Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Lying on the floor of the tunnel, apparently torn apart, was the remains of some kind of machine. Multi-limbed, with appendages that resembled tools, it reminded her of some kind of giant spider.

  Kali took a wide berth around it, just in case, and proceeded along the tunnel.

  With all of her concentration focused on detecting traps she felt sure should be there, she found herself suddenly caught off guard, her progress impeded not by any trap but an unexpected wave of dizziness and disorientation that threw her off balance and sent her staggering.

  “Whoa,” Kali muttered.

  Her head thumped, the passage seemed to spin about her, and she felt suddenly very hot with a wash of tingling saliva in her mouth, and a wave of nausea. Palms pressed against the passage wall, Kali swallowed and shook her head, feeling it buzz as she did and bringing a sudden stabbing pain behind the eyes. What the pits was going on? She suddenly felt as if she had the hangover from the hells. The previous evening had been a little heavy, even for her, but it felt all wrong. There was a throbbing heaviness of the head there, for sure, and an acid biliousness in her gut, but she knew what a hangover felt like and this wasn’t it.

  There was only one other conclusion. Something about – something in – this place was messing with her insides.

  The sensation passed as she moved a few feet further on, and returned once more as she drew nearer to the end of the passage, before inexplicably disappearing again. Thrown, Kali continued, experiencing a few minutes of normality, before, abruptly, the debilitating sensation hit her once more. And if anything, it was worse than before. The resurgent feeling slapped her like a wave and, never mind her stomach, she felt as if her brain itself was sloshing about in her head. This time Kali buckled and actually did throw up and for a few seconds remained on her hands and knees, trailing spittle and groaning. She didn’t want to get up but she knew she had to, that the sensations were connected to particular spots in the passageway and, perhaps by extension, in the whole place. Unless she wanted to suffer an ignominious death by a thousand heaves, she had to find a safe spot, and quickly.

  Kali picked herself up, her vision wavering and blurring, and, her brain feeling like one of Slowhand’s balloon animals, weaved like a drunk towards the end of the passageway. The current section seemed to have no safe spot whatsoever. She was dimly aware of passing another couple of the wrecked, spidery machines – in fact, almost tripping over one of them in her reduced state – and tried to think more about what function they might serve but found her concentration slipping away from her, unable to focus on anything but placing one foot in front of the other.

  As bad as she felt, however, she could not help but react to what she saw as she reached the end of the passageway – even if for a second she thought it might be some vision induced by her delirium. Once more, Kali fell to her knees, not due to the disorientating effects of the place but because she was so staggered by the chamber she found herself in.

  No, chamber was not a word that did this place justice. Spectacular as it had been, chamber was a word that described the lower level of Quinking’s Depths, but this was...

  Kali was kneeling on a platform overlooking a vast dwarven machine room, its metal-ribbed heights soaring as high above her as they plunged into the depths below. It was a vertiginous, spherical world of a place that made her feel as if she had stepped into the very core of Twilight itself. Great, irregularly-shaped metal objects rose and fell in the centre of the massive sphere, other smaller devices hovering around them like the satellites of metal moons. Other masses simply hung in the air, rotating slowly, while around the edge of the sphere, along its equator, a massive band of metal spun constantly, alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise, blurred by its speed – some kind of accelerator. And working on and around all of it – skittering on, about and around the devices – were spidery machines like the ones she had seen wrecked in the tunnel.

  Kali couldn’t take it all in, let alone make any sense of it, especially in the state she was in, and she crouch-walked along the platform until she found the blessed relief of a safe spot. Here, she felt able to crawl forward and peer down over the lip of the platform.

  The machine room went far deeper than she had envisaged, burrowing down into the natural, rocky depths, so that the whole place was the shape of an upturned teardrop. Rising from that rocky depth was the reason ‘the hub’ had been built here, a narrow and tapering pinnacle of rock that disappeared into the confusion above, forming the centre around which they turned. The rock seemed, somehow, to be exerting an influence on the objects, keeping them afloat and in motion, and even from where she studied it Kali could feel the force it was emanating, as if she were leaning into a strong wind. She realised suddenly what it was she was dealing with here. The pinnacle of rock was an unimaginably massive lodestone – a giant, natural magnet – and its satellites had to be magnets, too, repelling and attracting each other in a geological dance choreographed by unbelievably complex forces. By the gods, they said the dwarves were masters of the very rocks themselves but this... this was incredible. It was magnetism on a massive scale, a peninsula-wide field controlling the Engines of Apocalypse.

  Kali shook her head, another wave of dizziness hitting her, and, as she did, she caught a glimpse between the gaps in the revolving magnets of something else – something perched on top of the lodestone secured by bent struts. Some kind of platform, with what appeared to be a control panel on it. There was something else on the platform, too, and Kali felt a knot of dread in her chest as, through increasingly wavering vision, she made out four of Bastian Redigor’s soul-stripped, at their feet another wrecked spider. They had clearly been despatched to activate the Engines, and as far as she could see it would be impossible to access the controls without them detecting her presence.

