Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Obviously he hadn’t managed to translate that last bit.

  A few events distracted her during this time. The first was the ramming of an untershrak herd against the hull, sometimes so powerful she expected their triple-jawed snouts to punch through the watertight plating beside her head. The second an attack by the Great Blob itself. No one knew the exact nature or intent of this much feared aquatic denizen, though it struck Kali as being fundamentally benign – an observation based on its plaintive and almost befriending cries as it circled the Black Ship, occasionally rubbing itself up against it. Kali didn’t interfere as the Faith fought the creature off – how could she? – and felt monumentally saddened when the blob’s cries turned pained and then faded away into the distance.

  One night – on what she calculated was the twelfth night of the voyage and in relatively calm seas – music drifted down from somewhere above, a familiar melody that reminded her of Slowhand, and for the few hours until daylight came again she felt agonisingly homesick.

  At last, a burst of activity on the upper decks signalled what had to be the end of the voyage. Kali stole from her hiding place, figuring that if it was all hands on deck she should be able to go unnoticed in the crowd. Sure enough, as she emerged into natural, albeit a stormy grey, light for the first time in two weeks, the decks were awash with so much activity that no one had time to give her a second glance.

  Kali made her way to the prow, and immediately saw why. Couldn’t miss why, in fact.

  The Black Ship was heading towards a stretch of ocean that could only be the swirlpools that Brundle had described, and while the dwarf had intimated these obstacles were dangerous, the word dangerous hardly seemed to do them justice.

  Kali gasped. For what seemed like leagues ahead of them, and leagues to port and starboard, sweeping away in a broad band, the ocean was in upheaval. Great, circular eddies, hundreds of them whirling away, crammed together and crashing together, forming other, new manifestations of themselves, making the waters they were about to sail into seethe and boil and explode upward into the sky. Far higher than the Black Ship itself, these violent eruptions of ocean seemed almost alive, made of stuff more viscous than the seas that birthed them, somehow almost sentient in the way they hung there before plummeting whence they came, worsening the chaos beneath. It was like the ocean was at war with itself, and Kali knew instantly that to enter this battlefield would be deadly.

  A shadow darkened her view. Redigor stood calmly by her side, hands holding the rails, as if they were two friends on holiday, enjoying the view.

  “Spectacular, are they not?” the elf said.

  “Personally, I prefer the banks of the Rainbow River, or the Shifting Sands of Oweilau.”

  “Both beautiful, especially seen as I have seen them, awash with the blood of battle.”

  “Thanks for reminding me what a fruitcake you are, Baz. You don’t seem surprised to find me alive.”

  “Not surprised at all. I could feel you infesting the bulkheads like a filthy floprat. What is it you call such vermin these days? Pests?”

  “Then why didn’t you subject me to pest control?”

  “I had… other concerns.”

  “I can tell.”

  Kali studied the elf’s profile as he stared impassively beyond the prow of the Black Ship. His – that was Freel’s – condition had deteriorated dramatically even since they had met on the ship’s gangplank, and was presumably the reason he had locked himself away inside his quarters. His long black hair was thinning and billowing about his body like a shroud, his skin flaking away, peeled from him by the sea wind and trailing behind him to be slowly scattered amidst the grey, cloudy skies like ashes from a burnt-out fire.

  The man was a ghost even though he wasn’t dead yet.

  Not yet.

  “It’s over, Redigor. Give this up.”

  “I am touched by your concern for my health.”

  “I don’t give a flying fark about your health, elf. It’s Freel’s health I’m concerned about.”

  Redigor’s jaw tensed. “Forget your friend. He’s gone.”

  “Not while I’m drawing breath, Mister.”

  “Then I shall once more have to address myself to making sure that you don’t.”

  Kali glanced casually down over the edge of the deck, saw the white of the angry ocean rushing by the plimsoll line. There was no way she’d survive that. And even if she did, where would she go, in the middle of nowhere, here, on the other side of the world?

  “Shouldn’t you be ordering a full stop?”

  “On the contrary. The island is my destination. I intend to reach it.”

  “But the ship will be torn apart.”

  “Yes.”

  Kali gasped as a particularly violent surge caused her to lose her grip and she was slammed around, her back impacting painfully with the prow. It was in that moment that she realised something that she – and Brundle, wherever the dwarf was – had missed. The only thing that mattered to Redigor was that he made landfall, and to that extent the ship was nothing more than a means to an end. It had been built the way it had to be used as an ocean-going battering ram, to get them as close to the island as it could, and if it was wrecked in the process, he didn’t care.

  He wasn’t going home. No one on the ship was going home.

  This was a voyage of the damned.

  “My god, Redigor, what have you got planned?”

  “Salvation,” the elf said.

  And with that he raised his hand, signalling those on the bridge behind him not to slow but to speed their knottage. The Black Ship ploughed ahead.

  Heading straight for the swirlpools at ramming speed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ELF TURNED suddenly away from the prow. “You must forgive me, Miss Hooper, but it is time for your friends to be released from their confines. You may help if you wish.”

