Thief of the Ancients Read online

  She took a deep, satisfied breath, walked to the wheel and flipped off the lock, then began to swing it into reverse.

  The bridge began to move towards Slowhand and she watched him fighting off those who caught up while it arrived, echoing her tactic of discarding them one by one into the rocky drop – so many of them, in fact, that with only a few more additions they’d be forming their own bridge across the gap. Kali smiled. He was enjoying himself, she could tell. At last the gap was narrow enough for him to make the jump, and as soon as he leapt for and landed on the walkway she began to retract it again, blocking the path of future waves of guards – perhaps mercifully – from their sweaty but grinning potential despatcher.

  Slowhand joined her on the other side. They had escaped the complex but still had a way to go before they were out of danger. Forcing their way up the stairs was a running battle but finally they passed the dungeon level where Kali had been interrogated and reached ground level, bursting forth into the cathedral itself – right in the path of a group of advancing guards.

  “This way, move!” Slowhand said urgently.

  He raced down a corridor that branched off to the left, and then another to the right, heading towards the heart of the cathedral. Kali glimpsed more guards moving quickly along adjacent corridors, clearly manoeuvring to block off their route of escape.

  “Where the hells are we going?” she shouted. She had to because of the bells and the singing.

  “Up,” Slowhand responded.

  “Further up?”

  “Further up.”

  “And how do we get further up?”

  Slowhand snapped his head to the left and the right, then instead pointed ahead. “Through here. I think.”

  The troubadour burst through a large set of double doors into a transept, and Kali followed.

  The pair of them stopped dead, stared.

  Approximately two hundred people stared back. And as one they raised their eyebrows.

  What else could the Eternal Choir do, faced with a heavily sweating man and a panting woman dressed only in their underwear in the heart of Scholten Cathedral?

  Kali had to give them their due. They kept on singing.

  “Slowhand?” she said, dubiously.

  “Okay, that might not have been quite right,” he admitted. He listened to the heavy footfalls approaching from behind and bundled Kali into the left rank of choristers before taking up a position on the right. “Sing,” he mouthed across the aisle.

  “What?” Kali mouthed back.

  He gesticulated in front of his mouth. “Sing!”

  Kali cursed but did as she was bidden, or at least moved her lips in time with the others. Across from her, though, Slowhand went at it with gusto. But though he was apparently oblivious to the guards who clamoured in through the door, Kali wasn’t, and she had to remind herself to keep her gaze rigidly forwards as they moved up the aisle, heads turning to study the singers, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  It almost worked. Would have worked if the Eternal Choir hadn’t chosen that moment to segue from one hymn to another. Because in the fleeting quiet between the two a broken baritone that had become utterly carried away – including from any key – was heard declaring, “...of that lass named Kali Hoooperrr...”

  The game was clearly up.

  “Idiot!” she hissed at Slowhand as the guards shoved their way through the choristers towards him. The guards snapped their gaze to her. “Idiot!” she hissed again, but this time to herself.

  “Up there!” Slowhand yelled. He pointed to a balcony accessed by stairways sweeping up on either side of an organ positioned at the end of the transept, overlooking the cathedral nave. The curving archway the stairs formed there was lined with the organ’s airpipes and draped with Final Faith pennants slung from the balcony’s railings, and as Kali’s gaze travelled up them she saw that another archway led off the balcony itself, stairs beyond leading upwards again.

  “Oh, right,” Kali said. “You mean where those other guards are?”

  “What?”

  Slowhand looked again. Four guards had appeared on the balcony, and each had a crossbow aimed directly at their hearts.

  “Dammit!” Slowhand cursed. “Where did they –”

  “Never mind,” Kali sighed, peering at the organ. “You got us into this, I’ll get us out.”

