"Hooper, can you hear me? Hooper?"
The voice filled her mind, resonant and familiar. All there was in an otherwise deep and dark world. She floated there until the voice spoke again, and this time shook at the sound of it. No, something shook her. Was shaking her, again and again. The darkness began to swoop about her, blooming and flaring with light, and then her mind seemed to surge upwards, bringing a dizzying confusion, a lurching imbalance and a desperate need to steady the world. But all it did was shake some more.
"Hooper? Hooper, dammit, wake up!"
She sat upright, her eyes snapping open. There was a man in front of her, holding her tightly by the arms. Instinctively, she nutted him.
"Ow! Dammit! Steaming pits of… easy, Hooper, it's me."
"Slowhand? Shit, sorry."
"You okay?"
"Think so," Kali said, though from the lump on the side of her head she'd taken one hells of a bump. She looked around, saw she was sitting on the floor of the booth. "What the hells happened?"
Slowhand pulled her to her feet. "Dunno. A noise. Don't know how to describe it — wailing, spooky, like the sound of some old elven instrument. Whatever it was, it spooked the k'nid. They left the booth alone, disappeared, and the next thing I knew, the door opened and we were falling out. That's where you got the bump."
"Someone chased away the k'nid and let us out?"
"Looks that way. And that's not all. One of the doors in the corridor — one that was sealed before — that opened, too."
Kali raised an eyebrow. "Then why are we waiting. Let's go meet our saviour."
"Hold on. Our saviour could be the one who built that bloody deathtrap in the first place."
"I don't think it is a deathtrap."
"Pitsing well feels like one to me. I mean, come on, Hooper, what else could it be?"
"Don't know. But if the other door's open, maybe it's an invitation to find out?"
She moved out and, shaking his head, Slowhand followed. The pair passed through the unsealed door and neared another that was still sealed, seemingly a dead end until, somewhat unnervingly, it opened of its own accord. The same thing happened further on, and then again, their route clearly being manipulated through areas of the complex which, judging by the undisturbed layers of dust and cobwebs, the Final Faith had not been allowed to tread. In fact, these new chambers had a lonely feel to them that suggested to Kali that no one had entered them since the time of the Old Races themselves.
At last they came to a spiral staircase winding up the wall of an otherwise featureless chamber and both paused at its base, peering through thick and foreboding strings of cobweb to darkness above. The fact that the sphere shook at that moment seemed somehow appropriate.
"I think we're there," Kali said. She brushed the web aside and placed a tentative foot on the first riser. "Lair of the Dragon God, anyone?"
"Hooper, are you sure you — ?"
Kali gave him a look and Slowhand shut up. Because he knew that look — the look — the one of girlish excitement she couldn't contain when she knew she was near some significant find. Sometimes he wondered why she just didn't jump up and down, clapping her hands …
"There's something here, 'Liam. I feel it. There's intelligence here."
Slowhand nodded, and the pair of them took the steps slowly, one at a time, until they emerged into a spacious, yet almost featureless chamber. The one feature it did contain, however, was another sphere. In this case a large, membranous one filled with a liquid clearer though not dissimilar to that in the birthing wells. Stirring within it was what appeared to be some kind of plant. A fragile, multi-stranded, frond-like affair that made Kali think of some wavering growth on the ocean floor.
"It's a fish tank," Slowhand said flatly, pulling a face. "Gotta say, bit anticlimactic."
"Probably not a fish tank, Slowhand…" Kali said, patiently. She hoped not, anyway.
"Oh, come on. Can't you just see some little gogglefish darting in and out of that water feature ther — "
The archer quietened as Kali touched the sphere and, in response, another voice overrode his own, booming around them.
"Welcome, Kali Hooper. I have awaited your arrival for a very long time."
Kali and Slowhand stared at each other as the greeting resonated through the chamber, but while both waited in expectation of what might follow, no more words came. Kali stared around the chamber, hoping to discern the origin of the voice but, failing, fixed her attention back on the sphere. She guessed some reply to the greeting might be in order but, in the circumstances, she wasn't quite sure what she should say.
