Engines of the Apocalypse

by Mike Wild

  Beside him, Cardinal Kratos accepted and read a scroll handed to him by a messenger. His expression turned grim. "Faith riders report that more of the Pale Lord's forces have launched assaults on most of the settlements within twenty leagues of the Sardenne, and are moving farther afield. We believe we are looking at the total loss of Verity, Rasoon, Prayer's End, and countless communities, including Gargas."

  "What about the rest of it?" Kali interrupted. There was something very wrong going on here. "That... phantasm that came for Makennon and the other twelve? This... pillar of souls? Where do they fit in? It doesn't make sense."

  Freel sighed. "Are you suggesting an alternative theory?"

  "No, but you asked for my help, so give me time and I'll have one."

  "How much time?"

  Kali faltered. "I think it has something to do with the speed at which the pillar of souls is rising. I think its meant to touch Kerberos. And I think whatever is going to happen will happen then." She paused, calculating. "Three days. Give me three days and I'll shut down your machines and find out what you need to know."

  Freel was silent for a few moments, considering. "Agreed. But in the meantime, I have no choice but to convene a council of war."

  "You do that," Kali said. "But there's one other thing."

  "Oh?"

  "I want Killiam Slowhand to be in on this too. Fitch has him and I want him released."

  Freel's expression was unreadable. But he nodded briskly.

  "Under no circumstances!" Querilous Fitch objected. "The man is insane, a killer!"

  Kali smiled. "That he is. And a very good one. But he only kills those who deserve it."

  "No," Fitch insisted. "I refuse."

  Cardinal Kratos and General McIntee regarded the psychic manipulator with distaste. McIntee was the one who voiced their thoughts. "The decision is not yours to make, manipulator. In the absence of the Anointed Lord we are responsible for decisions for the good of the Faith." He turned to Kali. "Very well. I'll have him brought up from the cells."

  A few minutes later, Slowhand appeared in the doorway, and immediately tried to lunge for Fitch, but Kali, standing unnoticed beside the door, grabbed his arm and pulled him back. The archer turned on her, ready to lash out, but froze as he saw who he was facing.

  "Hooper?"

  "Slowhand."

  "How you doing?"

  "Just for a change, working for the Final Faith. And so are you."

  "Nice company," Slowhand said. He paused, then his eyes narrowed. "This is something to do with what happened to Makennon, isn't it?"

  "Uh-huh. The Faith think their First Enemy is planning some kind of invasion."

  "Him again? Who is this First Enemy guy?"

  "The Pale Lord."

  "Ah," Slowhand said. "Oooooh." He looked in Kali's eyes, then leaned forward to whisper in her ear. "Is he?"

  "He's planning something," Kali whispered back, "but nothing about this feels right to me. Keep smiling, anyway."

  Slowhand did. "So we need to sort this out, right? So where are we off? The Prison of Pain? Ranson's Remains? The Mound of Thunder?"

  "Actually," Kali responded, "to the library."

  "The library?" Slowhand repeated, not sure that he had heard right.

  "We need to do some research."

  "The library," Slowhand said again, deflated. "You know, one thing about working with this woman is there's never a dull moment."

  The Hall of Proscribed Knowledge, the largest of the collections in the Final Faith library, was situated in a wing of the cathedral all of its own. The vast depository was packed with shelves towering as high as the ornate architraves and each shelf, in turn, was crammed to bursting with tomes of all shapes, sizes and provenance, the evident age and titles of many of which almost made Kali drool. The ones set in elven or dwarven script, particularly.

