by Mike Wild
"Mmf... ooper?" Slowhand said, his eyes wide, as one of the tapers wrapped around his jaw. "Youf wanna helf me ouf here?"
"Hold on," Kali said, and attempted to tear the tapers away. "Shit," she shouted. "Shit!"
Not only were the tapers binding Slowhand as tightly as barrel hoops, but Kali's attempt to sever them prompted a backlash against herself. Suddenly they were far from mesmeric, a wild, thrashing mass that struck at her. She had no choice but to back off from Slowhand, and as the archer writhed helplessly on the floor, increasingly constricted, she adopted a defensive stance, gutting knife drawn in front of her.
"What are they?" Gabriella asked. She stared at the book's spine, which had thickened to accommodate the roots of perhaps a hundred of the tapers. "They look like some kind of..."
"Bookworm?" Kali suggested.
"I'm glad you said that."
"Hells, I call 'em as I see 'em."
Gabriella threw herself on top of Slowhand and, gripping him between her thighs, slashed at the tapers with her own twin blades, again to no effect. She, too, was forced back, Slowhand groaning in pain.
"There has to be something we can do." Gabriella said.
"Yeah, and fast. Before these things pop him out of his clothes." Gabriella looked at her strangely. "Trust me. It happens."
The Deathclaws, Kali realised. They might free Slowhand and prove to be a better defence. She leapt for the table where her backpack lay, snatched the blades from within and returned to slash at the tapers about the thrashing archer. They did the job, but the tapers had now multiplied to a degree where they were beginning to fill the entire reading area and, as Gabriella pulled Slowhand up and staggered with him down an aisle, Kali was forced to leap out of the path of the evil-looking mass and cling to the side of a bookshelf. At the same time she shouted to the curator who was approaching to see what all the commotion was about. "You! This book - where did it come from?"
"W-which book, Madam?"
Hanging there, Kali gave him her best, bemused look. "The one with the things growing out of it?"
"I d-don't know," he said, staring and stammering. "I'll need to ch-check the catalogue."
"The catalogue?"
The little man actually looked affronted. "M-Madam, there are over ten thousand tomes gathered in this library, subdivided into -"
"Just do it!" Kali shouted, slashing at the tapers with the claws. Severed sections spiralled away but more tapers darted in from her left and she threw herself from the shelf on which she clung to one on the opposite side of the aisle. "Because if you haven't noticed, things are getting a little out of hand here!"
The little man scuttled off and Kali found herself leaping from shelf to shelf as more and more tapers emerged from the book and snapped at her. The Deathclaws hummed in the air and the amputated tapers began to pile up below her, but there were always more, growing from the severed ends. Their tenacity was unrelenting and Kali wasn't sure how long she could keep up her defence. She saw one of the Eminences appear in the aisle, no doubt come to see what all the fuss was about, and the man stared in horror as a single taper shot out and punched into his chest. Kali actually saw it punch out of his back and then snap back, clutching his heart, leaving the dead man to slowly collapse to the floor.
"Keep back!" Kali warned as the curator returned, and it only took one look from the man to the still body of the Eminence for him to immediately obey. "Well?"
"This book and a number like it originated in the town of Fayence, Madam. They were acquired by the Hall of Proscribed Knowledge quite some years ago."
That sounded about right, Kali thought. "And their original owner?"
"A gentleman by the name of Bastian Redigor."
The name hung in the air for a second.
"The Pale Lord," Kali said.
The curator looked almost sheepish. "The Pale Lord," he repeated. "They were confiscated from his estate."
"Where the bastard must have trapped them before he was banished."
"Trapped?"
Kali sighed in exasperation. "Just what did you think we were dealing with here, Mister Curator? One of his collection of pop-up books?"
"No... I... oh, Lord of All, what do we do?"
Kali leapt from shelf to shelf again, veering mid-course so as not to bring the tapers that targeted her closer to the curator. He'd doubtless ask them to keep the noise down just before they ripped out his heart too. "We find a way to stop these things," she advised. "You get yourself and everyone else the hells out of here."
