Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Jerking to manoeuvre the pipe, Kali clung to the roughly wrought metal as, with a groan, it bent further away from the steeple until it projected at the diagonal, then swung her weight around, forcing the metal to the side and rotating it back in against the wall. The stress on its lower half was now so much that it was starting to snap but that didn’t matter – if it did crash to the ground the Faith would think it a victim of the storm, and it had served its purpose anyway. Even as she had manoeuvred the pipe, Kali had already spotted where to leap next, and she threw herself through the air to grab a horizontal section some feet away.

  Water splashing and beading coldly on her already chilled hands, Kali dangled there for a second, gasping, and watched the piping she had abandoned break away to tumble down the vertiginous side of the steeple tower. It turned end over end until it almost disappeared from sight and then bounced across the courtyard below with a series of barely audible clangs. It gone, she looked around her, regaining the orientation she had lost in her fall. Her sudden departure from her well-planned route across the rooftops had caused her to lose sight of her destination – the reason she had come to Scholten tonight – and it was a few seconds before she found it again. Then there, between annexes of the sprawling cathedral complex, she once more pinpointed her goal.

  Perched high above her, atop a sheer wall dotted with maybe a hundred or more yellowed, candlelit windows beyond which berobed shadows roamed, the dark dome that was the domain of Brother Incera sat.

  It remained a long climb away, but Kali knew she had to reach it during the azure night hours. Not only was this the only time she could guarantee Brother Incera would be present, but she would simply never make it through the complex during full daylight. There were too many Faith around for that. Far more than there had ever been before.

  Kali was about to move again when, far below, she heard the solid slamming of a heavy door and looked down to see a small group of Faith scurrying across the courtyard cobbles to investigate the noise of the fallen pipe. For a second they paused in the rain, staring up at the cascade of water and shaking their heads in dismay, and as another flash of sheet lightning lit the wall Kali pulled her legs up towards her middle, making herself as small as she could to avoid detection. Luckily the downpour left the Faith in no mood to tarry, and they returned whence they came. The door, caught by the wind, slammed shut behind them.

  Kali breathed a sigh of relief and lowered her legs. Her feet found purchase on another piece of guttering running parallel and below that to which she clung, and she used the two in tandem to inch her way to the corner of the steeple tower and onto its east facing. There, sheltered some from the storm, she transferred to another vertical stretch of pipe and, testing its solidity, began to ascend to a position where she could again work her way to the dome.

  She climbed haltingly, moving from shadow to shadow, because the wall of windows was right behind her now, and she was acutely aware that all it would take was one casual glance out into the darkness for her game to be up.

  It was an unusual feeling, being so wary of the Faith. But then, as with her own life, things with Makennon’s church were not what they had been. The Anointed Lord’s self-proclaimed ‘Only Faith’ had begun to change not long after the encounter with Bastian Redigor in the Sardenne, transforming over the year from the despotic though superficially benign church it had been, to the simply despotic. Many of its flock now lived as much in fear of its torch-wielding priests as they had once lived in awe of them, and as if the Eyes of the Lord, the Overseers and the Order of the Swords of Dawn hadn’t been enough of a handful, there were some new kids on the block. Recruited from mercenary factions, the Red Chapter had swollen the Faith’s paramilitary forces until they had begun to rival the Vossian army itself and, working alongside their more pious comrades, their presence across the peninsula was total. So total that most people had become afraid to even think.

  What was more disturbing, those brave souls who did dare speak out against the apparent hardening in attitude of Katherine Makennon had started vanishing. It wasn’t, of course, unusual for dissenters of the Faith to vanish but, where previously they might have expected to meet their end in the naphtha chambers beneath Scholten, there had been no sign of the smoke that meant the burners were in use. No, these people were simply gone, and the words on the lips of those who had lost loved ones was that it was to ‘a fate worse than death.’

