The Crucible of the Dragon God

'It's the League's self protection protocol. The towers are defending themselves as best they can.'

'You arrogant — this isn't the way, you bastard! Your people are destroying their own to protect themselves. You have to stop this!'

'There is nothing I can do. The Towers are sealed.'

'Well, think of something, dammit! They're tearing Andon apart!'

Sonpear hesitated, clearly torn between his League responsibility and the damage that it was causing. For a second he just listened to the sound of the fireballs and to the battering the exterior of the hotel was taking from the k'nid.

'There might be weapons,' he said finally, 'that may prove more effective in an offensive than those you currently possess. There will, however, be some hazards involved in obtaining them.'

'Pal, they can't be any more hazardous than opening that front door or waiting here while it gets blown off,' Jengo Pim interjected. 'What do you have in mind?'

Sonpear sighed, as if what he were about to announce he should not even be considering. He was about to speak when there was a sudden warning cry from Kali and he stared toward the Three Towers. Or rather, at the space between themselves and the Three Towers. Because one of the towers had turned towards them and, thrumming deeply as it came, growing larger every second, one of the fireballs was on direct collision course with the Underlook.

There was no time to run, nowhere to hide and absolutely nothing they could do. Heart pounding, the last thing Kali saw was Sonpear rushing at her, pushing Pim into the fireball's path. And then the fireball struck and the top of the Underlook was gone in a blazing inferno, just like that.

Chapter Seven

One thing made Kali question whether she was in the afterlife and that was that Jengo Pim seemed to be sharing eternity with her. When their times came she granted they might be near neighbours in whatever level of the hells she was despatched to — close enough to pop round for a cup of sulphur, perhaps — but, hey, she hadn't led the life of crime he had. She guessed, she had one or two redeeming features he hadn't, hadn't she?

She stared at Pim, picking himself up off the ground. He was staring at her in the same way she was staring at him — which was to say completely bemused — and it looked very much like he was thinking the same thing as she was, too. There was no way on Twilight the two of them couldn't be dead.

Both of them then turned to take in their surrounding. Or rather lack of them.

Wherever they were, it certainly looked like the afterlife. At least if one subscribed to the idea of it being some almost featureless limbo; dark, unoccupied and silent. The kind of place where one might wander until the Gods had counted up your good beads and bad beads on their divine abacus, or whatever the hells it was they did. It certainly felt like the afterlife, at least in the sense that her arrival here had left her rather numb. The one thing it didn't do was smell like the afterlife. But, to be honest, that was more likely to be Jengo Pim.

No wait, Kali thought, and sniffed her underarm. Okay, it had been something of an energetic twenty four hours.

'What,' Pim said slowly, 'just happened?'

Kali remembered the Underlook's turret room; a series of fleeting images that included the fireball, Sonpear shouting a warning cry, and then him staring her in the face, shoving her back into Pim, hard. The shock she had felt in that moment — that Sonpear was saving his own skin — didn't tally with the look she saw on his face. It no longer struck her as homicidal but somehow desperate, as if the mage were doing the only thing he could in the circumstances.

'I think he pushed us…' Kali said, vaguely.

'Oh, the bastard pushed us all right. Right into an early grave.'

'Do you feel dead?'

Pim looked himself up and down, patted his arms and legs and chest, frowned slightly when he noticed one of his sleeves was smoking gently. He patted it down. 'Well, no, but…'

'Like I said, I think he pushed us out of the way. Magically, I mean. I think we're somewhere else.'

Pim took a moment to absorb what Kali said. 'Somewhere else? This looks like nowhere.'

'That's exactly where I think it is. Nowhere. I think this is Domdruggle's Expanse.'

'Who's what?'

'Domdruggle. His expanse. It's another place — an echo of our own, existing on a different plane. At least that's how the story goes. It's very old, supposed to be something of a myth.'

Pim shrugged. 'Something of a boring myth, if you ask me.'

'No, we're just becoming acclimatised to it.' She stared out into the dark. 'Look, Pim. Look.'

The thieves' guild leader followed Kali's gaze, where shapes were indeed forming out of the nothingness, but instead of displaying an expression of wonderment, he frowned.

'You said it was an echo of our plane of existence. But if we're still where we were, it looks nothing like it.'

'No, it doesn't, does it?' Kali said, smiling. She continued to gaze into the darkness, making out rolling fields, and vast fortresses and soaring towers in the distance. Things other than clouds or birds scudded across the sky.

Great, winged things. 'That's because we're looking at the distant past.'

'Are you telling me we've travelled through time?'

Kali shook her head. 'Nope, we're exactly when we were. This is what Andon looked like when Domdruggle conjured the echo. Of course there was no Andon then, only the cities of the elves and the dwarves…'

She trailed off, her wonderment at what she was seeing coupled with the promise of what she could explore out there leaving her speechless. She almost left Pim and walked off into the ghostly landscape.

'So this is the time of the Old Races?' Pim asked.

'The memory of it. I wonder what day it was, what season, what year? When in their calendar was this?' She gazed up at the stars to see how different from her own time they were, but instead of seeing the stars saw something else, and gasped.

Kerberos loomed above, twice, three times the size it should have been. So immense its sphere was almost enveloping the planet, creating an eerie fogginess to the light. And that light was not the azure light they were used to but a deep, blood red.

'My Gods!'

'That doesn't look right,' Pim observed, bleakly. 'It's like it's swallowing Twilight.'

Kali nodded. 'I think this might be the End Time.'

'End Time?'

'The time when the elves and the dwarves died. When the Old Races disappeared.'

'What? You're saying that Kerberos killed them?'

Kali shook her head, not sure what to think. When she spoke, it was almost in a whisper. 'I don't know. But by the looks of things I'd be willing to guess it had something to do with it.'

'Perhaps one day soon, you should find out what, Kali Hooper,' a voice said.

'What? What?'

'What?' Pim echoed. It seemed that he had heard nothing.

Kali rubbed the side of her skull, feeling a strange irritation, almost a scratching within.

'Awe inspiring, isn't it?' the voice said again, and this time it sounded more familiar. 'Some say the whole expanse exists on the head of a pin.'

'Sonpear?' Kali said.