  Kali felt the Black Ship groan beneath her. Heard the bang of exploding rivets and creak of plating from its hull as it encountered the first of the stresses that the swirlpools presented. They had only just reached their edge.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got planned but damn right I’ll help,” she said, following.

  “Then be quick. There is no time to waste.”

  The two of them made their way back below decks and down to the prisoner’s hold, Redigor enlisting men to help as he moved. Watching the elf dance his hand over the rune-inscribed locks of the cages, opening them, wasn’t exactly what Kali had imagined when she’d promised Pim she’d get him and the others out of there, but considering the unexpected development it would have to do. Pim gave her a glance as, along with his men, he was pulled from his cage, still in chains, to join the other prisoners being ushered onto the upper decks. All Kali could do was give a shrug that said, wait and see.

  Redigor opened the cage holding Red and the others from the Flagons, and Kali quickly moved inside to help Martha DeZantez with Dolorosa. The sour stink of infection assailed her nostrils as she bent to wrap the old woman in her blankets, and Kali had to quash a flare of fury that Redigor had provided no medication for her wounds.

  Dolorosa groaned and shifted as her stretcher was lifted, and a hand slipped free. A small object trailed from loose fingers onto the floor of the cage. The old woman’s prayer beads.

  “Red, take her,” Kali said to the poacher, and turned to retrieve the beads. When she turned back the cage was empty and Redigor was standing by its door. He closed it with a clang, his hand dancing once more over the rune-inscribed lock.

  “Should have seen that one coming,” Kali said.

  “I believe you should have,” Redigor agreed.

  Kali glanced between the cages to the steps where the last of the prisoners were being taken to the upper decks. At their rear, Red Deadnettle turned and looked at her hopelessly. As he did, the entire ship rocked, almost turned onto its side despite the stability of its twin hulls, and, rather disorientatingly, began to rotate.


  They were entering the swirlpools proper, and, if the sounds of the tortured hull around her were anything to go by, the swirlpools would soon be entering the ship. A second later, a bulkhead beside the steps burst and a torrent of seawater began to flood the prison deck.

  “Goodbye, Miss Hooper,” Redigor said.

  And with that, he and the others were gone, the hatch to the upper decks shut behind them.

  Kali thumped the cage bars, cursing her own stupidity, and as the floodwaters began to swirl about her ankles and then her waist, her hand searched instinctively for her breathing conch in the side pocket of her bodysuit. Feeling empty space, her mind flashed with the image of the conch dwindling into the depths of Gransk harbour, and she cursed again.

  Then Kali remembered the small bag Merrit Moon had given her in the World’s Ridge Mountains. A few things that might help to keep you safe, he had said, so let’s see.

  She dug inside, extracting first an elven memory crystal, second a small sphere that looked like one of the old man’s ice-bombs and which she wasn’t willing to risk finding out, and third an object that rattled and hummed in her hand but of whose purpose she had no idea at all. Fine. If she wanted to record herself being frozen in a solid block of ice while some kind of weird clockwork toy got on her tits, then Moon had provided her with the perfect tools. But if she wanted to use them to get out of here, she was bollocksed.

  There was one more item. A small bag within the bag that had gone almost unnoticed in her search. She pulled it out, undid its drawstring, and then yelped in pain as a length of thin vine covered in tiny leaves wrapped itself tightly around her index finger, extracting more of itself from the bag as it did. Kali knew what this was. Tourniqueed. Back when, the elves had used it as dressing to staunch the flow of blood from wounds in battle, and it still grew to this day in the marshes of Rammora. Kali could only imagine that Moon hadn’t realised it was in the bag, a forgotten piece of a first aid kit he had perhaps used in his earlier adventuring days, but ironically it was of more use than any of the other objects he had given her.

  The water having risen to her neck, Kali pinched the leaves of the tourniqueed, releasing it from her finger, and wrapped it instead around one of the bars of the cage. She pinched the leaves again and the vine contracted. Many an elf had lost a limb before he or she had come to realise how to stop the vine’s contractions, and left to its own devices it was strong enough to cut through anything, even metal.

  It took time, though, and time was one thing Kali didn’t have. The seawater was splashing about her mouth and nose now, making her gag, and when at last the tourniqueed severed the bar she had already been submerged for almost a minute. Kali quickly snatched the vine from the water and reapplied it two feet further down the bar, and as it began to cut its way through once more she hammered the bar repeatedly, knowing she’d never survive until the tourniqueed had completed its job. She lost count of the number of desperate strikes she made, but she did know that her blows were becoming weaker each time, and finally she resorted to holding onto the surrounding bars, twisting her body and booting the face of the cage. Her vision was darkening and for a second she was only vaguely aware that the bar had become weak enough and was slowly spiralling away from her. She twisted and pulled herself through the opening it had made.

  Kali swam directly for the steps and the hatch above, but as she turned the wheel to open it, it stuck fast. Redigor, or one of his men, must have jammed it. Kali’s eyes widened and she turned desperately, seeking another way out.

  But there was none.

  She pounded on the hatch, bubbles of air exploding from her, but who was she kidding? Who did she expect to come to rescue her?

  Maybe the person who was now turning the wheel from the other side, opening the hatch to the equally flooded deck beyond.

