The beast craved flesh.
There, within the dark depths of the Sardenne Forest, that primal place curving like a great black bow beneath the frozen and fiery peaks of the World's Ridge Mountains, at the eastern edge of the peninsula, where civilisation stopped, the beast rolled insane and bulbous eyes, ground together huge and slavering jaws, and with a ravenous snort slowly advanced on the human it knew to be helpless before it.
The dark-maned young woman stood with her hands on the waist of her billowing squallcoat, head cocked to the side, weighing up the heavy creature as it came. She stood her ground, boots planted firmly against the foetid night winds of the forest, feeling her soles tremble as the ponderous beast thudded closer, unflinching despite the fact she was unarmed and facing it alone. There was no one nearby to help her. No one, in fact, anywhere within leagues of her, for this was a place humans rarely trod, and where the ones who had come before the humans had not trodden for countless aeons, since their civilisations had gone. She had long ago left behind what settlements dotted the edge of this dark expanse, long ago passed the silent stares and downed tools of their inhabitants as she moved between their homes and on into the darkness. Even those hardened woodcutters only ventured into the forest's outlying regions, and only then under the guard of their best fighting men, men who kept watchful eyes — and readied weapons — trained on the shadows that gathered about them. Beyond, the forest was considered impenetrable, and those who sought to prove otherwise — those who invariably never returned — to be foolhardy in the extreme. So it was the Sardenne had remained all but unexplored. The oldest of evils were said to lurk within its dark depths, and tales were told — in hushed tones, behind bolted doors — of creatures fantastic and terrifying that wandered there, waiting to corrupt or devour any intruder who entered their lair.
The young woman was not foolhardy but she was determined. By now, she had been travelling for three days, ever inwards, and so by all measures of the forest's dangers should be dead — or worse. With stealth, forestcraft and some alchemical guile, however, she had managed to evade the attentions of its darker denizens, though she had lost count of the times roars, rattles, whispers or blood-curdling screeches had alerted her to their presence, close by, in the darkness around her.
The darkness. What passed for night on the rest of Twilight — the haunting, azure halflight filtered through the gas giant Kerberos — was here more akin to longnight, the greater darkness that only occurred when, four times a year, the world's distant sun passed behind Kerberos and the eclipses came. It was worse than longnight, in truth, because while then the grey- and silver-streaked surface of the looming giant could still be discerned above her, here the forest's canopy was almost total, as smothering and as dark as an oubliette.
Dark, that was, apart from the moist whiteness of the eyes of the beast, glittering, demanding saucers that had grown ever closer and loomed before her now. Yes, she might have made it this far but this was a confrontation she could not avoid. This particular beast would not allow her to progress until it had taken everything she had, its unnatural hunger sated.
She let it come, one hand slipping into a pocket of her squallcoat and wrapping itself in readiness around a small round object hidden within. Seeing her movement, and perhaps suspecting something, the beast reared its head and snorted steam from dark and expansive nostrils, and on the end of a thick, anvilled snout a pair of huge and fleshy lips curled back to reveal an array of tombstone teeth that, exposed in this way, appeared to grin as insanely as the bulbous eyes had rolled. The young woman steeled herself, her hand ready, but then without warning the beast lurched forwards and a slimy tongue the size of a rowing boat paddle slapped across her face. She batted it away, gagging and recoiling from a blast of foetid breath, took a step back and, with a groan of disgust, wiped a sliding patch of viscous slobber from her cheek and the lapel of her squallcoat. She flicked it to the ground with a grimace, shaking her hand until all of it was gone. Gods, that was disgusting!
Kali Hooper sighed.
"I taught you to wait," she said, exasperated. "All right, fine, okay. But this is the last, you hear me?"
The beast whinnied, nodding its head rapidly, and Kali produced the round object from her pocket, a lardon of bacon she tossed towards it. The meat hit the beast's snout, from where, its party trick, it was deliberately bounced back into the air before being caught in the huge mouth then manoeuvred beneath it. The beast rolled its insane eyes again and chomped down gratefully, drooling copiously as it ate.
