Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  The thieves guild leader stared at her through the dancer’s tassel now draped over his head. Kali noticed it was labelled PROPERTY OF HELLS’ BELLIES. Meanwhile, someone at the back of the room snickered.

  “Original enough for you?” Kali said.

  Pim coughed and, after a second, coughed again. “I don’t know how you did that but you pass, Miss Hooper.” He stared down at her now-bared legs. “By the gods,” he breathed, “I could use someone like you on my team.”

  “Sorry, I work alone,” Kali said, smiling. “Now, about your help. The Forbidden Archive. How the hells do I get in?”

  Pim stared at her, knowing that, his agreement witnessed, he had no choice but to accede to her request. He nodded and led Kali back to the ballroom, but this time to a large table lain with maps and plans of all kinds. The pile reminded Kali of her captain’s chest back home and, as was the case with her own papers regarding places that seemed too much of a challenge, Pim found what he was after buried right at the bottom of the pile. He swept away the less challenging plans to reveal a set of architectural drawings that looked to have been there for years, but that didn’t matter because what they showed had not changed.

  It was the inner workings of the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige.

  Pim slammed a gloopy bottle on the corner of the document to keep it flat, and Kali wondered if it contained the remains of the Three Towers’ last victim, perhaps kept as a reminder of the difficulty of the task at hand. He traced the confused patterns of lines on the paper – standard builders’ marks and strange swirls that had to denote magical input – with his finger, frowning, remembering. “Big John Sinclair went in here... Hamish the Pumps here, and Nimble Neil Halliwell,” his finger made a circle and stabbed down, “right here. As I said, none returned. At least, not in their original condition.”

  “So we can safely assume that whatever traps took them down are still in place in those areas,” Kali said. “That could be an advantage – knowing what to expect.”

  Pim drew in a sharp breath, shook his head. “You might know the what of them, but not the where or when. Whatever did for them did for them quickly, and the trigger could be anything – weight, motion, sweat, breath, noise...”

  “Difficult to counter all of those,” Kali observed. She studied the plans, the bridges that connected the towers, what appeared to be the location of the Forbidden Archive in the third tower, then lowered her own finger. “What about this conduit here?”

  Pim smiled. “You have a good eye for possibility. That was exactly what I was going to suggest to you. Its purpose isn’t specified on the plans but from what we can tell it’s some kind of alchemical dump shaft that empties into the sewers – dangerous but potentially difficult to trap as any waste potions might have, shall we say, unforeseen side effects on the thaumaturgical triggers. But there’s a problem – the laboratories dump their waste regularly, every half an hour. The length of that conduit, you’d need to move fast. Very fast.”

  “All those wands, you’d think they’d just make the waste disappear,” Kali sighed. “All right, fast I can do. Question is, will it get me safely inside?”

  Pim traced the conduit’s route. “See for yourself. Once through the conduit you’ll be inside their perimeter defences. I don’t know what you’ll find after that but, with luck, you should be able to reach the stairs to the third tower.”

  “Any guards to worry about? Patrols?”

  “Trust me, this place doesn’t need them. It’s deadly, how many times do I need to tell you that? So I ask you again – are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Mister Pim,” Kali said seriously, “I really don’t have any choice.”

  For once, Jengo Pim stared nowhere but at her eyes, and, whatever the thieves guild leader saw there, a new note of respect crept into his voice. “Fine,” he said, handing her the plans from the table. “Take these in case you need them – it’s meant to be a maze in there. Also take whatever equipment and tools you think you’ll need for the job. There’s just one other thing. Kris Jayhinch goes with you.”

  Kali stared at Pim’s lieutenant. “What? No chance.”

  “Every chance, Miss Hooper. If you succeed in this suicide mission – which I seriously doubt – then the Grey Brigade gets a share of the loot you find.”

  “I’m not after loot. I’m after information.”

  “Then there’ll be all the more loot for us.” He gestured to Jayhinch. “There is no discussion in this matter – take Kris with you or you do not leave.”

  Kali sighed heavily. “Fine. But I lead and he follows. And he looks after his own back.”

  Pim nodded. In truth it was Jayhinch looking after her back that for some inexplicable reason had become his greater concern. “Understood.” He waved his arm to indicate the equipment racks. “Now, is there anything you need?”

  Kali pursed her lips, remembering Orlana Dawn at the Spiral of Kos. “You wouldn’t, by any chance, have one of those dark silk bodysuits?” she said.

  KALI AND JAYHINCH left after dark, negotiating alleyways doubly shadowed by the night’s azure gloom, until they came to a sewer entrance beneath the looming towers. Jayhinch pulled back a cover with a grating sound, then staggered back coughing as the area was suffused with a cloying and unnatural stench. What materials made up the stench Kali had no idea, but whatever they were they made the hole before them pulsate with an array of colours that looked considerably less than healthy.

  There was a flushing sound that began high above them and, giving it a little time to clear, Pim’s lieutenant gestured for Kali to drop inside the hole. “Twenty nine and a half minutes,” he said. “You did say you wanted to go first?”

