Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  “What? You’re joking, right?”

  “I wish I were. Because then I wouldn’t be facing this dilemma.”

  “What dilemma? For pits’ sake, it’s what you’ve been looking for, old man. Knock it back! Hells, I’ll even get you a brolly for it!”

  “No. The time is not yet right.”

  “What the hells do you mean, not right? Why?”

  The old man stared her straight in the eyes.

  “Perhaps because there is something you’re not telling me.”

  Kali tried her best to hold his gaze, swallowing slightly. “What’s to tell? We won and the k’nid are gone or, at any rate, will be soon. Slowhand and I saw them starting to dissolve on the way here from Andon. And the Tharnak’s safe in the Expanse. Hells, Sonpear even told me that when the portal closed the Expanse reverted to a state of stasis, so the ship didn’t even crash!” She smiled in a way she hoped would bring the conversation to an end. “Let’s hope we never need it, eh, old man?”

  “But we will, won’t we young lady?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What are you not telling me?”

  Kali stood up. “Look, will you stop it. It’s a day for celebration, so why don’t we celebrate okay? Enough talk about the end of the farking world.”

  Moon raised his eyebrows. “Did I mention the end of the world?”

  “No, but… oh, look, I don’t want to hear any more – really I don’t!” Kali shouted, much to Moon’s surprise. “I mean, why me, why Kali Hooper, or whatever the hells my true name is? All I ever wanted to do was get drunk, find places and poke around in the dark. Instead, what do I find? That I’m some kind of demi-human, that you died and became some half-ogur thing, that Horse isn’t a horse, that Slowhand’s sister died, and now – now…”

  Moon’s surprise at the unexpected outburst turned into a look of concern. “Kali, what is it?

  “Steaming pits of Kerberos, old man, I’m twenty-three years old. Twenty farking three! I don’t want the weight of the whole world on my shoulders!”

  “Young lady...”

  “It just isn’t fair!”

  “Kali...”

  “It isn’t farking fair!”

  “Hey, hey, hey, what’s going on?” Killiam Slowhand said, suddenly behind Kali and taking her by the shoulders. He turned her towards him, surprised to see the tears in her eyes. “Hooper?”

  Kali thumped him on the chest, repeatedly, as he drew her close. “Godsdammit, Slowhand, this never ends!”

  “Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s the matter, what do you mean. We won didn’t we? Didn’t we?”

  The old man nodded, but his face remained troubled. “This is about something else.”

  “What?” Slowhand asked Kali, softly. “What is it?”

  Kali tensed in his arms but said nothing. And then, after a second, she broke away, grabbed some bottles from the bar and, without a word to he or Moon, headed outside, slamming the door behind her. Slowhand started to follow but Moon stopped him, spinning him around with a hand on his shoulder which, being half ogur, Slowhand could hardly resist.

  “Leave her be,” he said and then, after a few more moments, led him over to the bar, signalling drinks from Red. “So, young man. Why don’t you tell me exactly what your intentions towards my protégé are…”

  Outside, Kali leaned for a few seconds with her back against the door, catching her breath. The fact was, her reaction had surprised her as much it had the old man and Slowhand, but she guessed that a bellyful of thwack and the fact that what was on her mind had to come out somehow was pretty much responsible for her uncharacteristic display. But what could she tell her friends? She knew full well that she couldn’t have done what she’d done over the last few days without their help. So how could she tell them that it might all have been for nothing?

  That’s right, she thought, nothing.

  Gods, she had to talk to someone about this, didn’t she? Or she would likely go insane.

  Kali drew a deep breath and made her way to the top of the hill beyond the tavern, ignoring the syrupy rain. There, she pushed her way through a gap in the bushes into a small glade, wherein a solitary grave was illuminated by a flash of green lightning. The grave’s headstone was carved with one simple word – Horse – and Kali touched it and smiled. It had become her habit to escape up here on the occasional night to tell Horse of the adventures she’d had since he’d been taken. And these chats were usually relaxed, meandering affairs, but the events of these last few days had left her hardly knowing where to start.

