs so that they expanded as he had never known them to do before. There were obviously some advantages to his changing form, and if he could use his apothecarial skills to prevent any further changes – if they were to come – then he had to admit that he might not be too discomforted by his strange fate, after all. If he was going to find Kali, however, he would need to seek medicines or potions in Andon or Fayence, because there would be no time to sweep north to...

  Merrit Moon faltered. He suddenly realised that he couldn’t remember where he lived. Gar – ? Garg – ? Oh, this was ridiculous. Damn the hells, where was it that Thrutt lived?

  Thrutt? he thought. No, his name wasn’t Thrutt, it was –

  Ah. So that was how it was going to be. Clearly, he was still changing, and the changes to him were not going to be merely physical, they were going to be mental as well. However much of this creature – this Thrutt – now resided within him, he was possibly faced with a battle for dominance that only one of them might win.

  Far from fearing that possibility, the idea intrigued him. The ogur obviously had the advantage on the physical side, but on the mental he would equally obviously be the victor. This thing was a creature of instinct and sensation, a hunter and a cannibal, but nothing more. In other words, for such a big head, there was remarkably little going on upstairs. It had no rationality, no logic, no intelligence with which it would be able to hold its own, and so...

  Again, Moon faltered. Did that make sense? he wondered. A situation such as this had no precedent after all. He wasn’t talking about a possession here, and this was no mere battle of body and wills, this was something completely different, a process forged in the minds of beings who... of beings who...

  Moon suddenly found himself confused by his own chain of thought, and then a wave of blackness washed through his brain that left him momentarily dizzy and blank. He tried to pull the thoughts back but suddenly realised that he no longer knew what they were. He’d been thinking about... thinking about...

  The sound of Thrutt’s roar echoed through the mountains.

  No! Moon thought. He had to get a grip on this, on himself, at least until he could find those medicines or potions that might help. But if he was going to do that then he had to hurry, hurry, hurry, because Andon and Fayence were both so very far away and he had never been there before.

  But wait – of course he had. So many, many times.

  Hadn’t he?

  Moon began to pound down the slopes below him, passing a place where tracks intersected, forcing himself to think about anything and everything that made him what he was. He thought of his shop, he thought of Horse, he thought of his adventures and, inevitably, he thought of Kali. He was glad that he had been able to tell her how much she meant to him because he had never been able to do that before, as he had never been able to share with her the secret of how he had found –

  There was a sudden stinging sensation in his right side, and he paused, rumbling curiously. Another such sensation stung him on his left, and this time he slapped at the part of his body where it had occurred. The sting transferred itself to his hand, and he lifted it – bigger than he remembered, and tinged slightly green – to see what had stuck there. It was a tiny dart that had caught in the soft flesh of the palm. And it looked like a piece of reed. Needlereed.

  Moon’s low rumble turned into a growl, and he sniffed the air around him, his nose jerking roughly as he did. There were men nearby. Men in hiding, at least four of them, and one of them smelled strangely familiar to him. Yes, he had the smell of one of the oomans who had invaded his cave...

  No! Merrit Moon thought. Not his cave, the ogur’s cave – but the smell of the man remained familiar all the same. And it made anger grow inside him – dark, uncontrollable, feral anger. He tried to stop it but he was losing his grip, could feel it, his thoughts running together, and the things that had stung him in his side, he saw that some substance dribbled from their ends, that it was on his skin and in it and...

  Gods, no, what was happening, and why now – why?

  As Merrit Moon roared more loudly, more primally, than ever before, the men with the needlereed darts came from behind the rocks and at him, but the toxins that had been fired into his system – the ones he had dimly thought had been meant to subdue him – had instead the opposite effect and stripped him of any fear of their coming. Primitive survival instincts taking over completely, Moon felt himself subsumed – drowned – by the primal reactions of a wounded beast and, dropping down into the depths of the dual consciousness he now seemed to possess, he found himself experiencing what happened next only as a kind of semi-aware observer. The observer was dully conscious of the fact, however, that it was not he who met the unexpected ambush but Thrutt the ogur.

  Unfortunately, even he was not capable of defending himself against the ambush for long as the toxins were indeed working, albeit slightly more slowly than they might have done before, and as Thrutt batted away first one attacker and then another, the adrenaline – and strength – that had flooded his veins was slowly sapped by their effects until, by the time he had batted a man away for the seventh time, he was slowly sinking to his knees. As he did, three of the men picked themselves up from where they had fallen, examined the one who had been shattered against a rock and then cautiously moved forwards to loom above him.

  Orders were given. And then he found himself being bundled into a wagon whose sides had been built as a makeshift cage. And as Thrutt stared out between the thick wooden bars, from somewhere within him Merrit Moon stared, too – right into the eyes of the man who had killed him.

  “Make sure the wagon is secured and prepare to return to Scholten,” Konstantin Munch ordered, slapping its sides. He stared at the ogur in captivity and himself growled. He did not like plans that did not go according to plan, especially when the plan was his own.