  “What?” Slowhand said. “Hooper, no, they’ll –”

  As with the bridge, he was too late to stop her. Kali burst from the choristers’ ranks and sprinted along the aisle, leaping upwards, towards the organ. She used its keyboard as the first in a flight of makeshift steps – filling the transept with a discordant wail – and the organist’s head as the second, eliciting a different kind of wail entirely. From there, she leapt onto the top of the organ, and then into the air, throwing herself forward and stretching to reach one of the pennants that hung from the balcony railing. It tore slightly as she grabbed it but the sudden downward jerk of the cloth granted Kali the extra manoeuvrability she wanted, allowing her to kick off from the balcony wall and use the pennant as a swing to run up and around the inside of the archway’s curve. The soles of her feet danced across the organ’s airpipes until her increasing speed took her out of the curve and she sailed into the open, first above the organ and then the choristers’ heads, gaining height until she began to swing back towards the balcony itself. The guards positioned there tried to target her with their crossbows but the truth was they barely had time to register her coming before the pennant finally tore from its mooring and Kali slammed into them, booting them over the railing in a single yelling and flailing mass.

  The organist scarpered as four heavy and heavily armoured bodies crashed like a ton of bricks onto the organ below, making it erupt with dust and buckling its wooden frame. Then one by one, each producing their own prolonged and discordant wail, the bodies slipped down over the keys and thudded to the floor. Their weight being the only thing that held the buckled instrument together, the organ creaked and groaned as each fell away, and as the last joined the pile it emitted a death rattle and gave up the ghost entirely. The organ fell apart.

  There was a sharp intake of two hundred breaths, and for the first time in nobody knew how long the Eternal Choir fell silent.

  “Er, sorry about that,” Kali said in the pregnant pause that followed. “Slowhand, you coming?”

  The troubadour ran, dodging the other guards whose mouths still hung open as widely as his had a moment before, and joined Kali on the balcony. They entered the archway and found themselves at the base of a spiral staircase that rose up into a tower, the purpose of which was unknown. But Slowhand again seemed to know where he was going and so Kali followed. And followed. And followed.

  It was only as they burst at last through the door at the top of the stairs that she had cause to think her faith might – to say the least – have been a little misguided.

  Kali looked down and couldn’t believe it. This was Slowhand’s escape route? Bloody great steaming pits of Kerberos, there were birds below!

  Their flight from Makennon’s guards had taken them up to the highest accessible point of the cathedral, a rope-and-plank walkway that at some point had been strung around the outside of its main steeple and hung there now as loosely as a whore’s belt. Some fifty feet below where the steeple’s tapering spire took over, the narrow, drunkenly undulating and half-rotten platform had perhaps once been used for repairs because as far as any other purpose went it was good for nothing, led nowhere.

  Damn Slowhand! She should have known better than to trust him. What the hells did the idiot expect them to do now – run round and round the thing until the guards following fell off, either through dizziness or exhaustion?

  She stared at Slowhand as he slammed the hatch behind them and barred it. No more than a second passed before there was an insistent hammering on its other side. If the hatch were as neglected as the walkway they balanced upon, it would not be long before they had company.


  “So,” Slowhand shouted casually above the winds that roared and buffeted here, taking a moment to sweep back his hair, “you’re a tomb raider these days?”

  Kali steadied herself on the swaying wood, positioning her feet with great care. Through a triangular gap between two planks she could see the toy-like rooftop of a Scholten steam factory belching a tiny plume of white fog in her direction. It was indeed a long way down. “A-ha.”

  “Like, erm...”

  “No! Not like ‘erm’.”

  Slowhand nodded vigorously, swallowed. “Fine. Fine.”

  Kali jammed her hands on her hips, regretting even that tiniest of movements when the walkway shifted beneath her and slapped against the side of the steeple, creaking loudly. “Look. Do you have a clue what you’re doing up here, or not?”

  Slowhand took a moment to reply. He was inching away from her along the precarious platform, his palms pressed against the side of the steeple, presumably for stability against the worst gusts of wind. “Hooper,” he shouted back, “have I ever let you down?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean apart from the Sarcre Islands.”

  “Slowhand, those things almost had me stuffed. And yes, apart from the Sarcre Islands.”

  “Okay. Right. But let’s get this straight. You have never, have you, actually come to any... permanent harm.”

