Engines of the Apocalypse

strike me as someone who has spent a lot of time with her head in a book,' she responded, after a moment.

Gabriella smiled coldly. 'You disappoint me, Kali. I'd have expected you of all people not to judge a book by its cover.'

'Oh?'

'A girl from a backwater tavern with an over fondness for drink, an absolute disregard for authority and a tendency to repeatedly cross swords with the Final Faith? Hardly the kind of person you'd expect them to turn to for help.'

'What can I say? We go back a ways.'

Gabriella nodded. 'I know, I've done some research of my own. The Clockwork King. The Crucible. Greenfinger's Wood. The Faith holds quite a file on you.'

'You surprise me. That crack about 'sex occasionally' still in there?'

'The Anointed Lord's small attempt at a joke. She's human, too, you know, despite her calling from the Lord of All.'

'Yeah, right,' Kali spat. Then she apologized. What DeZantez had shown her earlier had proven that there was at least some basis to the Faith's beliefs, even if she remained convinced that their interpretation of it was deeply suspect.

'For the record,' DeZantez went on, 'I spent a good deal of my childhood in a place such as this. Not on the same scale, of course. My mother ran — still runs — the Faith archive in Andon.'

Kali raised her eyebrows. 'Marta DeZantez is your mother?'

'You know her?'

'Not well, but I've had… occasion to consult her records. She's a good woman — non-partisan.'

For the first time DeZantez's smile warmed, and she nodded her acknowledgement, still a little uneasy.

'Listen,' Killiam Slowhand said loudly, in an attempt to defuse the situation. 'Seeing as we are all in the employ of the Fil — the Faith for the foreseeable future, what say we all be friends here?' The archer patted an adjacent chair. 'Sit by me.'

DeZantez stared at the proffered chair and then the archer, regarding him as she might a mollusc. 'So you can pretend to read a book while you ogle my thighs? I don't think so.'

'I guess she's read your file, too,' Kali said.

'Uh-huh,' DeZantez confirmed.

Slowhand did his best to look innocent, then attempted to change the subject. 'Gabriella DeZantez,' he said, with his best grin. 'Quite the mouthful. How about I call you Dez?'

The swordswoman's eyes darkened. 'Sure. How about I call you Slow?'

The archer's smile faded and it was Kali's turn to smile. She indicated a seat beside herself instead. 'There's a lot to get through. We'd welcome your help.'

Gabriella slid into the proffered seat. 'Okay. What are we looking for?'

'Two things. Anything about the machines, their origin and history, but particularly any mention of how they are activated and controlled. Secondly, dates and details relating to the legend of the Pale Lord, known experiments and movements, anything that might cross-reference with the Engines or this 'pillar of souls.''

DeZantez nodded. 'Fine. Who's doing what?'

'I'll tackle the machines, with Dez,' Slowhand volunteered.

'Nice, but how about you tackle the Pale Lord and Gabriella and I take the machines,' Kali corrected. It had been a while since she had seen the archer go into a sulk, but he did as he was told, and a few minutes later three heads were buried deep inside books.

The hours began ticking by. Kali hadn't been wrong when she'd said it was going to be a long night, and the reading table was soon stacked high with tomes from all sections of the library. Most offered nothing, and a few gave snippets of information useless by themselves. Gradually, however, and after Slowhand had been kicked twice for snoring, some snippets began to correspond and a sketchy picture emerged.

It seemed that during one of the bloodiest times of their later history, having been routed by the increasingly powerful magic of their elven enemies, the dwarves had constructed a number of weapons or deterrents — the meaning wasn't exactly clear — said to be capable of nullifying the magic of the elves, effectively interfering with the threads manipulated by their song-magic. That interference, Kali guessed, had to be caused by the sound the machines emitted; it was possible that the sound could also interfere with other types of magic, including the barriers to the cathedral's railway tunnels, whose magical origins lay with the elves in the first place. One thing puzzled Kali, however. Although there were several references to the machines there was no subsequent mention of them having been used successfully against the elves. History, in fact, recorded that there was no such change of fortunes in the elf/dwarf wars and that they had soon after declared a truce that was to be the starting point of their third age of existence, where the Old Races had advanced their civilisations in peace. But if that was the case, one obvious question needed to be answered — why hadn't the dwarves used the machines it had clearly taken them a great deal of time and effort to develop?

It was Gabriella who found the answer. Or at least something that pointed to an answer. Records from around the time of the machines' development spoke of severe upheaval across the peninsula, of unnatural storms and quakes, and of coastal settlements being consumed by the sea. It didn't take much of a leap to imagine that perhaps the cause of these phenomena lay with the machines themselves — that perhaps they affected more than just the threads and the dwarves had inadvertently, created some kind of doomsday weapon.

The theory gathered credence when Gabriella came upon one further reference. It needed to be translated from the dwarven by Kali but this one gave the machines a name.

The Engines of the Apocalypse.

Kali sat back with a sigh. They had discovered what they were dealing with, but it was now all the more imperative they find out how these engines were controlled, and from where.

A further number of hours research produced little on the former, but eventually Kali lit upon, of all things, a number of dwarven engineers' requisition forms buried amongst other preserved papers. Sometimes it was the small things, Kali reflected. The requisitions were for heavy construction materials, all of which were to be delivered to a particular location. The materials by themselves were no proof of any connection but the fact that the location was smack bang in the centre of the three groups of machines and had, from somewhere, acquired the name 'the Plain of Storms' sounded somewhat more promising.

They were, however, not yet done. The more she learned, the more Kali became convinced that the Pale Lord had to be planning something other than a simple invasion of the soul-stripped. After all, what could he possibly hope to gain from a devastated peninsula inhabited solely by the near-dead? No, Redigor's use of the engines to take Makennon and the others as well as render their mages powerless against his army was part of a greater plan, she was sure, and anything they could find out about the man himself might have a bearing on it.

'Anything, Slowhand?' Kali asked.

The archer shook his head. 'I've been through a hundred books and other than the usual guff about the Pale Lord being banished from Fayence for meddling with necromancy, then buggering off into the Sardenne to form his army of the soul-stripped, there's very little. But there is this one phrase that keeps recurring…'

'Oh?'

'Here they lie, still,' the archer quoted.

'Here they lie, still?' Gabriella repeated. 'Any idea what that means?'

'Reputedly, they were the last words spoken by Redigor before he entered Bellagon's Rip,' Slowhand said, consulting a passage. 'But who 'they' were and where they 'lie still,' nobody records.'

'Could he have been referring to the engines?' Gabriella mused. 'Maybe the dwarves moved them to the Sardenne? Their equivalent of decommissioning them?'

'Maybe,' Kali said, biting her lip. 'Anything else?'

Slowhand shook his head and thumped another large, dusty tome down in front of him. He had no sooner opened it, however, than he stopped with a start, his gaze flicking to Gabriella sitting opposite him. The archer coughed, squirmed slightly, then smiled and gave her a sly wink.

'Are you all right?' Gabriella asked suspiciously.

'Fine,' Slowhand answered, squeaking and clearing his throat. He jerked his head towards Kali, occupied with a new book, conspiratorially.

'You sure?'