Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  “Swing her round! One eighty degrees full rudder!”

  The deck lurched beneath Slowhand as the order was instantly acted upon, and he was forced to cling to a handrail to prevent himself stumbling. Jenna, however, strode the tipping deck with ease, clearly practised with her ‘airlegs’ and still barking orders as she went. Slowhand watched as she executed a series of manoeuvres that made him swell with pride, making the airship do things it was clearly not designed for. Despite the fact that the airship collided with the rocks around it on a number of occasions – and the faces of its crew were clearly concerned about the battering it was taking – they nevertheless continued to obey without question, until the last of the k’nid had been ripped away. Only then did Jenna sigh with relief.

  “Resume course. Steady as she goes.”

  Slowhand was about to move towards her and congratulate her on the flying display when Fitch strode towards her instead, whispering something in her ear.

  “Dammit,” Jenna said. “How bad?”

  “The orb has purged energy,” Fitch said. “We need to replenish it, enter Waystation One, or we will not reach Gransk.”

  “We can’t afford to lose the time, but I suppose there’s no choice. All right, prepare to take her in.”

  The orb, Slowhand thought.

  Presumably the pulsating orb that seemed to drive the airship, but the waystation, what was that? And what and where the hells was Gransk?

  “Problem?” he said, moving forward.

  “Nothing that can’t be rectified.”

  “Where, in this... Waystation One?”

  “That’s right, in Waystation One.”

  Slowhand was getting a little tired of being left out of the loop, even if, strictly speaking, he had no place in it. “What are you doing here above the clouds, sis? Where did this ship come from? What the hells is going on?”

  “All hands,” Jenna said. “Prepare to bring us around.”

  “Yes, Captain Freel.”

  Now Slowhand said nothing. Instead he simply stared at his sister instead.

  That she had effectively ignored him – was ignoring him – after all this time spoke volumes for the depth of indoctrination the Faith had instilled in her, but that wasn’t what disturbed him the most. What was with the Captain Freel bit? That wasn’t her name. What was going on? He perhaps couldn’t blame her for adopting another name but what he didn’t understand was why Freel? It wasn’t an assumed name like his own. So, unless she had become really boring in the intervening years, did that mean she had the name Freel for a reason? Had she been adopted? Gods, had she married? Whatever the reason it hinted at a history he knew nothing about, and considering that she was his twin sister, that simply wasn’t right.

  One thing was clear, however. The two of them were not going to be playing catch-up right now.

  “Three degrees right rudder. Orb to half power. Ready a pulse on my mark.”

  “Aye, Ma’am.”

  “Half degree correction and… mark! Steady as she goes, Mister Ransom. Prepare to take us in.”

  The Final Faith crew obeyed Jenna’s commands – with the exception of Fitch, who simply stood with his arms folded, staring at him, which Slowhand most definitely didn’t like.

  “This… civilian should not be seeing this,” Querilous Fitch snapped.

  “What would you have me do, threadweaver? Throw him overboard? He’s my brother, dammit.”

  “No. I am your brother now.”

  That was it as far as Slowhand was concerned. He was about to go for Fitch when something took his mind entirely off his intent. Because Jenna’s commands had turned the airship back towards Thunderlungs’ Cry – or rather back and beneath it – and what he saw there he was immediately convinced was what had made Thunderlungs’ lover falter and fall all of those many centuries ago.

  Beneath the Cry was a huge cave mouth that was not a cave mouth at all – at least not a purely natural one. It appeared to have been bored out of the rock and led deep inside it. All along its sides – leading inward in two neat rows – were lines of great, glowing tubes set inside rune-inscribed arches. Tubes which pulsed in sequence as if designed to guide an airship in. And that, it seemed, was exactly what they did, because the airship passed between them and was swallowed by the huge cavern mouth.

  My gods, Slowhand thought, gaping upward. This is Old Race – the biggest Old Race thing I’ve ever seen. Pits of Kerberos, Hooper would have given everything to see this.