  The books on the lower shelves were reached through a claustrophobic and labyrinthine network of narrow passageways which jinked left and right unexpectedly and along which two people could not walk abreast. These, however, were the more common tomes, and the loftier ones - literally and metaphorically - were accessed by a precarious and dizzying network of crooked and seemingly unlinked metal stairways that reminded Kali of a structure she'd struggled for weeks to scale in a recurring dream. As she had in the dream, she wondered quite how it was they managed to stay up. She doubted magic, because from the moment she and Slowhand had entered she'd sensed the library was somehow isolated from the rest of the cathedral, and whatever sorceries or technologies were in use elsewhere in the complex had no place here, lest they damage the tomes. There was probably even - under normal circumstances - a dampening field in place. The contents of at least some of these books also explained why so few people were present: a cardinal here, an eminence there, and white-gowned curators whom she presumed had been thoroughly vetted before being trusted with the information in their charge. This was a domain accessible only to the Faith elite, though Kali struggled to reconcile them with the term as over the sounds of scribbling and dry parchment pages being turned, there was the occasional consumptive cough, belch and blatantly delivered fart.

  "As I said," Killiam Slowhand muttered, "never a dull moment."

  "Shhh!" A voice admonished.

  Slowhand stared at the white-gowned curator, a wizened little man about half the height of Suresight, who was as dusty as the shelves.

  "Hey, I can mutter, can't I?"

  "Shhh!"

  Slowhand shook his head and pulled Kali aside. "I don't get it," he whispered. "Why here? Surely whatever we can find here, the Filth already know?"

  "Maybe, maybe not," Kali whispered back. "I'm willing to bet there are thousands of books here that have been confiscated simply because they could be confiscated, and haven't been touched since. Hopefully we'll find something they haven't."

  The archer looked dubious.

  "Come on, Slowhand, how many people do you know who've read the entire contents of their own library?"

  "You, for one."

  "Yes, well..."

  "And Merrit Moon," Slowhand said. "Well, all apart from -"

  "The Flesh Rituals of Elven Slither Maidens? With pictures by P'Tang?"

  "Oh, yeeeah." Slowhand looked at her suspiciously. "How did you know?"

  "Because I was reading in the corner when you crept down and nicked it from his shelf."

  "Borrowed."

  "A year ago. Frankly, I'd be amazed if you can still open the thing."

  Slowhand coughed and abruptly paled. He hissed, "Wait a minute. You're not seriously suggesting we work our way through this entire place!"

  "Shhh!"

  "Will you fark off!"

  "There is no need for -"

  "Hey!" Slowhand shouted. He unslung Suresight from his back and mimed using the little man as an arrow and shooting him out a window. The curator scuttled off.

  "Not if you know what you're looking for," Kali went on. She hopped up steps and plucked a pile of tomes, dropping them on Slowhand for him to read. "But it is going to be a long night."

  Kali browsed more shelves for tomes for herself, and then she and Slowhand made their way to a reading table. Kali rolled her eyes as she flung her backpack onto the table. The bag clattered and there was a long sigh from beyond the wall of books.

  They hadn't been working long when a shadow loomed over them.

  "Need any help?" A voice asked and Slowhand looked up. Then he looked down, then up again, before stretching back in his chair, hands linked behind his head, beaming.

  "Be our guest," he said, showing all his teeth.

  Kali, too, looked Gabriella DeZantez up and down. The woman had washed off the dust of the trail and changed into a clean white surplice, its brilliance accentuating the subtle but powerful musculature beneath her bronzed skin. Kali pouted inwardly - she spent far too much time underground to get a tan like that. "You don't strike me as someone who has spent a lot of time with her head in a book," she re
sponded, after a moment.

  Gabriella smiled coldly. "You disappoint me, Kali. I'd have expected you of all people not to judge a book by its cover."

  "Oh?"

  "A girl from a backwater tavern with an over fondness for drink, an absolute disregard for authority and a tendency to repeatedly cross swords with the Final Faith? Hardly the kind of person you'd expect them to turn to for help."

  "What can I say? We go back a ways."

  Gabriella nodded. "I know, I've done some research of my own. The Clockwork King. The Crucible. Greenfinger's Wood. The Faith holds quite a file on you."

  "You surprise me. That crack about 'sex occasionally' still in there?"

  "The Anointed Lord's small attempt at a joke. She's human, too, you know, despite her calling from the Lord of All."

  "Yeah, right," Kali spat. Then she apologized. What DeZantez had shown her earlier had proven that there was at least some basis to the Faith's beliefs, even if she remained convinced that their interpretation of it was deeply suspect.

