Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Her hand moved to the side of the cosmoscope and her fingers found and manipulated dials there, adjusting the instrument’s focus until the Hel’ss was outlined clearly and starkly against the background of the cosmos.

  She gasped.

  Brother Incera had been correct in his observations that while the Hel’ss superficially resembled Kerberos, in close up the difference between the two was marked.

  Where the azure surface of Kerberos was scudded with the layer of clouds Kali now knew to be the souls of Twilight’s dead that were drawn there, the surface of the Hel’ss was, in comparison, almost bare, resembling less a gas giant as some impossibly large, translucent brain. The more Kali studied it, the more she began to discern gaseous filaments reaching out from its surface across space and almost stroking the atmosphere of Kerberos, and the more uncomfortably aware of some sentient presence up there she became.

  It could just have been her imagination, of course, but it wasn’t, as what happened a moment later proved beyond doubt.

  For a second, just a second as Kali watched, the entire surface of the Hel’ss suddenly and unexpectedly reorganised itself into a reasonable semblance of a face. Her face.

  Kali pulled back with a gasp.

  “Are you all right, Miss Hooper?”

  What the hells was that? Kali thought. Was it even possible? But she had seen it with her own eyes – whether the Hel’ss was trying to scare her off or else imprinting itself with a knowledge of who she was, it had just demonstrated that it was a living thing.

  It was telling her it knew her.

  “Miss Hooper?”

  Kali shook her head to clear it of the image. “Yes… yes, I’m all right. Sorry.”

  “My brethren have come to believe,” Incera continued, “that the entity is some form of herald of Kerberos itself. That it is the first sign of the beginning of the cycle of their becoming one with their God.”

  That would explain a lot, and not for the first time in her dealings with organised religions Kali wondered where they got this shit. “You, I take it, are not of the same mind?”

  “I am a man of science, Miss Hooper, not so easily persuaded.”

  “You also said their God. Hardly the kind of scepticism I’d expect from such a long-standing member of the Faith.”

  Again, Incera shrugged. “When we began, the Faith were not quite so fanatical as they are now. There was room within their ranks for people with open minds. Free thinking souls. Our acceptance was tolerated for the tactical advantages our pursuit of knowledge might bring to them. But, one by one over the years, our numbers became depleted, until only I remained.” Incera smiled. “Somehow up here, in my little nest, I managed to evade the fundamentalist brooms that swept away the unworthy.”

  Kali realised at last that, in coming to see Brother Incera, she had made the right choice.

  “The Hel’ss,” she said. “What do you think it is?”

  Incera sighed, moving to the walls of the observatory where a number of large parchments were strung one atop the other. The astronomer flipped them, revealing his sketched impressions of objects the cosmoscope had revealed to him over the years.

  “There are many strange things in the heavens, Miss Hooper. I have seen worlds of flame and worlds of ice, worlds verdant and worlds long dead, and worlds that seem nought but smoke or shifting shadow. I have seen the stars by which they are lit and, on occasion, I have seen the children of worlds flit between them in tiny ships. I have seen great coloured clouds seemingly of no substance that take the shapes of everything imaginable by man. I have seen flares and streaks of fire that would incinerate Twilight would we be unlucky enough to feel their touch. But nowhere, Miss Hooper – nowhere – have I seen anything like the body that grows nearer to our world every day.”

  “You’re saying that it isn’t just some kind of… wandering star?”

  “I would stake my reputation on it.”

  Kali thought about the filaments. “It seems, somehow, to be connected to Kerberos.”

  “Indeed it does. But what form, what purpose, that connection takes, I cannot say.”

  Kali decided it was time to let Incera in on everything, and the astronomer listened with growing horror as he learned about the fate of the Old races and its cause, and how the same threat was now returning to Twilight.

  “It has to be stopped,” Kali concluded. “But I have no idea how to do that.”

  Incera swallowed. “Miss Hooper, I’m sorry – neither do I.”