  He only hoped that whatever Old Race ruin – for it would have been nothing else – had claimed her life at last was as awe-inspiring as this one, because then at least his lover would have died happy.

  If not, well, knowing Hooper, right now she’d be spinning in her grave.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!”

  The cry of fury, of pain and of sheer frustration that boomed from beneath the ground was sudden and startling, shattering the desolate quiet of the dusty canyon and causing the strange black birds that nested there in twisted trees to take to the air with a chorus of haunting caws. The cry reverberated out of the canyon and across the landscape beyond. But there was no one out there to hear it – no one for leagues – and after a while, as its echo died down, the birds returned to their trees. There, they did not snatch up the dropped carrion on which they had been feasting but, instead, regarded each other with furled wings, cowed heads and darting, beady eyes. Troubled by this latest disturbance to their long abandoned, isolated piece of the world, their gaze turned along the canyon, past the rusted, age-warped rails of metal and the overturned, skeletal frames of the carts which once had rode them, and towards the dark and forbidding mouth at the canyon’s end. And they wondered what it was they had done to offend the angry-spirit-who-had-come-to-live-beneath-them this time.

  Ever since the spirit had arrived on its strange, armoured steed and gone into that dark mouth – there first announcing its displeasure with a deep rumble, an unknown curse and a great cloud of dust that had erupted from it by sunset that day – they had struggled to understand its subsequent outbursts, no doubt intended for them, but each time they had neared their answer another outburst had come and they had fled to the skies in panic once more. So it was now – as they felt the seed of an answer within them – the words of the angry-spirit-who-had-come-to-live-beneath-them came once more:

  “Owww! Rollocks! Count to ten. One-two… no, soddit… You farking hoooor!”

  Far below, through a labyrinthine series of tunnels and diggings, through galleries and chambers that had never seen the light of day, and past tools and carts like those above, Kali Hooper grunted with pain as she pulled the lengths of cloth she held in each fist as taut as she could. The binding around the splints on her leg pulled tight, pressing the splintered bone in her shin tightly but agonisingly together, causing her to bite down hard on the gutting knife she had clenched between her teeth. Her groan echoed dully, joining the still audible reverberations of her earlier cry and reminding the solitary, bedraggled figure sitting pained, sweating and slumped in a small antechamber again and again of the mess she’d gotten herself into.

  No, not exactly her, she reflected, but a certain completely mad little bastard whom Killiam Slowhand, in her stead, had long since despatched to the hells. Damn the man, she thought. Even dead Konstantin Munch continued to cause her pain.

  The fact was, her current predicament was all the fault of Katherine Makennon’s one-time right hand man. It might have been months since her final battle with him at the dwarven outpost of Martak, and the dwarf-blooded resurgent might even now be floating decomposed in the still and murky waters of its collapsed ruins, but that didn’t stop his misconceived plan to resurrect dwarven glory from endangering her life yet again. Indirectly, at least. She should have known nothing good would come of it when one of Makennon’s agents had contacted her with a set of papers which he explained the Anointed Lord wished to gift her in return for helpi
ng her with that affair. She should have said ‘no thanks’ there and then, but the fact was she hadn’t been able to resist, had she? Oh no, because the papers turned out to be directions and maps to stores that Munch had established across the peninsula, and there was always a chance that there was going to be something more than a little interesting in there.

  There hadn’t been, as it turned out – the weapons and tools that Munch had collected to equip his fantasised army were as warped and useless as his masterplan – but in growing desperation to unearth at least one artefact, she had decided to give it one last stab, to follow one last set of directions. That stab and those directions had brought her here.

  She really had no idea how long ago that had been, now, and she had all but forgotten that, ultimately, the trip had proven useless again, but that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem this time was that it had turned out that it wasn’t so much what Munch had stored away but where he had stored it away.

