Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  “Oh,” Kali said, numbly. “Oh, that is so cool.”

  “Aye,” Brundle said proudly. “Now, are we goin’ to take back Trass Kattra, or what?”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BRUNDLE HAD INFORMED Kali of all the exits onto the surface, and she chose the lowest, the one closest to the beach where the flutterbys had landed, from which to begin the assault on Redigor. The dwarf had left the planning to her, and the first thing she had decided was to send him in alone.

  What might have seemed counter-productive folly – a lone figure emerging at the furthest point from their target – was, she’d decided, the best route to success. Because as she’d seen through the vertispys, Redigor had proven himself quite the tactician, doubtless a throwback to his days of being Lord of the Ur’Raney, where he would have led his forces into many a bloody battle. Deploying his sentries in positions perfectly calculated to offer uninterrupted and mutually supported surveillance across the island, he had the place sewn up tight. Each sentry kept an eye on not only his territory but two or more sentries, depending on their position on the rocks, at the same time. The result of this was that there was no way through them and no way other than this one to emerge onto the surface without being observed. To try to take out any one sentry elsewhere would instantly alert the others.

  She could, of course, have had Brundle deploy the Brogmas to take out more than one sentry, but as impressive as the mobile arsenals were, they were hardly built for stealth. The last thing she wanted was for Redigor’s major force – the one on Horizon Point – to be prematurely alerted to their presence as that would likely result in the execution of the prisoners, either through the sword or being fed to the Hel’ss Spawn before their time. No, they had to make it up there while Redigor was still involved in his negotiations with the parasite. Negotiations that she suspected would end not only with the sacrifice of the prisoners but those guarding them as well. It was a pity she couldn’t just tell them what a bastard Redigor could be.

  No, the Brogmas would have their moment, but it wasn’t yet. For the time being, it was Brundle’s play.

  The dwarf emerged from an unsealed hatch concealed in a tangled mess of scrub grass and washed up kelp, grumbling not only because of the effort it took to shrug the detritus from the long unused exit but that Kali had chosen him for the task. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her damn fool plan – in fact, it was rather good – but, all things considered, he’d rather be where she was, preparing to do what she was going to do. Now that was the fun part, not this floprat like scrambling up out of the ground. But she’d wanted – really, really wanted – to do it, and who was he to argue? He was, after all, only the caretaker, while she… well, she’d find out soon enough what she was, wouldn’t she?

  Apart from being a bloody annoying little girl.

  Brundle sighed and quietly lowered the hatch behind him, then pulled his Cloak of Many Contours fully about his body, shoulders and head. Had any eyes been watching at that moment the cloth might have transformed from its rank and basic dingy state into the semblance of wind-blown seaweed or perhaps a chunk of driftwood that rolled in the tide. But a second later, when Brundle actually stepped out from the small lee in the seashore and into the view of actual eyes, it, and he, resembled a berobed member of the Final Faith.

  The sentry standing on the shore above started slightly but Brundle simply nodded and strolled on by as if about his business, which seemed to put the man at ease. Beneath the hood of his cloak, the dwarf smiled. The first chink in Redigor’s armour had just been exploited, and he suspected the sentry was more disturbed that he’d allowed what he perceived to be one of his comrades patrolling the beach to get so close without noticing, than anything else.

  Brundle continued along the beach, passing the base of the path that led up into the ruins and towards the hostages that had been left behind under guard there. Nodding to the men who stood in a group watching over them – four, a number deemed sufficient not to have to be overlooked by other guards – he casually continued to their rear and then, producing the twin-bladed battleaxe he’d held under his cloak, swept the weapon around in a silent arc. Its sharpened edge cut cleanly through the necks of all four men and their heads bounced away into the tide.

  “Now then,” Brundle said. “Which one of you sorry looking bastards is Jengo Pim?”

  Most of the prisoners watched their guards’ bodies collapse onto the sand and up at the dwarf, shifting uneasily in their bonds. One, however, regarded him with steady, dark eyes and thrust himself unsteadily to his feet.

