by Mike Wild
Hey, Hammerhead, how about this? There's more than one kind of wind!
Kali was not about to tell Slack that she'd just gambled both of their lives on the strength of a fart gag, so instead she sauntered nonchalantly across the bridge, finally setting foot on the reassuring solidity of the central pillar. And right in front of her was what she had come for.
The Deathclaws.
Legend had it they had been forged by the renegade blacksmith Dumar, who had pledged his allegiance to an elven rather than dwarven court. Commissioned by that court's Lord, the mysterious metal from which they were made was said to have washed up as jetsam near Oweilau millennia before. That the metal could wash up - that it could float - was just one of its unusual qualities and had led many to speculate its origin lay with those said to live deep under the sea. True or not, the metal was unlike any worked before. It was pliable yet all but indestructible. When fashioned into the claws, they were sharp enough to slice through anything, natural or man-made, most importantly the unbreachable brodin armour in which the dwarves of that time garbed their warriors. It was even said that, wielded with skill, they could bypass the armour completely and slice away a dwarf's soul.
Unsurprisingly, the Lord who wielded the Deathclaws became unstoppable on the battlefield, and thousands of dwarven warriors had fallen before him, until, one night, the claws had simply vanished from the Lord's chambers.
The fact that, thereafter, Dumar returned to live among his own people in such circumstances that ten lifetimes' smithing could never have paid for may or may not have had something to do with the disappearance. But, by whatever means the dwarves acquired the claws, they had thereafter sealed them here, on the lowest level of Quinking's Depths, so that they might never be wielded again. They were, in short, a priceless treasure, a one of a kind artefact that Kali had had on her 'to find' list for as long as she could remember.
She sighed and lifted them from the podium on which they rested, then slipped them onto her hands. As light as silk, each of the metal handpieces was attached to five curved rune-etched blades by intricately crafted hinges and studs that allowed for perfect freedom of movement. It was hard to believe that something so delicately and lovingly constructed could have been intended for such deadly use. It wasn't simply the workmanship that belied their purpose, however. The legend also said that the elven Lord had imbued the runes with additional sorcery that ensured the blood of the fallen never tainted their beauty, and it was this that gave them their golden glow. Kali couldn't resist wielding them for a short time - slashing at the air like a cat, grinning as they cut the air with a hiss - and then she moved to return them to the podium.
"What are you doing?" Slack asked, aghast.
"Putting them back," Kali said.
"Are you insane?"
"Nope. I made a promise to a friend a long time ago that certain things should stay where they are, for the good of Twilight."
Behind her back, Slack hopped up and down, gesturing at the key, the bridges. "Then why all this?"
"Because I could."
"Because you could?"
Kali nodded. "It's about the thrill of the chase."
For a moment, Slack stared at her open-mouthed, then moved with hitherto unsuspected speed, putting a knife to Kali's throat. It was as dull as a twig compared with the treasure she had found but could still cause a nasty gouge. More uncomfortable by far was the fact that Slack was pressing himself tightly up against her rear, rubbing her exposed midriff slowly and panting in her ear. Kali sighed, but only with bored resignation.
"I will be taking the claws, Miss Hooper," Slack said.
"You sure about that?" Kali responded.
"What? Of course I am sure!"
"Only it's just that if I drop them to the ground you'll have to pick them up, and while you're doing that I'll kick your nuts so hard people'll be calling you 'four eyes.'"
There was a pause.
"I told you, Slack, plan ahead..."
"Then pass the claws to me slowly, between your legs."
Kali drew in a sharp breath in mock sympathy. "Or 'no nuts.'"
"Over your shoulder, then!"
"'Twilight's silliest hatpins'?"
Slack tightened his grip. "You are toying with me, woman."
"Actually, I'd prefer to get this over with. Have you any idea how much you stink?"
"Give me the claws."
"Won't."
"Will."
"Won't."
