Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  Guess who? she thought.

  The memory of what had happened on the sinking Black Ship still fresh in her mind, it was the very last thing she wanted to do, but Kali inhaled one slow, very deep breath and then dived beneath the surface into the Trial of Silus Morlader.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT WAS LIKE swimming through soup. Cold, leftover and half-rotten soup filled with every unwanted ingredient that could ever be imagined. As Kali propelled herself down with determined strokes, still moving painfully slowly against the swell – the murk around her offered up great patches of silt from the cave floor, wooden flotsam that bobbed and bumped against her, detritus that had accumulated over the ages, and finally, but by no means the least, lengthy, cloying strands of seaweed and other marine vegetation that slithered over and clung to her body and, on occasion, her face, making her want to release her air and gag.

  These were not the only obstacles she faced. The crystalline formations that lit the rest of the Trials were far less abundant here, worn away for the most part by the roiling water and eroding effects of its contents, and the further Kali swam from the entrance the darker the waters became. The darkness itself was not the danger, of course – with no idea of what form these submarine caves took, or even of which direction she was meant to be heading, she was blind in more ways than one, and her hands scraped repeatedly and painfully against boulders, sharp growths of coral, and rock walls. Kali began to trail blood, and at one point another length of the seaweed wrapped itself around one of her legs, sliding down to entangle her ankle. Repulsed, Kali kicked herself away so violently that she span in the water, her head cracking an unseen boulder so hard she saw stars.

  Disorientated, having involuntarily released a quantity of her air, Kali scrabbled back to what she thought was an upright position. But the disturbed water had become thick with silt, and there wasn’t even the faintest patch of light, and for all she knew she could have been attempting to swim downwards or sideways.

  The first stirrings of panic set in as all Kali could feel, whichever way she stroked her hands, was rock, and she turned again and again, this way and that, but finding no hope for her predicament. She twisted herself around once more. This time her hands dug into the base of the cave, scooping up fistfuls of sand and shells and, as she cast them away as if they were contaminated, another flare of panic came. She found the rock wall – a rock wall – once more, and groped her way along it, hoping that this time she had chosen the right direction in which to kick off.

  She had, finding a bend with her fingertips which she pulled herself around, but as she began to thrust herself forward once more the stark reality of her situation was already starting to hit home. It had been all right telling herself that she could negotiate the path designed for Silus, that her abilities would get her through, but the fact was if this path was meant to be as much of a challenge for him as her own had proven to her, then, despite the fact she was already faltering, she would only have, as it were, dipped her toes in the water.

  The realisation brought with it a desperate burst of energy, and Kali propelled herself through the water as fast as she felt it safe to do so, ignoring the bumps and scrapes to her arms and hips that had earlier given her cause to tackle the liquid path more cautiously. One pain that she couldn’t ignore, however, was the one growing in her breast, a searing heat of constrained, exhausted breath that was beginning to feel more and more as if someone were scraping the blade of a knife up and down her trachea. The pain made her want to cough and, more dangerously, swallow reflexively, and, as she did, her mouth opened slightly, expelling some of what was left of her air in a cloud of bubbles and allowing the taste of the mire through which she swam inside her. Kali swallowed it, for there was nothing else she could do, and knew it was only a matter of time before her lungs would involuntarily start to fill with more of the tainted liquid. There was nothing else for it. She swam on, determined but ultimately not built for that which she had been forced to endure, and then felt her stomach, her chest, her entire torso begin to spasm, fighting against her to draw in the great, gulping breath that she didn’t want to take.

  More bubbles exploded from her mouth and struggling, slowing to a stop, Kali hung there and then gradually began to incline vertically upwards, her limbs floating. She flailed in the water, bucking, resisting, knowing her fate was inevitable. She could hear her own resistant moans inside her head, magnified because she was unable to release them, whimpering and animalistic. Her eyes widened in desperation, even now seeking a way out of this deathtrap, but seeing nothing but the mire that was sure to become her watery grave.

