Engines of the Apocalypse

more ways than one,' she growled.

'I was only… making sure it was safe,' Slack said, breathlessly.

'Of course you were.' Kali winced and rubbed her bare stomach, ignoring Slack's hungry stare. 'But there are rules to this game,' she added. 'Rule one is watch every step.'

A flash of resentment crossed Slack's face as he dusted himself down, but he turned to stare into the dark, swallowing deeply. It was not in reaction to the end he had almost met, however, but a stare of undisguised greed.

Kali joined him at the edge of the abyss, wondering fleetingly whether it might have been less bothersome if she'd just let him fall, but considering what it was they faced, it was obvious Slack could make no move without her.

As always, her research had given her some idea of what to expect when coming here, but the expectation never quite did the reality justice. The two of them were staring into a vast cavern that must have extended beneath the whole of one of the hills above Solnos, an underground expanse hung with immense stalactites and dimly lit by a strange, golden glow in front of them. The glow was the only illumination and emanated from the top of an isolated pillar of rock, maybe six feet across, which thrust thinly and dizzyingly up from the abyss. It appeared unreachable from their position. Kali bit her lip and studied her goal. She could not yet make out the source of the glow, but was sure she knew what it was. The light was pulsing, dreamlike. The glow of something magical.

Kali had no doubt that she'd found what she'd come for. All she had to do was reach it.

'There?' Slack observed incredulously. 'But there is no way across!'

'Rule two,' Kali said, pulling a small object from a pocket in her bodysuit. 'Plan ahead.'

Slack stared at a small, ornate piece of stone — some kind of key — that Kali held in her hand, then watched her move along a narrow ledge to a carved niche. She brushed lichen away from an indentation in the stone, inserted the key and, with a grunt, turned it solidly to the right, the left, and then twice more to the right. Something grated behind the niche as, below in the darkness, something rumbled. Slack watched in amazement as another rock pillar rose judderingly from the abyss, shedding thick cobwebs, dust and the detritus of ages as it came. The top of the pillar stopped level with the ledge on which they stood, some hundred feet out into the void.

Kali withdrew the key from the niche and smiled. Slack, meanwhile, stared at the pillar and then Kali, regarding her quizzically.

'I do not understand,' he said. 'That is still too far away to reach.'

Kali nodded. The fact was, it was too far away for a running jump, even for her. But even had she been able, she wouldn't have tried. Revealing her abilities to a man who would, for the price of a shot of boff, tell all and sundry about it was not a wise move in a backwoods such as this. It could easily reach the ear of some overzealous Final Faith missionary, and she had no wish to be dragged to a gibbet and burned as a witch. Besides, jumping would take the fun out of it all.

'Rule three,' Kali said. 'Be patient.'

She smiled again as, from under the lip of the ledge where they stood, a scintillating plane of blue energy snaked out towards the newly risen pillar, zigzagging around the stalactites in its path to form a translucent bridge wide enough to take them both. Slack squinted, frowned, and Kali realised he hadn't a clue what he was looking at. It was easy to forget that while she'd come to live with such wonders on an almost day-to-day basis, the average peninsulan hadn't much experience of magic.

'It isn't witchcraft,' she explained. 'The bridge is made of something called threads.'

'Threads?'

'An elven thing but the dwarves weren't averse to their use when needs suited. They — ' Kali paused and contemplated. How exactly did you explain the threads of magic to a man such as Slack? 'They allow you to use the world around you… to do things with invisible tools.'

Slack looked enlightened. 'So, I could use these tools to dig a new dump-pit?'

Kali pulled a face. 'Uh, yeah, I suppose,' she conceded, thinking that she was the only one digging a hole around here. 'Let's move on, shall we?'

A wary Slack dibbed a toe onto the bridge, clearly not trusting its solidity, while Kali strode casually by him into the void, slapping the stalactites she passed and humming a happy tune. She reached the pillar and waited for Slack to catch up before inserting the key into a second indentation carved in its centre. This time she turned it left three times, right and then left again. There was another grating sound, and another rumbling from below.

'Six pillars,' Kali explained as another rose ahead of them, 'six combinations. If all are entered correctly, they form a bridge all the way to where we want to go…'

Slack sniffed. 'This is really quite easy, then.'

'Easy?' Kali chided as she waited for the bridge to form before skipping onto it. 'You think I got this key from some adventurer's junk sale? Oh, no. This key is a complex construct of separate components, each of which was hidden in a site rigged to the rafters with every kind of trap you could imagine. These past few weeks I've been shot at, scalded, suffocated, stifled, stung, squeezed, squished and squashed, so maybe, Mister Slack, you should rethink your 'easy.''

'And you say you're not doing this for the money?'

'Nope,' Kali said. 'Holiday.'

'Holiday?'

'Holiday.'

The fact was, she was still reeling from recent revelations about 'the darkness' coming to Twilight — so much so she'd had to get away, from friends, the Flagons, all of it. Not that there were actually that many friends around right now. Slowhand was off avenging the death of his sister, and she'd barely seen hide or hair of Moon or Aldrededor since she'd rescued the Tharnak from the Crucible — the old man, whose shop was being rebuilt after the k'nid attacks, and the pirate were spending all their time tinkering with the ship in Domdruggle's Expanse. Dolorosa had dismissed it as boys and their toys but there was a serious side to their tinkering, readying the ship for when — and for what — it might be needed. Not that she missed any of them — her holiday had been chosen specifically to keep her busy. She had, in fact, lost count of the times she'd barely avoided it becoming a funeral. In short, she'd had one hells of a time, and the acquisition of what lay ahead was the last challenge she had to face. Because what she had so far not told Slack was that forming the bridges was only half of it.

'One wrong move,' she said, 'and the entire mechanism resets itself. Bridges gone, pillars back where they came, carrying us with them into the depths.'

Slack peered down and glimpsed something huge, white and serpentine slither through the darkness. 'But there is something down there! Something horrible!'

Kali looked over her shoulder, smiled. 'Of course. There's always something horrible.'

With the more restrained Slack in tow, Kali negotiated more bridges, coming eventually to the last one — the one to the resting place of the artefact.

This time she wielded the key but hesitated as she held it before the lock, drawing a worried glance from her companion.

'There is a problem?' Slack asked.

'No, no, no problem,' Kali responded.

Well, not much of one. It was only that at this point she might most likely get them both killed. The fact was that while her studies of the dwarven key had revealed a pattern to her, she'd been sure of all the combinations except this last. The combinations represented a really quite simple series of nods to the inclinations of the dwarves' multifarious minor gods — lightning equalling from above, or up; sunrise, east, so right; sea, which at this point on the peninsula was to the west and therefore left. The problem with the last combination was that it contained a glyph for the god of wind and, frankly, that one had left her stymied. Wind, after all, could come from any direction, so how in the hells was she meant to know which was correct? In the end, she'd whittled the possibilities down to two answers — up, because the wind in this valley was predominantly northern, and down, or south, because… well, because.

Hesitantly, she inserted the key in the final niche, turned most of the combination and stopped before the final twist.

North now, or south? If she guessed wrong, the last thing she'd see would be Slack wetting himself again,