The Crucible of the Dragon God tok-4 Read online

  Kali slumped against the rock wall and made a brubbing sound with her lips. The fact was, it had become increasingly unlikely that she'd be getting involved with any lot again if she didn't get out of here soon, not since she'd accidentally flicked that lever by stumbling over it in the dark.

  One small mistake, that's all it was — an amateurs blunder — but that lever had been the key to this whole damned mess. It had transformed the mine's galleries in a loud and seemingly endless rattle of ancient chains and cranking of antique gears from the harmless tunnels they had been, into a deadly labyrinth constructed with one purpose in mind. To kill, as horribly and painfully as it could.

  A testing ground was what it turned out to be. An ancient arena for dwarven rites of passage, designed to test their mettle to the full. She knew this because, whilst her own mettle was being tested by a selection of swinging blades and giant axes, she had come across a torn and blood-browned journal she could only presume had been written by a dwarf whose own rite of passage had come to a sudden end. As she had translated it, it told the whole sorry story of Be'Trak'tak, roughly translated as 'the beginning or end.'

  Originating, she'd guessed, in the middle period of dwarven history — when their engineering skills were first beginning to evolve from the simple to the complex — it was to this place that the dwarven young were despatched at a certain age, sealed within the complex to face a series of elaborately designed traps and challenges whose survival would prove them to be warriors, or kill them in the process.

  Gods, she'd wondered, what the hells was it with those dwarves? Why couldn't they just go out on the twattle when they came of age like everyone else?

  Not that the dwarven traps would have proven too much of a challenge for her — not under any normal circumstances, anyway. The trouble was, it was the unimaginable length of time since any of them had stirred into life, because in that intervening age most of the materials from which the traps had been constructed had become rotten, making them dangerously unpredictable and unstable. It was the very reason why she was slumped here binding her broken leg right now.

  She had successfully negotiated her way through all but the last of a series of swinging hammer traps — itself just one more of an endless series of swinging, slicing or rolling something traps — when the beam that carried the final deadly bludgeon had splintered away as it swung, flinging the hammer where it was not meant to be when it was not meant to be. Kali remembered the agony as, halfway through a perfectly timed somersault manoeuvre, the hammer had sheared from its mounting and crushed her leg against the wall of the mine. Gods, that had hurt — and it had also proven to her that she was not quite as impervious to harm as events of the previous months had begun to lead her to believe. It was a salutary lesson and one she was not likely to forget so long as this farking splint remained on her leg.

  Kali shivered, not so much from cold, but a combination of exhaustion, slight fever and a hunger that came from subsisting only on the edible, though thoroughly revolting, fungus that grew on the mine walls. Of course, the state of her dark silk bodysuit didn't help. Having improved on the original thieves guild design by having it retailored to incorporate pockets for artefacts — it now hung in virtual tatters about her, having fallen victim not only to her need for cloth to tie her splint but to the various traps she'd found lying in wait. That wasn't the worst of it, though. The gaping patch of flesh around her hip was a constant reminder that somewhere along the way she had also lost her equipment belt, torn from her body and flung into some deep, dark and, by the sound of it, watery pit by an intricate whirlwind of jagged blades that someone, once upon a time, must have thought: Whirling and jagged, eh? Oh, go for it, that's a good one."

  She had lost Horse, too. She could certainly no longer sense him above, waiting patiently for her return as she expected he'd done for at least the first few days of her entrapment. No, Horse had become her faithful companion as much as the old Horse had been, but even he must have come to realise that Kali Hooper was not going to be returning to him anytime soon. She wondered where he had gone. Back to the Drakengrats where he had originally been captured? Or was he running free across the plains, the wind whistling through his horns? No, more likely he was galloping after some poor pack of worgles, terrorising them with his tongue.

  Kali sniffed. Dammit, she missed him and she was getting maudlin. Hells, it really was time to get out of here, to beat these farking traps once and for all.

  Kali heaved herself up against the chamber wall, thrusting a hand forward for balance as her bad leg took her weight, then hobbled out into the main tunnel, turning left and down rather than right and up. She knew that on the surface that seemed to make little sense but she also knew that there was no up — not since the landslide on the first day — and so she was going to gamble her survival on another possibility. Even the dwarves, with all their sadistic tendencies, surely couldn't expect any of their kind who had been 'warrior' enough to survive their traps to then renegotiate them on the way out. So it seemed logical that there had to be another way out, deeper into the mine.

  There was only one problem with that. What was in the way.

  Kali could hear it even from here. That rhythmic thumping, pounding and hissing that heralded the presence of the final trap. She had returned to it day after day for at least the last week, studying its timings and its intricacies and its foibles but making no attempt to pass. The reason for that was simple — this was the 'big one' and she was only going to get one chance at beating it.

  There it was again, she thought, entering the cavern that opened out from the mine tunnel, a complex arrangement of giant hammers and blades, arranged vertically and horizontally, that completely lined the bridge crossing the chasm in the centre. It was no simple chasm, either. The rock walls flanking it had been carved into the shapes of giant dwarven faces whose roaring mouths randomly belched great fiery clouds of breath, hot enough to have singed the wood in the trap mechanisms over the years into hard, carbonised masses.

