Thief of the Ancients Page 5

  At last the glow from the conflagration began to fade, and the horrors that surrounded them retreated once more into the dark. Instinctively, Horse slowed, but Kali rode him on for another ten minutes or so before she felt safe enough to rein him around and look back on what they had left behind.

  In the distance, visible even through its canopy, a giant pillar of fire still rose above the Sardenne, identical to the one she had seen in the vision that had caused her fall. The moments she spent staring at it were the first chance she’d had time to think about what had happened to her, and she frowned. There was no doubt now that the conflagration she had witnessed was that of the Spiral itself, and that meant she had seen the future – how could that possibly be explained? Gods, she thought, how could the whole bloody day be explained? Death traps, the Final Faith, the giant key still slung across her back – everything about it posed a question.

  Thankfully, she knew someone who could help her find the answers. She reined Horse around again, and together the two of them began the long trek back out of the forest. When they emerged from it, she knew, they would be taking the road to Gargas.

  Their exit from the Sardenne – and subsequent trek across the eastern plains of Pontaine – took four days, and while it was a relief to be amongst such dramatically different scenery, the endless fields dotted by the occasional hamlet that comprised this far eastern part of the peninsula made for a wearisome journey. But at least Kali was able to make camp each night relieved that she did not have to watch the movements of every shadow, and by the final night’s rest she had visibly relaxed.

  “You ever wonder, Horse,” she mused as she lay by her campfire nursing her sixth bottle of flummox, “if your ancestors are trotting around, looking down on you from up there?” She was gazing at the azure mass of Kerberos, where, common belief had it, souls went when the body died. There, they were meant to soar in endless majesty through the gas giant’s clouds, but only if they’d been good, gods-fearing boys and girls – condemned to its pits, the hells, if they had not. Kali suspected she knew where she was going. She took a swig from her bottle and waved it around. “I’m asking only because then they’d have to have been believers, wouldn’t they? You a believer, Horse? Is there some horsey church you go to when I’m not looking? Where you go clip-clopping up the neeiigghhve?” She giggled and yawned, stared at the distant sun. There was an eclipse coming. “No, I’m serious – wouldn’t it be nice to just drift around as light as a feather?”

  Horse chomped his bacon stew, ignoring her.

  “Speaking of light as a feather. You’re not listening, are you?”

  Chomp, chomp, chomp.

  “Thought not,” Kali said, and promptly fell asleep.

  The next morning they resumed their journey, the final leg, and reached the outskirts of Gargas by late afternoon. As they passed the sign to the market town, Horse perked up considerably, his trot breaking spontaneously into a canter without any prompting at all. Kali smiled and patted him on the neck. She was looking forward to seeing the old man too.

  Kali had known Merrit Moon almost all her adult life, since the day he had introduced himself in the Warty Witch in Freiport. What had always stuck in her mind – become part of what drove her, in many ways – were the words he had imparted to her at the time. She had just returned from one of her first expeditions, only slightly less naïve than the day she’d been born, and had been sitting in the tavern bruised, battered and exhausted with a much-needed jug of ale and the artefact she had managed to extract from a ruined site some miles outside that town. As she sat there examining her prize, turning it in her hands, caressing it with a great deal of curiosity and no small sense of wonder, she’d been oblivious to the stares that the small, scintillating sphere was attracting from the Witch’s other clientele. They, too, were curious about it, though their curiosity had little to do with the archaeology that motivated her and everything to do with lining their empty purses with gold. Two of what were presumably the more desperate among them, licking their lips, had begun to move over to her table when a hand had swept slowly across her own, pressing it down and hiding the object it held from view. At the same time, another hand waved the curious back towards the bar. The owner of both obviously possessed sufficient gravitas because the men left without question.

  “What you are holding in your hand,” a voice had said, “belongs to those who came before us, and is not a bauble to be toyed with. More importantly, it is not a bauble to be displayed in a place such as this.”

  A man had slipped then into the seat beside her, and she had looked over at a face of perhaps sixty years of age, weatherbeaten but at the same time gentle, with grey eyes that suggested a wealth of experience and a core of steel. Though a little portly, she’d suspected he hadn’t always been so, much as she’d suspected that the shoulder-length silvery hair that now looked suspiciously like a bad wig, but wasn’t, had once been more kempt. He was dressed, as she herself had favoured back then, in loose leathers but, rather startlingly, had slung about them a cloak of thick wool that looked and stank as if it belonged on a horse. And it was pink.

  The stranger introduced himself as Merrit Moon. She had been sure she had seen him somewhere before, but he assured her she had not.

  “Thanks for the advice, but I can look after myself,” she had answered.

  Merrit Moon had smiled. “Oh, of that, I have no doubt. But as much as that might be the case, don’t you think it a little foolish to provoke the need to do so?”

  He signalled for a drink and, as it came, continued, quietening only as the tankard was set down. “Ours is a rich world,” he said, “but most of those who live upon it do not even begin to realise where its true richness lies. Nor do most of them wish to. They have closed minds, and to those minds all there is around them is Vos, Pontaine, the Anclas Territories, places busy with petty dealings and squabblings, trade agreements, embargoes and hostilities. They are, of course, aware, somewhere in their closed minds, that we all live with the legacy of older races who came before us, but they choose to ignore that legacy because their minds are too full of the mundane day-to-day struggles it takes to survive in this blighted land.”

