Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Kali stared at her. DeZantez turned as the messenger who had delivered the shard returned, in a hurry and bringing news. “Sister DeZantez, Miss Hooper, Enforcer Freel requests your presence,” he said breathlessly. “The Eye of the Lord has returned.”

  The pair looked at each other and began to make their way to the bunker.

  “There’s something that I need to ask you,” Gabriella said en route. “Something I don’t understand.”

  Kali was grateful to return to more familiar footing. “Shoot.” “That thing that took the Anointed Lord. It was borne of sorcery, it had to be. Of magic. But I thought the magic had died.”

  The same seeming contradiction had occurred to Kali, and while she had no answer, she did have suspicions. The threads might have been cancelled by the machines, but what if this wasn’t the threads at work? Something close to them, yes, something similar, but not the threads everyone knew? She recalled Aldrededor telling her that while he had been piloting the Tharnak he had seen strange black threads lying dormant amongst the others, no longer a part of their tapestry but still there. They’d appeared lifeless, he’d told her, but nevertheless occasionally leeched colour from other threads.

  “It has,” Kali said to DeZantez. “That’s what worries me.”

  They reached Freel’s bunker where he and the others were gathered once more about the central platform, where a new sphere had been positioned for viewing. The returned Eye was blackened and damaged, still smoking slightly, as if it had been caught up in some incredibly vicious firestorm. Kali wondered how it had managed to limp home. But limp home it had and, by the looks on the faces of Freel, Fitch and the others, they had already viewed what it had brought back with it.

  “I have a feeling this isn’t good news,” Kali said.

  “It isn’t.” Freel replied.

  He nodded to Fitch and the manipulator activated the sphere. The flickering image showed the rolling plains of east Pontaine for a moment, before the target of the Eye of the Lord’s flight came into view.

  The sphere approached the perimeter of the Sardenne at a height of about a thousand feet, so that the demarcation between the ancient forest and the plains was clearly visible. It was darker than Kali had expected it to look, however, although she had experience of just how dark the Sardenne could be. The reason wasn’t immediately obvious, the distance still too great, but from Jakub Freel’s expression it was going to come as quite the revelation. She studied the image intently as the small recording blimp drew closer, and gradually began to make out exactly what it was that constituted that greater darkness.

  Gabriella DeZantez crossed herself once more, praying under her breath.

  Soul-stripped, thousands of them, standing shoulder to shoulder in the border of the forest, absolutely motionless and as grey as the shadows in which they stood. Distinguishable as individuals mainly by the whites of their lifeless, staring eyes, they were crowded together in an almost crushing mass but none reacted to the others, none complained, none jostled. Kali had no idea how far back into the forest these witless creatures lurked but, as she watched, more, presumably recent victims, shambled to join them and take up positions by their sides. As if those already assembled weren’t enough.

  This was a gathering of the Pale Lord’s servants on a massive and hitherto unprecedented scale. The necromancer was, it seemed, building an army.

  “Their eyes,” Fitch said. “It’s said that the First Enemy can, if he wishes, see through them all at once, and that when he does his gaze is powerful enough to see people’s thoughts.”

  “What the hells is going on?” Kali asked.

  Freel placed a hand on her shoulder. “There’s more.”

  Kali glanced at Gabriella, who looked as confused as she did, and turned back to the projection. The Eye of the Lord was heading beyond the edge of the forest, now, and the vista it displayed was an unending, rolling landscape of ancient and massive trees, a thick canopy that hid the presence of the multifarious creatures and horrors that lived beneath. As the sphere progressed, Kali mentally traced her own journey through the forest almost a year before, the only way that she could map the progression of the Eye of the Lord over the otherwise unchanging topography. She guessed it was nearing Bellagon’s Rip, now, which was generally accepted to be the stomping ground – or hiding place, depending on which way you looked at it – of the Pale Lord. Her guess turned out to be accurate as, after a minor alteration of its flight path, the view of the Eye of the Lord changed slightly and something hove into view.

