Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  The woman stared at Kali, gasping in disbelief.

  “The door,” Kali said. “Get it open. Now.”

  “It will do you no good.”

  “I got this far, didn’t I?”

  The woman shrugged and rapped on the door, a code that had changed from the one Kali remembered. As it opened, two men appeared on the threshold and Kali despatched them swiftly with punches to the nose. Moving inside, she worked her through the corridors of the old hotel until she came to its ballroom – the centre of operations and throne room of Jengo Pim.

  As expected, Pim sat on his makeshift throne, and regarded her coldly as she entered.

  “Pim, what is this?” Kali said.

  “Kali Hooper,” the thieves guild leader replied slowly. “So, which of my people dies horribly this time?”

  Kali was somewhat thrown by the tone of her reception. Pim had understood the death of his man during her incursion into the Three Towers had been unavoidable and no fault of her own.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Tom Daly!” Pim snapped. “You do remember how you got him turned to stone?”

  Oh yes, Kali thought, I remember. But I also remember that his name was Kris Jayhinch – and that was not something Pim himself was likely to forget.

  Something was wrong here. And now that she knew that, she was suddenly aware of the tension in the room – the beads of sweat on Jengo Pim’s face and, more importantly, those on the faces of the men who surrounded him. She studied the man right behind Pim – a man she did not know – and saw how his arm was tensed, as if holding something to Pim’s back. A knife, it had to be. It wasn’t Pim who had closed his doors to the refugees, it was these others. Pim had become the victim of a cowards’ coup and, by the looks of things, quite recently.

  “As you can see,” Pim explained, “you are not welcome here. Leave now or… my men will fire.”

  Kali could see that well enough and, for a moment, she said nothing, biting her lip as she tried to work out a way out of this. The number of crossbows that were trained on them made it impossible to pull off any sudden manoeuvres. Deprived of that possibility she could only try to talk her way out. But that, in itself, seemed a likely unsuccessful path.

  “Perhaps,” a voice said, “I might be of some assistance?”

  Kali turned and saw that Merrit Moon and the others had worked their way into the Underlook. But it was not Moon who had spoken. A figure pushed his way through the clamouring crowd and threw back his hood, and Kali found herself staring at a silver haired, bearded figure whose presence made him seem to loom tall over the others.

  “You,” she said.

  The man inclined his head slightly. “Poul Sonpear at your service.”

  “Who’s he?” Merrit Moon whispered in Kali’s ear.

  “Archivist for the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige, particularly the forbidden bit. Oh, and part time Final Faith spy.” She glanced at Jengo Pim and then back to Sonpear. “Well, this is turning into quite the reunion.”

  “Odd, isn’t it, how certain pivotal figures always seem to turn up in the right place at the right time.” Sonpear smiled, but it was a smile that seemed aimed only at Kali. “One might almost say it was preordained.”

  Kali eyes narrowed. Was Sonpear alluding to something? Something, perhaps, to do with her own origins and place in the scheme of things, much as a certain fish thing had alluded in Martak some time back? If he was – in the presence of all these people – if he knew something, now was not the time to talk about it.

  “What are you doing here, Sonpear? Shouldn’t you be closeted with your buddies in the Three Towers?”

  “I should, but clearly I am not.” He shrugged. “A small distraction. A liaison in the Skeleton Quays, where I found myself detained. By the time I returned to the towers, they had already been sealed.”

  Kali smiled. Detained in the quays, eh? She knew just the place and wondered how business was down the Bound to Please. So, despite the fact Sonpear had already proven he was literally capable of wiping the wall with her, he was quite human after all. And now he was stuck here as much as they were. Or, then again, perhaps she was jumping to conclusions.

  “I have made myself known to you because I believe I can help with our mutual predicament,” Sonpear said.

  “How’s that, then?”

  Sonpear said nothing and simply moved his right hand in a motion like he was turning some invisible dial, and the man with his knife in Pim’s back – as well as two others within stabbing distance – rose from the floor of the ballroom making choking sounds and clutching their necks, their feet kicking beneath them for a purchase they could not find. Kali had seen such magical ‘persuasion’ techniques before but not to the extent Sonpear seemed to be taking them. She swallowed as the eyes of the infiltrators began to bulge, then turned away as Sonpear suddenly flicked his wrist and their heads snapped around a hundred and eighty degrees. Three dead weights fell to the floor with a thud.

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “He’s right, Miss Hooper,” Jengo Pim interjected, gesturing for the bodies to be removed. “We are nothing without our code. These men needed to be taught that there should be honour among our kind.”

  “I think it’s a little late for them to learn anything.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the dead,” Pim responded. He nodded to the others in the room and, as Kali looked, she saw the change of attitude in them. The sense of insecurity that had pervaded the Underlook since she’d first arrived was gone now, replaced by a renewed and total allegiance to the true and proper leader of the Grey Brigade.