  Kali couldn't help but admire the workmanship. The first time she'd had laid eyes on the construction she'd imagined it had once been named 'The Bridge of Doom', 'Chasm of Chaos' or 'Gauntlet of the Gods.' But she hadn't liked the sound of any of those — so instead she'd called it 'Dave.'

  Like the earlier traps, Dave would once have been negotiable with relative ease, but the rot of years had left some of its components askew, others working faster or slower than they should, still others partly broken loose from their matching components and set into motion by the movement of the mechanisms around them. As if that were not bad enough, the bridge itself looked as rotten as hells, likely to collapse under foot anywhere and anytime. The whole thing was as unpredictable as hells. One wrong move and she was over the side. One small miscalculation and she would be crushed to death or sliced to pieces. There was absolutely no room for error.

  Kali narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath, studying for a final time the patterns of movement in the trap. She flexed her bad leg and pinwheeled her arms, loosening up her muscles. And then she swallowed. And then she ran.

  Kali roared as her feet slammed onto the first few slats of the bridge, bouncing forward immediately as she felt the aged wood creak and give beneath her weight. As she bounced, the first of the trap's death-dealing devices came at her.

  Kali eyed the trajectory of the whirling blade as it span towards her and then actually ran towards it, flipping herself above and over the blade at the point metal and flesh would have met. The forward flip had to be timed slightly later than she would have liked — and she felt a sharp sting as the blade's edge sliced her thigh — but the delay was necessary for her to be able to meet the next of the bridge's dangers.

  Righting herself, Kali landed on the upperside of a hammer that had just slammed down in her path and then balanced precariously on it as it began to rise. She did not let it take her all the way, instead she used its height to leap diagonally across the bridge so tha
t she grabbed and clung onto a hammer rising on its other side. This, too, she rode until the very last second, allowing another blade to pass beneath her and then punching herself away from her perch as the hammer clicked in its mooring and slammed down.

  She was between blades and hammers now but she didn't have a moment to rest. The instant she landed one of the dwarven heads belched fire towards where she was crouched. Kali didn't hesitate, snatching up a blade that had broken from its mechanism, she shored herself behind it, using it as a shield so that the fire was deflected past her on both sides. Then, the instant the fire died down, she used the now glowing blade as a wheel, rolling with it and behind it beneath the next hammer on the right side of the bridge.

  The hammer came down hard, buckling the circular blade and straining the mechanism, but Kali had already dumped the metal and used the temporary jam to crawl swiftly beneath the area where the hammer would otherwise have impacted. This, in turn, enabled her to roll beneath the next circular blade before coming upright and flipping herself forward once more as its companion followed through a moment later.

  Kali was moving fast and she was almost through to the end of the bridge now. She could barely contain the surge of elated adrenalin that accompanied that knowledge, because there she saw some kind of wooden elevator, as she knew she would, and all she had to do now was…

  Wood splintered suddenly beneath Kali's feet and she fell forwards, cursing. The curse had barely left her lips before there was a sudden, heavy whoosh from her left hand side and the last of the mechanisms — a great hammer that swung across the bridge — came straight at her. She tried to throw herself out of its way, back into the space between hammer and blades, and would have made it safely, apart from the one small variable she had forgotten to factor into her equations. Making her leg thicker by as little as an inch, her splint made contact with one of the whirling blades she had already negotiated. Its teeth bit into the wood and cloth strip, ripping at it and tearing it away.

  Kali felt her whole body vibrate bone-jarringly and then, as the teeth of the blade spat the splint out, found herself being flipped dizzyingly through the air back towards the hammer. There was no time to reorientate herself and, in the second she tried, the swinging bludgeon slammed directly into her front, knocking her, stunned and winded, cleanly off the bridge.

  It could have been worse, she supposed, she could have lost the leg, but that was actually quite academic right now because she wasn't getting out of here. The place had become her tomb after all.

  She looked down at the stalagmites and boulders that were now rushing towards her, estimated she had only a few seconds before she hit, and closed her eyes.

  She slammed into the cavern floor. But it didn't hurt half as much as she'd imagined it might.

  What? she thought.

  Instead of the hard rock Kali thudded onto — and through — a layering of planks, that once upon a time must have been set there to prevent unwary miners stumbling into a dropshaft. They were so rotten she passed through without harm. Another layer was almost immediately beneath them, and then another, level after level of shoring. As Kali plummeted through, her momentum slowed slightly each time.

  Kathuck, kathuck, kathuck.

  It seemed to go on forever, and Kali was beginning to think she might die of suffocation as opposed to anything else when, at last, she slammed through the last of the layers and crashed, flat on her back, onto a small hillock of rotten wood on some deep, deep tunnel floor.

  She lay there for a second.

  "Ow," she said.

  And then she flipped herself upright, ready for whatever trap was going to be thrown at her next.

  But there was none. Kali knew instantly that this place was different to Be'Trak'Tak. It looked different, felt different and even smelled different. And that could mean only one thing. The whole area she'd travelled through to reach Munch's mine had been riddled with other such excavations, and this had to be one of them. She'd broken through into another mine. And what was more, there was light ahead.

