Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Another question. With so much power at his disposal, why had Bastian Redigor allowed himself to be banished? From what she had seen here, he could have wiped the floor with any mage on Twilight, and certainly the berobed fops and jesters who made up Lord Fayence’s court wouldn’t have stood a chance in the hells against him, and he could have taken the town any time he wanted. So why? Why move from what was clearly his home, as well as a well-equipped base, to the unforgiving wilds of the Sardenne? And just why did he already have a map showing the Sardenne and Bellagon’s Rip?

  Kali studied the map again. If she expected to see any previously unseen feature she was soon disappointed, but her eyes were drawn once more to Redigor’s flowing script. Bellagon’s Rip. It was written there as plain as day and yet there was something not quite right about it. She suddenly realised that her mind had been filling in the gaps and she was reading what she expected to read, because that was the name by which that area of the forest had always been known. But what if it was misnamed? What if some more modern cartographer had chanced upon some previously scrawled notation of Redigor’s on some other map, and had misinterpreted it as she was doing now? Maybe this was a matter of perception rather than interpretation, because although Redigor had used human script on everything she had so far read there was still an elvish flourish to his hand that potentially gave a whole new meaning to what was written. Bearing that in mind, Kali reread the name, seeing each letter on its own rather than as a component part of a word, and gradually they began to flow together. That was it. It wasn’t a name at all but an elven phrase. Not Bellagon’s Rip but Bel’A’Gon’Shri. She concentrated hard, eyes closed, trying to pull together all the elvish she knew to make sense of the phrase, and her eyes snapped open in alarm.

  Bel’A’Gon’Shri.

  Here They Lie, Still.

  Gabriella DeZantez hadn’t been far wrong in her theory about its meaning. But the phrase wasn’t referring to the Engines and it wasn’t suggesting that anything was lying idle. It was suggesting that ‘they’ were lying where they’d lain for a long time and were waiting. And Kali suspected she knew who.

  The charts, the maps, the diagrams, the calculations, they suddenly all made sense. Rather in the manner of an Eye of the Lord, she imagined herself descending from the sky into the map, the image no longer two-dimensional but a living canopy of trees through which she swept down, down, down. And waiting for her beneath was a structure of gothic horror overgrown with the vegetation of thousands of years, a structure that she knew was sitting deep in the Sardenne.

  An elven necropolis.

  An Ur’Raney necropolis.

  Oh gods.

  The Faith, as she’d suspected, and as farking usual, had got it all wrong. There was going to be an invasion, all right, but not in the way they thought. She had to shut down the Engines of the Apocalypse and then get to the Faith, let them know what was really going on.

  She ran for the stairwell, trying to ignore the staring eyes of Bastian Redigor, and heard a click beneath her feet. She looked down.

  Trap, she thought. Dammit.

  In her eagerness to leave she’d triggered something she’d missed, and as a result could already sense that something was coming. Something from outside.

  Kali raced to a window, seeing the same wonderland as earlier. Now, thin, grey shapes were hurtling towards the tower through the sky. Whatever they were, they had the same aura about them as the death coach that had taken Makennon, as the tapers in the library, and had again to be born of the black threads. As Kali looked on in horror, the shapes resolved themselves into the figures of hags, skeletal things clad in translucent shrouds. Their talons were grotesquely overgrown, blurred streaks of things that seemed to stretch from this world into another.

  Kali swallowed, knowing now what had caused Abra to see stains upon the walls, smears across windows and splatters beneath his feet, and she stumbled back from the window as the hags shrieked into the tower. They seemed, though, to have no interest in her, tearing around the circular chamber like a dark whirlpool. They moved faster and faster, Kali ducking under Redigor’s desk, trying to work out what the hells was going on as a loud tearing sound rose over the creatures’ shrieking. Kali looked out and saw flashes of sky. The hags’ talons were slicing through the tower, not as the Deathclaws might slice through stone but seemingly through its very existence. Redigor had conjured the tower for his secret researches but must have booby-trapped it so that, if discovered, it would be obliterated.

  The whole place was coming apart around her. Being erased.

  Kali lurched from under desk, the flight of the hags – nothing more than blurs, now – whipping at her bodysuit and hair. She stared in horror as she saw great streaks of sky visible where, moments before, there had been a roof. Her heart began to pound as, around and beneath her, the walls and floor began to disappear slice by slice.

  Kali dashed for the stairwell, hoping she would be able to outrun Redigor’s trap, but then staggered back as the hags’ talons eradicated the entrance to the stairs.

  Oh, fark, that was not good. Not good at all.

  Kali looked around the room in desperation, searching for an alternative means of escape, but the only one that presented itself was to jump. Despite the fact that was ancient sky out there – thousands of years before her time – it was better than the alternative of staying where she was and being sliced from reality. Hells, if by some miracle she survived the jump, she could leave the Faith a note and experience the wonders of the Old Races first hand.