"Really?" she hazarded, after a second. "That's nice."
"That's nice?" Slowhand repeated, incredulous. The more cautious archer was already readying Suresight to loose an arrow at anything that came at them. "You may have been around a bit but don't you find the fact that something in this graveyard knows your name just a little disturbing?"
Kali couldn't deny that she did find it disturbing. But not because she had been referred to by name — as far as she knew her name could simply have been overheard sometime during their explorations. No, what disturbed her was the fact that the voice had said she had been awaited. Because this reminded her once again of her conversation with the fish-thing in the ruins of Martak, and its comment then that she was where she should be. Ever since that encounter, she had railed against what that meant, and to be faced with a similar comment now brought back all the worries that somehow, without her knowledge or consent, her life was following a preordained path.
"Who are you?" she asked. "Where are you?"
"My being, all around you. My physical form, before you."
"You? You're — ?"
"Hooper," Slowhand said worriedly, "maybe that bump did more harm than we thought. You do know you're talking to a plant?"
Kali ignored him and studied the sphere again. What she saw could easily be mistaken for a plant, that was for sure, but there was something more to it. A complexity about the hairy fronds and an energy inside them that suggested something more advanced, more alive.
"I don't think it's a plant. I mean it looks organic, yes it is organic, only not in that way."
"Not in what way?"
Kali stroked the sphere, tracing the outline of the shape within. "Strip away our flesh and our bone," she said, "our veins, organs, muscle, sinew, tendons, and what do you think you get?"
"A bloody mess?"
"I mean what's left, Slowhand. The very core of our being."
"Your companion shows a knowledge beyond that of her world, archer," the voice said, startling them both. "You see before you the nervous mesh central to the body of everything that lives. The threads, if you will, within us all."
"Right. So, your sphere, it's some kind of grow bag?"
"Slowhand!"
"Joke, Hooper. Breaking the ice with the plant is all."
"It isn't a plant."
"I know that, for fark's sake. Of all the steaming pits — you really do think I'm thick, don't you?"
"No, no, of course I don't. Not at all."
Slowhand stared challengingly and found Kali couldn't hold his gaze. He shook his head in resignation and ran his own palm over the sphere. "What I don't get is, are you saying it was once one of us. Human?"
Kali looked around at the decay of ages, and smiled. "Oh, I wouldn't think human, no."
She was only just beginning to appreciate the possible nature of the being whose presence they were in, and despite the gravity of the situation that had brought them here she couldn't help but almost giggle with the thrill of it. The mummified corpse in Be'Trak'tak was the closest she ever thought she would come to meeting a member of the Old Races, but now?
"Why don't you ask him?"
"Him? How do you know it's a him?"
Kali was getting a little tired of questions when so many of her own were clamouring to be asked. "Maybe because if it was a her — maybe someone called Endless Passion — you'd already be working on some unlikely contrivance to make your pants disintegrate."
"Hey. That is below the belt."
"No, we know what's below the belt. And where it's been."
"Hey!"
"Hey!"
They stopped, remembering where they were. Kali turned towards the sphere to apologise but then stood back, gasping.
"What the hells…?" Slowhand said.
Inside the sphere, the liquid had begun to flood with clouds of grey. They were clearly more than clouds, however, as not only did their mass seem to be made up of tiny organisms but they moved with purpose, variously wrapping, obscuring and agitating the fronds of the 'plant' until they began to change, thicken and grow. What their unexpected host had described as 'the threads within us all' were beginning to take on a fuller form, one gradually becoming more recognisable as a living being.
First came a skeleton, one bit of bone at a time, the bones lengthening to join others, creating joints, limbs, ribs, a skull. Next came sinews, organs, tendons and muscle, these growths in turn becoming interlaced and overgrown with capillaries, blood vessels and arteries, which, when whole and connected, began to flow with blood the colour of sky. Over these vessels grew tissue and then flesh, a body forming before their eyes. And, lastly, came eyes, hair, features, until both Kali and Slowhand found themselves staring at a fully formed being, floating before them in the sphere.
But it was like no being either of them had seen before.
