The Crucible of the Dragon God tok-4

by Mike Wild

  The realisation came once more that he was lying on some unknown machine that flew like a bird or floated like a cloud but clearly wasn't either, and a sudden desire to feel something firmer than cloth beneath him possessed him.

  The main centre of activity was towards the front of the airship, however, and until he knew who he was dealing with he thought it wise to descend from the airbag at the opposite end of the craft.

  He turned onto his front and crawled towards the rear, using the thick ropes that reinforced the airbag to pull himself along. Slowhand was about to flip downwards when he pulled suddenly back with a "Whoa!"

  The reason for this was what had so far been hidden from his view behind the vast balloon. A great, orange orb that pulsed there with an energy unknown to him, but which made his scalp itch, his eyes bulge and his skin throb. Whatever it was, it seemed to be powering the craft, but he wanted nowhere near it.

  Instead, Slowhand manoeuvred himself to where he could drop to a quiet part of the deck and, using the ropes to restrain his descent, slipped downwards until he could grab the lowest rope and flip himself over to land feet first on the deck below. His impact was quiet enough but he still dropped into a gentle squat, as if his additional weight might prove too much for the airship and force it out of the sky. He stayed that way for a few moments, gazing left and right at the still level skyline, then experimented further by thumping the deck with his fist, harder and harder with each swing. Satisfied that the machine was still aloft, he rose to a standing position and jumped on the spot, once — tentatively — then again, and then, in a state of merry disbelief, over and over again. The deck remained solid beneath him.

  There was only one thing left that he had to do to prove to himself that what was happening was happening. Slowhand ran to the side of the deck and peered over its railing, down towards the floor of the valley, far below. If he could have reached, he would have swung a hand below the hull, checking for invisible supports or struts. But he realised that was even more implausible than what he was seeing and, at last, came to accept that he was indeed up in the air with nothing underneath him.

  No doubt about it. He was flying.

  Well, okay, the machine beneath him was flying.

  "I see your clothes still fall off at every opportunity. For the Lord of All's sake, throw him a cloak someone."

  Slowhand turned around.

  The crew had made their way from the nose to where he stood and were gathered in a semi circle, regarding him. Whatever individuals he had expected to be manning this strange craft, he had to admit he hadn't expected it to be them. He looked at the cloak emblazoned with a crossed circle without saying a word. It wasn't the fact that they were Final Faith that disconcerted him but rather who appeared to be leading them.

  Tall, lithe and possessed of the same windswept mane of blonde hair as himself, she hadn't changed much in the six years since he had last seen her.

  "Hello, sis."

  "Brother."

  Slowhand swallowed. It wasn't the unexpected encounter that made him do so, but the way Jenna had said that single word. For a moment he had forgotten that while his sister may not have altered physically, the Faith had long since indoctrinated her into their ways. She was not the person he had known, and that 'brother' had been delivered almost as if she were conversing not with her own flesh and blood but simply a fellow member of her damned religion.

  "Jenna," he said. "Jenna…"

  "As touching as this reunion is," a figure behind Jenna said, "we have a problem requiring your attention."

  Jenna looked at him and the figure threw back his hood. Slowhand felt an involuntary snarl curl his upper lip. He was staring at a man he had not seen since his incarceration in the Final Faith's dungeons beneath Scholten Cathedral. Querilous Fitch. That he was here, with Jenna, made his blood boil — because this was the man who played with people's minds.

  "Was it you?" Slowhand demanded. "Was it you who took my sister away?"

  "I hardly think now is the time — "

  "We're talking!" Slowhand growled.

  "You will be dying if you do not heed my words," Fitch said matter-of-factly, and looked up.

  Slowhand followed his gaze, as did Jenna.

  The airship was now passing out from under the shadow of Thunderlung's Cry, but the outcrop of rock was barely visible for the number of dark shapes that were dropping from it towards them. The archer felt his heart lurch. Seemingly with scant regard for their own survival, the k'nid were flinging themselves at the airship, many of them plummeting past into the abyss, but others falling on the balloon, whilst their brethren clawed for purchase on the hull of the gondola.