The curator looked non-plussed. "But my readers do not like their studies disturbed!"
Kali couldn't quite believe what she heard. Staring at the ever thickening spine of the book, she was about to explain that unless they all departed right now there was every chance they wouldn't be going anywhere, ever again. All of a sudden the spine of the book exploded and the entire section of the library in which they stood or clung was filled with a tree-sized growth of the things, thrashing toward the ceiling. The curator needed no more convincing and turned and ran, screaming to Kali to please, please, please not damage his books.
Kali flung a glance towards Gabriella, who stood with Slowhand, staring in horror at what had manifested itself, here, in the very heart of her faith. Kali understood, this was the same magic that had taken Makennon - something dark and very, very old that the Engines had not subdued like normal thread magic, that might even be related to the black threads that Aldrededor had seen while piloting the Tharnak. A magic that had no place in the Faith's or anyone's doctrine, and that was unknown to them all. The realisation only served to reinforce what she'd thought about the Pale Lord, that there was something much more to him, much more to this whole affair, than met the eye. It was also clear that Bastian Redigor would not have seeded the tome with such a trap if he didn't have something really interesting to hide. The only problem lay in living long enough to find out what that was.
Kali dropped from her perch and raced towards Gabriella and Slowhand, the roiling mass of blackness pursuing her, batting aside bookshelves as it came. They skidded into another passage as one, the tapers lashing at their heels.
"I'm beginning to think they've got something against us!" Slowhand shouted, ducking as more woodwork exploded all around.
"What the hells makes you think that?" Kali shouted back.
"So what do we do now?"
"I don't know!"
"There's something that might stop them," Gabriella gasped. She was staring up into the highest reaches of the library as she ran, above the precarious stairways, where a caged platform was visible. "The Dellendorf Scrolls."
"The Dellendorf Scrolls?"
"An archive of Old Race, perhaps older, scrolls - assorted incantations, enchantments, destruction spells and so on. They were found by an excavation team twenty years ago."
"What's the point?" Kali said. "Only Redigor's magic is working!"
Gabriella shook her head. "My guess is that the Engines interfere with the stability of current spells or the casting of new ones, but the magic of the scrolls is sealed into their parchment, already cast. All one of us needs to do is release it!"
And I wonder which one of us that's going to be? Kali considered.
She stopped and stared up at the scrolls' store. It certainly wasn't going to be easy; and between her and them, a veritable forest of tapers now thrashed, expanding into other passages, attempting to catch them in a pincer movement.
"We're trapped!" Slowhand shouted. The archer loosed a number of arrows at the nearest tapers but they were batted away. Gabriella slashed at the encroaching mass with her blades, but this time the tapers snatched her weapons from her hands, flinging them away over the shelves.
"Yeah?" Kali said, as her companions backed up. She leapt onto one of the walls of books enclosing them and slashed the Deathclaws from top to bottom, landing back on the floor with a grunt. Slowhand stared at her, puzzled, until Kali booted the wall and the entire section tipped
away before her, crashing into another shelf beyond it, starting a domino effect across the library towards the stairway.
"Neat," Slowhand observed.
"Take these and try to slice yourselves a way out!" Kali shouted. She stripped off the claws and flung them towards Gabriella. The Enlightened One plucked them neatly from their flight. She nodded to Kali and donned them.
"Hooper -?" Slowhand began, but Kali was already gone, leaping along the downed bookshelves, the tapers snapping at her from beneath and around their sides. Her alternative route seemed to have confused the dark magic strands, and Kali made it over several of the fallen shelves, but she saw that the tapers had extended ahead of her and were now punching in through a gap. She rolled, dodged and weaved, the stairs drawing ever nearer, until a taper managed to whip itself around one of her ankles and she found herself flipped high into the air.
After a moment of dizzying disorientation, Kali thudded to the floor beyond the final row of shelves and lay on her stomach, winded. To her right lay the base of the stairway she needed to reach, but to her left, hurtling towards her at a speed that in her state she couldn't hope to outrun, was a solid, seething mass of the black strands.
