by Mike Wild
The accelerator punched itself in the opposite direction once more, and now Kali found herself travelling backwards, her bodysuit almost torn from her body. She suddenly hadn't a clue where in the chamber she was and, for a moment, nearly panicked. Then her eyes fixed on the central control platform, the only constant in an ever changing blur, and she kept her gaze trained on it, marking its position and the magnets around it each time the accelerator stopped. At least she was no longer being thrown, having splayed herself over the accelerator like a human limpet.
Kali had to endure another five of the sudden punches while she waited for the floating magnet to rotate into a position where she would be able to reach it. It was hellishly slow and, by the time it finally did come round, she felt as if she'd been locked in a stable with a rampaging bamfcat. She simply wanted to lie down and die. This was hardly the spot to do so, however. If she relaxed, even for a second, her only memorial would be a Kali Hooper shaped hole in the chamber wall which no living thing would ever see.
Kali rode the accelerator for what was hopefully the last time, slowly and very, very carefully lifting herself into a crouching position. With even her hair whipping at her, she was almost torn free before the accelerator even stopped - and in that position certainly would be when it did stop - but her plan was to make the leap between accelerator and magnet in the split second before it did, using the speed and angle to propel herself to the target. Despite her calculations, this was going to be a leap of faith and the last thing she needed was the sudden, dizzying pounding in her head. Kali didn't even have the strength to curse, and certainly not the strength to hold on any longer, so she simply allowed herself to be thrown into the air.
Impact with the magnet was, of course, potentially as lethal as impacting with the chamber wall, but somewhere within her throbbing world of pain Kali calculated just how much she needed to adjust her trajectory to lift herself above the magnet. It seemed to have worked because she wasn't staring at her own backside splattering the surface of her destination. She quickly scrabbled beneath her for the surface - all she was capable of doing, really - almost broke her fingers as they touched, and then grabbed. She was once again thrown head over heels, slamming hard onto her back, but roared with determination and clung on despite her arms being wrenched so hard she thought for a moment they'd been ripped off. Kali lay stunned for a second as the magnet rotated beneath her, her eyes beginning to bulge slightly, and groaned loudly.
Something tickled her feet. She looked up to see one of the spider machines poised over her legs, ready to sweep down with a blade that would have amputated them. She was so thoroughly pitsed off that she just booted the maintenance machine off the magnet, sending it clattering into the abyss below.
More weary than she had ever felt, Kali picked herself up, waited for the slow rotation of the magnet to bring it into alignment with her destination and leaped.
She landed, at last, on the control platform and found herself among the collapsed remains of the soul-stripped who had been deployed there. She tried not to pay too much attention to them, to wonder who they might have been. She tipped their stiffened forms over the edge of the platform to tumble silently after the insect machine. Then she turned her attention to the control panel itself.
Oh hells.
Kali had lost count of the number of Old Race cryptograms, riddles, puzzles and traps she had been forced to decipher or solve in her time, but this one took the biscuit.
The panel was etched with a fine and impossibly intricate pattern of lines that glowed slightly and seemed to move, an optical illusion that didn't help her dizziness at all. The pattern was made up of circles, ellipses, ovals, plumes, radial spreads and whorls, all in various sizes and all overlapping. There were no other kinds of control mechanisms, buttons, levers or otherwise, and Kali felt her heart sink, wondering why for once, just farking once, the Old Races couldn't have designed something with a simple on/off switch.
Kali gazed at the panel woozily, and for a second thought she was about to make the task of deciphering the panel even more problematic by splattering thwack and kebab all over it. She swallowed the impulse down, however, and tried to ignore the pounding in her head. Each of the curving lines had to represent the line of a magnetic field, surely, so was it possible that somewhere in the pattern were also representations of what they affected? Working on that theory, she gradually began to discern three shapes that seemed static within the shifting of the etching, and guessed that these could be what she was looking for - the Engines themselves. The problem was that while the Faith had pinpointed the real locations of the Engines, their positions here, forming the three points of a triangle, seemed only symbolic, not relative to the sites they physically occupied. She was missing something, clearly - some term of reference that could relate how the magnetic fields interacted with the Engines in the real world - and without it she had no idea how they could be manipulated.
Suddenly, however, a thought struck her. Or rather, an image. She once again saw the map she had discovered in Redigor's tower - the one she had at first thought represented battle manoeuvres and had subsequently dismissed - and realised that it could be, after all, a vital piece of the jigsaw. If it wasn't battle manoeuvres it was illustrating, what if it were magnetic fields?
Kali once again shoved aside the pain in her head to concentrate hard, struggling to summon what she remembered of the map, its lines, and where they were positioned in relation to the coastline of the peninsula. She kept the image in her head and stared down at the control panel, trying to match up the slashes and curves. It seemed next to impossible, but she realised that all she really had to do was find the first. And there it was, a great sweeping line that ran from Scholten and across the Anclas Territories to grasp Miramas in its encompassing curve. Another ran across it, roughly paralleling the Territories themselves and was bisected by a third in the region of Andon. More of Redigor's smaller scrawls then became discernible, but they weren't really necessary. With their main counterparts identified, Kali was able to work out where on the control panel the coastlines of the peninsula lay, and with that knowledge the overall pattern laid out before her began to make a lot more sense. It really was quite ingenious the way every field of magnetic force affected every other across the whole landscape. What the dwarves might have accomplished had they survived could have been staggering. Now all Kali had to work out was how to ruin their achievement of a lifetime. To throw, as it were, a spanner in the works.
