Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Slowhand looked up, swallowed, and shook his head slowly. The gesture might have seemed casual but there was pain in the archer’s expression.

  “Guess it’s time for Plan B, huh?” Slowhand said.

  “Plan B,” Kali said. “The three of us finish the job ourselves.”

  She stared up through the dense forest canopy, which, while it defeated most attempts by daylight to brighten the murk, could not fully obscure the brilliance of the pillar of souls as it lanced into the sky.

  “We’re close enough to the necropolis to make it without portals now,” Freel observed. “But we still have a journey ahead of us.”

  Slowhand stood and snuffed the remains of the brackan with his boot. “Then the sooner we get started...”

  They moved on into the forest, trying not to think of the dead they were leaving behind. For some hours they worked their way through the treacherous terrain, which grew still denser as they neared the necropolis. The vegetation was changing, from the vines and sub-tropical plants Kali associated with the Sardenne to thick patches of dry scrub and coarse, thorny bushes. They felt wrong somehow, tainted, and the further they moved, the more hostile the plants became, until at last there was little doubt that they formed a defensive barrier around Bel’A’Gon’Shri, likely conjured by Redigor himself. As Kali and the others hacked their way through she reflected that the Pale Lord had missed at least one trick by not infusing the vicious barbs with poison. Still, knowing that bastard, she supposed there was time yet.

  Kali approached Slowhand and spoke quietly.

  “What were you doing, talking about me to Freel?”

  Slowhand looked surprised. In truth – considering what had happened on the train and all – he wasn’t really sure.

  “What? Hey, it was a trek, Hooper, and you and Dez were busy with girly talk.”

  “Girly talk?”

  Slowhand nodded. “Nothing wrong with that. Nice to see you making a friend.” He paused, smile fading. “Kal, I’m sorry she didn’t make it.”

  “Me, too. Don’t change the subject.”

  “What is the problem? I’m willing to bet you talk about me, don’t you? Don’t you?”

  “Actually, no. What would I tell people? About the collection of underknicks pinned to your bedroom ceiling? Or how a girl would be lucky to get through a first date without your clothes falling off?”

  “Hey, I took the underknicks down, didn’t I?”

  “Pshyeah. And then kept them labelled in a drawer. How was Luci Lastic, by the way? Or Nikola Start? Those were their names, ri –”

  Slowhand suddenly slapped his palm over Kali’s mouth, and her eyes widened in shock and rage. She was about to pull free, demand to know why it was she couldn’t get a full farking sentence out today, when the archer nodded between thorn bushes, at a feral shape moving towards them fast.

  Breaking apart, he and Kali readied bow and knife while Freel dashed into cover, his whip to hand.

  A second passed and something wild-eyed, torn and filthy burst into view. But rather than some slavering denizen of the Sardenne, it was human. Garbed in the shredded remnants of a green robe and considerably older than any of their party, however, he wasn’t one of their own.

  The man collapsed at Kali’s feet. “Help me. Lord of All, help me, please.”

  “Where the hells did you come from?” Freel breathed.

  “The Lord... the Pale Lord,” the man gasped, pointing back through the thorns.

  “Easy,” Kali said, kneeling. “You’ve come from the Pale Lord?”

  The man nodded, taking slugs of water from a skin Kali handed him. As he drank, Freel studied him warily. The man was terrified, but beneath the dirt and sweat he was well-groomed. He did not belong in the Sardenne.

  “Be careful,” Freel suggested. “This could be Redigor’s doing.”

  “No, wait a minute, I know this guy,” Slowhand said. “We’ve met before.”

  “Before?” Freel queried.

  “It doesn’t matter where.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “Fine. In court, if you must know. He gaoled me for a longnight for... well, let’s just say I know what colour sheets cover a lot of beds in Kroog-Martra.” He stared at Kali. “And before you say a word, Hooper, it was a bet and I had no time to collect their underknicks, okay?”

  Kali gave Slowhand a weary shake of the head. “This is the magistrate of Kroog-Martra?”

  “Yeah. A magistrate in the middle of the Sardenne. A fat lot of use he’s going to be.”

