Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  “Cursed how?”

  “Something about me always being dressed for dinner. Never could work it out myself.”

  Freel looked at him sceptically. He’d read the report of the number of times Slowhand had been arrested for losing his clothes, so it was either an astounding set of coincidences or the man was in complete and utter denial.

  “Let’s move on,” Freel said.

  He grabbed the base of the next statue and heaved himself upward. Slowhand was about to follow when, with a crack, the statue broke away from its base. Freel tried to throw himself free but was snagged in the statue’s hands and found himself tipping over the edge of the buttress. The statue dropped another foot with a sharp jerk and the remainder of its base began to crumble. Slowhand steadied himself and thrust out a hand but couldn’t reach.

  “If you’re thinking of making a rope out of your clothes, don’t,” Freel growled through gritted teeth. “I’d rather take the fall.”

  Slowhand studied the crumbling statue. “Fall, then.”

  Freel snapped a look upward, glaring at him. And the statue jerked again.

  Slowhand’s jaw pulsed. “Fall.”

  A strange expression crossed the enforcer’s face – disappointment, perhaps? – but there was no time to work it out as the statue came free of its base and began to fall, Freel still trapped in its grip.

  The moment it did, Slowhand snatched Suresight from his back, primed an arrow and aimed it at his falling companion. But he didn’t fire. Not yet. Instead he waited while the falling statue impacted with the incline of the entrance slab, breaking apart. His eyes narrowed, picking out Freel’s flailing form amid the cloud of debris. Suresight moved infinitesimally but, again, Slowhand did not release his arrow until his aim was true.

  The arrow flew through the coils of chain whip at Freel’s waist, and ricocheted off the entrance slab beneath to wrap around the neck of one of the statues further below. Freel came to a sudden stop, bouncing on Slowhand’s rope, and looked up at the archer calmly securing its other end. He blew out a relieved breath.

  “I thought you were...”

  “I know what you thought,” Slowhand said. The archer climbed back down a number of statues and thrust out a hand, which Freel grabbed.

  The remainder of the climb was laborious but uneventful, and at last Slowhand and Freel pulled themselves up onto the necropolis roof. A slight mist curled on its lip. They walked forward between the towers of the Time of the Bell, mouths agape at the pandemonium beyond.

  Both men swallowed. On reaching the roof, they had, of course, expected to see the pillar of souls, for it was now originating from beneath them, but neither had given much thought as to how it might be rising from Bel’A’Gon’Shri. Through some kind of dome, maybe, or perhaps even just a channel in the rooftop. But ahead of them there was no rooftop. They faced a surreal, broken landscape that seemed half part of reality and half not. It looked as if the entire top of that part of the necropolis had exploded upward and, moments after detonation, frozen, component parts suspended in a slow-motion limbo. A gently rotating jumble of bricks, lintels and stones dangling the moss and detritus of ages, starkly illuminated by the blazing pillar.

  The pillar itself was a screaming, roaring, constantly whirling maelstrom of ghostly forms and presences, these once human manifestations, thousands of them, writhed and churned about each other, even tore at each other, as they sought release. Stripped from their bodies as they had been, drawn inexorably into this insane captivity, it must have seemed to them that they had been condemned to the hells themselves. As Slowhand and Freel moved closer, they found themselves recoiling as the desperate souls tried to punch through the surface of the maelstrom – a horrifically distended eye here, a screaming mouth there, half a face or a spasming, clutching hand on the end of an arm made of spectral bone. Nor were these horrors occurring only before them. The pillar of souls was so vast that the victims passed out of sight in all directions. They craned their necks to try and see the distant top of the pillar stretching out to Kerberos.

  “Not something you come across every day,” Slowhand shouted.

  “True,” Jakub Freel agreed. His jawline throbbed as he regarded the morass with a steely gaze. “The Pale Lord will answer for this.”

  “Come on. There might be some way we can get down into the necropolis.”