  “Oh, my gods,” Kali said.

  The Eye of the Lord had turned to look over the Sardenne’s canopy, Kerberos’s azure curve clearly visible above the forest. It was neither the canopy nor the gas giant that drew the eye, though, but the space between the two, where a massive pillar of energy, the width of a small village, punched up from the forest towards Kerberos. The pillar pulsed regularly and, each time it did, seemed to rise a little higher.

  “What are those things you can see in it?” Gabriella DeZantez asked.

  “I wish we knew,” Freel responded. “Miss Hooper, have you ever come across anything like this in your travels?”

  Kali shook her head. She was gaining a better view of the pillar now as the Eye of the Lord moved closer. The ‘clouds’ were revealed to be an agitation of the entire insides of the pillar, the shapes thick within it, slapping and battering against each other like leaves in a storm. Kali squinted, peering at them to make out more of their exact form when a thought struck her. She nudged DeZantez, indicated the shard and then raised it to her eye to view the projection.

  Kali swallowed before speaking.

  “They’re souls,” she announced.

  Freel, Fitch and the others snapped their gazes towards her but, before Kali could elaborate, the projection suddenly juddered and flickered and, with the sphere perhaps thirty feet from the surface of the pillar, blackened and disappeared.

  “The Eye of the Lord closed at this point,” Fitch pointed out. “And returned to me.”

  “Did you say souls?” DeZantez asked Kali, clearly disturbed by what she had seen.

  “But the ascension is meant to be a personal calling,” Cardinal Kratos said, seemingly of the same mind, though Kali wasn’t sure she believed him. “An individual journey. Not this... this –”

  Kali offered him the shard. “Watch again and see for yourself. I’m sorry but they’re souls. One for each of those soul-stripped.”

  Freel blew out a breath, looked at Kali. “I have to ask again – have you ever come across anything like this?”

  She shook her head. “Believe me, it’s only recently that I’ve got aboard this whole ‘soul’ thing.”

  Kratos sighed. “I think the enforcer had hoped to benefit more from your experience.”

  “Hey,” Kali protested, “do I look like a farking encyclopedia?”

  “No,” Fitch joined in. “What you look like is the owner of a disreputable tavern in the middle of nowhere.”

  “That’s it, I’m off...”

  Gabriella DeZantez blocked Kali’s way.

  “I thought we’d gotten past that,” Kali snarled.

  “Gentlemen, ladies, please,” Jakub Freel said. “The pressure of this current situation has obviously affected us all. May I just ask you all for your conclusions on what you’ve seen?”

  “What other conclusion can there be?” General McIntee answered. “You saw the number of those things. The First Enemy is planning a full-scale invasion of the peninsula.”

  Beside him, Cardinal Kratos accepted and read a scroll handed to him by a messenger. His expression turned grim. “Faith riders report that more of the Pale Lord’s forces have launched assaults on most of the settlements within twenty leagues of the Sardenne, and are moving farther afield. We believe we are looking at the total loss of Verity, Rasoon, Prayer’s End, and countless communities, including Gargas.”

  “What about the rest of it?” Kali interrupted. There wa
s something very wrong going on here. “That... phantasm that came for Makennon and the other twelve? This... pillar of souls? Where do they fit in? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Freel sighed. “Are you suggesting an alternative theory?”

  “No, but you asked for my help, so give me time and I’ll have one.”

  “How much time?”

  Kali faltered. “I think it has something to do with the speed at which the pillar of souls is rising. I think its meant to touch Kerberos. And I think whatever is going to happen will happen then.” She paused, calculating. “Three days. Give me three days and I’ll shut down your machines and find out what you need to know.”

  Freel was silent for a few moments, considering. “Agreed. But in the meantime, I have no choice but to convene a council of war.”

  “You do that,” Kali said. “But there’s one other thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “I want Killiam Slowhand to be in on this too. Fitch has him and I want him released.”

  Freel’s expression was unreadable. But he nodded briskly.

  “Under no circumstances!” Querilous Fitch objected. “The man is insane, a killer!”

