Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  She was between blades and hammers now but she didn’t have a moment to rest. The instant she landed one of the dwarven heads belched fire towards where she was crouched. Kali didn’t hesitate; snatching up a blade that had broken from its mechanism, she shored herself behind it, using it as a shield so that the fire was deflected past her on both sides. Then, the instant the fire died down, she used the now glowing blade as a wheel, rolling with it and behind it beneath the next hammer on the right side of the bridge.

  The hammer came down hard, buckling the circular blade and straining the mechanism, but Kali had already dumped the metal and used the temporary jam to crawl swiftly beneath the area where the hammer would otherwise have impacted. This, in turn, enabled her to roll beneath the next circular blade before coming upright and flipping herself forward once more as its companion followed through a moment later.

  Kali was moving fast and she was almost through to the end of the bridge now. She could barely contain the surge of elated adrenalin that accompanied that knowledge, because there she saw some kind of wooden elevator, as she knew she would, and all she had to do now was…

  Wood splintered suddenly beneath Kali’s feet and she fell forwards, cursing. The curse had barely left her lips before there was a sudden, heavy whoosh from her left hand side and the last of the mechanisms – a great hammer that swung across the bridge – came straight at her. She tried to throw herself out of its way, back into the space between hammer and blades, and would have made it safely, apart from the one small variable she had forgotten to factor into her equations. Making her leg thicker by as little as an inch, her splint made contact with one of the whirling blades she had already negotiated. Its teeth bit into the wood and cloth strip, ripping at it and tearing it away.

  Kali felt her whole body vibrate bone-jarringly and then, as the teeth of the blade spat the splint out, found herself being flipped dizzyingly through the air back towards the hammer. There was no time to reorientate herself and, in the second she tried, the swinging bludgeon slammed directly into her front, knocking her, stunned and winded, cleanly off the bridge.

  It could have been worse, she supposed, she could have lost the leg, but that was actually quite academic right now because she wasn’t getting out of here. The place had become her tomb after all.

  She looked down at the stalagmites and boulders that were now rushing towards her, estimated she had only a few seconds before she hit, and closed her eyes.

  She slammed into the cavern floor. But it didn’t hurt half as much as she’d imagined it might.

  What? she thought.

  Instead of the hard rock Kali thudded onto – and through – a layering of planks, that once upon a time must have been set there to prevent unwary miners stumbling into a dropshaft. They were so rotten she passed through without harm. Another layer was almost immediately beneath them, and then another, level after level of shoring. As Kali plummeted through, her momentum slowed slightly each time.

  Kathuck, kathuck, kathuck.

  It seemed to go on forever, and Kali was beginning to think she might die of suffocation as opposed to anything else when, at last, she slammed through the last of the layers and crashed, flat on her back, onto a small hillock of rotten wood on some deep, deep tunnel floor.

  She lay there for a second.

  “Ow,” she said.

  And then she flipped herself upright, ready for whatever trap was going to be thrown at her next.

  But there was none. Kali knew instantly that this place was different to Be’Trak’tak. It looked different, felt different and even smelled different. And that could mean only one thing. The whole area she’d travelled through to reach Munch’s mine had been riddled with other such excavations, and this had to be one of them. She’d broken through into another mine. And what was more, there was light ahead.

  Wasting no time, Kali dusted herself down and began to move towards it, trying all the time to suppress the presumption that what was she looking at was an exit. After so long it was just too much to ask for, surely? And it was. Following the light to its source, Kali came up against a solid rock wall.

  No, wait, not solid. There was something there.

  Kali’s disappointment upon discovering that the light source was not an exit was mitigated slightly by the fact that it seemed to be no kind of natural light, and she found herself intrigued. Also she saw that it was not one light source but two, only seeming to be a whole because they were embedded in the rock close together. No, not embedded, she realised as she examined them further. The lights seemed to be attached to something else embedded in the rock, something bigger that a roof collapse had buried at some time in the past and that had remained undisturbed since. The question was, how long had it remained undisturbed? Kali studied the collapse with a professional eye, noting the visible fossilisation, the settlement of the larger pieces of debris, and the compactness of the scree around them, which was absolutely solid. A very long time, then, she concluded. The only problem now being that, if that were true, how in all the hells could the lights – whatever they were – still be glowing?

  She used her gutting knife to work away at the scree surrounding them, eventually revealing two small, orange orbs that seemed to throb beneath her touch, prompting a dull headache as they did. Suddenly, she realised what they had to be. Unless she’d missed her guess, they were some kind of power source for the thing to which they were attached.

  Kali slapped the area she had revealed around the orbs tentatively, and then a little bit harder, and then harder still until her palms hurt. No doubt about it. Metal, and solid – apparently armoured or, at least, reinforced. But what on Twilight was it? She took a few steps back so that she could see the thing more fully and, with a pulse of excitement, realised that that the metal object was mounted on some kind of rotating tracks as if it might ride on them – move on them, in fact.