  She wasn’t completely suicidal, though, and needed something to slow her fall. The rope in her backpack would be nowhere near long enough. There was only one other thing that she could see might work, even if it was one hells of a gamble. Moving almost in a blur herself, Kali spun around the remains of the chamber, gathering its thick and sticky coating of cobwebs about her body in layer after layer, then, when she felt she had gathered enough, turned to face the remains of one of the windows, took one deep breath and ran and leapt. The coating of cobweb wrapped about her body pulled masses of the stuff after her, almost stripping the tower clean.

  Kali plummeted. And marvelled. As she fell, she travelled not only downward, but forward through the ages. In a flash, the elven city crumbled and disappeared, and clouds scudded across wasteland. The course of the river changed, twisting like a striking snake. Another city arose, then fell, and one after that, though none were yet Fayence. Faster and faster the images came until Kali could no longer keep up, each year, maybe even each century, a flash in the mind, gone before she could register anything she saw. The feeling was incredible, marred only by her sadness at falling through all she had ever wanted to know. Then, building by small building, Fayence appeared below.

  Kali was keenly aware that the next thing that might flash through her mind could be the pavement. Though still distant, the ground was coming up fast and the cobweb wasn’t yet slowing her fall. Just as she started to worry that her plan wasn’t going to work, the thick layers wrapped about her jerked subtly and began to tear themselves away in ever increasing strips. That was it, cobweb’s end, and all she could hope for now was that her descent would be slowed enough to negotiate some kind of safe landing.

  What she hadn’t counted on was that, as the strips tore away, they twined about and adhered to each other until they had formed a kind of elasticated rope. The only thought that went through her mind as she reached the end of her drop and continued on was that jumping from great heights attached to something that, if it didn’t smash you into the ground, was going to snap you back into the air like a pea from a catapult, wasn’t a pastime she could ever see anyone choosing to do for fun.

  Unless she wanted to be on nodding terms with Kerberos, she needed an anchor.

  And there was one, still distant but coming up fast.

  “Abra!” She shouted.

  “Yes?” A puzzled voice responded from below.

  The fat man was waiting pa
tiently at Redigor’s front door, clutching an immense and, by now, stone-cold kebab. The vendor slowly rose before her, and, catching a glimpse of a pair of Hells Bellies’ socks while thanking the gods that the cobweb seemed to have stretched its furthest, Kali grabbed onto his belt. Momentarily they were face to face – albeit with her upside down – and Kali stared Abra in the eyes and smiled. “Never mind,” she said.

  The pair of them shot into the air where, to his credit, Abra remained stoically silent, as if this kind of thing happened every day. He managed a weak smile.

  The return flight reached its apex and they dropped again. Then rose. Then dropped. At last the cobweb seemed to recognise that enough was enough, and they ended up dangling a foot above the ground.

  As the remains of the cobweb began to tear themselves slowly apart, dropping them towards the pavement, Abra coughed.

  “Did you,” he asked slowly, and with a crack in his voice, “discover what you needed to know?”

  Kali stared back up at where the tower had been.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said after a second. “The Ur’Raney. He’s planning to bring them back.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  HEAD DOWN, KALI rode hard and fast, pushing Horse to his absolute limit. The bamfcat was, as usual, loyal and uncomplaining, though he did seem somewhat confused at being unable to do what he normally would and shorten the journey. But he could not jump; for the last few leagues they had been riding across the Plain of Storms.

  It was one of the peculiar features of the area. Surrounded by the temperate farmlands of mid Pontaine, the almost perfectly circular valley was a meteorological anomaly, prone to a stultifying heaviness of air and battered by constant electrical storms. Those who lived on the periphery of the area said that sometimes the catastrophic conditions on the plain affected other weather it had no business affecting, pulling at the northern lights and bending them toward the ground, or even snatching a maelstrom from the Storm Wall, far away on the coast, for a few hours. If this were true – and Kali had seen enough of the raw potential of Old Races creations to believe it could be – it was likely that the energies of the control centre for the machines, what she had nicknamed ‘the hub,’ were responsible.

  In other words, she guessed she was in the right place.

  Nearing the centre of the plain, Kali slowed Horse to a stop and stared into the rain-lashed, thundering vista before her. She dismounted, took her squallcoat from her saddlebag and slipped it on, fastening it securely. From there on in, she led Horse by the reins.

  It was hard going, fighting the unnaturally heavy atmosphere and taking deep, grasping breaths as she went. Here and there, tornadoes whirled across the barren ground, threatening to pluck her up if she strayed too close. Not that it was much safer out of their path – where the whirlwinds didn’t manifest themselves, Kali found herself having to dodge sudden bolts of lightning that struck the ground about her, leaving small, smoking craters where they hit. One or two almost got her, but she soon learned to anticipate their arrival, the dense air further thickening a few seconds before each strike, as if someone were pressing down hard on her head. No pitsing wonder the area was so desolate, she thought. Other than a few scattered hardy plants, tanglevine and redweed among them, it was like walking through a bad dream. No one had ever tried to fully explore, let alone colonise the region, but why in the hells would they?

  Once again, she thought, to find the hub you’d have to know it was there.

  And suddenly, unexpectedly, it was there. A dark cave mouth loomed before her out of a dust storm. Not just a cave mouth, though: the eroded rock still retained the faint remains of carvings chiselled into it millennia earlier, shapes Kali recognised as dwarven. The most obvious clue to its provenance, though, was that the cave mouth itself was the shape of one of the Engines.