  The two men picked their way onto the floating masonry at the pillar’s periphery, taking care to avoid stones whose orbit took them too close, lest the grasping maelstrom pull them in. Hopping slowly from stone to stone, they caught glimpses of the necropolis’ interior between the jumble of tumbling rubble. Hair and clothes whipping about them, they found themselves a relatively stable platform and stared down onto a floor they guessed was a few hundred yards in from the necropolis’ main entrance. At the base of the pillar of souls, the chamber could only be one thing.

  The Chapel of Screams.

  Their position, in truth, did them little good. Despite Slowhand’s best attempts to find an anchor for a whizzline, there was no way down. All the pair could do for now was reconnoitre from here and then look for another route.

  The Chapel of Screams was blood-red. Arranged around a central aisle were tombs, six to the left, six to the right, and before each but one stood a rigid figure, but who these figures were was impossible to tell. At the end of the aisle, the Chapel widened into a huge circular chamber, and a raised stone platform overlaid with a complex magical circle. This was the base of the pillar of souls, and its screaming captives, for the most part, obscured it. All that could be made out with certainty was that the patterns were not carved, because they pulsed and shifted occasionally, darting about the circle like angry snakes.

  Or perhaps threads. Black threads.

  Standing before the platform, dwarfed by the pillar of souls, were two more figures, one as rigid as those by the tombs, the other, much taller and with a mane of flowing hair, thrusting his hands high into the air, as if summoning the gods themselves.

  Bastian Redigor. The Pale Lord.

  Slowhand shifted towards the edge of the platform they stood on, and Freel held him back.

  “What are you doing? We already decided there’s no way down.”

  “I’m not going down,” Slowhand said, pulling Suresight from his back. “I’m going to end this thing right now.”

  Freel stared at the distant figure of the Pale Lord. “In these conditions? Impossible.”

  “Yeah?”

  Slowhand notched an arrow and aimed directly at Redigor’s forehead, right between the eyes. The shot wasn’t impossible, but it was challenging, even for him. There were a number of factors he had to compensate for – the height, the movement of the platform beneath him, the disturbance from the pillar of souls – but doing so was just a matter of patience. Unfortunately, patience wasn’t only a virtue, it was time-consuming, and by the time Slowhand had locked his aim, the platform beneath him had begun to move again, rotating about the pillar of souls.

  It became suddenly like finding a target through a kaleidoscope.

  Slowhand narrowed his eyes, unfazed, and loosed his arrow. The tip raced unerringly towards the Pale Lord and would, a second later, have punched directly into his brain – but the arrow stopped dead in the air, an inch from his face, and dropped to the floor. The Pale Lord looked up, directly at Slowhand, smiled, his mouth widening into a razor-toothed maw.

  “We’re out of here, now,” Freel said, and pulled Slowhand up by the shoulder. He bundled him across the floating stepping stones.

  “Dammit, Freel. I can take another shot.”

  “To what end, Slowhand? You saw what happened.”

  “I’m quicker than he is – I’ll get an arrow through!”

  “Really? How exactly? By making it up as you go along?”

  “What the hells is that supposed to mean?”

  Freel span to face him. “That sometimes you have to think about things. Maybe if you’d thought about thing
s a bit more at the Crucible you could have avoided a confrontation. And maybe my wife might still be alive.”

  Slowhand stared at him. Is this it? He wondered. Is this when it all finally boils over?

  “Jenna intended to blow us out of the sky,” he said, more calmly than he felt. “And without that ship, the k’nid would have obliterated the peninsula.”

  “The Faith would have found a way to combat them. I would have found a way.”

  “Are you sure about that, Jakub? It was, after all, your wife – my sister – who could have avoided a confrontation. But that doesn’t seem to have occurred to you, does it – it never does in the Final Filth.”

  Freel’s grip tightened about the stock of his whip but he made no move.

  “Face it, Jakub. Jenna became a puppet. The Faith’s puppet. Your puppet.”

