Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Kali and the archer staggered back, watching the deluge pour onto the Clockwork King, and as the rocks crashed onto and shattered its cogs and pistons and gears, water poured thunderously onto the crystals that had brought its army to life. There was a series of sparks and then small explosions, and, at the opposite end of the throne room, the warriors that continued to march towards the exit suddenly stopped. Just like that.

  Kali and Slowhand stared at them, watching to see if they moved again. But they didn’t.

  “Okaaaay...” Kali said.

  Slowhand suddenly pulled her to the side as a chunk of rock hurtled down and smashed into the deluge next to where they stood.

  “The whole place is coming down,” he said. “Time to go.”

  “No argument there.”

  “After you.”

  “No, no, after you.”

  “Hooper, just –”

  “Move. I know.”

  They swam towards the exit, manoeuvring themselves around the frozen forms of those clockwork warriors that had ground to a halt before it, and preparing to do the same with those in the corridor itself. Their red eyes stared as dully as those of Munch now, and they seemed strangely at peace.

  The sea can have them, Kali thought.

  Slowhand swam through the doors before her, and she was only an arm’s length behind him when a sudden surge in the water caught her from behind and sucked her away in its backwash, returning her to the heart of the collapsing and flooding chamber. And, unbelievably, she saw that the doors to the throne room were closing.

  “Slowhand!” she yelled.

  The archer had already noticed her absence and had turned around, attempting to swim back to her aid. But it was almost as if the water was consciously trying to keep him back, one small surge after another catching him and holding him where he was so that he did little more than tread water. He stared up at the closing doors and roared with anger and frustration.

  “Hooper!”

  Dammit, Kali thought. Dammit, dammit, dammit! But as much as she tried to reach the closing gap, similar surges to those that frustrated Slowhand held her back. The rumbling of the doors could be heard even over the roaring of the inrushing sea, and the last thing she saw of Slowhand was his anguished face as they closed finally with a resounding boom.

  Kali splashed around. The seawater continued to rush in with a roar and she rose slowly towards the throne room ceiling. Then, suddenly, the roaring stopped and she realised she was fully underwater, the throne room completely flooded.

  As rocks fell about her in slow motion, an eerie silence descended. Kali fumbled in her equipment belt and withdrew her breathing conch, jamming it in her mouth, then floated there and stared into the murk. She might have been cut off from Slowhand but she was not alone, and below her the lifeless body of Munch drifted from its seat and rose up, ascending above the still forms of his warriors. Kali let the corpse float past her face without reaction, but then another shadowy shape in the water caught her eye and she almost spat out her conch in shock.

  Because the seawater that had poured in from above had brought something with it.

  Kali back-pedalled in a sea of bubbles. There, hovering before her in the water, was a humanoid figure – but humanoid was as close as it came to anything human-looking she had ever seen on Twilight.

  Some kind of... fishman. She’d heard reports that similar creatures had been sighted in Turnitia but she’d dismissed them as the ramblings, perhaps even the ravings, of thieves too gone on flummox to be grounded in reality. But here one was, right in front of her – and it was staring at her.

  Communicating with her.

  Not talking, though. The thieves she had spoken with had described the fishmen as black-eyed, green-scaled, razor-toothed and bespined, but this one was different, its scales silver, face smooth and mouth toothless, with glowing nodules that hung from either side of its jaw. But neither mouth nor jaw moved as it spoke. Instead, Kali heard its words inside her head.

  And, what was even more disturbing, it knew her name.

  Kali Hooper. I am pleased that your path has brought you where you should be. That you have achieved what you must.

  Kali found herself responding without even knowing how. And finding herself doing so without the need to speak, she found herself asking everything in her head at once.

  Where I should be? What are you? Just what the hells is going on?

  The creature floated where it was, regarding her, a paper-thin tail moving lazily behind it, and Kali felt a kind of smile – a very cold one.

  Questions. Questions all the time, since when you were a child. Even then we could hear you – here, beneath the sea.

  What? Are you saying you’ve been spying on me?

  Spying? No. Watching. You, and the others. The Four.

  The Four?

  Four known to us. Four unknown to each other. Four who will be known to all.

  Oh, gods help me, you’re one of those who talks in riddles. I’ve come across your kind before. Statues, mainly, but –

  Riddles? No. Only answers not yet formed.

  Listen! You’re doing it again! Hey, it’s been a long day – how about some simple answers to some simple questions?

  The creature floated before her, saying nothing. Kali took it as an invitation to continue.

  Who are you?

  Our name would mean nothing. We are the Before. The After. Those who have always been and will be again.

  Will you stop it!

  I... we... they... apologise.

  Kali scowled, then frowned. The Before? she thought. The After?

  My visions? she asked. Were you responsible for them?

  Yes.

  How? Why?

  The first, to offer a solution. The second, to drive you. The third – the third to remind you of your own mortality... and, more importantly, that everything is not as it seems. The creature paused. We know you but... we were uncertain of your resolve.

