Thief of the Ancients Read online

  “Oh, that’s easy. Something deadly.”

  “Something deadly,” Slowhand repeated. “Right, fine, thanks for sharing that with me.”

  “My pleasure.” Kali gestured towards the lift. “After you.”

  “No, no, I insist. After you.”

  “Slowhand, get on the bloody lift.”

  “You are getting quite domineering, you know that?”

  “And you love every minute of it.”

  The lift was hardly the engineering marvel that Kali had ridden at the Spiral of Kos but it did the job, creaking on a rope as it descended a shaft that had been roughly cut from rock and felt strangely warm. The marks of modern tooling suggested to Kali that the shaft was the work of the Final Faith, which likely meant that the site to which they were heading had another – original – entrance elsewhere, but what or where that was she didn’t know. She had never come across anything resembling an entrance in her explorations of the countryside surrounding Scholten, so maybe it had become blocked over the years by rockfalls or subsidence, or maybe had even been deliberately sealed. It didn’t really matter because they were heading where they wanted to go.

  The question was, where was that? The lower the lift descended, the less the creaking of its supporting rope could be heard, the sound overwhelmed by a growing hissing and pounding coming from below, as if machines were at work in the rock. As the sounds became so loud that the shaft itself began to vibrate, Slowhand looked to Kali for some kind of explanation, but she could only shrug. It was only when – at last – the lift reached bottom and they negotiated a small tunnel that their source became clear. Staggeringly so.

  “My gods,” Slowhand said. He, like Kali, was staring into a natural cavern in the bedrock far beneath Scholten that was bigger than the Final Faith’s distribution centre, looming above them into shadow and dropping away beneath them to a bubbling lava lake some hundred feet down. The lake surrounded an island of rock that rose out of it to their eye level, and on that island – connected to where they had entered by a narrow and recently suspended bridge – stood a structure that was far from natural and could only be the secure location of the fourth and final key. Looking something like a cross between a kiln and a furnace, its width that of seven men and its height of five, the stone dome sat solidly on the island perch, pistons positioned all around its circumference pumping out great bursts of black smoke while, in the centre of its roof, a round hole, some kind of chimney, belched out thick clouds of steam. If, Kali reflected, the Spiral of Kos had had a distinctly elven feel about it, then this site had dwarf written all over it in letters bigger than the dwarves themselves.

  She wondered what kinds of traps dwarves favoured.

  As if on cue, a piercing scream emanated from somewhere within the stone dome, and a few moments later Makennon and a bunch of cronies stormed out of the single entrance. Kali and Slowhand hid as the group passed, Makennon clearly cheesed off, and Kali presumed that she had just lost another of the tomb raiders she’d apparently been throwing at this thing.

  This was her chance. The trouble was, she couldn’t risk using the main entrance because Makennon had likely left guards behind and, as far as she could see, that left her with only one choice.

  Slowhand saw her staring at the chimney, timing the gaps between its eruptions of steam.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no. No, Hooper, no.”

  “Don’t worry. You aren’t coming with me.”

  “Of course I am. But not that way.”

  “There is no other way, Slowhand. But no, I need you to stay here. Watch my back in case Makennon returns.”

  “You think I’m letting you go in there alone?”

  “Listen, you just said –”

  “I know what I said –”

  “Slowhand, listen. Think back to the night of my escape. Now look at those belches of steam. There’s no time for us both to go.”

  Slowhand couldn’t argue the point, and sighed. “Fine, I’ve got your back. But Hooper, this is still suicide.”

  “Since when did that ever stop me?”

  Kali moved across the bridge, clinging to its cabling and staring down at the bubbling red lake below. Lava, she thought, luvverly. Reaching the dome, she worked her way around the outside rim of the structure until she had moved completely behind it, she wondering idly if this dwarven thing had remained active since the day it was built. That seemed unlikely. It was far more probable that Makennon had either accidentally triggered its mechanisms in her efforts to recover the key or one of the less than capable tomb raiders she’d hired hadn’t been able to resist pulling some nice, shiny lever on the wall.

