by Mike Wild
An Abaddon Books ™ Publication
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First published in 2010 by Abaddon Books ™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
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ePUB ISBN: 978-1-84997-176-8
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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.
The end of the world began with a scream. A very high-pitched, girly scream.
Not Kali, then. She wasn't a girly scream kind of girl.
No, the scream in question came from her guide, one Maladorus Slack, hired only hours before in the Spider's Eyes when he'd claimed to know the location of a lost passage leading directly to the fourth level of Quinking's Depths. It was an audacious claim and it wasn't every day Kali trusted the word of some ratty little chancer in a seedy tavern, but there had been something in the way he made it - with wariness as well as greed in his eyes - that had made her take a gamble and hand over fifty full silver for the privilege of having him share what he knew.
As it turned out, it was money well spent, Slack guiding her at twilight into a cave in the hills above Solnos and, deep within, tearing creepers off an ancient cryptoblock he swore, once unlocked, would enable her to bypass the Depths' upper levels and find treasure of such value that she might, as he put it, come over all tremblous in the underknicks. Kali had been forced to have words with him about this, pointing out that it was her business what went on in her underknicks and also, while she had him pinned against the wall, that she wasn't your common or garden tomb raider doing what she did for the money. Unless her taxes were due, of course.
Later, she would feel a bit bad that Slack had spent some of his final moments being throttled, especially when she recalled the hungry roar that followed the poor sod's scream. Not that what happened to him was her fault. Nor Slack's. In fact, there was no way either of them could have guessed what was going to happen after she picked up the Claws.
Okay, okay, okay, she'd been at this game long enough so perhaps she should have known better. Perhaps, given the way things had been going until then, she should have sensed the whole thing was going to go tits up.
"This cryptoblock..." Slack had queried as she worked on the numerous etched blocks that formed the seal. The conditions in the cave were cramped, and he was balanced awkwardly between the skeletal remains of earlier treasure seekers who had found their way to the threshold, trying to ignore the fact that all their bones were utterly and inexplicably shattered. "It is some kind of puzzle, yes?"
"Not some kind of puzzle," she replied. "A very specific kind."
"You have seen such puzzles before?"
"Once or twice. Cryptoblock seals are typical of an ancient race called the dwarves."
"The Old Race?" Slack said. "Tall with pointy ears and bows?"
Kali sighed, but took time to set the man straight because he had at least heard of the Old Races, which was more than could be said of most people on the peninsula, especially out here in the sticks. "No, the other lot. Short-arsed with attitude and axes."
"But surely both are stories for the children, yes? These Old Races did not exist?"
"Oh, you'd be surprised..."
Slack sniffed. It was the kind of rattling snort where you could hear the contents of his nostrils slap wetly against his brain and Kali grimaced in distaste. But the man seemed to accept the truth of what she was saying.
"The dwarves. They were supposed to have been masters of deadly traps, were they not?"
"Not supposed."
"Then this door is a trap?"
Kali glanced at the skeletons on the floor of the cave. "Either that or these guys had a very bad case of the jitters."
Slack glanced fearfully around the cave, looking for hidden devices.
"You won't see a thing," Kali advised. "They were master engineers, too."
"You do know what you are doing?"
"Wish I did," Kali said. She ran a finger down the join between two blocks, concentrating hard, tongue protruding between teeth. "Trouble is, no two cryptoblocks are the same... springs, balances, counterbalances... you just have to feel your way around." She gasped as something suddenly sprang inside the cryptoblock and slammed together where she delved. "Farker!" She cursed, whipping out her fingers and sucking their tips. Then she almost casually grabbed Slack's sleeve and pulled him aside as a solid stone fist the size of an outhouse punched down from the cave roof onto the spot where he'd stood, reducing what remained of the skeletons to dust. With a grinding of hidden gears, the fist retracted, and Kali returned to her work, smiling slightly as Slack had, himself, come over all something in the underknicks, a small stain forming on the front of his pants.
"Sorry about that," she said, wrinkling her nose. "Might be a while."
She'd worked diligently on the puzzle well into the night, Slack staring warily about him all the time, flinching or whimpering each time there was a click, clunk or clack from the door. At last, though, there was a sound that was different to the others - somehow final - and, as he watched, Kali stood back with a sigh of satisfaction, brushing the dust off her hands.
Slack regarded her and the cryptoblock with some puzzlement, because, at first, nothing happened. Then, with a soft rumbling and puffs of ancient dust, the blocks making up the door began to punch in and out. Some then slid behind those next to them, which in turn slid in front of others next to themselves. Yet more ground up or down, obscuring or obscured by their neighbours, or simply retracted backwards into darkness, never to be seen again. The movements became faster and more complex, the cryptoblock shrinking all the time, until at last all that remained was a single block, floating in the air, which Kali grabbed and casually tossed aside. Slack found himself staring at the discarded stone.