At least, not quite.
The thing was, Kali recognised elements of the creature she saw before her — the musculature of the limbs, the shape of the torso, the physiognomy of the face — but what confused her was that they seemed to come from two different anatomies. She was familiar with this creature and yet wasn't at the same time. Because while it had always been her dream to meet a living, breathing member of one of the Old Races, she had never, ever dreamt she would meet a living, breathing member of both Old Races simultaneously. It was hardly what she'd expected the Dragon God to be.
"You?" she said breathlessly. "You're — "
"The first of the dwelf. The last of the dwelf."
"My Gods!"
"Dwelf?" the archer said, confused.
"Work it out, Slowhand."
"Are you telling me this thing is half dwarf, half elf. A hybrid?"
"Yup."
"Glad I wasn't hiding in the wardrobe in that boudoir."
Kali raised her eyes. "I doubt it happened like that."
"No? You wanna tell me another way you know of making," Slowhand paused and shuddered, "little dwelfs?"
"I am not the result of physical procreation," the dwelf explained, "but of other processes."
Slowhand wasn't sure what that meant. "Are they as much fun?"
"Slowhand!"
"Sorry, sorry"
"You said 'other processes.'" Kali said to the dwelf. "You mean those birthing pools? Is that what this sphere is — your own birthing pool? Were you created here?"
"Created when your race was young."
"Looking good on it, pal," Slowhand said, then pulled a face as he visualised the frond thing the dwelf had first been. "Now, anyway."
"Actually, I doubt he's as old as we are," Kali corrected the archer. "That's right, isn't it? When we saw you grow, you were being created all over again, just like the first time, weren't you? The liquid in this sphere is the same as that in the pools but… more complex, somehow. It enables you to form and reform at will?"
"Nutrients, proteins. The essential building blocks of life. I would not have survived this long had I not been able to revert to a state of stasis among them."
"You're thousands upon thousands of years old," Kali breathed. "But at the same time, so young."
"Oh, come on," Slowhand objected. "He can pop in and out of existence, just the same as he was, every time, with all his memories intact? I may be just an old soldier boy, Hooper, but — "
"Perhaps you simply do not have all of the facts, Killiam Slowhand," the dwelf said.
As he spoke, his body faded into a state of translucency for a second and something that looked like a length of stretched and shimmering gold could clearly be seen coiled throughout his body.
Slowhand stared. "What the hells?"
Kali could hardly believe it herself. She thought back to her meeting with Kane in Andon, the way he used the threads as physical things. It seemed the Old Races had too, but in a way that even Kane would likely find hard to believe. The Old Races, particularly in their last age, had been outstanding engineers, but she had never imagined — never could have imagined — that they had begun to engineer themselves.
"I think that's a line of thread magic," she said. "An actual magical thread interwoven with his very being."
"Yeah?" Slowhand responded, perhaps not quite grasping the enormity of what she said, or perhaps, being Slowhand, simply asking the sensible question. "Why?"
"It is a necessary part of the process," the dwelf said.
"Necessary for what? To churn out those things from the pools? Or maybe just try and suffocate anyone who pops by?"
"The atmosphere chamber," the dwelf said. "That was not I."
"Oh? Then who?"
"No one. Your entrapment was accidental, the process automatic. However, I regret the facility was left unsealed."
"Atmosphere chamber?" Slowhand asked but Kali placed a hand on his shoulder, preferring the conversation walked before it ran.
"If you were the one that freed us, thank you," she said. "And for chasing away the k'nid, however you did."
"That is what you call the spawn? Interesting. But yes. The k'nid, like most organisms, are susceptible to certain harmonics and vibrations which cause them discomfort, in this case forcing them to flee."
"Harmonics and vibrations you've used before. To interrupt the absorption of those bodies out there."
The dwelf was silent for a second.
"I had no interest in saving the intruders," he said. "Only in protecting this place." As he spoke, the structure shook once more, rumbled deeply. "The birthing k'nid have inflicted considerable damage on the complex."
"The Faith, too, by the look of what we've seen out there," Slowhand chipped in. "Why the hells didn't you use these harmonics to get rid of them, too?"
