Watchmaker. He had achieved this level by ingenuity, cunning, and a technical skill which far outweighed most who lived in Silva Valley. Kradek-ka's skill had been with clockwork; not just the machining of parts, or the intricate assembly of clockwork components, but with the design of new clockwork machines – machines which, more importantly, could integrate with the vampire society, keeping the dying race alive. This engineering also formed the basis of their religion, accelerating them in an evolutionary arc which left them… superior.
However. With his daughter, Anukis, Kradek-ka made changes. For a start, unlike normal vachine, Anukis could not drink the refined narcotic blood-oil, which every vachine relied on to sustain their clockwork mechanisms and, it was said, lubricate their clockwork souls. No. Anukis was different. Anukis was special. Anukis could not take the blood-oil like normal vachine. She could not mate with the magick. She could not feed as a normal vachine would feed… and, technically, this made her unholy, her very existence sacrilege to the High Engineer Episcopate.
Still. Here, and now, Anukis had other problems to worry about.
She was tall, and beautiful, and in possession of long, flowing, golden curls which shone and sparkled in the sunlight. Her fangs were brass, and as she had recently found, her clockwork was built to a more advanced design than any in the vachine society had before witnessed. Kradek-ka had made her a Goddess – and in making her a Goddess, had at the same time cursed her, and condemned her under Vachine Law.
On a mission to find her father, Kradek-ka, whom the Silva Valley needed to repair their malfunctioning Blood Refineries, Anukis had soon found herself in position of victim, of slave, at the hands of Vashell, one of the youngest ever Engineer Priests to achieve such a rank; and a vachine who had sworn to love her until the end of time, marry her, and sire a hierarchy of proud and vicious vachine warriors. That was, until the day he discovered her impurity, her living sacrilege. After vicious humiliation, they thus set upon a mission to discover her father's whereabouts within the dangerous and daunting Black Pike Mountain range. After a series of violent events which saw Anukis discover her true nature – that she was no longer vachine, but something more pure, something infinitely more primal… a word which taunted her with its haunting echo of millennia – vampire, she was vampire – Anukis had been separated from Vashell, and the kidnapped Falanor Queen, Alloria, and found herself on an Engineer's Barge deep within hidden tunnels under the Black Pike Mountains, drawn inexorably towards the fabled Vrekken in the hope it was an esoteric pathway which led to her missing father, whom she believed trapped in the near-mythical world of Nonterrazake.
The Vrekken.
The Vrekken roared. It surged. And it pulled… nearly half a league across, and filling a cavern of such incredible scale it veered off around Anukis to impossible heights, distant sheer walls glinting with dark rock and lit by wrist-thick skeins of mineral deposits.
The Vrekken howled, like a primal giant in pain. It was a huge circular portal, a juggernaut of churning spirals leading down in massive, sweeping circles towards a savage cone depth… a whirlpool, thought Anukis, eyes taking in the scene in an instant, head tossing back golden curls as her lips came back, brass vampire fangs snarling in horror, her clockwork ticking inside with increased rhythm as gears stepped and cogs spun, twisted, clicked, and Anukis grasped the edges of the Engineer's Barge. There was nothing she could do. The powerful current had her, pulled the boat towards the Vrekken, towards its vast circular sweep and tears ran down Anukis's face for here, here she had discovered her true identity and suddenly realised what her father wanted of her – to help revert the vachine to the pure, to the vampires of old, and away from the twisted merging with deviant clockwork technology, away from a reliance on the machine.
Anukis breathed out in a hiss.
And sped towards the huge underwater whirlpool…
The Engineer's Barge was tugged, then flung into the Vrekken and caught like a toy. It powered in circles, nose in the air leaving a wide wake through churning waters and Anu spun down, and down, and round and down and she realised the mighty whirlpool consisted of layers and she passed down, through layer after layer of this oceanic macrocosm, of whirling dark energy, of raw power and violent fusion and screaming howling thrashing detonation and mighty primordial compression, and she thought…
There is no fabled Nonterrazake. It does not exist.
