Thief of the Ancients

by Mike Wild

  The old man wasn’t among them, but he was nearby. Kali found him in the doorway of the bunker where she had left Horse, talking to the beast. But her relief at the discovery that the two of them were still alive was lessened somewhat by the appearance of the old man.

  Kali bit her lip as she approached, taking in the fact that he was all but slumped in position. The shallow breathing and raised and pulsing veins on his arms, coupled with his bloodshot eyes, were testimony to the fact that he had only recently recovered from a full Thrutt transformation.

  But, by the look of things, Thrutt had sated himself before he had burned out. The bloodied and cracked remains of various k’nid covered the old man’s clothes, along with a considerable amount of blood from the old man himself.

  “We are losing this battle, young lady,” Moon breathed, wearily.

  “I know, old man.” She only hoped that those she had despatched back to the Underlook were not facing their last stand. “I know.”

  “It is good to see, however, that you have not become one of its victims.”

  Kali smiled. “Not for the want of their trying. The k’nid and the pitsing League.”

  Moon sighed. “I don’t think the latter will be a problem any longer. Observe, young lady.”

  Kali turned and, as she did, noticed two things – that all of those who were able in the makeshift hospital were turning to look the same way, and that the incessant thrumming and pounding of the fireballs from the League had ceased. And with good reason.

  As the people around her stared, muttering curses, words of disbelief or even prayers to their gods, she saw that the Three Towers had given up on its offensive. Its soaring and majestic towers were doing something she had never seen them do before, or even knew they could do. They were twining around each other, apparently for protection, looking for all the world like the tails of whipped curs.

  And, even from this distance, Kali could see swarms of k’nid skittering up their heights, scrabbling for a way in.

  “If the Three Towers has fallen, Andon has fallen,” Merrit Moon said, matter-of-factly. He eased himself up with a groan, to stand by his protégé. “It’s up to us, now, young lady. We must reach the Drakengrats and stop these things at their source, find a means to destroy them. And we must hurry.”

  “You think more of the k’nid are coming?”

  “Oh, that I don’t doubt – but more coming is not the only problem. I saw it when I fought them, when Thrutt fought them. When the k’nid have consumed a certain amount, they duplicate themselves. Their numbers are doubling at a regular rate, Kali, and eventually there will be so many that their presence will be absolute.”

  “I saw it happening. When they first stormed the walls.”

  “That isn’t all. They consume everything and their presence must already be changing the land, making it unsuitable for crops, for livestock, for any kind of habitation. Why they’re doing this I don’t know, but soon they will cover the peninsula like a living shroud and the damage will be irreversible.”

  “Gods, Merrit... how long?”

  “A week.”

  “Five days?”

  “Five days. No more.”

  Kali’s face set with determination. “Then I’d better get a move on.”

  “I?”

  “Old man, you’re in no state to –”

  “Pardon me, Miss,” one of the guards interjected. He looked exhausted. “A moment ago, your grandfather mentioned travel to the Drakengrats?”

  Despite the circumstances, Merrit Moon coughed and said something under his breath. Kali patted him.

  “He did.” Kali said, warily.

  “Then I’m sorry, but our scouts report the Vos military have closed the border at the Anclas Territories. Apparently, their population centres have taken considerable damage and their people are crowding the old war shelters, and they refuse to compound their crisis by allowing anyone from Pontaine through. All refugees are being detained at the border.”

  “They’re leaving us to our own fate,” Moon said. “Sealing us in with the k’nid.”

  “The bastards. It isn’t even their land.” Kali said.

  She considered their options. The fact was, she could probably make it through Vos’s defensive lines but it would be a tricky business. One wrong move and, in the current state of trigger-happiness Vossian retribution might encompass execution of the refugees. She couldn’t and wouldn’t risk that. But, still, she had to reach the Drakengrats. There had to be a way.

  She suddenly realised that there was. And that it might even expedite matters.

  “Would you excuse us, please?” she said to the guard, and then turned to Moon. “Old man, I need you to take Horse and get to the Flagons, take a message to Aldrededor for me.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not. You and Horse are both out of this fight but can still help by doing what I ask. I reckon Horse has one more jump in him so use it to get to the Flagons. It, er, might be a little noisy but, trust me, you’ll be safe there.”

  Moon looked puzzled, and his eyes narrowed. “What are you planning, young lady?”

  Kali told him.

  “What? O-ho, no, young lady, no.” The old man stared at her. “Impossible! It would take specialist equipment, mapping, planning, weeks of preparation. Your own research has shown what a potentially deadly maze they might be, unstable and likely collapsed at multiple points, to say nothing of the fact that you have no idea what’s down there.” He shook his head, adamant. “No, young lady, be realistic. You’ll never make it through.”

  “Since when have I been realistic, old man?” She stared at him and smiled. “Besides, as far as specialist equipment goes, I think I have just the thing.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE LOST CANALS of Turnitia.

