Engines of the Apocalypse

to face — albeit with her upside down — and Kali stared Abra in the eyes and smiled. 'Never mind,' she said.

The pair of them shot into the air where, to his credit, Abra remained stoically silent, as if this kind of thing happened every day. He managed a weak smile.

The return flight reached its apex and they dropped again. Then rose. Then dropped. At last the cobweb seemed to recognise that enough was enough, and they ended up dangling a foot above the ground.

As the remains of the cobweb began to tear themselves slowly apart, dropping them towards the pavement, Abra coughed.

'Did you,' he asked slowly, and with a crack in his voice, 'discover what you needed to know?'

Kali stared back up at where the tower had been.

'Oh, yeah,' she said after a second. 'The Ur'Raney. He's planning to bring them back.'

Chapter Ten

Head down, Kali rode hard and fast, pushing Horse to his absolute limit. The bamfcat was, as usual, loyal and uncomplaining, though he did seem somewhat confused at being unable to do what he normally would and shorten the journey. But he could not jump; for the last few leagues they had been riding across the Plain of Storms.

It was one of the peculiar features of the area. Surrounded by the temperate farmlands of mid Pontaine, the almost perfectly circular valley was a meteorological anomaly, prone to a stultifying heaviness of air and battered by constant electrical storms. Those who lived on the periphery of the area said that sometimes the catastrophic conditions on the plain affected other weather it had no business affecting, pulling at the northern lights and bending them toward the ground, or even snatching a maelstrom from the Storm Wall, far away on the coast, for a few hours. If this were true — and Kali had seen enough of the raw potential of Old Races creations to believe it could be — it was likely that the energies of the control centre for the machines, what she had nicknamed 'the hub,' were responsible.

In other words, she guessed she was in the right place.

Nearing the centre of the plain, Kali slowed Horse to a stop and stared into the rain-lashed, thundering vista before her. She dismounted, took her squallcoat from her saddlebag and slipped it on, fastening it securely. From there on in, she led Horse by the reins.

It was hard going, fighting the unnaturally heavy atmosphere and taking deep, grasping breaths as she went. Here and there, tornadoes whirled across the barren ground, threatening to pluck her up if she strayed too close. Not that it was much safer out of their path — where the whirlwinds didn't manifest themselves, Kali found herself having to dodge sudden bolts of lightning that struck the ground about her, leaving small, smoking craters where they hit. One or two almost got her, but she soon learned to anticipate their arrival, the dense air further thickening a few seconds before each strike, as if someone were pressing down hard on her head. No pitsing wonder the area was so desolate, she thought. Other than a few scattered hardy plants, tanglevine and redweed among them, it was like walking through a bad dream. No one had ever tried to fully explore, let alone colonise the region, but why in the hells would they?

Once again, she thought, to find the hub you'd have to know it was there.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, it was there. A dark cave mouth loomed before her out of a dust storm. Not just a cave mouth, though: the eroded rock still retained the faint remains of carvings chiselled into it millennia earlier, shapes Kali recognised as dwarven. The most obvious clue to its provenance, though, was that the cave mouth itself was the shape of one of the Engines.

Kali tethered Horse, moved to the mouth and paused. If this was indeed the entrance to the hub then surely it was once a prime target for the dwarves' elven enemies, and as such she'd have expected it to be protected by the usual array of dwarven defences and traps. There was no evidence of anything, however, and Kali wondered if perhaps the traps, like the mouth itself, had been obliterated by the ravages of the plain. She bit her lip, deciding all she could do was proceed with caution.

Kali entered the cave mouth, briefly disappointed. To be frank she had been expecting to find more than just a cave. But that was all she'd got. A plain tunnel sloped gently downwards, ending in a chamber devoid of features but for a large hole in the ground. Kali eased her way to its edge and peered down. While deep, it appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be simply that. A hole in the ground. Then Kali noticed that the floor of the cave leading towards it was scarred and grooved. Once upon a time heavy objects, and a good number of them, had been dragged towards that hole. She pictured teams of dwarves pulling their burdens on ropes and then -

And then what? She wondered.

Because unless she had been completely wrong about this being the hub and she had, in fact, stumbled across some dwarven landfill site, surely they hadn't simply been dumped down there? She looked around. There was no sign of any haulage mechanisms with which they might have been lowered. As far as she could tell there was also no sign of any mechanism which might raise an elevator from far below. Frowning, Kali conducted a thorough search of the surrounding rock, but nothing. It did indeed appear as if she had come all this way to be stymied by a hole.

Kali sat herself against the wall and made a flubbing sound. If she were going to make the rendezvous with DeZantez and the others, she did not have the advantage she normally might in such circumstances — to take as much time as she wished to ponder the problem. Frustrated, she plucked stones from the cave floor around her and began to lob them towards the hole. If she listened carefully, she might at least be able to determine how deep the farking thing was. It was then that she noticed two things — one, a thrumming from below that was barely audible over the lightning strikes outside and, two, the fact that the stones she had lobbed at the hole hadn't fallen in.

What the hells? Kali picked herself up and moved to its edge, leaning forward to grab one of the hovering stones from mid air. It seemed to contain metallic ore. As she leaned forward, she felt a resistance, placing her hand in a soft pillow, and stood back, her heart thumping. Did that mean what she thought it meant? That if she — ?

Kali stripped off her backpack and threw it out over the seemingly bottomless drop, raising her eyebrows as it, too, bounced about as if tossed by currents of air. But this was not air she was dealing with — she felt nothing on her flesh, on her face, in her hair — it seemed instead to be something that warped the air.

Perhaps, even, the same force that kept the Engines of the Apocalypse aloft?

Okay, what's the worst that can happen? Kali thought. If I step over the breach I end up hovering there and have to claw my way back.

But what if the only reason that the rocks and backpack were hovering was because they were lighter than she was? What if this resistance, whatever it was, allowed the gradual descent of something with more mass — the objects that had scored the floor of the cave, perhaps? What if the strange force warping the air acted as some kind of invisible elevator?

Kali stepped forward, her foot wobbling slightly on the air, and then drew herself over the hole. She stuck her arms out straight like a wire walker and giggled as she floated. Then, very slowly she began to descend. Instinctively, Kali took a deep breath, but then smiled to herself. This wasn't water she was dealing with, this was something else entirely, and it had so far proved to be harmless, so she saw no reason why she shouldn't enjoy the ride.

Down she went, slowly down. At long last, Kali felt solid rock beneath her feet once more.

She stared at a solid rock wall. Disappointment threatened to overwhelm her once again. But then she turned around.

Kali smiled. Hello, hub, she thought.

Stretching away ahead of her, cut to the same dimensions as the vertical shaft, was a tunnel running horizontally through the rock, disappearing into the distance. Kali took a step forward, shrugged away a moment of giddiness, and waited while her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the underground.

The smooth, curving walls here were not bare rock, but lined with a softly-glowing metal, as was the floor, both inscribed over every inch of their surface with thousands upon thousands of delicate etchings. There were far too many of these etchings for Kali to be able to make sense of them as a whole, but they were undoubtedly dwarven in style and, what was more, of a kind that she had never come across before. The archetypal dwarven