"Because I have observed your world and know their motives, the singular, dark mission of their Church. Had my presence been revealed to them it would have served no good and perhaps have led to other discoveries. Also, my influence over the complex is no longer absolute. The damage it has sustained even without the k'nid — naturally over the long, long years — has left areas of it dead to me."
"Like the birthing pools — the Crucible," Kali said, and the sphere rumbled again as she spoke. "The Final Faith turned it on, didn't they?" she said, remembering Jenna's recordings. "That was what she meant by their mistake."
"And now you can't turn it off," Slowhand said.
"The Faith disturbed the precise calibrations of minds long since dust, spawning the k'nid in numbers not intended. Worse, the prism central to the birthing process — the same prism that could abort the process — became misaligned beneath their meddling hands." The dwelf sighed. "You are correct, archer. I cannot stop it."
"Stop it?" Slowhand repeated. "Why in the hells did you start it? For gods sakes, why on Twilight would you want to create such creatures in the first place?"
The dwelf's answer sounded regretful and — considering what it seemed he, or at least his people, were responsible for — also somewhat unlikely. "To save the world."
"News for you, pal, that's her job," Slowhand said, nodding at Kali. "So what's the real story?"
Kali wasn't as hasty in responding. The dwelf's regret had sounded genuine enough for her.
"Do you have a name?" she asked.
"I was created to be a guardian," he said. "The elven word for such a role would be Tharnak."
"Tharnak it is, then. Tharnak, please, I don't understand. How would creating these things save the world?"
"Our world faced a threat foretold in tomes of as great an age as divides our civilisations now. A threat both from the unknown and unknown in essence. Though both elven and dwarven races knew of its coming, we knew also that it was alien to us. We did not know what could stop it because we could not know what its weaknesses were. And so we constructed the Crucible. Its purpose was the creation of a singular life form specific in its purpose — to combat any threat."
"Must have been a pretty unique threat."
"It was. As unique as the solution we devised. The creatures you call k'nid were the result of complex manipulations of Twilight's life forms — extracting from them those elements which brought them victory in the survival of the fittest. In the process we gave birth to other creatures, and these, too, became part of the process. Our survival was at stake and so we had to create the ultimate defence. A life form capable of surviving any environment, of winning and transforming that environment and becoming its dominant life form. The only life form."
"So overwhelming it would spread like some disease," Kali said, "consuming the enemy. Tharnak, we're not the enemy and your creations aren't saving our world, they're destroying it."
"Because," the dwelf said, "they were never meant to be unleashed here."
"Unleashed here? I don't understand."
"On this world."
"What?"
"The k'nid were destined for the heavens."
"Okay, pal, that's it," Slowhand cut in. "Hooper, don't waste breath on this guy. He's a short wick in a long candle."
"Slowhand, let him fin — "
"No, Hooper. Think about it. What isn't ringing true here? Apart from this heavens rubbish? If this project of theirs was so damned important — so vital to the future of both their races — why is it stashed away up here at the top of our world, hidden in a secret valley behind the Dragonfire? I'll tell you why. Because it's a farking loony bin, is why."
"My friend has a point," Kali said, biting her lip. "If elves and dwarfs were working together, in a time when there were only elves, dwarves and a handful of primitive humans who would have posed no threat, who exactly were you hiding yourselves from?"
"Many of our peoples were against what we would achieve."
"Hardly surprising," Slowhand said.
"Do you imagine that because we were races who had attained greatness, that we did not have as many fundamental divisions among us as divide the peninsula today? There were those who ignored the threat to us, those who courted, even welcomed it, and those who actively sought to prevent us stopping it, for their own reasons, insane as they may have been. We were called blasphemous, sacrilegious, and even within our own ranks there was doubt. Doubt that could only be assuaged by my creation. A living compromise between elf and dwarf factions, a believer of both sides."
"So the Crucible was built in secret?" Kali said. "Your rulers, governments, churches, knowing nothing about it?"