  "For the record," DeZantez went on, "I spent a good deal of my childhood in a place such as this. Not on the same scale, of course. My mother ran - still runs - the Faith archive in Andon."

  Kali raised her eyebrows. "Marta DeZantez is your mother?"

  "You know her?"

  "Not well, but I've had... occasion to consult her records. She's a good woman - non-partisan."

  For the first time DeZantez's smile warmed, and she nodded her acknowledgement, still a little uneasy.

  "Listen," Killiam Slowhand said loudly, in an attempt to defuse the situation. "Seeing as we are all in the employ of the Fil - the Faith for the foreseeable future, what say we all be friends here?" The archer patted an adjacent chair. "Sit by me."

  DeZantez stared at the proffered chair and then the archer, regarding him as she might a mollusc. "So you can pretend to read a book while you ogle my thighs? I don't think so."

  "I guess she's read your file, too," Kali said.

  "Uh-huh," DeZantez confirmed.

  Slowhand did his best to look innocent, then attempted to change the subject. "Gabriella DeZantez," he said, with his best grin. "Quite the mouthful. How about I call you Dez?"

  The swordswoman's eyes darkened. "Sure. How about I call you Slow?"

  The archer's smile faded and it was Kali's turn to smile. She indicated a seat beside herself instead. "There's a lot to get through. We'd welcome your help."

  Gabriella slid into the proffered seat. "Okay. What are we looking for?"

  "Two things. Anything about the machines, their origin and history, but particularly any mention of how they are activated and controlled. Secondly, dates and details relating to the legend of the Pale Lord, known experiments and movements, anything that might cross-reference with the Engines or this 'pillar of souls.'"

  DeZantez nodded. "Fine. Who's doing what?"

  "I'll tackle the machines, with Dez," Slowhand volunteered.

  "Nice, but how about you tackle the Pale Lord and Gabriella and I take the machines," Kali corrected. It had been a while since she had seen the archer go into a sulk, but he did as he was told, and a few minutes later three heads were buried deep inside books.

  The hours began ticking by. Kali hadn't been wrong when she'd said it was going to be a long night, and the reading table was soon stacked high with tomes from all sections of the library. Most offered nothing, and a few gave snippets of information useless by themselves. Gradually, however, and after Slowhand had been kicked twice for snoring, some snippets began to correspond and a sketchy picture emerged.

  It seemed that during one of the bloodiest times of their later history, having been routed by the increasingly powerful magic of their elven enemies, the dwarves had constructed a number of weapons or deterrents - the meaning wasn't exactly clear - said to be capable of nullifying the magic of the elves, effectively interfering with the threads manipulated by their song-magic. That interference, Kali guessed, had to be caused by the sound the machines emitted; it was possible that the sound could also interfere with other types of magic, including the barriers to the cathedral's railway tunnels, whose magical origins lay with the elves in the first place. One thing puzzled Kali, however. Although there were several references to the machines there was no subsequent mention of them having been used successfully against the elves. History, in fact, recorded that there was no such change of fortunes in the elf/dwarf wars and that they had soon after declared a truce that was to be the starting point of their third age of existence, where the Old Races had advanced their civilisations in peace. But if that was the case, one obvious question needed to be answered - why hadn't the dwarves used the machines it had clearly taken them a great deal of time and effort to develop?

  It was Gabriella who found the answer. Or at least something that pointed to an answer. Records from around the time of the machines' development spoke of severe upheaval across the peninsula, of unnatural storms and quakes, and of coastal settlements being consumed by the sea. It didn't take much of a leap to imagine that perhaps the cause of these phenomena lay with the machines themselves - that perhaps they affected more than just the threads and the dwarves had inadvertently, created some kind of doomsday weapon.

  The theory gathered credence when Gabriella came upon one further reference. It needed to be translated from the dwarven by Kali but this one gave the machines a name.

  The Engines of the Apocalypse.

  Kali sat back with a sigh. They had discovered what they were dealing with, but it was now all the more imperative they find out how these engines were controlled, and from where.