  “I’m Pim.”

  “Well now, Mister Pim,” Brundle explained as he released his chains, “your friend Miss Hooper has a message for ye…”

  “She’s alive?”

  “Do I look like a clairvoyant?” Brundle snarled, and then realised he was still shrouded in his cloak. “Oh, sorry, maybe ah do.” He shrugged the garment off and some of the prisoners gasped as for the first time in their lives they set eyes on a dwarf. A dwarf with what appeared to be a large trident stuck to his back. “Yes, she’s alive, and very soon she’s going to be kicking. That’s where you come in…”

  Brundle asked Pim’s men to identify themselves and then moved to release their chains. The other prisoners he left as they were. The last thing he and Kali wanted was for a number of panicked civilians to be running around while there was a job to be done.

  Brundle explained Kali’s plan as he worked, and by the time the last of Pim’s men was freed of his bonds, they and Pim himself knew their part in it. The leader of the Grey Brigade knelt in front of his people and gestured to each, then at the rocks above. Each man nodded, his instructions clear.

  “Good luck,” Brundle said, patting Pim on the back.

  The group was about to move out when a figure appeared from behind the mass of one of the flutterbys. A tall, dark-haired, swarthy looking man with a peculiar x-shaped scar on his cheek, he had to be one of Redigor’s men. But as Pim and his men froze, the stranger simply nodded to them. Carry on.

  Nodding back, Pim and his men slid into the lee of the rocks, as silent as the shadows that swallowed them. Brundle, meanwhile, regarded the stranger.

  “Whoever ye are,” he said. “Jerragrim Brundle thanks yer. I’ve already enough blood ta clean from me blade.”

  He began to move off into the rocks himself but a question from his rear stopped him.

  “Wait,” the stranger said, pointing at the trident slung on the dwarf’s back. “What is that?”

  Brundle looked quite pleased to be asked.

  “This, my friend is a transmitting aerial. A little something I call ‘faraway control’.”

  “Faraway control?”

  “A-ha.”

  The stranger frowned, none the wiser. In the rocks above, so did Pim. Why was it, he reflected that any encounter with Kali Hooper seemed to bring out the weirdest in people – or, to be honest, just the weirdest of people. He quickly returned his mind to the task at hand, however, for in the few seconds he and his men had been moving, they had already come close to the first of the guards on the steps. Hooper wanted he and his friends removed from their positions silently and, more importantly, simultaneously, and Pim watched as one of his men peeled off from the group, melting into the shadows behind him. More men peeled off the higher they climbed, concealing themselves directly behind the guard that Pim had allocated to them, and Pim, having reserved the highest of the guards for himself, continued on alone. The Grey Brigade’s leader seemed not to exist at all as he used the patches of darkness on the rugged landscape to his advantage, darting from one to the other with the silent surety of a man who had spent a lifetime being where he was not meant to be. Without generating the merest amount of suspicion from the guards he passed between, he took his own place and waited for the rest of Kali’s plan to unfold.

  You’ll know when to make your move, the dwarf had told him. This presumably meant that Hooper was going to give some kind of signal,
but what form the signal would take he hadn’t a clue.

  Pim therefore waited, as still as a statue, watching the guard above him shifting slightly as he tried to make himself comfortable on his watch. All was silent other than for the crashing of the waves on the shores of the island. There was nothing to hear that was out of the ordinary, nothing to see but rocks. Then, suddenly, Pim’s keen hearing picked out a slight drone coming from the sea, like the buzzing of an insect, and when he looked in its direction he made out a small dark speck, heading towards the island. The guard heard the drone, too, and began scanning the water for the source of the sound. Pim found it, his gaze suddenly locking onto the dark speck, much closer now, its droning louder, and he tensed, ready to call out a warning to his comrades in arms.

  That was it.