  “I would suggest,” Sonpear said to the other crossbow wielders around the room, “that you put those down. Now is a time to work together, not against one another.”

  Pim’s men capitulated, and Pim himself rose from his throne with a relieved sigh.

  “Right,” he said. “Miss Hooper, get your people inside. Ferret, see to their wounded. Rathbone, once everyone’s safely gathered in seal those bloody doors. I believe we have ourselves a siege situation.”

  The men went about their duties and it was only seconds later that the outside walls of the hotel reverberated with a series of impacts from outside, sifting dust from cracks in the ceiling of the ballroom. Many of the people from Gargas looked around in fear and hugged each other.

  “They wasted no time,” Kali said coolly. “Pim, are you sure this place is fully sealed?”

  “Tight as an ogur’s underpants,” Pim said, glancing at Moon when his comment elicited a strange growl. “The question is, how long will the walls themselves hold.”

  Kali nodded. “The place is old but it’s better than nothing. Still, we can’t stay here for ever.” She turned to Merrit Moon. “Old man, have you got any i –”

  A sudden boom from outside, much louder than before, shook the hotel to its foundations, and Kali stopped speaking. Another such boom caused her to look around in alarm.

  “What the hells?” she said.

  “I believe that my people may be attempting to provide a solution,” Poul Sonpear said.

  “What the fark are they doing – bombing us?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  Kali spun to face Jengo Pim. “Is there any way to see?”

  Pim nodded. “Upstairs, on the top floor, in the old turret room. Follow me.”

  Kali and Sonpear raced after Pim up flight after flight until they came to a small, circular chamber which Kali noticed, with some amusement, Pim appeared to have turned into a shrine to the Hells’ Bellies, the walls plastered with handbills and memorabilia. What was evidently his sanctum sanctorum was otherwise featureless apart from a panoramic circle of shuttered windows. Pim moved to open one but Sonpear redirected him to another. “No, there. The view will be… better.”

  Puzzled, Pim did as he was told and flung the shutters wide, then stepped back as the full scale of what was occurrin
g struck him. Kali pushed in beside him.

  “My gods!”

  The eastern quarter of Andon spread out beneath her and there wasn’t a street or an alleyway, a square or a cul-de-sac of it that wasn’t overrun by the k’nid. Smoke, screams and chaos were the order of the day, and it seemed there was no escape from it anywhere. As Kali looked down in horror she saw at least ten people who had not managed to make cover stalked and taken by the k’nid, their skeletons left discarded on the scarred streets. It was not, however, the events that were occurring below her that made Kali gasp, but rather above. Because it seemed that, in reaction to the invasion of their city, the Three Towers were going on the offensive.

  Kali had been inside that complex and had heard it thrum with its strange power, had known it to be magical, but it was not until this moment that she realised just how magical it actually was. The three towers, that were the headquarters of the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige, were moving, each of them twining like immense snakes, the bridges that connected them having seemingly retracted – or perhaps simply disappeared – to enable this new and unexpected freedom. But it wasn’t just the fact that they were moving that stunned Kali, it was what they were doing as they moved – and what they were doing were blitzing Andon. From the top of each of the looming, swaying structures, huge, orange balls of energy were being fired down into the streets, each so powerful that, as it departed its tower with a thwoom, Kali felt the floorboards of the hotel beneath her vibrate. The vibration was nothing, though, compared to the shaking that followed as the spheres impacted, not only at ground level but occasionally on rooftops as they targeted the k’nid wherever they were. Explosion after explosion lit the battle torn streets. Not only k’nid but buildings and people were blasted apart, flailing and spinning through the air.

  “What the hells are they doing?” Kali demanded of Sonpear.

  “It’s the League’s self protection protocol. The towers are defending themselves as best they can.”

  “You arrogant – this isn’t the way, you bastard! Your people are destroying their own to protect themselves. You have to stop this!”

  “There is nothing I can do. The Towers are sealed.”

  “Well, think of something, dammit! They’re tearing Andon apart!”

  Sonpear hesitated, clearly torn between his League responsibility and the damage that it was causing. For a second he just listened to the sound of the fireballs and to the battering the exterior of the hotel was taking from the k’nid.

  “There might be weapons,” he said finally, “that may prove more effective in an offensive than those you currently possess. There will, however, be some hazards involved in obtaining them.”

  “Pal, they can’t be any more hazardous than opening that front door or waiting here while it gets blown off,” Jengo Pim interjected. “What do you have in mind?”

  Sonpear sighed, as if what he were about to announce he should not even be considering. He was about to speak when there was a sudden warning cry from Kali and he stared toward the Three Towers. Or rather, at the space between themselves and the Three Towers. Because one of the towers had turned towards them and, thrumming deeply as it came, growing larger every second, one of the fireballs was on direct collision course with the Underlook.

