by Mike Wild
As they recovered from the impact, it was a good position for her to study the creatures. She certainly couldn’t disagree that they were ugly little bastards, flooding the courtyard like a colony of insects that had been disturbed from beneath some rock. But whatever rock that had been, she had certainly never come across one like it. These things struck every fibre of her being as unnatural.
They did not, however, seem to be quite the destructive force Aldrededor’s reports had suggested. They were certainly making no moves to destroy the Flagons.
Now, why exactly was that? she wondered.
It took her a second to realise that the k’nid seemed to be reacting to the vibrations from inside the tavern – actually shying back each time a thud occurred. Was it possible, she thought, that these things had worked their way across the peninsula, attacking all in their path, only to be stopped here, by a dance troupe?
Kali chided herself, almost laughed. No, that was plain daft. In fact, it was the stupidest thing she’d ever –
The Flagons suddenly fell silent, doubtless in response to Dolorosa informing everyone that the k’nid had come to eat their face, and sure enough each lit window was suddenly eclipsed by a number of shapes peering into the night. What mattered more, though, was that as soon as the thudding stopped the k’nid had become more agitated and their attention had turned to the tavern – and consequently the people inside.
There was a sudden rush against the side of the tavern and Kali cringed as she heard masonry and wood splintering before the assault.
Dammit.
She had to warn those inside, but there was no way she could get back to the door. Instead, she raced along the stable roof, leaping from there onto the Flagons’ outhouse, and from there onto the roof of the tavern proper. She clambered up its slates, slipping back twice as some broke from their fixings beneath her and then, at last, reached the apex. There, she found herself doing something and saying something – especially to its intended recipients – that she would never, ever, in a thousand lifetimes, have imagined she would.
“Dance!” she shouted into the Flagons’ chimneypot. “Dance, or die!”
There was a few second’s silence and then a puzzled and weak reply came back
“Wotta you say? Who issa speaking, please?”
Kali couldn’t believe it. “Dolorosa, it’s me.”
“Who issa me?”
“Kali!”
“Kali? Why arra you uppa the chimaney?”
“I’m not uppa the chimaney, woman! Dammit, Dolorosa, just listen…”
Kali explained what was happening – what she thought was happening, at least – and how it was imperative not only that the regulars stay inside the tavern but also that the Hells’ Bellies keep on dancing. She explained also that she wouldn’t be joining them for her memorial evening or any evening in the foreseeable future. As she did she tried as best she could to hide the excitement in her voice. For her one glimpse of the k’nid had sparked in her a familiar and – considering the alternative – quite welcome feeling: the thrill of the hunt. No, these things weren’t natural and to her that shouted Old Races from the veritable treetops. So, she was off on her travels again, and she knew already what her first port of call was going to be, a certain market town and a certain half-ogur who just might have some theories as to what they dealing with.
All she had to do was get there. But was Horse up to it? After all, he’d had better days.
She should have known better than to even question the fact as, at that moment, as if sensing her impending departure, Horse’s growl was clearly audible from his stable. Then the door buckled slightly on its hinges as he gave it a gentle nudge with his snout.
Kali worked her way back down the rooftops until she was above his stable and then, keeping her eye on the k’nid, stretched down to unbolt the door.
As Horse trotted slowly out, his armour flaring slightly at the creatures, Kali reversed the manoeuvre that had got her on the rooftops in the first place, flipping herself down onto Horse’s back. Then she eased Horse out of the courtyard, keeping him at a walk as they passed through the ranks of k’nid, which growled softly as they passed. Horse, in turn, growled at them and Kali could feel every inch of his body tense, ready to activate his armour fully at the merest sign of movement from the predators. The vibrations from the Flagons, however, still seemed to be rendering them passive. Passing without harm into the open countryside beyond, Kali spurred Horse first into a trot and then the beginnings of a gallop. There were likely more k’nid out here, she thought, and away from the Flagons their behaviour might be a different story, so she suspected it was going to be an interesting journey to Gargas.