"Those things will make you fat, Horse, you know that?" Kali said. "Eff — ay — tee." She punctuated the letters with hearty slaps to the shire's thick neck, prompting a head-butting that almost pushed her over. "What use will you be then, you obese lump? Going to be you riding me to the Spiral, is it?"
The Spiral, Kali thought, and sighed again. The truth was, she'd be happy lugging Horse there if only she could find the damned thing. She slapped his neck a final time and slumped herself down at the base of a tree, once again unfolding the map she'd paid fifty full silver for from a contact in Turnitia some weeks before. Focusing on it in the dimness, she made a tired, brubbing sound with her lips. Acquired from a collection whose legal ownership she wasn't privy to, the old and hand-drawn map purported to show the whereabouts of an Old Race site whose name she'd translated as the Spiral of Kos. She'd had her doubts about the map's provenance at the time but had handed over her money not because of what the Spiral of Kos was — frankly, she hadn't a clue — but rather its location here in the deeps of the Sardenne. Its very inaccessibility meant the site was likely untouched, and potentially that made it — and what it might contain — her most interesting find yet. Trouble was, authentic or not, the map was not to scale, and having found nothing so far she now had to decide whether to venture deeper into the forest, knowing that there lay Bellagon's Rip, reputed to be the stomping ground of the Pale Lord himself. While she didn't have any problem with that wayward necromancer — as long as he left her alone — she had to admit the vast army of undead under his command gave her pause for thought. If she wanted to spend the rest of her existence staggering around gibbering, she'd rather just be permanently betwattled, thank you very much.
Kali wished she could have a drink right there. Her chosen lifestyle — what she liked to think of as athletic archaeology — was one hells of a way to make a living.
She started. She had been so absorbed in her thoughts she had almost missed the fact that some thing had moved in the nearby undergrowth just then, something that alerted her with a crack of wood and a flash of something… chitinous at the edge of her vision. She instantly tensed, hunched to make herself small, and her eyes darted from left to right in her otherwise frozen form. Dammit, she thought — she'd broken her own golden rule, grown too complacent, stayed in one place too long. What was worse, she'd only just noticed that in wiping off some of Horse's drool she'd also smeared away some of the floprat render with which she'd been coating her squallcoat to deceive curious noses, and in doing so had released a whiff of her own human scent.
Humans were a delicacy here, and a whiff was enough. Whatever was in the bushes had found her because of it. And whatever it was, it wasn't friendly.
Kali didn't hang around, springing gymnastically onto Horse's back. Behind her, heralded by a sudden flight of panicked shrikes, she saw not one but maybe three predators — it was difficult to tell — glistening, angular carapaced things that reared out of the undergrowth on stickwood legs, and then in total silence, bar a sound like baby bones snapping, folded themselves around the trees towards her. Kali had no idea what the things were, and didn't want to know — and neither did Horse.
Her entreaty of "Go, go, go!" was entirely redundant as the great beast had also spotted the monstrosities and, with a panicked bray, was off, not at anything that could be described as a gallop but building his own hulking momentum, designed to get him and Kali the hells out of there, whether there were trees in the way or not. The pair ploughed ahead, gaining a few seconds as their predators sniffed at what Horse had involuntarily left behind, but then they could be heard behind them once more, folding and snapping themselves through the forest in a determined and slowly accelerating pursuit.
Accelerating some himself now, Horse thudded blindly on, neither he nor Kali caring where they headed. But then the pair of them broke through, suddenly, into an unexpectedly treeless area of the forest, a large glade where the canopy opened to the sky. Despite the openness the place was almost unnaturally still, thick with lazily hovering insects and bestrewn with strange vines that covered the ground and crawled in a tangle over a central low but sweeping hill. Kali urged Horse on towards the rise, reasoning that if they could make it to the top she might be able to make a stand against their pursuers. But just before they began to climb, she threw a glance backwards and saw that though they had emerged into the glade they had ceased their chase, having come to a sudden stop at the edge of the trees. A nervous twisting and cracking of their chitinous forms suggested that for some reason they were wary of going on, and then they actually skulked away, back into the forest. Kali was so distracted by the development that it took her a moment to realise that Horse had stopped just as suddenly as they had.