  He’d gestured to the object she’d held. “Such objects might stir greed in some, as happened with those... gentlemen, but in others they stir fear – fear of the unknown, fear of instability, fear that their own lives and existences could as easily be snuffed as were the lives and existences of those who once crafted such things.”

  She had stared at him. Merrit Moon had the air of a man who had made his own way on Twilight, much as she had herself, and she instinctively trusted him.

  “You sound as if you have knowledge of the Old Races.”

  “Enough to know when to keep that knowledge to myself, for fear of a knife in my back.”

  She had glanced up at the men and kept the sphere low, but had not been able to resist stroking it with her thumbs, wondering at its smoothness of manufacture. Smoothness, that was, apart from one intriguing dimple...

  “This thing,” she had asked. “What is it?”

  Unexpectedly, Moon had laughed. “Do you know how many times I have asked myself that same question? Not, of course, with what you hold – I know that – but with many a hundred other objects – perhaps a thousand, I have found? And perhaps with one object in each hundred I have actually come up with answers.” He’d smiled. “Though not necessarily the right ones.”

  “What kind of answers? I mean, what things have you found and what do they do?”

  Moon had leaned in eagerly, almost conspiratorially, and his eyes had twinkled as he spoke. “Narrow cylinders of light that, unlike candles, never dim. A ring that when spun speaks with the voices of beings long gone, in a language long dead. A gauntlet that generates a field of force nothing to do with the threads of any mage, shadow or otherwise.”

  She had looked at him in wonder. In all her ventures up to that time, she’d found nothing so exciting. Except,
perhaps, what she held then. Whatever it was. “And this one?”

  “That one?” Moon had said, as if it were nothing. “That one’s a bomb.”

  “Bomb,” she’d repeated, thumbs frozen where they were.

  “Icebomb, in actual fact. Quite ingenious but quite common, and I’d advise you not to touch the dimple.” He’d sighed heavily. “I touched the dimple...”

  “You did? What happened?”

  “Froze my dog solid. Tried to fetch it when I threw it away.”

  She’d looked at him to see if he was joking but there was a definite tear in his eye. “Pits! Hey, wait, I wasn’t going –”

  “Don’t lie. Yes, you were.”

  “Okay, I was.” She’d quickly put the sphere down and changed the subject. “So what are you telling me – these objects you found, they harness magic?”

  “Not magic, young lady. Science. Old Race science.”

  “They were that advanced?”

  “That – and less, and more. The truth is, they dominated this land for a long time – through three ages – but tales from the Final Age tell of them actually preparing to send ships to the heavens. To explore Kerberos itself.”

  “Kerberos,” she’d whispered. “But I don’t understand. Other than this thing, I’ve never –”

  “Found such things?” Moon had finished, chortling. “Perhaps that’s because you haven’t been looking as long as I have. Or perhaps because you haven’t been looking in the right places.”

  Without a word, he’d slid a map across the table in front of her.

  “What’s this?”

  A shrug. “The location of an Old Race city. Only three streets remaining, but interesting nonetheless. I’m giving it to you because I’d like to help you in your pursuits, if I may.”

  She’d gawped at the map. “Why? Why would you help me?”

  And he’d smiled. “Because of your very first question to me. ‘What is this?’ you asked. Not ‘What is this worth?’ but ‘What is this?’ because you are interested in its history.”

  “That doesn’t mean I mightn’t still want to sell it.”

  “But you won’t, will you? Because you now know what it is. You have a great deal to learn before the things you see and find begin to make sense, but you have already learned the first lesson – that Twilight is not ready for its own past. Hide the sphere and keep it safe, because perhaps one day you will need it.”

  “Hey, old man – a girl’s got to live.”

  “And you will. Oh, how you will! The true baubles you find? Sell them, as I have done over the years. Sell them so you can go to greater depths, in search of greater secrets. Sell them to finance the life you’ll lead.”

  “The life I’ll lead?”

  “Finding out what happened to the elves and dwarves, of course!” Moon had declared with sudden passion. He’d squinted at her, a smile playing on his lips. “That is what you want to do, isn’t it?”

  “All I ever wanted,” she’d breathed.

  “Hah! Barkeep, two more drinks,” he’d shouted, then, thumping the table in glee before turning to her. “Then join me, Kali Hooper. There’s a whole world out there, and it isn’t ours.”

  There’s a whole world out there, and it isn’t ours, Kali thought. The old man had spoken those words five years earlier, and in that time Merrit Moon and Kali had shared adventures and expeditions, the old man teaching her tricks and techniques that had proved invaluable since – but also in that time he’d become less physically capable and had eventually begun to act as advisor rather than active participant in their finds. And then, there had come a time when he had retired from the field altogether. He could not shed himself of his interest in the subject, of course, and on moving to Gargas had opened a shop whose income allowed him to maintain that interest, particularly when it came to acting as a sounding board for her more intriguing discoveries.

