Mike Wild - Engines of the Apocalypse

"If you're thinking of making a rope out of your clothes, don't," Freel growled through gritted teeth. "I'd rather take the fall."

Slowhand studied the crumbling statue. "Fall, then."

Freel snapped a look upward, glaring at him. And the statue jerked again.

Slowhand's jaw pulsed. " Fall."

A strange expression crossed the enforcer's face — disappointment, perhaps? — but there was no time to work it out as the statue came free of its base and began to fall, Freel still trapped in its grip.

The moment it did, Slowhand snatched Suresight from his back, primed an arrow and aimed it at his falling companion. But he didn't fire. Not yet. Instead he waited while the falling statue impacted with the incline of the entrance slab, breaking apart. His eyes narrowed, picking out Freel's flailing form amid the cloud of debris. Suresight moved infinitesimally but, again, Slowhand did not release his arrow until his aim was true.

The arrow flew through the coils of chain whip at Freel's waist, and ricocheted off the entrance slab beneath to wrap around the neck of one of the statues further below. Freel came to a sudden stop, bouncing on Slowhand's rope, and looked up at the archer calmly securing its other end. He blew out a relieved breath.

"I thought you were…"

"I know what you thought," Slowhand said. The archer climbed back down a number of statues and thrust out a hand, which Freel grabbed.

The remainder of the climb was laborious but uneventful, and at last Slowhand and Freel pulled themselves up onto the necropolis roof. A slight mist curled on its lip. They walked forward between the towers of the Time of the Bell, mouths agape at the pandemonium beyond.

Both men swallowed. On reaching the roof, they had, of course, expected to see the pillar of souls, for it was now originating from beneath them, but neither had given much thought as to how it might be rising from Bel'A'Gon'Shri. Through some kind of dome, maybe, or perhaps even just a channel in the rooftop. But ahead of them there was no rooftop. They faced a surreal, broken landscape that seemed half part of reality and half not. It looked as if the entire top of that part of the necropolis had exploded upward and, moments after detonation, frozen, component parts suspended in a slow-motion limbo. A gently rotating jumble of bricks, lintels and stones dangling the moss and detritus of ages, starkly illuminated by the blazing pillar.

The pillar itself was a screaming, roaring, constantly whirling maelstrom of ghostly forms and presences, these once human manifestations, thousands of them, writhed and churned about each other, even tore at each other, as they sought release. Stripped from their bodies as they had been, drawn inexorably into this insane captivity, it must have seemed to them that they had been condemned to the hells themselves. As Slowhand and Freel moved closer, they found themselves recoiling as the desperate souls tried to punch through the surface of the maelstrom — a horrifically distended eye here, a screaming mouth there, half a face or a spasming, clutching hand on the end of an arm made of spectral bone. Nor were these horrors occurring only before them. The pillar of souls was so vast that the victims passed out of sight in all directions. They craned their necks to try and see the distant top of the pillar stretching out to Kerberos.

"Not something you come across every day," Slowhand shouted.

"True," Jakub Freel agreed. His jawline throbbed as he regarded the morass with a steely gaze. "The Pale Lord will answer for this."

"Come on. There might be some way we can get down into the necropolis."

The two men picked their way onto the floating masonry at the pillar's periphery, taking care to avoid stones whose orbit took them too close, lest the grasping maelstrom pull them in. Hopping slowly from stone to stone, they caught glimpses of the necropolis' interior between the jumble of tumbling rubble. Hair and clothes whipping about them, they found themselves a relatively stable platform and stared down onto a floor they guessed was a few hundred yards in from the necropolis' main entrance. At the base of the pillar of souls, the chamber could only be one thing.

The Chapel of Screams.

Their position, in truth, did them little good. Despite Slowhand's best attempts to find an anchor for a whizzline, there was no way down. All the pair could do for now was reconnoitre from here and then look for another route.

The Chapel of Screams was blood-red. Arranged around a central aisle were tombs, six to the left, six to the right, and before each but one stood a rigid figure, but who these figures were was impossible to tell. At the end of the aisle, the Chapel widened into a huge circular chamber, and a raised stone platform overlaid with a complex magical circle. This was the base of the pillar of souls, and its screaming captives, for the most part, obscured it. All that could be made out with certainty was that the patterns were not carved, because they pulsed and shifted occasionally, darting about the circle like angry snakes.

Or perhaps threads. Black threads.

Standing before the platform, dwarfed by the pillar of souls, were two more figures, one as rigid as those by the tombs, the other, much taller and with a mane of flowing hair, thrusting his hands high into the air, as if summoning the gods themselves.

Bastian Redigor. The Pale Lord.

Slowhand shifted towards the edge of the platform they stood on, and Freel held him back.

"What are you doing? We already decided there's no way down."

"I'm not going down," Slowhand said, pulling Suresight from his back. "I'm going to end this thing right now."

Freel stared at the distant figure of the Pale Lord. "In these conditions? Impossible."

"Yeah?"

Slowhand notched an arrow and aimed directly at Redigor's forehead, right between the eyes. The shot wasn't impossible, but it was challenging, even for him. There were a number of factors he had to compensate for — the height, the movement of the platform beneath him, the disturbance from the pillar of souls — but doing so was just a matter of patience. Unfortunately, patience wasn't only a virtue, it was time-consuming, and by the time Slowhand had locked his aim, the platform beneath him had begun to move again, rotating about the pillar of souls.

It became suddenly like finding a target through a kaleidoscope.

Slowhand narrowed his eyes, unfazed, and loosed his arrow. The tip raced unerringly towards the Pale Lord and would, a second later, have punched directly into his brain — but the arrow stopped dead in the air, an inch from his face, and dropped to the floor. The Pale Lord looked up, directly at Slowhand, smiled, his mouth widening into a razor-toothed maw.

"We're out of here, now," Freel said, and pulled Slowhand up by the shoulder. He bundled him across the floating stepping stones.

"Dammit, Freel. I can take another shot."

"To what end, Slowhand? You saw what happened."

"I'm quicker than he is — I'll get an arrow through!"

"Really? How exactly? By making it up as you go along?"

"What the hells is that supposed to mean?"

Freel span to face him. "That sometimes you have to think about things. Maybe if you'd thought about things a bit more at the Crucible you could have avoided a confrontation. And maybe my wife might still be alive."

Slowhand stared at him. Is this it? He wondered. Is this when it all finally boils over?

"Jenna intended to blow us out of the sky," he said, more calmly than he felt. "And without that ship, the k'nid would have obliterated the peninsula."

"The Faith would have found a way to combat them. I would have found a way."

"Are you sure about that, Jakub? It was, after all, your wife — my sister — who could have avoided a confrontation. But that doesn't seem to have occurred to you, does it — it never does in the Final Filth."