  But wait. There was something not right about them. The soul-stripped were less than animate when not under the direct control of the Pale Lord but these four seemed to be not so much standing at the panel as slumped there. But that didn’t make sense. Wouldn’t Redigor would have kept them alive to ensure the continued operation of the Engines, or at the very least to stop anyone coming along to turn them off? What, then, was going on?

  Kali swallowed as the brief glimpses of the soul-stripped the revolving magnets permitted her revealed more about their state. The soul-stripped were not moving because they could not move. Each of them was quite, quite dead, rivulets of blood congealed beneath their mouths, ears and nostrils. Where their eyes had been were simply empty sockets still slowly oozing gore. It was as if some external influence had taken hold of their heads and squeezed until they popped.

  Kali raised her fingertips to her own nostrils, and they came away red and wet. The dwarves had established no defences here because no defences were needed. The spider machines had been built to maintain the hub once it was running because the dwarves knew the overwhelming magnetic forces at play would prove deadly to any living thing, including themselves. While Redigor’s puppets were no longer strictly alive, their bodies were still flesh and blood, subject to the same physical vulnerabilities as anyone.

  Kali wondered if Bastian Redigor had felt the agonising pain that must have accompanied the soul-stripped’s deaths. And she wondered, more resilient than most or not, how long it would be before she started to feel her own.

  She had to reach the control panel.

  Get the job done and get out of there fast.

  Kali stood and found herself staggering, forced to steady herself on a nearby strut. Oh, that was just great. Under normal circumstances getting the job done might have involved a couple of daring leaps across the magnets and then onto the control platform, but in her current condition there was no chance of that. She had to find an alternative route.

  Kali studied the chamber and its central platform. Once upon a time it had to have had some kind of access walkway but that had clearly been removed once the structure was finished, meaning there was no direct way
to it. The pattern in which the magnets orbited it, however, did present one or two moments when protrusions of the rotating stones almost touched the platform. If she could get onto one she should be able to make the jump across. There was no way onto them from this side of the chamber, but on the other side one of the objects that passed near the platform also passed near the edge of the chamber, and that distance, too, looked jumpable. It sounded easy enough – A to B to C – but the only problem was that getting to B would involve having to hitch a ride on the accelerator. The very, very, very fast accelerator.

  Kali looked down. There was some kind of access hatch beneath her feet and she bent and flipped it open, staggering back as a wave of velocity seemed to slam through the gap. The accelerator lay directly under the hatch, as she’d hoped, but there was no way she could drop onto it while it was in motion. Kali swallowed, watching it ram first one way and then the other, each transition marked with an almighty clang. Gods, it was fast – the moment in which it paused to change directions fleeting – and her timing would have to be perfect. She waited while it stopped once, twice, and on the third time dropped without hesitation, flattening herself and grabbing hold as tightly as she could before it started again.

  Thankfully, the accelerator was layered with tiny ridges and these afforded Kali a better grip than she would otherwise have had. Even so when, a heartbeat later, the accelerator punched back into life, she was almost ripped from its surface like a leaf. Kali skidded backwards, grabbing at the ridges to slow herself, and heard herself screaming, partly in exhilaration, partly in shock. She felt her teeth bared, her cheeks flapping and the flesh of her face rippling against her skull as she was carried around the perimeter of the chamber at unimaginable speed, the room blurring. The ride was over almost in an instant, however, and Kali screamed again as she found herself flipped heels over head, her grip snatched away, skidding helplessly forward on her back. She had only a second to react and she clamped her fingers onto the ridges and, with a grunt, flipped herself over, grabbing them once again.

  The accelerator punched itself in the opposite direction once more, and now Kali found herself travelling backwards, her bodysuit almost torn from her body. She suddenly hadn’t a clue where in the chamber she was and, for a moment, nearly panicked. Then her eyes fixed on the central control platform, the only constant in an ever changing blur, and she kept her gaze trained on it, marking its position and the magnets around it each time the accelerator stopped. At least she was no longer being thrown, having splayed herself over the accelerator like a human limpet.

  Kali had to endure another five of the sudden punches while she waited for the floating magnet to rotate into a position where she would be able to reach it. It was hellishly slow and, by the time it finally did come round, she felt as if she’d been locked in a stable with a rampaging bamfcat. She simply wanted to lie down and die. This was hardly the spot to do so, however. If she relaxed, even for a second, her only memorial would be a Kali Hooper shaped hole in the chamber wall which no living thing would ever see.

  Kali rode the accelerator for what was hopefully the last time, slowly and very, very carefully lifting herself into a crouching position. With even her hair whipping at her, she was almost torn free before the accelerator even stopped – and in that position certainly would be when it did stop – but her plan was to make the leap between accelerator and magnet in the split second before it did, using the speed and angle to propel herself to the target. Despite her calculations, this was going to be a leap of faith and the last thing she needed was the sudden, dizzying pounding in her head. Kali didn’t even have the strength to curse, and certainly not the strength to hold on any longer, so she simply allowed herself to be thrown into the air.