  The smallest population centre in Pontaine, Gargas was a market town that sat alone amidst the eastern plains’ northern farmlands. Merrit had chosen it as his home because, unlike Andon or Miramas or Volonne, it enjoyed a tolerably low level of interference from Pontaine’s governing bodies and, latterly, from what he considered to be the scourge that was the Final Faith. For a large portion of the year its wide cobbled streets were empty, its inhabitants dots in a desolate community, but twice a year, when the harvests came in, it was transformed into a bustling centre of trade and commerce as farmers and merchants distributed their produce from all over Pontaine and beyond. Then, the city’s population more than tripled in size, its streets thronged not only with legitimate salesmen but wheelers and dealers of every kind, the shops that lined them enjoying a week or so of frenetic prosperity that sustained them throughout the rest of the year.

  It happened to be market time now, and as Horse trotted in through Gargas’s southern gate Kali was almost overwhelmed by the riot of colour, noise and smell that greeted her. Garlanded and festooned stalls crowded every open space, their equally colourful owners selling cloths and spices, ales and trinkets, meats and fruits, and everything in between. Kali dismounted Horse and led him by his reins through the bustling throng, dodging hawkers who regaled her with tales of products that would change her life and worgles that rolled hopefully along the ground in search of scraps, and avoiding by as much of a margin as she could the foul breath of traders’ mools, the black and white patched ruminants they used to ferry their goods. More than once she had to swerve swiftly off course, hurrying along as Horse nosebagged a sausage or a pie from its seller’s stall, the baskets they sat in and all. With all this going on, it took her a good half-hour to wind her way through to her destination but there, at last, it was.

  Merrit Moon’s shop was hidden away down a side alley behind a flummox still run by brother and sister Hannah and Arthur Greenwood, and Kali winked to them as she passed. But though hidden, Wonders of the World was no less patronised for it – in fact, it was one of the most popular destinations for the punters filling Gargas’s streets. The old man had certainly tapped a vein when he’d decided to market souvenirs of Twilight’s more inaccessible areas, and it had become quite the thing in the cities to own a rock from the foothills of the Drakengrat Mountains or a walking stick carved from wood chopped on the edge of the Sardenne. It was all junk, of course, but it was profitable junk and it was genuine and it allowed Merrit to rid himself of some of the more useless items he had accumulated over the years. Not that he didn’t still collect – in fact he paid good bonuses to the would-be adventurers he employed to gather his sticks and stones if they ever returned with something more interesting.

  Few, of course, provided him with the kinds of finds she did. Spotting her as soon as the bell jangled above the door, Merrit tried to conceal his pleasure at seeing her by merely raising a finger to acknowledge her presence. Kali smiled – it was rare these days that her visits were for purely social reasons, and she could see the eagerness in his eyes to discover what she’d brought him this time. His interest in selling a throbsnake’s shedded skin to some Vossian noble waned instantly, offering the man the supposed aphrodisiac at a significant discount just to get him out of the door. The rest, timewasters by the look of them, he shooed away with a Drakengrat death-rattle, flicking the sign on the door to ‘closed’ as soon as they had gone.

  “Hello, old man,” Kali said. She moved to embrace him but Merrit, as always, scuttled away, pretending some nonexistent business. Again, Kali smiled. She’d get him one day.

  “You have the smell of the deep Sardenne about you,” Moon said brusquely, sniffing the air in the room with distaste. “Have you been taking my faithful old friend somewhere less than healthy, young lady?”

  My faithful old friend, Kali thought. The old man was referring to Horse. Sometimes she wondered whether Moon cared more about Horse than he did her – knowing that, if not, it would be one hells of a close-run thing. For the fact was, when he had stopped adventuring, she had stepped not only into Moon’s metapho
rical shoes but into his metaphorical stirrups as well, Horse having been his companion before hers, and for a good deal longer. They had been through a lot together, those two, but, when it had come time for Merrit’s retirement, it was clear Horse would not be happy wandering in circles in some field all day, and had actually twice run away, lurking on the edge of town staring dolefully into the distance, where such adventures – and perhaps some exotic variant of bacon stew – lay. So Moon had offered him to her. She’d had her reservations at first, because Horse had seen a lot of miles in his time. But then in a sudden moment of insight it had occurred to her that time was precisely the point. All of the places she wished to go had already waited so many hundreds of years, so what difference would an extra couple of days – okay, in some cases a week – in getting there on a slower steed actually make? And, as it turned out, it even gave her time to prepare, to think. It was an arrangement that kept everyone happy.

  Speaking of which, Moon was circling her, prodding and sniffing at the key she had bundled up on her back, eager to unwrap her latest find. Kali nodded to a trapdoor in the floor of the shop, indicating that what she had might be a little too important to reveal here. Even more intrigued now, Moon rubbed his hands together and lifted the trap.

  A ladder led down to a cellar and Merrit and Kali descended, the old man waving his hand over light cylinders to illuminate the subterranean room where he kept his – and her – more unusual finds.