Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  All he had was Suresight, but despite his trusted bow’s failure – through no fault of her own – to halt the soul-stripped previously, he raised her anyway. The arrows would do little damage, he knew, but damage wasn’t his intention. He let fly again and again, targeting the dropping soul-stripped half way between tunnel roof and train, aiming not for the vitals but for peripheries – shoulders, hips and thighs. Because the archer’s intention wasn’t to drop the soul-stripped as they landed, but to hit them before they did.

  One soul-stripped, two, four and then ten were hit in mid air by his arrows, solid impacts knocking them sideways in their descent, away from the train. The soul-stripped spun helplessly, silently down to the tunnel floor on either side, hitting the sides of the tracks with a crunch of muscle and bone, twitching rapidly where they lay.

  Slowhand couldn’t get them all, of course, and inevitably many landed on the roof. Thankfully, most of those the archer missed were immediately intercepted by DeZantez and Freel in a blur of claws and chain. The Deathclaws were, as expected, singularly effective in despatching the cadaverous forms, slicing and amputating them at every joint, but Freel suffered the same handicap as he. But his whip lashed out to wrap around ankles and wrists, flipping the soul-stripped from the train.

  But even all three of them couldn’t handle everything, and those of the soul-stripped who escaped their triple defence began swinging themselves down into the cars below.

  Orders were barked and what weapons could be used came into play, but the relentless and uncaring manner in which the Pale Lord’s puppets threw themselves at their targets, scrabbling ferally, took its toll. Slowhand stared over the edge of the train at the warriors, young and old, being tossed to the tunnel floor, where he witnessed the true horror of the soul-stripped, the means by which the Pale Lord was building his pillar of souls. Each soldier who fell was instantly seized upon, drawn up into a lover’s embrace as a cold mouth was pressed to theirs. They quickly surrendered to the Pale Lord’s puppets, their eyes rolling back in their heads, their skin paling to a waxy sheen. For a few moments they lay still, before rising up to join their new brethren.

  “They just keep coming,” DeZantez said, suddenly next to him. The claws she wielded were ribboned with flesh. “How many more are there?”

  “Let’s find out,” Slowhand said.

  It had been his intention to save the special arrows he had adapted for use in the Sardenne but, of course, things rarely turned out as intended. He plucked one of his naphtha dipped creations from his belt and struck it against the flashpad he wore as a ring, igniting the arrow as it launched. The billowing projectile arced through the tunnel and illuminated the way ahead.

  Freel was silhouetted in the heart of the fire, his squall-coated figure striding up the train, whip lashing left and right like something out of the hells. But beyond him were the hells themselves.

  It hadn’t been a one-off gauntlet they’d been passing through. Some few hundred yards ahead, there was another mass of them. Only this time the dark shapes didn’t just cover the tunnel roof but the tunnel’s sides, and thickly blocked the tracks themselves. The soul-stripped were everywhere and they went on for ever.

  “Lord of All,” Gabriella breathed, “the tunnel may as well end here. We’ll never get through alive.”

  “We’ll get through,” Slowhand said.

  Setting his jaw manfully, he smiled at Gabriella and raced for the train driver’s cab, jumping in next to the man’s sweating, but so far untouched, form.

  “We need to use the train as a battering ram!” Slowhand shouted. “Can you crank it up to top speed?”

  The driver nodded and thrust a lever forward. Slowhand was hardly rocked off his feet. They had gained maybe a third more speed. At a push. If this was the train’s top speed, the only thing it was going to be capable of battering was a fish.

  “What? That’s it?”

  The driver nodded again. He flinched as a number of soul-stripped crashed onto the front of the train and ripped at the metal cage that protected the cab. Though two of them tore their arms away in the attempt, the cage thankfully remained intact. “It runs on cables,” he said through clenched teeth. “And the cables’ speed is regulated by controls at either end of the line.”

  Slowhand shot an arrow into the eye of a soul-stripped who had worked out the cab had a side door, and booted it away. “Then what the hells does it need a driver for?”