  That this hellshole had been a mine at some point in its history – though mining what, she didn’t know – was clear, but equally clearly the mine had become exhausted at some point and become… something else.

  Maybe it was why Munch had chosen the place. Because, apart from its total remoteness, it was, as she had so painfully learned, a deathtrap. Not just neglected and unsafe and falling apart but a bloody deathtrap. The thought had even crossed her mind that Makennon had included the map to its location because she knew that and thought it a convenient way to be rid of her. Maybe she was being paranoid but she’d interfered once in the Final Faith’s grandiose plans – even if in doing so she had saved the world – and with future plans likely in the offing maybe the Anointed Lord considered her too much of a loose cannon to be allowed to live. Not that she had any wish to get involved with that lot again.

  Kali slumped against the rock wall and made a brubbing sound with her lips. The fact was, it had become increasingly unlikely that she’d be getting involved with any lot again if she didn’t get out of here soon, not since she’d accidentally flicked that lever by stumbling over it in the dark.

  One small mistake, that’s all it was – an amateur’s blunder – but that leverhad been the key to this whole damned mess. It had transformed the mine’s galleries in a loud and seemingly endless rattle of ancient chains and cranking of antique gears from the harmless tunnels they had been, into a deadly labyrinth constructed with one purpose in mind. To kill, as horribly and painfully as it could.

  A testing ground was what it turned out to be. An ancient arena for dwarven rites of passage, designed to test their mettle to the full. She knew this because, whilst her own mettle was being tested by a selection of swinging blades and giant axes, she had come across a torn and blood-browned journal she could only presume had been written by a dwarf whose own rite of passage had come to a sudden end. As she had translated it, it told the whole sorry story of Be’Trak’tak, roughly translated as ‘the beginning or end.’

  Originating, she’d guessed, in the middle period of dwarven history – when their engineering skills were first beginning to evolve from the simple to the complex – it was to this place that the dwarven young were despatched at a certain age, sealed within the complex to face a series of elaborately designed traps and challenges whose survival would prove them to be warriors, or kill them in the process.

  Gods, she’d wondered, what the hells was it with those dwarves? Why couldn’t they just go out on the twattle when they came of age like everyone else?

  Not that the dwarven traps would have proven too much of a challenge for her – not under any normal circumstances, anyway. The trouble was the unimaginable length of time since any of them had stirred into life, because in that intervening age most of the materials from which the traps had been constructed had become rotten, making them dangerously unpredictable and unstable. It was the very reason why she was slumped here binding her broken leg right now.

  She had successfully negotiated her way through all but the last of a series of swinging hammer traps – itself just one more of an endless series of swinging, slicing or rolling something traps – when the beam that carried the final deadly bludgeon had splintered away as it swung, flinging the hammer where it was not meant to be when it was not meant to be. Kali remembered the agony as, halfway through a perfectly timed somersault manoeuvre, the hammer had sheared from its mounting and crushed her leg against the wall of the mine. Gods, that had hurt – and it had also proven to her that she was not quite as impervious to harm as events of the previous months had begun to lead her to believe. It was a salutary lesson and one she was not likely to forget so long as this farking splint remained on her leg.

  Kali shivered, not so much from cold, but a combination of exhaustion, slight fever and a hunger that came from subsisting only on the edible, though thoroughly revolting, fungus that grew on the mine walls. Of course, the state of her dark silk bodysuit didn’t help. Having improved on the original thieves guild design by having it retailored to incorporate pockets for artefacts, it now hung in virtual tatters about her, having fallen victim not only to her need for cloth to tie her splint but to the various traps she’d found lying in wait. That wasn’t the worst of it, though. The gaping patch of flesh around her hip was a constant reminder that somewhere along the way she had also lost her equipment belt, torn from her body and flung into some deep, dark and, by the sound of it, watery pit by an intricate whirlwind of jagged blades of which someone, once upon a time, must have thought: Whirling and jagged, eh? Oh, go for it, that’s a good one.”

