Mike Wild - The Crucible of the Dragon God

If not, well, knowing Hooper, right now she'd be spinning in her grave.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhhhh!"

The cry of fury, of pain and of sheer frustration, that boomed from beneath the ground was sudden and startling, shattering the desolate quiet of the dusty canyon and causing the strange black birds that nested there in twisted trees to take to the air with a chorus of haunting caws. The cry reverberated out of the canyon and across the landscape beyond. But there was no one out there to hear it — no one for leagues — and after a while, as its echo died down, the birds returned to their trees. There, they did not snatch up the dropped carrion on which they had been feasting but, instead, regarded each other with furled wings, cowed heads and darting, beady eyes. Troubled by this latest disturbance to their long abandoned, isolated piece of the world, their gaze turned along the canyon, past the rusted, age-warped rails of metal and the overturned, skeletal frames of the carts which once had rode them, and towards the dark and forbidding mouth at the canyon's end. And they wondered what it was they had done to offend the angry-spirit-who-had-come-to-live-beneath-them this time.

Ever since the spirit had arrived on its strange, armoured steed and gone into that dark mouth — there first announcing its displeasure with a deep rumble, an unknown curse and a great cloud of dust that had erupted from it by sunset that day — they had struggled to understand its subsequent outbursts, no doubt intended for them, but each time they had neared their answer another outburst had come and they had fled to the skies in panic once more. So it was now — as they felt the seed of an answer within them — the words of the angry-spirit-who-had-come-to-live-beneath-them came once more:

"Owww! Rollocks! Count to ten. One-two… no, soddit… You farking hoooor!"

Far below, through a labyrinthine series of tunnels and diggings, through galleries and chambers that had never seen the light of day, and past tools and carts like those above, Kali Hooper grunted with pain as she pulled the lengths of cloth she held in each fist as taut as she could. The binding around the splints on her leg pulled tight, pressing the splintered bone in her shin tightly but agonisingly together. Causing her to bite down hard on the gutting knife she had clenched between her teeth. Her groan echoed dully, joining the still audible reverberations of her earlier cry and reminding the solitary, bedraggled figure sitting pained, sweating and slumped in a small antechamber again and again of the mess she'd gotten herself into.

No, not exactly her, she reflected, but a certain completely mad little bastard whom Killiam Slowhand, in her stead, had long since despatched to the hells. Damn the man, she thought. Even dead Konstantin Munch continued to cause her pain.

The fact was, her current predicament was all the fault of Katherine Makennon's one-time right hand man. It might have been months since her final battle with him at the dwarven outpost of Martak, and the dwarf-blooded resurgent might even now be floating decomposed in the still and murky waters of its collapsed ruins, but that didn't stop his misconceived plan to resurrect dwarven glory from endangering her life yet again. Indirectly, at least. She should have known nothing good would come of it when one of Makennon's agents had contacted her with a set of papers which he explained the Anointed Lord wished to gift her in return for helping her with that affair. She should have said 'no thanks' there and then, but the fact was she hadn't been able to resist, had she? Oh no, because the papers turned out to be directions and maps to stores that Munch had established across the peninsula, and there was always a chance that there was going to be something more than a little interesting in there.

There hadn't been, as it turned out — the weapons and tools that Munch had collected to equip his fantasised army were as warped and useless as his masterplan — but in growing desperation to unearth at least one artefact, she had decided to give it one last stab, to follow one last set of directions. That stab and those directions had brought her here.

She really had no idea how long ago that had been, now, and she had all but forgotten that, ultimately, the trip had proven useless again, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem this time was that it had turned out that it wasn't so much what Munch had stored away but where he had stored it away.

That this hellshole had been a mine at some point in its history — though mining what, she didn't know — was clear, but equally clearly the mine had become exhausted at some point and become… something else.

Maybe it was why Munch had chosen the place. Because, apart from its total remoteness, it was, as she had so painfully learned, a deathtrap. Not just neglected and unsafe and falling apart but a bloody deathtrap. The thought had even crossed her mind that Makennon had included the map to its location because she knew that and thought it a convenient way to be rid of her. Maybe she was being paranoid but she'd interfered once in the Final Faith's grandiose plans — even if in doing so she had saved the world — and with future plans likely in the offing maybe the Anointed Lord considered her too much of a loose cannon to be allowed to live. Not that she had any wish to get involved with that lot again.

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.