  “To flip the lever that moves the grip from the slow to fast cable!”

  “The grip?”

  “Under the train!” He stared at Slowhand as if the last thing he needed was an idiot. “The grip grips the cable and the cable pulls the train!”

  Slowhand just stood there, desperately considering his options. Going back to DeZantez and telling her he’d set his jaw for nothing wasn’t one of them.

  Grip, cable, cable, grip, he thought – come on, Slowhand, you’re an archer, and cables are just like thick bow strings, right? Is there anything you can do with them?

  “What happens if the grip slips off?” He asked.

  “The train stops.”

  “I mean, how do you put it back on?”

  “There’s an access panel under your feet.”

  Slowhand looked down, tore open the panel. The track below was hardly racing by but, this close up, it was a little unnerving. He fixed his attention on the cables instead – three of them, not two as he’d expected. “There’s a middle cable here that isn’t moving,” he shouted to the driver. “What does that do?”

  “It’s the torque cable,” the driver shouted back. “It regulates the tension in the other two.”

  “And if it severs?”

  “What?”

  “If it severs, what would happen then?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the other cables would snap and whiplash away.”

  “Like the one we’re attached to now?”

  “Yes but –” The driver paused. “Oh, no. No, no, no...”

  “Bingo,” Slowhand scrambled back up out of the cab. More soul-stripped had landed on the train’s roof in his absence and he simply didn’t have time for them. As Slowhand raced back towards the train’s rear he aimed Suresight as he moved, loosing naphtha arrows with such force that their flaming shafts simply punched any attacking soul-stripped into the air, off the train, and out of his way.

  He paused only once, grabbing one of the Deathclaws from a surprised DeZantez’s hand, before reaching the end of the train and launching himself into the air.

  Slowhand landed on the tracks behind, rolled, and swung the claw through the torque cable. It severed immediately and began to unravel, as did the one pulling the train. The archer grabbed onto its end, allowing the whiplashing cable to carry him into the air and back towards the train. It arced above the last carriage and he let go, crashing onto the roof, and immediately shouted a warning to DeZantez, Freel and all of those in the cars below.

  “Hold on tight!”

  Beneath him, the train, still gripped to the cable which was no longer restrained at one end, began to pick up speed,and Slowhand threw himself flat.

  The front of the train ploughed into the wall of soul-stripped, bucking slightly on its tracks as it did. As always, there were no screams of cries of protest from those it hit, but a series of sickening fleshy crunches and a rain of dismembered body parts. The rattling and clattering of the train’s wheels faded as the vehicle travelled not on bare metal but a thick layer of gore and blood. Slowhand cautiously raised his head and found himself staring into the blood-spattered face of Gabriella DeZantez. He offered her a hand up.

  “You okay?”

  “You know the personal motto of every Sword of Dawn. ‘I always rise again.’”

  Slowhand smirked. “I thought that was my motto.”

  DeZantez shook her head. “Quick thinking with the cable.”

  “I’m sure you would have thought of it yourself,” Slowhand replied.

  “Oh, I di
d. I just wanted to see how quick Slow was.”

  Slowhand nodded with a small smile, an acknowledgement that the prospect of their working together might not be as bad as it had seemed. He found himself staring up at Jakub Freel too, but the leather-clad man merely wiped a patch of gore from his cheek and slapped it to the train’s roof with some disgust.

  “It might not be over yet,” he said, with no hint of gratitude. “We need to check for stragglers, any of them that might still be on or near the train. I’ll check the front, DeZantez you get the sides, and Slowhand, you get the tracks to the rear.”

  Slowhand picked himself up, nodding as he wiped away gore. He made his way back down the cars and looked down. But other than the occasional piece of limb or bloody chunk of flesh being dragged along in their wake, there was nothing – the soul-stripped were gone.

