Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  ELSEWHERE IN ANDON, Jengo Pim lay on his bed in the Underlook Hotel, clutching his greasy knife as he imagined the Hells Bellies writhing before him. The hideaway of the Grey Brigade was unusually quiet, most of his boys out on jobs for the night, leaving only twelve or so snoring in nearby rooms. As Pim gnawed on the leg of meat his knife skewered, swilling it down with a chunky Allantian red, there was an unexpected creak from the floor below. The thief frowned, then shrugged – the Underlook was an old building, prone to shifting. He rejoined his fantasy, wiping juice from his mouth with a satisfied sigh, when a second creak – this time the drawn out, pressured creak of foot on floorboard – impelled him to extract his knife and slip off the bed, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

  He moved onto the landing and stared down the main staircase. As he did, a candle was snuffed below, then another and another, until all was black. A shape – possibly more than one – flitted through the darkness. Visitors, Pim thought, but no problem – the old hotel didn’t take kindly to unexpected guests.

  Pim tapped gently on bedroom doors, rousing sleepers, and then flipped a lever on the wall. A dull clank and ratchet sound signified that all of the traps on the ground floor were now active, and as his men slipped silently down the stairs with garrots tensing and daggers gleaming, he was confident that caught between a rock and a hard place, whoever had checked into the Underlook this night had no chance.

  A series of screams met him from below, and protesting cries as traps were tripped, but a chill went through Pim as he realised the voices in both cases were those of his own men.

  He called out – no reply. How could a dozen of the best thieves in the business be taken out so easily? His mind raced, trying to identify who might possess a strong enough grudge against the Grey Brigade to launch such an offensive. It was only at the last moment, after he had slowly taken the stairs himself and swift, shadowed figures came at him, driving him to the floor with a yell, did he realise what this was all about. Her name, as blackness descended, was the last thing that passed his lips.

  “Hooper!”

  AS PIM’S ROAR echoed through the Underlook, Martha DeZantez knelt by her daughter’s graveside in Solnos. There was no body in the grave, but that didn’t matter, because it was here that Gabriella was remembered in spirit, next to the grave of the man she had loved, and it had become a place of peace and remembrance. She would find no peace today, however, as for a second her heart seized as she heard Gabriella’s voice, as clear as day, warning her against something, and then shadows loomed suddenly over her. A second later all that remained of her presence was a flower with a broken petal lying on the ground.

  IN FAYENCE, ABRA Sarkesian had just wheeled his Abra-Kebab-Bar into its lock-up for the night, woeing the takings of the day, when a shadow at the rear of the storage area caught his eye. The lock-up had provided an emergency bolt-hole for Kali Hooper on more than one occasion, he dropping awnings to hide its existence the moment she rode into it, and his heart lifted to see she had sought his shelter once more. But the face that emerged from the shadows was not Kali’s – not even close.

  SO IT WENT. Peninsula wide from Oweilau to Malmkrug to Turnitia, Vosburg to Freiport to Volonne, anyone with recent contact with Kali Hooper, however minor, simply disappeared. But not everything went according to plan. At that moment in Gargas...

  A GLOVED HAND prevented the bell on the door of Wonders of The World from tinkling as it opened. Yan DeFrys motioned his heavily armed men into the shop in silence. He’d been told his target was a strange one, rumoured to possess a faculty for bodily transformation, and had decided his best tactic for capture would be to simply overwhelm him. He’d hoped to have all of his men inside before he was alerted but it seemed that was not to be. Though the shop had appeared empty through its windows, the old man was suddenly there, appearing as if by magic.

  Yan DeFrys sneered. With a shock of white hair and beard, and what looked like a pink horse blanket over his shoulders, the old man shuffled about the shop waving a feather duster over piles of stock. This was his target?

  “I’m closed,” Merrit Moon said.

  “Then you should lock your door, Mister Moon.”