  She herself had narrowly avoided being one of them. The day of the memorial service to the victims of the Sardenne a year ago had, of course, ended with her verbal attack on Makennon and, while she was willing to concede that her comment about the tassels on her tits might have been a little inappropriate, she had been unusually shit-faced and so would have expected little more than a prompt ejection from the speakers’ platform. That, though, hadn’t been what happened. In the absence of Slowhand, the one other person she’d have thought she could rely on had instead ordered her arrest. Jakub Freel. Dammit, how could she have been so wrong about him? How could she and Slowhand have been so wrong? The bonds of friendship they both thought they had forged with the undercover Allantian prince were clearly not as strong to him, and the fact that Freel had subsequently ordered her to be incarcerated in the Deep Cells pending what he called ‘relocation’ severed them completely. It was only the fact that after a month her cell had been unlocked by some unknown ally – to this day she didn’t know who, though from the peculiarly misshapen handprint on the lock she was certain it wasn’t Freel – that she hadn’t found out first-hand what it meant to become one of the ‘disappeared’.

  Ironically, thereafter, she’d been forced to make herself disappear. Declared an outlaw by Freel, she’d been hunted wherever she went by Overseers and Eyes of the Lord, by every priest in every town, and by the mercenary-bolstered Order of the Swords of Dawn, some of whose ranks had scant regard for the vows taken by their brothers. They were, in short, a bunch of psychopaths fit to rival Konstantin Munch or even the Ur’Raney, and their constant snapping at her heels made an already difficult task even more so. This past year she’d been forced to skulk in the shadows and rely on the shelter of friends during her investigations, and there had been a few close shaves during it. One particular group who’d had the temerity to get too close were now entombed for all eternity inside Black Johnson’s Crypts, and if they had any hopes she was going to return and release the seals, they had another think coming.

  Fark ’em. She had a world to save.

  But the question remained, from what? Or, more accurately, from what exactly? Kali heaved herself onto the roof and took a breather, crouching at its edge like a gargoyle, silhouetted by the body that dominated the azure night sky. The gas giant hung there like a giant, malevolent eye and was the reason she had come here in search of Brother Incera.

  The gas giant was not Kerberos, however.

  It was the Hel’ss.

  Kali bit her lip as she stared at the object she had first seen from the deck of the Tharnak, when it had been nothing more than a smudge on the side of Twilight’s distant sun. It was a smudge no longer, but a fully fledged part of the heavens in its own right. And while it shared many characteristics with Kerberos, though was of a more violent, redder colour, it differed from its counterpart in one very important respect.

  It was drawing closer to Twilight every day.

  Kali recalled what she had managed to piece together about this cosmic entity since she had first learned of its existence, and whichever way the facts were interpreted, things did not look good. From the vastly expanded and darkened sphere of Kerberos that she and Pim had experienced during their visit to the past in Domdruggle’s Expanse, to the countdown that marked its approach at the Crucible of the Dragon God, to Bastian Redigor’s revelation that the last time the Hel’ss appeared his race died, and that this time it was the turn of the humans, there was only one inescapable conclusion.

  It wasn’t just the Hel’ss that was drawing near, it was the
End Time.

  “This world is called Twilight for a reason,” the dwelf at the Crucible had told her. “Once in an age, to every civilisation, a great darkness comes.”

  And it seemed to have fallen to her to help stop it.

  Whatever ‘it’ was.

  Her destiny as one of ‘the Four’.

  The Four. Gods, she was coming to hate the phrase. Because despite having learned what she had about the Hel’ss, her knowledge of who and what the Four were was almost as scant as it had been the day she’d first heard the phrase beneath the floodwaters of Martak. The strange undersea creature she’d encountered there had spoken cryptically of ‘Four Known To Us, Four Unknown To Each Other, Four Who Will Be Known To All’, but the fact was its comments remained as annoying a riddle now as they had then – more so considering she had met two of the Four and they were as much in the dark about things as she was.