  Kali’s mind was so starved of oxygen now that it all seemed like a dream. Maybe it was a dream because the person who had opened the hatch – her rescuer – wasn’t a person at all. In the grey, murky waters, Kali found herself looking at the same creature she had encountered in Gransk harbour, possibly the same creature she had long ago encountered in the floodwaters of Martak. Whether it was the same or not, she didn’t know, for this time the creature did not speak in her mind, but merely took hold of her floating form and pulled her after it. Familiar ship’s corridors, their angles warped by the waters that filled them, segued by, and in what remained of her conscious thoughts Kali recognised that she was being taken to safety.

  Thank you, she wanted to say. Please tell me, who are you?

  But she couldn’t. Finding herself lying face down on the deck above, her sodden form gasping, the creature was gone.

  Kali picked herself up, but her problems were only just beginning. The stresses she’d witnessed tearing the ship apart below were far more evident above, and the ship pitched suddenly and dramatically, flinging her across the deck and almost hurling her into the sea. Except there was no sea. Clinging onto the rail, Kali looked down the precipitous drop of the hull to the part of the maelstrom in which it was caught. A section of one of the swirlpools churned right below her – or maybe above, in the constant skewing of the world it was difficult to tell – battering and lashing the ship while all the time staring back like some unblinking, giant, malevolent eye.

  But the swirlpool was no eye, she knew that now. It was a mouth to the hells. A mouth that was fully capable of swallowing the ship whole. And the only reason it hadn’t yet done so was that it vied with maybe a hundred others that made up the barrier around Trass Kathra.

  A hundred.

  And the ship was caught in the heart of them all.

  As it was pulled from one to another, increasingly battered and twisted, the sound of the swirlpools’ roaring hunger almost, but not quite, drowned out the sound of dull, periodic explosions and screams from along the deck.

  Redigor and his people. And the hostages. It had to be. Despite her enforced delay, they must not yet have made it off the ship.

  Kali began to move towards the screams. Reaching their source was not easy, however. Even as she forced herself off the rail against which she’d been thrown, the ship pitched again, and she found herself staggering back towards the hatch from which she’d emerged, slapping into it and then onto the deck as a crash of water soaked herself and the deck about her. This time, for good measure, the ship turned, too, its bow being forced around by the edge of an adjacent swirpool, and the creaks and groans of its protesting bulkheads began anew. There wasn’t much time. The ship was coming apart.

  The sky revolved giddily, and Kali found the only way to negotiate the wall in which the hatch sat was to allow herself to slide along it, carried by the water that flooded towards the stern. This, too, turned into a treacherous exercise as the ship dipped violently, transforming what had been a level, if unstable, deck into an acutely angled slide. Again, Kali let herself go with it, gaining speed as she skidded down, then, at the last minute, grabbed onto another passing rail before she impacted with what would have been bone-crunching finality against one of the deck stanchions.

  “Woo!” she cried, feet dangling and kicking in mid-air.

  She jerked herself aside as two Final Faith brothers, presumably having been engaged in some last minute business at the bow, sailed past her, robes flapping as they plummeted to their inevitable end. Their sudden departure from the ship reduced the numbers she had to deal with and she didn’t feel the slightest guilt in taking pleasure from their demise. It was the silly bastards’ own bloody fault for coming here in the first place.

  This handy method of reducing the opposition was only momentary, however, and the ship’s bow crashed back onto the water with an almighty belly-flop that jarred every rivet in the hull and loosened yet more of its plating. A sheet of seawater splashed down onto the deck and Kali was punched off the rail and found herself spiralling along, caught in a series of crashing waves and rolling banks of water. This time she could not avoid being sla
mmed into one of the stanchions, and the wind was knocked out of her, leaving her briefly dazed. But when she recovered her orientation, she found the waters had carried her to the part of the deck from which the explosions and screams had been coming.

  Kali hid behind the stanchion and stared at what she saw there.

  The explosions came not, as she’d expected, from disintegrating parts of the ship, but from explosive bolts that secured the mysterious, cigar-shaped objects to the deck. As these detonated, Redigor’s men were tugging the canvas sheeting from them, revealing large, dark metal objects the purpose of which Kali couldn’t make out for the throng gathered about them. One thing was likely, though. From the desperation with which they worked, these things were a way off the sinking ship.

  Kali’s attention turned to the throng. Something was wrong here. Counting Redigor’s people and the hostages – who were being forcefully jostled amongst them, still in chains – there seemed far too many potential survivors, especially as it seemed one of the cigar-shapes had been damaged during the voyage. Redigor himself was already scowling at this and, among his men, shouts of recrimination and accusations of negligence were being bandied around. This got them nowhere, of course, because it was clear that there could be only one conclusion to this realisation.

  Some people would have to be left behind.

  Oh gods, Kali thought. The hostages. If it was a choice between his own men and the hostages, Redigor would surely dispose of them here.

  She was about to break cover, simply take a chance and go all out to save them, when she faltered. A bright blue flash in the middle of the throng was followed by a scream, and the body of one of the Faith thudded to the deck, as a smoking and charred heap of meat. Others around him backed off, muttering fearfully, and this revealed the cause of the first flash as it happened again.