  Kali continued her excavation anew, pulling now at larger stones and rocks that were embedded in the scree and then rolling each down over their predecessors until the pile was too big to accommodate more. But that didn’t matter because she had managed to reveal enough of the machine for her purpose, and what she had revealed made her step back with a gasp.

  She was standing in the space between the rock and what, it seemed, had been travelling through the rock, although what mechanism it employed to do this she could not see as she had not yet unearthed its front end. It was clearly a vehicle, however, as evidenced by the fact that there was a hatch in its side – and the hatch was covered in dwarven runics. Kali ran her palm over it in some wonderment, realising that while it was far from the first dwarven artefact she had discovered, it could very well be the first from the age that had produced it.

  Through her own studies she had accredited three distinct periods of development to the Old Races – both elven and dwarven – during which they had progressed from opposing factions, utilising either magic or technology to build their individual civilisations, through periods of conflict where they had waged war using magic against technology, to the final age where, reconciled, both Old Races joined forces to expand each civilisation through magical technology. By this time both were so advanced that they would have been perceived almost as gods, and they could have been glorious and supreme if something hadn’t happened. Whatever it was that had been powerful enough to wipe out these two great civilisations – to effectively eradicate them from the surface of Twilight – was perhaps the greatest of all mysteries but one that Kali intended one day to solve. The point was, that the vehicle she was studying appeared to come from the end of that last age, because what else could those orbs be but magical technology?

  Becoming more excited by the second, Kali moved to the edge of the hatch, feeling around it until she had traced a round cornered, rectangular shape. It was sealed tightly but, being a hatch, there clearly had to be a way to open it. Perhaps that little niche there, marked with the rectangular symbol?

  Kali felt inside
and her hand wrapped around what felt like a small handle, which she gripped and pushed. Nothing happened, so she pulled instead. And then she staggered back as a giant, bronchial floprat with halitosis exhaled heavily in her face.

  That, at least, was what it felt and smelled like. But there was no floprat, only the rank atmosphere coming from inside.

  Kali watched the hatch release itself from its seal, punching away from the main body of the vehicle with a second exhalation and there waiting for a moment before, with a kind of wheeze, it slid slowly to the side. Kali understood now what she had just activated. The hatch was similar to the rune surrounded doors she had discovered in the Spiral of Kos, vacuum sealed by a method she did not understand to protect whatever lay behind them. But, where beyond those doors had lain ancient laboratories, behind this one lay only darkness.

  No, she thought, not quite darkness. What appeared to be some kind of small, cramped cabin lay within, illuminated very dully by the same strange glow that had brought her to this part of the cave. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed that the glow seemed to be emanating from a number of places within, each of them small – panels, perhaps, with levers. Some kind of control cabin then? But controlled by what?

  Oh, she thought suddenly, my gods.

  The panels were not so bright as they might have been, not because they were actually dim, but because something was blocking their glow. There was a figure within, just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Kali swallowed, knowing that if it moved she would very likely have a dicky fit.

  But it didn’t, of course. How could it? Who knew how long this machine had been stranded here, within the rock? Anything within it could not have hoped to survive. Hells, what a lonely, lonely death it must have been. But what nagged at Kali more than that morbid thought was, why had no one come to help? She wondered for a second whether it was possible that the inhabitant of the machine had died here because there was no one to come to help – that perhaps he had died here at the time the Old Races had gone away? And if that was the case then it begged the obvious question. What was she looking at?

  Swallowing again, Kali leaned in and the figure emerged from the shadows before her eyes. Squat but, by the size of the ribbed uniform enclosing its now shrunken frame, once well-muscled and powerful. It remained utterly still. Dry, eyeless sockets stared straight ahead, gnarled hands gripping levers on the panel before it that had not moved since before the land was young. Though the body was completely mummified there was no doubt at all what it was she was looking at.

  A dwarf.

  Kali realised she had been holding her breath, and she let it out now in an exhalation that almost turned into a laugh. This was incredible! Something she had always hoped, but never thought, she would find!

  The discovery was a momentous one and Kali took the appropriate length of time and appropriate reverence to appreciate it. After all, after gods knew how long stuck in this hellshole a few more minutes would make no difference at all. But then, with a deep sigh, she moved forward, grabbed the desiccated corpse by its shoulder and turfed it out of the cabin onto the mine floor. The dwarf’s remains crumbled under her touch – clothing and all – and while the arms and torso hit the rock, they left the legs behind, half sitting on the seat. Kali heaved them off with a grimace and dropped them onto the collapsed torso – and only then realised she hadn’t a clue where the head had gone. She scanned the cabin, peering into its shadowed recesses, and then spotted the missing appendage lying in the far corner, out of her reach. The head was looking right at her, its empty eye sockets baleful and reproachful, but Kali ignored them – what else could she do? – because her friend had been sitting in the driving seat of something that was still working. She slipped into the empty seat, thinking: Sorry, my friend, but I have a lot more need of this thing than you do.

  Whatever this thing was.