  Then suddenly, waveringly, there. Kali wasn’t sure whether she was actually seeing it or whether it was the result of the increasing, spotted flaring of her vision, but above her seemed to be light. She began swimming upwards, brushing gleefully welcome, upwardly sloping rock as she did, and then unexpectedly burst the surface with a single, long gulping inhalation of breath. The breath caught on the muck that had settled within her and immediately she vomited up the dire water she had swallowed.

  Taking another gulping breath, hacking and spitting, Kali looked around. There wasn’t much to see. Illuminated by a small collection of crystals, a small, hollow niche surrounded her, not quite big enough for her to fully stretch out her arms. At first she thought it might have been some kind of rest area for Silus – a staging post on his trial, maybe – but she then realised he would have no need of such respite. Studying the rock, she realised it was a natural formation, the result of erosion into which the swirling waters below must periodically rise, trying to find an alternate exit from the labyrinth through which they flowed.

  Kali forgot what such a feature was called but, in actual fact, didn’t give a toss. She was just grateful it was there. Had she been able to reach it, she would have kissed the rock above. Shagged it, if the rock had been in the mood. This tiny pocket of air could prove to be her salvation. It could even prove the means by which she might survive Silus’s trial after all. Using it as a base, a central point, she could reconnoitre the labyrinth that lay ahead, gauge distances, directions, each time returning here for vital oxygen. And each time, hopefully, having managed to map the trial a little further. This was nowhere near a guarantee, of course – who but its builders knew how far the trial extended – but it was a start.

  Kali wasted no time, filling her lungs, dipping her head back beneath the water and power-stroking down. Less panicked now, with a brain filled with thoughts rather than adrenalin, she twisted, eel-like, around a bend in the cave she could now discern. The bend led to a narrow flue that dropped vertically and she twisted again, doggy-paddling herself into position to descend it. The flue dropped about a hundred yards and, at its base, she found a number of passages radiating off a small chamber. Kali decided to explore them clockwise, and swam into the first, finding, after about ten yards, a dead end. She retraced her path and was about to tackle the second passage when she started to feel the familiar burning sensation in her midriff. Time to return and refuel, as it were.

  Done, Kali tried the second passage, and then the third – dead ends again – though the second proceeded so far in that she thought it was leading somewhere, and only just made it back to the airhole. On her return trip, the fourth passage proved to be the one she wanted and, after a winding route, she shot with surprising speed into another chamber, one much larger than the last. Again, though, she had reached the limit of her explorations, and twisted herself around in the water to return from whence she came. But there was a problem. Her accelerated arrival into the chamber had been the result of the strong current generated in the passage she’d used, and returning to the passage, swimming against the current, wasn’t possible. Kali struggled, her arms pumping and legs kicking, but she made no headway at all, and, ever weakening, found herself spat back into the heart of the chamber, where she was tossed and rolled helplessly.

  Panic flared within her once more as she felt more
currents tugging at her and, using what little strength she had left simply to remain stable, realised she was in the middle of a maelstrom. The chamber, like the one above, offered a variety of exits, but in this case many, many more, riddling it like Gargassian cheese, and from each and into each water poured under such pressure that attempting to fight or resist its flow was a lost cause. Not that she had time to fight or to resist as her breath was almost gone now, the searing pain in her chest urging her to take one breath, just one breath…

  An involuntary burst of bubbles escaping her mouth, Kali’s mind raced as fast as the currents clashed with each other around her. Like the rest of the aquatic labyrinth this chamber had clearly been designed as a challenge for Silus, but surely not simply to confuse and to trap him here, because for a man with no need of breath, what would be the point? He could take all the time in the world to negotiate his way through. If not a trap, then, what? Some kind of gauntlet? A test of his endurance and skills? If that was the case, what skills, other than the ability to breathe under water, did Silus Morlader possess?