  She had lost Horse, too. She could certainly no longer sense him above, waiting patiently for her return as she expected he’d done for at least the first few days of her entrapment. No, Horse had become her faithful companion as much as the old Horse had been, but even he must have come to realise that Kali Hooper was not going to be returning to him anytime soon. She wondered where he had gone. Back to the Drakengrats where he had originally been captured? Or was he running free across the plains, the wind whistling through his horns? No, more likely he was galloping after some poor pack of worgles, terrorising them with his tongue.

  Kali sniffed. Dammit, she missed him and she was getting maudlin. Hells, it really was time to get out of here, to beat these farking traps once and for all.

  Kali heaved herself up against the chamber wall, thrusting a hand forward for balance as her bad leg took her weight, then hobbled out into the main tunnel, turning left and down rather than right and up. She knew that on the surface that seemed to make little sense but she also knew that there was no up – not since the landslide on the first day – and so she was going to gamble her survival on another possibility. Even the dwarves, with all their sadistic tendencies, surely couldn’t expect any of their kind who had been ‘warrior’ enough to survive their traps to then renegotiate them on the way out. So it seemed logical that there had to be another way out, deeper into the mine.

  There was only one problem with that. What was in the way.

  Kali could hear it even from here. That rhythmic thumping, pounding and hissing that heralded the presence of the final trap. She had returned to it day after day for at least the last week, studying its timings and its intricacies and its foibles but making no attempt to pass. The reason for that was simple – this was the ‘big one’ and she was only going to get one chance at beating it.

  There it was again, she thought, entering the cavern that opened out from the mine tunnel, a complex arrangement of giant hammers and blades, arranged vertically and horizontally, that completely lined the bridge crossing the chasm in the centre. It was no simple chasm, either. The rock walls flanking it had been carved into the shapes of giant dwarven faces whose roaring mouths randomly belched great fiery clouds of breath, hot enough to have singed the wood in the trap mechanisms over the years into hard, carbonised masses.

  Kali couldn’t help but admire the workmanship. The first time she’d had laid eyes on the construction she’d imagi
ned it had once been named ‘The Bridge of Doom,’ ‘Chasm of Chaos’ or ‘Gauntlet of the Gods.’ But she hadn’t liked the sound of any of those – so instead she’d called it ‘Dave.’

  Like the earlier traps, Dave would once have been negotiable with relative ease, but the rot of years had left some of its components askew, others working faster or slower than they should, still others partly broken loose from their matching components and set into motion by the movement of the mechanisms around them. As if that were not bad enough, the bridge itself looked as rotten as hells, likely to collapse under foot anywhere and anytime. The whole thing was as unpredictable as hells. One wrong move and she was over the side. One small miscalculation and she would be crushed to death or sliced to pieces. There was absolutely no room for error.

  Kali narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath, studying for a final time the patterns of movement in the trap. She flexed her bad leg and pinwheeled her arms, loosening up her muscles. And then she swallowed. And then she ran.

  Kali roared as her feet slammed onto the first few slats of the bridge, bouncing forward immediately as she felt the aged wood creak and give beneath her weight. As she bounced, the first of the trap’s death-dealing devices came at her.

  Kali eyed the trajectory of the whirling blade as it spun towards her and then actually ran towards it, flipping herself above and over the blade at the point metal and flesh would have met. The forward flip had to be timed slightly later than she would have liked – and she felt a sharp sting as the blade’s edge sliced her thigh – but the delay was necessary for her to be able to meet the next of the bridge’s dangers.

  Righting herself, Kali landed on the upperside of a hammer that had just slammed down in her path and then balanced precariously on it as it began to rise. She did not let it take her all the way, instead she used its height to leap diagonally across the bridge so that she grabbed and clung onto a hammer rising on its other side. This, too, she rode until the very last second, allowing another blade to pass beneath her and then punching herself away from her perch as the hammer clicked in its mooring and slammed down.