As she and Horse traversed the first couple of leagues she turned back in the direction of the Flagons and the peninsula beyond, thinking of where she would be if she hadn’t become trapped in Munch’s mine. Because the thought of meeting Merrit Moon had made her think of another meeting she should have had, a certain rendezvous in Malmkrug.
Killiam Slowhand was out there, somewhere in the overrun west, searching for his sister, and wherever he was she hoped he was all right, and that he’d had the sense to keep his head – and the rest of him – down.
CHAPTER FOUR
DESPITE THE GLOWERING and threatening presence of Querilous Fitch lurking behind him, Killiam Slowhand could not take his eyes off what was in front of him. He leaned forward against the rails of the airship, like the excited child he had been on the deck of a far different kind of ship, a lifetime ago. Then, the Merry B had entered the bustling harbour of Freiport after his father had been posted from Allantia to the mainland, and to leave that island with the promise of a new life full of adventure on the much larger peninsula – even if then he’d had no idea just how much – had filled him with awe and a sense of wonder that he could barely contain. That wonder had returned now and Slowhand gazed upward, his mouth open, unable to believe what he saw.
The parallel with Freiport was more than the sense of wonder, however, because the sights he saw here were in many ways similar to those of that long distant shipping port. Moving slowly into a vast, and only partly natural cavern, hundreds of feet inside solid rock, the airship on which he was being carried aloft was entering its own harbour.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Jenna said, joining him at the rail.
She spent a few seconds leaning in silence by his side, watching as the airship passed gantries and loading cranes and other such devices that projected from rock walls and then, staring ahead, towards a strange cradle-looking dock towards which the airship was heading. “Before we came, no ship had docked here in thousands upon thousands of years. No one even knew it was here.”
Hardly surprising, Slowhand thought. Human ignorance of such places was common – how many people had heard of Martak, for one? – but he had to admit there was something different about the place they were entering now. Its location, its position, its isolation suggested to him that it hadn’t merely become lost like its contemporaries but had always been designed to be lost. In other words, hidden away from the world, even when that world was capable of constructing such a wonder. But, if that was the case, whatever clandestine purpose it had served was long past. Apart from one isolated area that he could see above him, the harbour was neglected, derelict, ill-maintained. Rusted and warped metal beams framed and criss-crossed the cavern like malformed ribs, twisted and time warped gears lay idle in unused machines, and crates sitting in loading bays rotted away along with their contents. Most telling of all, however, was that there were three more airships like this one – or, at least, once upon a time, there had been – and Slowhand simultaneously frowned and gaped as he stared up at the bedraggled remains of what had once been equally wondrous machines. Their canopies were rotted away now and hanging in strips from metal skeletons which would never take to the skies again. Identifying symbols that hung half obscured upon the rotted cloth left the archer in no doubt as to what he was looking at.
This was the remains of an elven skyfleet.
“You were thinking of Freiport, weren’t you?” Jenna said. “The day we arrived?”
Slowhand stared at her, his surroundings momentarily forgotten. “You remember?”
“Of course I remember, Killiam. The Faith would have gained nothing destroying that part of me they valued in the first place.”
“Your strategic skills?” Slowhand remembered the position she had held with the Freiport military. “They – or was it just Fitch – destroyed something, though, eh? Your free will? Your choice to leave?”
Jenna stared at him, strangely hesitant for the first time since their reunion. “Perhaps there were other reasons…”
“What?” Slowhand said, grabbing her arm and, as he did, part of her robe fell away to reveal a red choker around her neck inscribed with Final Faith runics. It was a wedding band.
“Outside, your man called you Captain Freel,” Slowhand said. “Captain Freel. My gods, you married one of them didn’t you?”
Jenna pulled her arm away, straightened her robe. “Sorry you weren’t invited to the wedding, brother. The ceremony was in Scholten Cathedral. The Anointed Lord herself officiated.”