Slack sighed in exasperation and Kali smiled. All you ever had to do was wait for the sigh that said your opponent was off guard.
She elbowed Slack in the ribs and flung him around in front of her, kicking his legs out from under him as he came. It should have pinned him to the ground with the Claws at his throat, and that was exactly where they would have been had the entire cavern not begun to quake violently, almost spilling the pair of them into the depths. As it was, Kali stumbled to her knees, the Deathclaws skittering from her grip, and Slack took advantage of the moment to grab them and run. Kali growled and made after him, then suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.
What the hells?
That some kind of quake was occurring was beyond doubt, the cavern shaking and thick falls of rock dust pouring from the roof. The rumbling was almost deafening. The quake, though, was not what had caused Kali to stop in surprise. Something seemed to be interfering with the thread bridges throughout the cavern. As Kali watched, they faded and flickered. The magic seemed to be destabilising for some reason and, if it disappeared completely, she and Slack were going to be trapped down here.
Slack himself had a more immediate problem, however. Oblivious in his flight, the rat was already running across the fifth bridge and, from her vantage point, Kali could see it was the most unstable of them all.
"Slack, come back!" Kali shouted, but the only response she got was a backward flip of a finger. "Fine, you moron, run, then! Just get off the farking bridge!"
She'd meant the warning to galvanise him but it actually had the opposite effect. Slack paused in his tracks, turning to face her. That he was listening was good, but it was also the worst thing he could have done.
Kali stabbed a finger downwards, trying to make the man aware of his situation, and comprehension slowly dawned as Slack looked down. His mood turned from triumphant glee to undisguised panic as he saw the bridge flickering in and out of existence. The sudden realisation that, at any moment, there might be nothing between himself and an abyss filled with something horrible spurred the thief into running for his life but, unfortunately, time had run out for Slack.
"Aaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee!"
"Bollocks," was Kali's honest response. But she couldn't help raising her eyebrows when she saw the Deathclaws remained where Slack had been, still held in his bloody, severed hands, amputated by the flickering bridge the moment he'd fallen through. For the bridge, like the others, had not yet gone for good. She had time - though not, necessarily, any to waste.
Kali ran. As the six bridges continued to blink on and off, she knew that crossing each successfully was going to be a matter of a timing, using the pillars that connected them as staging posts.
The first bridge was, at that moment, in an either/or state of flux, and she ran on the spot until she felt it safe enough to traverse, then put on a sudden burst to reach its other end. She did the same with the second, and then the third. The fourth presented a problem, almost as unpredictably erratic as the one on which Slack had met his doom. The effects of the quake on the cavern were worsening. What the dwarves had intended to be a protective sanctum for as long as the hill above existed was now starting to come down about her ears. While she ran on the spot waiting for safe passage a rain of dust and stones left her coated in a grey shroud, and she had to dive out of the path of several large chunks of debris.
Then, when the bridge finally seemed stable enough for passage and Kali began to race across, all of the pillars began to move up and down.
Kali felt her stomach lurch as the pillar ahead rose and the one behind sank, taking the bridge with them so that she suddenly faced an uphill flight.
Oh, you have got to be kidding.
Kali pumped her legs until she neared the rising pillar ahead, and, with a bellow, threw herself onto it, rolling into a ready position for the next, crouched to leap.
There were only two bridges left now, but she was painfully aware that the next was the one that had so abruptly ended Slack's time on Twilight. It was once more flickering every half second or so but, interestingly, the claws had still not fallen through, which suggested it was stable enough to take her. The problem lay in timing it right, because if she moved at the wrong moment the pillar ahead would have risen too far and she'd once again face a steep incline to reach the end.
Kali ducked as the cavern shook violently and further falls of rock poured from the roof all about her, and then scowled at the bridge ahead. It looked as right as it was ever going to be.