  You just couldn’t get the staff these days.

  Kali wasted no time. She leapt for the side of the dome and scrambled onto its sloping surface, feet scrabbling behind her but maintaining enough purchase to enable her to grab a fingerhold on the rough stone. This done, she pulled herself slowly upwards until she reached the apex of the dome, ducking back as the chimney belched out a cloud of steam. Once it had done so, she peered inside the flue. A shaft dropped away before her, dark, dirty and utterly uninviting – just the way she liked it.

  She sat back while another cloud erupted. Two minutes between belches. She was going to have to be very precise in the matter of timing. She would also have to be ready for anything as she would be going in blind, literally plunging into the unknown. But whatever was going on in this fiery hole, it seemed likely that the chimney would take her to the heart of the matter.

  She stared across the cavern, found Slowhand and then jabbed her finger downwards, indicating she was going in. The archer’s mouth opened, his head shook, and then he was holding it in his hands in disbelief.

  Another cloud belched, and Kali scrambled inside.

  She anchored herself against the sides of the chimney with her elbows and thighs, shuffling quickly down, estimating it would take her no more than a minute to descend the depth of the dome, more than enough of a safety margin between belches of steam. Quite how she’d exit the chimney near its base she hadn’t yet worked out, but that she considered to be one of the challenges of her trade.

  Something, though, was wrong – that was already becoming clear. All she could see beneath her was darkness, the perspective of the flue veeing below, and she suddenly realised that the shaft went deeper than she’d anticipated, the heart of the site not within the dome but the pitsing rock itself.

  In other words, she’d never make it in time. Already she could hear booms coming out of the darkness below, what she presumed to be precursors of the next release of steam. There was only one thing for it – and that was to let herself freefall as far as she could.

  Kali released her grip and immediately plummeted down the flue. She yelped as she slid down, down and down, her body thudding painfully into the sides of the shaft. More than once she crashed against unexpected ridges or bars, and the impacts bounced her sideways and around until she was in danger of becoming utterly disorientated in the dark. She couldn’t allow that, however, or she’d be encountering the origin of the steam first-hand, something that just might spoil her day and the rest of her life.

  She had to risk it. She jammed herself against the sides of the shaft once more, careering a further ten feet before she came to a jarring halt, and then looked down to see just where in the general scheme of things she’d ended up.

  As it turned out, she’d made her move just in time. Not far below her the shaft widened and then branched off in a number of directions, splitting to envelop some central core. Had Kali continued down any one of them she would have been dead, because in each a lapping red glow was reflected from what could only have been the lava lake itself.

  Kali didn’t want to go there. But she did want to get inside the central core.

  She eased herself down what remained of the shaft before it split, aware of the limited time she had but also that one slip would bring the same instant death as being consumed in a belch of steam. She dr
opped onto the roof of the central core and quickly heaved open a metal panel she found there. Dropping into a shaft of about her own height, she slammed the panel shut just as a final boom heralded a release of steam that made the metal above her rumble with the force of its release. Kali sighed with relief, but it was a short sigh, because as much of a challenge as getting this far had been, she suspected the hard part was yet to come. This was, after all, the site that Makennon had been trying to access since last she’d been in Scholten – and it was whatever lay below the second panel – the one she now found under her feet – that was going to be the true test of her mettle.

  Kali pulled a rope from her toolbelt and secured it to the side of the shaft, dangling from it as she booted the panel open. Then she moved herself around until her head peeked through a hole on one side of a curving ceiling.

  Well, she thought, this is interesting.