Horse? she thought, but that was all, as the direct consequence of him halting so abruptly was that she was thrown out of her saddle and over his head. Kali's world turned upside down, and for a moment all she could see was the dizzyingly swooping sky, and then she landed hard on the slope of the hill, flat on her back, with an ooff and a crack that sounded like her spine had snapped in two. She lay where she was, stunned, while her brain tried to reorientate itself inside her skull. Rather ominously, she was dimly aware that Horse had begun to bray and snort and back away behind her.
Surprisingly, she found she could move — but when she did, stopped doing so immediately. There had been another crack beneath her, sounding this time not like her spine but the fracturing of ice on a frozen lake. It happened again — kuuchruuck! — and Kali hissed in a sharp breath as the slope shifted beneath her, a drop of perhaps only half an inch but one that felt so vertiginous it made her heart lurch. She didn't think twice, somersaulting from where she crouched, feeling the ground give again as she rolled to where Horse circled nervously below her.
What in all the pits of Kerberos — ?
Panting, Kali picked herself up and turned to look where she had fallen. The hill before her had looked solid enough but evidently wasn't, and had to be why both Horse and their chitinous friends had refused to go on. That, or they sensed something else. She had to admit the glade had a strange feel to it, a sense of something dormant and waiting, undisturbed for lifetimes. Something old.
Something old!
Kali felt a buzz of excitement — maybe, at last, she'd found something. Maybe. She calmed Horse then took off her squallcoat and tossed it over his saddle, revealing beneath the shnarl-hide working gear she'd had made in Freiport a couple of years earlier. The figure-hugging outfit, bespoke-tailored with artefact pockets on its arms and legs, was showing its age as well as some of her it shouldn't, but Kali didn't care, the kinds of places she wore it being well away from public gaze. She was rather fond of it, actually, as every tear or gash and every blood-stained hole brought its own memory. Around its waist she strapped a leather toolbelt she took from a saddlebag, and then to that a rope she took from another, securing the opposite end to the nub of the saddle itself. In the absence of trees in the glade, Horse would serve as an anchor for her safety rope. It wasn't the first time she had used his bulk in such a way.
Kali returned near to the spot where she'd been thrown, then knelt and swept her hand back and forth to brush away tiny plants and topsoil, creating an arc of investigation. The surface was thin and came away with surprising ease, and she realised this was because there was nowhere for roots to take hold. There was metal beneath. Riveted metal. By the look of it, some kind of supporting rib.
She sat back, surprised and confused. Not only because of the incongruous presence of the rib but the fact that metal would not have cracked beneath her the way she had felt the ground do. It was doubly odd. Checking the tightness of the rope, she inched her way up the rib until she overlooked the exact point where she had fallen, and again swept her hand back and forth. This time the topsoil offered absolutely no resistance at all, sliding away and trickling down to form a heap at the base of the hill. What lay beneath made her breath catch — a shiny, dark material as smooth as glass other than where hairline fractures marred it, fresh fractures that wouldn't be there except for her own ignominious crash-landing. She stroked the surface with her palm, realising two things. The material itself wasn't dark, it just had darkness beneath it. And it wasn't glass — it was crystal.
Kali stood, puzzling over what she'd found when she heard a shifting above her, and suddenly the trickle of soil about her feet became a small flood. She looked up and saw that where she'd wiped away the topsoil she had, in turn, disturbed the soil above it, and it, too, had begun to slip towards her. And with it gone, everything above had become unstable.
Horse brayed, hung his head and looked at her with chastising eyes. She'd caused a landslide. The entire bloody hill was coming down.
"Ohhh, bugger!" Kali said.
She staggered back along the metal, trying to get out of the way as the mass of soil and roots came crashing past her to the forest floor, almost dragging her off her feet and choking her in a dense, fibrous fog. She waded against the thick tide for what seemed like an eternity, and when, finally, it ceased, and its cloud had dispersed, found herself staring up at what remained.