  He thought back to the moment it had formed in his mind, the moment when, from his hiding place in a narrow crevice, he had observed the Hooper girl running from the ogur cave. That she had apparently somehow escaped Scholten’s deep cells had come as little surprise – she was extremely resourceful, after all – but that she had seemingly recovered from her interrogation to such a degree had surprised him, though not as much as what had occurred after she had gone. The strange blue glow that had suffused the cave had drawn him from his hiding place with an overwhelming curiosity, and despite the danger he had eased himself painfully back down the cave, ignoring his own injuries from the ogur attack, to discover its source. What he had witnessed there, again from hiding, he knew of, but had never thought he would see. Perversely, though, the miracle of elven magetech was less important to him than the fact that the old man would live again – because now that he knew Kali Hooper was on the loose once more, it struck him that he might come in very useful as a hostage-cum-bargaining chip should the girl try to thwart his plans in the future. He would have taken the old man there and then, if he could, but the presence of the ogur and the fact that Moon seemed to have drawn a little more than life essence from his victim, stayed his hand. Instead, he had returned to his base camp and ordered his men there to construct the holding wagon in readiness for what would be the old man’s inevitable descent from the hills. He knew he would be wanting to find his irritating pupil after all.

  That, though, was when it had all gone wrong. Moon had descended from the hills, certainly, but the man he had caught in his ambush had borne scant resemblance to the man he had been when he had inserted his blade in his chest and gu
ts and, in fact, had borne less resemblance as the ambush had progressed. Clearly, something had gone wrong with the scythe-stone process, which was tragic for the old man but even more so for him – for how was he meant to use Moon as a hostage when Hooper would be unable to recognise her mentor at all? No, unless this strange transformation reversed itself – which of course it might, which made it unwise to slaughter the beast – all he was stuck with was a sideshow freak, good only for the circus when it came to Ramblas Square.

  Munch growled again and turned away from the holding wagon, wincing with pain. His injuries from the ogur attack were... troublesome and he ought to get them seen to. He turned to the mage he had left with the base party, intending to solicit some relief, but then saw that the woman was concentrating hard and staring into the distance in the way that those blessed – or cursed, he thought – with telescrying abilities did. Still, they did make life in the field somewhat easier.

  Munch waited until she had finished, returning to reality hollow-faced, and with a shiver and a sigh.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “News from Scholten, sir. From the Anointed Lord. She wishes to inform you that she is in possession of the fourth and final key.”

  Munch drew in a deep breath. At last.

  “There is something else, sir. A location where she wishes you to rendezvous with her party – the site known as Orl.”

  Munch laughed. Yes, Orl, he thought. Orl indeed.

  He ordered his remaining people to break camp, and mounting the holding wagon instructed its driver to move out.

  Towards the Final Faith’s destiny.

  Towards his own.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  EVERYONE SEEMED INTENT on hot-footing it to Orl, and that included Kali Hooper. It was just that for the moment – oddly self-defeatingly – she was telling Slowhand not to move. Not an inch. In fact, she would have preferred it if he didn’t even breathe.

  It was nothing personal. Granted, it might have been very personal at one time but, since his recent reappearance, Slowhand had been somewhat helpful so the least that she could do was try to save his life.

  The lava lake had calmed somewhat and was no longer belching out angry plumes of fire, but it was continuing to rise. It had almost reached them now and, any second, threatened to bubble over the lip of the rock on which they stood, at which time they would be hot-footing it whether they had escaped or not.

  Thankfully, all was not lost – and, in a manner of speaking, Orl was not lost, either. The pair of them stood no longer on the island but on a small shelf of rock behind and across from the dome, on the opposite side to the incinerated bridge. They had managed to reach it through a combination of her gymnastics and Slowhand’s ropes and arrows, an exercise in teamwork that had resulted in a couple of embarrassing tangles but had got them there in the end, she with a sprained thigh and he with a smile on his face.

  The shelf, though, was a precarious perch, only a few inches wide and crumbling in an ever-increasing number of spots beneath their feet. But it did lead to a way out. Possibly.

  Kali’s reasoning that there had to have been an original entrance to the dome had, in their time of need, led her to seek it out as an escape route and, while successful in doing so, the tunnel she had found was blocked as she’d suspected it might be, manifesting itself now as a vague tracery of rocks beyond the remains of a long-collapsed stone bridge, some of the component parts of which had been visible as tiny islands in the lava before they had been consumed by the bubbling mire. Kali wasn’t sure that the tunnel behind the tracery of rock was going to be passable and the only way she could find out was by removing the rocks from the tunnel mouth. The problem was, she had to do it very, very slowly and very, very carefully, otherwise the resultant rockslide would sweep them both into the hottest – and last – bath of their lives.

  “You have to think of it like a jigsaw,” she said slowly and quietly to Slowhand. She gently removed a rock with an archaeologist’s hands, dropping it into the burgeoning lava with a plop. “Each piece dependent on the other to construct – or, in this case, deconstruct – the whole picture without forcing any one piece.”

  “Really?” Slowhand said, nodding, his arms folded tightly against his chest. He would have smiled at the way her tongue stuck out between her lips as she worked, other than for the fact the lava had reached the soles of his boots and they had begun to sizzle slightly. “Is this an easy jigsaw?”

