Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  “What, you think we’d let you do this alone?” He shouted as Kali ducked to let the ladders pass.

  Kali watched their progress. Gabriella’s hands blurred, the Deathclaws slicing constantly, the Enlightened One spinning and leaping between the two ladders in a dance that ensured not a single one of the tapers got near her or Slowhand. She and the archer cut a swathe through the mass, the black strands falling in their hundreds. The whole thing lasted no more than thirty seconds and, the tapers briefly repulsed, Gabriella leapt from the ladders and Slowhand released them.

  “What are you waiting for?” She shouted to Kali. “Move!”

  Kali didn’t need telling twice. She ran for the stairway but, even as she did, more tapers lashed in from beyond the shelves, wrapping themselves around the lower risers, preventing her mounting them. This time Slowhand came to the fore.

  “Hooper!” He shouted, and two of his arrows whizzed over Kali’s head to embed themselves solidly in the wall. She leapt onto the first Slowhand had fired as another arrow struck the wall above her, feeling it snap under her but giving her enough upward momentum to carry her to the second, and then the third. Kali climbed Slowhand’s makeshift staircase above the level of the tapers as he continued shooting, and threw herself onto the stairway beyond their reach. Her feet clattered on metal as she ascended, and the tapers raced after her, but Kali tumbled and leaped, leaving them behind as she negotiated the complicated structure. At last she reached the cage containing the scrolls, booted off the padlock and threw herself inside, slamming the cage closed behind her. The tapers swarmed about and rattled the metal enclosure but the mesh was too fine for them to penetrate. Kali let out a relieved breath.

  Her relief was short-lived.

  It was all right for DeZantez to say she could use one of the Dellendorf scrolls to blitz the tapers but, dammit, which one? There were hundreds stacked before her and, as far as she knew, the one she chose might make things worse, not better. It seemed, though, that whichever curators had been assigned to investigate these mysterious scrolls were possessed of frustrated egos and somewhat fanciful imaginations, and Kali found a clue to what she wanted in their attached notations. Quite clearly named after the curators themselves, the scrolls glorified in such names as Hamish’s Wandering Eye, Charles’s Dream of Domination and Gleeson’s Worrisome Whiff, and one which sounded as if it might be up to the job – Strombolt’s Devastator. Yes, that sounded pretty unequivocal. Now, how was it Gabriella had demonstrated it should be used?

  Kali took a breath and stood in the centre of the cage, sweeping her palm across the scroll she held. As she did, the script upon it – a strange collection of symbols unknown even to her – parted company with the parchment and flew out through the mesh of the cage. Nothing happened for a second, and then the floating symbols raced together and collided, forming a dense, pulsating cloud above the centre of the vast library. The air grew immensely heavy, the light dulled, and a charge in the atmosphere made Kali’s hair stand on end. The last thing she thought as she wrapped her arms about her head was how the curator had pleaded with her not to damage his books.

  The Hall of Proscribed Knowledge, all of it, detonated with an explosion so powerful that its walls buckled momentarily outwards, prompting screams and cries of alarm from outside. The stained glass windows lining its upper storey disintegrated, shards falling as a rainbow rain. The chandeliers were propelled upwards, bouncing off the ceiling and dropping broken metal and molten wax before crashing to the floor below. The explosion finished the job the tapers and Kali had started, smashing each and every piece of furniture – tables, chairs and bookshelves – against the walls, leaving them as a shattered tide washed against the hall’s perimeter. For quite some time afterwards countless cream and white leaves – all that remained of the books that had crammed the shelves – fluttered to the floor. If there was any saving grace to what Kali had just unleashed, it was that the tapers had flopped to the floor, dormant or dead.

  “Oops,” Kali said as she picked herself up from the floor of the cage. She coughed and picked splinters from her hair. From far below she heard other coughs and looked down to see Slowhand and Gabriella emerging, battered and bruised but otherwise unharmed, from behind a heavy shelf that had miraculously landed at an angle over them. Gabriella backed cautiously away from Slowhand, looking puzzled and disturbed as to how the explosion, which left her relatively unscathed, could have blown him so neatly out of his clothes. Kali worked her way slowly down towards the pair.

