Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Thankfully, as they proceeded down more of the huge steps, the sea baffled most of the sound for them. While they could still make out the crashing of the waves outside, the sound was for the most part overlaid by the noise of the great black pipes that curved into the cowl from under the sea. Actually, they weren’t strictly pipes any more, but tubes, each the thickness of two men, their casing after they entered the cowl changing from rough and barnacled metal to smooth, if age-grimed, glass. What could be seen inside was a murky detritus and seaweed-filled brine that glowed slightly and, agitated by the outside motion of the waves, slopped back and forth within. Bladed fans also stirred lazily along their length at regular intervals, their purpose, for the moment, unknown.

  The steps that had led the way down the cliff continued down and down, and in the light from the betubed sea – caused by algae, Kali guessed – they could be seen in more detail than had been possible above. They were less weatherworn, too, and this extra factor drew Kali’s gaze to their risers.

  “Look at this,” she said, kneeling and brushing away grime.

  “Erm, what exactly?” Slowhand queried.

  “There are more runics here. Carved into the fronts of the steps.”

  “So?”

  “So...” Kali said. She frowned as she studied them. For once, the runics were easy enough to understand, common words in the dwarven language. “I don’t like what they say.”

  “And what do they say?”

  Kali pointed at each of the runics in turn. “Death. Kill. Destroy.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. So I take it the people who lived here weren’t very pleasant?”

  Kali frowned. “I’m beginning to think no one lived here at all.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think this was any kind of settlement, Slowhand. I think this was some kind of military outpost. An army barracks.”

  “An army?” Slowhand said in mock surprise. “Should have seen that coming the first time you mentioned the word ‘dwarf’.”

  “Maybe, but –” She paused and stared at the steps again, at the same weight-induced cracks in them that she’d seen above. “I think this one was a very unique army.”

  “Oh?”

  This time, Kali stared down the stairs. “What’s more – I think it might still be down there.”

  Slowhand stared. “Okaaaay, now you’re starting to worry me. Hooper, this place has got to be how old? A thousand years?”

  Kali rose. “I know,” she said in a tone which despite the circumstances was clearly excited. And with no further explanation she began to skip down the stairs. “You coming, or what?”

  Slowhand stood where he was for a second. Why does she never tell me anything? he thought. What am I? Lackey? Hired hand? Someone to just stand guard and shoot things? Hells – am I a sidekick?

  He sighed. Yep, that’s about the longbow and the shortbow of it. Gods, what was it about this bloody woman?

  He followed.

  It was obvious now that the steps were continuing far under the sea – actually under the seabed, unless Kali missed her guess – and it was a feat of engineering that only dwarves could ever dream they could achieve. But the steps were only the half of it, and as they came to the bottom of their present flight, the true scale of what they had achieved here became awesomely clear. A long corridor stretched away before them, and one after another in rows against both walls, there were statues of dwarves. Each the height of five men, the bearded, behammered likenesses, posed in various battle-ready, grimacing positions, were clearly meant to be warriors, and despite being awed by the fact that she was for the first time looking upon faces from another age, Kali also shivered at the impression they gave. The runic messages on the stair risers, and now this – it seemed as if the entire exit from Martak had been designed to provoke bloodlust, to incite a hunger for violence and war.

  Kali and Slowhand proceeded, coming eventually to another, shallower set of steps, and Kali sensed they were near now to the main area of the complex. The first sign of it was when they came upon the rear of Makennon’s carnival, her people having reached the base of the steps but having had their progress halted there by the largest pair of doors Kali or Slowhand had ever seen. Sighting them, Kali flung out a blocking arm, slapping Slowhand in the face.

  “Ow! Hey!”

  “Shush!”

  Both of them crouched on the steps, observing what was going on. The reason that Makennon and her people could not get the doors open was clear, and seeing what it was Slowhand stared at Kali, his expression questioning and concerned. But the expression on Kali’s face told him that exactly the same concerns were running through her mind.

  The huge doors had been sealed shut with a massive, glowing rune. A rune in the shape of a crossed circle.

  “Hooper, isn’t that – ?”

  Kali swallowed. Pulsating slowly with a red fire, the giant rune was the symbol of the Final Faith, all right, but she could not believe that she was seeing it. There had to be another reason for its presence here, because otherwise all of Makennon’s babblings about the Final Faith’s destiny threatened to prove right. No, there had to another reason. Had to be!

  One thing was clear. If it was the symbol of the Final Faith then Makennon was nevertheless having problems bending it to her will – and it was obviously not going to be wiped away with a wave of the Anointed Lord’s hand. As they continued to watch, Makennon gestured to the mages in her party and the men and women congregated in front of the rune, beginning to weave their magical threads that would dispel it.

  Makennon and company had clearly reached a temporary impasse and, as they worked out how to get the doors open, Kali realised it was her and Slowhand’s chance to get ahead of their party. She looked around for a way to do so, certain with the knowledge of experience that there was always a way past these things, if you looked beyond the obvious. Her gaze fastened on one of the higher seawater tubes that ran along the corridor close to the ceiling. Where the tube met the wall in which the door was set, there was a small crawlspace around it. She nudged the archer, indicated it.