  Wasting no time, Kali dusted herself down and began to move towards it, trying all the time to suppress the presumption that what was she looking at was an exit. After so long it was just too much to ask for, surely? And it was. Following the light to its source, Kali came upon against a solid rock wall.

  No, wait, not solid. There was something there.

  Kali's disappointment upon discovering that the light source was not an exit was mitigated slightly by the fact that it seemed to be no kind of natural light, and she found herself intrigued. Also she saw that it was not one light source but two, only seeming to be a whole because they were embedded in the rock close together. No, not embedded, she realised as she examined them further. The lights seemed to be attached to something else embedded in the rock, something bigger that a roof collapse had buried at some time in the past and that had remained undisturbed since. The question was, how long had it remained undisturbed? Kali studied the collapse with a professional eye, noting the visible fossilisation, the settlement of the larger pieces of debris, and the compactness of the scree around them, which was absolutely solid. A very long time, then, she concluded. The only problem now being that, if that were true, how in all the hells could the lights — whatever they were — still be glowing?

  She used her gutting knife to work away at the scree surrounding them, eventually revealing two small, orange orbs that seemed to throb beneath her touch, prompting a dull headache as they did. Suddenly, she realised what they had to be. Unless she'd missed her guess, they were some kind of power source for the thing to which they were attached.

  Kali slapped the area she had revealed around the orbs tentatively, and then a little bit harder, and then harder still until her palms hurt. No doubt about it. Metal, and solid — apparently armoured or, at least, reinforced. But what on Twilight was it? She took a few steps back so that she could see the thing more fully and, with a pulse of excitement, realised that that the metal object was mounted on some kind of rotating tracks as if it might ride on them — move on them, in fact.

  Kali continued her excavation anew, pulling now at larger stones and rocks that were embedded in the scree and then rolling each down over their predecessors until the pile was too big to accommodate more. But that didn't matter because she had managed to reveal enough of the machine for her purpose, and what she had revealed made her step back with a gasp.

  She was standing in the space between the rock and what, it seemed, had been travelling through the rock, although what mechanism it employed to do this she could not see as she had not yet unearthed its front end. It was clearly a vehicle, however, as evidenced by the fact that there was a hatch in its side — and the hatch was covered in dwarven runics. Kali ran her palm over it in some wonderment, realising that while it was far from the first dwarven artefact she had discovered, it could very well be the first from the age that had produced it.

  Through her own studies she had accredited three distinct periods of development to the Old Races — both elven and dwarven — during which they had progressed from opposing factions, utilising either magic or technology to build their individual civilisations, through periods of conflict where they had waged war using magic against technology, to the final age where, reconciled, both Old Races joined forces to expand each civilisation through magical technology. By this time both were so advanced that they would have been perceived almost as gods, and they could have been glorious and supreme if something hadn't happened. Whatever it was that had been powerful enough to wipe out these two great civilisations — to effectively eradicate them from the surface of Twilight — was perhaps the greatest of all mysteries but one that Kali intended one day to solve. The point was, that the vehicle she was studying appeared to come from the end of that last age, because what else could those orbs be but magical technology?

  Becoming more excited by the second, Kali moved to the edge of the hatch, feeling around it until she had traced a
round cornered, rectangular shape. It was sealed tightly but, being a hatch, there clearly had to be a way to open it. Perhaps that little niche there, marked with the rectangular symbol?

  Kali felt inside and her hand wrapped around what felt like a small handle, which she gripped and pushed. Nothing happened, so she pulled instead. And then she staggered back as a giant, bronchial floprat with halitosis exhaled heavily in her face.

  That, at least, was what it felt and smelled like. But there was no floprat, only the rank atmosphere coming from inside.

  Kali watched the hatch release itself from its seal, punching away from the main body of the vehicle with a second exhalation and there waiting for a moment before, with a kind of wheeze, it slid slowly to the side. Kali understood now what she had just activated. The hatch was similar to the rune surrounded doors she had discovered in the Spiral of Kos, vacuum sealed by a method she did not understand to protect whatever lay behind them. But, where beyond those doors had lain ancient laboratories, behind this one lay only darkness.

  No, she thought, not quite darkness. What appeared to be some kind of small, cramped cabin lay within, illuminated very dully by the same strange glow that had brought her to this part of the cave. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she noticed that the glow seemed to be emanating from a number of places within, each of them small — panels, perhaps, with levers. Some kind of control cabin then? But controlled by what?

  Oh, she thought suddenly, my Gods.

  The panels were not so bright as they might have been, not because they were actually dim, but because something was blocking their glow. There was a figure within, just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Kali swallowed, knowing that if it moved she would very likely have a dicky fit.

  But it didn't, of course. How could it? Who knew how long this machine had been stranded here, within the rock. Anything within it could not have hoped to survive. Hells, what a lonely, lonely death it must have been. But what nagged at Kali more than that morbid thought was, why had no one come to help? She wondered for a second whether it was possible that the inhabitant of the machine had died here because there was no one to come to help — that perhaps he had died here at the time the Old Races had gone away? And if that was the case then it begged the obvious question. What was she looking at?