by Mike Wild
Becoming swathed in so much of the stuff that she began to resemble something bored of its sarcophagus, even Kali's boundless energy was taxed as she went round and round, but she found strength in the realisation that she had to be ascending some kind of magically constructed tower hidden from the outside world by the same kind of glamour that concealed its base. She found it slightly disconcerting that, in a sense, this meant she was climbing up into thin air, but the tower felt solid enough about her. Solid and very old. Old enough, in fact, to explain the preternatural thickness of the cobwebs: this, for some reason, was the growth of thousands and thousands of years.
The tower's top was becoming visible, now, and the shadows above lightened. Not much, the kind of illumination one might expect if daylight were projecting through a number of narrow windows, but enough to suggest the presence of a chamber above.
Kali didn't know what to expect up there. But it wasn't this.
Bastian Redigor waited for her at the top of the stairs.
"Shit!" Kali shouted, and almost fell back the way she had come. Saved only by a patch of the thick, sticky cobweb, she clung to the tower for a moment, fully expecting the clang of footsteps from above, but Redigor did not appear. Very slowly, she peered back around the last turn of the stairs. "Girl," she chastised herself.
Kali climbed into a chamber dominated by a portrait of the Pale Lord. It, too, was almost entirely obscured by cobweb, as indeed was the rest of the room, but the part she could see — had seen — showed the piercing black eyes, flowing raven hair and handsome, aquiline features she was familiar with from illustrations in books. Even represented in oils, Redigor had presence, and he wore expensive robes of a fashion not seen on the peninsula for a very, very long time.
Kali drew her gaze away from the portrait, turning her attention to the chamber, and tore away blankets of cobweb. If she had been looking for information, she guessed she could pretty much say she had found it.
A desk in front of her overflowed with books, journals, scrolls, notes and charts, most of which pertained to necromancy in one way or another. The assorted papers were not limited to the desk, either. The floor was littered with more of the same, the walls covered in diagrams and maps of every size and description, including, interestingly, one of the sprawling expanse of the Sardenne. Across this Redigor had marked in sweeping scrawl the location of Bellagon's Rip.
Kali sighed. What she needed was new information. It was here, she was sure of it, but she didn't have a clue where to start digging. She decided after a second to thrust her hands into a stack of papers to see what came out.
For the next few hours Kali ploughed through notes on anatomy, alchemy, conjuration, revivification, holding and other kinds of magical constraint. She flicked through sketches of Twilight and of Kerberos, and through diagrams of what appeared to be the pillar of souls she'd seen at Scholten. There were starcharts, too — in the kind of detail she'd heard only the Final Faith's astronomer had compiled — but she had no idea why. She had no idea, either, of the meaning of endless reams of calculus, columns of figures in their thousands, that Redigor seemed to have constantly annotated in his strange, sprawling script. One document did, for a moment, seem to bear out the Faith's theory that Redigor planned an invasion — a map of the peninsula overlaid with countless thin, sweeping lines — but unless the Pale Lord planned to despatch his soul-stripped on a thousand or more fronts, it made little tactical sense.
That was the problem. All this effort and the only conclusion she had drawn was that nothing here made sense.
Gahh! She needed a break.
Dumping a batch of papers, Kali strode to one of the windows that lit the tower, stretching, and froze.
Instead of staring out high over Fayence, she was gazing on a sprawling panorama of glistening towers whose architecture she had never seen but which, after her time in Domdruggle's Expanse, was cloyingly familiar — architecture out of the distant past. Except that it couldn't be out of the distant past. It was new and thriving, figures moving along the streets below, sleek objects darting through the sky between towers, and between them a crystal clear river meandering into the distance.
It was a vast, Old Race city. An elven city. The warm breeze from it was fresh.
It was real.