  Kali had been planning to explore them for as long as she could remember. They were, however, a massive undertaking. Some references she had unearthed about them suggested that they went on for hundreds of leagues and, until now, somewhere between the planning and the exploration of them, something had always managed to get in the way. Last year, there had been the matter of the Red Queen, for instance, and only a few months before she’d been considering their allure when she had been distracted by the small affair of the Clockwork King. Her current circumstances were perhaps not the ideal ones in which to finally fulfil her ambition, but Kali was quietly relieved that fate had pushed her in this direction and she had to admit that she was more than a little excited by the prospect ahead of her.

  The journey from Andon had taken her a day and a half, moving slowly and cautiously through the stonewood forests of southern Pontaine, on a horse hired from the city wall stables, which she had dismounted and slapped back home when she had neared the Anclas Territories. She had used the cover of the forests not only to avoid the k’nid, but also to avoid the gaze of the surveillance scopes with which the Vossian army had equipped their forts.

  Dividing the peninsula – and thus Vos and Pontaine – like a great thick belt, the Anclas Territories stretched from Freiport in the north to Turnitia in the south, and had once been neutral farmland. After the Great War between Vos and Pontaine, however, the former had wasted no time in establishing a number of forts on the land whose official reason for existence – the protection of the Vos Empire – had always struck Kali as somewhat ironic considering that it was they who had invaded Pontaine in the first place. Whatever the politics of it, Pontaine, battered by the war, had been in no position to dispute the placements. While they remained little more than observation posts, the number of additional forts, garrisons and service structures that had grown alongside and between them over the intervening years, had transformed Vos’s presence in the area from a broken series of scattered bases to a virtual wall, over which they held complete autonomy and control. They hadn’t exercised its strategic power until now, allowing relatively free trade and passage between the neighbouring states, like Pontaine,
having no wish to precipitate another conflict, but in doing so it had become abundantly clear how insidious its growth had been to the area. Simply put, when they had closed the borders they had had the capability to do it literally. There was no way through.

  Lucky, then, that Kali hadn’t wanted to go through. All she’d had to do was make sure they didn’t see what it was that was going under it. And the two bound and gagged and struggling guards at her feet were testimony to the fact that she had succeeded.

  Kali stood, now, on one of the more remote guard towers towards the southern end of the Territories, staring through the surveillance scope with which the guards had unwillingly provided her. The looks on their faces as she had suddenly appeared before them, forty feet up in the air, had been priceless. While they weren’t to know that she had, in fact, been dangling from a strip of shadow wire at the time, their surprise had lasted long enough for her to be able to slam their heads together, disabling them before they could sound the alarm. The action had been necessary because, out of all the towers in the Anclas line, it was this one that overlooked her destination. Or, to be more accurate, the entrance to her destination; one of the huge roundels to which she had given the name dropshaft.

  That was the thing about the Lost Canals of Turnitia – they were not lost in the sense that no one had been able to find them. They were only lost in the sense that they had been long abandoned. Long, long abandoned by Kali’s reckoning. Because, as far as she could make out, the inscriptions on the dropshafts were neither elven nor dwarven and seemed to her old enough to predate both. What exactly the implications of that were, she had no more clue than she had to what purpose the dropshafts served. In all the time she had been planning an expedition to the canals, she had located three of the dropshafts, one south east of Scholten, one west, near Malmkrug, and the third here, near the coastal city of Turnitia. That Turnitia had been honoured with giving its name to the canals was not, though, in reference to this particular dropshaft but rather that – unique among the canal network – this part of the coast had once had an entrance to the canals leading in from the sea.

  Kali trained the surveillance scope to the north-east, and it was from that direction, from the Flagons, that she expected her companion to come. Anytime now.

  Sure enough, as she watched a small, though bulky and unnatural, shape appeared on the horizon and began moving towards her, weaving erratically in a way that suggested its driver was not quite used to the controls. As she had instructed in her note, the headlights of the machine had been dimmed upon approaching the Anclas Territories.

  It was time to go, to make her rendezvous. But first she had to make sure that two sets of eyes did not lay sight on something they shouldn’t. It was Merrit Moon’s old edict, told to her long ago in the Warty Witch. Certain discoveries from the world’s past had to be kept to themselves, for everyone’s peace of mind. So, to ensure the guards neither saw nor heard the approaching dwarven artefact, Kali smiled sweetly and apologized. Then she bent down and punched both guards hard on the nose, knocking them cold before leaping onto the shadow wire and lowering herself to the ground.

  Now came the hard part.

  Kali had left the actual opening of the dropshaft until the last minute because she had not wanted any Vossian patrol stumbling across it in the dark, ruining not only her privilege of being the first person to access the network in an unimaginable time, but also any chance of a successful stealth operation into the bargain. She reckoned she had perhaps fifteen minutes before the Mole reached her and in that time, she would put into practice what she had been researching ever since she had first learned of the canals’ existence.