  Kali slumped with her back to the headstone, cracked a bottle of flummox and began. She told him how the world – her world – had changed so much this past week that he would barely recognise it, and then she told him that what troubled her the most was that she had seen what the Old Races had ultimately been capable of, but that for all their greatness and the levels of technology, they had still been unable to stop whatever it had been that had wiped them out. And if they had been unable to prevent their extinction, then what hope did she and the others have of preventing theirs? Because the threat was as real to them as it had been to the Old Races, she knew that now. She knew that because she had finally realised why the dragon had taken them to the edge of the heavens – it had wanted to show them something. And that something had been a smudge on the side of the sun. With that realisation she had also worked out the purpose of the strange black sphere at the Crucible, the one that had once moved slowly forward on its straight tracks. It had done so because it wasn’t a sphere, it was a countdown. A countdown the dwelf had obliquely referred to in the fading moments of his life.

  She never had found out why she had been awaited. And she never had found out why she was like she was. And, now, she knew, there was a possibility that she never would.

  Kali took a slug of her flummox as she remembered the dwelf’s last words once more.

  “This world is called Twilight for a reason,” he had told her. “Once in an age, to every civilisation, a great darkness comes.”

  THE END

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE END OF the world began with a scream. A very high-pitched, girly scream.

  Not Kali, then. She wasn’t a girly scream kind of girl.

  No, the scream in question came from her guide, one Maladorus Slack, hired only hours before in the Spider’s Eyes when he’d claimed to know the location of a lost passage leading directly to the fourth level of Quinking’s Depths. It was an audacious claim and it wasn’t every day Kali trusted the word of some ratty little chancer in a seedy tavern, but there had been something in the way he made it – with wariness as well as greed in his eyes – that had made her take a gamble and hand over fifty full silver for the privilege of having him share what he knew.

  As it turned out, it was money well spent, Slack guiding her at twilight into a cave in the hills above Solnos and, deep within, tearing creepers off an ancient cryptoblock he swore, once unlocked, would enable her to bypass the Depths’ upper levels and find treasure of such value that she might, as he put it, come over all tremblous in the underknicks. Kali had been forced to have words with him about this, pointing out that it was her business what went on in her underknicks and also, while she had him pinned against the wall, that she wasn’t your common or garden tomb raider doing what she did for the money. Unless her taxes were due, of course.

  Later, she would feel a bit bad that Slack had spent some of his final moments being throttled, especially when she recalled the hungry roar that followed the poor sod’s scream. Not that what happened to him was her fault. Nor Slack’s. In fact, there was no way either of them could have guessed what was going to happen after she picked up the Claws.

  Okay, okay, okay, she’d been at this game long enough so perhaps she should have known better. Perhaps, given the way things had been going until then, she should have sensed the whole thing was going to go tits up.

  “This cryptoblock...” Slack had queried as she w
orked on the numerous etched blocks that formed the seal. The conditions in the cave were cramped, and he was balanced awkwardly between the skeletal remains of earlier treasure seekers who had found their way to the threshold, trying to ignore the fact that all their bones were utterly and inexplicably shattered. “It is some kind of puzzle, yes?”

  “Not some kind of puzzle,” she replied. “A very specific kind.”

  “You have seen such puzzles before?”

  “Once or twice. Cryptoblock seals are typical of an ancient race called the dwarves.”

  “The Old Race?” Slack said. “Tall with pointy ears and bows?”

  Kali sighed, but took time to set the man straight because he had at least heard of the Old Races, which was more than could be said of most people on the peninsula, especially out here in the sticks. “No, the other lot. Short-arsed with attitude and axes.”

  “But surely both are stories for the children, yes? These Old Races did not exist?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised...”

  Slack sniffed. It was the kind of rattling snort where you could hear the contents of his nostrils slap wetly against his brain and Kali grimaced in distaste. But the man seemed to accept the truth of what she was saying.