  There was no time to run, nowhere to hide and absolutely nothing they could do. Heart pounding, the last thing Kali saw was Sonpear rushing at her, pushing Pim into the fireball’s path. And then the fireball struck and the top of the Underlook was gone in a blazing inferno, just like that.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ONE THING MADE Kali question whether she was in the afterlife and that was that Jengo Pim seemed to be sharing eternity with her. When their times came she granted they might be near neighbours in whatever level of the hells she was despatched to – close enough to pop round for a cup of sulphur, perhaps – but, hey, she hadn’t led the life of crime he had. She guessed, she had one or two redeeming features he hadn’t, hadn’t she?

  She stared at Pim, picking himself up off the ground. He was staring at her in the same way she was staring at him – which was to say completely bemused – and it looked very much like he was thinking the same thing as she was, too. There was no way on Twilight the two of them couldn’t be dead.

  Both of them then turned to take in their surroundings. Or rather lack of them.

  Wherever they were, it certainly looked like the afterlife. At least if one subscribed to the idea of it being some almost featureless limbo; dark, unoccupied and silent. The kind of place where one might wander until the Gods had counted up your good beads and bad beads on their divine abacus, or whatever the hells it was they did. It certainly felt like the afterlife, at least in the sense that her arrival here had left her rather numb. The one thing it didn’t do was smell like the afterlife. But, to be honest, that was more likely to be Jengo Pim.

  No, wait, Kali thought, and sniffed her underarm. Okay, it had been something of an energetic twenty four hours.

  “What,” Pim said slowly, “just happened?”

  Kali remembered the Underlook’s turret room; a series of fleeting images that included the fireball, Sonpear shouting a warning cry, and then him staring her in the face, shoving her back into Pim, hard. The shock she had felt in that moment – that Sonpear was saving his own skin – didn’t tally with the look she saw on his face. It no longer struck her as homicidal but somehow desperate, as if the mage were doing the only thing he could in the circumstances.

  “I think he pushed us…” Kali said, vaguely.

  “Oh, the bastard pushed us all right. Right into an early grave.”

  “Do you feel dead?”

  Pim looked himself up and down, patted his arms and legs and chest, frowned slightly when he noticed one of his sleeves was smoking gently. He patted it down. “Well, no, but…”

  “Like I said, I think he pushed us out of the way. Magically, I mean. I think we’re somewhere else.”

  Pim took a moment to absorb what Kali said. “Somewhere else? This looks like nowhere.”

  “That’s exactly where I think it is. Nowhere. I think this is Domdruggle’s Expanse.”

  “Who’s what?”

  “Domdruggle. His expanse. It’s another place – an echo of our own, existing on a different plane. At least that’s how the story goes. It’s very old, supposed to be something of a myth.”

  Pim shrugged. “Something of a boring myth, if you ask me.”

  “No, we’re just becoming acclimatised to it.” She stared out into the dark. “Look, Pim. Look.”

  The thieves guild leader followed Kali’s gaze, where shapes were indeed forming out of the nothingness, but instead of displaying an expression of wonderment, he frowned.

  “You said it was an echo of our plane of existence. But if we’re still where we were, it looks nothing like it.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it?” Kali said, smiling. She continued to gaze into the darkness, making out rolling fields, and vast fortresses and soaring towers in the distance. Things other than clouds or birds scudded across the sky.

  Great, winged things. “That’s because we’re looking at the distant past.”

  “Are you telling me we’ve travelled through time?”

  Kali shook her head. “Nope, we’re exactly when we were. This is what Andon looked like when Domdruggle conjured the echo. Of course there was no Andon then, only the cities of the elves and the dwarves…”

  She trailed off, her wonderment at what she was seeing coupled with the promise of what she could explore out there leaving her speechless. She almost left Pim and walked off into the ghostly landscape.

  “So this is the time of the Old Races?” Pim asked.

  “The memory of it. I wonder what day it was, what season, what year? When in their calendar was this?” She gazed up at the stars to see how different from her own time they were, but instead of seeing the stars saw something else, and gasped.

  Kerberos loomed above, twice, t
hree times the size it should have been. So immense its sphere was almost enveloping the planet, creating an eerie fogginess to the light. And that light was not the azure light they were used to but a deep, blood red.

  “My gods!”

  “That doesn’t look right,” Pim observed, bleakly. “It’s like it’s swallowing Twilight.”

  Kali nodded. “I think this might be the End Time.”

  “End Time?”

  “The time when the elves and the dwarves died. When the Old Races disappeared.”

  “What? You’re saying that Kerberos killed them?”

  Kali shook her head, not sure what to think. When she spoke, it was almost in a whisper. “I don’t know. But by the looks of things I’d be willing to guess it had something to do with it.”

  “Perhaps one day soon, you should find out what, Kali Hooper,” a voice said.

  “What? What?”

  “What?” Pim echoed. It seemed that he had heard nothing.

  Kali rubbed the side of her skull, feeling a strange irritation, almost a scratching within.