Trials of Trass Kathra

by Mike Wild

  But what lay ahead of them might not prove such an easy task.

  Roaring with a sound that drowned out of all its compatriots, out of all the swirlpools that surrounded Trass Kathra, this was the daddy of them all.

  “You might want to use that tube now!” Brundle warned, and even as Kali fitted it tightly into her mouth, the pumps to the rear of the scuttlebarge rotated so that they were pointing upwards, forcing the machine beneath the waves. Everything was replaced by the turmoil of grey water, and all that Kali could make out was Brundle’s beard, previously in danger of slapping, with all its bells, into her face, floating about her.

  The reason Brundle had submerged had already become clear to Kali. Even with his expertise there was no way he could have negotiated the sheer power and violence of this swirlpool on the surface, but here, under the water, things were just that little bit calmer, even if it did still appear as a maelstrom from the hells. Brundle used the same technique he had above, riding the scuttlebarge into the outer edge of the underwater spiral and then allowing it to carry them around, to what would hopefully be calm on its other side. There was, however, something different about the swirlpool down here – caught up in the churning waters were patches of a whiter substance, still liquid but slightly more viscous than the surrounding element, which moved within it and yet not with it. Whatever the stuff was, it was clearly not simple seawater, and Kali noticed that Brundle put all of his effort into grimly and steadfastly avoiding it.

  Dark shapes bounced around the scuttlebarge, and as the currents brought one of them smack bang into Kali’s face, fleetingly revealing a horrified though quite dead visage whose lips had pulled back from its teeth, she realised they had hit a pocket of drowned men from the ship. A couple of the bodies bumped against the side of the scuttlebarge, forcing Brundle to correct his course slightly, but then, thankfully, they were through the cluster of dead. Kali couldn’t help but turn to look behind her as they passed, however, and for the briefest of moments thought she saw one of the bodies caught up in the whiter substance whose nature she still knew nothing about. All she knew was that she was glad Brundle had managed to avoid it, because, as it touched the drowned Final Faith, his whole body seemed simply to drift apart.

  What the hells? Kali thought.

  The scuttlebarge began to rise, and Kali realised Brundle was returning it to the surface, using the last of the power of the swirlpool to throw them beyond its influence into calmer waters. They should, now, be nearing the island, she calculated, and, sure enough, as the machine lurched above the surface, slewing water from its barnacled frame, the coastline of Trass Kathra was right ahead of her.

  Oh Gods.

  The island was not so much an island as a mountain in the middle of the sea, and built into its shadow and into its sides were structures so ancient and overgrown they’d come to resemble the rocks themselves. Accessed by a precipitous network of carved steps that led up from a small cove on the shoreline – what, perhaps, had once been a landing point – Kali saw strange bunkers and metal towers, many of these collapsed and bent at unnatural angles, a couple of carapaced structures that looked as if they might be some kind of warehouse, and numerous other, oddly shaped buildings whose purpose she couldn’t even begin to guess at. Dominating them all, though, was the most impressive looking structure of them all. Almost at the island’s highest point, on the slope of a great, thrusting clifftop, was what appeared to be a huge observatory dome.

  Kali’s mouth dropped open. Out here, far beyond the known world, where nothing at all should be, was the work of those whose secrets she’d spent a lifetime exploring.

  An Old Race outpost.

  She couldn’t wait to set foot on those steps.

  Disappointingly, however, Brundle wasn’t piloting the scuttlebarge towards the cove but keeping an equidistant course along its coast. If they continued the way they were, they would leave the steps far behind and round the island’s farthest point.

  She tapped the dwarf on the shoulder, shouting above the noise of breakers on rocks.

  “What the hells are you doing?”

  “We’re not landing here, smoothskin,” Brundle responded. “Too dangerous.”