  Rain suddenly began to hammer the walkway, soaking the two of them instantly. Standing there in her vest and pants, and from beneath dripping, slicked-down hair, Kali stared hard and ground her teeth. “Nooooo...”

  “And that’s because,” Slowhand shouted slowly, “I always plan ahead.”

  He plucked a cloth-wrapped bundle seemingly by magic from the steeple’s side, and Kali realised he hadn’t been pressing his palms there for stability but searching for a hidey-hole. From the shape of the bundle, it contained one of the weapons that had once been Slowhand’s tools of the trade.

  “You hid a longbow up here? Why on Twilight would you do that?”

  Slowhand stripped away the cloth, hefted the impressively sized crescent and pursed his lips. “The amount of anti-Makennon rhetoric I’ve been spouting of late, I knew it wasn’t going to be long before she sent her goons to have a word. I just thought of every eventuality.”

  “Actually, I meant what use is a bow up here? What are you planning to do – spear a cloud for us to ride away on?”

  “Oh, funny,” Slowhand said. Acting quickly, he pulled a coil of thin rope from the same hidey-hole and attached one end to an arrow, the other to one of the more secure parts of the walkway. The coil certainly looked long enough to be able reach a cloud.

  Slowhand squinted down at distant buildings, eyeing a trajectory, then aimed the bow high into the air.

  “What the hells are you doing?”

  Slowhand ignored a louder banging on the hatch. It sounded as if the guards were almost through. “Little idea I came up with. Call it a death slide.”

  “Nice,” Kali said, and then put two and two together. “Hold on – you’re going to fire that rope at a building down there and expect us to slide down it?”

  “Nope. Building’s no good – from this height you’d slam right through the wall. Need to hit somewhere open, target it through a ring.”

  “A ring?”

  “Okay, a big, iron ring,” Slowhand admitted. “One I tied between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly’s, actually.” He pulled back on the bow and winked. “There’s a pack of supplies down there and a stables nearby so you should be able to find a horse to get you out of the city. Clever little bugger, eh?”

  Kali said nothing. She couldn’t even make out the places he talked about. She knew Slowhand was good – very good – but to make the shot he planned over such a distance, at such a target, and in this weather? Impossible.

  Then Slowhand reminded her why he had gained the sobriquet Slowhand.

  In the space of a second her ex-lover seemed to shut the world away. The wind and the rain and the hammering and the shouts seemed no longer to matter to the man at all, and an aura of great calm enveloped him, as if he lived now in a universe entirely his own. Gone was the happy-go-lucky troubadour he had styled himself as of late, and back was the famed archer who for what had seemed like an eternity had tested the hearts of the men he had fought beside at the Battle of Andon eight years before, during the Great War between Vos and Pontaine. Kali had heard the story told in a hundred of Andon’s taverns, how their forces were in danger of being overwhelmed – were being overwhelmed – and Slowhand had stayed his hand as his comrades had clamoured at him to loose his arrow and take one more of the invading bastards down. But Slowhand had waited – even as enemy swords and axes had cut and sliced about him, he had waited – because he had chosen his target and would not fire until he knew his aim was true. Finally his arrow flew. Just one arrow across the length of a battlefield that was sheer chaos – through the flailing, bloodied forms of a thousand battling warriors and their dense sprays of blood – unerringly on until it found its home in the forehead of John Garrison, the commanding enemy general. One arrow into one man, but a man on whose survival the morale of the enemy depended. With his death, Slowhand bought Andon’s forces the time they needed to gather strength, and the tide of that battle had been turned.

  Slowhand let fly. His arrow sang into the sky then arched downwards. He must have calculated its flight perfectly because seconds later the rope it carried with it ran taut.

  “After you,” Kali said.

  Slowhand stared at her, hesitated. “There’s just one thing. I’m not going.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no time for two runs,” he said, looking towards the hatch. “And in this weather it’s too dangerous to risk the rope to two.”