  Oh sure, she knew who her brothers-in-arms were: Lucius Kane, Shadowmage; Silus Morlader, Mariner; and Gabriella DeZantez, Sister of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, now deceased and ascended to Kerberos, but what was the connection between them other than the physical and mental gifts they each possessed? What the hells were they, was she, meant to do? To make matters worse, the only one to whom she had not spoken, who just might know something, Silus Morlader, hadn’t been seen for months, and the rumour was that both he and his ship had been lost at sea.

  That was the problem. It seemed she was being stymied at every turn. Even what had been such a promising lead – the so-called ‘Halo Files’ that Querilous Fitch was meant to possess – had, after months of effort, ultimately proved fruitless. A seemingly endless amount of cajoling, bribery and tracking of Querilous Fitch’s past movements had led her eventually to a priest to whom Fitch had given the files for safekeeping, but on going there she had found the priest’s house razed to the ground by forces unknown. The only lead she’d gained was from a remnant of parchment that mentioned the island of Trass Kathra, but that wasn’t much of a lead at all, because Trass Kathra – the Island of the Lost – was exactly that: lost. The place was a myth, a rock in the middle of nowhere that had vanished long, long ago, pummelled under the waves supposedly by the gods themselves.

  Banging her farking head against the wall. That was what she had been doing. Then it had occurred to her – if doors were slamming in her face every time she tried to find out more about ‘the Four’ then maybe, instead, it was time to find out more about the threat they faced.

  To take a closer look at the Hel’ss.

  Literally.

  And with Merrit Moon’s elven telescope having been destroyed in the k’nid invasion, there was only one other place on the peninsula she could do that.

  Kali moved on, working her way across the storm struck rooftops towards her destination. The route was complex and treacherous, and for anyone with normal abilities it would have been suicidal, an impossible challenge. But Kali’s preternatural prowess got her where she needed to go in a little over an hour. Not that her passage was without incident – at one point she was forced to negotiate a precipitous wall of old but barely rooted ivy, flinging herself from one section to the next as each ripped away, at another to shimmy above a rumbling portcullis as the crunching boots of a Faith battalion marched through it into the night, and at yet another – somehow the most nerve-racking of all – having to inch her way past the apartment windows of her old sparring partner, Katherine Makennon herself. The Anointed Lord was home and awake, silhouetted with her back to her before a large, roaring fire, staring motionlessly into it, but her presence made Kali feel strangely uneasy and she felt it best not to disturb her reverie by knocking and saying ‘hi’.

  The most dangerous section saved itself for last. The ‘bridge’ between the wing she was on and the wing she needed to reach was a stretch of flat rooftop filled with lightning rods that caught the raw power of the heavens and transmitted it to the sub-levels of the complex and the Old Race technology in use there. The violent night meant that bolts of lightning were striking one or more of the rods every few seconds and, threatening to overload, the rods were subsequently discharging the strikes to other rods, causing arcs of bright blue energy to flit between them randomly. There was no way Kali could predict a safe route and a single touch would burn her to a crisp, and so the only thing she could do was trust in her reactions, pray to the gods, and run like the hells.

  Her brain buzzed heavily, feeling like lead, as she rolled, somersaulted and flung herself through the deadly and ever moving web but she made it, the only sign of her running the gauntlet a scorched and smoking bodysuit with a few slashes across the arms and one particularly revealing one on her arse that was going to give Dolorosa a dicky-fit the next time she snook home.

  Gasping, she came at last to the dome within which she hoped to find Brother Incera. The structure was much larger close to than it had appeared during her approach, as one might expect considering it housed the Faith’s so-called cosmoscope. The immense arrangement of lenses and mirrors that magnified the skies above Twilight had been considered by many within the Church to be a blasphemous, sacrilegious object but somehow it had survived the Faith’s puritanical purges over the years, as had its keeper, Incera himself. The aging Brother probably knew more about the vagaries and mechanisms of the heavens than anyone else on Twilight, and for that reason Kali hoped that he, amongst a Faith who, troublingly, seemed to have accepted the Hel’ss as a part of their religion, might be able to enlighten her as to what the entity was and what the hells was going on.