  Kali frowned. She looked back towards the cove and saw what her enthusiasm had denied her seeing before. The cove was filled with the grounded flutterbys from the Black Ship. And though she saw many of the guards and their prisoners snaking their way up the steps to whatever destination Redigor had in mind, others of his landing party – prisoners and guards – remained behind. A number of the guards having positioned themselves as sentries on the steps, there was no way they would get past them.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” Brundle shouted over his shoulder. “Yer got the name o’ the place wrong. People always get it wrong. It ain’t Trass Kathra, the Island of the Lost. It’s Trass Kattra... the Island of the Four.”

  Kali almost fell off the scuttlebarge.

  “What?”

  Brundle smiled and turned his attention back to ploughing through the waves.

  “Child of Trass Kattra,” he roared, “welcome home!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHILD OF TRASS Kattra, Welcome Home! The words reverberated in Kali’s mind, begging a hundred different questions, but her attempts to gain an answer to any of them were thwarted by the choppy coastal waters they had entered. Brundle couldn’t hear a thing – or chose not to hear a thing – as he gunned the scuttlebarge’s engines, expertly playing the breakers, slapping and lurching the old and battered machine ever closer to land.

  They rounded the end of the island, and there approached a patch of darkness at the base of a cliff. A cave. It seemed this was their destination and, considering Brundle’s other words – about this being the Island of the Four, whatever that meant – Kali couldn’t help but start to imagine what wonders it might hold.

  Nothing, was the answer. Bugger all. Because as the cliff face swallowed the scuttlebarge, plunging it into shadow, there were no wondrous Old Race machines, no looming statues of ancient heroes, nothing, in fact, that suggested the island would live up to the promise of its name. Instead, as Brundle cut the engine and they drifted in, she saw a primitive jetty and walkway that was all but falling apart, lit by the few torches that hadn’t been broken. Those that weren’t picked out nets and seafood pots dangling from railings, spears, tridents and harpoons. There was even a pair of wellies stacked amongst them. The only signs of technology were the remains of three other scuttlebarges, in various states of disrepair, one of which bobbed by the jetty, the others lying skewed where they had been driven up against the sides of the cave for makeshift berthing.

  Something splashed near her right leg as it dangled in the water and Kali looked down. She spotted a huge keep net in which scores of fish the likes of which she’d never seen swam. One, the size of a floprat, bared sharp teeth and darted at her, and she snatched her leg from the water with a yelp.

  “Thrap,” Brundle stated. “Vicious little sods but good wi’ a shake o’ sea salt.”

  Kali nodded, not really listening. It was still here. Too still. The acoustics of the cave were such that they blocked out the sound of the raging seas beyond, and as she continued to look about in the flickering torchlight, listening to the slow lap of waves and almost soporific drips of water from the roof, she sensed that her surroundings had been like this for literally ages; a backwater at the end of the world, never, ever changing.

  “What is this place?”

  “Home.”

  “You live here?”

  “Aye. It ain’t much, but it satisfies our needs...”

  “Our needs?”

  Brundle pointed down at the keepnet. “I like a piece o’ thrap, lass, but not that much.”

  “How many of you are there, then?”

  “Two.”

  “Two?” Kali echoed. She stared at the keepnet. “Maybe still a little greedy.”

  “Aye, well... yer haven’t met the wife.”
/>   “Wife?”

  “Brogma,” Brundle said. “Wife number... blast it, ah forget what number she is, now.” He sighed, but Kali couldn’t tell whether tiredly or regretfully. “Believe me, there’ve bin a few.”

  “And Brogma – she’s a dwarf, too?”

  “O’ course she’s a bloody dwarf! Are yer thinkin’ ah’d marry an elf?!”

  “That isn’t what I meant. Don’t forget from my perspective dwarves are, er... a little short on the ground. I thought maybe that in the absence of anything else she might be human?”

  “Human? Pah to bloody human! There’s mendin’ to be done! Cleanin’! Cookin’! Forgin’! A human could no more satisfy me needs than one o’ them posin’ ponces, the elves!”

  Equality was clearly not big with dwarves, but Kali couldn’t help smiling. Of all the ways the ancient tales referred to the elves it was the first time she’d heard them called ‘posin’ ponces’. It almost made her feel better about Redigor’s presence on the island.

