Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  She began the long ascent, but it soon became clear that she would never make it all the way up without being detected – the stairs were simply too busy with mages crossing between floors. There was only one alternative. Much as she hated the idea of having to take one on, Kali secreted herself in an alcove near the base of the steps, reasoning that the best way to tackle a mage would be to surprise him from behind. This she did, waiting until she caught one alone then, as he passed cracking him on the head and catching him as he dropped. His robe came off in one.

  The body concealed in the alcove, and suitably attired, Kali continued quickly on. She did not want to be anywhere near him when he woke up.

  Thirty-five storeys later she emerged gasping through an exit into the open air, which led directly onto the bridge she wanted. Thirty-five storeys was a dizzying height and Kali expected a worse buffeting than she had received above Scholten, but to her surprise the bridge was totally calm and silent, protected, she assumed, by some invisible magical canopy. Made sense, she thought, smiling. After all, if they needed to visit the archive the last thing the League’s mages needed was a nasty draught up their robes disturbing their forbidden musings.

  Had Makennon got some of her own information from here? Kali wondered. After all, if ever a place needed to be infiltrated by a sender, this was it. The bridge leading to the Forbidden Archive looked harmless enough but Kali had by now seen enough of the things to recognise that the barely visible but variously coloured curtains of shimmering and sparkling energy that separated the bridge into sections promised something nasty the moment she tried to step through them. These were particularly powerful, no doubt about that – she could feel them buzzing in her brain.

  She studied the bridge. It had no walls or railings and, naturally enough, no conduits, no side passages and no ledges. None, in other words, of her usual shortcuts. She tentatively touched where she imagined the magical canopy to be, and while her hand moved through it with ease, she guessed that if she passed through it completely there would be no way back in.

  Handy enough for suicidal sorcerers but useless as far as she was concerned.

  She had to admit, she felt stymied. There was no way across without indulging in some serious lateral thinking. She was beginning to think she was completely out of laterals when, fortunately, one arrived in the form of a mage coming through the door behind her. As soon as she heard the door open Kali twisted to the side and flattened herself against the wall, watching as a League member came through and began to amble across the bridge, seeming almost to float in his long robe. His relaxed attitude made her presume that he was not about to be frozen, incinerated or generally done to death by any of the traps so, like his brothers below, he had to have some kind of protection about him.

  Normally, she would not have welcomed his presence at all, but this, she hoped, was her way through. She had to take the gamble, there was no other choice. She had to stick to him as close as a second skin. Used as she was to sneaking about places, she was about to find out just how stealthy she could be.

  As the mage moved past her, Kali moved into step behind him, a living shadow, crouched but moving on tiptoe, matching his every move. As his left leg moved, so did hers, as his right, the same. Every pause, every hesitation and every subtle twist and turn of the mage’s body was matched perfectly as he – and she – passed through the first of the defensive curtains and she felt nothing other than a slight fluttering in her muscles. But that she felt even that while she was protected proved her suspicion of how powerful these final traps were.

  Two curtains, three curtains, four. Her plan was working – and then it wasn’t. She was one curtain away from the end of the bridge when the mage stopped dead in his tracks, causing Kali to wobble and almost bump into him it was so unexpected.

  There was what seemed to be an eternal pause. What are you doing? she thought. Come on, come on, tell me what you’re doing.

  The mage patted a pocket of his robe, shook his head in self reprimand and tutted loudly.

  He’s forgotten something, Kali thought. The bloody idiot’s forgotten –

  Oh, cra –

  She moved as he did, a hundred and eighty degrees in perfect silence and synchronisation, staying in the same position behind him all the time. She couldn’t believe she managed it, but she did, and the mage didn’t even have a clue she was there. Though outwardly calm and in control, as Kali watched him walk back the way that he had come, she was surprised he didn’t hear her heart threatening to burst out of her chest.

  He disappeared through the door and she was left trapped between the last two curtains.

  She threw her hands in the air and walked quickly around in a circle. There was no way forwards, no way back – and absolutely nowhere to hide when Mister Duh! Forgot My Head returned.

  Idiot!

  There had to be a way through – and she had to work out what it was fast. The first step was finding out what kind of trap she was looking at. Kali quickly tore a small patch from her dark silk bodysuit and tossed it at the curtain. There was a zuzzz, a puff of smoke and then nothing – the patch was gone. This was some kind of electrical trap and if she tried to step through she’d end up doing a dance that would put the Hells’ Bellies to shame.

  A very brief dance.

  Dammit! She wasn’t going to find out the location of the keys this way.

  The keys, she thought, something nagging at the back of her brain. These differently coloured curtains with their different magics – surely the mages couldn’t constantly invoke protection against each? What, then, if they instead carried with them some kind of key? She hadn’t seen anything actually being used and so what could it – ?

  She looked down. The pattern on her stolen robe scintillated slightly, more so when she moved closer to the curtain. Gods, she thought, was that why the mages still wore them – because the robes themselves were the keys?

