Engines of the Apocalypse

Freel regarded him steadily. 'So… what say we get on with it?'

'What say we do.'

Slowhand held out a hand, and the enforcer took it.

'Tell me one thing,' Slowhand said. 'Why since your first question to me have I been unable to keep my mouth shut?'

'Ah, that,' Freel said. He ran his hand down his squallcoat. 'This whole thing is stitched together with mumbleweed.'

'Mumbleweed?'

Freel leaned in almost conspiratorially. 'I'd have thought you'd have come across it in your travels. It relaxes people's inhibitions. Very handy when you're a spy.'

The two men turned, distracted by a noise from the forest. They leapt from the stones and returned to the roof's edge. Something big was approaching through the trees, and approaching fast, and it made even the temple roof pound like a drum skin beneath their feet.

Freel looked at Slowhand.

Slowhand looked at Freel.

The two men turned and ran, almost falling over themselves in their efforts to shield the other and push him away, and they cried out in unison.

'Ohhhhhh, shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit…'

Chapter Fifteen

Kali grunted, pushing her boot against the tree trunk as she pulled the vine taut and knotted it in place. It was the fourth time she had carried out such an operation, and the fourth time she wondered just what it was she was getting herself into. As usual, she decided her plan didn't bear too much thinking about.

She slapped the vine to test its tension, and dropped from the tree and moved on. More coils of the stuff were slung over her shoulders, and they would all be used. For once in her life she didn't resent the number of times she had needed to bail Red, her adoptive father, out of trouble — both financial and physical — now that the time she had spent with the old poacher was at last coming in useful. He had a way with traps, did old Red.

Kali ducked as a flock of shrikes burst from the thick branches above, but ignored them. The wildlife had returned to the forest since she, Slowhand and Freel had reached the necropolis, which was an added complication, but she frankly didn't have the time to be bothered with it. It had taken some effort to renegotiate the thorn barrier. If she had to hide every time she had a close encounter with the forest's denizens the Pale Lord's plan would be done and dusted before she got anywhere. Even so, she wasn't stupid, and had taken added precautions to conceal herself from the creatures around her. Having decided that floprat render alone might not be enough to confuse predators' senses, she had trapped and butchered a yazuk, stripping the flesh from the creature and draping it about her like a cloak.

It stank to the pits but, once more, thank you Red.

Amidst the noises and movement of the forest were the sudden, horrified screams of soldiers and mages who had survived the juggennath assault. She had no time for them either, but each time she heard them she closed her eyes and bit her lip. They may have been why she had made it so far without being attacked but she could not be grateful for them. There was nothing she could for them other than to will them not to run, to panic, to stay still, to pray, but she knew, ultimately, it would do no good. If she were in their place in this godsforsaken hellshole wouldn't she do the same?

A young, sweating Sword suddenly crashed through the undergrowth before her, falling to his knees on the forest floor. He spotted Kali and stared at her imploringly, shouting 'Help me! Help me!' but it was already too late. The tendrils coiled about his ankles snapped him back in an instant. The sounds of his thrashing struggle — and screams — continued for several seconds before they were abruptly silenced by a gelatinous gloop.

Kali kept moving, not even looking back, and chose another tree.

Once more she lashed vines about its trunk, stretching their length in a tense line to another opposite, where she climbed and lashed them tightly again. She repeated the procedure two more times, with trees further ahead and hundreds of yards apart, and at last seemed satisfied that all she could do with the vines had been done.

Girl, she thought, you've taken risks before but this time you've got to be mad.

Kali negotiated her way further into the forest, fighting a growing sense of isolation and wishing she had Horse by her side. The area she was entering was where she and the first Horse had almost given up on their search for the Spiral. Yes, there was the acrid stench of the Spiral's ruins and there was the mix of odours — metallic, biological, faecal — that meant the juggennath was still nearby. She had successfully made her way back to its stomping ground.

Stomping ground. Never was a phrase more appropriate, because Kali felt her prey before she saw it, vibrations in the forest floor that resonated in her bones.

Kali moved forward cautiously, weaving her way through the undergrowth. The trees thrashed and snapped back and forth, as if caught in the throes of a violent storm, but the sky above was clear of clouds. Abruptly, the air was split by a series of angry, deafening roars.

She eased her way to a clearing ahead.

Kali had been presuming that the creature that had attacked their party had been a juggennath, she had been calling it a juggennath, and it certainly smelt like she imagined a juggennath should smell, but it was only now, setting eyes fully upon on it that she really appreciated what a juggennath was.

Legend had it that the elves had grown six of these creatures in huge vats. They were unnatural, undying behemoths nurtured of thousands of gallons of offal, sinew, hide and bone, the mashings of huge creatures, individually terrifying, who roamed the peninsula long ago. Elven alchemists had grown them with one purpose — to empty the battlefields of the dwarves they had fought in the oldest of the wars. It was said that the six could reduce a line of ten thousand men to a bloody smear. Armoured in spiked metal plates, shaped over vast anvils, and armed with stone hammers hewn in blocks higher than a man, they were said to be unstoppable, and only by choosing their battlefield cleverly — in a place known as the Hollow Fields — had the dwarves eventually rid the world of their destructive blight. The abyssal caverns of the Fields, lying beneath thin layers of topsoil and roots, had swallowed even the juggennaths whole, and the dwarves had given those caverns a name, too — in dwarven, Yan'Tuk — which in human speak meant something roughly along the lines of 'Up Yours'.

Okay, Kali had never been sure about that last bit. But she liked it.

Clearly, though, one juggennath had survived. The thick, heavy mass that blocked her view was its legs. She craned her neck as far back as it would go, past legs the width of redwood trunks and a torso the size of a small hill, to a head and shoulders as high as the treeline, if not above.

The only thing that Kali could think was, no wonder the dwarves wanted rid of them.

Well, that was precisely why she was here, wasn't it? But before she made a move she needed to work out a route.

Kali studied the juggennath further. On a colossal scale, the creature resembled the primates of the higher World's Ridge Mountains — the ogur, for example — and was covered almost entirely in hair, muscular arms and legs concealed by the thick and straggly coat. In places jagged sections of rusted and tarnished metal clung to its body, some pieces still bearing the remains of the spikes that had once covered it. They would come in handy. The remains of some of her party were strung and slung about its massive frame, at least thirty men and women bounced lifelessly against the juggennath as it shifted, and whether they were worn for decoration or for food, Kali almost turned away seeing the state they were in.

She had seen what she needed, and was ready. All she had to wait for now was for the juggennath to move again.

It did so, the trees and branches about it thrashing and breaking as a wave of shrikes and razorbeaks circled its head, at least twenty of them taking it in turns to dart at the giant figure as it flailed against their attacks. The