The problem was that there were still no visible controls and yet, clearly, the lines on the panel had to have been set somehow.
Experimentally, Kali moved her hand across the surface and nothing happened. She tried once more and still nothing. Then she looked up and realised that by looking at the control panel for changes to its settings she had been looking in the wrong place. Her gaze fixed ahead of her, she moved her hand experimentally once more, this time in a circle, and smiled as one of the magnets across the chamber rotated as it did, at exactly the same speed and for the same duration. She was onto something. Now all she had to do was work out how to get that magnet to interact with the others, from there determine how exactly they influenced the magnetic forces on the surface, and from there to determine a way to use them to disable the Engines.
For the first time in her life Kali began to regret dropping the moroddin lessons that Pete Two-Ties had once tried to thrust upon her, because the more she experimented with the controls the more she realised it was like playing some complex musical instrument. Still, she had to try.
Kali began to move her hands in a more relaxed manner, remembering Pete's words before she had aborted his teachings to feel the instrument in her hands, to let it be the guide, and as she did she found that she was gradually moving all of the magnets in the chamber at once, and not only that but managing to slow and speed up the accelerator as well. The whole process gave her an overwhelming feeling of power. If she weren't feeling so much like death, she
might even have begun to enjoy herself.
The feel of the control panel much more familiar now, the magnets moving at her whim, Kali began to concentrate instead on the panel, which seemed to have warmed beneath her hands, so much so that she could feel the flesh of her palms beginning to tingle. Then she realised that it wasn't heat that was causing the sensation but the softest of magnetic pressures being emitted by the metal. As she moved her palms across its entire surface once more it was like moving them over a series of small, invisible hills and valleys - a miniature topography made of magnetism.
That was it!
Eager now, Kali placed her palms above the three spots that represented the positions of the Engines and there felt peaks of magnetic push far sharper than elsewhere on the etched map. As she began to gently manipulate them they actually began to soften in their resistance and began to move.
I have you now.
It would take a good deal of concentration and dexterity but, in theory, she should be able to move the Engines anywhere she wanted.
Kali set to work.
Kali made the rendezvous that evening, helped along by three jumps from Horse, the last of which brought them atop an escarpment overlooking the dark border of the Sardenne. The forest stretched to the west and east as far as the eye could see, as did, about half a league back, the Final Faith cordon. Dotted by campfires along its vast length, it was as yet impossible to make out the individual figures waiting around them, but the numbers involved were staggering. Bolstered now by legions from both the Vossian and Pontaine militaries, the force represented the first time the two armies had come together since the Great War, and the first time ever that they had done so in peace. It was a reflection of the seriousness of the threat they faced. As Kali watched them from on high she felt almost like a party pooper knowing she had to tell them they had no choice but to stay their arms.
Her gaze rose into the azure twilight. As massive as the cordon was, the escarpment afforded a ringside view of something even more daunting - something now utterly unavoidable. The thick pillar of souls rising from deep within the Sardenne was now twice the height it had been when Kali had last seen it. A vertical maelstrom that swirled endlessly and chaotically and, whether it was her imagination or not, seemed to scream out at the darkening sky. Maybe the poor souls trapped within sensed their time was coming, Kali thought, because the pillar appeared, from her perspective, to be already piercing the outer layers of Kerberos, actually making contact with the gas giant itself. It wasn't - yet - but at the rate the pillar was growing she reckoned she'd been more or less bang on with the deadline she'd estimated.
Tomorrow was when it would happen.
Kali bit her lip and spurred Horse gently on, walking him down the hillside and to the perimeter of the central camp. Two Faith guards nodded in acknowledgement and parted to let her pass. She tethered Horse near a gathering of tents, clustered around a crackling campfire. A few acolytes were clustered around the fire, where Slowhand was fleecing them in a game of quagmire. By the look of his upturned cards, the archer had just stymied his opponents with a five-card plop and was raking in a handful of silver tenths.
"Hooper, how you doing?" He said casually as she approached. He nodded to the acolytes, a request for privacy, and they left shaking their heads and pulling less than pious faces.
"Oh, you know. Been introducing the pure of heart to the evils of gambling?"
Slowhand inclined his head to the east. "Didn't fancy a walk in the woods."
"Understandable." Kali sat herself down beside him and cracked open a bottle of thwack from her backpack, downing two thirds of it and heaving sigh.
"Introducing the pure of heart to the evils of drink?" Slowhand countered.
"Nope. It's all mine."
Slowhand smiled.
"Besides, there's no such thing as evil drink, only evil empty bottles." She took another swig and then upturned the one in her hand, scowling. "See."
"Rough couple of days?"
