Mike Wild - Engines of the Apocalypse

"Boo!" She said suddenly, and giggled, blowing a hole in a thin blanket of cobweb, which dropped down onto her face like a flap of skin.

Kali puffed it away, peered through the hole and frowned. Even sobered up slightly. From what she could see through further cobwebs, the staircase went up high. Higher than the house itself. Maybe it was something to do with her pickled brain, or maybe it was because she had become used to such things, but Kali didn't find anything odd about that at all. Nor did she find its shadowed heights unnerving or daunting. Far from it, because she knew she was staring at a threshold that hadn't been crossed since Redigor had abandoned the house. This staircase was what he had been hiding, his little secret, and at its top she might very well find out just what the Pale Lord was really all about.

Did she go up or didn't she? Kali placed a finger on her lips. Difficult one.

Under normal circumstances, she'd have taken the spiral steps slowly, but, fuelled by booze, she raced up them as fast as she could — which was just as well, as they seemed to go on for ever. It was only after she had passed through the house's attic and found herself still going up that she began to slow, but this was more to do with the ever thickening cobwebs — almost like netting now — than any dwindling enthusiasm.

Becoming swathed in so much of the stuff that she began to resemble something bored of its sarcophagus, even Kali's boundless energy was taxed as she went round and round, but she found strength in the realisation that she had to be ascending some kind of magically constructed tower hidden from the outside world by the same kind of glamour that concealed its base. She found it slightly disconcerting that, in a sense, this meant she was climbing up into thin air, but the tower felt solid enough about her. Solid and very old . Old enough, in fact, to explain the preternatural thickness of the cobwebs: this, for some reason, was the growth of thousands and thousands of years.

The tower's top was becoming visible, now, and the shadows above lightened. Not much, the kind of illumination one might expect if daylight were projecting through a number of narrow windows, but enough to suggest the presence of a chamber above.

Kali didn't know what to expect up there. But it wasn't this.

Bastian Redigor waited for her at the top of the stairs.

"Shit!" Kali shouted, and almost fell back the way she had come. Saved only by a patch of the thick, sticky cobweb, she clung to the tower for a moment, fully expecting the clang of footsteps from above, but Redigor did not appear. Very slowly, she peered back around the last turn of the stairs. "Girl," she chastised herself.

Kali climbed into a chamber dominated by a portrait of the Pale Lord. It, too, was almost entirely obscured by cobweb, as indeed was the rest of the room, but the part she could see — had seen — showed the piercing black eyes, flowing raven hair and handsome, aquiline features she was familiar with from illustrations in books. Even represented in oils, Redigor had presence, and he wore expensive robes of a fashion not seen on the peninsula for a very, very long time.

Kali drew her gaze away from the portrait, turning her attention to the chamber, and tore away blankets of cobweb. If she had been looking for information, she guessed she could pretty much say she had found it.

A desk in front of her overflowed with books, journals, scrolls, notes and charts, most of which pertained to necromancy in one way or another. The assorted papers were not limited to the desk, either. The floor was littered with more of the same, the walls covered in diagrams and maps of every size and description, including, interestingly, one of the sprawling expanse of the Sardenne. Across this Redigor had marked in sweeping scrawl the location of Bellagon's Rip.

Kali sighed. What she needed was new information. It was here, she was sure of it, but she didn't have a clue where to start digging. She decided after a second to thrust her hands into a stack of papers to see what came out.

For the next few hours Kali ploughed through notes on anatomy, alchemy, conjuration, revivification, holding and other kinds of magical constraint. She flicked through sketches of Twilight and of Kerberos, and through diagrams of what appeared to be the pillar of souls she'd seen at Scholten. There were starcharts, too — in the kind of detail she'd heard only the Final Faith's astronomer had compiled — but she had no idea why. She had no idea, either, of the meaning of endless reams of calculus, columns of figures in their thousands, that Redigor seemed to have constantly annotated in his strange, sprawling script. One document did, for a moment, seem to bear out the Faith's theory that Redigor planned an invasion — a map of the peninsula overlaid with countless thin, sweeping lines — but unless the Pale Lord planned to despatch his soul-stripped on a thousand or more fronts, it made little tactical sense.

That was the problem. All this effort and the only conclusion she had drawn was that nothing here made sense.

Gahh! She needed a break.

Dumping a batch of papers, Kali strode to one of the windows that lit the tower, stretching, and froze.

Instead of staring out high over Fayence, she was gazing on a sprawling panorama of glistening towers whose architecture she had never seen but which, after her time in Domdruggle's Expanse, was cloyingly familiar — architecture out of the distant past. Except that it couldn't be out of the distant past. It was new and thriving, figures moving along the streets below, sleek objects darting through the sky between towers, and between them a crystal clear river meandering into the distance.

It was a vast, Old Race city. An elven city. The warm breeze from it was fresh.

It was real .

The conclusion was inescapable. Somehow she and the tower in which she stood were in the past. It was incredible, not only the wonders she could see but the sorceries that must have brought it about. Maybe that was what Redigor had done with the tower, she thought. Maybe it wasn't concealed from Fayence with a glamour field because it didn't need to be. Maybe it projected itself further into the past the higher it rose.

My Gods, I'm there , she realised. The time of the Old Races. The temptation to climb out of the window, regardless of the insane height, was almost irresistible. But why would Bastian Redigor have done this? Why would he have expended the vast amounts of energy needed to stare out over a vista long gone? Maybe he just had a thing for elven architecture, she thought. Or maybe he couldn't stand looking out over the depravity in which Fayence excelled. Or maybe -

Maybe it simply made him feel at home.

Kali's heart thudded, and she spun back to face the inside of the chamber. That was what had been missing from all this, why she hadn't been able to make any sense out of what she'd studied, because all along she'd been trying to work out the plans of your average human, world-dominating necromancer. But there was much more to him than that, wasn't there?

Kali raced to the portrait, tearing away cobweb to reveal more of its detail. Of course. In pictures of himself elsewhere, Redigor had appeared as he wanted to appear, but here, in a portrait that would be seen by no eyes other than his own, he seemed almost to have taken pride in sweeping back his hair.

It was an ear thing.

Bastian Redigor was an elf.

Kali swallowed. It wasn't just the revelation that somehow this bastard had survived down the long years but what she saw in the rest of the exposed portrait.

The woman next to him bore a striking resemblance to Katherine Makennon. It wasn't her, of course, because even had she been alive when the picture was painted, there was no way Makennon would allow herself to be pictured garbed as this woman was — which was to say, in very little at all. That Redigor, smiling slightly, also held a fine chain attached to a collar about her neck, put paid to the possibility fully.