Her mouth dropped open.
The hill hadn't collapsed, only the detritus with which nature had hidden what it really was over the course of long, long years. And now, rising away from her and sweeping off to her left and right, was a dome.
A vast, ornately ribbed, crystal dome.
Kali's heart thudded. Steaming pits of Kerberos, she had never seen anything like this!
There was no question about what to do next. She had to find out what was inside. Unlacing a pouch on her toolbelt, Kali dug through various odds and ends, took out a small hammer and clambered back up the rib to where she had knelt earlier, intending to tap the fractured crystal to create an exploratory hole. But as she raised the hammer to strike she felt tugs on the rope about her waist, minor at first but then hard enough to actually jerk her off balance. Unusually for Horse, it seemed he was getting skittish. But turning to see what the matter was, Kali realised Horse was more than skittish, he was clopping about in considerable agitation.
She looked past him and saw why. Something was coming at them out of the trees — fast. They must have worked up some courage because their friends were back with a vengeance.
There was no time to act, no time to hide, no time to dodge — Kali didn't even have time to brace herself. The chitinous things came swooping around Horse and straight at her, folding and flapping and then slamming into her with a speed that knocked the wind from her lungs. Their intent was presumably to pin her to the ground where they could rip her apart but, of course, there was no ground and, with a sound like a shocked and sibilant hiss, Kali and her three assailants crashed into and through the surface of the dome.
All four plummeted into blackness — Kali backwards with the things clinging on to her front — falling helplessly amidst countless shards of the partly shattered dome. Under different circumstances Kali might have found the susurrating crystal rain surrounding her mesmerising, but she was too busy bracing herself to hit the ground beneath the dome to pay much attention. No impact came, however, and she realised the dome must enclose something more than the forest floor itself — but what? For a moment she forgot the rope, imagined herself plunging ever downwards into some unknown abyss, but then the rope reached maximum length and she came to a halt with a whiplash jerk that made her internal organs collide and winded her worse than the folding bastards had moments before. Those same things, which until that moment still clung tenaciously to her front, triangular maws trying to snap at her face, were wrenched from her and tumbled away screeching, down and down into the dark. Seconds passed and then she heard the sound of three impacts from somewhere far below.
Kali groaned and hung where she'd halted, limp as a discarded doll, rotating slightly, the rope creaking above her in the silence that followed the fall. A dot in darkness, her head flopped backwards, she stared down into a vast and circular subterranean chamber lit vaguely by the half-light penetrating the broken dome. Whatever the place was, it seemed deserted and utterly still — the only movement motes agitated by her intrusion bouncing in the air — and the centre of it was dominated by a strange, shadowy mass that the whole structure seemed to have been built around. Also circular and broad at the base, but tapering gradually with greater and greater height, it rose towards her from the chamber floor like some huge ant hill — a hill within a hill — ever upwards, almost as far as the lip of the dome itself. It was a dizzying sight, especially when viewed upside down, and while Kali hadn't the faintest idea what it was, she did know she wanted a closer look.
The air in the chamber — old air, the kind she liked — acted on her like smelling salts and she snapped to, realising she had to find a way down from where she hung. But that was going to be easier said than done. Even if she whistled Horse to the edge of the dome, the rope on which she dangled was nowhere near long enough to reach the top of the mass, let alone the chamber floor, and unless she was going to be happy taking home memories of a bird's eye view of… wherever she was, she was going to have to find another way to descend. She pulled herself upright and turned on the rope, eyeing her surroundings, and had gone almost full circle before her gaze lit upon what looked like a platform, metal and ornately railed, running like a stretched-out horseshoe along the curving upper chamber wall. Some fifty feet away and below her, it would do as a start. It looked like one hells of a jump, however, and in taking it Kali knew she'd be committing herself to a descent with no return, because there was no way she'd be able to reach the rope again.