  Kali did, manoeuvring her landing to avoid a rainbow sludge that was evidently the result of the purge from the towers, then a half-splash from behind her signalled that Jayhinch had joined her not so successfully in the mire. Wiping something that fizzed like acid from his boot, he then moved with her to a grate at the sewer’s end – a grate smeared with the thicker contents of discarded experiments from above. Avoiding contact, the pair prised it away with disgust, and then began to climb a conduit that rose upwards, aware that they had just entered the Three Towers’ outer wall. The knowledge made them move with increased caution but, however cautious they were, there was no way to prevent what happened next.

  Kali wasn’t sure what alerted her to the danger, whether it was some slight click or a subtle disturbance in the air, but something did – though unfortunately all she had time to do was shout a warning and then throw herself down. Kris Jayhinch was not as quick.

  There was a whooshing crack and Kali kept her head low while whatever threat accompanied the noise passed. She heard an agonised cry and then an odd crackling sound that chilled her to the bone.

  She turned to look back. Jayhinch was exactly where he had been a moment before but he would not be accompanying her any further. Arms outstretched towards her, eyes staring blankly and mouth wide in a silent scream, the now grey-coloured lieutenant blocked the conduit as still as a statue.

  And with good reason. Pim had evidently been wrong about there being no traps here.

  Kris Jayhinch had been turned to solid stone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  KALI BLEW OUT a long breath to calm herself, fully aware of how Jayhinch’s fate could so easily have been her own. The unwanted thieves guild companion Jengo had thrust upon her had proved himself useful, yes, but in a way she would never have asked for, never have desired.

  A gorgon trap was no way for anyone to go. The invidious magic could perhaps be thought merciful if it caused petrification in an instant, but Kali had heard that sometimes it took the internal organs – and most perversely the brain – as long as a day to fully turn to stone.

  One minute in, one man dead – or as near as made no difference. That kind of put the Three Towers’ quagmire cards on the table. No – it slammed them down with all the arrogant confidence of a winnin
g bogflush, in fact. Suddenly the Three Towers seemed less of an entertaining, professional challenge and more the indiscriminating deathtrap that the thieves guild leader had threatened it would be. From here on in, if she didn’t want to share Jayhinch’s fate, she was really going to have to watch her step.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly to his immobile form, trying not to notice how a section of his skull – almost scalpless as a result of the lethally traumatic magic – remained as yet unpetrified and glistening, a bloody reminder of the man he’d been only moments before. She stared into his agonised, frozen eyes, wondering if Jayhinch heard her inadequate words, and then turned and continued on alone.

  She didn’t get far before the next of the defences hit. She experienced a sensation almost like a swoon, and then suddenly the conduit seemed to stretch away endlessly ahead of her, wavering slightly in her vision. Kali craned her neck and looked behind her, seeing that the conduit stretched into the distance that way, too, seemingly without end. But something was clearly wrong with the picture – apart from the fact she knew she hadn’t crawled that far, the remains of Jayhinch were nowhere to be seen along its yawning length. It was also obvious to her that what she saw could not be real because the Three Towers, individually or as a whole, were simply not that expansive.

  The sight that met her eyes, therefore, had to be some kind of illusion. An infinity illusion. But she couldn’t see the point of such a trap. Any intruder who made it this far was unlikely to be dissuaded from progressing further as they’d know what they saw wasn’t real, so why bother unless –

  Unless it was a delaying tactic, meant to confuse while –

  Kali’s mind raced, wondering which way to go. Her natural inclination in such close confines would be to flatten against the floor as she had not long before, but the mages of the Three Towers clearly liked to play, to twist things, and dropping to the floor seemed wrong – wrong! Instead, she slammed her hands and feet against the conduit walls and with a grunt quickly heaved herself up above the floor, hoping to hells she’d made the right choice. At the exact moment she did a wave of ice hurtled towards her from along the conduit, turning the metal beneath her blue-white and sizzling and cracking it with cold. Limbs trembling with the effort it took to keep herself suspended, Kali hung above it, swallowing as she watched her breath condense into crystals over the super-chilled metal only a few inches below. The cold was spreading up the curve of the conduit, too – she could feel it in her palms, and, if she didn’t let go soon, she’d be bonded to the metal so badly the only way to break the grip would be to rip the flesh off her palms.

  Thankfully, the magically generated ice vanished as quickly as it had appeared, presumably because its job, for those with slower reactions, would have been done. Kali lowered herself back to the conduit floor with a groan, rubbing her palms to restore circulation to the throbbing skin, then did the same to her nose to alleviate a touch of frostbite.

  She proceeded upwards, finding that the conduit levelled out some now, and as a result found her feet squelching in patches of alchemical waste that had not been fully flushed away. She avoided the muck as much as she could, stepped lightly and quickly through that which she could not, spurred to such action by the small skeletal remains of floprats who had chanced to crawl here. The remains of the rodents hadn’t just been eaten away, their skeletons had been twisted and changed.

  Her slightly increased pace made Kali no less aware of the danger around her, and she deftly avoided the triggers for another couple of traps – one apparently designed to release a cloud of living biomagical toxin into the conduit, another – which she purposefully triggered once she’d passed by – to make that section of the conduit momentarily discorporeal, meaning anyone unfortunate enough to be traversing it at the time would become part of the conduit on a permanent basis.