  “Why? Others respect the sign hanging there. You see what it says, hmm? ‘Go Away’ is what it says, and I’d be obliged if you did so.”

  “We’re not here to shop, old man.”

  “No? Some pongbegon for you, I think. Wooh-hoo, yes. And you, sir – in you I sense a man with a frustrated wife. Knickerknocker Glory’s what you need. Direct from the Sardenne and very good for the old early oooh, if you know what I mean.”

  The mercenary to whom Moon had spoken moved forward, but DeFrys held him back.

  “We have no interest in your trinkets, trivia or fetishes, old man. We’re here for you.”

  Moon continued to shuffle about, apparently not listening. It was odd but for a second DeFrys got the impression he seemed to blur between locations rather than physically move. DeFrys nodded to two of his men, who moved to apprehend him. Moon looked up as they began to weave their way through piles of stock, and manoeuvred himself behind others when they drew close. This happened twice more and the mercenaries cursed in exasperation finding direct pursuit impossible. The stock had been arranged in such a way that it formed a miniature maze seemingly designed to frustrate their every attempt to reach their quarry.

  “That’s right, that’s right,” Moon said. “Have a good look around.”

  “I already told you, old man,” DeFrys barked. “We have no interest in your goods.”

  “Today’s special is a boozelhorn made by the Yassan of the Drakengrats. It’s said if you blow a boozelhorn your enemies comprehensively fill their trousers. Would you like a demonstration?”

  DeFrys growled; game over. He bashed away a pile of stock, hurling pots and jars to the floor. Some clattered through an open trapdoor which Moon moved towards.

  “I expect there’ll be quite a mess,” he said. “Now where did I put that shovel?”

  “Stay where you are, old man!” DeFrys ordered as Moon began to descend. His men crashed after him, reaching the opening just as the old man’s head vanished below. It was odd but just for a second he thought he saw the old man disappear before he disappeared – that was, before passing out of view beneath the floorboards. It had to have been a trick of the light. It was difficult to tell with his men crowding around.

  “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “Follow him!”

  DeFrys expected to hear the sounds of a scuffle before the old man was dragged back to the ground floor. But there was only a puzzled cry from one of his men.

  “Sir, he’s gone, sir!”

  “What?”

  “The old man, he just seemed to disapp… no, no, wait, he’s here. I think.”

  “Make up your mind, man!”

  “I could have sworn…”

  DeFrys bit his lip. This whole thing was damned peculiar.

  “Don’t let him out of your sight,” he said. “I’m coming down.”

  DeFrys descended the ladder. Half way down he paused, running his hand over a light tube that illuminated the lower level – the kind of light tube, Old Race technology, that he had only ever seen in archaeological sites or the sublevels of Scholten Cathedral. What were they doing in a primitive market town in Pontaine?

  What, for that matter, were all the other objects down here?

  The old man stood on the other side of the cellar, smiling. In the artificial light he looked somehow strange, almost flat and two dimensional.

  “An impressive collection, isn’t it?” he said. “Reserve stock which I normally only make available to special customers. Those I trust to use it properly.” His expression darkened. “Some of it I don’t make available at all.”

  DeFrys looked to where the old man was pointing. Beside him was another small chamber beyond the cellar, one that appeared to normally be hidden behind a display cabinet that was, for the time being, swung open on co
ncealed hinges. His eyebrows rose at what he saw in there – even if he didn’t necessarily know what it was he was seeing.

  “Do you realise how many years it has taken me to collect these items?” Merrit Moon said. “How many sites I have risked my life to explore to bring them here, to safety?”

  “Proscribed technology,” DeFrys said.

  “What has come to be known as proscribed technology,” Moon said. A needless repetition that brought a momentary frown to DeFrys’ face. “Proscribed by a Church which has neither the wit or wisdom to use it properly.” He turned towards the chamber, staring wistfully at each object in turn. “Here there are devices that can change the nature of a man or his surroundings. Devices which can control the weather, bringing rain or sunshine depending on which is your desire. Devices which can turn the tide of a war…”

  DeFrys stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder and took a step towards the old man.