Kali shrugged. "No more than usual. Discovered Bastian Redigor is an elf, travelled a few thousand years into the past, give or take a teatime, almost got sliced apart by spectral hags, and then nearly turned into a doily by magnets the size of farking mountains."
"Right."
"Oh, and I had a kebab."
"Ooooh. There's that death wish again. But I take it the elf thing is what I should be paying attention to?"
Kali nodded. "I need to talk to the others."
"Well, Freel's patrolling the camp. Fitch is off somewhere, avoiding me. And Dez - sorry, Gabriella - is in her tent. I think she's... you know, the thing with the hands."
"Praying?"
"That's the one."
"For once, it might not do any harm. Which tent is she in?"
"The one behind you," DeZantez said. She was folding up a shnarlskin prayer mat as she exited, appearing casual, but by the look of her Kali had risen in her estimation for having returned. "Did I hear you say something about an elf?"
Kali stood. "I think you'd better get your people together."
Gabriella studied her, then nodded.
A few minutes later she, Freel, General McIntee, Fitch and assorted other senior officers were gathered in war council, listening to what Kali had to say. The relief of the magic users following their realisation that magic was, as it were, back on line, dissipated when Kali told them what she had discovered. There was almost universal silence, the only person to speak Gabriella DeZantez. And perhaps because what she heard conflicted so much with her own faith - everything she believed about the sanctity of souls and Kerberos - the only word she was able to utter was an incredulous, "What?"
"The return of the Ur'Raney," Kali said. "It's what the Pillar of Souls is for. To act as a conduit between Twilight and Kerberos, allowing the exchange of the human souls Redigor has taken with those of his dead elves. One for one, every one of his subjects reincarnated, right here, as an army, in the bodies of the soul-stripped."
"The bodies of farmers and their wives, their children?" General McIntee said doubtfully. "I do not see how they could pose much of a threat."
"I seem to remember them being pretty threatening under your cathedral," Slowhand countered. "To say nothing of the shit that's been hitting the fan everywhere else."
"Actually, the general's partly right, Liam. When the Ur'Raney inhabit the soul-stripped they will be alive again, and physically vulnerable as a result. But it's my guess that during whatever ritual Redigor is going to conduct he'll also transfer some of the physical essence of the Ur'Raney to alter the hosts." She turned to McIntee. "If I'm right, General, they'll be transformed, and you won't be facing farmers, their wives and their children, you'll be facing thousands of elven biomorphs."
"That's the bit I don't get," Slowhand said. "This necropolis you mentioned. It's got to be just bursting with pointy-eared stiffs, yes? So why doesn't Redigor just 'ritualise' the Ur'Raney back into their old bodies?"
"That, I don't know," Kali admitted. "Maybe it's just been too long."
Freel took a pensive breath. "You called them Redigor's 'subjects,'" he said. "Are you saying Redigor was some kind of elven king?"
"King, no. Lord, yes. The elves had no monarchy as such. What they did have were elven 'families' or courts - the Ur'Raney, Pras'Tir, Var'Karish and others - each autonomous but led by their Lord and twelve lieutenants who made up a kind of high council called the rannaat."
"Coincidence?" Gabriella pointed out. "The Anointed Lord and the other dignitaries who were taken by the soul-stripped?"
Kali nodded. "I think Redigor has them marked as hosts for his lieutenants."
"Except thirteen were taken," Freel pointed out. "Thirteen, not twelve."
"Yes, well," Kali said slowly.
She had her own theory on that particular discrepancy and her mind flashed back to the portrait in Redigor's tower. Makennon's resemblance to his one time mu'sah'rin must have seemed to him to be a gift from the gods or, at leas
t, his gods.
Because, at one and the same time, the 'First Enemy' had the opportunity to behead the Final Faith of its leader and humiliate them in a way only the Ur'Raney knew how. The effort of reactivating the Engines of the Apocalypse might have been worth it to him for that alone.
"I think I can explain that," Kali continued carefully, considering the loyalties and sensitivities of the company she was in. "The Ur'Raney had little respect for the females of their court and I don't think Makennon has been taken to be one of his lieutenants."
"Then what?" Fitch queried.
"It's... difficult to explain. Mu'sah'rin. A kind of... submissive partner."
Slowhand almost coughed up his tonsils.
"Sorry," he said, after a moment.
The reactions from the others varied slightly. Freel took a second, then nodded. Fitch turned away to stare into the trees. Gabriella flared with anger and embarrassment. The only vocal reaction came from General McIntee.
"We order the advance immediately," he growled. "End this now."
"You can't," Kali said.
McIntee looked to the west and east, nodding to the ranks of soldiers and Swords of Dawn, and the mages amongst them. In an ever extending line in both directions, weapons were drawn and determined fists flared with fire, lightning and ice. "Oh, young lady, I assure you, we can."
"No!" Kali persisted, slapping a palm solidly on his chest as he moved to lead them. "That isn't what I mean."
The general halted, glaring. Freel stepped in to draw Kali's hand from his heaving chest, defusing the confrontation. "What do you mean, Miss Hooper?" He asked.