  Freel roared, raced at him, and the archer was winded as the enforcer piled into his stomach and threw the two of them back over the floating stones.

  Slowhand found himself with his head only yards from the pillar of souls, but his greater concern was Freel’s hands, slowly tightening about his throat. For a second the two men stared at each other, faces red and taut with strain, before Slowhand found enough strength to growl, “Is this it, then? Where you kill me?”

  “Kill you?”

  “Like on the train? What stopped you, Freel? That DeZantez would be a witness? Or was it just what it felt like – some kind of warning, a game?”

  “What the hells are you talking about?”

  “The shove in the back? The almost but not quite death on the tracks? The whip?”

  Freel’s eyes flickered over him, as if suddenly shocked to find someone in such a helpless position beneath him and he snatched his hands away. He rolled onto his back and snorted. “I guess working together finally got to us both. I wasn’t trying to kill you, you fool! That cable you cut came lashing back, almost cut you in half. I was pushing you out of the way.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Why on Twilight would I want to kill you? I helped save you from Fitch, remember? Even went so far as to steer him away, told him you were mine.”

  “And just why would you do that?”

  Fitch laughed, rough and guttural.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that we are, in fact, brothers-in-law, you and I? That out of all the people on this godsforsaken world we are the only ones with something unique in common? Someone we loved?”

  “Jenna,” Slowhand said. “No... no, it hadn’t.” He shifted uneasily. “Even so, I find it hard to believe that an agent of the Final Faith would let family get in the way of removing a thorn in their side.”

  Freel paused. “Let me ask you something. Were you to work in a tavern, would that make you a drunk? If you yanked teeth for a living, would you necessarily like causing pain?”

  “I’ve known a few in both cases. What’s your point?”

  “Simply put? That the job doesn’t always make the man.”

  “You work for the Filth. You’re their chief enforcer, for fark’s sake. I’d say that was more vocation than job, Jakub.”

  “So much so that I almost never pray.”

  “Come on. I’d have thought that was mandatory.”

  Freel shrugged. “Abstinence is a privilege of the position.”

  “Wait a minute,” Slowhand said. “Are you telling me that while you’re an agent of the Faith, you’re not of the Faith?”

  “What can I say? I prefer a choice of gods myself.”

  Slowhand blew out a breath. “Oh, this day is just full of surprises. Then why, Freel? Why do what you do?”

  “Let’s just say that certain... factions in Allantia have growing concerns about the Faith’s ultimate mission here on the mainland, because Allantia is not so very far away. And that the demise of Konstantin Munch provided them with an opportunity to place one of their own in a position of some seniority – and perhaps influence, if and when needed. Thank you for creating the vacancy, by the way.”

  “You’re a spy.”

  “More of an observer.”

  Slowhand said nothing for a second.

  “Jenna. Did she know?” He asked at last.

  Freel shook his head. “I couldn’t take the chance that she’d reveal what she knew under Fitch’s influence. But I like to think that the man she fell in love with was the real me.”

  “I always thought...”

  “What? That our marriage was a forced one? Decreed by Makennon and orchestrated by Fitch? No, Slowhand, we loved each other. And she, in turn, loved you and me both.”

  “Then why in the hells didn’t you get her out of there?”

  Freel smiled, though it was tinged with sadness. “I had been making plans for her removal after the Drakengrats. A disappearance – a convenient death – during a mission arranged by me. She would have been free.”

  Slowhand looked up at the enforcer.

  “Gods, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You did what you had to.”

  Finally, Slowhand heaved himself to his feet. “The tension of these last few days. From you. It struck me as pretty genuine.”

  “Oh, it was. I didn’t know you, archer – as you didn’t know me – but I knew your reputation. Since then I’ve learned more about the man you are. I needed to be sure that this, all of it, including Jenna’s death, was more than a game to you.”

  “Oh, it’s no game,” Slowhand said. “Not any more.”