  Think, woman, think! He was a mariner, right? He had lived all his life with the sea. The fact that his legacy had endowed him with the preternatural ability to survive in a submarine environment could, in a way, almost be considered a bonus. But there was little doubt that his abilities, even when latent, must have drawn him to the sea, because that, after all, was his destiny, as much as it had been her destiny to spend her life burrowing beneath the ground. Silus Morlader and the seas of Twilight were complementary forces. They were one with him, and he was one with them.

  One.

  That was the answer. You didn’t fight that which made you whole. You didn’t struggle. And the purpose of running a gauntlet was to prove it presented no danger to you, that you accepted its dangers and were comfortable with them. Yes, that had to be it.

  Unless she wanted to die here, decomposing until her flesh became one with these waters, her bones battered on the chamber’s rock walls until they, too, were silt, it was her only chance.

  Kali relaxed her body, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to drift into the strongest of the currents. She forced herself to remain relaxed as it snatched her away, ignoring the presence of the rocks that projected all around her, trusting, as Silus would have done, the tumultuous ebb and flow of the chamber’s currents, allowing them, with only the slightest instinctive changes in her posture, to deliver her where she was meant to be.

  Her body was carried through the waters of the chamber, bending and twisting, supple and slithery as a snake, and, while occasionally she felt looming masses of rock flashing at her or within inches of her side, or her whole body buffeted as one current crossed another, she did not resist and simply went with the flow. Even the now agonising tightness of her chest seemed to dull as she proceeded, accepting the inevitability of her underwater journey, which could now only end one of two ways, neither of which she had any say in at all.

  On through the waters she continued, until at last the current transported her into one of the many passages that led off the gauntlet, which Kali was only aware of because of an increased darkness about her. Down, then sideways, then up she travelled, the slight shifts in her posture occasionally misjudged, her body scraping the passage walls but unharmed, the rock worn to an organic smoothness by the force of the water that travelled through it. But the darkness around her wasn’t the only darkness, now, her body finally succumbing to lack of oxygen, and heavy shadows began to close in on her mind. As unconsciousness loomed, insidiously, like slipping into a dream, any attempt at manoeuvring was forgotten and, less Kali Hooper now than piece of living flotsam, her body began to drift in the current, bouncing and then slamming with increasing force off the passage walls as it was carried seemingly forever onward.

  And as it did, her mouth yawned opened, and water began to enter her lungs.

  Kali’s eyes snapped open. The cold shock of the liquid inside her brought her back from the brink of oblivion, extinguishing the fire within her breast but not welcome for doing so, and with a loud blub she expelled it back from whence it came. The urge to inhale again was immediate, and she almost did, but, angry now – angry that she had almost allowed herself to die, angry that these Trials conspired to kill her when she was so close to the truth – she decided that she wasn’t dead yet.

  No way. No farking way.

  Kali forgot everything except reaching the end of the Trial. Her body already black and blue from the battering it had taken against the walls, she cared little what further damage it took, because this was do or die. Instead of allowing the current to simply carry her along, she began to kick, punch and throw herself off the walls, rolling, flexing and punching herself ever forward, like a sentient bullet trying to find the end of the barrel of a gun. Her progress was lost in a welter of bubbles, thrashed water and flailing limbs as on and on she went, but, so long as she felt the current still pushing her from behind, she was going to be all right.

  She had to be…

  …she was going to be all right…

  …going to be…

  …going to…

  …going…

  A sudden, deafening roaring filled Kali’s ears, she felt air on her face, and she heaved in a gasping breath so deep that for a moment she felt that her upper half was going to implode.

  The roaring resolved itself into the sound of thunderously rushing water through which, feeling it smash into her back from above, she was falling. Kali looked down and saw that far below her, almost obscured by a billowing cloud of white spray, the water was pouring into the base of another cylindrical flue, but this one much broader – and, of course, unsubmerged – as those earlier. The fact that it was unsubmerged gave her a sense that she was at last close to the end of Silus’s Trial, but it wasn’t quite yet time to rejoice, for if she didn’t do something about her uncontrolled plummet the impact into the waters below would snap her into pieces.

