Night's Haunting (31 page)

Kali withdrew the stone key from the niche and smiled. Slack, meanwhile, stared at the column and then Kali, regarding her quizzically.

"I still do not understand," he said. "That is still too far away to reach."

Kali nodded. The fact was, it was
just
too far away for a running jump, even for her. But even had she been able, she wouldn't have tried. Revealing her unique capabilities to a man who would, for the price of a shot of boff, tell all and sundry about a freak who could make such a jump was not a wise move. In a backwoods region such as this, such tales could easily reach the ear of some overzealous Final Faith missionary, and she had no wish to be dragged to a gibbet and burned as a witch. Luckily, however, there was no need to jump at all.

"Rule three," Kali said. "Be patient."

She smiled again as, from under the lip of the ledge where they stood, a scintillating layer of bright blue energy moved out towards the risen column, manoeuvring itself around stalactites and stalagmites to form a zig-zagging translucent bridge. More motes danced lazily in the blue, before freezing where they hung, trapped in what had appeared.

Slack squinted, frowned, and Kali realised he hadn't a clue what he was looking at. It was easy to forget that while she lived with such wonders on a day-to-day basis now, the average peninsulan, especially those out here, had never once encountered the threads.

"It's called magic," she explained.

"Magic?"

"It's -" Kali paused and contemplated. How exactly
did
you explain magic to a man like Slack? "It's kind of like using the world around you... a way of doing things with invisible tools."

"So, with this... magic, I could dig a cesspit with an invisible spade?"

Kali pulled a face. "Uh, yeah, I suppose," she conceded, thinking that she was the only one digging a hole around here. "Let's move on, shall we?"

A wary Slack dibbed his toe onto the bridge, clearly not trusting its solidity, and as he did Kali strode casually by him into the void, high-fiving stalactites and humming a happy tune. She reached the column and waited for Slack to catch up before she inserted her stone key into a second niche carved in its centre. This time she turned it left three times, right and then left again. There was another grating sound, and another rumbling from below.

"Six columns," Kali explained as another rose ahead of them, "six combinations. If all are entered correctly, they form a bridge all the way to where we want to go."

Slack sniffed, becoming over-confident once more. "That sounds easy enough."

"Easy?" Kali chided as she waited for the bridge to form and skipped onto the next stage. "You think I got this key from some bloody adventurer's corner shop? It's been crafted from separate components, six again, each one hidden in a site rigged to the rafters with every kind of trap imaginable. These past few weeks I've been shot at, scolded, suffocated, stifled, stung, squeezed, squished and squashed, so maybe, Mister Slack, you should rethink your 'easy'."

"And you say you are
not
doing this for the money?"

"Nope," Kali said. "Holiday."

"
Holiday?
"

"Holiday." The fact was, she was still reeling from recent events and revelations, so much so that she'd had to get away, from friends, from the
Flagons
, from all of it. Not that there were actually that many friends around right now - she'd barely seen hide nor hair of Merrit Moon or Aldrededor since she'd brought the
Tharnak
from the Crucible, the old man, whose shop was being rebuilt after the k'nid attacks, and the pirate spending all their time tinkering with the ship in Domdruggle's Expanse. Dolorosa had summed it up with a phrase that had brought a grin to her face - boys and their toys. There was a serious side to their tinkering, it had to be said - readying the ship for whenever and for
whatever
it might be needed - but a desire not to think about that was what had brought her here. Slowhand, too, was currently absent from her life - the archer making good on his promise to avenge the death of his sister. Not, of course, that she'd had time to miss Slowhand or the others - the holiday she'd taken, she'd chosen specifically to keep her on her toes, and she had lost count of the number of times she had barely avoided it becoming a funeral. In short, she'd had one hell of a time, and the acquisition of what lay ahead of her was the last challenge she had to face. Because what she had so far not told Slack was that forming the bridges was only half of it - and what would happen if you didn't input the codes directly. She debated keeping this aspect to herself but what the hells - it would do him good to know how much he needed her around.