  “The dwarves. They were supposed to have been masters of deadly traps, were they not?”

  “Not supposed.”

  “Then this door is a trap?”

  Kali glanced at the skeletons on the floor of the cave. “Either that or these guys had a very bad case of the jitters.”

  Slack glanced fearfully around the cave, looking for hidden devices.

  “You won’t see a thing,” Kali advised. “They were master engineers, too.”

  “You do know what you are doing?”

  “Wish I did,” Kali said. She ran a finger down the join between two blocks, concentrating hard, tongue protruding between teeth. “Trouble is, no two cryptoblocks are the same... springs, balances, counterbalances... you just have to feel your way around.” She gasped as something suddenly sprang inside the cryptoblock and slammed together where she delved. “Farker!” She cursed, whipping out her fingers and sucking their tips. Then she almost casually grabbed Slack’s sleeve and pulled him aside as a solid stone fist the size of an outhouse punched down from the cave roof onto the spot where he’d stood, reducing what remained of the skeletons to dust. With a grinding of hidden gears, the fist retracted, and Kali returned to her work, smiling slightly as Slack had, himself, come over all something in the underknicks, a small stain forming on the front of his pants.

  “Sorry about that,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Might be a while.”

  She’d worked diligently on the puzzle well into the night, Slack staring warily about him all the time, flinching or whimpering each time there was a click, clunk or clack from the door. At last, though, there was a sound that was different to the others – somehow final – and, as he watched, Kali stood back with a sigh of satisfaction, brushing the dust off her hands.

  Slack regarded her and the cryptoblock with some puzzlement, because, at first, nothing happened. Then, with a soft rumbling and puffs of ancient dust, the blocks making up the door began to punch in and out. Some then slid behind those next to them, which in turn slid in front of others next to themselves. Yet more ground up or down, obscuring or obscured by their neighbours, or simply retracted backwards into darkness, never to be seen again. The movements became faster and more complex, the cryptoblock shrinking all the time, until at last all that remained was a single block, floating in the air, which Kali grabbed and casually tossed aside. Slack found himself staring at the discarded stone.

  “I do not understand,” he said. “It is gone. How can it be gone?”

  Kali frowned. Questions, always questions. “Translocation mechanics,” she said, adding in response to his puzzled stare, “It’s a dimension thing.” It might well have been, for all she knew; the truth was, despite having cracked a few of these bastards, she really hadn’t a clue where they went.

  Luckily, Slack hadn’t been interested in analysing her statement too deeply. His attention had been side-tracked by the passage that lay beyond the cryptoblock, and the ore that glittered in its walls. It was only triviam, all but worthless, but its shine held the promise of greater things, and as Slack wiped sweat from his lips with his arm, she frowned. The man might have saved her the trouble of negotiating the first three levels of the Depths, but there was a growing air about him suggesting that, while he’d been happy to guide her to the cryptoblock, he’d never really expected her to open it, and now that she had was having second thoughts about who deserved the treasure beyond. Her suspicions were confirmed as Slack raced ahead of her into the opening.

  Kali cursed and threw herself forward, grabbing his tunic from behind – just in time, as it turned out. Slack was already skidding helplessly down a sharp incline and, now a dead weight on the end of her arm, wrenched Kali onto her stomach and pulled her down after him. The stone floor of the passage was rough beneath her, tearing her dark silk bodysuit, and grazing her exposed torso with sharp scree. She ignored the pain, concentrating instead on jamming her legs against the sides of the narrow incline in an effort to slow their progress. The walls tore at her ankles, stripping them of skin, but she ignored this,too, groaning as she stretched out her other hand to get a firmer grip on Slack. He suddenly yelped and lurched, and Kali willed all her weight onto the floor of the incline, praying for enough traction. She was yanked forward and her arms were almost pulled from their sockets, but the two of them came, at last, to a tentative stop – again, not a moment too soon. Kali sighed. Below her, Slack dangled over a seemingly bottomless abyss, too terrified to struggle or even object to the rain of stones that bounced off him, clattering down into the dark.