"I do not understand," he said. "It is gone. How can it be gone?"
Kali frowned. Questions, always questions. "Translocation mechanics," she said, adding in response to his puzzled stare, "It's a dimension thing." It might well have been, for all she knew; the truth was, despite having cracked a few of these bastards, she really hadn't a clue where they went.
Luckily, Slack hadn't been interested in analysing her statement too deeply. His attention had been side-tracked by the passage that lay beyond the cryptoblock, and the ore that glittered in its walls. It was only triviam, all but worthless, but its shine held the promise of greater things, and as Slack wiped sweat from his lips with his arm, she frowned. The man might have saved her the trouble of negotiating the first three levels of the Depths, but there was a growing air about him su
ggesting that, while he'd been happy to guide her to the cryptoblock, he'd never really expected her to open it, and now that she had was having second thoughts about who deserved the treasure beyond. Her suspicions were confirmed as Slack raced ahead of her into the opening.
Kali cursed and threw herself forward, grabbing his tunic from behind - just in time, as it turned out. Slack was already skidding helplessly down a sharp incline and, now a dead weight on the end of her arm, wrenched Kali onto her stomach and pulled her down after him. The stone floor of the passage was rough beneath her, tearing her dark silk bodysuit, and grazing her exposed torso with sharp scree. She ignored the pain, concentrating instead on jamming her legs against the sides of the narrow incline in an effort to slow their progress. The walls tore at her ankles, stripping them of skin, but she ignored this,too, groaning as she stretched out her other hand to get a firmer grip on Slack. He suddenly yelped and lurched, and Kali willed all her weight onto the floor of the incline, praying for enough traction. She was yanked forward and her arms were almost pulled from their sockets, but the two of them came, at last, to a tentative stop - again, not a moment too soon. Kali sighed. Below her, Slack dangled over a seemingly bottomless abyss, too terrified to struggle or even object to the rain of stones that bounced off him, clattering down into the dark.
Kali twisted herself into a stable position and heaved him up. "Looks like I need to keep an eye on you in more ways than one," she growled.
"I was only... making sure it was safe," Slack said, breathlessly.
"Of course you were." Kali winced and rubbed her bare stomach, ignoring Slack's hungry stare. "But there are rules to this game," she added. "Rule one is watch every step."
A flash of resentment crossed Slack's face as he dusted himself down, but he turned to stare into the dark, swallowing deeply. It was not in reaction to the end he had almost met, however, but a stare of undisguised greed.
Kali joined him at the edge of the abyss, wondering fleetingly whether it might have been less bothersome if she'd just let him fall, but considering what it was they faced, it was obvious Slack could make no move without her.
As always, her research had given her some idea of what to expect when coming here, but the expectation never quite did the reality justice. The two of them were staring into a vast cavern that must have extended beneath the whole of one of the hills above Solnos, an underground expanse hung with immense stalactites and dimly lit by a strange, golden glow in front of them. The glow was the only illumination and emanated from the top of an isolated pillar of rock, maybe six feet across, which thrust thinly and dizzyingly up from the abyss. It appeared unreachable from their position. Kali bit her lip and studied her goal. She could not yet make out the source of the glow, but was sure she knew what it was. The light was pulsing, dreamlike. The glow of something magical.
Kali had no doubt that she'd found what she'd come for. All she had to do was reach it.
"There?" Slack observed incredulously. "But there is no way across!"
"Rule two," Kali said, pulling a small object from a pocket in her bodysuit. "Plan ahead."
Slack stared at a small, ornate piece of stone - some kind of key -- that Kali held in her hand, then watched her move along a narrow ledge to a carved niche. She brushed lichen away from an indentation in the stone, inserted the key and, with a grunt, turned it solidly to the right, the left, and then twice more to the right. Something grated behind the niche as, below in the darkness, something rumbled. Slack watched in amazement as another rock pillar rose judderingly from the abyss, shedding thick cobwebs, dust and the detritus of ages as it came. The top of the pillar stopped level with the ledge on which they stood, some hundred feet out into the void.
Kali withdrew the key from the niche and smiled. Slack, meanwhile, stared at the pillar and then Kali, regarding her quizzically.
"I do not understand," he said. "That is still too far away to reach."
Kali nodded. The fact was, it was too far away for a running jump, even for her. But even had she been able, she wouldn't have tried. Revealing her abilities to a man who would, for the price of a shot of boff, tell all and sundry about it was not a wise move in a backwoods such as this. It could easily reach the ear of some overzealous Final Faith missionary, and she had no wish to be dragged to a gibbet and burned as a witch. Besides, jumping would take the fun out of it all.
"Rule three," Kali said. "Be patient."