The conclusion was inescapable. Somehow she and the tower in which she stood were in the past. It was incredible, not only the wonders she could see but the sorceries that must have brought it about. Maybe that was what Redigor had done with the tower, she thought. Maybe it wasn't concealed from Fayence with a glamour field because it didn't need to be. Maybe it projected itself further into the past the higher it rose.
My Gods, I'm there, she realised. The time of the Old Races. The temptation to climb out of the window, regardless of the insane height, was almost irresistible. But why would Bastian Redigor have done this? Why would he have expended the vast amounts of energy needed to stare out over a vista long gone? Maybe he just had a thing for elven architecture, she thought. Or maybe he couldn't stand looking out over the depravity in which Fayence excelled. Or maybe -
Maybe it simply made him feel at home.
Kali's heart thudded, and she spun back to face the inside of the chamber. That was what had been missing from all this, why she hadn't been able to make any sense out of what she'd studied, because all along she'd been trying to work out the plans of your average human, world-dominating necromancer. But there was much more to him than that, wasn't there?
Kali raced to the portrait, tearing away cobweb to reveal more of its detail. Of course. In pictures of himself elsewhere, Redigor had appeared as he wanted to appear, but here, in a portrait that would be seen by no eyes other than his own, he seemed almost to have taken pride in sweeping back his hair.
It was an ear thing.
Bastian Redigor was an elf.
Kali swallowed. It wasn't just the revelation that somehow this bastard had survived down the long years but what she saw in the rest of the exposed portrait.
The woman next to him bore a striking resemblance to Katherine Makennon. It wasn't her, of course, because even had she been alive when the picture was painted, there was no way Makennon would allow herself to be pictured garbed as this woman was — which was to say, in very little at all. That Redigor, smiling slightly, also held a fine chain attached to a collar about her neck, put paid to the possibility fully.
Kali's mind reeled. The woman was clearly mu'sah'rin — in human terms, somewhere between forced consort and slave — and that could mean only one thing. Redigor wasn't only an elf, he was Ur'Raney. The most misogynistic, cold-hearted, sadistic so-called 'family' of the elves there had ever been. The Ur'Raney were the same family who had relentlessly pursued and slaughtered the dwarves at Martak, who had brought both Old Races to the brink of war, and who, because of their gleeful, unremitting cruelty, were reviled even by their own kind.
Most contemporaneous texts had been of the opinion that Twilight would be better off without them.
Kali calmed herself. So, Redigor was an elf. The fact was, she couldn't say she felt that surprised, because something had occurred to her in Scholten that seemed to have been missed by everyone else. The Engines of the Apocalypse being what they were, lost to and forgotten by countless generations, should have been exactly that — lost and forgotten. Unless the Pale Lord had stumbled upon their control centre while out for a walk one day — an unlikely turn of events, to say the least — they had to have been activated by someone old enough to know it was there. Well, that was Redigor, all right. He had revealed his true heritage at last. But the question remained, what the hells was he up to?
Here They Lie Still.
Kali replayed the phrase Slowhand had quoted in the library through her mind, analysing it in a different light now she knew Redigor's true identity. As she did, she studied the assorted papers again, trying to piece together the jigsaw that was the Pale Lord's experimentation. Why should an ancient elf wish to unlea
sh an army of soul-stripped onto the peninsula? What the hells was he going to get out of that? Unless, as she had suspected, that wasn't what he was planning at all. Her gaze rose back to the portrait of Redigor and the woman and once more she asked herself — what the hells did the Pale Lord want with Makennon or the other 'dignitaries' his soul-stripped had snatched from all over the peninsula? What was special about those thirteen people?
Another question. With so much power at his disposal, why had Bastian Redigor allowed himself to be banished? From what she had seen here, he could have wiped the floor with any mage on Twilight, and certainly the berobed fops and jesters who made up Lord Fayence's court wouldn't have stood a chance in the hells against him, and he could have taken the town any time he wanted. So why? Why move from what was clearly his home, as well as a well-equipped base, to the unforgiving wilds of the Sardenne? And just why did he already have a map showing the Sardenne and Bellagon's Rip?