  Kali twisted herself into a stable position and heaved him up. “Looks like I need to keep an eye on you in more ways than one,” she growled.

  “I was only... making sure it was safe,” Slack said, breathlessly.

  “Of course you were.” Kali winced and rubbed her bare stomach, ignoring Slack’s hungry stare. “But there are rules to this game,” she added. “Rule one is watch every step.”

  A flash of resentment crossed Slack’s face as he dusted himself down, but he turned to stare into the dark, swallowing deeply. It was not in reaction to the end he had almost met, however, but a stare of undisguised greed.

  Kali joined him at the edge of the abyss, wondering fleetingly whether it might have been less bothersome if she’d just let him fall, but considering what it was they faced, it was obvious Slack could make no move without her.

  As always, her research had given her some idea of what to expect when coming here, but the expectation never quite did the reality justice. The two of them were staring into a vast cavern that must have extended beneath the whole of one of the hills above Solnos, an underground expanse hung with immense stalactites and dimly lit by a strange, golden glow in front of them. The glow was the only illumination and emanated from the top of an isolated pillar of rock, maybe six feet across, which thrust thinly and dizzyingly up from the abyss. It appeared unreachable from their position. Kali bit her lip and studied her goal. She could not yet make out the source of the glow, but was sure she knew what it was. The light was pulsing, dreamlike. The glow of something magical.

  Kali had no doubt that she’d found what she’d come for. All she had to do was reach it.

  “There?” Slack observed incredulously. “But there is no way across!”

  “Rule two,” Kali said, pulling a small object from a pocket in her bodysuit. “Plan ahead.”

  Slack stared at a small, ornate piece of stone – some kind of key – that Kali held in her hand, then watched her move along a narrow ledge to a carved niche. She brushed lichen away from an indentation in the stone, inserted the key and, with a grunt, turned it solidly to the right, the left, and then twice more to the right. Something grated behind the niche as, below in the darknes
s, something rumbled. Slack watched in amazement as another rock pillar rose judderingly from the abyss, shedding thick cobwebs, dust and the detritus of ages as it came. The top of the pillar stopped level with the ledge on which they stood, some hundred feet out into the void.

  Kali withdrew the key from the niche and smiled. Slack, meanwhile, stared at the pillar and then Kali, regarding her quizzically.

  “I do not understand,” he said. “That is still too far away to reach.”

  Kali nodded. The fact was, it was too far away for a running jump, even for her. But even had she been able, she wouldn’t have tried. Revealing her abilities to a man who would, for the price of a shot of boff, tell all and sundry about it was not a wise move in a backwoods such as this. It could easily reach the ear of some overzealous Final Faith missionary, and she had no wish to be dragged to a gibbet and burned as a witch. Besides, jumping would take the fun out of it all.

  “Rule three,” Kali said. “Be patient.”

  She smiled again as, from under the lip of the ledge where they stood, a scintillating plane of blue energy snaked out towards the newly risen pillar, zigzagging around the stalactites in its path to form a translucent bridge wide enough to take them both. Slack squinted, frowned, and Kali realised he hadn’t a clue what he was looking at. It was easy to forget that while she’d come to live with such wonders on an almost day-to-day basis, the average peninsulan hadn’t much experience of magic.

  “It isn’t witchcraft,” she explained. “The bridge is made of something called threads.”

  “Threads?”

  “An elven thing but the dwarves weren’t averse to their use when needs suited. They –” Kali paused and contemplated. How exactly did you explain the threads of magic to a man such as Slack? “They allow you to use the world around you... to do things with invisible tools.”

  Slack looked enlightened. “So, I could use these tools to dig a new dump-pit?”

  Kali pulled a face. “Uh, yeah, I suppose,” she conceded, thinking that she was the only one digging a hole around here. “Let’s move on, shall we?”