  Slowhand knew what she had in mind. Quietly, he unslung his bow and took a roped arrow from his quiver, aiming upwards. The arrow flew and arced perfectly over the tube, taking the rope with it and wrapping it round and round until it was fixed firmly. Slowhand tested its grip and then indicated for Kali to climb.

  She did, and he followed, and the two of them moved silently along the top of the tube in a crouched position, high above the oblivious Makennon and her people. There, they ducked into the crawlspace and through the wall. They passed through about twenty feet of darkness carved from the rock beneath the seabed and emerged finally into a space that was detectable only by their sudden freedom of movement as it was almost totally devoid of light.

  Then their eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness, and they both gasped out loud.

  Because the scale of the statues in the corridor outside was nothing compared to the scale of this room.

  The first people to do so in over a thousand years, they had just entered what they, and Makennon, had journeyed to the edge of their world to find.

  The throne room of the Clockwork King.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE THRONE ROOM was vast. That such an excavation could exist here, hewn from rock beneath the waves, was mind-boggling enough, but made even more so by the fact that as they stared around it in wonder the sea hung above them like a sky.

  This – a bit to Kali’s disappointment but to Slowhand’s huge relief – turned out to be an illusion, the huge, stone buttresses of the throne room walls reflecting and magnifying the glowing seawater in the tubes, so that it seemed to ripple and shift in kind. But Kali’s disappointment was mollified by the fact that the glow served a useful purpose, providing an effective, if haunting, illumination, bathing in a blue-green light this marvel of dwarven engineering that had been lost from sight and mind since before her own civilisation was born. What th
eir eyes beheld as they further adjusted to the light was no illusion, however – but they could have been forgiven for thinking that it was.

  The throne room stretched out ahead of them, bigger even than the inside of Scholten Cathedral, an immense rectangular chamber that could once have welcomed titans and giants as courtiers, and which, for all they knew, perhaps once had. A central aisle that was as wide as a road, inlaid with dwarven mosaics, led forwards, and at its end – distant but nonetheless still dominating the room – a huge and shadowed, seated figure loomed high in the dark. As compelling as it was, though, it was not the only figure in the room, and as Kali dropped from the pipe and began to wander slowly up the aisle, her head turned from left to right, staring up at three raised galleries, accessed by broad interconnecting stairways, that ran the entire length of the throne room on either side. As the corridor outside had been lined with dwarven statues, so were these, but in this case with many, many more, each and every one of them draped in cobwebs but otherwise identical and separated from the next only by their own width again. Kali swallowed as she studied one statue after another, the unease she had started to feel on the surface growing with each frozen visage she passed.

  But uneasy as she was, Kali could barely control her other feelings. On the one hand, the sheer scale of this place and its contents made her feel like a starving mouse beneath a feast-laden table, and she longed to explore, to investigate, to catalogue the things she’d found – to touch them, the first person to do so for literally ages. On the other hand, however, she knew that was not why she was here, and the feeling of elation she felt at her greatest find to date was marred by the fact not only that – strictly speaking – she hadn’t found it, but that, incidentally, she had to destroy it, too. Or, at the very least, stop it doing what it did.

  Whatever it was that was.

  Doubts resurfaced once more – that what the old man had told her was partly wrong, that perhaps Makennon’s destiny did lie where she said – but the doubts were fleeting. She knew what she had seen and read in the Three Towers, knew what ideas of her own were forming, and most of all, she knew how this place felt – and it felt wrong. No, more than wrong. Troubled. Tainted. Bad. Something truly awful had happened within these walls, a long, long time ago, and its aura remained and resonated still.

  She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder. “Nice place they’ve got here,” Slowhand said. “Cosy.”

  Kali nodded, only half-listening, and walked further up the aisle until she came close enough to study the giant, seated figure at its end. No, not seated, bethroned. The idea that the Clockwork King might have been some kind of giant walking automaton had always verged on the edge of preposterous in her mind, but even so she’d been ready for anything. But looking at it now it was clear that the King was not designed as a giant that would arise from its throne, have a quick stretch, and pound across the peninsula sweeping all in its path aside. No, in actual fact, it seemed to be just a statue – a towering and staggering and very pitsing imposing statue, it had to be said, but a statue nonetheless.

  Kali craned her neck, staring up to study it, and found herself being stared back at by a pair of giant stone eyes set in a gnarled, bearded and cruel dwarven face. Though the eyes were only stone, their stare was distinctly unsettling, made all the more so by the fact the face was draped in the same lengthy cobwebs as the statues against the walls, and Kali pulled her own gaze away, examining the rest of the statue instead. The giant figure wore – or had been sculpted wearing – the kind of studded leather armour she recognised as being from dwarven middle history, and in one hand held a like-period battle hammer, in the other a spiked dwarven shield. Again, cobwebs dangled from the shield’s spikes, so long that Kali found she could walk through them like a curtain. It was only as she did that she noticed one of the less obvious features of the statue – one around the side.

  Around the side and, then, to the rear, actually. For there the same kind of seawater tubes that ran into the cowl ran around and into the back of the Clockwork King. No, she realised, tracing the tubes back, they weren’t the same kind of tubes – they were the same tubes, splitting and terminating here and in other places throughout the throne room as they ran around its walls like arteries.