  Kali peered down at the panels and the levers and realised that she didn’t have a clue how to use them even if she knew what it was they did. So what followed, she thought, was going to be interesting, to say the least. She did, though, have one starting point – a button marked with the same rectangular symbol she had seen on the outside of the machine. Humming softly to herself, she pressed it. With the same judder and sliding motion that it had opened with, the hatch closed and sealed itself.

  Kali felt as if she were trapped inside a metal coffin.

  But she just knew this thing was her way out of here. So, it was time to see what it could do.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DOLOROSA CONSIDERED SHE had better things to do than chase a herb up and down the hillside. The preparations for Kali Hooper’s memorial evening – a drink-till-you-drop session which all the Flagons’ regulars considered the most appropriate way to remember her – had taken the best part of two days. The last of them, a surprise stew for the evening – which was, of course, no surprise to the regulars, though none of them had told Dolorosa that – was all but done. But the hunt for one of its more vital ingredients was proving to be difficult. Said task had occupied her for the past half hour and, in that time, something of a murderous glint had appeared in her twitching right eye.

  “I will ’avva you, you leetle red bastardo!” she threatened, her arm swooping down to grab the skittering bunch of macalorum.

  But once again the leafy herb evaded her clutches, bouncing and flapping away down the hill towards the Flagons and causing the tall, thin woman to lose balance on the slope and flip heel over head, her skirt flapping after her and enveloping her like a tent.

  “Bastardo!” she hissed again, from beneath the cloth.

  A group of drinkers outside the tavern stared open-mouthed at an exposed pair of skull and crossbones bloomers and – possibly as a release of tension at the bad news they had all received – there was much pointing and loud and raucous bursts of laughter. Dolorosa’s head popped out of the bundle of cloth and she flipped her skirt back over her dignity and squinted at them, hard. It was a squint that some said could kill – some even said it had killed – and the laughter stopped. Dead.

  Dolorosa straightened, then squinted down at the tavern again. The drinkers had disappeared inside but she could still see their faces pressed up against the tavern’s windows and she strained to listen for the merest titter from them. But there was none and they seemed only to be checking that she wasn’t striding down the hill after them.

  Lucky fora them, she thought, because if they hadda tittered, I would havva to keel them horribly and withouta mercy.

  After she had keeled the bastardo.

  Dolorosa spun as she saw that the macalorum had taken advantage of her unexpected halt to turn around and bounce back up the hill, chittering as it passed her. Once again she made a grab for it, and once again missed. What had made this essential ingredient of her surprise stew quite so skittish she wasn’t sure – it was normally such a docile little herb – and she wondered whether it had anything to do with the reports of strange creature sightings to the west. These things nicknamed the k’nid. Certainly macalorum wasn’t the only thing around here that was uneasy at the moment, as most of the smaller wildlife in Tarn seemed to be that, or worse. Whatever the cause, the macalorum’s determination to avoid becoming an ingredient only made her all the more determined to catch it.

  Dolorosa bent and slid her fingers into the rim of her right boot, then rolled up her sleeves and began to stomp after the herb.

  The stiletto she had extracted from her footwear gleamed viciously and the woman grinned evilly and tossed it in her palm, weighing it up, before flipping it so that she held it by the end of the blade. All she had to do now was time her moment right. And there it was, she thought, where the herb was about to hop over that small ridge into the trees beyond. The macalorum tensed it roots and Dolorosa threw.

  Victory issa mine! she thought, and began to scramble up the hill towards the impaled and struggling herb.

  She was almost upon it when she found herself staggering
backwards. The sky above her tipped dizzily, as if she were going into a swoon.

  Greata Gods of the Seas, I havva overdone myself, she thought. My ’usband, in moments of passion, hassa warned me ovva this.

  There was only one problem with that theory, she realised – she didn’t feel remotely dizzy or weak. Why, then, did she continue to fall backwards, landing on her behind with a thud and a puff of dry soil?

  Anda wotta wassa happening to the hill?

  To her confused eyes it seemed to be getting bigger.

  Pah! Eet ees impossible.

  Impossib –

  “Greata Grandma of the Gods!”

  Above her, no more than a yard from her upturned feet, the grass that covered the hill was breaking apart, spilling roiling piles of soil onto the otherwise green landscape, like a pan that had begun to bubble over. Dolorosa scrambled back, thinking that perhaps she was being visited by a rarely seen undermuncher, but it soon became clear that it was bigger even than that. The roiling soil was spreading ever outward now, so much so that her feet and the bottom of her legs had begun to rise with it, tipping her further backwards so that she had to steady herself on the palms of her hands. The old woman watched, mesmerised, as the mound turned into a small hillock, and then one not so small, and her eyebrows raised as something suddenly poked its nose through the surface. Something big.

  Dolorosa rapidly muttered a small number of hail glorias, and then far more curses, as she was once more tipped heels over head, her skirt enveloping her again, though this time perhaps mercifully as it shielded her gaze from whatever monster was emerging from the depths. She rolled down the hill in darkness, aware as she went that whatever was emerging from the ground was rumbling loudly and that it stank of the depths and something old. Totally unnecessarily, considering she was under her skirt, she closed her eyes and waited for whatever fate was going to befall her.