  She was looking down into what appeared to be a dwarven forge, a circular chamber whose floor and walls were plated with metal panels decorated with the same repetitive runic shapes as had been at the Spiral of Kos, except here they were crosses instead of circles. The design of the walls made them look as if they might rotate, allowing access in and out, but for now they were tightly shut. Beyond this, the chamber was featureless apart from the forge itself, a raised and central metal mould carved with a complex coil design, in which lay the fourth of the keys. The parallel was obvious – other than for the fact this chamber was claustrophobic rather than vast, it was a dwarven version of the Spiral of Kos, right down to the presence of an observation area built into a curve of the wall behind a window of what appeared to be reinforced glass.

  It was also, quite clearly, designed to be equally deadly. What Kali had ignored until now was the fact that the floor of the forge was blackened here and there by the twisted and charred remains of Makennon’s unsuccessful tomb raiders, all of whom appeared to have been roasted alive, and one of whom still smoked where he or she had recently fallen.

  It hadn’t been too hard to work out that the trap here was going to be heat-based, but now it was time for her to find out exactly what she was up against. And if she was right...

  Kali dug in her toolbelt and pulled out a small, polished stone she kept for such occasions, then dropped it towards the forge’s floor. It struck one of the metal panels and bounced onto another, then another, and, with a moment’s gap between them, the first and third panels sank slightly into the floor with a grating sound.

  Kali smiled. She knew it. The panels were weight-sensitive, probably rotating at random to provide a false sense of security but in actuality trapping anyone who thought they’d found a safe path to the forge. All she had to do now was find out what they did.

  On the subject of which...

  She felt the heat before she saw it, the carved coils on the side of the mould turning first a dull red, then brighter, and then brighter still until they were almost white-hot. Kali knew now the reason for the dome’s pistons and steam chimney – they had to be part of some elaborate mechanism that pumped lava into the dome from the lake surrounding the island, probably pressurising and concentrating its flow before delivering it here, to the forge itself. The carvings on the mould were not simple decorative patterns, they were sophisticated heating coils.

  And what heat! Kali had to draw back into the shaft as the mould itself began to glow, gradually matching the intensity of the coils, and as it heated up, so too did the key inside. And after perhaps half a minute, watched through a heat haze, the key seemed to start receding away in her vision.

  Only it wasn’t receding, she realised, it was melting.

  A few seconds later she stared down at a key that had become completely molten.

  It wasn’t what Kali had been expecting, but she had to admit it was ingenious. This place hadn’t been built so much as a trap as a preventative, the mechanisms involved designed not to stop anyone stealing the key but to stop them leaving with it. The fact that that same anyone would die horribly, roasted alive by the heating coils, was simply a side effect.

  The weight-sensitive panels reset themselves with a metallic chuk and the key started to cool again. Fitting exactly into the mould as it did, it started to regain its form in no time.

  Kali knew now what she had to do. There was no way she could reach the key with her rope so instead she was going to have to play a game. And it was going to be exactly the same game she used to play as a girl, disturbing the regulars in the Flagons. Its aim was to get all the way around the bar using only furniture – okay, and the occasional head – and without touching the floor.

  Exactly like that game. Only deadlier. So much so that every one of her movements had to be precise.

  Kali took a steadying breath, and then slowly lowered and then removed her hands from the rope so that she was suspended only by the waist, then turning face downwards let her body find its own level as the rope took her weight. It was a delicate balancing act but, when stabilised, she was able to raise her arms and legs so that she hung horizontally spread-eagled, her limbs outstretched.

  She gave a small kick, and turned, examining the chamber about her. There was a ledge there she could use, a ridge in the wall over there, and – whoah, difficult one – a slight rib between panels there. But then she’d be next to the key. Okay, she thought, running it through her head again – One, ledge, two, ridge, three, rib... four, key.

  Oh, the hells with it, just go!