  Kali smiled. “That he is. And a very good one. But he only kills those who deserve it.”

  “No,” Fitch insisted. “I refuse.”

  Cardinal Kratos and General McIntee regarded the psychic manipulator with distaste. McIntee was the one who voiced their thoughts. “The decision is not yours to make, manipulator. In the absence of the Anointed Lord we are responsible for decisions for the good of the Faith.” He turned to Kali. “Very well. I’ll have him brought up from the cells.”

  A few minutes later, Slowhand appeared in the doorway, and immediately tried to lunge for Fitch, but Kali, standing unnoticed beside the door, grabbed his arm and pulled him back. The archer turned on her, ready to lash out, but froze as he saw who he was facing.

  “Hooper?”

  “Slowhand.”

  “How you doing?”

  “Just for a change, working for the Final Faith. And so are you.”

  “Nice company,” Slowhand said. He paused, then his eyes narrowed. “This is something to do with what happened to Makennon, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. The Faith think their First Enemy is planning some kind of invasion.”

  “Him again? Who is this First Enemy guy?”

  “The Pale Lord.”

  “Ah,” Slowhand said. “Oooooh.” He looked in Kali’s eyes, then leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “Is he?”

  “He’s planning something,” Kali whispered back, “but nothing about this feels right to me. Keep smiling, anyway.”

  Slowhand did. “So we need to sort this out, right? So where are we off? The Prison of Pain? Ranson’s Remains? The Mound of Thunder?”

  “Actually,” Kali responded, “to the library.”

  “The library?” Slowhand repeated, not sure that he had heard right.

  “We need to do some research.”

  “The library,” Slowhand said again, deflated. “You know, one thing about working with this woman is there’s never a dull moment.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE HALL OF Proscribed Knowledge, the largest of the collections in the Final Faith library, was situated in a wing of the cathedral all of its own. The vast depository was packed with shelves towering as high as the ornate architraves and each shelf, in turn, was crammed to bursting with tomes of all shapes, sizes and provenance, the evident age and titles of many of which almost made Kali drool. The ones set in elven or dwarven script, particularly.

  The books on the lower shelves were reached through a claustrophobic and labyrinthine network of narrow passageways which jinked left and right unexpectedly and along which two people could not walk abreast. These, however, were the more common tomes, and the loftier ones – literally and metaphorically – were accessed by a precarious and dizzying network of crooked and seemingly unlinked metal stairways that reminded Kali of a structure she’d struggled for weeks to scale in a recurring dream. As she had in the dream, she wondered quite how it was they managed to stay up. She doubted magic, because from the moment she and Slowhand had entered she’d sensed the library was somehow isolated from the rest of the cathedral, and whatever sorceries or technologies were in use elsewhere in the complex had no place here, lest they damage the tomes. There was probably even – under normal circumstances – a dampening field in place. The contents of at least some of these books also explained why so few people were present: a cardinal here, an eminence there, and white-gowned curators whom she presumed had been thoroughly vetted before being trusted with the information in their charge. This was a domain accessible only to the Faith elite, though Kali struggled to reconcile them with the term as over the sounds of scribbling and dry parchment pages being turned, there was the occasional consumptive cough, belch and blatantly delivered fart.

  “As I said,” Killiam Slowhand muttered, “never a dull moment.”

  “Shhh!” A voice admonished.

  Slowhand stared at the white-gowned curator, a wizened little man about half the height of Suresight, who was as dusty as the shelves.

  “Hey, I can mutter, can’t I?”

  “Shhh!”

  Slowhand shook his head and pulled Kali aside. “I don’t get it,” he whispered. “Why here? Surely whatever we can find here, the Filth already know?”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Kali whispered back. “I’m willing to bet there are thousands of books here that have been confiscated simply because they could be confiscated, and haven’t been touched since. Hopefully we’ll find something they haven’t.”

  The archer looked dubious.

  “Come on, Slowhand, how many people do you know who’ve read the entire contents of their own library?”