  What? You thought I’d give up? Back off because what I faced was too much? Then, Mister – you are a Mister? – however much you think you know me, you don’t know me at all.

  From this moment, no. Your path is what it has become. It was important to us only that you were here – at Martak.

  Kali trod water. Martak. The way the creature spoke of it – spoke of her – it was almost as if they both had a place in some unknown scheme of things. It suddenly occurred to her once more how un-dwarven the water network had felt.

  You were here when all this began, weren’t you? You helped the dwarves to build this place – to build the Clockwork King?

  They were dying. They had no resources. The balance had to be maintained.

  The balance?

  Too many of the elven ones, too few of the dwarves. The ferocity of the Ur’Raney was unanticipated, and their numbers after their victory had to be... curtailed.

  Curtailed? You’re saying you did what you did to give the dwarves an advantage? By all the gods, you wanted the Ur’Raney culled, didn’t you? Only it all went wrong – the warriors you helped the dwarves create turned on their own as well – and then on everyone and everything else...

  The creature remained silent for a second. We chose our agent badly... everyone makes mistakes.

  But why would you do that?

  The balance had to be –

  Maintained? Kali shouted in her head. What balance – why the hells are you talking abou –

  She suddenly choked and realised that, once more, her breathing conch was near to exhausted, something that her conversational partner had also spotted.

  I would suggest that you have time for one more question.

  One more question, Kali thought, and despite the fact she had a thousand in her head – about the balance, about this undersea creature, about the Old Races – she knew exactly what it had to be. Because, somehow, she knew it was relevant.

  Do you know where I come from?

  The creature laughed –
not laughed in her mind but actually, physically laughed – and was suddenly obscured in a cloud of bubbles that came either from whatever orifice it used to breathe or simply from the stirring of the water created by its thrashing reaction. Wherever the bubbles had come from, when they went away the creature was gone.

  Damn you, Kali thought. Whoever or whatever you are, damn you.

  More rock fell about her from above, and with her last lungful of air she began to swim upwards, kicking and kicking until at last she passed through a fissure in the ceiling of the throne room and up, out into the sea. She broke its broiling surface and began to swim towards the shore. Slowly, wearily, she ascended the steps, glancing down at the jetty and the stilled warriors that would remain there now, until the weather of the area simply wore them away.

  Slowhand, Horse and the ogur were assembled above. There was, however, one member of the party missing.

  “Where’s Makennon?”

  “She skedaddled when the army stopped. Probably halfway back to Scholten Cathedral already, licking her wounds. Glad to see you made it, Hooper. But then, I should have known you would.”

  Kali waved him away, too knackered to speak. Her banter with Slowhand would, she knew, resume some time soon. There were, after all, things to do, among them find his sister and a cure for Merrit Moon.

  Before that, however...

  Kali patted Horse and took a bottle of flummox from his saddlebag. She drank deeply, and burped.

  And then she stared down at Martak. At the sea. And she thought of what she had just encountered in it.

  There were more questions to be answered than ever before. It was good, then, that she liked a challenge. In fact, she felt a renewed determination to discover the secrets of Twilight and the ultimate fate of the Old Races. And in doing so, she knew, she would leave nothing unexplored, nothing undiscovered, nothing untouched.

  THE END

  In memory of

  JOE HALLIWELL

  2001-2009

  His game over far too soon

  CHAPTER ONE

  THIS IS HOW Kali Hooper would have escaped the things that had slaughtered four men before the first of them could scream. The same things that were coming to slaughter him.

  That huge, seemingly unscalable rock, there, the one just ahead? That she would have scaled with ease. And that frozen vine beyond? The one ready to snap? On that she would have swung without thinking twice. The vine would have snapped at exactly the right moment, of course, and she would have soared with it over the abyss. This would not have worried her, though, because that ledge further on and down – yes really, that one, way over there – she would have flailed towards, rolling like some circus tumbler to soften her impact as she came in to land. And she would not have stopped there – oh no, though she might be grunting now – kicking up scree as she ran on and threw herself towards that crumbling ledge, and then the one beyond that, flipping, twisting and spinning, stretching all ways to grab the next small lump of salvation that would save her from a plummeting, broken death.

  She would have made it, too, though rocks might have fallen in her wake – knowing her, perhaps there might even have been an accidental avalanche that would have destroyed half the mountainside – but, as usual, she would make it because she had to succeed. There, dangling from that last ledge, she would take a moment to catch her breath before her piece de resistance, a full body flip that would take her up and over until she could climb the rockface to safety. Her flight would have been done then and, from her refuge on the clifftop, she would have turned, bitten the cork from a bottle of flummox and downed the beer. And then, with a smile and a burp, she would have spat the cork at her pursuers. If she were feeling particularly mischievous, she might even have shown them her –

  No. He did not want to think about that particular part of her anatomy. It seemed, now, somehow… disrespectful. Because this is how Kali Hooper would have escaped the things, had Kali Hooper not been dead.