  Slowhand bowed slightly, placing his palms on his thighs and breathing a sigh of relief, when a hard shove in the small of his back sent him flying into the air.

  He cried out in shock, twisting in mid air, and saw Freel standing on the lip of the last car. Slowhand fully expected to hit the tracks once more, but Freel’s whip lashed towards him, coiling about him and slamming him against the rear of the train. Slowhand hung, dazed, and saw Freel glaring down at him, his teeth bared.

  What the hells is this? Slowhand thought. First the bastard shoves me off the back of the train, and then he catches me, and now he leaves me dangling here?

  This was about Jenna, it had to be. Freel was playing mind games, for sure.

  The Faith enforcer stared down at him for what seemed an age, his face red, his eyes wide and wild, and then suddenly jerked the chain upward, bringing Slowhand with it. The archer clutched the lip of the car’s roof and pulled himself up, and Freel snapped the chain off him, turned and walked away.

  Slowhand stood, breathing hard and rubbing his wrists, staring after the man. His every instinct was to follow, to grab him and to sort the problems between them out right now, but somehow he didn’t have it in him.

  Instead, as the train sped inexorably towards the Sardenne he returned wearily to the cross-legged position he had adopted at the start of their journey, and once more his mind began to wander.

  This time, however, his imaginings were not of naked women, of the rolling plains of Pontaine, or even of the Sardenne. Instead, they were of his sister’s face, staring at him from the burning gondola of the Makennon. One word kept repeating itself, over and over in his mind. An order, delivered in his own, sure voice.

  “Fire!”

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT WAS SAID that a fistful of full golds could buy you anything in Fayence, but the bigger the fist the better the anything it bought. Not that any of the personal services of this town were in any way unsatisfactory. The local Lord, who maintained a fiscal and hands-on interest in them all, made sure of that. It was merely a matter of how long it would take to recover from the relaxations on offer, whether they were mental, physical, or both. Stimulation-wise, Fayence boasted it catered for all six senses, sometimes all at once, and it wasn’t for nothing that the many hotels in the town were known as convalesalons.

  Kali moved through a noisy crowd of the coming night’s – or possibly week’s – guests-to-be, many of whom, by the look of them, should have checked in some hours before. She was making her way along Fayence’s main thoroughfare – known to one and all as Sin Street – and the air was a fug of exotic perfumes, stimulating massage balms and dreamweed clouds, the odours brushing off on Kali in the jostling melee. Though she knew exactly where she was heading, she found it impossible to get there in a straight line, the sea of revellers carrying her first towards Maloof’s Erotivarium, thence the Palace of Pleasure and Pain and its patented ‘Sinulator’ by way of the Slither Baths and the Womb Chambers, the barkers in front of which deafeningly promised a sensory experience such that “you’ll wish you’d never been born!” Kali knew that the so called ‘Womb Chambers’ were, in fact, the extracted bladders of globe toads from the Turnitian marshes but if the owners weren’t going to tell the punters that little trade secret who was she to spoil their fun? You sure as hells had to admire the inventiveness of this place.

  Not that Kali was that familiar with Fayence’s attractions, she would be at pains to point out to anyone who asked – no, no, no, not at all. Slowhand, of course, had been badgering her to come here since they’d first become an item, but as that prospect was the equivalent of letting a very greedy little boy loose in a very large sweet factory, she had consistently denied him her company – and knowing she knew, he hadn’t dared come alone. She smiled, thinking how galled he’d be if he knew she were here now. Even if she currently had only a passing curiosity in the establishments of Sin Street and was actually heading towards one of the town’s more unusual attractions, a little more off the beaten track.

  That was the thing about Fayence. It hadn’t always been like this. For hundreds of years, in fact, the town had been the favoured home of those who studied the old Wheel of Power, and had once even been considered as a potential site for the Three Towers, the headquarters of the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige. That it had lost out to Andon in this respect had been an early blow for Fayence but one which had ultimately served it well. When their more conformist brethren had decamped to the north-west, the mages who subsequently came here – followed, in turn, by such complementary professionals as apothecaries, herbalists and suppliers of various arcane needs –shared a certain streak of independence, an individual approach to their studies that would have made it difficult for them to gain acceptance amongst their peers elsewhere.