Kali struggled to her feet, looked for a way out, found none. She spun in a circle and punched shelves of books in frustration, furious with herself. A peculiar rumbling sound came from the direction of the stairs and she turned to face it, wondering what new threat she faced.
Her eyebrows rose. Gabriella DeZantez was racing towards her in mid-air, straddling two of the sliding ladders the curators used to access books on higher shelves. Between her legs, pushing the ladders as hard as he could, was a red-faced Slowhand.
"What, you think we'd let you do this alone?" He shouted as Kali ducked to let the ladders pass.
Kali watched their progress. Gabriella's hands blurred, the Deathclaws slicing constantly, the Enlightened One spinning and leaping between the two ladders in a dance that ensured not a single one of the tapers got near her or Slowhand. She and the archer cut a swathe through the mass, the black strands falling in their hundreds. The whole thing lasted no more than thirty seconds and, the tapers briefly repulsed, Gabriella leapt from the ladders and Slowhand released them.
"What are you waiting for?" She shouted to Kali. "Move!"
Kali didn't need telling twice. She ran for the stairway but, even as she did, more tapers lashed in from beyond the shelves, wrapping themselves around the lower risers, preventing her mounting them. This time Slowhand came to the fore.
"Hooper!" He shouted, and two of his arrows whizzed over Kali's head to embed themselves solidly in the wall. She leapt onto the first Slowhand had fired as another arrow struck the wall above her, feeling it snap under her but giving her enough upward momentum to carry her to the second, and then the third. Kali climbed Slowhand's makeshift staircase above the level of the tapers as he continued shooting, and threw herself onto the stairway beyond their reach. Her feet clattered on metal as she ascended, and the tapers raced after her, but Kali tumbled and leaped, leaving them behind as she negotiated the complicated structure. At last she reached the cage containing the scrolls, booted off the padlock and threw herself inside, slamming the cage closed behind her. The tapers swarmed about and rattled the metal enclosure but the mesh was too fine for them to penetrate. Kali let out a relieved breath.
Her relief was short-lived.
It was all right for DeZantez to say she could use one of the Dellendorf scrolls to blitz the tapers but, dammit, which one? There were hundreds stacked before her and, as far as she knew, the one she chose might make things worse, not better. It seemed, though, that whichever curators had been assigned to investigate these mysterious scrolls were possessed of frustrated egos and somewhat fanciful imaginations, and Kali found a clue to what she wanted in their attached notations. Quite clearly named after the curators themselves, the scrolls glorified in such names as Hamish's Wandering Eye, Charles's Dream of Domination and Gleeson's Worrisome Whiff, and one which sounded as if it might be up to the job - Strombolt's Devastator. Yes, that sounded pretty unequivocal. Now, how was it Gabriella had demonstrated it should be used?
Kali took a breath and stood in the centre of the cage, sweeping her palm across the scroll she held. As she did, the script upon it - a strange collection of symbols unknown even to her - parted company with the parchment and flew out through the mesh of the cage. Nothing happened for a second, and then the floating symbols raced together and collided, forming a dense, pulsating cloud above the centre of the vast library. The air grew immensely heavy, the light dulled, and a charge in the atmosphere made Kali's hair stand on end. The last thing she thought as she wrapped her arms about her head was how the curator had pleaded with her not to damage his books.
The Hall of Proscribed Knowledge, all of it, detonated with an explosion so powerful that its walls buckled momentarily outwards, prompting screams and cries of alarm from outside. The stained glass windows lining its upper storey disintegrated, shards falling as a rainbow rain. The chandeliers were propelled upwards, bouncing off the ceiling and dropping broken metal and molten wax before crashing to the floor below. The explosion finished the job the tapers and Kali had started, smashing each and every piece of furniture - tables, chairs and bookshelves - against the walls, leaving them as a shattered tide washed against the hall's perimeter. For quite some time afterwards countless cream and white leaves - all that remained of the books that had crammed the shelves - fluttered to the floor. If there was any saving grace to what Kali had just unleashed, it was that the tapers had flopped to the floor, dormant or dead.