  That’s right, he thought. Dead. Gone. Twelve hands under. The desperately running, blonde-maned archer had struggled to accept it but had come to realise that it had to be true – had to be given the facts. Hooper had been missing for weeks now and in that time there had been no sightings, news or contact other than that over which she’d likely had no control – the return to the Flagons, alone, of a half-starved and agitated Horse, and the discovery, washed-up as jetsam on a Nürnian beach, of her equipment belt attached to a blood-stained piece of her dark silk body suit. Where she had met her end he could not – might never – know, because she had left the tavern with a frown, telling no one what her destination was. But what he did know was that under no circumstances would she have missed the rendezvous she was meant to keep with him eight days before, at the base of the Drakengrat Mountains. He knew that because he knew she knew how important to him this expedition was. No, without doubt Hooper was gone, and whether she had met her end in the Razor Ruins of Rarg or the Blood Bogs of Bibblebobble or whatever other malignantly named hellshole had piqued her interest this time, it seemed the secret history of the peninsula she had worked so hard to unearth had, ultimately, buried her instead.

  The painful truth was that he missed her like hells but it was what he, Killiam Slowhand, did that mattered now, and frankly, as far his imagined escape for Kali went… well, there wasn’t a chance in the hells.

  There’d be no impossible leaps up the rockface, no suicidal swings on snapping vines and no fairground acrobatics to leave his pursuers stymied. Because he wasn’t Hooper. No, he was just her sometime lover, sometime sidekick and – oh, by the way, mere mortal. If he didn’t spot a way out of this that was within his capabilities he wouldn’t even be that. All he could do was run for his life. Oblivious to all but the pounding of his feet beneath him and the mountain winds that whistled around him, all he could do was keep moving and hope that something provided him with a means of escape.

  The k’nid, he reflected as he ran, spinning occasionally to fire a volley of arrows in their direction, hoping to slow the blurry, crackling things down. Named by a Malmkrug baron after the local term for bogeyman, they had begun to appear near the town about the time of Slowhand’s arrival there. Already a number of its inhabitants had fallen victim to them, lost to their sheer speed. They were not only fast, they were deadly and seemingly impervious to harm – and they seemed to be growing in number. People in Malmkrug had already shored up their homes in defence against them and their attacks on the town were as sudden and inexplicable as their origin was unknown.

  Or, at least, had been until now.

  For as he had ascended higher and higher into the mountains and seen the trails of more of the unnatural creatures – though most, thankfully, from afar – Slowhand knew something those below did not. That the k’nid, whatever the hells they were, seemed to be coming from somewhere around here.

  It was typical. Pure Slowhand luck. To have fetched up in the apparent spawning ground of a plague of the deadliest things the peninsula had ever seen – and he had no one but himself to blame.

  Over the past few months he’d put out a number of fresh feelers regarding his sister, and while the vast majority of them had returned nothing, the one that had led him here had shown promise. He had learned from a trader in Malmkrug that some two months before, a party of adventurers had purchased sufficient supplies for a prolonged ascent into the Drakengrat range. Despite the fact they seemed to have gone to considerable length to disguise themselves, their attitude, bearing and general demeanour very quickly gave them away as Final Faith. There was nothing, apart from the obvious, wrong with them being Faith, but the fact that they’d felt the need to disguise themselves meant they had to be up to something clandestine. That in itself was worthy of investigation. What was more worthy of investigation, however, was that the trader had said the party was led by a woman – a woman whose description he had found achingly familiar.

  Jenna.

  Slowhand still felt a burning rod o
f anger inside him every time he thought of what those bastards had done to his sister – recruiting and forcefully indoctrinating her into the Faith – and the thought that she was involved in something they found necessary to disguise their involvement with, made him as concerned for her safety as he was angered by her involvement in it. Unfortunately, that anger had had more than enough time to cool, the lead that had seemed so promising a week ago turning out to be as much of a wild frool chase as so many had before. Because if Jenna was up here, then she had discovered some chameleon spell that had transformed her into just one more of the endless snow covered rocks. No, there had been no Jenna, not even a sign of Jenna, and her presence had been supplanted by the k’nid, and all he could do now was cut his losses and run.

  Slowhand’s chest felt leaden now, and his breath was hot and rasping; symptoms not only of the altitude but of a speed and distance covered that he had not attempted since what his army passing out class, impressed and more than a little jealous, had dubbed the ‘Night of a Hundred Wives.’ And that had been quite some years ago. He was maintaining his lead on the k’nid, though, if only because one of his volleys of arrows had caused a rockfall on the narrow mountain path along which he fled. The rockfall hadn’t harmed the k’nid, or even slowed them down, but it had forced them to take a detour, which was good enough for now. As he continued onward and upward, struggling more and more, he was even starting to think that he might lose them. But that was when he ran out of ground.

  Slowhand came to a skidding, skittering stop, gasping with exhaustion and frustration, watching in disbelief as stones pushed by his sliding soles tumbled away only a few inches in front of him over a precipice. What made his predicament a hundred times worse was that not only had the terrain come to an end ahead of him but, unnoticed until now, to his left and right as well. In fact, there was little more than a half foot of rock on either side of him before –