by Mike Wild
He had not told Kali this but the fact was, since the Hel’ss appeared, he was changing more than he had been. Not changing more frequently – although the bouts did seem to have their own accelerating timetable – but more dramatically. He sighed and raised a trembling hand, watching as the sinew and tendons beneath his skin pulsed and throbbed. These painful phenomena were not just linked to his hands, either, the same effect manifested itself at different times throughout his body, and he could not stare at himself in a mirror for more than a few minutes before one such tic or another materialised. All of these felt different to the Thrutt transformations – for one thing they occurred spontaneously, without the raised adrenalin that normally acted as a trigger – and the only conclusion he could draw was that his body was responding in some way to the presence of the Hel’ss. The question was, why?
This, he had no answer to – yet. What he did know was that these occasions were something to which he could not risk exposing his friends. The feeling of unfettered power that accompanied them both terrified and awed him, and if it were to be unleashed, beyond his control, when anyone was nearby... he didn’t like to think what would happen.
So, in the end, he’d decided to leave. What choice did he have? The interesting thing was that it hadn’t been at all difficult to choose where to go. And for one simple reason.
He could not stop dreaming of the World’s Ridge Mountains.
They were calling to him.
And he had answered – or at least relocated to their vicinity in the hope he would there find out what the dreams meant. The lower to middle heights of the World’s Ridge still hid Old Race sites he had been too inexperienced to challenge as a young man, and too incapable of challenging when old, but now he had, if needed, the physical means to survive, what better time to explore them? He had not, after all, lost his interest in learning of the past, far from it – the ever growing presence of the Hel’ss in the skies was surely an indication that the fate of the Old Races was more relevant than ever.
Moon picked himself up, biting into an apple to finish the lunch he’d eaten, and strolled to the mouth of the cave he was using as a bivouac. It actually wasn’t so much a cave as a recess halfway up the side of a sheer and precipitous wall of a much, much larger cavern, and what Moon’s dwarfed figure saw as he looked out made him crunch deeply and appreciatively on his fruit. The bite and subsequent self-satisfied sigh seemed unnaturally loud in the vast expanse. Every archaeologist on Twilight – what few true ones there were – dreamed of the ultimate find, but most had to content themselves with second best. But not he. Not any more. The sense of wonder and magnificence he had felt when he had first set eyes upon this site was not misplaced, and he once more revelled in the name he had given it.
The Gallery.
Most caverns had galleries somewhere within them, of course, but few in an artistic sense, and none on the scale of what he’d found here.
As soon as Moon stepped into the bosun’s cradle he had strung beneath his makeshift living area, he came face to face with a small section of ancient cave painting, covering the entirety of the vast wall in which his bivouac was set. So close to, it was impossible to discern what the painting depicted and, even from the other side of the cavern, it was difficult, the primitive art obscured by growths of vines, creepers and other vegetation. Moon had spent the last few weeks negotiating the wall in the cradle, laboriously clearing the growths away, but had even now completed only perhaps a quarter of the work needed to fully reveal the painting. Further clearance was not on his agenda today, however, and had not been for the past two days, ever since he had discovered what appeared to be the entrance to a chamber hidden within the complexity of the painting itself.
It was all really rather exciting, and Moon hummed to himself as he used the complex system of rope pulleys and fulcrums it had taken him a week to assemble to pull himself along the wall. Stone projections at certain points required that he moved down and then across again, and then down, up and across once more, but the old man was patient, in no hurry to get where he wanted to go. The cradle at last ended up suspended before a small ledge.
Moon stepped from the cradle onto the ledge to face a cryptoblock. What lay before him was not quite so daunting as it seemed, however, he having worked on it full-time since its discovery. Though cryptoblocks had become something of Kali’s speciality, he’d retired the previous evening having only one last element to arrange, and though its proper positioning had confounded him through the night, the solution had at last popped into his head over lunch.
It was all very simple, really.
Moon pushed a block of the puzzle inwards and then immediately pulled it out again. A second later the ratchet that had been triggered by the pressure sprang into place. The cryptoblock collapsed before him.
“Well, well, old man,” Moon whispered to himself, “I guess you haven’t lost it, after all.”
He took a breath and stepped into the unsealed chamber. He cracked an elven lightstick that he took from a satchel and moved it slowly about. A flare of light bounced back from something reflective in the centre of the room.
Just one object in the whole of the chamber.
My, my. That had to be important.
The old man cracked more lightsticks and scattered them about the floor of the chamber. He found himself staring at an object perched on a podium that appeared to be some kind of metal dodecahedron. It was difficult to tell because its material was so polished that it shone like a tiny sun.
Moon circled it slowly, his hands almost but not quite touching, as if the object were his partner in a slow waltz. Then he dropped to his haunches, licked his lips, examining it only with his eyes.
“What have we here?”