  “You, for one.”

  “Yes, well...”

  “And Merrit Moon,” Slowhand said. “Well, all apart from –”

  “The Flesh Rituals of Elven Slither Maidens? With pictures by P’Tang?”

  “Oh, yeeeah.” Slowhand looked at her suspiciously. “How did you know?”

  “Because I was reading in the corner when you crept down and nicked it from his shelf.”

  “Borrowed.”

  “A year ago. Frankly, I’d be amazed if you can still open the thing.”

  Slowhand coughed and abruptly paled. He hissed, “Wait a minute. You’re not seriously suggesting we work our way through this entire place!”

  “Shhh!”

  “Will you fark off!”

  “There is no need for –”

  “Hey!” Slowhand shouted. He unslung Suresight from his back and mimed using the little man as an arrow and shooting him out a window. The curator scuttled off.

  “Not if you know what you’re looking for,” Kali went on. She hopped up steps and plucked a pile of tomes, dropping them on Slowhand for him to read. “But it is going to be a long night.”

  Kali browsed more shelves for tomes for herself, and then she and Slowhand made their way to a reading table. Kali rolled her eyes as she flung her backpack onto the table. The bag clattered and there was a long sigh from beyond the wall of books.

  They hadn’t been working long when a shadow loomed over them.

  “Need any help?” A voice asked and Slowhand looked up. Then he looked down, then up again, before stretching back in his chair, hands linked behind his head, beaming.

  “Be our guest,” he said, showing all his teeth.

  Kali, too, looked Gabriella DeZantez up and down. The woman had washed off the dust of the trail and changed into a clean white surplice, its brilliance accentuating the subtle but powerful musculature beneath her bronzed skin. Kali pouted inwardly – she spent far too much time underground to get a tan like that. “You don’t strike me as someone who has spent a lot of time with her head in a book,” she responded, after a moment.

  Gabriella smiled coldly. “You disappoint me, Kali. I’d have expected you of all peop
le not to judge a book by its cover.”

  “Oh?”

  “A girl from a backwater tavern with an over fondness for drink, an absolute disregard for authority and a tendency to repeatedly cross swords with the Final Faith? Hardly the kind of person you’d expect them to turn to for help.”

  “What can I say? We go back a ways.”

  Gabriella nodded. “I know, I’ve done some research of my own. The Clockwork King. The Crucible. Greenfinger’s Wood. The Faith holds quite a file on you.”

  “You surprise me. That crack about ‘sex occasionally’ still in there?”

  “The Anointed Lord’s small attempt at a joke. She’s human, too, you know, despite her calling from the Lord of All.”

  “Yeah, right,” Kali spat. Then she apologized. What DeZantez had shown her earlier had proven that there was at least some basis to the Faith’s beliefs, even if she remained convinced that their interpretation of it was deeply suspect.

  “For the record,” DeZantez went on, “I spent a good deal of my childhood in a place such as this. Not on the same scale, of course. My mother ran – still runs – the Faith archive in Andon.”

  Kali raised her eyebrows. “Marta DeZantez is your mother?”

  “You know her?”

  “Not well, but I’ve had... occasion to consult her records. She’s a good woman – non-partisan.”

  For the first time DeZantez’s smile warmed, and she nodded her acknowledgement, still a little uneasy.

  “Listen,” Killiam Slowhand said loudly, in an attempt to defuse the situation. “Seeing as we are all in the employ of the Fil – the Faith for the foreseeable future, what say we all be friends here?” The archer patted an adjacent chair. “Sit by me.”

  DeZantez stared at the proffered chair and then the archer, regarding him as she might a mollusc. “So you can pretend to read a book while you ogle my thighs? I don’t think so.”

  “I guess she’s read your file, too,” Kali said.

  “Uh-huh,” DeZantez confirmed.

  Slowhand did his best to look innocent, then attempted to change the subject. “Gabriella DeZantez,” he said, with his best grin. “Quite the mouthful. How about I call you Dez?”