  “Well, that seemed to work,” Gabriella DeZantez said.

  “You know something?” Slowhand added, seemingly uncaring that he was naked, “I’m beginning to think we might make a pretty good team.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SLOWHAND HAD TO hand it to the Final Filth – for a bunch of God-Botherers, they did military mobilisation rather well. Preparations for their response to the Pale Lord’s threat were already well under way at dawn the next day, the sublevel a hive of activity as engineers and support workers prepared and supplied funicular trains while the men and women who would ride them gathered in ranks, waiting to board. The sides of the railway tunnels were packed with swordsmen, axemen, archers and lancers, many of them young and, considering what it was they were being sent to face, understandably nervous. Steadfast, if no less grim, were the hardened warriors draped in the livery of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, and mages – lots and lots of mages. Quartermasters and Enlightened Ones walked among them all, the former inspecting weapons while the latter blessed their bearers for the trials ahead.

  Impressive as it all was, Slowhand frowned. The war council had convened while he, Hooper and DeZantez had been occupied in the library and had informed them of their decision when they had emerged. Despite Hooper’s doubts about the Pale Lord’s intentions – reinforced during their researches – the Faith remained committed to their belief that he planned a soul-stripped invasion. The plan was to establish a cordon along the length of the Sardenne after the last of the Pale Lord’s strange army had filed in. The cordon was to be a defensive one – they at least had the sense to realise offensive strategies would be suicide while the Engines were active – and would only engage in combat if the Pale Lord made a move. Once the Engines were shut down and magic restored, however, they planned to advance on the soul-stripped – to go in, as it were, with all hands blazing. Of course, the Faith alone did not have the numbers for such a massive endeavour, which was why some of the trains were to remain empty for now. The Faith had arranged not only to second thousands of troops from the Vossian army, who would board at Faith ‘missions’ en route, but to enlist aid from the Pontaine militia too. Considering the attacks that had been occurring in their half of the world, Slowhand had no doubt they would agree.

  Hence the frown. The Faith was, tactically, putting all the peninsula’s eggs in one basket, an approach he had never been particularly fond of, and he could only hope the basket wasn’t dropped somewhere along the way.

  Slowhand moved through the frantic activity towards what would be his train. The fate of the Anointed Lord not forgotten in all of this, it had been decided that he, Freel, DeZantez and, of all people, Fitch – along with Hooper, when she returned from what she had to do – would not be part of the cordon but instead form a ‘strike team’ to infiltrate the Sardenne to try to find and rescue Makennon. As such, they were not to travel to the edges of the cordon, but to the main base camp – what had once been ‘the pulpit.’ To reach the pulpit meant they’d have to travel along the disused tunnel, where this nightmare had started and the thing that had taken Makennon had emerged.

  Slowhand yawned. For what he’d expected to be, thanks to Fitch, a quiet night in the Faith’s deep cells, things had turned out markedly different. Hooper’s announcement that they were both temporarily seconded to the Filth had initially made him feel quite uncomfortable, and he had even felt slightly resentful that she had taken it upon herself to forge such an alliance on his beh
alf. Now, though, even though he’d slept little, spending what had been left of the night ‘conferring’ with Hooper and then fletching some special arrows for the rigours ahead, his discomfort had faded. As he moved towards his train he was actually beginning to find that the Filth’s resemblance to an army on the move had instilled in him some of the feeling of his old, military days. It wasn’t nostalgia exactly – he had seen and done too much for that, some still regretted – but there was a fondness for the sense of directed mass purpose that part of him still missed. Filth or not, it felt reassuring to be part of such a large force working together to a common aim, even if there were one or two tarnishes on the force’s collective armour.