  A further number of hours research produced little on the former, but eventually Kali lit upon, of all things, a number of dwarven engineers' requisition forms buried amongst other preserved papers. Sometimes it was the small things, Kali reflected. The requisitions were for heavy construction materials, all of which were to be delivered to a particular location. The materials by themselves were no proof of any connection but the fact that the location was smack bang in the centre of the three groups of machines and had, from somewhere, acquired the name 'the Plain of Storms' sounded somewhat more promising.

  They were, however, not yet done. The more she learned, the more Kali became convinced that the Pale Lord had to be planning something other than a simple invasion of the soul-stripped. After all, what could he possibly hope to gain from a devastated peninsula inhabited solely by the near-dead? No, Redigor's use of the engines to take Makennon and the others as well as render their mages powerless against his army was part of a greater plan, she was sure, and anything they could find out about the man himself might have a bearing on it.

  "Anything, Slowhand?" Kali asked.

  The archer shook his head. "I've been through a hundred books and other than the usual guff about the Pale Lord being banished from Fayence for meddling with necromancy, then buggering off into the Sardenne to form his army of the soul-stripped, there's very little. But there is this one phrase that keeps recurring..."

  "Oh?"

  "Here they lie, still," the archer quoted.

  "Here they lie, still?" Gabriella repeated. "Any idea what that means?"

  "Reputedly, they were the last words spoken by Redigor before he entered Bellagon's Rip," Slowhand said, consulting a passage. "But who 'they' were and where they 'lie still,' nobody records."

  "Could he have been referring to the engines?" Gabriella mused. "Maybe the dwarves moved them to the Sardenne? Their equivalent of decommissioning them?"

  "Maybe," Kali said, biting her lip. "Anything else?"

  Slowhand shook his head and thumped another large, dusty tome down in front of him. He had no sooner opened it, however, than he stopped with a start, his gaze flicking to Gabriella sitting opposite him. The archer coughed, squirmed slightly, then smiled and gave her a sly wink.

  "Are you all right?" Gabriella asked suspiciously.

  "Fine," Slowhand answered, squeaking and clearing his throa
t. He jerked his head towards Kali, occupied with a new book, conspiratorially.

  "You sure?"

  "Oh, I'm sure," Slowhand said, leaning forward and whispering in Gabriella's ear. "Only I thought you weren't interested."

  "Interested?"

  "Your foot," Slowhand breathed, "on my thigh."

  Gabriella's eyes narrowed. "Mister, believe me, the only place you'll ever find my foot is between your thighs, but you'll be too busy peeling your gonads from the ceiling to enjoy it."

  "Funny," Slowhand purred, "that sounds just like something Hooper would say."

  "What sounds like something Hooper would say?" Kali joined in.

  "Oh, nothing," Slowhand said. He turned to give Gabriella another knowing glance but she'd already stood to replace some of the books on the shelves. He glanced quickly under the table, where 'her foot' was still at work.

  "Er, ladies..."

  Kali glanced up, stood and pushed back her chair with a curse. Beside her, Gabriella unsheathed her twin swords with a metallic ring that echoed throughout the vast library.

  "Shhh!" came an admonition from beyond the shelves.

  Kali ignored it. "What the hells?"

  The book which lay open in front of Slowhand, who was leaning well back and staring at it warily, was exuding something from its spine. A number of thin, black tapers were curling from the top and bottom of the book, growing by the second, one of them now fully curled around Slowhand's thigh. Multiplying and thickening, accompanied by a dry, sinister hiss, they were redoubling their interest in the archer.

  "Hooper, one of 'ems heading for my -"

  "Slowhand, get up slowly," Kali said.

  "That might be a good idea," he responded. It took him a second to react, however, the tapers having a strangely mesmeric effect on those who watched them, and it was only when the taper made a sudden dart for his crotch that he stood and kicked his chair back with a "Whoa!"

  It was, unfortunately, a little too late, and before Slowhand knew what was happening twenty or more of the things had wrapped themselves around different parts of his body and were holding him in their grip. The archer struggled against them but, with as echoing thud, they tipped him off his feet and slapped him to the floor.