  A sheet of lightning illuminated Kali as she paused at the base of the dome, frowning. She might have reached it but getting inside was another matter. The actual entrance to the dome was one floor down, inside the cathedral, and other than risking further close encounters with the Faith the only other way in was the gap in its curved surface out of which the cosmoscope viewed the heavens. And that was currently positioned almost at the apex of the dome, trained, it seemed, on Kerberos.

  Kali jumped back at a sudden grating in the rooftop beneath her feet, and realised that the dome was turning. She looked down at its base, where thick greased wheels revolved along a circular track, and then upwards, where she could just make out the nose of the cosmoscope being realigned to a different viewpoint. The angle and degree of rotation left little doubt in Kali’s mind that it was turning to face the Hel’ss, and Kali guessed – hoped – that Incera was doing what she’d hoped he would be doing – comparing the two celestial bodies like the man of science he was. Because if Incera’s curiosity was piqued sufficiently for him to do that, then she just might not have to force the information she needed out of him.

  Kali dug into a pocket of her slashed silk bodysuit and withdrew a small tube, the base of which she rotated. The tube was one of a number of Old Race devices she’d scrounged from Merrit Moon some months before, reasoning that if she’d become Public Enemy Number One she needed all the assistance she could get. From the top of the tube a magnetic wire shot upwards to wrap itself around the cosmoscope, and Kali pulled the wire taut and climbed, grabbing onto the broad cylinder of metal. She heaved herself upwards with a grunt, her chest pressing against the cosmoscope’s outer lens, and then she flipped herself onto its top from where she was able to work her way inside the dome.

  It was a tight squeeze but at last she made it through. She dropped to the floor of Brother Incera’s observatory; a wet, smouldering and bedraggled figure looking like something that had dragged itself from the depths of the Strannian Sulphur Swamps.

  Three acolytes stopped what they were doing and stared. One of them made a move for a bell suspended in a niche in the wall, but as the young woman was about to raise its accompanying hammer to sound the alarm a voice from the operative end of the cosmoscope said, “No.”

  Kali turned, water sloughing from her to form a puddle at her feet. The man who had spoken continued to stare into the eyepiece of the cosmoscope but waved a hand behind him, sho
oing the acolyte away from the alarm. Though she couldn’t see his face, Kali guessed that the older, more hunched looking form beneath the Faith robes was who she had struggled here to see.

  Brother Incera turned a moment later, a look of curiosity on his face. There was also an intrigued twinkle in his eyes and superficial resemblance to the old man that reminded Kali very much of Merrit Moon.

  “Leave us,” Incera said to the acolytes. “And say nothing to the guards.”

  The acolytes did, though casting vaguely suspicious glances behind them.

  “Thank you,” Kali said after they’d gone. “For not raising the alarm.”

  Incera shrugged. “It isn’t every day an old man has the chance to gaze upon two new and, may I say, impressive celestial bodies.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  The astronomer coughed, glancing with some embarrassment at her chest, then up at the cosmoscope itself.

  Kali blushed. What she had wasn’t much but she guessed if they were magnified a few hundred times…

  “Oh. Right. Look, I’m sorry about that but it was the only way I could get to see you. Brother Incera, my name is Kali Hoo –”

  “I know who you are, Miss Hooper. Among the Faith, your exploits have become a matter of some… consternation over time. I know also why you are here.”

  “You do?”

  “Take a look,” Incera said without preamble. He gestured at the cosmoscope’s eyepiece and Kali moved hesitantly towards it.

  “Kerberos and its new companion,” Incera said as she did so. “To the naked eye, so very similar, aren’t they? On closer inspection, not so at all.”

  Kali placed her eye against the eyepiece and pulled back slightly, blinking. For a second she was puzzled as to why a device so advanced should produce such blurred results, but then she realised that the lenses would have been set to Brother Incera’s eyesight, which was likely not so acute as her own.