  The thought of the elf returned her mind to business – and the many questions she had. As the scuttlebarge bumped against the jetty and Brundle disembarked, hooking the machine’s nose with a thick hemp rope he then tied off, Kali ignored his offer of a hand and hopped up under her own steam, turning to block his path with hands on her hips.

  “Explanations,” she demanded. “Now.”

  “What explanation did yer have in mind?”

  “Oh, let’s see,” Kali said. “How about that little fondling act back in Gransk? Or why you wanted to blow up the ship to stop it coming here? And hey, while we’re at it, what was that thing out there in the swirlies, what the hells is this place and why’s it called the Island of the Four, and – oh, oh, last but not least – what the fark did you mean by welcome home?”

  The dwarf waited while his hair settled and the bells in his beard stopped jangling.

  “Have ye done?”

  “Yes!”

  Brundle sighed. “I can answer some o’ yer questions, lass, but not all. That tale’s a long one, and it ain’t mine for the tellin’.”

  “Then whose? Brogma?”

  “No, not Brogma.”

  “There’s someone else on the island?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Kali repeated, increasingly frustrated. “What is it with you, dwarf? Were you born awkward or did you take special classes?”

  “Special classes. I’ve had a lot of time to kill.”

  “Funny. Take me to them, then. Whoever can tell me the whole story.”

  “You’ll have yer little chat soon.”

  “Soon?”

  Brundle smiled. “Why don’t we have a little bit o’ tea first?”

  Kali growled in exasperation as the dwarf weaved his way past her, and, having no choice, followed. Brundle neared a rockface and, purposefully this time, jangled the bells in his beard. The sound they made was loud and distinctive. After a second, a chunk of the rock face before him, what Kali had thought was the end of the cave, rumbled aside, revealing a torch-lit passage. A waft of something cooking – powerfully fishy – came from within.

  “This way, smoothskin,” Brundle directed. And then shouted, “Hi, honey, I’m home!”

  Kali took one last look behind her and followed Brundle, possibly more bemused than she’d ever been. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected when she reached Trass Kathra – Trass Kattra, she corrected – but this certainly wasn’t it. And what she expected least of all, just before they exited the passage into what lay beyond, was a set of flowery curtains that Brundle, with some embarrassment, pulled aside.

  “Don’t blame me,” he growled. “We live with what we find.”

  “Live with what you fi –?” Kali half repeated, then stopped. The passage had led them into an inner cave which opened out before her, and though it was much the size of the one they had just left, there was barely an inch within it to move. The whole place was crammed with enough junk to fill a city of scrapyards, piled up against the walls, across the floor, in great piles in the corners of the chamber. At least Kali presumed they were the corners of the chamber, because as far as she could tell this rubbish might go on for ever. It was like looking at the World’s Ridge Mountains made out of crap.

  Despite being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the stuff, however, she couldn’t help but be drawn to specific items contained in the mounds. Because most of this stuff was old – very old – and despite it being bruised and battered she still felt a little like a child let loose in a confectionarium.

  “Where the hells did you get all this?”

  The dwarf shrugged. “Plenty is washed up by the storms or makes its way on the tides. Or was salvaged from the wrecks o’ those daft enough to try to take on the Stormwall. When that bastard really packed a punch, that was.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve suggested the Stormwall is less than it was.”

  “All ah can say, smoothskin, is that one upon a time she were magnificent. Stretched around the peninsula like a necklace o’ heavenly fire, she did, from both ends o’ the World’s Ridge to the Sarcre Islands. Nothin’ could get through it. Nothin’ at all.”

  “You mean it was some kind of wall?”

  “Just something that was where the mountains weren’t.”

  “What the hells is that supposed to mean?”

  “That, smoothskin, isn’t me place to tell.”

  “How did I know you were going to say that?”