  “’Liam, hang on. If you’re right, this guy is one of the twelve taken for Redigor’s High Council. He might know something about what we can expect at Bel’A’Gon’Shri.” Kali took the magistrate by his shoulders, forcing him to look at her. “How and why are you here? Did you escape? Did you escape the necropolis?”

  “Kroog-Martra was attacked. By things hardly alive. Something came. A coach as black as night. Brought me to that place. Oh, Lord of All, that place...”

  “Hey, m’lud!” Slowhand pressed. “The lady knows that, okay? You maybe wanna cut the pie and get to the meat?”

  “In the depths,” the magistrate went on. “Tombs. Vast, cold tombs. There they lie, still. The elves.” He struggled in Kali’s grip, remembering, suddenly desperate to get away. “But they’re coming back. Lord of All, they’re coming back!”

  Freel strode to the magistrate and gripped him by the head. “How did you escape?”

  “The Anointed Lord,” the magistrate said, flinching. “She was taken with myself, the others. The Pale Lord took something from us, everything seemed like a dream, a nightmare. But the Anointed Lord she fought him... she was defiant... she was strong.”

  “Makennon escaped with you?” Kali asked.

  “Makennon?” The magistrate repeated, and shook his head. “No, no. But while the Pale Lord fought to bring her under his control, I felt his magic weaken. Not much... not much at all... but enough for me to run, to flee the Chapel of Screams.”

  “The Chapel of Screams?” Slowhand repeated “Oh, the day just keeps getting better and better.”

  Kali sighed, looked up at Freel. “I think he’s telling the truth.”

  Freel nodded. “The Chapel of Screams sounds like where the ritual is going to take place.”

  “The ritual,” the magistrate said. “Yes, yes, the ritu –”

  He stopped abruptly, eyes widening with fear. The forest had begun to resonate with a slow, bass tolling.

  “The ritual begins,” the magistrate said. “The Time of the Bell.”

  “Time of the Bell?”

  “The summoning.”

  Freel snapped Kali a look. “Does that mean we’re too late?”

  Kali bit her lip. “I doubt it,” she said, although in truth she wasn’t really sure.

  The magistrate had said it begins, and if her calculations were correct they had some hours yet, so likely the Bell was only the start of a ritual they should yet be able to stop. She was about to question the magistrate further when he at last managed to break from their grip and run. Slowhand leapt after him, but halted as he saw countless soul-stripped heading towards him. Slowhand, Kali and Freel stared at the approaching horde open-mouthed, as they passed through the thorns – and through them, too – insubstantial and translucent, leaving them with a feeling that somebody had walked over their graves.

  “What’s happening to them?” Freel asked. “They’re like ghosts.”

  Kali had wondered how Redigor intended to bring the soul-stripped to Bel’A’Gon’Shri across the sprawl of the Sardenne. And now that she knew, she didn’t like it one bit.

  “He’s using a different plane of existence to phase them to the necropolis,” she said.

  “But if he has the power to do that, with such numbers?” Freel calculated. He did not need to voice the next question for Kali to answer.

  “Once he brings his people back, he can send them anywhere, right across the peninsula.”

 
; Freel kicked a tree-root. “The bastard’s one step ahead of us all the time! Tricked us into forming a line at the Sardenne. And for nothing. Miramas, Volonne, Andon, Fayence, and Vos beyond – they’re all but defenceless. We’ll never make it back in time.”

  “Then we’d better make sure we get to Redigor in time,” Kali said.

  Slowhand and Freel stared as she stepped into the stream of spectral figures and, absorbed by the mist-like cloud wreathing the figures, began to walk amongst them.

  “Hooper, what the hells are you doing?”

  “Going along for the ride. Can you think of a better way of getting where we want to go?”

  Freel smiled and joined her. “This, I take it, is the ‘making things up as you go along’?”

  “Aha. But be careful. We’ll be in direct contact with the Pale Lord and he could sense us, so try to empty your mind.”

  The pair concentrated while Slowhand, too, stepped into the stream.

  “Empty your mind, ’Liam.”

  “Done.”

  “What?”

  “Mind. Empty. Done it.”