"For three years our people — those who believed — worked with and within them, utilising their resources and hoping, also, to recruit some to our cause. But — as is the case with your own Final Faith — the ideals and aims and beliefs of most were too intractable, entrenched to change. Had we been discovered we would have been banished, or worse. Still, our people managed to establish a chain of contacts, supplies and the means to transport them, the cooperation of sympathisers to our cause and, eventually, began to establish their presence, here, in the Drakengrat Mountains."
"The waystations," Kali said.
"Constructed, again, in secret, and as defended in their time as the Crucible itself. Not only a means to ferry our materials but designed to intercept any who might wish to stop what the Crucible hoped to achieve. Some of the airships therein were fighters."
"Fighters? It sounds like a war."
"More than just a war. A holy war. We had no wish to spill the blood of our own but we had to protect the complex whilst its purpose was achieved."
"A holy war?"
"As I said, the k'nid were designed with a specific purpose and that purpose was to destroy the deity in our heavens."
"Destroy the deity?" Slowhand echoed. He almost laughed. "Are you saying their purpose was to kill God?"
"Some called it God."
Kali found herself almost physically staggering. "Deity," she said. The dwelf had spoken in the singular so presumably he was not referring to the various Gods whom most on Twilight had worshipped before the coming of the Final Faith. Was he, therefore, speaking of their god, the one god? If that was the case, did that mean the Old Races acknowledged its existence literal ages before the Faith came into being — as an actual entity? That it might be real was something she struggled to accept. "Tharnak are you talking about the Lord of All?"
The dwelf almost spat his response, so vehement was it. "I am talking about the Lord of Destruction, the Lord of Nothing!"
Kali frowned. Lord of Destruction? Lord of Nothing? What the hells did those phrases mean? Were these just other terms for the Lord of All, or for something else entirely? She was about to ask when another tremor ran through the Crucible, more violent than any that had come previously, and she was forced to steady herself against the sphere as growth fluids sloshed about inside. Even Tharnak himself seemed concerned.
"Would that I could show you," the dwelf said with a sigh. "Make you understand. But there is so little time."
Tharnak's weary resignation made Kali realise that she was unlikely to get any further with this line of questioning for the moment and, while she still didn't understand the meaning of the threat, there was something becoming increasingly obvious to her — something made inherently clear by the fact that the Old Races were no more.
The threat, she thought. Is this what happened to the Old Races? My Gods. Is this how they died?
"Your attempt to eradicate this deity," she said, "it failed, didn't it? Why?"
"Hubris, arrogance, foolishness. At that stage in our civilisation, though we possessed the technology to do what we did, it was not enough. We needed the magic, too. But the magic, by then, had become weak, for we had destroyed those who made it whole."
"Destroyed? Destroyed who?"
"The Dra'gohn."
"The Dra'gohn? You mean the dragons?"
"If that is what you call them, yes."
Kali didn't have a clue why the absence of dragons should affect the magic — make it whole — but that hardly seemed the point. The Old Races were the reason they had gone away?
"How?" she asked. "Why? What happened?"
The sphere shook again and the dwelf's weariness returned, almost as if he were dying with the Crucible. "Cowardice… greed… does it really matter? They were gone — and with them, our only chance to survive."
"But this place," Kali protested, aware as she spoke of how naive the question seemed. "All of its potential — couldn't you have somehow remade them, brought them back?"
The dwelf actually laughed, although the sound was guttural and bitter. "How many times over these countless, lonely years do you think I have been tempted to try? To rectify our mistake, and to apologise to them, even though it would have been too late? No, it would have been an empty exercise, for that is why we failed. The magical threads that bind our creations are weak. Nothing made here can survive for long if it leaves the Crucible." The dwelf paused. "How could I bring the dra'gohn back knowing that when they took to the skies I would once more be responsible for their end — that they would die?"
"You mean like the yassan, you bastard?" Slowhand said. "How do you think they feel — out there, changed, unable to leave that frozen wilderness they call home? Tell me, Tharnak, did you really need to make them part of your soup or were you just playing games?"
"We took no pleasure in our experiments on them. It was our wish that, when we left, we gifted this valley to them in return. But, of course, we did not leave."
