The Trials of Trass Kathra

by Mike Wild

  TWILIGHT OF KERBEROS

  The TRIALS

  of TRASS KATHRA

  By Mike Wild

  TWILIGHT ofKERBEROS

  GABRIELLA DEZANTEZ

  The Light of Heaven

  LUCIUS KANE

  Shadowmage

  Night's Haunting

  Legacy's Price (Coming in 2012)

  KALI HOOPER

  The Clockwork King of Orl

  The Crucible of the Dragon King

  Engines of the Apoclaypse

  The Trials of Trass Kathra

  SILUS MORLADER

  The Call of Kerberos

  The Wrath of Kerberos

  TWILIGHT OF KERBEROS

  The Children of the Pantheon (Coming in 2012)

  An Abaddon BooksTM Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  abaddon@rebellion.co.uk

  First published in 2011 by Abaddon BooksTM, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Desk Editor: David Moore

  Cover Art: Mark Harrison

  Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

  Marketing and PR: Keith Richardson

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Twilight of Kerberos created by Matthew Sprange and Jonathan Oliver

  Copyright © 2011 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Twilight of KerberosTM, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-337-3

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-338-0

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ONE YEAR AFTER Kali Hooper last laid eyes on Killiam Slowhand she came face to face with her lover once more. The reunion, if such it could be called, was brief; he a sketch on a stray handbill plastered to a storm-lashed steeple high above Scholten Cathedral, she a flailing, cursing figure sliding hopelessly down its slates in the direction of thin air and certain death.

  Despite this, Kali couldn’t help but snatch up the sodden parchment and gaze on it curiously. The bill advertised a travelling carney and its main attraction, Slowhand. Except Slowhand was now ‘Thongar the Golden Archer!’ with the emphasis very much on the ‘thong’. The tiny posing pouch in which he was pictured hid little – which, okay, was quite a lot, she’d grant – but she’d seen those bits before. It was the burgeoning beer belly, sparkling body paint and peaked feathered cap that were new to her.

  So it was that when she plunged off the steeple, her cry was a mix of bemusement, hilarity and desperation.

  “Waha? Wahahaha! Wahaaarrrggghhh...”

  The wind snatched away the handbill and Kali shut up. It wouldn’t do to alert the Faith with her noise – especially if that noise was a splat. She concentrated instead on finding a way to halt her fall, perhaps to make the violent night that had caused her to lose her footing in the first place work for rather than against her.

  She was high enough, fortunately, to allow herself to simply drop and look for a second, and this she did, though unfortunately there seemed to be nothing more substantial nearby than the curtain of water pouring from the steeple, acting as a backdrop to her descent.

  Then, lit by a sudden and powerful sheet of lightning, she made out a ramshackle trellis-work of iron behind the filthy liquid curtain, guttering meant to carry the ocean unleashed by the heavens which, like herself, had been overwhelmed by volume and unremitting strength. What rain the guttering did carry filled it beyond capacity and bubbled, foamed and spurted from every joint, threatening to break the protesting labyrinth of pipes and send a tangle of iron crashing into the courtyard far below.

  Kali spotted one pipe ready to go and, twisting with a grunt in mid-air, snatched through the waterfall at the column of over-stressed iron. Already loose in its mooring, pulled further by her weight, its top half broke from the wall, a jet of filthy grey water erupting in her face. Another jet came from its disjoined gutter above, plastering her hair flat, and Kali flubbed her lips, spitting away the clinging strands. Dammit, she’d just had her hair done, too.

  Jerking to manoeuvre the pipe, Kali clung to the roughly wrought metal as, with a groan, it bent further away from the steeple until it projected at the diagonal, then swung her weight around, forcing the metal to the side and rotating it back in against the wall. The stress on its lower half was now so much that it was starting to snap but that didn’t matter – if it did crash to the ground the Faith would think it a victim of the storm, and it had served its purpose anyway. Even as she had manoeuvred the pipe, Kali had already spotted where to leap next, and she threw herself through the air to grab a horizontal section some feet away.

  Water splashing and beading coldly on her already chilled hands, Kali dangled there for a second, gasping, and watched the piping she had abandoned break away to tumble down the vertiginous side of the steeple tower. It turned end over end until it almost disappeared from sight and then bounced across the courtyard below with a series of barely audible clangs. It gone, she looked around her, regaining the orientation she had lost in her fall. Her sudden departure from her well-planned route across the rooftops had caused her to lose sight of her destination – the reason she had come to Scholten tonight – and it was a few seconds before she found it again. Then there, between annexes of the sprawling cathedral complex, she once more pinpointed her goal.

  Perched high above her, atop a sheer wall dotted with maybe a hundred or more yellowed, candlelit windows beyond which berobed shadows roamed, the dark dome that was the domain of Brother Incera sat.

