Mike Wild - Engines of the Apocalypse

The Pale Lord's home was the eeriest in the eerie warren of properties — a foreboding, rambling structure at the end of the street which, despite being long-abandoned, seemed to glow faintly of candlelight from within. Kali approached slowly, looking around to make sure she was alone, and climbed the step to the entrance. The door was half-obscured by thick cobwebs and half-hanging off its hinges and, when pushed, fell to the floor in a cloud of dust. Shadows danced slowly within. Kali eased into the hallway, and could have sworn she heard the sound of footsteps from the upper floor. She swallowed.

Disappointingly, though, as Kali cautiously began to explore, there were no ghosts — and very little of anything else — to be found. Apart from a couple of fairly obvious traps which she carefully defused, the house seemed exactly what it appeared to be: empty and derelict. For an hour, she worked her way minutely through all its rooms, finding nothing and ending up in the building's main parlour where, from the looks of what remained, Redigor had once kept his library and laboratory. But as elsewhere, there was little to see. What the passage of time had not rotted had been removed, most noticeably in the bookshelves lining the room. Even the laboratory was a disappointment. A dust-covered and vaguely horseshoe-shaped workbench occupied the heart of the room. Kali could imagine Redigor standing there conducting his 'unique' experiments, but the only evidence which now remained of them was the odd upturned belljar or shattered pipette. Kali pursed her lips. Not quite what she'd expected of an infamous necromancer's laboratory, it had to be said.

Still, though the dwelling seemed to offer her nothing, Kali couldn't shake the feeling that she was missing something. She had the feeling there was something wrong with the room that she couldn't quite put her finger on, something to do with space. For some reason, it felt bigger than it was, more open. Kali backed up to the door and studied it anew — nothing. Maybe she'd been wrong to come here after all, she thought, frustration flooding her.

It was in that moment, her mind returning to the bigger picture, filling with images of the Sardenne and what lay within it, that she stopped looking — and that was when she saw .

It wasn't much, like something in the corner of her eye right in front of her , but it was there. Something odd about the way the workbench curved, as if its relations with the rest of the room were oddly misaligned. She noticed then how it wasn't just the bench that appeared odd but the other trappings, too — bookcases, furniture, even the tiling on the floor. Where their lines should have been straight, they curved ever so slightly, and where surfaces should have been flat, they were very gently concave. The only comparison Kali could draw was that it was like looking through a very weak fish-eye lens, but what she saw was there — something bending the reality of the heart of the room.

Kali moved into the 'u' of the bench and waved her hand slowly back and forth where light seemed to bend the most. She felt a slight thickening of the air and, for a moment, her fingers brushed against something almost, but not quite, insubstantial. Dammit, she knew what this was now. It was a glamour field like the one she'd encountered at the Crucible, only in this case highly localised, highly concentrated. So concentrated it was able to confound every sense. To manipulate reality with such finesse would have taken great skill indeed, and such a degree of skill would surely only have been used if, as she suspected, Redigor had something very significant to hide.

Kali's elation was fleeting. The problem that remained was finding out what. Even though she knew there was something there, her perception remained too wrong-footed to tease it out into the open. Frustrated, she flopped down against a wall, clucking her tongue as she stared at the field.

Come on, Hooper! There has to be a way to work this, a way to skew my senses so that I'm not looking at what the field wants me to look at.

For a while no solution presented itself and then, slowly, she smiled. What was that old adage about mixing business with pleasure?

A moment later, Kali was out in the street, racing back through the Ghost Quarter to Abra's stand.

"Your thwack," she said. "I want it."

Shock at her sudden appearance mingled with surprise at actually making a sale. "H-how many bottles?"

"All of them."

" All of them?"

"And flummox. You got any flummox?"

"I–I think I may have a few bottles, yes…"

"Those, too. What about twattle?"

" Twattle?" Abra gasped. He glanced about himself guiltily. "I have one bottle. But it is deadly. And illegal. It is also very, very expensive."

Kali pulled a coinpurse from her pocket and emptied its golden contents into Abra's hands. "I'll take it. I'll take everything. The lot. But I'll need you to wheel it to Redigor's house."

The suggestion brought even more sweat to Abra's face than was already running down it but, as he watched Kali bite the cork from the bottle of twattle and down it in one, he realised she was not to be messed with. He had, after all, once seen a bottle of twattle make someone's ears drop off. Quickly, he began to unlock his stand's complex arrangement of brakes and supports. Kali, meanwhile, grabbed two armfuls of bottles and was gone.

Back at the house, she ploughed into the various ales with industrial zeal, popping out to Abra when necessary for more, and the wall where she slumped was soon stacked with a small mountain of empties. The booze hadn't yet achieved its desired result, however, her preternatural capacity for the stuff preventing her from getting drunk enough to loosen her hold on reality. Not that it wasn't having some effect.

As she once more sought out Abra for supplies she felt an overwhelming desire to tell him what a very nice fat man he was — no, no, really , Abra — and, on returning to the laboratory, she accidentally booted half the bottle mountain across the room. Kali hopped up and down flapping her arms, trying to shush them as they rolled and rattled everywhere, but the little farkers wouldn't listen, so she called them names instead.

She dropped to her knees, snorting, eyes moving in circles over her fresh supply. Which to pick? Which to pick? Which to pick?

Having decided that the fourth of the identical bottles was by far the prettiest, she stood precariously and raised it in a toast to the glamour field. There was still no change in its appearance but the small manoeuvre threw her off kilter and her feet momentarily forgot which of them was which. Kali staggered into one of the bookcases, bowed and apologised profusely, then soothed its hurt feelings by drawing shapes in the dust of one of its shelves. It was as she was doing this that she realised she could murder a kebab.

Kali staggered to a window and shouted to Abra at the top of her voice. As she turned back, it suddenly occurred to her that she had stumbled upon actually quite a cool concept, having food delivered to your door. Maybe she ought to jack in all the world saving stuff, go into partnership with Abra and open a home delivery shop. Hells, with Horse she could have the food anywhere in a five league radius in no time, still warm and at no extra charge. Now, what would she call it? Kebakali? Kalibabi? Kebabkalbulbu -

Pitsh!

There was something wrong with her lips.

The realisation suddenly struck Kali that for the last few seconds she'd been staring at a spiral staircase in the centre of the room. Mouth gaping, bottle dropping to the ground, she half walked, half stretched towards it, as if any sudden move might make it vanish once more. It didn't. It was there, all right, as real as everything else in the room, solid beneath her touch. Kali burped and pulled herself in, turning sinuously around its metal core like a dancer, head angled to peer up the spiralling steps into shadow.