  Kali swung forwards on the rope, building enough momentum to carry her over the first gap, then cut her rope cleanly with her knife. She sailed away, arcing forwards, hit the ledge and twisted, at the same time kicking herself away with her foot. Flipping forwards, somersaulting smoothly in mid-air, she felt her toes touch the ridge and lunged forwards, spinning this time slightly to her right, correcting her balance with a flap of her arms as her hip grazed the wall. There wasn’t enough width in the ridge to keep that balance for long so she hopped quickly along it, only at the last second batting the wall with her hand so that she flew sideways out into the room. She let herself fall, inclining head first, then landed on the rib with the palms of her hands, immediately cartwheeling once, twice, then three times, and coming upright at the exact point the rib came to an end. Flexing her legs and bouncing as she returned to vertical, she leapt upwards and forwards, yelling with the exertion it took, and crossed the final gap between herself and the key. Landing on the edge of the mould on the balls of her feet, she windmilled her arms once more for balance, then stood upright, looking down at the object she sought.

  Piece of pits, Kali thought. She only wished she could have done that sort of thing as a kid. It would have earned her a drink or two.

  Kali bent and extracted the key from the mould – oh, ooh, ow, ow, ow – a little prematurely as it happened. She juggled it from hand to hand, her heart lurching as she almost dropped it on the third pass, then sighed with relief as it cooled. The key firmly in her grip, all she had to do now was get out of the place. She was about to start examining the walls for an escape route when a long rumbling signalled the rotation she’d suspected they were capable of. A number of doors were revealed, which then opened – a spiral stairway visible beyond them – and in each stood one of Makennon’s people, aiming a crossbow directly at her. If that wasn’t bad enough, framed in the last to open was Makennon herself – and beside her was Killiam Slowhand.

  He didn’t speak. But Makennon did.

  “Miss Hooper, we meet again,” she said. “Pray, tell me, what brings you here today?”

  Kali smiled. “Oh, you know, out for a walk, fell down a hole...”

  “And there was I thinking you’d taken up a career as a chimney sweep. You should, you know – as an occupation it’s much less hazardous.”

  “But not as rewarding,” Kali said, holding up the key.

  “Give me that key, Miss Hooper.”

  “No.” Kali looked down at the panelled floor. “Want to come get it, Anointed Lo
rd?”

  “I’d rather you just threw it to me.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  Slowhand spoke for the first time. “Hooper, just do it. The lady has you outgunned.”

  “Nice backwatching, Slowhand.”

  “They had us marked as soon as we entered the cavern. Took me as soon as you disappeared inside. I guess they wanted you to do the job for them. Give her the key, Kali.”

  “She’s not getting the final key!” Kali shouted. She hovered on the edge of the mould, her intention clear. “It melts with me, if need be.”

  Makennon sighed loudly. “I gather that since our last talk you have been doing some research into the keys and what they are?”

  “I’ve seen and heard a few things.”

  “And I imagine this behaviour is because you veer to the... darker interpretations of the facts to hand.”

  “That’s right. End of the world, and all that. But hey, I’m not the one blinded by holy light.”

  Makennon smiled coldly. “I understand your concerns, I do. But I have seen insufficient darkness to dim that light, and perhaps the opposite is true of you. So, as I once said to Mister Slowhand – what if I could prove to you that it were otherwise?”

  Kali faltered momentarily, remembering what she had seen on the map. But she dismissed the concerns quickly. This was, after all, still the Final Faith.

  “Makennon, you’re not getting your hands on this key.”

  “Hooper...” Slowhand urged again.

  “Slowhand, no! This thing is dangerou –”

  Kali never even saw it happen. One second Slowhand had no bow in his hand, and then he did – and an arrow knocked the key from her grip, its trajectory perfectly aligned to bounce the key to Makennon’s feet. The Anointed Lord bent to pick it up.

  “Thank you... Lieutenant,” she said.

  Kali stared at the archer. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Hooper, they’d have –” Slowhand began, but broke off as a sudden push from Makennon sent him sprawling into the centre of the chamber. At the same time, Makennon and her guards retreated, and the walls began to rotate back to their closed position.