  “Urrm... somewhere between medium and challenging?”

  “Right. Like a bowl of fruit with a binyano, an apple and a pear?”

  “I guess so,” Kali said. She removed another rock and dropped it away, freezing as the collapsed rocks left behind in the fall settled slightly. “If they’ve all been tipped on the floor and trampled by a betwattled cyclops.”

  “Fine. You are good at jigsaws aren’t you?”

  Kali’s hand hovered over another rock before changing her mind and extracting the one next to it. Again, she dropped it away. “Nope. Never could stand the things.”

  “Oh, that’s great. Hooper, look, how about that one there? No, that one. That one looks –”

  “Will you stop waving your hands about and stand still?”

  Slowhand hopped from foot to foot, his soles sticking and stringing whenever they made contact with the rock.

  “Getting – a – little – difficult – to – do – that. Could you please get a move on?”

  “I’m trying, all right!” Kali snapped. The sweat running off her now had as much to do with pressure as the heat of the lava. She bent and dropped a heavier rock, regretting snapping when Slowhand took the opportunity to wipe her brow.

  “Just one more...” she said through clenched teeth. “Easy... easy...”

  There was a sudden shift in the rockface, and then a low rumble, and Kali spun herself away from the front of the fall to flatten herself against the wall to its left. Slowhand needed no urging to do the same and, at the very second he spun to the right, the whole pile of rubble collapsed away from the tunnel mouth, avalanching down into the rising lake.

  Behind the fall, the tunnel was clear.

  “Go, go, go!” Kali shouted, and just in time. The sudden and dramatic fall of rocks into the lava had disturbed its recently calm rise and it began again to spurt and belch. Unnoticed by Slowhand as he darted into the shadowy tunnel mouth, a patch of the molten fire spattered onto his trouser leg, burning into the cloth, but before it could reach his skin Kali followed him in and tore the offending patch away.

  “Don’t get excited,” she said. “That’s all that’s coming off.”

  “Hey, flesh happens,” Slowhand retorted, and stared at her heavily perspiring form. “Hot stuff.”

  Kali shook her head – the man could never resist. She followed him into the dark, making out a winding tunnel that curved away into the rock. She hesitated to think when last it had been used, but for a second thought that she caught a stale whiff of whatever had been the last thing to tread the passage, something overtly male – the smell, perhaps, of dwarf? Her eyes adjusted further to the dark and all her instincts cried out for the time to examine her surroundings – especially as she could now see this was no mere cave but a constructed tunnel complete with those X-shaped dwarven runics – but that was simply not to be. The avalanche that had stirred the lava back into angry life had, it seemed, disturbed more than just the lake, perhaps ruptured another vent beneath the dome and, as she watched, the lava began to bubble into and then sweep with increasing acceleration up the tunnel behind them.

  “Hooper,” Slowhand said. “I strongly suggest that we run.”

  “Ohhh, running as we speak,” Kali said, passing him.

  Slowhand put on his own spurt and the two of them raced up the tunnel as fast as they could, but the collapsed rock at the dome entrance was not the only place where the integrity of their dark confines had been compromised, and every few feet or so they found their progress slowed by roof-falls wh
ich they had to clamber over. Thankfully, these same roof-falls acted also as makeshift dams – albeit briefly as it didn’t take long for the lava to engulf them – and they managed to stay ahead of the flow. Just.

  “Hooper, how far to the exit?” Slowhand asked, vaulting over another blockage in front of them.

  Kali leapt in his wake, a spray of pebbles from her heel vanishing into the lava that was now immediately behind her. She slammed a palm onto the wall. “Not sure. But the temperature of the rock suggests we’ve still a way to go – maybe a tenth of a league?”

  “Pits of Kerberos – a tenth of a league?”

  “Excuse me! You did ask.”

  “I know but, hells, Hooper, sometimes I wish you didn’t know as much as you do.”

  Kali stopped, slammed her hands on her hips and nodded back where they’d come from. “I got us out of there, didn’t I?”

  Slowhand sighed and grabbed her as the lava plopped over where they had vaulted, catching up with her heels. They ran on. “Maybe,” he said, nodding ahead, though Kali was still so busied staring daggers at him that she hadn’t noticed what he had.

  “Fark.”

  “What?”

  “The tunnel dips. Deeply. Some kind of U-bend.”

  “What?” Kali said again. “Why in the hells would it do that?”

  Slowhand pointed towards the roof of the tunnel. “Maybe because of that.”

  Still moving, Kali looked up, then skidded to a halt. A few yards in front of them, the roof of the tunnel nosed downwards and changed in texture, no longer composed of rock but something else, some kind of fossilised remains, a dark and chitinous substance that reminded her of the brackan in the Sardenne. But these remains were not those of any brackan, because they were bigger – much, much bigger – and as well as nosing down they folded themselves through the walls on either side of the tunnel and into its floor, immortalised as an organic archway in the rock.

  “The speed of this stuff, we’ll never make it out the other side,” Slowhand said.