  One of the more unusual aspects of the dropshafts was that they were sealed with a metal door containing one of the most complex locking mechanisms Kali had ever seen. It was designed, if an attempt to open it was made incorrectly, to jam the chambers in place permanently, preventing anyone ever accessing it again. One thing was certain – whoever had built these things had gone to extreme measures to ensure no unauthorised person could access them, accidentally or otherwise.

  Just what the hells were they going to such lengths to conceal?

  Reaching the dropshaft, Kali worked slowly and carefully, following the diagram in her head that she had worked out over long nights at her table by the Captain’s Chest. First, she disengaged the perimeter safeguards, then locked down the punchbolts in a predetermined order and, finally, released the chambers one by one, until the entire centre of the dropshaft door rotated counter-clockwise. She moved to the right of the metal plate, repeating the procedure – though, when it came to the punchbolts, in a different order – until, again, the centre of the door rotated, this time clockwise.

  Kali sighed with relief. There was only one thing left to do.

  Directly in the centre of the door, a circle of ten metal projections rose from the otherwise flat surface. These, she knew, had to be depressed in exactly the right order, otherwise the entire process would cancel itself out. There was only one problem – according to the ancient records she had found, the order was different for each of the dropshafts, and there was absolutely no indication of which order applied to which dropshaft. She had a one in three chance of success, so it was lucky, then, that she liked a gamble.

  Tongue sticking out of her mouth, she crouched on her haunches and tried to put herself in the mind of whoever had last – if ever – operated the projections. Then, swallowing, she plumped for the third from the left, depressing it with a strenuous groan, until it was almost flush with the surface of the plate. There, with a metallic boom, it locked into place. Bingo – but that was the easy one, because two of the sequences started with that projection. The sixth from the left, then, or the eighth, the antepenultimate one? The eighth. She was sure it was going to be the eighth, and after that it would be plain sailing.

  Be sure. Be very sure.

  Kali depressed the eighth projection. There was another metallic boom. She cast a quick glance around all the perimeter chambers and they all seemed to be remaining in place. Yes! she thought.

  Boom. Boom, boom, boom.

  The locks were cancelling.

  Shi –

  All kinds of things went through Kali’s mind, not least how stupid she had been. With her one-in-three chance of success, she had been presuming that the three sequences related to the three dropshafts she knew of, but if the sequence she was using was wrong that meant there was another one out there somewhere. This made the network potentially even bigger than she thought! The thrill she felt at the prospect was, however, rather comprehensively subsumed in the fierce rush of adrenaline produced by the realisation that she had only seconds to stop her work being in vain.

  With a grunt of exertion she flung herself across the dropshaft plate, whipping a small metal bar from her equipment belt and jamming it between the chamber bolts before they could slam shut. The collision of metal on metal vibrated the whole plate and almost took Kali’s hand off, but at least it had prevented the reverse sequence going any further. But it was not the only one. Kali back-flipped, grabbing another metal cylinder from her belt and jammed it into the second chamber feed before sighing in relief. That should have been that but Kali’s interfering with the delicate balance of the locks and chambers had clearly knocked the whole mechanism out of kilter. She looked around in disbelief as chambers and punchbolts began to engage and disengage themselves in no particular order and with ever increasing speed.

  Dammit. There had to be an order to it somewhere.

  As she leapt around blocking or freeing those bolts that looked as if they should go this way or that, Kali tried to visualise the underworkings of the dropshaft plate. Rapid calculation after rapid calculation followed, Kali flinging herself here and there like something possessed, and she was beginning to think that she’d be doing this until she dropped dead of exhaustion when there was a sudden heavy clank from beneath her.

  The plate had just released itself
.

  It began to rise.

  There was only one problem. If Kali were to keep it open she had to remain in the position she was in, a kind of crooked spreadeagle with the sole of her left foot jamming one punchbolt, the calf of her right leg another, one hand pushing upward to block yet another, and a painfully positioned elbow blocking the last. She looked as if she were posing for some strange art class.

  The plate had risen fully now, and Kali with it, and while she could not see what was beneath it, she could smell it. A dank, briny mouldiness that was redolent of the rot of ages. It made her want to gag. She didn’t, though, because her mind was taken off the desire by a prolonged and bass rumble that originated somewhere from within wherever the opened plate led.

  Or at least she thought that was where it came from. It was difficult to tell because he Mole was nearing her now, the sound of its engines drowning out everything around it. And all Kali could do was wait until it fully arrived. She was glad that she had incapacitated the guards in the watchtower because this, frankly, was embarrassing.

  The Mole manoeuvred into position beside her and, after a second, there was the hiss of its opening hatch. A tall, wiry, moustachioed and ear-ringed figure eased itself out of the hatch, took in Kali’s predicament with an amused glance, and then stroked his moustache.