“And how voluntary was that, Jenna? Who is he, your husband? Is he here?”
“Lord of All, you never change, do you? No, Killiam, he isn’t here. He’s on special assignment, just like me.”
Just like you, Slowhand thought. And just like Konstantin Munch had been before the shit had hit the fan. “Do you ever think,” he said, “that the Final Faith has its fingers in too many pies?”
Again, Jenna hesitated. “They… I…”
“What?” Slowhand demanded. But before Jenna could elaborate, the airship jarred suddenly and he realised that it had just entered the cradle they had been heading towards and that the cradle was, in fact, an elevator. Clamping them into position it then began to rise. Jenna pulled her arm away, suddenly all business once more.
“Mister Ransom, prepare to couple the orb feed. Mister Blane, disengage the canopy locks. Port and starboard rudders down and neutral, people. Let’s get this done and get ourselves out of here!”
Despite the sudden burst of activity around him, Slowhand wasn’t going to let Jenna’s comment go, and he followed his sister as she went about her business, adjusting various dials and levers as the elevator reached its destination and began to turn on its own axis, positioning the airship’s strange, pulsating orb before a huge panel. The crewman called Ransom began to link umbilical looking pipes up to it, and while he and the others were professionally adept at what they did – clearly familiar with the airship’s workings – a number of things were now becoming clear to Slowhand.
“This isn’t your ship, is it, sis? It’s Old Race, scavenged from the remains of their technology and put together piecemeal. And this isn’t your final destination, either, is it?” As Jenna helped crew position a gantry so that they could reach a rock platform filled with more modern machines and crates, which the crew then proceeded to load, he persisted. “All this equipment? What are you up to, Jenna? Where are you going?”
Jenna spun to face him. “Going, brother? We aren’t going anywhere. In fact, we’re running away from somewhere – as fast as we can.”
“Somewhere or something?” Slowhand said with sudden realisation. “On the ship, what you said when those things came. You knew what the k’nid were, didn’t you?”
“The k’nid?”
“Yes, the k’nid. The things that attacked your ship.”
“Oh, so they’ve been given a name.”
“Is it those things you’re running from? What the hells are they? Where do they come from?”
Jenna stared at him defiantly, as if she were not going to answer, but then, as he held her eyes, she seemed to relent slightly. “There has been… a mistake,” she said slowly, swallowing. “We need to rearm, reinforce, return to rectify what we have –”
“That is enough,” Querilous Fitch interrupted, grabbing Jenna by the wrist and spinning her around. “This civilian cannot be allowed to know the business of the Final –”
“Hey!” Slowhand shouted, moving forward. “Get your hands off this civilian’s sister or you’re gonna find out just how uncivil he can –”
Fitch’s gaze snapped to him and, for a second, Slowhand swore he could see the blood vessels in his eyes dart and writhe like a nest of snakes.
“Or what?” he said disdainfully, and the archer suddenly found himself airborne, though this time with no dirigible beneath him.
The dismissive snap of the arm with which Fitch had accompanied his words had, seemingly without any effort on his part at all, flung him upwards and backwards with such force that he found himself hurtling through the harbour towards the energy panel from which the dirigible crystal fed. He impacted so hard that the wind was knocked completely out of him.
“My gods, Jenna,” he gasped weakly. “What has the Faith done this time?”
Jenna stared but no answer came and suddenly, seemingly instinctively, his left hand shot out to grab a small node on the panel, gripping it tightly so that he dangled there. This, Slowhand found strange, because there was no way – instinctively or otherwise – that he would grab such a device having seen the kind of power it channelled. Sure enough, his whole arm buzzed with a strange energy that spread through his bones to his ribs, but however much he wanted to he found he couldn’t let go. In fact, he suddenly realised, his other arm was reaching for the opposite node.