  Pim unfolded himself from his crouched position so that he was standing directly behind his victim. His preferred method of despatching him would have been a clean blade across the throat, but as his weapons – along with those of his men – had been removed on the mainland he was forced to use an unarmed though no less effective technique.

  Pim slid one hand onto the side of the guard’s neck and another onto the side of his forehead, locking his head in place. At various positions below him, he knew, his men would have done exactly the same. And in the same moment that Pim snapped the guard’s head sharply to the right, so too were snapped the heads of all of the guards lining the steps. As one they fell to the rocks below them, their necks broken.

  Pim grinned and scooped up his victim’s weapons.

  Miss Hooper, he thought. You’re on.

  SOME QUARTER OF a league out to sea, having swung in on an accelerating course that had skirted the swirlpools and brought her into a trajectory heading directly for the island, Kali watched the distant shapes drop and gunned the scuttlebarge on which she rode. The machine kicked beneath her, far more violently than the last time she had ridden it thanks to the extra two engines that Brundle had installed. The controls of the device fought against her grip and her knuckles whitened as she struggled to keep the scuttlebarge on course, because she knew that the slightest deviation from her target would end in disaster.

  That target loomed ever closer ahead of her; a section of hull that had been sheared away from the Black Ship to be slammed into the rocks of Trass Kattra, where it now rested, thrust up against the cliffs. What Kali knew she needed to do in order not to endanger the hostages was generate as much of an element of surprise as possible, and to that end the section of hull suited her needs perfectly.

  She gunned the engines of the scuttlebarge until they began to smoke and whine in protest, and the dwarven machine slapped and bounced across the waves towards its destination.

  Kali felt the scuttlebarge jerk violently and then tip sideways as it parted company with the sea and crashed down on the shattered section of Black Ship. Kali leaned hard in the opposite direction to maintain equilibrium, and while the engines no longer had anything to work against, the sheer momentum of the scuttlebarge propelled it up the hull, aided in its passage by the slithery accumulation of seaweed it gathered as it went. Sparks flying where it stripped away the growth, its own metal shearing away in chunks, the scuttlebarge reached the top of the hull and, looking like some airborne sea monster, took off. For the briefest of moments Kali caught sight of Brundle below her, the dwarf looking up and shaking his head in some envy, and then of Pim and his men, giving her the thumbs up, and the sense that her plan was coming together was reflected in her own long and drawn out cry.

  “Ohhhhhhh yeeeeaaaaahhhhh…”

  The fact that Kali cried out so loudly was no longer a matter of concern to her, for the fact was that the ‘stealth’ part of her plan was over. Considering the method of her arrival onto the island, it really couldn’t be anything but over.

  Rising higher and higher into the air, above the rocks that had formed Redigor’s first line of defence, the airborne scuttlebarge and its trailing fronds of seaweed came into view of the soldiers the elf had left in charge of the prisoners. As it did, they gaped upwards to a man. It was exactly the reaction that Kali had wanted, for as long as they were gaping they would not be harming those she had come to liberate, who were doing a considerable amount of gaping themselves. Kali winked as, down below, she spotted the cheering forms of Red Deadnettle and Hetty Scrubb, the latter having become so excited that she was attempting to punch the air despite her chains, the action making her repeatedly fall to the ground.

  Speaking of which, as memorable as Kali’s arrival had been, what went up had to come down, and in that respect she had little control over what happened next.

  The scuttlebarge’s nose began to dip a second after it passed over the main group of soldiers and prisoners, and Kali saw she was heading directly for a ridge from which four more soldiers overlooked the rest of the group. Two of these ceased to be a problem the moment the nose of the dwarven machine slammed into them, and they departed their duties in an explosion of blood, while the third was sent fleeing in a desperate attempt to escape the spinning chunk of metal that broke away from the hull on impact. The last of the guards was the only one to offer a challenge, standing his ground with sword drawn, ready to knock Kali from her seat, but sadly he had failed to take the scuttlebarge’s continuing momentum into account. Kali yanked the controls around so that the rear end of the scuttlebarge span in a half circle, and as the soldier yelled in protest, holding his sword uselessly to block its approach, the hull slammed him off the ridge to fall screaming onto the sharp rocks below.