  It remained a long climb away, but Kali knew she had to reach it during the azure night hours. Not only was this the only time she could guarantee Brother Incera would be present, but she would simply never make it through the complex during full daylight. There were too many Faith around for that. Far more than there had ever been before.

  Kali was about to move again when, far below, she heard the solid slamming of a heavy door and looked down to see a small group of Faith scurrying across the courtyard cobbles to investigate the noise of the fallen pipe. For a second they paused in the rain, staring up at the cascade of water and shaking their heads in dismay, and as another flash of sheet lightning lit the wall Kali pulled her legs up towards her middle, making herself as small as she could to avoid detection. Luckily the downpour left the Faith in no mood to tarry, and they returned whence they came. The door, caught by the wind, slammed shut behind them.

  Kali breathed a sigh of relief and lowered her legs. Her feet found purchase on another piece of guttering running parallel and below that to which she clung, and she used the two in tandem to inch her way to the corner of the steeple tower and onto its east facing. There, sheltered some from the storm, she transferred to another vertical stretch of pipe and, testing its solidity, began to ascend to a position where she could again work her way to the dome.

  She climbed haltingly, moving from shadow to shadow, because the wall of windows was right behind her now, and she was acutely aware that all it would take was one casual glance out into the darkness fo
r her game to be up.

  It was an unusual feeling, being so wary of the Faith. But then, as with her own life, things with Makennon’s church were not what they had been. The Anointed Lord’s self-proclaimed ‘Only Faith’ had begun to change not long after the encounter with Bastian Redigor in the Sardenne, transforming over the year from the despotic though superficially benign church it had been, to the simply despotic. Many of its flock now lived as much in fear of its torch-wielding priests as they had once lived in awe of them, and as if the Eyes of the Lord, the Overseers and the Order of the Swords of Dawn hadn’t been enough of a handful, there were some new kids on the block. Recruited from mercenary factions, the Red Chapter had swollen the Faith’s paramilitary forces until they had begun to rival the Vossian army itself and, working alongside their more pious comrades, their presence across the peninsula was total. So total that most people had become afraid to even think.

  What was more disturbing, those brave souls who did dare speak out against the apparent hardening in attitude of Katherine Makennon had started vanishing. It wasn’t, of course, unusual for dissenters of the Faith to vanish but, where previously they might have expected to meet their end in the naphtha chambers beneath Scholten, there had been no sign of the smoke that meant the burners were in use. No, these people were simply gone, and the words on the lips of those who had lost loved ones was that it was to ‘a fate worse than death.’

  She herself had narrowly avoided being one of them. The day of the memorial service to the victims of the Sardenne a year ago had, of course, ended with her verbal attack on Makennon and, while she was willing to concede that her comment about the tassels on her tits might have been a little inappropriate, she had been unusually shit-faced and so would have expected little more than a prompt ejection from the speakers’ platform. That, though, hadn’t been what happened. In the absence of Slowhand, the one other person she’d have thought she could rely on had instead ordered her arrest. Jakub Freel. Dammit, how could she have been so wrong about him? How could she and Slowhand have been so wrong? The bonds of friendship they both thought they had forged with the undercover Allantian prince were clearly not as strong to him, and the fact that Freel had subsequently ordered her to be incarcerated in the Deep Cells pending what he called ‘relocation’ severed them completely. It was only the fact that after a month her cell had been unlocked by some unknown ally – to this day she didn’t know who, though from the peculiarly misshapen handprint on the lock she was certain it wasn’t Freel – that she hadn’t found out first-hand what it meant to become one of the ‘disappeared’.

  Ironically, thereafter, she’d been forced to make herself disappear. Declared an outlaw by Freel, she’d been hunted wherever she went by Overseers and Eyes of the Lord, by every priest in every town, and by the mercenary-bolstered Order of the Swords of Dawn, some of whose ranks had scant regard for the vows taken by their brothers. They were, in short, a bunch of psychopaths fit to rival Konstantin Munch or even the Ur’Raney, and their constant snapping at her heels made an already difficult task even more so. This past year she’d been forced to skulk in the shadows and rely on the shelter of friends during her investigations, and there had been a few close shaves during it. One particular group who’d had the temerity to get too close were now entombed for all eternity inside Black Johnson’s Crypts, and if they had any hopes she was going to return and release the seals, they had another think coming.

  Fark ’em. She had a world to save.

  But the question remained, from what? Or, more accurately, from what exactly? Kali heaved herself onto the roof and took a breather, crouching at its edge like a gargoyle, silhouetted by the body that dominated the azure night sky. The gas giant hung there like a giant, malevolent eye and was the reason she had come here in search of Brother Incera.

  The gas giant was not Kerberos, however.

  It was the Hel’ss.

  Kali bit her lip as she stared at the object she had first seen from the deck of the Tharnak, when it had been nothing more than a smudge on the side of Twilight’s distant sun. It was a smudge no longer, but a fully fledged part of the heavens in its own right. And while it shared many characteristics with Kerberos, though was of a more violent, redder colour, it differed from its counterpart in one very important respect.