Tentatively, he reached out a hand, intending no more than the gentlest caress of the object’s side, but a sudden spasm – the kind of spasm he was by now all too familiar with – made his arm jerk violently, and instead of caressing the object his hand knocked it fully from the podium to bounce across the opposite side of the chamber.
Not now, Merrit Moon demanded of himself.
But it was too late.
There was a grinding noise from the surrounding walls.
Protective failsafes. Preventative measures. Proof that the mysterious object was as important as he’d suspected it to be.
Or, to put it another way, a trap. And very likely a deadly one.
Moon wasted no time. Despite the pain and the throbbing in his arms and legs, not to mention the agonised flaring at the back of his head that made him feel as though someone was scooping out his brainstem with a spoon, he loped around the edge of the podium and grabbed the object, jamming it into his satchel. Then he turned towards the entrance, noting that a thick stone slab was already descending where the cryptoblock had been. His days of rolling beneath such things were beyond him and he knew he didn’t have much time, and so the last thing he needed as he made a dash for the shrinking exit was for another spasm to hit him, this time harder than ever before.
He belly-flopped onto the floor, lay there gasping and groaning. The same hand that had triggered the podium’s weight sensors stretched out quaveringly towards the closing gap but the slab was already two thirds of the way down. He knew there was no way he could make it.
Too slow. Too old. Despite thinking that his... condition could help him be young again.
Merrit Moon’s head slumped to the floor of the chamber, and he sighed. But despite the fact that he was clearly doomed to die, he smiled to himself. Perhaps better this way – doing what he loved – than facing the unknown future that his physical instability offered him. It was, he reflected, the way Kali would have preferred him to die.
Kali. He swore he could almost hear her now. Though, admittedly, sounding less articulate than imagined.
“Gahh! Uuung. Get in there, you farking... ”
He looked up and saw the silhouette of a figure outlined in what remained of the exit. A figure
which rammed something into the dwindling space between slab and floor. The length of wood, if that’s what it was, was already splintering and cracking beneath the weight of the stone.
“Kali?” Moon queried.
“That’s me,” the figure said. A head appeared in the gap. “Look, old man, I’m sorry to be a pain and I know this is all a bit last minute but I need someone to look after my bamfcat.”
“What?”
“Well, y’know, putting him in kennels is just so expensive...”
“What? What are you talking ab –”
He broke off, just as something else did the same. “Look out!”
“Shit!” Kali yelled, seeing the wooden support give way. She at least proved herself capable of rolling out of danger, even if it was in the wrong direction. As she bumped into Moon, the stone slab slammed shut behind her.
Kali stared at the old man, saw how the entire surface of his body seemed to be... rippling.
“Hi,” Kali said breathlessly. And then, “Old man... are you all right?”
Moon felt his spasms start to subside, struggled into a sitting position and dusted himself down.
“Am I all right? Do you realise what you have just done?”
Kali gave a cursory glance around. “So we’re trapped. Not the first time for either of us, right? And for once we have two minds to figure a way out.”
The walls surrounding them rumbled again. And with an expulsion of dust juddered an inch closer to them.
“Quickly?” Kali added, with a sheepish grin.
“Oh, there’s no rush,” the old man said wearily, all too aware that their predicament was his fault. “You’re inside a Bevvel’s Conundrum.”
“I am?”
“Otherwise known as Bevvel’s Chamber of Unending Torment. Think yourself lucky you’ve never come across one. In the time it takes to contract – about a week, I believe – they say that in your mind you die a thousand times. Each time imagining the final, slow constriction of the walls, the pressure as your internal organs are squeezed, and the cracking and splintering of your bones as they’re crushed beyond recog –”
“Do you mind? Fark me, have you always been this blunt or is it an age thing?”
“There is no need for foul language, young lady.”
“Well, I’m sorry, old man but... don’t you think we’d be better employed trying to determine a way out?”
“There is none, believe me. Bevvel’s construction is based on cryptoblock dimensional dynamics.”
“No trap is foolproof, old man.”
“You are welcome to try to prove that.”
Kali did. During the time it took her to exhaust possibilities, the trap contracted once more.
“Shit,” she said softly. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“I told you...”
“I had to try.”
“... about the language.”
Kali glared, and slumped in a corner, hitting the stone petulantly as it rudely juddered forward once more. Then it occurred to her.
“Hang on,” she said. “Wasn’t that a bit... quick?”
Moon’s eyes widened and he stuck his ear to the floor. “There is something wrong,” he said. “The gears sound misaligned.”
“Cryptoblock dimensional dynamics have gears?”
“It’s... complicated. It took me a lifetime to work out how much so.”
“Well, I’m not going to have a lifetime to catch up unless we do something.”
At Kali’s feet the elven lightstick that Moon had activated fizzled out. In the resultant darkness there was another crunch of gears.