  He hesitated for a second, as if remembering something, but whatever it was remained unspoken as there was a hammering at the door to the observatory.

  “One of my acolytes must have reported you to the guards,” he said. “You have to go.”

  “In a minute,” Kali said. She was used to the hammering of guards on doors and had become quite adept at calculating exactly how long it would take them to break through. She had time yet. “I want one more look at this thing before I go,” she said, moving back to the eyepiece of the cosmoscope.

  Incera glanced nervously between her and the door. “You must hurry.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kali muttered, and then, “Oh gods.”

  “Miss Hooper, is something wrong?”

  “I’ve a feeling the guards are the least of our problems,” Kali said. “It’s the Hel’ss. Something’s happening on the surface.”

  “Let me see.”

  Incera shoved Kali aside and stared into the eyepiece for a second. Kali knew he was looking at the same sudden and strange disturbance on the surface of the body that she had – a kind of broiling – and then the eyepiece flared with a light so bright it left a burned circle on Kali’s retina. She didn’t want to know what it had done to Incera’s eyes.

  “Oh,” the astronomer said, staggering back from the cosmoscope. “Oh, Lord of All.”

  Whatever had caused the light, for it to be so intense through that tiny an aperture could only mean it had been blindingly so on the surface of the Hel’ss. And, what was more, the reason for it no longer needed to be viewed through the cosmoscope.

  Through the break in the dome, Kali could see the entire night sky above Scholten filling with scintillating drops of light, intermingled with the rain and falling towards them.

  “I think we should leave.”

  “Is something happening?” the astronomer said, blinking to restore vision. “What is it. Tell me!”

  “I don’t know. But trust me, it doesn’t look good.”

  “What do you see?” Incera demanded.

  But before Kali was able to give him an answer two things happened.

  The first was that the guards at the door managed to break through and moved towards them, and the second was the first of the drops falling from the Hel’ss arrived, punching right through the metal of the dome.

  Most hit the floor in short, sizzling spurts but one hit the palm of Incera’s right hand.

  “What is that – rain?” he said, dumbfounded. “How can it be raining inside the dome?”

  Kali looked up, biting her lip at the impossibility of it. If there was any advantage to this unexpected development, it was that the guards had stopped at the sight of the strange downpour.

  “It hurts,” Incera said.

  He groaned as the flesh of his palm seemed almost to liquefy, spiralling slowly about itself as if a corkscrew had been stuck into the flesh and turned. Kali grabbed his hand and stared as the skin and the bone beneath it melded together in a moving circle of white and red scar tissue, forcing out blood, that then slowly progressed through his flesh until it had burrowed a hole right through to the back of his hand. Incera groaned again, more loudly, as the ends of lost sections of cartilage and sinew snapped or contracted, twisting his hand into a grotesque parody of itself, like the misshapen claw of some old crone.

  What the hells was this stuff? Kali thought. Some kind of acid? It was certainly acting like acid on the dome and the apparatus beneath it but she had never seen
acid act the way this was doing on flesh. The liquefaction, the strange warping of Incera’s hand, the lack of actual burning, it was as if the flesh were somehow being undone and remade.

  Gods, if the stuff should hit something vital…

  Kali wanted to shout get out, get out now!, not just to Incera but to the guards as well, but knew it was already too late.

  The first tentative drops of the glowing rain were but a vanguard of what the Hel’ss had released on them, and the true downpour hit the dome with a vengeance.

  Hundreds of drops punched through the dome and impacted with the observatory floor, creating a sea of sizzling holes. They were followed in rapid succession by more, many splashing and burning into the wall of the round chamber, incinerating Incera’s charts, others punching into the cosmoscope itself, shattering the lenses mounted at both ends.

  His eyes only now focusing, Incera stared at the ruined device and its cracked, smoking glass half quizzically, half in horror, but then found himself being bundled away from where he stood, thrust to safety by Kali. Her sudden manoeuvre sent the two of them crashing to floor where Kali rolled them over and over, their bodies narrowly avoiding the impacts of more of the potentially deadly projectiles.