  He could see tarnish number one ahead of him right now. The archer had hardly believed it when he’d finally been introduced to the man he’d be working with and, pulling the belt holding his special arrows taut across his chest, he nodded now to Jakub Freel. The enforcer nodded back noncommittally, the barest of acknowledgements and hardly the greeting of a comrade-in-arms. The atmosphere between the two of them had been neutral while Hooper had been around but distinctly cooler in her absence, each tolerating the other’s presence only because they had little choice in the matter. Considering the loss they had both endured, and the circumstances of it, they were hardly going to become bosom buddies were they? He would have to keep an eye on him.

  Tarnish number two was another matter. Standoffish in a different way and for reasons he was still struggling to understand, Gabriella DeZantez was perched on an upturned railway sleeper as he neared her, sharpening her twin blades on a stone and examining the results with a practiced, expert eye. A fresh surplice was bulked out with armour, gleaming beneath the cloth. She wore it utterly naturally, as comfortably as a second skin. Slowhand had come across a number of the Swords of Dawn in his travels – had even, on occasion, had cause to avoid them – but he could remember few, if any, who had looked so born for the role. What had caused her to relinquish that role until now, he didn’t really know, but her reaction to him the previous night suggested that, one way or another, she had been badly hurt at some point in her past – the kind of hurt that could only have been caused by a man. Who that man had been, and where he was now, he couldn’t begin to guess.

  DeZantez glanced up at him as he approached, and Slowhand smiled rather than nodded. What the hells, he thought, it might be a fault of his but the woman had helped to save his life and he couldn’t help still wanting to break the ice.

  “I didn’t get chance to thank you,” he said. “For last night.”

  “You make it sound as if we lay together,” DeZantez said, her attention having returned to her blades.

  And he’d thought they’d worked together so well. “No, I didn’t mean –”

  “I know what you meant, Slowhand. It’s just a little irksome when you couch everything in innuendo.”

  He found himself staring at the top of her head, and swallowed. “That wasn’t what I –”

  “As for the fact I saw you naked last night, don’t make the mistake of thinking it has planted a latent seed of desire in me. It hasn’t.”

  Slowhand tried a grin. “Most girls remember the sight, at least.”

  “I’m not most girls. And most men I’ve seen naked were wetting themselves or worse as they pleaded for their lives within the gibbet, which tends to temper any erotic aspect, believe me.” She looked up. “Let’s get this clear. We work together, that’s all.”

  Slowhand’s grin faded. “Look, is there a problem here? I mean, more than just me?”

  “Your girlfriend is gone.”

  Ah, yes. That had been the other part of the plan. When it had been arranged for Hooper to leave to stop the Engines that morning, she was meant to have taken DeZantez along.

  “I know. She gave me a goodbye kiss.”

  “She was meant to be in my custody. That was the deal I made with the Overseer.”

  Slowhand shrugged. “Yeah, she told me. Thing is, it’s nothing personal. Hooper has a problem with authority. And she likes to work alone.”

  DeZantez made a particularly violent sweep along her blades with the sharpening stone, making Slowhand wince. “She isn’t coming back.”

  “What? Of course she’s coming back!”

  “Then why did she sneak out of here before daybreak?”

  “Because she could.”

  “Not funny.”

  “Not meant to be. But she left you these.”

  DeZantez looked up. The weapons she had returned to Kali after the library were being proffered to her once again.

  “The Deathclaws?”

  “The Deathclaws. She thought you might make better use of them than she could.”

  “But they must be priceless.”

  “Oh, they are. She asked me to ask you to consider them as bail. If she doesn’t come back. To fix a church roof or something...”

  DeZantez hesitated, then said in a resigned tone, “The City Watch reported her heading south-east, not due east towards the Plain of Storms. What’s she up to?”

  “Said something about having to make a house-call first. Don’t ask me why because I’m always the last to know. It’s what she does.”

  “Slowhand,” DeZantez said after a second. “Do you trust her to get the job done?”

  “With my life.”

  “That might come to be the case.”

  “I can handle myself.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But I mean will she succeed, before the Pale Lord mobilises?”