Kali moved, faster than even she thought possible, but once again the quake scuppered her plans. As she began to race for the final pillar a massive boulder detached itself from the cavern roof and plummeted straight down. The boulder seemed to hit the pillar in slow motion, splitting asunder before bouncing off into the abyss, and in its wake the pillar started to crack and break apart. What was worse, it severed the link with the last two bridges. Kali staggered and yelped in protest as the threads there began to sputter and die, and now it was her mind rather than her body that raced. She took in all of the possibilities presented by the changing circumstances and moved again, heading not for the pillar but for the Deathclaws. It had never been her intention to remove them from the cavern but now they were coming with her whether she liked it or not. In fact, they might even save her life.
Kali didn't even slow to pick the ancient weapons up, executing a rolling somersault as she ran, one hand slipping into each of the claws and shaking to lose Slack's disembodied grip. His appendages spun down into the abyss, arcing trails of blood, until something white snatched them out of the air to join the rest of him, but Kali was already gone.
Her sole interest now was in reaching the collapsing pillar before the bridge died or it broke apart completely. The pillar was more or less level as she reached it, though far from intact, and as Kali landed on its buckling and crumbling surface it finally relinquished its hold on the bridge ahead, which blinked out of existence before her eyes.
She didn't need to turn around to know that the bridge behind her was also gone, but neither did she let the fact that she was seemingly now trapped on a disintegrating finger of rock hinder her pace. Kali ran full pelt across its surface and then, even as she felt the pillar tipping and tumbling away beneath her feet, she let out a loud "gaaaaaah!" and launched herself into the air.
Arms and legs flailing to stretch as much distance out of the leap as possible, she seemed to hurtle though the air for ever. But then she thudded into the stalactite ahead of her, the claws embedding themselves effortlessly into the spine of rock.
Kali simply hung there for a second.
"Oh, yes," she breathed to herself.
From the stalactite to the ledge and the exit was now only a minor jump, and Kali made it with ease. She would have taken a moment to pay her respects to Slack but the cave was rapidly filling with rubble. But as Kali moved into it she did cast a backward glance into the cavern that had almost claimed her life. The last of the bridges were flickering out now, leaving the ages old resting place in darkness but even as the roof caved in, she sensed that it hadn't been the quake that had caused the bridges to go away. No, something else had killed the magic.
Maybe when she reached the surface she'd find out what the hells was going on.
Hells was the right word. As in all of them breaking loose. Kali dragged herself spluttering and squinting up into the dawn light, disorientated and wrong-footed. Not only because the landscape she remembered from before her descent was now obscured by a dust cloud so thick she could bite it; she also immediately found herself dodging rivers of scree flowing rapidly down the hillside. As the treacherous stones threatened to sweep her off her feet, Kali hopped left and right.
There was no escaping it. The whole range rumbled as if the world itself were coming to an end. The boulders she dodged smashed into others below, cleaving apart with cracks like thunder, the guttural, groaning, thrashing sounds of uprooted trees and vegetation and the strange, hollow clattering of falling rock everywhere. There was another sound, too, not particularly loud in comparison, but one to which demanded Kali's attention. It was the agitated snorting and roaring of Horse, whom she had left tethered nearby - safely, she'd thought at the time.
Kali scanned the hillside, trying to locate the bamfcat in the chaos. As she did she caught sight of a dark, spherical object, the size of a fussball, darting here and there through the dust-filled air. As she saw it, it stopped dead, hovering right in front of her eyes. Kali recoiled instinctively, thinking what the hells? But by the time she'd recovered enough to try to work out what the sphere was it had already gone, darting away into the fog as quickly as it had come.
Weaving to dodge the tumbling descent of yet more stones, Kali began to work her way across the hillside once more, at last spotting Horse rearing against his tether, horns and armour plating deployed to deflect falling rubble. She moved to him quickly, slapped his side solidly and whispered calming words in his ears, and, though his nostrils still flared and he bucked slightly beneath her, the bamfcat no longer fought her. One thing was for sure, though - she had to get him out of there. Kali quickly untied his tether and led him away from the quake. At least that was her intent. The problem was, there didn't seem to be any away to get to. What Kali had thought to be a phenomenon specific to the hills was actually affecting an area much wider.