  Now that, Kali thought, was odd. And there was something else that was odd – now that she had seen that the statue was just a statue, why was it called the Clockwork King?

  She sighed, moving to the part of the massive construction that she had purposefully saved for last. Directly in front of the throne was a large stone plinth inlaid with what looked like templates for the four keys, a complex-looking mechanism that seemed, in parts, to rotate and, presumably, lock into place.

  There was a sound like a prolonged roll of thunder, and distracted as she was Kali had difficulty placing its source until Slowhand tapped her gently on the shoulder and, when he had her attention, pointed back the way they had come. It seemed that Makennon and her mages had managed to release the runelock, and the vast doors were opening. They were about to have company.

  Makennon’s soldiers came first, and then the Anointed Lord herself, sweeping into the throne room with a regal stride that suggested she had already claimed the place as her own. Nevertheless, for a few seconds she displayed the same reactions to the scale and content of the place as Kali and Killiam had, nodding to herself in approval. But then she spotted their distant figures standing before the king, and her brow furrowed in disbelief and annoyance. She gestured to the front members of her entourage, despatching them to various tasks around the chamber, and then strode up through the wide aisle towards the throne.

  Kali’s heart thudded, though not because the Anointed Lord approached. The reason for her sudden burst of adrenaline was the doors through which Makennon had passed – or rather what was now revealed upon them. Opened towards her and showing their outside face, Kali could see the remains of the fire runic that Makennon’s mages had dismissed to gain entry, an embery half-circle that as she watched slowly extinguished and faded away into nothing. Suddenly everything became clear, and all the confused pieces fell into place. Gods – how could she have been so blind!

  She turned to Slowhand, saw that he too stared and wondered if he had realised the same thing. But he hadn’t. In actual fact, Slowhand was fighting a potentially embarrassing twitch of excitement. Hells, Katherine looked good in her tight and shiny battle armour, he thought. That walk, the way those hips swivelled when she moved...

  He swept back his hair, waiting.

  And Makennon walked right past him without even a glance.

  “Kali Hooper,” she declared with a long sigh. “The Spiral of Kos, Scholten, the World’s Ridge Mountains, Andon, Scholten again, and now, finally, here in Orl. Tell me – for the record – just how many of you are there?”

  Kali remembered her first encounter with Makennon, and her questioning. “Oh, just the one – but enough to mess with your head.”

  “She does that a lot,” Slowhand said, leaning in with a grin.

  “And I’m about to do it again,” Kali said, silencing him with a glance. “Makennon, listen to me, this place isn’t what you think. It hasn’t got anything to do with the Final Faith, and never has had, I know that now. Coming here was a big mistake.”

  “For you, perhaps, Miss Hooper,” another voice said as its owner approached, boots thudding on stone. Kali scowled. “The girl does not know what she is talking about,” Munch continued. “Like anyone young she adopts an overfamiliarity with things older than herself that is, at best, arrogant and, at worst, offensive in the extreme.”

  “Speaking of offensive...” Slowhand said.

  “Makennon, listen to me,” Kali went on, ignoring both. “This place isn’t called Orl, it’s called Martak. And Martak isn’t a dwarven word, it’s a dwarven phrase – M’Ar’Tak. You know what it means, Katherine? An eye for an eye.”

  “The girl spouts nonsense,” Munch interrupted. “You have seen the evidence
with your own eyes. Anointed Lord, we have worked hard for this moment – please, order the activation of the keys.”

  “Katherine, no –”

  Makennon held her gaze for a few seconds. “The signs are clear,” she said after some consideration. She turned and signalled for the remainder of her entourage to enter the throne room, prompting a smile from Munch. “Bring them forwards.”

  Kali spun in frustration. “Dammit, Makennon, you want to know about signs? Then let me tell you about the one on those doors, the one that was so difficult to break because it was so obviously there to keep you – to keep everyone – out. That runic wasn’t the symbol of the Final Faith because it’s actually two runics, one overlaid on the other. A circle and a cross, Katherine, different symbols but ones used by the elves and the dwarves to mean the same thing. That’s why there were two of each on the map showing the sites of the four keys, because the elves and the dwarves built two sites each. They’re warning symbols, woman! They mean stay away, danger. They mean death.”

  “Oh, now you tell me,” Slowhand muttered.

  “And the one on those doors?” Kali went on, pointing back along the throne room. “That was the elves and the dwarves combining their symbols to shout the meaning to the world. Because when together they’d finally managed to stop whatever evil came out of this place, they sealed it with the biggest warning sign of all.”

  For the first time Makennon seemed to waver, and Kali was about to press her advantage when the wagon containing the keys trundled into the throne room. What gave Kali pause, however, was what followed it – the wagon containing the ogur. The ogur spotted her, too, and began to pound against the bars of its cage, its roars clearly audible even across the distance that separated them.

  Munch saw what was happening and frowned. The old man’s... changes had not lessened and there was surely no way the girl could recognise him, so this reaction made him curious. But, he thought, what did it matter if it had thrown her off guard?