  It was drawing closer to Twilight every day.

  Kali recalled what she had managed to piece together about this cosmic entity since she had first learned of its existence, and whichever way the facts were interpreted, things did not look good. From the vastly expanded and darkened sphere of Kerberos that she and Pim had experienced during their visit to the past in Domdruggle’s Expanse, to the countdown that marked its approach at the Crucible of the Dragon God, to Bastian Redigor’s revelation that the last time the Hel’ss appeared his race died, and that this time it was the turn of the humans, there was only one inescapable conclusion.

  It wasn’t just the Hel’ss that was drawing near, it was the End Time.

  “This world is called Twilight for a reason,” the dwelf at the Crucible had told her. “Once in an age, to every civilisation, a great darkness comes.”

  And it seemed to have fallen to her to help stop it.

  Whatever ‘it’ was.

  Her destiny as one of ‘the Four’.

  The Four. Gods, she was coming to hate the phrase. Because despite having learned what she had about the Hel’ss, her knowledge of who and what the Four were was almost as scant as it had been the day she’d first heard the phrase beneath the floodwaters of Martak. The strange undersea creature she’d encountered there had spoken cryptically of ‘Four Known To Us, Four Unknown To Each Other, Four Who Will Be Known To All’, but the fact was its comments remained as annoying a riddle now as they had then – more so considering she had met two of the Four and they were as much in the dark about things as she was.

  Oh sure, she knew who her brothers-in-arms were: Lucius Kane, Shadowmage; Silus Morlader, Mariner; and Gabriella DeZantez, Sister of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, now deceased and ascended to Kerberos, but what was the connection between them other than the physical and mental gifts they each possessed? What the hells were they, was she, meant to do? To make matters worse, the only one to whom she had not spoken, who just might know something, Silus Morlader, hadn’t been seen for months, and the rumour was that both he and his ship had been lost at sea.

  That was the problem. It seemed she was being stymied at every turn. Even what had been such a promising lead – the so-called ‘Halo Files’ that Querilous Fitch was meant to possess – had, after months of effort, ultimately proved fruitless. A seemingly endless amount of cajoling, bribery and tracking of Querilous Fitch’s past movements had led her eventually to a priest to whom Fitch had given the files for safekeeping, but on going there she had found the priest’s house razed to the ground by forces unknown. The only lead she’d gained was from a remnant of parchment that mentioned the island of Trass Kathra, but that wasn’t much of a lead at all, because Trass Kathra – the Island of the Lost – was exactly that: lost. The place was a myth, a rock in the middle of nowhere that had vanished long, long ago, pummelled under the waves supposedly by the gods themselves.

  Banging her farking head against the wall. That was what she had been doing. Then it had occurred to her – if doors were slamming in her face every time she tried to find out more about ‘the Four’ then maybe, instead, it was time to find out more about the threat they faced.

  To take a closer look at the Hel’ss.

  Literally.

  And with Merrit Moon’s elven telescope having been destroyed in the k’nid invasion, there was only one other place on the peninsula she could do that.

  Kali moved on, working her way across the storm struck rooftops towards her destination. The route was complex and treacherous, and for anyone with normal abilities it would have been suicidal, an impossible challenge. But Kali’s preternatural prowess got her where she needed to go in a little over
an hour. Not that her passage was without incident – at one point she was forced to negotiate a precipitous wall of old but barely rooted ivy, flinging herself from one section to the next as each ripped away, at another to shimmy above a rumbling portcullis as the crunching boots of a Faith battalion marched through it into the night, and at yet another – somehow the most nerve-racking of all – having to inch her way past the apartment windows of her old sparring partner, Katherine Makennon herself. The Anointed Lord was home and awake, silhouetted with her back to her before a large, roaring fire, staring motionlessly into it, but her presence made Kali feel strangely uneasy and she felt it best not to disturb her reverie by knocking and saying ‘hi’.

  The most dangerous section saved itself for last. The ‘bridge’ between the wing she was on and the wing she needed to reach was a stretch of flat rooftop filled with lightning rods that caught the raw power of the heavens and transmitted it to the sub-levels of the complex and the Old Race technology in use there. The violent night meant that bolts of lightning were striking one or more of the rods every few seconds and, threatening to overload, the rods were subsequently discharging the strikes to other rods, causing arcs of bright blue energy to flit between them randomly. There was no way Kali could predict a safe route and a single touch would burn her to a crisp, and so the only thing she could do was trust in her reactions, pray to the gods, and run like the hells.

  Her brain buzzed heavily, feeling like lead, as she rolled, somersaulted and flung herself through the deadly and ever moving web but she made it, the only sign of her running the gauntlet a scorched and smoking bodysuit with a few slashes across the arms and one particularly revealing one on her arse that was going to give Dolorosa a dicky-fit the next time she snook home.