“Don’t suppose you have any more of those?” Kali asked.
Moon held up one more, lit it and laid it at their feet.
“Dark soon, then.”
“Quite so.”
The two of them sat there in silence for a while – or at least silence punctuated by the juddering of stone. Kali reckoned she’d got about two hundred and forty seventh into imagining her thousand deaths when it proved too much. She started to hum.
“What are you doing here, Kali,” Moon asked.
“I came to say goodbye. Found your note at the shop. Just before they came and... you know.”
“Goodbye?” Merrit Moon repeated, ignoring the reference to the fate of his shop. “Kali, I wouldn’t have stayed out here without seeing you once more. I would have found a way.”
Kali shook her head. “I’m not talking about you, old man. I’m talking about me.”
Moon hesitated. “You’re imagining you’re going somewhere you might not come back from? That isn’t like you.”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I... just have a feeling about this one.”
The old man placed his hand on hers. “Where?”
“The Island of the Lost.”
“Trass Kathra?”
“Trass Kathra,” Kali repeated. “It exists.”
Moon turned away. His mind raced, weaving and reweaving a thousand separate strands of knowledge he had accumulated over the years with an equal number of theories. He shared none of them with Kali because she was involved in every permutation and every permutation ended the same way – he would lose her from his life in the same mysterious fashion she had arrived. It had been so convenient to forget this child had been found as a newborn in some kind of Old Race ‘pod’ that hadn’t been seen since. He had pretended to himself that she had been normal but, of course, she wasn’t – with such an origin how could she be? – and, now, maybe, if Trass Kathra was involved, was the time her past came home to roost. The fact was, all the old legends associated Trass Kathra with the End Time, so maybe Kali had found her ultimate destination at last.
One thing seemed undeniable. If that was the case, he had to be certain she got there. And to do that, he had to get her out of the deathtrap that his own curse had stuck her in.
Moon broke suddenly from his introspection, and began to slam his fist on the stone floor of the chamber, making Kali start at the unexpected violence of it. As he continued and the skin of his fists split, leaking blood, she tried to stop him, but he shrugged her off, intent on achieving what could be their only salvation.
“What the hells are you doing?” Kali asked.
“Leaving,” the old man said, simply.
His blows became more powerful because he became more powerful, his head snapping back and the irises of his eyes changing as he purposefully unleashed his inner ogur – and what he had found lay beyond the inner ogur. Sitting in the corner of the shrinking chamber, Kali swallowed, because although she had witnessed his transformation into Thrutt a number of times, what was happening now went far beyond anything she had ever seen.
Every muscle in the old man’s body was expanding, he himself becoming taller, broader, bigger, and with the extra strength this granted him he was able to shatter the stone of the floor and expose the gears beneath. These, too, he pounded, though not mindlessly, and suddenly the contractions of the Bevvel’s Conundrum became more pronounced and more frequent, reducing the area of their confinement by half in a matter of seconds.
“Old man...?” Kali said.
The chamber jerked inward once more, and Merrit Moon stood.
“Get beneath me,” he said. There was a timbre in his voice deeper than any previously heard. Kali looked at him, saw his expression, and obeyed, huddling in the old man’s shadow, though the truth was he appeared hardly old, in fact hardly a man, any more.
The chamber shuddered again, and Kali felt the cold touch of stone nudging at her heels.
It was at that moment that the light went out. The old man’s explosion of anger had subsided but, instead, she heard a low growl. An inhuman and even un ogur-like growl. The growl of something incredibly powerful. And then the growl turned into a roar and she heard the sound of massive fists punching outward, fists which shattered the stone around them, reducing the walls of the Bevvel’s Conundrum to dust.
As the dust settled, she looked up. Something mass
ive and incapable of speech loomed over her. But its message, as it offered her a hand, was clear.
Time to go.
Kali followed the beast like creature to the exit from the cavern, watching its form dwindle as they progressed upward. By the time they reached the surface, Merrit Moon was almost himself again, though Kali couldn’t shake the image of the old man’s transformation from her mind, far more violent, far more dramatic than it had ever been. She waited until his breathing steadied before asking the question that had to be asked.
“Merrit, what happened to you down there?”
Moon raised his eyes to meet hers. “I’m sorry if I frightened you.”
Kali smiled, touched the old man’s arm with its enlarged cartilage, tendons and muscle that even now throbbed and pulsed beneath the skin.
“You could never frighten me, old man. I’m just concerned. I don’t understand what’s going on...”
“Then that makes two of us.”
“It’s unlike you not to have some kind of theory.”
“Oh, I have a theory, all right. But you’re not going to like it.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m staring to believe...” Merrit began, then paused.
“What, old man?”
“I’m starting to believe that I was never meant to leave the World’s Ridge Mountains. I mean after what happened, after I died. That it happened, how and where it did, for a reason.”
“The ogur cave?”