  They had their limits, however, and while many of their experiments might have stretched these to breaking point there were areas of their craft that, by general agreement, were considered too dangerous for exploration and, therefore, forbidden. Creation magic was one. Necromancy another. Thus it was that when Bastian Redigor was discovered to be waving his wand around in such murky waters – the specifics of which had not survived the passage of time – the man was banished forthwith from Fayence, never to return. It was at this point that the town’s fortunes had begun to wane, not least because it was rumoured that with a wave of his hand upon his departure Redigor had left behind a legacy in the form of an incurable and agonising taint that quite literally consumed mages’ brains, reducing the skull to an empty shell within a day.

  Whether the rumour were true or not, one by one the mages died, and with them gone the livelihood of the apothecaries, herbalists and suppliers went too, and while a few remained to this day – albeit providing services for a clientele with more intimate requirements – Fayence was reduced to a little more than a ghost town.

  So it remained for a number of years until the present Lord of Fayence, Aristide, inherited his position, whereupon he reinvented the town to reflect his own predilections, a change of emphasis he knew would be lucrative bearing in mind the amount of coin he himself had spent elsewhere over the years.

  There was one area of the town Aristide did not change, however. Whether for fear of a return of the taint, or whether because the aura of the outcast who had become known as the Pale Lord still, after all this time, lingered there, it was left to rot, untouched, abandoned.

  It was where the mages had died. They called it the Ghost Quarter.

  Kali approached this forgotten part of town between the ignominious landmarks of a derelict comfort parlour called Whoopee Kushen’s, outside of which an out-of-date courtesan swatted flies, and a grimy street stand trading in spit-roasted mool and bottles of thwack that gloried in the name Abra-Kebab-Bar. It was doubtful if either enterprise was licenced by Lord Fayence, but they had attached themselves to the outer periphery of his salacious empire to engage in its spirit nonetheless. As Kali neared the latter, its proprietor – a huge, fat, greasy-bearded man three times the size of his stand who presumably was Abra – almost fell off his stool at the prospect of an actual customer. But his ear-
to-ear grin faded as Kali nodded, smiled and passed on by.

  “Girly, lady, madam, missus-woman,” he protested as she passed, “I assure you, there is nothing for you beyond my small but perfectly formed establishment.” He stroked his beard. “A little like yourself, if I may say...”

  Kali smiled. “You can forget the flattery, Abra. I’m not looking for food or drink.”

  Abra coughed, and actually looked embarrassed. “Ah, I see.”

  The man’s redness made Kali flush too. “No, no, not that either – not anything.” She resorted to her failsafe tactic when she found herself in an impasse situation. “Actually, I’m trying to save the world.”

  “The world?”

  “Umm. Think so, anyway. Not quite so sure about what’s going on this time.”

  “The world,” Abra said again and then, aghast, “My advice to you is forget the world, save yourself.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because if you are heading within, you must be heading for the Pale Lord’s house yes? There can be no other reason to go there. I say do not do so, because those who do, they do not come back.”

  “Other people have gone there?”

  Abra made a dismissive sound. “Oh, not often. The occasional mage or relic hunter, eager for a memento of our infamous son. Young, drunken couples with their underknicks already about their ankles, clearly acting upon a dare.” He sighed and shook his head. “I do not see any of them again, other than as a stain upon a wall, a smear across a window, a splatter beneath my feet.” Abra emphasised his point by suddenly squeezing a large dollop of kebab sauce onto the ground with a loud and flatulent plop, making Kali jump.

  “I see,” Kali said. Redigor had obviously trapped his old home the same way he’d trapped his books, which made her destination all the more interesting. “Thanks for the warning, Abra. I’ll watch my step.”