Mike Wild - Engines of the Apocalypse

Kali's mind reeled. The woman was clearly mu'sah'rin — in human terms, somewhere between forced consort and slave — and that could mean only one thing. Redigor wasn't only an elf, he was Ur'Raney. The most misogynistic, cold-hearted, sadistic so-called 'family' of the elves there had ever been. The Ur'Raney were the same family who had relentlessly pursued and slaughtered the dwarves at Martak, who had brought both Old Races to the brink of war, and who, because of their gleeful, unremitting cruelty, were reviled even by their own kind.

Most contemporaneous texts had been of the opinion that Twilight would be better off without them.

Kali calmed herself. So, Redigor was an elf. The fact was, she couldn't say she felt that surprised, because something had occurred to her in Scholten that seemed to have been missed by everyone else. The Engines of the Apocalypse being what they were, lost to and forgotten by countless generations, should have been exactly that — lost and forgotten. Unless the Pale Lord had stumbled upon their control centre while out for a walk one day — an unlikely turn of events, to say the least — they had to have been activated by someone old enough to know it was there. Well, that was Redigor, all right. He had revealed his true heritage at last. But the question remained, what the hells was he up to?

Here They Lie Still.

Kali replayed the phrase Slowhand had quoted in the library through her mind, analysing it in a different light now she knew Redigor's true identity. As she did, she studied the assorted papers again, trying to piece together the jigsaw that was the Pale Lord's experimentation. Why should an ancient elf wish to unleash an army of soul-stripped onto the peninsula? What the hells was he going to get out of that? Unless, as she had suspected, that wasn't what he was planning at all. Her gaze rose back to the portrait of Redigor and the woman and once more she asked herself — what the hells did the Pale Lord want with Makennon or the other 'dignitaries' his soul-stripped had snatched from all over the peninsula? What was special about those thirteen people?

Another question. With so much power at his disposal, why had Bastian Redigor allowed himself to be banished? From what she had seen here, he could have wiped the floor with any mage on Twilight, and certainly the berobed fops and jesters who made up Lord Fayence's court wouldn't have stood a chance in the hells against him, and he could have taken the town any time he wanted. So why? Why move from what was clearly his home, as well as a well-equipped base, to the unforgiving wilds of the Sardenne? And just why did he already have a map showing the Sardenne and Bellagon's Rip?

Kali studied the map again. If she expected to see any previously unseen feature she was soon disappointed, but her eyes were drawn once more to Redigor's flowing script. Bellagon's Rip. It was written there as plain as day and yet there was something not quite right about it. She suddenly realised that her mind had been filling in the gaps and she was reading what she expected to read, because that was the name by which that area of the forest had always been known. But what if it was misnamed? What if some more modern cartographer had chanced upon some previously scrawled notation of Redigor's on some other map, and had misinterpreted it as she was doing now? Maybe this was a matter of perception rather than interpretation, because although Redigor had used human script on everything she had so far read there was still an elvish flourish to his hand that potentially gave a whole new meaning to what was written. Bearing that in mind, Kali reread the name, seeing each letter on its own rather than as a component part of a word, and gradually they began to flow together. That was it. It wasn't a name at all but an elven phrase. Not Bellagon's Rip but Bel'A'Gon'Shri. She concentrated hard, eyes closed, trying to pull together all the elvish she knew to make sense of the phrase, and her eyes snapped open in alarm.

Bel'A'Gon'Shri.

Here They Lie, Still .

Gabriella DeZantez hadn't been far wrong in her theory about its meaning. But the phrase wasn't referring to the Engines and it wasn't suggesting that anything was lying idle. It was suggesting that 'they' were lying where they'd lain for a long time and were waiting . And Kali suspected she knew who.

The charts, the maps, the diagrams, the calculations, they suddenly all made sense. Rather in the manner of an Eye of the Lord, she imagined herself descending from the sky into the map, the image no longer two-dimensional but a living canopy of trees through which she swept down, down, down. And waiting for her beneath was a structure of gothic horror overgrown with the vegetation of thousands of years, a structure that she knew was sitting deep in the Sardenne.

An elven necropolis.

An Ur'Raney necropolis.

Oh Gods .

The Faith, as she'd suspected, and as farking usual, had got it all wrong. There was going to be an invasion, all right, but not in the way they thought. She had to shut down the Engines of the Apocalypse and then get to the Faith, let them know what was really going on.

She ran for the stairwell, trying to ignore the staring eyes of Bastian Redigor, and heard a click beneath her feet. She looked down.

Trap , she thought. Dammit.

In her eagerness to leave she'd triggered something she'd missed, and as a result could already sense that something was coming. Something from outside.

Kali raced to a window, seeing the same wonderland as earlier. Now, thin, grey shapes were hurtling towards the tower through the sky. Whatever they were, they had the same aura about them as the death coach that had taken Makennon, as the tapers in the library, and had again to be born of the black threads. As Kali looked on in horror, the shapes resolved themselves into the figures of hags, skeletal things clad in translucent shrouds. Their talons were grotesquely overgrown, blurred streaks of things that seemed to stretch from this world into another.

Kali swallowed, knowing now what had caused Abra to see stains upon the walls, smears across windows and splatters beneath his feet, and she stumbled back from the window as the hags shrieked into the tower. They seemed, though, to have no interest in her, tearing around the circular chamber like a dark whirlpool. They moved faster and faster, Kali ducking under Redigor's desk, trying to work out what the hells was going on as a loud tearing sound rose over the creatures' shrieking. Kali looked out and saw flashes of sky. The hags' talons were slicing through the tower, not as the Deathclaws might slice through stone but seemingly through its very existence . Redigor had conjured the tower for his secret researches but must have booby-trapped it so that, if discovered, it would be obliterated.

The whole place was coming apart around her. Being erased.

Kali lurched from under desk, the flight of the hags — nothing more than blurs, now — whipping at her bodysuit and hair. She stared in horror as she saw great streaks of sky visible where, moments before, there had been a roof. Her heart began to pound as, around and beneath her, the walls and floor began to disappear slice by slice.

Kali dashed for the stairwell, hoping she would be able to outrun Redigor's trap, but then staggered back as the hags' talons eradicated the entrance to the stairs.

Oh, fark, that was not good. Not good at all.

Kali looked around the room in desperation, searching for an alternative means of escape, but the only one that presented itself was to jump. Despite the fact that was ancient sky out there — thousands of years before her time — it was better than the alternative of staying where she was and being sliced from reality. Hells, if by some miracle she survived the jump, she could leave the Faith a note and experience the wonders of the Old Races first hand.