  Kali twisted and flexed until she was pointing headfirst at the water, her body straight and her arms outstretched beside her. As she cut through the waterfall, wind that had never been more welcome whipped at her. Then, a few seconds before she disappeared into the cloud of spray, she inclined her arms beneath her, as straight as the rest of her, waiting for her fingertips to slice neatly into the waiting water.

  Kali plunged into the foaming mass that filled the base of the flue, feeling its swirling, roiling presence strangely warm and all over her skin like a reaffirmation of life, and then she burst the surface with the cry that she had been wanting to vent the moment she had been able to breathe again.

  “Yeeeeeeeee-haaaaaaaahhh!”

  She’d done it, she’d survived the Trial, and not her Trial but Silus’s Trial. The cry she’d emitted, even though it was inaudible above the sound of the waterfall, segued into laughter as Kali looked up and splashed her face. Gods, she was good. Yes, Kali Hooper was good. She’d proven herself to be one of the Four.

  Kali’s laughter faded as she began to turn involuntarily in the waters that surrounded her, and then she frowned as, amidst great disturbance on its surface, the water began to rise, taking her with it. Within a second of the phenomenon occurring she had risen twenty feet within the vertical flue, spinning dizzyingly all the time, and all that she could see above her were its revolving walls becoming submerged ever and ever faster. What the hells was this? What was happening now?

  But if Kali had learned anything during this Trial it was to let things simply take their course – not that she really had any choice – and as she rose she studied the flue’s sides, trying to gauge, to prepare for what was to come. There seemed to be some kind of opening on what was momentarily the left, and another opposite, slightly higher, on the right. The purpose of both were unknown. Pits of Kerberos, she thought, if she was going to be dumped into either of these, this whole process beginning again, she’d save the Trial the trouble and quaff the waters down like thwack. Enough was enough.


  As it turned out, however, the whole process was not going to begin again, because as Kali rose to the level of the first opening she saw that the rising water was already beginning to spill into it, flowing down a short, sloped channel then cascading away as a waterfall like the one through which she’d been dumped here. She turned in the water and saw that the opposite opening had a set of ancient stone steps leading down, bridging the gap between the two. So that was it, she thought, the flue wasn’t a flue but a means to bring whoever had survived the earlier journey into it to this point, the whole thing acting as a kind of giant cistern and the water that cascaded away recycled, no doubt, through another labyrinthine series of passages so that the process would repeat over and over again.

  She felt the tug of the new waterfall drawing her towards the first opening but kicked against it, and a second later drew herself onto the steps that the second proffered. Water dripping from her, hair plastered to her head, she ascended them slowly, to an arch that awaited her at their top.

  Kali stepped through the arch and gasped.

  She had entered the most massive cavern of the underground labyrinth yet, what had to be the most massive cavern, as it seemed to fill the entire centre of the island, a hollow core beneath a rock roof whose inverted topography matched what she knew to be the landscape above. It wasn’t the above that drew Kali’s gaze, however, but what was ahead of her, and below. She was standing at the beginning of a narrow rock bridge, one of four that entered the cavern from each point of the compass, the other three what could only be the ends of the Paths of Magic, Faith and Survival. She might have reached this place by the wrong route but it didn’t matter, because they converged here.

  Each bridge spanned the cavern across a raging body of water, and as she looked down Kali could make out various caves that she presumed opened into the sea. This was doubtless the same water which supplied Silus’ Path, the one she had just negotiated, and now she would have to negotiate it again, this time from above. This wasn’t a path she was looking forward to any more than Silus’s, because the water, thrust by violent tides and slapped by the walls of the cavern – and doubtless made all the more tumultuous by what she had seen happening to the Hel’ss Spawn – frequently crashed above the height of the bridges, momentarily drowning them with such force that if she timed her crossing badly she’d be instantly washed away.