But she hadn't come all this way for nothing, and as Horse was probably getting a little disgruntled holding her dead weight, why not do him a favour and lighten his load? Besides, whoever had built this place must have built it with a front door, and in her experience of these old sites front doors were always easier to find from the inside than from the out.
Decided, Kali detached the rope from her belt and began to swing back and forth, building up an arc of momentum that would allow her to make the jump. She continued to swing until she had reached her desired speed and apex, and then with a determined cry let go of the rope. She flew, arcing through the air and then dropping, and landed hard on the platform, rolling to lessen her impact. Lessened or not, there was an eruption of dust and a loud metallic clang that echoed around the ancient chamber, quieting only after Kali thought she might go deaf. She very much doubted anyone was home but, if they were, they now sure as hells knew she'd come to visit.
All remained still and Kali stood, cautiously at first, but then, realising what she stood upon, throwing caution to the wind and instead grabbing the ornate railing to stare down, amazed. Still high above the chamber floor, the platform was clearly built for observation, and what it observed was the strange mass that dominated the place — the hill within a hill. Only it was no hill, she could see now, but a huge and vertiginous, winding metal stairway.
Kali swallowed because it really couldn't be anything else.
She was looking at the Spiral of Kos.
It was as incredible as it was mystifying. Overlooking its summit — still impossible to reach from where she stood — the dizzying structure was constructed in the same ornate fashion as the railing on which she leant, the steps of the stairway itself spiralling up inside a superstructure composed of flowing and curving ironwork the likes and artistry of which she had never seen. What drew her attention more than anything, however, was where the stairway led. Because there, at its top, completely isolated from the rest of the chamber, was another railed platform, and on it a large metal plinth.
And resting on the plinth was a giant key.
A key! Oh, she loved keys. Kali had no idea why it was there, where it had come from or what it unlocked, but she was certain of one thing — she wasn't leaving until she had it in her hands.
She turned, meaning to find a way off the platform and down to the first of those stairs, but as she did she caught a hint of movement from the Spiral itself. She turned back and squinted. Her eyes more adapted to the gloom, she noticed for the first time that the superstructure had apparently once housed some kind of hanging garden, for the dry and neglected remains of plants — thick tendrils and a number of presumably once-corpulent pods — still draped it now. That explained things. Perhaps one of those had shifted slightly in a draught from above — or then again, perhaps it had been nothing. A trick of the light.
Kali moved off the rail, searching for the way down that had to be there. Oddly, though, she found no connecting walkways, no ladders, no obvious way off the platform at all other than a small gate that led to… well, she wasn't sure what it led to. But as she walked closer, she felt a glimmer of recognition. The gate led to a cage, large enough that she could, if she so wished, step inside and which had a single entrance-cum-exit. Though it was different in many respects — more ornate, more complex, more mechanical-looking — it was clearly a version of the devices in use in the more industrialised areas of Vos — hoists and pulleys that had once lifted warehouse materials but now lifted men. Was that what this was, then? A… lift that could transport her off this platform? If so, where was the rope or chain suspending it? Curious, she leant around the edge of the cage, examining it more closely, and saw that though there was nothing to suspend it from above, the rear of the cage was secured to a thick metal arm that rested in the upper of two wide recesses in the chamber wall, recesses that swept away and down the wall in a reverse spiral to that of the Spiral itself, vanishing into the shadows below.
It had to be the way down. But after ages of disuse, could she trust it? Would the thing even work?
There was only one way to find out. Kali opened the gate and stepped warily into the cage, feeling for any kind of shift beneath her feet, all too aware that under the suspended floor there was nothing but a long, long drop. But she found it solid enough and so turned and closed the gate.
Kali waited. Nothing happened.
She waited more, and still nothing, and she frowned. Then she spotted a dust-shrouded lever on the wall of the cage next to where she had entered. Some kind of switch? Swallowing, she laid her hand on the lever and pulled it down. There was an empty clank.
Again, nothing happened — for a moment. Then, from somewhere inside the walls of the vast chamber, machinery that Kali knew to be older than her civilisation groaned as it stirred into life, filling the place with a bass cacophony as if it were haunted suddenly by its builders' ghosts. The noise resounded around the chamber, growing in volume until Kali felt the walls themselves rumble, and then silence descended abruptly and unexpectedly once more. Dammit, Kali thought.