"And that's meant to make things all right?"
"'Liam, don't," Kali said. She stared at the dwelf. "If that's the case, why are the k'nid able to survive?"
"They are not. Their capability for self-replication grants them a longer life span than others but eventually they, too, will revert to nothing. They would not have reached the heavens. Beyond this valley they have, perhaps, a matter of days."
Which we don't, Kali thought. "Then, please, is there a way to stop them?"
"The prism above the birthing pools. It holds upon it the runics capable of reversing their creation, removing them. Combined with the magic of your Three Towers — if your men of magic channel their threads of destruction through them — the plague upon the peninsula will be ended."
"It's that simple?" Slowhand said, beginning to revise his opinion of the plant.
Easy for you to say, Kali thought. She calculated she had some hours before the next wave of k'nid were spawned but, from what she'd seen of them, that didn't necessarily make the birthing pools any less dangerous. "So this is the bit where I risk life and limb in some potentially lethal hellshole to save the world once more, right? Fine. I'll go get it."
"Then you must do so with all speed. There is little time."
"There should be hours yet."
"Until the next birthing cycle, yes. But that is not the threat you face." The dwelf's eyes closed, as if he were sensing something far away. "The Final Faith have returned. They have their own airships. And sorcerers who, even now, are attempting to break through our force barrier."
"Airships?" Slowhand said. "There was only one airship."
"Gransk," Kali said. "I think Jenna had a telescryer in her party, sent them the information how to build them."
"'I'll glide this thing into Gransk', Jenna said," Slowhand remembered. "Hooper, what the hells is Gransk?"
"Final Faith shipyards, on the coast between Turnitia and Malmkrug. Top secret."
"Right."
Kali turned to the dwelf. "How long do we have?"
"The force barrier weakens. They will gain access by dawn."
"When they'll blow this place to bits," Kali said.
"Sounds good to me," Slowhand said. "So why don't we get the hells out of here right now?"
"The prism," Kali said.
"Fine. Then we get the prism and then get out of here."
"I cannot allow you to leave this place, Killiam Slowhand," the dwelf said, unexpectedly. "Not yet."
Slowhand raised Suresight without hesitation, an arrow pointed unwaveringly at the hybrid.
"Yeah? Difficult to see how you'd stop us with this sticking out of your forehead."
"Please. I do not intend my words to be a threat."
"Sounding pretty pitsing much like one to me."
Kali raised an arm and lowered Suresight, much to Slowhand's consternation. "'Liam, wait. Let's hear what he has to say."
"Hooper, I do not see the problem. Whether this guy's on our side or not, it was his people who caused this mess in the first place. You tell me — what exactly is wrong with having the Crucible destroyed right now? Isn't it what we came here for?"
"Because there's something else, isn't there, Tharnak? There has to be." She thought back to Slowhand's comment about the yassan, and about the atmosphere chambers and other strange rooms the two of them had seen. The dwelf had said that they were creating the life form but he had also said 'that and those who could deliver it to its goal.'
The dwelf nodded and, across the chamber, on a shimmering patch of air, a view of the Kerberos sphere appeared — in its centre the glamour field.
"We learned early in our experiments that we, the elves and the dwarves, would not survive the journey to the heavens but that humans — changed humans — would. We were creating four such travellers when the end came."
"What happened to them?"
"I do not know. It was necessary that I reverted to my hybernartion state to survive the end and when, finally, I awoke they, like the races which sired me, were gone and I was alone."
Slowhand saw the disappointment cloud Kali's face. He knew she needed to know exactly how the Old Races had died.
"In other words, you were here when it happened but you missed it because you were asleep?"
"In essence, yes. But perhaps you will be able to glean some knowledge from this …"
In the Kerberos sphere, the glamour field began to dissolve.
"In my solitude I became guardian not only of this place but what remained within it, hidden from view for countless years. But now my time is over, and another guardian is needed."
Kali and Slowhand stared.
"Is that what I think it is?" Slowhand gasped. "I mean, I'm not sure what I think it is… but is it?"
"Oh, my Gods!"