  The guards possessed much slower reactions and were not so lucky, and the first of them were felled instantly; one clutching at his heart through a widening hole as he collapsed with a gasp to the floor, the other simply toppling forward with a stunned expression in his eyes and a hole the size of a gold tenth in his head that was spiralling into his brain. This sent their brothers in arms into panic, stumbling over their fallen comrades in a dash for the door, but the rain was heavier still now and they had barely made a move before each of them was struck multiple times.

  Kali caught fleeting glimpses of the same strange spiralling of flesh as the rain did its work, and within seconds they were writhing in agony on the dome’s floor, their limbs and joints twisting and bending until they were grossly malformed, in some cases reduced to vestigial flaps of skin, until the guards resembled a twitching, spasming collection of involuntary circus freaks. Even the two who had been killed instantly were not spared the horror, their bodies shrinking and morphing before her eyes, spreading patches of flesh now just exposed veins and arteries seeping dark puddles of blood onto the floor.

  Kali wanted very much to close her eyes – wished she could do the same with her ears, too, against the agonised screams – but she couldn’t. She had managed to roll Incera under the cosmoscope but he was struggling against her, unable to cope with what he was seeing, trying to get away. That wasn’t her only problem.

  Above them the cosmoscope was buckling beneath the rain, its own integrity compromised, and it was only a matter of seconds before it fell onto them, crushing them beneath its riddled mass. Then, suddenly, a chunk of it did drop a foot, and as Kali struggled to hold it off them, Incera fled her grip, making a dash for the door.

  Kali had no choice but to leave Incera and the guards to whatever fates might befall them and just do her best to stay alive. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and survival would be purely a matter of luck.

  Dodging beneath chunks of metal she hoped were thick enough to absorb the lethal impacts, she darted from one to the other until, in turn, they began to collapse above her. Increasingly desperate screams sounded from all about her but all she caught were fleeting glimpses of bodies between metal – legs stumbling, torsos falling, heads slamming fatally to the floor – as she kept moving and the rain continued to fall.

  Trembling, Kali moved and huddled, moved and huddled, and thought that the downpour was never going to end. When, suddenly, it did, she was left with a slight ringing in her ears and an inability to accept, for a second, that she had, in fact, survived. Then the groans of the deformed and dying, audible now that the rains were gone, coupled with an ever growing pool of blood that was seeping almost languidly into her last hiding place told her that she was, indeed, experiencing the aftermath.

  Slowly, cautiously, Kali emerged from beneath the buckled metal, and gasped at what she saw.

  The observatory dome was all but gone and most of the guards dead but, miraculously, Incera lay propped against the remains of the far wall of the observatory still, though barely, alive. Kali quickly moved to him, noting he was in a very bad way, his legs all but useless, part of his torso appearing to have been turned inside out, revealing glistening organs, head slumped to the side, blood trickling slowly from a mouth that gaped now almost to his ear.

  “I’ll get you some help,” Kali said.

  Incera held her back.

  Through his deformed mouth, he spoke in a kind of half gurgle, half drawl. “Nohh. Theh’el khill yooo.”

  “I can’t leave you here like this!”

  Incera gave a weak laugh. “Mhaybee is worshe than it lhooks. Yooo harve to gho. Shtop… whatever ish happenink.”

  “I wish it were that easy. Without the Halo files, I don’t have the faintest idea where to start.”

  Incera’s eyes widened. “Haylo Fihles? Thart what I wash goin to tehll yoo. The enforsher, Freel, has the Haylo Fihles.”

  “Freel has them? How do you know that?”

  Incera pointed weakly at the shredded remains of his research. “Brought me something to anahlyze frohm them – a stahrchahrt.”

  “He wanted to know about the stars?”

  “Yesh. Nho. Nhot the stahrs themselves but what they would lhook lhike from a location here ohn Twilight. Whanted me to calchulate where iht wars.”

  “And did you?”