  Freel regarded him steadily. “So... what say we get on with it?”

  “What say we do.”

  Slowhand held out a hand, and the enforcer took it.

  “Tell me one thing,” Slowhand said. “Why since your first question to me have I been unable to keep my mouth shut?”

  “Ah, that,” Freel said. He ran his hand down his squallcoat. “This whole thing is stitched together with mumbleweed.”

  “Mumbleweed?”

  Freel leaned in almost conspiratorially. “I’d have thought you’d have come across it in your travels. It relaxes people’s inhibitions. Very handy when you’re a spy.”

  The two men turned, distracted by a noise from the forest. They leapt from the stones and returned to the roof’s edge. Something big was approaching through the trees, and approaching fast, and it made even the temple roof pound like a drum skin beneath their feet.

  Freel looked at Slowhand.

  Slowhand looked at Freel.

  The two men turned and ran, almost falling over themselves in their efforts to shield the other and push him away, and they cried out in unison.

  “Ohhhhhh, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit...”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  KALI GRUNTED, PUSHING her boot against the tree trunk as she pulled the vine taut and knotted it in place. It was the fourth time she had carried out such an operation, and the fourth time she wondered just what it was she was getting herself into. As usual, she decided her plan didn’t bear too much thinking about.

  She slapped the vine to test its tension, and dropped from the tree and moved on. More coils of the stuff were slung over her shoulders, and they would all be used. For once in her life she didn’t resent the number of times she had needed to bail Red, her adoptive father, out of trouble – both financial and physical – now that the time she had spent with the old poacher was at last coming in useful. He had a way with traps, did old Red.

  Kali ducked as a flock of shrikes burst from the thick branches above, but ignored them. The wildlife had returned to the forest since she, Slowhand and Freel had reached the necropolis, which was an added complication, but she frankly didn’t have the time to be bothered with it. It had taken some effort to renegotiate the thorn barrier. If she had to hide every time she had a close encounter with the forest’s denizens the Pale Lord’s plan would be done and dusted before she got anywhere. Even so, she wasn’t stupid, and had taken added precautions to conceal herself from the creatures around her. Having decided that floprat render alone might not be enough to conf
use predators’ senses, she had trapped and butchered a yazuk, stripping the flesh from the creature and draping it about her like a cloak.

  It stank to the pits but, once more, thank you Red.

  Amidst the noises and movement of the forest were the sudden, horrified screams of soldiers and mages who had survived the juggennath assault. She had no time for them either, but each time she heard them she closed her eyes and bit her lip. They may have been why she had made it so far without being attacked but she could not be grateful for them. There was nothing she could for them other than to will them not to run, to panic, to stay still, to pray, but she knew, ultimately, it would do no good. If she were in their place in this godsforsaken hellshole wouldn’t she do the same?

  A young, sweating Sword suddenly crashed through the undergrowth before her, falling to his knees on the forest floor. He spotted Kali and stared at her imploringly, shouting “Help me! Help me!” but it was already too late. The tendrils coiled about his ankles snapped him back in an instant. The sounds of his thrashing struggle – and screams – continued for several seconds before they were abruptly silenced by a gelatinous gloop.

  Kali kept moving, not even looking back, and chose another tree.

  Once more she lashed vines about its trunk, stretching their length in a tense line to another opposite, where she climbed and lashed them tightly again. She repeated the procedure two more times, with trees further ahead and hundreds of yards apart, and at last seemed satisfied that all she could do with the vines had been done.

  Girl, she thought, you’ve taken risks before but this time you’ve got to be mad.

  Kali negotiated her way further into the forest, fighting a growing sense of isolation and wishing she had Horse by her side. The area she was entering was where she and the first Horse had almost given up on their search for the Spiral. Yes, there was the acrid stench of the Spiral’s ruins and there was the mix of odours – metallic, biological, faecal – that meant the juggennath was still nearby. She had successfully made her way back to its stomping ground.