  “Why are you telling us these things, old man?”

  “I once told a protégé of mine – perhaps you’ve heard of her – Kali Hooper?” Moon went on. Again it struck DeFrys as a non-sequitur, “that she had to take great care in what she released into the world. I have to tell you the same now.”

  “These objects will be confiscated, old man,” DeFrys said. “Examined by experts within our ranks…”

  “I doubt, however,” Merrit Moon continued, “that you will pay much notice to what I say.”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t take them with me, you see. Had to leave them behind. But I cannot let them fall into your hands. Simply cannot. It would not be right.”

  “What?” DeFrys said again.

  He stared hard at the old man, his face questioning, but Moon simply stared impassively back. A sudden tug of fear gripped the mercenary, for now that the old man was so close the sense of unreality about him that had been so nagging seemed more pronounced. He took a step forward so he was standing nose to nose with the man he was to arrest. His target had no body heat, no body odour, no substance at all.

  “For that, I am genuinely sorry,” Merrit Moon said.

  DeFrys swallowed and put out his hand. It passed right through Merrit Moon.

  “Genuinely sorry…” Merrit Moon repeated.

  Suddenly everything made sense to DeFrys. Moon’s seeming to blur as he moved. His momentary disappearance at the trapdoor. But most of all his inability to answer a direct question. The old man wasn’t being obstructive or evasive – he simply wasn’t answering questions because he hadn’t heard them!

  These last few minutes this… projection had been delivering a pre-recorded lecture.

  And class had just been dismissed.

  “It’s a trap, get out, get out!” he shouted to his men, but too late.

  As the walls around DeFrys began to throb and glow with strange green veins, he found himself scrabbling for the rungs of the ladder alongside his men. Forcing them off it, in fact.

  His breach in officerial responsibility was academic, for his men would never report him. The cellar of Wonders of the World exploded with a force no human bomb could have achieved, and a second later the rest of the shop – ground and upper floors – followed suit. DeFrys was running for his life from the building when it was wiped from the map, and the concussion hit him like a giant sledgehammer in the back. He was thrown forward to land crookedly and heavily on his front, the impact forcing out an explosive grunt.

  As Gargassians began to run towards the site, pointing and gasping, it took a few seconds for the mercenary to cease moving forward, his twisted body ploughing a furrow in the ground where he’d landed, his jaw carving a rut.

  HUNDREDS OF LEAGUES away, Merrit Moon was eating a sandwich when he felt his old life vanish forever, the event transmitted to him by the elven sensory sphere he had left behind with the holographers in the shop. The One Faith, the Only Faith, the Fewer Faith, he thought philosophically. And continued to chew.

  The knowledge that he no longer had a home did not come as the wrench he thought it might, surprisingly. The old place had never been the same since being all but demolished by the k’nid, and even as he had been packing the cracks they had left with the elven compound he had named detonite, in readiness for the Faith forces he knew would inevitably come for him, he hadn’t felt particularly sad. There were some things the k’nid attack had destroyed that could never be replaced – his elven telescope, ironically the first thing that had seen them coming, among them – and he was far too old to seek out and gather such treasures again. To surround himself with such seemed folly in these changing times, in fact.

  There was, of course, also his health. He wasn’t ailing – in fact, for a man of his age he was in quite superior shape – but that was wholly due to the ogur corruption that continued to taint his body. The solutions and elixirs he had perfected to keep his transformative affliction in check continued to do their job, and while he still possessed the thread-engineered antidote that Kali had brought from the Crucible, he resolutely refused to use it. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust it – because of its provenance its efficacy was beyond question – but that, as he’d told Kali that night in the Flagons, to use it just didn’t feel right. If he were honest, he had never been able to shake a conviction that what had happened to him had happened for a reason, and in the light of recent developments he was becoming more convinced still.