  “Now, where was I? Oh, aye. That which doesn’t find its way here otherwise is foraged around the coast of the mainland. Ah make trips five or six times a year with the scuttlebarge an’ a sled. Generally tie ’er up in Ten Bones Bay. It was the trip before last ah learned about the buildin’ o’ that bloody Black Ship, an’ scuttled back here as fast as ah could for me bombs...”

  Kali nodded, only half listening. She was working her way through the twisting avenues created by his collection, hands caressing shapes and objects of all sizes as she went, most of them unscathed by what might have been millennia in the sea. Even though she didn’t have a clue what the pieces were – especially as they were only bits of pieces, as it were – she lingered over one or two of them as she might over works of art, trying to find meaning in the precisely turned metal objects, perfectly curved and rune-inscribed plating, the sheer craftsmanship involved in their smallest parts and in every other aspect of their making. They sure as hells didn’t make ’em like that anymore. Yet.

  One piece she came across was a work of art. It was a painting of what she at first thought was herself and Brundle on the scuttlebarge, but on closer inspection realised that couldn’t be the case at all. For one thing, how could it be here, now, and for another the figure she’d thought was her own was sitting in the pilot’s seat, not the dwarf. The fact that the woman was also considerably older than she – more, what was the word they used, handsome? – seemed to confirm the fact. It was intriguing, though. At least until Brundle punched her on the shoulder.

  “Take a left just up ahead,” he instructed. “Six paces and a right, twenty left and straight on. I’ll be right behind ye.”

  Despite the dwarf’s words, he wasn’t – lagging behind grumbling, tutting and occasionally striking a piece of junk with his fist, as if he’d noticed a flaw somewhere. Kali was therefore alone when, having followed his directions she emerged cautiously into what appeared to be a living area in the heart of the tunnels. It was as packed with junk as the rest of the place but one small area had been set out with chairs, a table made, it seemed, from the panelling of an elven dirigible, and a kitchen with a ferocious looking stove on which three cauldrons bubbled.

  A short, squat – that was, shorter and squatter than usual – dwarf, a female of the species, stirred them one by one. Her back was to Kali and she was dressed in a pinny and flowery skirt which looked to have been cut from the same cloth as the curtain that Brundle had pulled aside.

  �
�Hello, dear,” she said, without turning. “Did you have fun blowing up your boat?”

  “Er, hi...” Kali said.

  The dwarf span, ladles in hands, and some fishy gloop splattered Kali’s face. It was hot but she didn’t move, letting it drip from her chin. The best course of action here, it seemed, was to simply stand there and smile.

  “Hammers of Ovilar,” the dwarf gasped. “You almost made me rust me pantaloons.”

  “Sorry,” Kali said, cringing.

  Brogma, for this was presumably she, waddled forward and prodded her in the chest. It had to be, Kali was beginning to think, a family trait.

  “By the gods, who are ye, girl?”

  “This,” Jerragrim Brundle announced, slapping Kali in the back and almost sending her face first into a cauldron, “is Kali Hooper. You’ve heard of Kali Hooper, haven’t yer, wife?”

  “No.”

  “No, neither had I. But she’s –” Brundle moved forward and whispered something in the female dwarf’s ear. Her eyebrows rose. Very high.

  “Is she?” she said.

  Brundle nodded conspiratorially. “But where are me manners?” he declared. “Smoothskin, this is me wife, Brogma. Brogma, this is... well, bugger it, yer know the rest.”

  “Sit yourself down, dear,” Brogma said. “You’re just in time for tea.”

  “Look, that’s very kind but I don’t have time for tea. I have to help my friends and –” Kali paused, staring daggers at Brundle “– find out what’s going on.”

  “Yes, of course, dear. As one of the Four, you must.”

  Kali couldn’t hide her surprise. “You know about the Four?”

  “Of course!” Brogma declared, ladelling up food. “Keep an eye on things, I do. Now, let me see – there’s the shadowmage, Lucius Kane; the Sister of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, Gabriella DeZantez; the mariner, Silus Morlader; and the explorer, Marryme Moo –”