  “I see. But you expect me –”

  “Listen to me. I saw how you handled yourself during our escape, your reflexes, your speed – what you could do. There’s something different about you, something changing... something better.” He tested the tension in the rope that stretched out into the night sky, wiping the moisture from it on his tunic. “I knew it when I came up here. To be honest, in these conditions I don’t know if I can make this slide, Hooper. But I know you can.”

  “I’m not just going to abandon you here.”

  “Call it payback for the Sarcre Islands.”

  Kali faltered. Was this Slowhand being serious?

  “Use the bow,” he said, quickly stripping it of its string then handing it to her, nodding in reassurance. “It’ll hold. Go, Kali. Find your friend. Now.”

  Kali knew there was no other choice, not if she was going to save Merrit Moon. Even if that meant not only abandoning Slowhand, but abandoning him defenceless. She slung the stringless bow over the wire and pulled down until it became a horseshoe, gripping either end as tightly as she could. Then she felt Slowhand’s hand in the small of her back, for a second almost tenderly.

  “Enjoy the ride,” he said. And as he spoke, Kali heard the door to the walkway crash open.

  Kali looked down and let her body go loose. “Slowhand, I’ll be seeing you again. I’ll be –”

  Slowhand slapped her off the walkway.

  “Bye bye.”

  Kali gasped, the sky taking her as swiftly and as powerfully as if she had been snatched by a dragon’s claw, and though those legendary creatures were now long extinct, she felt for a second what it would have been like to be taken thus. She appreciated also just how powerful they must have been to survive at the heights they had flown, for what she had stepped into was a maelstrom.

  Every one of her senses was immediately and utterly overwhelmed as she dropped and the deathslide took her weight, her eyes and ears and flesh battered by the elements, blinding and deafening and, on her skin, as agonising as being slapped by open palms. No one before had been exposed to the heavens at this height – no one had seen Scholten from this unique perspective – but Kali had no opportunity or desire to appreciate the sce
nery, busy as she was shivering in her underwear and simply clinging on for dear life.

  Slowhand’s bow slid down the rope with a noise like some large insect, a deep zuzzz that made the muscles in Kali’s arms flutter as if tickled but at the same pierced them through with pain, making even her teeth ache. The curve of the bow slick with the rain that pelted down, it was difficult enough to hang on without the added hazard of the wind that threatened to dislodge her with every passing second but, roaring with the effort of keeping her grip, she managed. At one point she even managed to twist her neck to look back towards the roof of the cathedral, but when she did wished she hadn’t. The guards that had appeared on the rooftop had moved across and reached Slowhand, and as Kali watched the resultant scuffle she thought that she saw the troubadour go down at the point of a knife and tumble screaming from the steeple. And there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing.

  She continued her inexorable descent, her momentum gaining, and with it the wind resistance against her. Her arms were now corded with the effort of gripping the bow but her increasing speed meant that the length of time before she reached safety was lessening dramatically with every yard she slid. The rooftops of Scholten were coming at her as blurs now, and above the roar of the wind and rain she could actually begin to hear the noises of the city and its people below. Soon she would be on the ground and be able to lose herself in their ranks. Soon she would be safe.

  Suddenly, though, something felt different.

  There was a lack of tension in the slide.

  There could be only one explanation for that, and Kali felt a hard knot of fear in her gut.

  Because she was still far from the ground. Far too far to survive the fall she was plummeting into now that the rope had been cut.

  CHAPTER NINE

  KALI ESTIMATED SHE was seventy or so feet from the rooftops, no longer hurtling towards Killiam’s ring but dropping back and down, her forward momentum cancelled out by the sudden loss of tension in the slide. Letting go of the bow – a surprise present or a sore head for someone below – her hands flailed for the whipping rope, hoping to use it as a swing to at least get her closer to the ground, but her greater weight had already caused her to fall from its reach, and the lifeline was snatched away into the darkness, signalling its departure by momentarily blinding her with a few heavy drops of rain that had clung to the hemp. There was nothing now that would slow her descent – nothing, of course, but the impact that would inevitably come – and she plummeted towards Scholten like a rejected soul from Kerberos, spat back to Twilight on this dark and stormy night.