  “Are you taking the pits?”

  “Hooper, I’m ready, okay. Now are we doing this thing or not?”

  They did the thing, now reduced to phantasms, staring at each other in wonder as they moved. Whole swathes of the Sardenne, including the thorn barrier, passed in instant blur as they, along with all the soul-stripped who had no choice in the matter, were drawn ever closer to Bel’A’Gon’Shri.

  Redigor’s enchantment did not take them right to the necropolis’s door, however, but to a deep, creeper-lined gorge on the approach to it, and there the soul-stripped began to return to corporeality. As they did, some turned to stare curiously at Kali, Slowhand and Freel.

  “Redigor’s getting his eyes back,” Kali warned.

  “Then it’s time to break ranks,” Freel said.

  Kali and Slowhand trailed the Faith enforcer as he walked to the side of the gorge and took cover behind a dense wall of creeper. From there, the three of them watched the soul-stripped file in, emerging only when all of them had finally passed by. Then, after waiting a few more seconds, they followed some distance behind.

  “Oh, crap,” Slowhand said.

  Freel stared. “Lord of All.”

  Carved out of the gorge’s end, soaring above them, was the entrance to Bel’A’Gon’Shri. A threshold of utter blackness punctuated only by the occasional circling, cawing shrike. It wasn’t the entrance itself that was disturbing but what surrounded it. Angled away from her, rising up on either side of the blackness to the twin horns tolling the Time of the Bell, great rock ramparts had been sculpted into a grotesque statuary which, decrepit and strewn with creepers, loomed malevolently over everything below. Great, winged creatures – the hags Kali had seen in Fayence – thrust stone claws at the world, while sweeping carvings of the black coaches that had come for Makennon and the others raced around and between their malformed limbs. Most unnerving were the screaming faces that covered every remaining space on the ramparts, which whispered as the wind blew past them, murmuring half-heard warnings not to approach, to leave this place while they still could.

  “Bloody hells,” Kali said at last.

  “Not exactly welcoming, is it?” Freel added.

  “It’s going to be less welcoming in a second, if we don’t move it.” Slowhand nodded towards the top of the threshold.

  While the three of them had been examining the necropolis, the ranks of soul-stripped had continued to file towards it, into it, and now the very last of them were being absorbed by the blackness within. The entrance began to seal, a mountainous stone slab rumbling slowly down. The three of them were still some two hundred yards away from it.

  “Shit!” Kali cried, and began to run, Slowhand and Freel hot on her heels.

  Negotiating the tangled floor of the gorge at speed was not easy, however, and the entrance was half closed before they had covered a third of the distance.

  Kali continued to pound along the gorge, shouting to Slowhand and Freel to move, move, move! The two men were already slowing behind her. Kali struggled for a few more steps before she, too, was forced to accept that the attempt was hopeless, and she roared in frustration. As the last of the soul-stripped vanished, the slab closed with a rumble of ground-shaking, deafening finality. She pounded on the door as the others caught up.

  “Hooper, it’s useless...” Slowhand said.

  Kali continued to pound, staring up at and around the slab as she did. “Dammit, I will not be stopped now!”

  “Miss Hooper, I fear the archer is correct.”

  “No! There’s a way. There has to be a way.”

  Slowhand slumped with his back to the slab. “Well, we’re open to suggestions...”

  Kali stared at him, hot, angry, and breathing hard. She was about to bite his head off when she suddenly turned away from the slab, staring back down the gorge, toward the forest.

  She began to stomp off, Slowhand giving her a curious glance.

  “Hooper, where the hells are you going?”

  “Redigor’s not going to stop me now,” Kali reiterated. “You two stay here, do what you can.”

  “And you?” Slowhand shouted after her.

  “Plan C!”

  “Which is?”

  “We have a locked door, right?” Kali yelled. “Then what we need is a key!”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SLOWHAND AND FREEL watched Kali work her way back down the gorge and into the undergrowth with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. The archer thought he caught sight of her a few minutes later – of all things, climbing trees – but he couldn’t be certain and his attention was caught by Freel, anyway. The Faith enforcer had been studying the huge, statue-covered frame of the slab, apparently working out a way to climb the incline. Now he seemed to have decided where to start and lashed his whip upwards so that it wrapped around one of the lower statues, then, with a grunt, began to pull himself up towards it.