Kali studied the map again. If she expected to see any previously unseen feature she was soon disappointed, but her eyes were drawn once more to Redigor's flowing script. Bellagon's Rip. It was written there as plain as day and yet there was something not quite right about it. She suddenly realised that her mind had been filling in the gaps and she was reading what she expected to read, because that was the name by which that area of the forest had always been known. But what if it was misnamed? What if some more modern cartographer had chanced upon some previously scrawled notation of Redigor's on some other map, and had misinterpreted it as she was doing now? Maybe this was a matter of perception rather than interpretation, because although Redigor had used human script on everything she had so far read there was still an elvish flourish to his hand that potentially gave a whole new meaning to what was written. Bearing that in mind, Kali reread the name, seeing each letter on its own rather than as a component part of a word, and gradually they began to flow together. That was it. It wasn't a name at all but an elven phrase. Not Bellagon's Rip but Bel'A'Gon'Shri. She concentrated hard, eyes closed, trying to pull together all the elvish she knew to make sense of the phrase, and her eyes snapped open in alarm.
Bel'A'Gon'Shri.
Here They Lie, Still.
Gabriella DeZantez hadn't been far wrong in her theory about its meaning. But the phrase wasn't referring to the Engines and it wasn't suggesting that anything was lying idle. It was suggesting that 'they' were lying where they'd lain for a long time and were waiting. And Kali suspected she knew who.
The charts, the maps, the diagrams, the calculations, they suddenly all made sense. Rather in the manner of an Eye of the Lord, she imagined herself descending from the sky into the map, the image no longer two-dimensional but a living canopy of trees through which she swept down, down, down. And waiting for her beneath was a structure of gothic horror overgrown with the vegetation of thousands of years, a structure that she knew was sitting deep in the Sardenne.
An elven necropolis.
An Ur'Raney necropolis.
Oh Gods.
The Faith, as she'd suspected, and as farking usual, had got it all wrong. There was going to be an invasion, all right, but not in the way they thought. She had to shut down the Engines of the Apocalypse and then get to the Faith, let them know what was really going on.
She ran for the stairwell, trying to ignore the staring eyes of Bastian Redigor, and heard a click beneath her feet. She looked down.
Trap, she thought. Dammit.
In her eagerness to leave she'd triggered something she'd missed, and as a result could already sense that something was coming. Something from outside.
Kali raced to a window, seeing the same wonderland as earlier. Now, thin, grey shapes were hurtling towards the tower through the sky. Whatever they were, they had the same aura about them as the death coach that had taken Makennon, as the tapers in the library, and had again to be born of the black threads. As Kali looked on in horror, the shapes resolved themselves into the figures of hags, skeletal things clad in translucent shrouds. Their talons were grotesquely overgrown, blurred streaks of things that seemed to stretch from this world into another.
Kali swallowed, knowing now what had caused Abra to see stains upon the walls, smears across windows and splatters beneath his feet, and she stumbled back from the window as the hags shrieked into the tower. They seemed, though, to have no interest in her, tearing around the circular chamber like a dark whirlpool. They moved faster and faster, Kali ducking under Redigor's desk, trying to work out what the hells was going on as a loud tearing sound rose over the creatures' shrieking. Kali looked out and saw flashes of sky. The hags' talons were slicing through the tower, not as the Deathclaws might slice through stone but seemingly through its very existence. Redigor had conjured the tower for his secret researches but must have booby-trapped it so that, if discovered, it would be obliterated.
The whole place was coming apart around her. Being erased.
Kali lurched from under desk, the flight of the hags — nothing more than blurs, now — whipping at her bodysuit and hair. She stared in horror as she saw great streaks of sky visible where, moments before, there had been a roof. Her heart began to pound as, around and beneath her, the walls and floor began to disappear slice by slice.