  That particular manoeuvre brought the nose of the scuttlebarge pointing down the slope of the ridge and, taking a deep breath, Kali bucked her body to send it on its way. The machine began to slide down the slope, picking up momentum again. The juddering, bucking mass of metal with its engines whining more than ever was clearly not an object to be in the path of, and soldiers threw themselves left and right as it came, some of them not quite in time. A trail of severed, twitching limbs and screaming victims left in her wake, Kali rode the scuttlebarge across the level of the plain until it finally slewed to a halt, where she leapt out to face the remainder of the soldiers in charge of the prisoners.

  They stood before her in a line, twenty or so of them with weapons drawn, sneering at what they thought was a foregone conclusion. None of them seemed eager to make the first move, however, the woman in their midst quite clearly insane. Kali played to that belief, regarding them with determined upturned eyes and a smile of invitation to come try it on. And when at last they did begin to move in on her, it was already too late, because a solid mass of metal had risen between them.

  Kali smiled as the Brogmas rose on the freight elevator that Brundle, visible on a nearby rock, had activated with his faraway control. The old mechanism, he had told her, had once serviced the Thunderflux, but, since its capping, had fallen into many centuries of disuse, a situation reflected in the fact that until now it had been totally invisible, buried beneath an overgrowth of grass.

  The elevator was not the only thing the faraway control activated, however, and as Brundle fiddled with it once more, the Brogmas repeated the foot stomping, weapon twirling ritual which had so impressed Kali below. ‘Impressed’ was not a word that could be used to describe the reactions of the soldiers for whom they now performed on the other hand, because clearly there was one thing more off-putting than a solid mass of metal between they and their target, and that was a moving mass of metal between they and their target. Especially one moving in their direction.

  One or two of the men ran away. A few more, who might have heard barrack room tales of the rout at Martak, which only the Anointed Lord herself had survived, froze in their tracks in much the way Kali had when she’d first seen the machines. The majority, however – if only because they were perhaps more fearful of what Redigor might do to them if they did not – raised their weapons to defend themselves.

  Kali admired their guts.

  No, reall
y.

  The soldiers which the Brogmas proceeded to go through like a hot knife through butter were not the only ones that had to be contended with, of course, and as soon as that battle had been joined a further phalanx of Redigor’s troops poured down the slope. As if that were not enough, those soldiers who had been positioned on the ridges around the slopes roared to spur themselves on and then raced at Kali and the Brogmas from two directions, closing on them in a pincer movement.

  Thankfully, Kali and the Brogmas no longer had to fight alone. Having activated his machines, Brundle himself waded in with his battleaxe, and one by one, up the top of the steps, brandishing the weapons they had acquired from the sentries, came Pim and the rest of the Grey Brigade. Pim directed a couple of his people to start releasing the prisoners from their chains, and then, with his other men behind him, raced into the furore.

  The battle, as all battles do, soon degenerated from an initial, full on clash to a series of smaller skirmishes fought across the slope of Horizon Point. With the aid of the Brogmas especially, the tide soon began to turn their way, though Kali herself had a couple of close calls. The first came when she was bashed on the back of the head by the hilt of a sword and went down, stunned. The soldier responsible stood above her and was about to swing down the weapon’s more lethal component when help arrived from an unexpected source.

  Burrowing up through the ground, having made its way to the surface at last, the small sphere that Kali had released from the jack-in-the-box, shot straight up into the air before him and, taking advantage of his momentary distraction, Kali leapt up, grabbed and twisted the soldier’s swordarm, and thrust the blade into his stomach. The soldier doubled over and fell, impaling himself further, and Kali rammed the point home by booting him up the behind.