Exactly how much became clear as soon as she and Horse topped the next ridge.
When she had ridden up into the hills with Slack the previous evening, she had left below her a town lying peacefully in the savannah and forest lands east of Andon. Solnos was positioned beyond a sun-bleached but solid wooden bridge, the river meandering gently around its northern outskirts, and at the other end of town a grassy escarpment rose to the south before sloping away in the direction of Fayence. The town itself was a little smaller than Kalten, without defensive walls because none had ever been needed, and its buildings were one or two-storey affairs, constructed of blindingly white plastered bricks over a wooden framework. The buildings were centred around two squares, each strung with bunting and paper lanterns, one lined with shops selling everything from food to farming implements to bolts of silk, the other home to the town's well and church, a twin-turreted and bell-towered affair that was rurally typical of the Final Faith. The Faith's 'missionary' presence in such an otherwise idyllic spot had been the only thing that had stopped Kali musing on the possibility of opening a second Here There Be Flagons in the town, but it had been something she'd remained willing to consider should the Faith ever be kicked out on their arses, as they thoroughly deserved.
Now, it was likely she never could. Solnos was turning rapidly to ruin.
Where only the previous afternoon children had been laughing and playing in the streets, their parents sampling the exotic fare of the town's communal dining plaza, all had degenerated into chaos.
The white buildings were now criss-crossed with a growing number of cracks, each widening by the second as the buildings were shaken to their foundations. Many of the inhabitants of the town were racing in and out of the buildings, desperately gathering valuables or loved ones, or rushing in panic about the streets, trying to understand what was happening to them. The destruction wasn't limited to the buildings, either - even those who had safely evacuated their homes could not escape the effects of the quake, as they found themselves fleeing dark, jagged rents in the streets themselves, bunting and lanterns falling and fluttering about them like dying birds.
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br /> It was utter calamity and confusion. The people of Solnos hadn't the slightest clue what was hitting them. But Kali did. From her vantage point on the hillside, she could see it, even if she couldn't quite yet take it in.
"Okay," she said with a levity she didn't feel, "that's a new one."
To the west of the town, in the midst of its farmlands, massive machines were drilling out of the valley floor. There were three of them in all, emerging one after the other, the first already risen to the height of the ridge on which Kali stood, filling the sky and dwarfing her with its mass. The machines resembled, of all things, giant fir cones. The comparison was hardly apt, however, because these were not the products of some unbelievably huge, nightmare tree, but things of metal which spouted steam as they rose. Things which crackled with electrical energy. Things which Kali had no doubt had been manufactured, which only served to make them all the more staggering.
She could only stand stunned beside Horse as the second and third machines rose to join the first, churning slowly out of the ground with a deafening crunching of substrata and roots, carrying with them great scoops of soil, shrub, and even whole trees, sloughing from their sides in lethal downpours. Rising ever higher, they inevitably became visible to the town beyond the ridge, and Kali's gaze flicked to the people of Solnos, who as one had momentarily forgotten their immediate concerns to stop and point, or scream.
As one, the massive machines had begun to turn slowly on their vertical as well as horizontal axis so their pointed peaks would eventually face towards the ground. As they did this they emitted a siren sound that reminded Kali of the last, desperate calls of some dying leviathan, or of some impossibly loud and haunting foghorn, blaring endlessly into the night. The sound drowned out everything, even the clatter of the crumbling hills.
What in the pits of Kerberos were these things? The style of their construction and the runes Kali could make out carved into their eaves were dwarven, and the devastation they'd caused upon emerging suggested they had lain underground for millennia. Their history and reasons for construction were only two of the questions that intrigued her, though. What had brought them to the surface? Who or what controlled them? And why?