Kali dashed for the stairwell, hoping she would be able to outrun Redigor's trap, but then staggered back as the hags' talons eradicated the entrance to the stairs.
Oh, fark, that was not good. Not good at all.
Kali looked around the room in desperation, searching for an alternative means of escape, but the only one that presented itself was to jump. Despite the fact that was ancient sky out there — thousands of years before her time — it was better than the alternative of staying where she was and being sliced from reality. Hells, if by some miracle she survived the jump, she could leave the Faith a note and experience the wonders of the Old Races first hand.
She wasn't completely suicidal, though, and needed something to slow her fall. The rope in her backpack would be nowhere near long enough. There was only one other thing that she could see might work, even if it was one hells of a gamble. Moving almost in a blur herself, Kali spun around the remains of the chamber, gathering its thick and sticky coating of cobwebs about her body in layer after layer, then, when she felt she had gathered enough, turned to face the remains of one of the windows, took one deep breath and ran and leapt. The coating of cobweb wrapped about her body pulled masses of the stuff after her, almost stripping the tower clean.
Kali plummeted. And marvelled. As she fell, she travelled not only downward, but forward through the ages. In a flash, the elven city crumbled and disappeared, and clouds scudded across wasteland. The course of the river changed, twisting like a striking snake. Another city arose, then fell, and one after that, though none were yet Fayence. Faster and faster the images came until Kali could no longer keep up, each year, maybe even each century, a flash in the mind, gone before she could register anything she saw. The feeling was incredible, marred only by her sadness at falling through all she had ever wanted to know. Then, building by small building, Fayence appeared below.
Kali was keenly aware that the next thing that might flash through her mind could be the pavement. Though still distant, the ground was coming up fast and the cobweb wasn't yet slowing her fall. Just as she started to worry that her plan wasn't going to work, the thick layers wrapped about her jerked subtly and began to tear themselves away in ever increasing strips. That was it, cobweb's end, and all she could hope for now was that her descent would be slowed enough to negotiate some kind of safe landing.
What she hadn't counted on was that, as the strips tore away, they twined about and adhered to each other until they had formed a kind of elasticated rope. The only thought that went through her mind as she reached the end of her drop and continued on was that jumping from great heights attached to something that, if it didn't smash you into the ground, was going to snap you back into the air like a pea from a catapult, wasn't a pastime s
he could ever see anyone choosing to do for fun.
Unless she wanted to be on nodding terms with Kerberos, she needed an anchor.
And there was one, still distant but coming up fast.
"Abra!" She shouted.
"Yes?" A puzzled voice responded from below.
The fat man was waiting patiently at Redigor's front door, clutching an immense and, by now, stone-cold kebab. The vendor slowly rose before her, and, catching a glimpse of a pair of Hells Bellies' socks while thanking the gods that the cobweb seemed to have stretched its furthest, Kali grabbed onto his belt. Momentarily they were face to face — albeit with her upside down — and Kali stared Abra in the eyes and smiled. "Never mind," she said.
The pair of them shot into the air where, to his credit, Abra remained stoically silent, as if this kind of thing happened every day. He managed a weak smile.
The return flight reached its apex and they dropped again. Then rose. Then dropped. At last the cobweb seemed to recognise that enough was enough, and they ended up dangling a foot above the ground.
As the remains of the cobweb began to tear themselves slowly apart, dropping them towards the pavement, Abra coughed.
"Did you," he asked slowly, and with a crack in his voice, "discover what you needed to know?"
Kali stared back up at where the tower had been.
"Oh, yeah," she said after a second. "The Ur'Raney. He's planning to bring them back."
Chapter Ten
Head down, Kali rode hard and fast, pushing Horse to his absolute limit. The bamfcat was, as usual, loyal and uncomplaining, though he did seem somewhat confused at being unable to do what he normally would and shorten the journey. But he could not jump; for the last few leagues they had been riding across the Plain of Storms.