And then the cage lurched.
Nothing could have prepared her for what happened next, and for a few exhilarating seconds she knew fully why she pursued the things she did. This was Old Race technology she was using, the first living being to have done so in perhaps a thousand years or more, and it was working.
Oh gods, was it working!
Kali laughed out loud.
The cage in which she stood released itself from the platform and swept majestically down along the chamber wall as if it floated freely in the air, the movements of the mechanisms that propelled it barely discernible at all. The passage down the spiralling recess afforded her a constantly rotating view of the Spiral of Kos, travelling so smoothly she could have been flying around it. Down and down and round and round she went, ducking involuntarily as, at what she guessed must have been the halfway point, a vast counterweight swept up the lower recess and beneath the cage with a heavy whooooshh that seemed to take the air away.
Kali watched the counterweight rise away and whooped, the magnitude of what was happening — what she'd found — hitting home. Her biggest find yet, all of this was hers to explore, and hers alone, the first person to tread within these walls since its Old Race occupants had gone. All of this — and that mysterious key.
Gods!
She looked down, almost clapping in anticipation of the cage berthing into a lower platform, and then she saw the light.
Her heart thudded.
It was hardly anything, a flare of whiteness perhaps two hundred feet below, but it was what the flare illuminated that was important.
People.
There were people below.
It couldn't be.
Kali stared at the shadowed figures, unable to distinguish who or what they were, only that a small group were crossing the chamber floor towards the base of the Spiral of Kos, their way lit by the raised hand of one of them. A glowing hand. Were they Old Race? Was it possible that some of them were still alive? Was it possible she was looking down at the builders? It couldn't be. It just couldn't.
One thing was clear. The cage in which she stood was going to deliver her right into their midst. And she couldn't chance that, having no idea if they were friend or foe.
Kali did the only thing she could. She rammed the lever back into its original position and, with a protesting groan, the cage lurched to a sudden halt, throwing her hard against its side. The groan caused the figures below to look up, and Kali threw herself to the cage floor, crawled to its edge and peered down, relieved as she saw them turn away. She'd been lucky — it seemed the figures had dismissed the noise as unexplained.
Nevertheless, she was too exposed where she was. All it would take to reveal her presence above them was another curious glance at the lift, a whim. She had to get out of there and down — and quickly. Keeping her eyes on the unknown group, she crouched and then swung herself quietly out of the front of the cage, twisting so that she could grab onto its side, and from there swung herself onto the metal arm on which it rode. Then she worked her way into the recess, wide and deep enough to accommodate her crouching form. Using it to get down would still leave her exposed but if she kept in its shadows, and her luck held, she would make it unseen.
She began to inch her way down towards the chamber floor. She had perhaps a hundred, a hundred and thirty feet to go.
And it was then that the vision hit her.
Searing agony cut through her mind, as if someone had embedded an axe in her forehead, and suddenly her world was yellow and red and white, everything the colour of raging fire. What had been a shadowy, abandoned chamber a moment before was now consumed by a blaze apocalyptic in intensity, the Spiral of Kos being destroyed in a conflagration beyond imagining. Things lashed and writhed within the flames — strange things that she had no time to identify before agonised screams swept them away. For a second she was outside the dome, staring as a pillar of fire rose high above the darkness of the Sardenne, and then she was back once more, in the fire's raging heart, in its midst. It couldn't be real but it was. She didn't just see it, she could feel it, the heat from the fire strong enough to sear and bubble her skin and to blind her with its bright, bright heat. What the hells am I seeing? she wondered. What the hells am I feeling?
Instinctively she flailed against it, and in that second realised where she was. Where she really was.
But it was too late. Her flailing had taken her too far towards the edge of the recess, beyond balance.
She tumbled out, and fell.
And when she landed, the fire faded to blackness.
And, as shadows loomed over her, so, too, did she.