"One wrong move," she said, "and the entire mechanism resets itself. The bridges behind and ahead of us would disappear and we'd be stranded on the current column. Not to worry, though - it's not like we'd starve to death or anything - because the column would then retract into the depths below - bang just like that.
That's
when we'd need to worry."

Slack peered warily into the black depths. "Are you saying there is something down there?"

Kali leaned over his shoulder, cheek to cheek, and whispered, "Something horrible. There's always something horrible."

With the even more restrained Slack in tow, Kali negotiated three more bridges, coming at last to the final one - the one to the resting place of the artefact. This time she wielded the key but hesitated as she held it before the lock, drawing a worried glance from her side.

"There is a problem?" Slack asked.

"No, no, no problem," Kali responded. Well, not much of one - only that at this point in the game it was most likely she'd get them both killed. The fact was that while her studies of the dwarven key had revealed a pattern to her, she'd been sure of all the combinations except this last. The combinations represented a really quite simple series of nods to the inclinations of the dwarves' multifarious minor gods - "lightning" equalling "from above," in other words up; sunrise, east, therefore right; sea, which from this point on the peninsula was to the west and so was left - and so forth. The problem with the last combination was that it contained a glyph for the god of wind, and frankly that one had left her stymied. Wind, after all, could come from any direction, north, south, east or west, down, up, left or right, so how in the hells was she supposed to know where it came from? In the end, she'd whittled the possibilities down to two answers - up, because the wind in this valley was predominantly northern, which was spurious to say the least, and down, or south, because... well, because.

Hesitantly, she inserted the key in the final niche, turned most of the combination, and stopped before the final twist. North now, or south? If she guessed wrong, the last thing she'd see would be Slack wetting himself, and she could think of better images with which to depart the world. She stared at the smelly man and decided. Because it had to be, didn't it?

She turned the key south, locked it into place. After a few seconds the bridge appeared.

Kali sighed long and hard, realising she'd gambled correctly. And on a dwarven joke. A crude but effective joke, much like the dwarves themselves. She could imagine them roaring with laughter when they had thought of it - hey, Hammerhead, how about this?
There's more than one kind of wind!

Beside her, Slack whooped, and not about to tell him she'd just gambled both of their lives on a fart, Kali moved on without a word, setting foot on the reassuring solidity of the central column. And right in front of her was what she had come for.

The Breachblades. Legend had it they had been forged by the greatest of dwarven smiths from wreckage washed up on shore near Oweilau millennia before. No one knew the origin of the wreckage but many speculated it had been part of a machine of those said to live deep beneath the sea, themselves having forged it from a material from the skies capable of withstanding the pressures of impossible depths. Whatever its origin, the metal possessed unprecedented properties, a toughness that was as evident in its finest component parts as its largest. It had taken the finest dwarven tools to extricate a piece which could be worked but from it the smith had produced prototypes of weapons for use against the elves. The blades were said to be sharp enough to slice through anything - rock, metal, or, more relevantly, the impenetrable armour with which the elves had by that time garbed their warriors. For such was the armour's indestructibility that one elf was able to cut a swathe through hundreds of dwarven warriors before being felled, and their enemies were desperate to even the odds. The irony was that though the dwarves had planned to forge a thousand such blades, these Breachblades were the only ones ever made - the moment of their forging coinciding with a new found peace between the Old Races that, in itself, was to last for almost a millennium. They were, in other words, unique, a one of a kind artefact that Kali had had on her 'must have' list for as long as she could remember. The only sadness was that because of the need to protect Twilight from itself, she could never let anyone know she had found them, let alone sell them, which was irksome because with the money they'd raise she could rethatch the Flagons with
gold
.
That
was something she had planned to do with the money for the plans for the elven ship, the
Llothrial
, but the Filth had put paid to that when they had visited the tavern uninvited one night. The bastards.