  "Dammit!" Jenna declared. "Persistent little bastards, aren't they?" She span to the crew. "All hands — prepare to repel boarders. Mister Ransom, Mister Leech, take us hard to port, full power. This'll be a rough ride, people, but trust me we'll shake our visitors off."

  "Shake them off?" Slowhand said. "You must have weapons. Use them!"

  "What good did your weapon do, brother?" Jenna snapped back at him, striking Suresight dismissively with the back of her hand. "Tell me that!"

  Slowhand couldn't deny how useless his bow had proven, and looked desperately at the k'nid, biting his lip. "Is there something I can do?"

  "Yes. Stay out of the way."

  With that, Jenna moved off to position herself just behind the two men manning the airship's twin wheels, barking orders from where she stood, omitting only Querilous Fitch whose duty seemed to consist wholly of standing stock still and glowering at the archer. Slowhand ignored him, unable to help but be impressed with the way this crew handled their strange vessel.

  Since the debacle of the Clockwork King, he had come to regard the Final Faith not only as dangerous but as dangerously irresponsible. Blundering buffoons whose interference in the peninsula's past could bring it close to doomsday. But here it was different and he was sure that was due in no small part to the tactical skills of his sister. She handled her crew with ease and they repaid her with utmost loyalty. Slowhand felt a momentary surge of pride, recognising that she had obviously come a long way since the last time he had seen her, even if her development had taken place under the auspices of the Faith.

  The only thing that gave him cause for concern now was what the hells she was doing — especially as the airship was heading straight for the rock face.

  "Urm, Jenna…"

  "Steady as she goes," Jenna ordered, seemingly unphased. "Steady… steady… and… turn now!"

  Both of the men manning the wheels reacted instantly, spinning hard to the left. Slowhand felt the deck tip beneath him as the gondola swung beneath the canopy. It swung so far, in fact, that as the dirigible went into its turn, the side of the hull and the airbag scraped against the face of the rock. The air was filled with a wrenching that sounded as if the gates of the hells themselves were opening.

  Jenna's manoeuvre had been executed perfectly but there had to variables — the prevailing wind, air pockets — in an airship such as this, and what had been executed perfectly in theory did not necessarily turn out so in practice. It wasn't her fault, then, that the hull sounded to him like it was in danger of tearing itself apart. Despite being told to stay out of the way, Slowhand couldn't help but feel like the protective brother and raced to the guard rail, unslinging Suresight as he went and then using the bow to push off from the rockface. Slowhand staggered back, yelping, as he was punched in the face and then spun away from his position. He glared into the angered face of Jenna.

  "What in the almighty hells do you think you're farking doing? You're tearing this ship apart!"

  "Am I, brother?" Jenna shouted again. "Look! Look!"

  Slowhand did, and suddenly realised his mistake.

  The ship's impacting with the rocks hadn't, it seemed, been a miscalculation on his sister's part, but a carefully calculated strategy to remove their troublesome visitors. As he watched, those k'nid that were working their way towards
them were scraped away from the dirigible's bag as they were caught between its surface and the rock. The screeching things tumbling away into oblivion. However, it only removed those k'nid that clung to that section of the hull. Slowhand was opening his mouth to point this out when he realised, once again, that Jenna was way ahead of him.

  "Swing her round! One eighty degrees full rudder!"

  The deck lurched beneath Slowhand as the order was instantly acted upon, and he was forced to cling to a handrail to prevent himself stumbling. Jenna, however, strode the tipping deck with ease, clearly practiced with her 'airlegs' and still barking orders as she went. Slowhand watched as she executed a series of manoeuvres that made him swell with pride, making the airship do things it was clearly not designed for. Despite the fact that the airship collided with the rocks around it on a number of occasions — and the faces of its crew were clearly concerned about the battering it was taking — they nevertheless continued to obey without question, until the last of the k'nid had been ripped away. Only then did Jenna sigh with relief.