  Again, it was a gamble, but if she didn’t take it she was stuffed anyway. Kali took a deep breath and walked slowly forwards, passing through the energy field with ease.

  She cringed. All the effort she’d put into marking Mister Duh! Forgot My Head when she could have passed through any time.

  Idiot!

  She opened the door ahead of her and she was inside at last. The Forbidden Archive.

  Her eyes narrowed.

  Or... not.

  What in the hells was this? Kali wondered, aghast. There was nothing here. After all her effort, the upper half of the third tower was an empty chamber, completely featureless apart from a solitary, podium-like structure at its centre and a red glow that suffused the place and seemed to emanate from the walls.

  Okay – if this had been a guided tour, then she’d have demanded her money back.

  She moved towards the podium, her footfalls clattering despite the fact she wore shnarl-hide soles. Of all the things she had encountered so far it was the clattering that made her shiver. This place was weird.

  Kali mounted the podium and found it inscribed with a number of symbols, none of which she recognised, the symbols being magical not linguistic, and not her area of expertise. She pressed one, then another, and then each in turn, but nothing happened. She tried a different order and, again, nothing. On her fourth unsuccessful attempt she threw up her arms in frustration, then quickly stepped back as the air in front of her seemed suddenly to change. Then, spiralling down seemingly from thin air above came a number of tiny shapes that began to gather before her eyes, and as they did an object began to assemble itself from these tiny building blocks. Some kind of container – elven by the look of it – marked with the familiar circular symbol of their race.

  Kali moved her hand forwards to touch the container but found nothing there.

  An idea struck her, and she waved her hands again. As rapidly as it had appeared, the container disassembled itself and spiralled back towards the heights of the chamber, replaced by another object spiralling down and assembling itself in it
s place. This time it was a manuscript containing, by the look of it, some kind of outlawed spell.

  Kali’s gesticulations became more varied, and she dismissed and summoned more and more objects, each redolent to some degree of evil and possessed of an ominous aura. She had no idea what magics were involved, but it was becoming clear to her what was happening here – the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige obviously considered the collection of the Forbidden Archive too dangerous to keep physically in one location and so had devised this method of virtually retrieving each object for study from elsewhere – perhaps some plane that could not be physically reached at all.

  It was an indication of their power and it was wondrous, but it did her very little good. How out of all the collection was she meant to find what she needed, because if she had managed to summon the items she had at random then the collection itself had to be immense, with infinite combinations of symbology. And hells – she didn’t even really know what it was she was looking for.

  There had to be a way of narrowing it down. Kali looked at the symbols on the podium again, reasoning that not even the League’s mages could reasonably be expected to remember every combination, and that maybe they were subdivisions – some kind of cataloguing system. Instead of pressing it this time, she replicated the first symbol on the podium with arm movements, feeling what she had missed before, some kind of receptive magical field slightly thickening the air, and a second later a box not dissimilar to the first she had summoned assembled itself. Kali took a gamble and tried waving it on, and to her surprise the gesture worked – another curiosity assembling itself in its place. But she was clearly in the section for artefacts when what she wanted was manuscripts. She replicated the next symbol – spells – and the next – ancient relics. Only on the fourth and last did she find what she was looking for, or at least a place to begin.

  Kali’s gesticulations increased in pace and she began to summon, study and dismiss manuscript after manuscript, growing more and more adept with the practice until she looked as if she were conducting some complex symphony. She found she was able to pull writings towards her for closer study, turn them around or upside down to seek hidden illuminations and, in the case of actual tomes, flip from page to page with ease. The number of ancient documents stored astounded her, but her joy at discovering such a treasure trove was tempered by the knowledge that she had no time to truly study any but those she sought. Having still not found them and increasingly aware that the forgetful mage could return at any time, her efforts became more urgent, a degree of frustration creeping in as she hurled each document on with a snap of her hand.

  Then suddenly, there. Images similar to those Slowhand had described from Makennon’s archive in Scholten. There, on the first manuscript she saw, and on more following, diverse and variously decomposed references presumably collected here from different sources and different times.

  Kali stopped cycling, hands moving slowly so that she could fold back and forth between the most telling documents, an illuminated manuscript, a map, and what appeared to be some ancient bard’s tale of events. It was all there just as Slowhand had said. The hellsfire, the damnation, the vast horde marching under what appeared to be the crossed-circle banner of the Final Faith – not to mention the people kneeling before the horde in apparent worship. Also, looming over them in the background, a figurehead that could have been a representation of the Lord of All – what Makennon believed to be the horde’s leader – but to less subjective eyes could equally have been anything else, including, troublingly, a gigantic and stylised version of your typical – how could she put this? – small, warlike person.

  In fairness, Kali could see how Makennon had inferred what she had, but there were things here the woman must have been blind not to notice, that leapt off the pages and were simply wrong. For one thing, as had occurred to Slowhand, it seemed to her that the kneeling figures were not human, their physiognomy, though stylised again, more Old Race, elf and dwarf. For another, it struck her that they were not kneeling in worship but in supplication, praying to the marching horde and its leader, not for their help in divine ascension but for their mercy.

