Mike Wild: The Crucible of the Dragon God

Kali shivered, not so much from cold, but a combination of exhaustion, slight fever and a hunger that came from subsisting only on the edible, though thoroughly revolting, fungus that grew on the mine walls. Of course, the state of her dark silk bodysuit didn't help. Having improved on the original thieves guild design by having it retailored to incorporate pockets for artefacts — it now hung in virtual tatters about her, having fallen victim not only to her need for cloth to tie her splint but to the various traps she'd found lying in wait. That wasn't the worst of it, though. The gaping patch of flesh around her hip was a constant reminder that somewhere along the way she had also lost her equipment belt, torn from her body and flung into some deep, dark and, by the sound of it, watery pit by an intricate whirlwind of jagged blades that someone, once upon a time, must have thought: Whirling and jagged, eh? Oh, go for it, that's a good one."

She had lost Horse, too. She could certainly no longer sense him above, waiting patiently for her return as she expected he'd done for at least the first few days of her entrapment. No, Horse had become her faithful companion as much as the old Horse had been, but even he must have come to realise that Kali Hooper was not going to be returning to him anytime soon. She wondered where he had gone. Back to the Drakengrats where he had originally been captured? Or was he running free across the plains, the wind whistling through his horns? No, more likely he was galloping after some poor pack of worgles, terrorising them with his tongue.

Kali sniffed. Dammit, she missed him and she was getting maudlin. Hells, it really was time to get out of here, to beat these farking traps once and for all.

Kali heaved herself up against the chamber wall, thrusting a hand forward for balance as her bad leg took her weight, then hobbled out into the main tunnel, turning left and down rather than right and up. She knew that on the surface that seemed to make little sense but she also knew that there was no up — not since the landslide on the first day — and so she was going to gamble her survival on another possibility. Even the dwarves, with all their sadistic tendencies, surely couldn't expect any of their kind who had been 'warrior' enough to survive their traps to then renegotiate them on the way out. So it seemed logical that there had to be another way out, deeper into the mine.

There was only one problem with that. What was in the way.

Kali could hear it even from here. That rhythmic thumping, pounding and hissing that heralded the presence of the final trap. She had returned to it day after day for at least the last week, studying its timings and its intricacies and its foibles but making no attempt to pass. The reason for that was simple — this was the 'big one' and she was only going to get one chance at beating it.

There it was again, she thought, entering the cavern that opened out from the mine tunnel, a complex arrangement of giant hammers and blades, arranged vertically and horizontally, that completely lined the bridge crossing the chasm in the centre. It was no simple chasm, either. The rock walls flanking it had been carved into the shapes of giant dwarven faces whose roaring mouths randomly belched great fiery clouds of breath, hot enough to have singed the wood in the trap mechanisms over the years into hard, carbonised masses.

Kali couldn't help but admire the workmanship. The first time she'd had laid eyes on the construction she'd imagined it had once been named 'The Bridge of Doom', 'Chasm of Chaos' or 'Gauntlet of the Gods.' But she hadn't liked the sound of any of those — so instead she'd called it 'Dave.'

Like the earlier traps, Dave would once have been negotiable with relative ease, but the rot of years had left some of its components askew, others working faster or slower than they should, still others partly broken loose from their matching components and set into motion by the movement of the mechanisms around them. As if that were not bad enough, the bridge itself looked as rotten as hells, likely to collapse under foot anywhere and anytime. The whole thing was as unpredictable as hells. One wrong move and she was over the side. One small miscalculation and she would be crushed to death or sliced to pieces. There was absolutely no room for error.

Kali narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath, studying for a final time the patterns of movement in the trap. She flexed her bad leg and pinwheeled her arms, loosening up her muscles. And then she swallowed. And then she ran.

Kali roared as her feet slammed onto the first few slats of the bridge, bouncing forward immediately as she felt the aged wood creak and give beneath her weight. As she bounced, the first of the trap's death-dealing devices came at her.

Kali eyed the trajectory of the whirling blade as it span towards her and then actually ran towards it, flipping herself above and over the blade at the point metal and flesh would have met. The forward flip had to be timed slightly later than she would have liked — and she felt a sharp sting as the blade's edge sliced her thigh — but the delay was necessary for her to be able to meet the next of the bridge's dangers.

Righting herself, Kali landed on the upperside of a hammer that had just slammed down in her path and then balanced precariously on it as it began to rise. She did not let it take her all the way, instead she used its height to leap diagonally across the bridge so that she grabbed and clung onto a hammer rising on its other side. This, too, she rode until the very last second, allowing another blade to pass beneath her and then punching herself away from her perch as the hammer clicked in its mooring and slammed down.

She was between blades and hammers now but she didn't have a moment to rest. The instant she landed one of the dwarven heads belched fire towards where she was crouched. Kali didn't hesitate, snatching up a blade that had broken from its mechanism, she shored herself behind it, using it as a shield so that the fire was deflected past her on both sides. Then, the instant the fire died down, she used the now glowing blade as a wheel, rolling with it and behind it beneath the next hammer on the right side of the bridge.

The hammer came down hard, buckling the circular blade and straining the mechanism, but Kali had already dumped the metal and used the temporary jam to crawl swiftly beneath the area where the hammer would otherwise have impacted. This, in turn, enabled her to roll beneath the next circular blade before coming upright and flipping herself forward once more as its companion followed through a moment later.

Kali was moving fast and she was almost through to the end of the bridge now. She could barely contain the surge of elated adrenalin that accompanied that knowledge, because there she saw some kind of wooden elevator, as she knew she would, and all she had to do now was…

Wood splintered suddenly beneath Kali's feet and she fell forwards, cursing. The curse had barely left her lips before there was a sudden, heavy whoosh from her left hand side and the last of the mechanisms — a great hammer that swung across the bridge — came straight at her. She tried to throw herself out of its way, back into the space between hammer and blades, and would have made it safely, apart from the one small variable she had forgotten to factor into her equations. Making her leg thicker by as little as an inch, her splint made contact with one of the whirling blades she had already negotiated. Its teeth bit into the wood and cloth strip, ripping at it and tearing it away.

Kali felt her whole body vibrate bone-jarringly and then, as the teeth of the blade spat the splint out, found herself being flipped dizzyingly through the air back towards the hammer. There was no time to reorientate herself and, in the second she tried, the swinging bludgeon slammed directly into her front, knocking her, stunned and winded, cleanly off the bridge.