  "Resume course. Steady as she goes."

  Slowhand was about to move towards her and congratulate her on the flying display when Fitch strode towards her instead, whispering something in her ear.

  "Dammit," Jenna said. "How bad?"

  "The orb has purged energy." Fitch said. "We need to replenish it, enter Waystation One, or we will not reach Gransk."

  "We can't afford to lose the time, but I suppose there's no choice. All right, prepare to take her in."

  The orb, Slowhand thought.

  Presumably the pulsating orb that seemed to drive the airship, but the waystation, what was that? And what and where the hells was Gransk?

  "Problem?" he said, moving forward.

  "Nothing that can't be rectified."

  "Where, in this… Waystation One?"

  "That's right, in Waystation One."

  Slowhand was getting a little tired of being left out of the loop, even if, strictly speaking, he had no place in it. "What are you doing here above the clouds, sis?"

  "Where did this ship come from? What the hells is going on?"

  "All hands," Jenna said. "Prepare to bring us around."

  "Yes, Captain Freel."

  Now Slowhand said nothing. Instead he simply stared at his sister instead.

  That she had effectively ignored him — was ignoring him — after all this time spoke volumes for the depth of indoctrination the Faith had instilled in her, but that wasn't what disturbed him the most. What was with the Captain Freel bit? That wasn't her name. What was going on? He perhaps couldn't blame her for adopting another name but what he didn't understand was why Freel? It wasn't an assumed name like his own. So, unless she had become really boring in the intervening years, did that mean she had the name Freel for a reason? Had she been adopted? Gods, had she married? Whatever the reason it hinted at a history he knew nothing about, and considering that she was his twin sister, that simply wasn't right.

  One thing was clear, however. The two of them were not going to be playing catch-up right now.

  "Three degrees right rudder. Orb to half power. Ready a pulse on my mark."

  "Aye, Ma'am."

  "Half degree correction and… mark! Steady as she goes, Mister Ransom. Prepare to take us in."

  Responding to Jenna's commands the Final Faith crew — with the exception of Fitch who simply stood with his arms folded, staring at him, which Slowhand most definitely didn't like.

  "This… civilian should not be seeing this." Querilous Fitch snapped.

  "What would you have me do, threadweaver. Throw him overboard? He's my brother, dammit."

  "No. I am your brother now."

  That was it as far as Slowhand was concerned. He was about to go for Fitch when something took his mind entirely off his intent. Because Jenna's commands had turned the airship back towards Thunderlungs Cry — or rather back and beneath it — and what he saw there he was immediately convinced was what had made Thunderlungs' lover falter and fall all of those many centuries ago.

  Beneath the Cry was a huge cave mouth that was not a cave mouth at all — at least not a purely natural one. It appeared to have been bored out of the rock and led deep inside it. All along its sides — leading inward in two neat rows — were lines of great, glowing tubes set inside rune-inscribed arches. Tubes which pulsed in sequence as if designed to guide an airship in. And that, it seemed, was exactly what they did, because the airship passed between them and was swallowed by the huge cavern mouth.

  My Gods, Slowhand thought, gaping upward. This is Old Race — the biggest Old Race thing I've ever seen. Pits of Kerberos, Hooper would have given everything to see this.

  He only hoped that whatever Old Race ruin — for it would have been nothing else — had claimed her life at last was as awe-inspiring as this one, because then at least his lover would have died happy.

  If not, well, knowing Hooper, right now she'd be spinning in her grave.

  Chapter Two

  "Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh!"