Slowhand felt a bolt of panic. He stared down at Fitch and saw the mage grinning coldly up at him. Damn it, it was the threadweaver who had made his arm lash out. And now he was forcing him to raise the other.
Querilous Fitch was in his head.
Below, Jenna snapped her gaze from Fitch to her brother and then back again, for a moment uncertain what was happening – but then it dawned on her. If his right hand connected with the other strut he would complete the circuit, and if that happened his whole body would be channelling the energy of the panel. Slowhand didn’t want to know what would happen to him if it did. But the fact was, in his current position, there was nothing he could do to stop it.
His hand rising jerkingly, face twisted and sweating profusely, fighting against Fitch’s will, he looked desperately at Jenna. His sister was clearly uncomfortable with what was happening, but it seemed her conditioning was preventing her from doing anything about it.
Fight it, sis, Slowhand thought. Help me.
And as if she had heard his plea, her gaze snapped to him once more, her brow furrowing deeply.
Decide who and what’s important to you, the archer urged. Make your choice.
Suddenly Jenna was struggling with Fitch, trying to turn him away from Slowhand, to break his hold. But despite his frame, the threadweaver seemed to be as strong in body as he was in mind, and would not be turned. As the struggle continued, so did Slowhand’s, his grip no more than inches away from the second node now. Groaning, he tried to fight against Fitch, but whatever part of his mind the threadweaver was manipulating it was inaccessible to him. Slowhand craned his neck to watch as his right arm rose ever upward and then suddenly spasmed in shock as it made contact and completed the circuit. The effect was agonising and the archer screamed and bucked, held as the current locked all of his muscles, seemingly gluing him to the panel. But as his body danced, he nevertheless managed to form one word in a guttural tone.
“Jennnnnaaaa…”
Below, Jenna continued to struggle with Fitch but then, as if he had tired of a dog snapping at his ankles, he snapped his hand to the side and Jenna was thrown away from him to slam heavily into a pile of crates. Some of the crew turned, shocked that their Captain had been treated in such a way, but it was clear that none of them would do anything about it – dare challenge the threadweaver – and they continued to work. For her part, Jenna stared daggers at her so-called lieutenant, wiping a spot of blood from the side of her mo
uth. But for the moment she was evidently too weak to pick herself up and retaliate. If she even dared take Fitch on.
Slowhand realised that if he were going to live he had to get out of this himself. Thankfully, as Fitch had used some of his energy to throw Jenna aside he had felt a fleeting and slight reduction in the threadweaver’s hold. Enough for him to be able to pull his right hand away from the contact panel. If he could work on that…
Slowhand moaned with effort, not only of trying to pull his hand away but also trying to make his intent as little obvious as possible. If Fitch spotted what he was doing, he had no doubt that his hand would be struck back to the panel in a second – and then he would be a dead man.
Slowly, though, it began to work and with a sudden jerk of his limb he realised it was free of the connection, though the panel behind him continued to throb with the charge it had built up. Slowhand took advantage of this, making his body buck as if it were still part of the circuit, but secretly concentrating on the effort involved in freeing his right leg. It, too, broke free, though for a second the archer held it in place, making Fitch think he was as much constrained as he had always been.
“Hey, Fitch,” he gasped. “Shouldn’t I be dead by now?”
The threadweaver’s eyebrow rose in surprise that his victim was able to speak, let alone breathe. Suddenly Slowhand felt a resurgence of the power, Fitch forcing him further onto the panel and, teeth gritted, he fought against the push with all of his will.
“Threadweaver. I’m starting to think you couldn’t weave your way out of a papyrus bag.”
Below him Fitch growled.
“Querilous Fitch,” Slowhand taunted further. “You think maybe that should be Querilous Oh-There’s-A-Hitch?”
That did it. As Slowhand had hoped, Fitch was the kind of man who, despite his power, couldn’t resist venting his anger in a more physical form. The threadweaver lurched towards him with a snarl.