  He had not told Kali this but the fact was, since the Hel’ss appeared, he was changing more than he had been. Not changing more frequently – although the bouts did seem to have their own accelerating timetable – but more dramatically. He sighed and raised a trembling hand, watching as the sinew and tendons beneath his skin pulsed and throbbed. These painful phenomena were not just linked to his hands, either, the same effect manifested itself at different times throughout his body, and he could not stare at himself in a mirror for more than a few minutes before one such tic or another materialised. All of these felt different to the Thrutt transformations – for one thing they occurred spontaneously, without the raised adrenalin that normally acted as a trigger – and the only conclusion he could draw was that his body was responding in some way to the presence of the Hel’ss. The question was, why?

  This, he had no answer to – yet. What he did know was that these occasions were something to which he could not risk exposing his friends. The feeling of unfettered power that accompanied them both terrified and awed him, and if it were to be unleashed, beyond his control, when anyone was nearby… he didn’t like to think what would happen.

  So, in the end, he’d decided to leave. What choice did he have? The interesting thing was that it hadn’t been at all difficult to choose where to go. And for one simple reason.

  He could not stop dreaming of the World’s Ridge Mountains.

  They were calling to him.

  And he had answered – or at least relocated to their vicinity in the hope he would there find out what the dreams meant. The lower to middle heights of the World’s Ridge still hid Old Race sites he had been too inexperienced to challenge as a young man, and too incapable of challenging when old, but now he had, if needed, the physical means to survive, what better time to explore them? He had not, after all, lost his interest in learning of the past, far from it – the ever growing presence of the Hel’ss in the skies was surely an indication that the fate of the Old Races was more relevant than ever.

  Moon picked himself up, biting into an apple to finish the lunch he’d eaten, and strolled to the mouth of the cave he was using as a bivouac. It actually wasn’t so much a cave as a recess halfway up the side of a sheer and precipitous wall of a much, much larger cavern, and what Moon’s dwarfed figure saw as he looked out made him crunch deeply and appreciatively on his fruit. The bite and subsequent self-satisfied sigh seemed unnaturally loud in the vast expanse. Every archaeologist on Twilight – what few true ones there were – dreamed of the ultimate find, but most had to content themselves with second best. But not he. Not an
y more. The sense of wonder and magnificence he had felt when he had first set eyes upon this site was not misplaced, and he once more revelled in the name he had given it.

  The Gallery.

  Most caverns had galleries somewhere within them, of course, but few in an artistic sense, and none on the scale of what he’d found here.

  As soon as Moon stepped into the bosun’s cradle he had strung beneath his makeshift living area, he came face to face with a small section of ancient cave painting, covering the entirety of the vast wall in which his bivouac was set. So close to, it was impossible to discern what the painting depicted and, even from the other side of the cavern, it was difficult, the primitive art obscured by growths of vines, creepers and other vegetation. Moon had spent the last few weeks negotiating the wall in the cradle, laboriously clearing the growths away, but had even now completed only perhaps a quarter of the work needed to fully reveal the painting. Further clearance was not on his agenda today, however, and had not been for the past two days, ever since he had discovered what appeared to be the entrance to a chamber hidden within the complexity of the painting itself.

  It was all really rather exciting, and Moon hummed to himself as he used the complex system of rope pulleys and fulcrums it had taken him a week to assemble to pull himself along the wall. Stone projections at certain points required that he moved down and then across again, and then down, up and across once more, but the old man was patient, in no hurry to get where he wanted to go. The cradle at last ended up suspended before a small ledge.

  Moon stepped from the cradle onto the ledge to face a cryptoblock. What lay before him was not quite so daunting as it seemed, however, he having worked on it full-time since its discovery. Though cryptoblocks had become something of Kali’s speciality, he’d retired the previous evening having only one last element to arrange, and though its proper positioning had confounded him through the night, the solution had at last popped into his head over lunch.