  The cry of fury, of pain and of sheer frustration, that boomed from beneath the ground was sudden and startling, shattering the desolate quiet of the dusty canyon and causing the strange black birds that nested there in twisted trees to take to the air with a chorus of haunting caws. The cry reverberated out of the canyon and across the landscape beyond. But there was no one out there to hear it — no one for leagues — and after a while, as its echo died down, the birds returned to their trees. There, they did not snatch up the dropped carrion on which they had been feasting but, instead, regarded each other with furled wings, cowed heads and darting, beady eyes. Troubled by this latest disturbance to their long abandoned, isolated piece of the world, their gaze turned along the canyon, past the rusted, age-warped rails of metal and the overturned, skeletal frames of the carts which once had rode them, and towards the dark and forbidding mouth at the canyon's end. And they wondered what it was they had done to offend the angry-spirit-who-had-come-to-live-beneath-them this time.

  Ever since the spirit had arrived on its strange, armoured steed and gone into that dark mouth — there first announcing its displeasure with a deep rumble, an unknown curse and a great cloud of dust that had erupted from it by sunset that day — they had struggled to understand its subsequent outbursts, no doubt intended for them, but each time they had neared their answer another outburst had come and they had fled to the skies in panic once more. So it was now — as they felt the seed of an answer within them — the words of the angry-spirit-who-had-come-to-live-beneath-them came once more:

  "Owww! Rollocks! Count to ten. One-two… no, soddit… You farking hoooor!"

  Far below, through a labyrinthine series of tunnels and diggings, through galleries and chambers that had never seen the light of day, and past tools and carts like those above, Kali Hooper grunted with pain as she pulled the lengths of cloth she held in each fist as taut as she could. The binding around the splints on her leg pulled tight, pressing the splintered bone in her shin tightly but agonisingly together. Causing her to bite down hard on the gutting knife she had clenched between her teeth. Her groan echoed dully, joining the still audible reverberations of her earlier cry and reminding the solitary, bedraggled figure sitting pained, sweating and slumped in a small antechamber again and again of the mess she'd gotten herself into.

  No, not exactly her, she reflected, but a certain completely mad little bastard whom Killiam Slowhand, in her stead, had long since despatched to the hells. Damn the man, she thought. Even dead Konstantin Munch continued to cause her pain.

  The fact was, her current predicament was all the fault of Katherine Makennon's one-time right hand man. It might have been months since her final battle with him at the dwarven outpost of Martak, and the dwarf-blooded resurgent might even now be floating decomposed in the still and murky waters of its collapsed ruins, but that didn't stop his misconceived plan to resurrect dwarven glory from endangering her life yet ag
ain. Indirectly, at least. She should have known nothing good would come of it when one of Makennon's agents had contacted her with a set of papers which he explained the Anointed Lord wished to gift her in return for helping her with that affair. She should have said 'no thanks' there and then, but the fact was she hadn't been able to resist, had she? Oh no, because the papers turned out to be directions and maps to stores that Munch had established across the peninsula, and there was always a chance that there was going to be something more than a little interesting in there.

  There hadn't been, as it turned out — the weapons and tools that Munch had collected to equip his fantasised army were as warped and useless as his masterplan — but in growing desperation to unearth at least one artefact, she had decided to give it one last stab, to follow one last set of directions. That stab and those directions had brought her here.

  She really had no idea how long ago that had been, now, and she had all but forgotten that, ultimately, the trip had proven useless again, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem this time was that it had turned out that it wasn't so much what Munch had stored away but where he had stored it away.

  That this hellshole had been a mine at some point in its history — though mining what, she didn't know — was clear, but equally clearly the mine had become exhausted at some point and become… something else.

  Maybe it was why Munch had chosen the place. Because, apart from its total remoteness, it was, as she had so painfully learned, a deathtrap. Not just neglected and unsafe and falling apart but a bloody deathtrap. The thought had even crossed her mind that Makennon had included the map to its location because she knew that and thought it a convenient way to be rid of her. Maybe she was being paranoid but she'd interfered once in the Final Faith's grandiose plans — even if in doing so she had saved the world — and with future plans likely in the offing maybe the Anointed Lord considered her too much of a loose cannon to be allowed to live. Not that she had any wish to get involved with that lot again.