Kali sighed and picked up the Breachblades from their resting place in the pillar of light, swinging them about her experimentally. Some sources said they were even capable of slicing an elf's soul from its body and, while she held little belief in the whole Soul-goes-to-Kerberos thing, she couldn't deny a certain aura about them as they cut the air with a sibilant whoosh. She weighed the weapons in her hands, feeling as if she were barely wielding anything, their metal as light as a feather...

Which was something that could hardly be said about the rusty, serrated blade she felt suddenly pressed against her throat. Kali sighed again, but this time with a weary resignation.

Well,
that
was a surprise.

"I will be taking those, Miss Hooper," Maladorus Slack said from behind her. His blade wasn't anywhere near as uncomfortable as the fact that he was pushing himself up tight against her, his other hand rubbing slow circles on the exposed midriff beneath her torn bodysuit. His breath was hot as he added, "Drop them to the ground."

"You sure about that?" Kali responded.

"What? Of course I am sure!"

"Only it's just," Kali went on, "that if I drop them to the ground then you'll have to pick them up, and while you're doing that I'll kick you in the nuts so hard people'll be calling you Four-Eyes."

There was a hesitant pause.

"I told you, Slack, plan ahead."

"Then pass them to me slowly, between your legs."

Kali drew in a sharp breath. "Or No-Nuts."

"Over your shoulder, then!"

"Mister Knife-head."

"Damn you, woman. You are toying with me. Buying time."

"Actually, no. I'd prefer to get this over with quickly. Have you any idea at all how much you
stink
?"

"I sympathise. But you will not be able to stink... smell me when you're dead."

"Don't kid yourself, swamp boy."

"
Give me the blades
."

"No."

"No?"

"No."

Slack sighed in exasperation and Kali smiled, having waited for it. All you ever had to do was wait for the sigh of exasperation because at that moment you knew that whoever
thought
they had the upper hand was momentarily off guard. She took advantage of this subtle shift in his stance to elbow Slack in the ribs then fling his gasping form around in front of her, kicking his legs out from under him as he came. It was a manoeuvre that should then have enabled her to pin him to the ground with her much sharper blades at
his
throat, and that was exactly where they would have been were it not for the fact that at that very moment the entire cavern trembled violently, so much so that it almost spilled them off the column. Kali stumbled and dropped to her knees, the Breachblades skittering from her hands. There was another tremble and Kali looked upwards, thinking
what the hells
? She hardly cared as, with a cry of triumph, Slack grabbed the blades and ran for the bridge, then she remembered the hand on her stomach and with a grunt of irritation made to pursue him. But she abruptly stopped about four yards onto the bridge.

What the hells
? she thought again.

The tremors, the quake, whatever the pits it was, seemed to be interfering with the energy bridges throughout the cavern and, as Kali watched, each faded or flickered dangerously on and off. In his greed, Slack seemed not to have noticed but the very surface on which his filthy little feet pounded was already beginning to sparkle with the very same pattern it had when it formed. For whatever reason, the magic seemed to be destabilising.

"Slack, come back!" Kali shouted, but the only response she got was a backward flip of a finger. "Fine, you idiot, run, then! Just get off that farking bridge!"

This actually had the opposite effect to what she intended, and Slack paused in his tracks, turning to face her with a curious glance. It was the worst thing he could have done. And as Kali suddenly leapt back onto the security of the central island with a startled yelp, Slack's perspective on his situation turned his mood from triumphant glee to undisguised panic. For as his gaze shifted from Kali down to his feet he saw that the bridge was flickering more rapidly now, blinking in and out of existence every half second, the rapidity of the transition the only thing that was stopping him from falling through. There was no guarantee that it was going to continue blinking in that fashion, though, and the sudden realisation that at any moment there could be nothing between himself and an abyss filled with
something horrible
galvanized the thief into turning and running for his life. Unfortunately, the exercise was pointless, the man having realised his predicament at approximately the half way point of the crossing, so whichever way he went he seemed doomed. And a few seconds after he began his run for his life Maladorus Slack found himself treading air, and then, with a whimper, a forgiving dog-eyed glance at Kali and a scream, he was gone, flailing into the abyss.