Just death. Death in this place…
Anukis screamed… and waited to be crushed, eyes closed, hunched down on the brass barge with its thumping clockwork engine, her heart thundering in her ears like the ticking of the strangest, deviant clock. Spray burst over the barge, drenching her, and she could taste salt and bitterness and the whole world was a confusion. Round and round she spun. Down down through dark layers. She felt the pressure, and heard squeals as the Engineer's Barge started to buckle, to compress and crunch and fold in upon itself and Anukis hunkered down further, a ball of foetal fear, and then there came a crash and wrenching of iron and something slammed her face and darkness rushed in like a surge of sea water into a drowning ship – and Anukis remembered no more.
A dark lake lapped a dark shore. It was raining, fat droplets pattering across the lake. Anukis fluttered open butterfly eyelids that felt stretched to the point of breaking, and wondered if she were dead. But then pain slammed her like an iron oar, and she realised she couldn't be dead; the world hurt too much, and in her experience, this sort of pain only came from being alive. With a tiny hiss, her vachine fangs ejected, and then retracted. This, too, told her the world was real. Only Man could have invented the vachine.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, and listened. Nothing, but the lapping of water and the fall of rain. She frowned. Wasn't she inside the mountain? Then, slowly, as if dissolving from a dream, a gentle rhythmical hush hush hush came to her ears, and she looked up, and her mouth dropped open. Above her, the Vrekken spun, massive and violent and dark, a whirlpool in the sky, black and blue and gold and laced with traces of occasional purple. Rain fell from the mighty whirlpool, and Anukis climbed to her knees, and then to her feet, her body aching, every joint complaining, her eyes still fixed – locked – to the truly stunning and magnificent sight above. For long minutes everything was forgotten, but slowly Anukis came round, her clouded mind clearing, and she was brought back to the present. She glanced right, to where something lay crumpled by the dark lake's shore. She began to walk, soft boots silent on slippery wet rock, and with a start she recognised the crumpled thing; it was the Engineer's Barge, crushed into a loose tangle of metal as if folded and squeezed in a giant's mighty fist. With a quick movement, Anukis looked down at herself, as if fearing, for a few seconds at least, that she had been crushed also. But she hadn't; and except for a dull throbbing in her bones, as if her internal frame had somehow taken a battering but left her flesh intact, she felt fine. More than fine. She felt… invigorated!
Glad to be alive.
She stopped and gazed around, and wondered if this was Nonterrazake, the fabled mythical underworld and, more importantly, the secret home of the Harvesters. She moved to the wall, which followed in parallel with the lake's shore, and began to walk, footsteps quick, urgent now, for she was certainly trapped down here, in this underground place, and of one thing Anukis was certain beyond all doubt: there was no way she could head back up through the Vrekken. It was a one-way journey.
She stopped, by a small tunnel. She would have to crawl. She got down on hands and knees and peered in. She could see light, a distant eerie glow, and began to crawl through the rock. Gradually, the mountain beneath her hands, and indeed above and around her, began to fade, a graduated change from black through grey, and finally to the colour of ivory. Of bone, bleached and old. Beneath her hands the rock was no longer black, but a rough- textured white. Her nostrils twitched, for she could smell fresh, cool air. She emerged into a larger tunnel, and saw immediately she was in a mass of inter-connected tunnels which led off, seemingly randomly. Anukis swallowed. She imagined wandering down here in a labyrinth, forever, or at least until she starved and died.
She picked a tunnel at random, and walked across rough bone floor, hand trailing against bone-smooth walls, her mind working. She looked up; the ceiling was high, vast, and it was from above cool air flowed. It caressed her skin, soothing, like a sigh from a lover.
Anukis quelled a savage laugh. That sort of life was over for her. It had been since Vashell's… abuse.
Vashell. She remembered his love. His words of kindness. Then his hatred, and actions of violence. Beating her. Making love to her. Fucking her. She smiled. There was a difference; a big difference. And then their quest, their journey, their fight. Right up to the point where she ripped off his face, and left him scarred and bleeding beyond all recognition because of her powers of newly awakened vachine dominance.
Where are you now, lover? she thought. And she could not keep the bitterness from her mind.
She walked. It could have been hours, or even days, for down in this bone-white place, this place of caverns and caves and tunnels, time seemed to have no meaning. And although this strange underground labyrinth of