  Pits of Kerberos! These guys really are bastards.

  She continued on, relieved to find that at last the traps seemed to have stopped. Quite right, too, because anybody who had made it this far bloody well deserved to make it the rest. She couldn’t relax until she was out of the conduit, however – the number of delays she’d suffered had eaten into the time she had for safe passage, and she reckoned she had less than a minute left before the alchemical laboratories were purged.

  She hurried, the seconds ticking, and spied at last the access hatch marked on the map. The moment she reached it she heard dull, echoing rumblings from above, and grabbed quickly for the hatch wheel to swing it open.

  Thread magic coursed through her, a crackling storm of blue energy that paralysed her momentarily before blowing her off her feet and slamming her into the conduit wall. Kali groaned and slipped to the floor, and lay there stunned, bucking and spasming involuntarily as small discharges continued to spark off her body.

  Dammit, one last trap. They’d lulled her into a false sense of security and caught her unawares.

  One thing she couldn’t help but be aware of, though, were the noises. The echoing rumblings from above had become a series of metallic clangs, and as she lay there she realised with a dull knot of fear that the drop-hatches from the labs were opening.

  Gods! She had to move now! Only she couldn’t, not an inch. Not even to thump the conduit in frustration. Annoyingly, all she could do was dribble.

  Dammit, Hooper, come on, come on. You’ve been an idiot, but do you want to die here? Do you want to die and prove Jengo Pim right?

  The conduit filled with the sound of sloshing.

  Hooper, she screamed inwardly, do you want to fail the old man?

  Kali roared with exertion and, consciously forcing every movement of her body, lurched forwards, twisted the hatch wheel and heaved the cover open just in time. The last thing she saw before she dived head first through the hatch and it clanged shut behind her was a raging torrent of rainbow sludge.

  She plummeted with a yell and thudded onto the floor below as if she had just been birthed by a pregnant mool, embryonic, twitching and covered in splashes of gunk. After a second she thrashed the gunk away, but stayed down while her spasms subsided, coughing and retching loudly. Only then did she perceive where she was – the middle of a corridor in the first tower – and lying there exposed and all but helpless, it occurred to her that her entrance had not exactly been the stealthy one she’d planned. She comforted herself, however, with the fact that the last trap would have killed – or at least hammered the final nail into the coffin of – anyone less bloody-minded than she.

  She frowned, wondering. Was it just bloody-mindedness that had got her out of there? Or was it something to do again with the changes happening to her, the things that made her able to do the things she did? One thing was certain – now was not the time to think about it.

  Kali groaned and picked herself up. The corridor in which she’d landed was a shimmering, smooth affair and, thankfully, empty, though it felt oddly not so. The corridor thrummed quietly to itself, as if the power of the Three Towers were contained within its walls, and Kali had the uneasy feeling that, while she saw no one, she was not alone. She felt as if she were being observed from all angles, almost as if she were being watched by the building itself, which, considering the nature of the place, it was just possible she was. Nothing happened as a result of her feeling, though, and she wondered if perhaps it was just a magical suggestion that hung in the air, designed to unnerve anyone who shouldn’t be here. Even so, it was pitsing creepy.

  Pulling out Jengo’s map, she orientated herself and crept slowly forwards, thankful for the fact there’d been no alarms. She’d had more than enough alarms in Scholten. She began to weave her way through a maze of corridors towards the stairs that would lead her upwards and from there, across the bridge, to the third tower and her destination. The Forbidden Archive.

  Despite Jengo’s concerns, she moved with relative ease. Now that she was within the outer defences, there was little to be wary of in the way of traps, and as most League members were busy blowing up or
dissolving things in the labs she passed, they presented little problem. Those mages that she did encounter in her path she simply avoided, a task made easier by the fact that in their flowing and colourful patterned robes it was easy to spot them before they chanced upon her.

  Those robes. She found it perverse how these bastards still garbed themselves in the garish showbusiness style of parlour entertainers when their business was no longer entertainment but death. Still, she couldn’t help but think that one or two of them were wasted here in the towers and should actually put themselves up for sale as a nice pair of curtains.

  As she moved steadily on, only one thing hampered her – here and there certain corridors were blocked by shimmering curtains of different coloured energy and, while the mages moved through them with ease, presumably having protected themselves against whatever the energies did, a stray floprat that attempted to follow ended up as a small puddle of fur and blood. Kali did not want to chance her arm – or any other part of her body – by emulating it. Instead, she found the bottom of the stairs by a different route.

  Following echoing, whispering corridors, they appeared before her at last, and Kali looked up their spiralling heights and cursed. According to the map, the connecting bridge to the Forbidden Archive could be found on the thirty-fifth floor. There was no lift. The hells with a lift, she thought. These guys were mages so why hadn’t they magicked some kind of... lifty-uppity zoomy tube? But they hadn’t, had they? No. Knowing her luck, they probably just spouted some kind of incantation that stopped them getting absolutely bloody knackered.