"Oops," Kali said as she picked herself up from the floor of the cage. She coughed and picked splinters from her hair. From far below she heard other coughs and looked down to see Slowhand and Gabriella emerging, battered and bruised but otherwise unharmed, from behind a heavy shelf that had miraculously landed at an angle over them. Gabriella backed cautiously away from Slowhand, looking puzzled and disturbed as to how the explosion, which left her relatively unscathed, could have blown him so neatly out of his clothes. Kali worked her way slowly down towards the pair.
"Well, that seemed to work," Gabriella DeZantez said.
"You know something?" Slowhand added, seemingly uncaring that he was naked, "I'm beginning to think we might make a pretty good team."
Slowhand had to hand it to the Final Filth - for a bunch of God-Botherers, they did military mobilisation rather well. Preparations for their response to the Pale Lord's threat were already well under way at dawn the next day, the sublevel a hive of activity as engineers and support workers prepared and supplied funicular trains while the men and women who would ride them gathered in ranks, waiting to board. The sides of the railway tunnels were packed with swordsmen, axemen, archers and lancers, many of them young and, considering what it was they were being sent to face, understandably nervous. Steadfast, if no less grim, were the hardened warriors draped in the livery of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, and mages - lots and lots of mages. Quartermasters and Enlightened Ones walked among them all, the former inspecting weapons while the latter blessed their bearers for the trials ahead.
Impressive as it all was, Slowhand frowned. The war council had convened while he, Hooper and DeZantez had been occupied in the library and had informed them of their decision when they had emerged. Despite Hooper's doubts about the Pale Lord's intentions - reinforced during their researches - the Faith remained committed to their belief that he planned a soul-stripped invasion. The plan was to establish a cordon along the length of the Sardenne after the last of the Pale Lord's strange army had filed in. The cordon was to be a defensive one - they at least had the sense to realise offensive strategies would be suicide while the Engines were active - and would only engage in combat if the Pale Lord made a move. Once the Engines were shut down and magic restored, however, they planned to advance on the soul-stripped - to go in, as it were, with all hands blazing. Of course, the Faith alone did not
have the numbers for such a massive endeavour, which was why some of the trains were to remain empty for now. The Faith had arranged not only to second thousands of troops from the Vossian army, who would board at Faith 'missions' en route, but to enlist aid from the Pontaine militia too. Considering the attacks that had been occurring in their half of the world, Slowhand had no doubt they would agree.
Hence the frown. The Faith was, tactically, putting all the peninsula's eggs in one basket, an approach he had never been particularly fond of, and he could only hope the basket wasn't dropped somewhere along the way.
Slowhand moved through the frantic activity towards what would be his train. The fate of the Anointed Lord not forgotten in all of this, it had been decided that he, Freel, DeZantez and, of all people, Fitch - along with Hooper, when she returned from what she had to do - would not be part of the cordon but instead form a 'strike team' to infiltrate the Sardenne to try to find and rescue Makennon. As such, they were not to travel to the edges of the cordon, but to the main base camp - what had once been 'the pulpit.' To reach the pulpit meant they'd have to travel along the disused tunnel, where this nightmare had started and the thing that had taken Makennon had emerged.
Slowhand yawned. For what he'd expected to be, thanks to Fitch, a quiet night in the Faith's deep cells, things had turned out markedly different. Hooper's announcement that they were both temporarily seconded to the Filth had initially made him feel quite uncomfortable, and he had even felt slightly resentful that she had taken it upon herself to forge such an alliance on his behalf. Now, though, even though he'd slept little, spending what had been left of the night 'conferring' with Hooper and then fletching some special arrows for the rigours ahead, his discomfort had faded. As he moved towards his train he was actually beginning to find that the Filth's resemblance to an army on the move had instilled in him some of the feeling of his old, military days. It wasn't nostalgia exactly - he had seen and done too much for that, some still regretted - but there was a fondness for the sense of directed mass purpose that part of him still missed. Filth or not, it felt reassuring to be part of such a large force working together to a common aim, even if there were one or two tarnishes on the force's collective armour.