  Incera nodded. “Aht sea. Fhar beyond the Storhmwall. Ttharn any ship has ehver sailed.”

  “At sea? But that doesn’t make sense.”

  “If there were an ihsland there. Freel mentioned ah name. Trahss Kathra.”

  Kali felt as if she had been hit with a sledgehammer.

  “Freel’s found Trass Kathra? It exists?”

  “Having ship built right now. At Gransk.”

  Gransk, Kali thought. The Faith shipyards. She couldn’t believe that she had a lead after all this time, and it had to be her next destination.

  Beneath her, Incera convulsed suddenly with pain, and she moved to lift him, to find him help, despite the danger. But then the sound of bootfalls on the stone stairs leading to the observatory signalled the approach of more guards, and Incera once more shoved her away.

  “The uhniverse should be constant,” he said, staring up at the exposed sky and the Hel’ss in particular. “Bhalance, counterbalance, everything in plhace.” His face darkened. “But that… thing doesn’t belong. You are the only one who can shtop it. Gho…”

  Kali stared at Incera for a second, then nodded. She moved to the edge of the observatory and then, with a last, concerned glance back, disappeared beyond the remains of the dome.

  Incera stiffened as the sound of bootfalls reached the broken door and a fresh group of guards flooded in, recoiling from what lay before their eyes. Then the guards parted and Jakub Freel himself strode into the remains of the dome. Ignoring the gasps for help from Brother Incera, the studded leather clad man ran the links of his chain whip through his hands as he slowly and thoughtfully gazed at the carnage before him.

  “Sir!”

  Freel turned in response to the cry from one of the guards, who had moved to the edge of the newly created parapet and was pointing out across the rooftops of the cathedral. In the distance, a small, body-suited figure leapt from one building to another, gradually working its way towards the edge of the complex.

  “It’s the Hooper woman, sir!”

  Freel sighed heavily. “Why does that child always leave such destruction in her wake?”

  “Sir?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Do we go after her, sir?”

  “Don’t be a fool. You would not have a chance of catching her.”

  “But, sir –”

  Freel glared at the man, who staggered back as if physically struck.
<
br />   “Th-then your orders, sir?”

  “Have this mess cleared away,” Freel said, his gaze deliberately taking in Incera along with the other bodies. Then he paused, deep in thought, his jaw twitching. A whole year and the combined efforts of the Final Faith had not delivered Kali Hooper into his grasp, and now the little minx had reappeared at what he considered to be a pivotal moment. Maybe it was time to adopt a different tactic – to, as it were, take out some insurance against any further interference. Even if it did not prove necessary, it would at least bolster the numbers for his plans for the near future.

  “Alert the Red Chapter,” he said, “Have them mobilise the Eyes of the Lord and the best men they have, and find everyone Kali Hooper has contacted in the last year. If I can’t lay my hands on Miss Hooper herself, then I think it’s time that her little network of helpers started to disappear…”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PALE LORD pushed the problem of Kali Hooper to the back of his mind and strode the shadowed halls of Scholten Cathedral as if born to them. The delicious irony in the fact that he, the Final Faith’s First Enemy, was now as accepted a part of these rarefied environs as the Anointed Lord herself was not lost on him, and frequent flashes of lightning so strong as to wash away all colour from the hall’s stained glass windows – mirroring his own, true pallor – illuminated a self satisfied smile. Neophytes, Enlightened Ones and Cardinals alike mistook the smile for a sign of his blessing and nodded reverently, bowed in supplication or scurried aside, dependent on rank, as he proceeded with single-minded determination to his apartments.

  These humans’ attitude amused Bastian Redigor. But why shouldn’t they treat him so? Since he had taken possession of Jakub Freel’s form in the Chapel of Screams, they had come to owe him much. The changes he’d instigated in the Faith had both strengthened and buoyed their Church, hardened it in its resolve and redefined it in the face of its flock, all of these things ostensibly preparing it for what both its ministers and ever-growing number of worshippers believed was soon to come.