  Kali tethered Horse, moved to the mouth and paused. If this was indeed the entrance to the hub then surely it was once a prime target for the dwarves’ elven enemies, and as such she’d have expected it to be protected by the usual array of dwarven defences and traps. There was no evidence of anything, however, and Kali wondered if perhaps the traps, like the mouth itself, had been obliterated by the ravages of the plain. She bit her lip, deciding all she could do was proceed with caution.

  Kali entered the cave mouth, briefly disappointed. To be frank she had been expecting to find more than just a cave. But that was all she’d got. A plain tunnel sloped gently downwards, ending in a chamber devoid of features but for a large hole in the ground. Kali eased her way to its edge and peered down. While deep, it appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be simply that. A hole in the ground. Then Kali noticed that the floor of the cave leading towards it was scarred and grooved. Once upon a time heavy objects, and a good number of them, had been dragged towards that hole. She pictured teams of dwarves pulling their burdens on ropes and then –

  And then what? She wondered.

  Because unless she had been completely wrong about this being the hub and she had, in fact, stumbled across some dwarven landfill site, surely they hadn’t simply been dumped down there? She looked around. There was no sign of any haulage mechanisms with which they might have been lowered. As far as she could tell there was also no sign of any mechanism which might raise an elevator from far below. Frowning, Kali conducted a thorough search of the surrounding rock, but nothing. It did indeed appear as if she had come all this way to be stymied by a hole.

  Kali sat herself against the wall and made a flubbing sound. If she were going to make the rendezvous with DeZantez and the others, she did not have the advantage she normally might in such circumstances – to take as much time as she wished to ponder the problem. Frustrated, she plucked stones from the cave floor around her and began to lob them towards the hole. If she listened carefully, she might at least be able to determine how deep the farking thing was. It was then that she noticed two things – one, a thrumming from below that was barely audible over the lightning strikes outside and, two, the fact that the stones she had lobbed at the hole hadn’t fallen in.

  What the hells? Kali picked herself up and moved to its edge, leaning forward to grab one of the hovering stones from mid air. It seemed to contain metallic ore. As she leaned forward, she felt a resistance, placing her hand in a soft pillow, and stood back, her heart thumping. Did that mean what she thought it meant? That if she –?

  Kali stripped off her backpack and threw it out over the seemingly bottomless drop, raising her eyebrows as it, too, bounced about as if tossed by currents of air. But this was not air she was dealing with – she felt nothing on her flesh, on her face, in her hair – it seemed instead to be something that warped the air.

  Perhaps, even, the same force that kept the Engines of the Apocalypse aloft?

  Okay, what’s the worst that can happen? Kali thought. If I step over the breach I end up hovering there and have to claw my way back.

  But what if the only reason that the rocks and backpack were hovering was because they were lighter than she was? What if this resistance, whatever it was, allowed the gradual descent of something with more mass – the objects that had scored the floor of the cave, perhaps? What if the strange force warping the air acted as some kind of invisible elevator?

  Kali stepped forward, her foot wobbling slightly on the air, and then drew herself over the hole. She stuck her arms out straight like a wire walker and giggled as she floated. Then, very slowly she began to descend. Instinctively, Kali took a deep breath, but then smiled to herself. This wasn’t water she was dealing with, this was something else entirely, and it had so far proved to be harmless, so she saw no reason why she shouldn’t enjoy the ride.

  Down she went, slowly down. At long last, Kali felt solid rock beneath her feet once more.

  She stared at a solid rock wall. Disappointment threatened to overwhelm her once again. But then she turned around.

  Kali smiled. Hello, hub, she thought.

  Stretching away ahead of her, cut to the sam
e dimensions as the vertical shaft, was a tunnel running horizontally through the rock, disappearing into the distance. Kali took a step forward, shrugged away a moment of giddiness, and waited while her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the underground.

  The smooth, curving walls here were not bare rock, but lined with a softly-glowing metal, as was the floor, both inscribed over every inch of their surface with thousands upon thousands of delicate etchings. There were far too many of these etchings for Kali to be able to make sense of them as a whole, but they were undoubtedly dwarven in style and, what was more, of a kind that she had never come across before. The archetypal dwarven symbology was, of course, usually to do with war but Kali didn’t see a single battleaxe, anvil or roaring dwarven visage. Instead, the fine etchings were flowing, swirling patterns – millions of them, perhaps – that reminded her of mathematical or algebraic symbols, all interlocking and sweeping in every direction and along the curving walls, combining as a whole into a thing of beauty. But were they just decorative or did they serve another purpose? Kali placed her palm on one small area of the etchings and immediately snatched it away, her flesh jolted, tingling and numb. Well, that answered that. Whatever they were, they were more than just decorative.

  The answers lay ahead, they had to, and Kali began to walk the tunnel’s length. She moved with caution, her concerns about the lack of traps playing on her mind. Again, though, there was no sign at all of anything threatening. The one thing that made her slow in her tracks turned out not to be any kind of hazard at all.