  All of this, of course, was a matter of perception, but as Kali studied the text of the illuminated manuscript and then cycled to the bard’s account, it became more a matter of interpretation. She was fluent in neither dwarvish or elvish – hells, who was? – but she had over her explorations picked up enough bits and pieces to recognise key words and put together the bones of a story.

  The... middle times? A war between a clan of dwarves and a family of elves... dwarven defeat... no, near-annihilation. Survivors... and a sorcerer. Belatron? Belatron the Black? The Butcher? Anyway... a war machine... a leader... built to avenge... no, to satisfy?... the dwarven dead. But something wrong. Yes... something gone horribly wrong... a massacre. More death than in the war itself... genocide for both elf and dwarf... and a desperate alliance to stop it...

  Kali blew out a breath. That, as far as she was concerned, clinched it – mostly. Everything here tallied with what Merrit Moon had told her, and was, in turn, totally at odds with what Katherine Makennon believed. The only thing she couldn’t understand was why the symbol of the Final Faith and its prominence was on not one but two of the manuscripts she studied? Surely this was no representation of the Final Faith’s future, it was a warning to everyone on the peninsula from the past.

  So much for the history. Merrit Moon had wanted her to stop this thing and what she needed to do was find the information relevant to the here and now, to the threat they faced. She cycled to the map and studied it. The old man had said that between them the elves and the dwarves had built four containment areas for the keys, and there they seemed to be, marked in four widespread locations by two circles and two crosses, each with a representation of a key drawn in above. Why they were not marked by four circles or four crosses, instead of both, Kali wasn’t sure, but she supposed the differing symbols were simply elven and dwarven equivalents of X marks the spot. Yes, she thought, remembering the runic circles at the Spiral of Kos, because as one of the circles here lay in the Sardenne Forest at the approximate location where the Spiral had been, that had to be what they were. Knowing that, even though the map was old and parts of the peninsula coastline looked different, she should be able to extrapolate the locations of the other keys from there. Only one thing confused her – the small amount of text on the map made passing reference to five keys not four. Had the old man been wrong and there was actually another, missing location? No, that didn’t make sense – the map itself contradicted it. What, then, if there was a fifth key needed to access Orl itself? Yes, that could be it, even though there was no indication of a location for a fifth key on the map. Dammit, she thought, looking at the text again, she wasn’t that good so maybe she’d just interpreted it wrong.

  She had to concentrate on the matter at hand. She possessed the rough locations for the four keys but, for insurance, she needed the location of Orl itself. If this map, for whatever reason, had been meant to be some kind of overall guide, then it had to be here. Somewhere.

  Kali took a deep breath and studied the map again, something nagging at her. Suddenly she pulled it towards her for a closer view of the key in the Sardenne. The whorls in the ornate head of the key looked familiar, and with good reason – the drawing was a stylised map of the topography of the area centred on the Spiral of Kos, a more detailed map of its location! But important as that was, there was something else – some of the whorls on the key seemed extraneous, nothing to do with the local topography and seeming to belong somewhere else entirely. Her heart thudded as she realised she was looking at part of a map within a map.

  She waved her hand, flipping the document from side to side and slightly up and down, pulling it towards her to zoom in on each key in turn. For the moment she ignored the locations of the containment sites each gave, concentrating instead on the extraneous whorls, overlaying each set in her mind. Together,
they formed a topography she recognised, part of the peninsula far to the west.

  Kali zoomed to that part of the map. There did appear to be some kind of site marked, but the map was damaged around it, barely legible, and the marking could apply to anywhere within a number of leagues. But what she could make out appeared again to be the symbol of the Final Faith.

  No, she thought, that had to be wrong! Because if it wasn’t, what would that mean? That Makennon was right? That she was destined to find Orl?

  There was something else that shook her, too – more dwarven text, but text that made no reference to the site being called Orl but... Mor... Mar... no, it was no good, she couldn’t make it out.

  Pits of Kerberos, she’d come in search of answers and all she’d found were more questions. But at least she had a rough location, and that would do as a start. She zoomed again, searching for landmarks that might help further, but then everything before her eyes suddenly faded. Kali blinked. The Forbidden Archive was a featureless red chamber once more.

  “Find anything of interest?” a voice asked.

  Kali spun and found herself facing a bearded figure who had to be Mister Duh! Forgot My Head. Only, seeing him from the front, his eyes and expression did not strike her as forgetful at all but instead rather threatening and intense.

  Disliking tackling them head on or not, Kali didn’t know what else she could do. She rushed the mage, intending to silence him before he could alert others of his kind, but with a sweep of his hand the man did something with the air in front of him and she found herself bouncing back off an invisible field of force that felt like rubbery water. She flung a fist at him instead, hoping that would penetrate, but another sweep of the hand wove a different thread and, this time, she was slammed back and away from him, without any physical contact at all.