  Impact with the magnet was, of course, potentially as lethal as impacting with the chamber wall, but somewhere within her throbbing world of pain Kali calculated just how much she needed to adjust her trajectory to lift herself above the magnet. It seemed to have worked because she wasn’t staring at her own backside splattering the surface of her destination. She quickly scrabbled beneath her for the surface – all she was capable of doing, really – almost broke her fingers as they touched, and then grabbed. She was once again thrown head over heels, slamming hard onto her back, but roared with determination and clung on despite her arms being wrenched so hard she thought for a moment they’d been ripped off. Kali lay stunned for a second as the magnet rotated beneath her, her eyes beginning to bulge slightly, and groaned loudly.

  Something tickled her feet. She looked up to see one of the spider machines poised over her legs, ready to sweep down with a blade that would have amputated them. She was so thoroughly pitsed off that she just booted the maintenance machine off the magnet, sending it clattering into the abyss below.

  More weary than she had ever felt, Kali picked herself up, waited for the slow rotation of the magnet to bring it into alignment with her destination and leaped.

  She landed, at last, on the control platform and found herself among the collapsed remains of the soul-stripped who had been deployed there. She tried not to pay too much attention to them, to wonder who they might have been. She tipped their stiffened forms over the edge of the platform to tumble silently after the insect machine. Then she turned her attention to the control panel itself.

  Oh hells.

  Kali had lost count of the number of Old Race cryptograms, riddles, puzzles and traps she had been forced to decipher or solve in her time, but this one took the biscuit.

  The panel was etched with a fine and impossibly intricate pattern of lines that glowed slightly and seemed to move, an optical illusion that didn’t help her dizziness at all. The pattern was made up of circles, ellipses, ovals, plumes, radial spreads and whorls, all in various sizes and all overlapping. There were no other kinds of control mechanisms, buttons, levers or otherwise, and Kali felt her heart sink, wondering why for once, just farking once, the Old Races couldn’t have designed something with a simple on/off switch.

  Kali gazed at the panel woozily, and for a second thought she was about to make the task of deciphering the panel even more problematic by splattering thwack and kebab all over it. She swallowed the impulse down, however, and tried to ignore the pounding in her head. Each of the curving lines had to represent the line of a magnetic field, surely, so was it possible that somewhere in the pattern were also representations of what they affected? Working on that theory, she gradually began to discern three shapes that seemed static within the shifting of the etching, and guessed that these could be what she was looking for – the Engines themselves. The problem was that while the Faith had pinpointed the real locations of the Engines, their positions here, forming the three points of a triangle, seemed only symbolic, not relative to the sites they physically occupied. She was missing something, clearly – some term of reference that could relate how the magnetic fields interacted with the Engines in the real world – and without it she had no idea how they could be manipulated.

  Suddenly, however, a thought struck her. Or rather, an image. She once again saw the map she had discovered in Redigor’s tower – the one she had at first thought represented battle manoeuvres and had subsequently dismissed – and realised that it could be, after all, a vital piece of the jigsaw. If it wasn’t battle manoeuvres it was illustrating, what if it were magnetic fields?

  Kali once again shoved aside the pain in her head to concentrate hard, struggling to summon what she remembered of the map, its lines, and where they were positioned in relation to the coastline of the peninsula. She kept the image in her head and stared down at the control panel, trying to match up the slashes and curves. It seemed next to impossible, but she realised that all she really had to do was find the first. And there it was, a great sweeping line that ran from Scholten and across the Anclas Territories to grasp Miramas in its encompassing curve. Another ran across it, roughly paralleling the Territories themselves and was bisected by a third in the region of Andon. More of
Redigor’s smaller scrawls then became discernible, but they weren’t really necessary. With their main counterparts identified, Kali was able to work out where on the control panel the coastlines of the peninsula lay, and with that knowledge the overall pattern laid out before her began to make a lot more sense. It really was quite ingenious the way every field of magnetic force affected every other across the whole landscape. What the dwarves might have accomplished had they survived could have been staggering. Now all Kali had to work out was how to ruin their achievement of a lifetime. To throw, as it were, a spanner in the works.

  The problem was that there were still no visible controls and yet, clearly, the lines on the panel had to have been set somehow.

  Experimentally, Kali moved her hand across the surface and nothing happened. She tried once more and still nothing. Then she looked up and realised that by looking at the control panel for changes to its settings she had been looking in the wrong place. Her gaze fixed ahead of her, she moved her hand experimentally once more, this time in a circle, and smiled as one of the magnets across the chamber rotated as it did, at exactly the same speed and for the same duration. She was onto something. Now all she had to do was work out how to get that magnet to interact with the others, from there determine how exactly they influenced the magnetic forces on the surface, and from there to determine a way to use them to disable the Engines.

  For the first time in her life Kali began to regret dropping the moroddin lessons that Pete Two-Ties had once tried to thrust upon her, because the more she experimented with the controls the more she realised it was like playing some complex musical instrument. Still, she had to try.

  Kali began to move her hands in a more relaxed manner, remembering Pete’s words before she had aborted his teachings to feel the instrument in her hands, to let it be the guide, and as she did she found that she was gradually moving all of the magnets in the chamber at once, and not only that but managing to slow and speed up the accelerator as well. The whole process gave her an overwhelming feeling of power. If she weren’t feeling so much like death, she might even have begun to enjoy herself.