She smiled again as, from under the lip of the ledge where they stood, a scintillating plane of blue energy snaked out towards the newly risen pillar, zigzagging around the stalactites in its path to form a translucent bridge wide enough to take them both. Slack squinted, frowned, and Kali realised he hadn't a clue what he was looking at. It was easy to forget that while she'd come to live with such wonders on an almost day-to-day basis, the average peninsulan hadn't much experience of magic.
"It isn't witchcraft," she explained. "The bridge is made of something called threads."
"Threads?"
"An elven thing but the dwarves weren't averse to their use when needs suited. They -" Kali paused and contemplated. How exactly did you explain the threads of magic to a man such as Slack? "They allow you to use the world around you... to do things with invisible tools."
Slack looked enlightened. "So, I could use these tools to dig a new dump-pit?"
Kali pulled a face. "Uh, yeah, I suppose," she conceded, thinking that she was the only one digging a hole around here. "Let's move on, shall we?"
A wary Slack dibbed a toe onto the bridge, clearly not trusting its solidity, while Kali strode casually by him into the void, slapping the stalactites she passed and humming a happy tune. She reached the pillar and waited for Slack to catch up before inserting the key into a second indentation carved in its centre. This time she turned it left three times, right and then left again. There was another grating sound, and another rumbling from below.
"Six pillars," Kali explained as another rose ahead of them, "six combinations. If all are entered correctly, they form a bridge all the way to where we want to go..."
Slack sniffed. "This is really quite easy, then."
"Easy?" Kali chided as she waited for the bridge to form before skipping onto it. "You think I got this key from some adventurer's junk sale? Oh, no. This key is a complex construct of separate components, each of which was hidden in a site rigged to the rafters with every kind of trap you could imagine. These past few weeks I've been shot at, scalded, suffocated, stifled, stung, squeezed, squished and squashed, so maybe, Mister Slack, you should rethink your 'easy.'"
"And you say you're not doing this for the money?"
"Nope," Kali said. "Holiday."
"Holiday?"
"Holiday."
The fact was, she was still reeling from recent revelations about 'the darkness' coming to Twilight - so much so she'd had to get away, from friends, the Flagons, all of it. Not that there were actually that many friends around right now. Slowhand was off avenging the death of his sister, and she'd barely seen hide or hair of Moon or Aldrededor since she'd rescued the Tharnak from the Crucible - the old man, whose shop was being rebuilt after the k'nid attacks, and the pirate were spending all their time tinkering with the ship in Domdruggle's Expanse. Dolorosa had dismissed it as boys and their toys but there was a serious side to their tinkering, readying the ship for when - and for what - it might be needed. Not that she missed any of them - her holiday had been chosen specifically to keep her busy. She had, in fact, lost count of the times she'd barely avoided it becoming a funeral. In short, she'd had one hells of a time, and the acquisition of what lay ahead was the last challenge she had to face. Because what she had so far not told Slack was that forming the bridges was only half of it.
"One wrong move," she said, "and the entire mechanism resets itself. Bridges gone, pillars back where they came, carrying us with them into the depths."
Slack peered down and glimpsed something huge, white and serpentine slither throug
h the darkness. "But there is something down there! Something horrible!"
Kali looked over her shoulder, smiled. "Of course. There's always something horrible."
With the more restrained Slack in tow, Kali negotiated more bridges, coming eventually to the last one - the one to the resting place of the artefact.
This time she wielded the key but hesitated as she held it before the lock, drawing a worried glance from her companion.
"There is a problem?" Slack asked.
"No, no, no problem," Kali responded.
Well, not much of one. It was only that at this point she might most likely get them both killed. The fact was that while her studies of the dwarven key had revealed a pattern to her, she'd been sure of all the combinations except this last. The combinations represented a really quite simple series of nods to the inclinations of the dwarves' multifarious minor gods - lightning equalling from above, or up; sunrise, east, so right; sea, which at this point on the peninsula was to the west and therefore left. The problem with the last combination was that it contained a glyph for the god of wind and, frankly, that one had left her stymied. Wind, after all, could come from any direction, so how in the hells was she meant to know which was correct? In the end, she'd whittled the possibilities down to two answers - up, because the wind in this valley was predominantly northern, and down, or south, because... well, because.
Hesitantly, she inserted the key in the final niche, turned most of the combination and stopped before the final twist.
North now, or south? If she guessed wrong, the last thing she'd see would be Slack wetting himself again, and she could think of better images with which to depart the world. She stared at the odorous little man and, in doing so, made up her mind. It had to be, didn't it?
Kali turned the key south, locked it in place and, after a few seconds, the bridge appeared.
She sighed heavily; she'd gambled correctly. On a dwarven joke. A crude but effective joke, much like the dwarves themselves, and she could imagine them roaring with laughter when they had thought of it.