  “Where the hells are you going?” Slowhand said.

  “Doing what I can. Looking for another way in.”

  “Hooper will get us in there, Freel. Trust me.”

  “I believe she will try. But in all truth this whole operation has been a disaster so far, though through no fault of your Miss Hooper. And now she’s out in the Sardenne, alone. Face it, archer, there’s no guarantee she’ll be back.”

  “She’ll be back. She always comes back.”

  “And if she doesn’t come back this time? Like Jenna didn’t?”

  The question completely threw Slowhand. “I –”

  “I knew Jenna had been assigned to the Drakengrats,” Freel said. “And I didn’t know why, or for how long. But you sense, somehow, when it’s been long enough, and then you start to wonder. I wondered, in fact, until Makennon summoned me, with news. The news came from the one survivor...”

  “Freel...”

  “You love her, don’t you?”

  Slowhand hesitated, momentarily unsure whether Freel meant Jenna or Kali, until he realised that he’d spoken in the present tense.

  What had brought about these sudden revelations, he wasn’t sure, nor why he was about to again be so candid with the man. Was it because of what had happened to Jenna at his hands? Did he feel the need to justify himself, giving Freel the full picture of the circumstances, and his place in them, that had brought about his sister’s – and Freel’s wife’s – death?

  “Sometimes I love her. And sometimes she annoys the fark out of me. And sometimes I wonder whether I’m in way out of my depth. I’d follow her anywhere and do anything for her but one thing’s for sure – she isn’t the innocent tavern owner and sometime adventurer she was when we first met. Something’s happening, Freel, but whatever it is, she won’t let me anywhere near it.”

  Freel nodded. He lashed his whip around a second statue now, and began to haul himself up. “You coming?”

  Slowhand looked back down the gorge, b
ut if he had indeed seen Kali she was now gone. He nodded and, without hesitation, unslung Suresight, attached one of his whizzlines, and fired it towards a statue above Freel. A second later he had hoisted himself to a position where he waited for the enforcer to catch up.

  “Useful toy,” Freel commented. “But this isn’t some kind of competition...”

  “I know. I’m just trying to get the job done.”

  Now that they had bypassed the initial lip of the slab’s frame, where the statuary was sparser, there was no need to continue using the whip or Suresight, and the pair were able to pull themselves manually from one statue to the other. The going was slow. Some of the grotesque figures were unstable in their settings, and needed to be negotiated with the utmost care. When, finally, they reached the halfway point of the incline, the men paused, breathless and sweating.

  “How did you meet?” Freel asked. “You and Miss Hooper.”

  Despite himself, Slowhand smiled. “On the Sarcre Islands. I’d bought passage with a pilot named Silus. He, in turn, had been hired to pick up a female passenger from one of the outlying islets – but I don’t think he knew what he was going to get. Hooper came running at us out of the jungle, down the beach, dropping ancient artefacts as she ran, she was trying to carry so many. She yelled at us to rig for top knots, and a mob of angry natives poured out of the jungle after her. All of a sudden about a thousand fire arrows came arcing through the sky and Silus had no choice but to get the boat out of there. I was pitched overboard and ended up on the beach, with Hooper, surrounded by the natives. Turned out what she’d thought was an Old Race site was actually a temple to their fertility god... Rumpo-Pumpo, or something.” Slowhand paused and shrugged in the manner of someone convinced the name couldn’t be quite right. “Hooper was new to the game, then.”

  “You obviously lived to tell the tale.”

  “Just. The two of us ended up stripped and dumped in a pot to be blanched for the native’s supper, jammed together thigh to thigh. Only got out when I told them we had the hic.”

  “That would do it. You actually sound as if you enjoyed yourself.”

  “Ohhhh, yes. Took Hooper back a year or two later when the natives had started dabbling in tourism. Room with a hot tub. Wasn’t my fault the native eldress recognised us. Hooper almost got stuffed and I... well, I was cursed.”