  “She said she’ll rendezvous with us the day after tomorrow, at ‘the pulpit.’”

  “That doesn’t give her much time.”

  “She’ll make it. You might have noticed she has a rather unusual Horse.”

  DeZantez nodded then slid off the railway sleeper and sheathed her blades. She accepted the Deathclaws from Slowhand, attaching them to her belt.

  “Then I guess it’s time we got this show on the road,” she said, and pointed.

  Slowhand turned to see Jakub Freel striding along the tunnel past them, climbing onto the front carriage and waving back along the train’s length. It was a signal to the gathered soldiers, and all along the tunnel they picked up their gear and boarded the carriages.

  Slowhand stared at Jakub Freel. The enforcer was in command of this particular train and, as such, could have waved Slowhand aboard too. But he just stared as if he didn’t care whether Slowhand boarded at all. The archer shrugged and grabbed a rail on the side of the last car, using it to swing up onto the train’s roof where he had already decided he could serve the expedition best by riding shotbow. DeZantez mirrored his move, opting for the first car, as far away from him as she could get. It wasn’t – he hoped – personal. Whatever the darkness that had come for Katherine Makennon was, for all they knew, it could still lurk somewhere in the tunnel ahead, and they would all need to be on the alert.

  The train lurched beneath him and was off. There was a long journey ahead and Slowhand settled himself down into a cross-legged position, watching the curved, moss-covered ceiling of the tunnel roll by. It grew monotonous over the hours, the train seemingly limited by its funicular cable to trundle along at only a few leagues an hour.

  Despite the danger of their situation, Slowhand found the rhythmic clacking of the train soporific and, tired from his almost sleepless night and lulled by the soft, warm breeze created by the train’s passage, he began to nod off. Dimly aware that they were passing beneath the Anclas Territories right now and would, in an hour or so, be under the Pontaine plains, he found himself traversing them overland rather than underground.

  He was flying above flowery, rolling fields, and in each field beneath him naked women danced from behind giant blooms to frolic and wave at him as he passed. Slowhand smiled, his clothes vanishing like thinning clouds, and saw he was over Miramas and Gargas, now. Their streets were devoid of naked women, but every bedroom window was flung wide, a happy, expectant trilling coming from wit
hin. Slowhand swooped down, but before he could pass through any of the colourful curtains that fluttered invitingly in the breeze, he became aware of something else – something beyond the towns – a great, dark mass on the distant horizon that swept to the east and to the west as far as the eye could see. It seemed that whatever worries were playing at the back of his mind wanted in – there was no escaping the Sardenne Forest and its appearance halted his reverie like a slap in the face. Literally.

  Ow.

  “Wake up.” Gabriella DeZantez said. “We’ve got trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “The tunnel roof,” the Enlightened One said. “Looks like the Pale Lord left a few of his friends behind.”

  Slowhand followed her gaze forward and upward and swallowed. A few? He thought.

  Where the front of the train was nosing into darkness, the gently curving rock that they had been passing beneath seemed rougher somehow, and the reason could be made out as they drew close. Perhaps a hundred or more of the Pale Lord’s soul-stripped were clinging to the roof of the tunnel like insects – blackened by tunnel grime, their whitened eyes their only distinguishable feature.

  “Oh, crap,” he said.

  “My thoughts exactly.” DeZantez responded.

  Both she and Slowhand raced along the carriage roofs, shouting warnings to those within. There was little the occupants could do to escape the impending threat, however, and little room to use any of their weapons effectively. Their only real recourse was to steel themselves as best they could and raise shields at each car’s entrance. Consequently, of course, any proactive defence of the train was left to those who rode on its roof, and Slowhand was actually quite pleased to see Jakub Freel climbing up from the driver’s cab as the first of the soul-stripped dropped from the dark.

  “Here we go,” DeZantez said. Her jaw was set and her weapons drawn – the claws rather than her blades, Slowhand noted, if only because they were the only effective weapon against their current foes.