The Crucible of the Dragon God

duplicate themselves. Their numbers are doubling at a regular rate, Kali, and eventually there will be so many that their presence will be absolute.'

'I saw it happening. When they first stormed the walls.'

'That isn't all. They consume everything and their presence must already be changing the land, making it unsuitable for crops, for livestock, for any kind of habitation. Why they're doing this I don't know, but soon they will cover the peninsula like a living shroud and the damage will be irreversible.'

'Gods, Merrit… how long?'

'A week.'

'Five days?'

'Five days. No more.'

Kali's face set with determination. 'Then I'd better get a move on.'

'I?'

'Old man, you're in no state to — '

'Pardon me, Miss,' one of the guards interjected. He looked exhausted. 'A moment ago, your grandfather mentioned travel to the Drakengrats?'

Despite the circumstances, Merrit Moon coughed and said something under his breath. Kali patted him.

'He did.' Kali said, warily.

'Then I'm sorry, but our scouts report the Vos military have closed the border at the Anclas Territories. Apparently, their population centres have taken considerable damage and their people are crowding the old war shelters, and they refuse to compound their crisis by allowing anyone from Pontaine through. All refugees are being detained at the border.'

'They're leaving us to our own fate,' Moon said. 'Sealing us in with the k'nid.'

'The bastards. It isn't even their land.' Kali said.

She considered their options. The fact was, she could probably make it through Vos's defensive lines but it would be a tricky business. One wrong move and, in the current state of trigger-happiness Vossian retribution might encompass execution of the refugees. She couldn't and wouldn't risk that. But, still, she had to reach the Drakengrats. There had to be a way.

She suddenly realised that there was. And that it might even expedite matters.

'Would you excuse us, please?' she said to the guard, and then turned to Moon. 'Old man, I need you to take Horse and get to the Flagons, take a message to Aldrededor for me.'

'I'm coming with you.'

'No, you're not. You and Horse are both out of this fight but can still help by doing what I ask. I reckon Horse has one more jump in him so use it to get to the Flagons. It, er, might be a little noisy but, trust me, you'll be safe there.'

Moon looked puzzled, and his eyes narrowed. 'What are you planning, young lady?'

Kali told him.

'What? O-ho, no, young lady, no.' The old man stared at her. 'Impossible! It would take specialist equipment, mapping, planning, weeks of preparation. Your own research has shown what a potentially deadly maze they might be, unstable and likely collapsed at multiple points, to say nothing of the fact that you have no idea what's down there.' He shook his head, adamant. 'No, young lady, be realistic. You'll never make it through.'

'Since when have I been realistic, old man?' She stared at him and smiled. 'Besides, as far as specialist equipment goes, I think I have just the thing.'

Chapter Nine

The Lost Canals of Turnitia.

Kali had been planning to explore them for as long as she could remember. They were, however, a massive undertaking. Some references she had unearthed about them suggested that they went on for hundreds of leagues and, until now, somewhere between the planning and the exploration of them, something had always managed to get in the way. Last year, there had been the matter of the Red Queen, for instance, and only a few months before she'd been considering their allure when she had been distracted by the small affair of the Clockwork King. Her current circumstances were perhaps not the ideal ones in which to finally fulfil her ambition, but Kali was quietly relieved that fate had pushed her in this direction and she had to admit that she was more than a little excited by the prospect ahead of her.

The journey from Andon had taken her a day and a half, moving slowly and cautiously through the stonewood forests of southern Pontaine, on a horse hired from the city wall stables, which she had dismounted and slapped back home when she had neared the Anclas Territories. She had used the cover of the forests not only to avoid the k'nid, but also to avoid the gaze of the surveillance scopes with which the Vossian army had equipped their forts.

Dividing the peninsula — and thus Vos and Pontaine — like a great thick belt, the Anclas Territories stretched from Freiport in the north to Turnitia in the south, and had once been neutral farmland. After the Great War between Vos and Pontaine, however, the former had wasted no time in establishing a number of forts on the land whose official reason for existence — the protection of the Vos Empire — had always struck Kali as somewhat ironic considering that it was they who had invaded Pontaine in the first place. Whatever the politics of it, Pontaine, battered by the war, had been in no position to dispute the placements. While they remained little more than observation posts, the number of additional forts, garrisons and service structures that had grown alongside and between them over the intervening years, had transformed Vos's presence in the area from a broken series of scattered bases to a virtual wall, over which they held complete autonomy and control. They hadn't exercised its strategic power until now, allowing relatively free trade and passage between the neighbouring states, like Pontaine, having no wish to precipitate another conflict, but in doing so it had become abundantly clear how insidious its growth had been to the area. Simply put, when they had closed the borders they had had the capability to do it literally. There was no way through.

Lucky, then, that Kali hadn't wanted to go through. All she'd had to do was make sure they didn't see what it was that was going under it. And the two bound and gagged and struggling guards at her feet were testimony to the fact that she had succeeded.

Kali stood, now, on one of the more remote guard towers towards the southern end of the Territories, staring through the surveillance scope with which the guards had unwillingly provided her. The looks on their faces as she had suddenly appeared before them, forty feet up in the air, had been priceless. While they weren't to know that she had, in fact, been dangling from a strip of shadow wire at the time, their surprise had lasted long enough for her to be able to slam their heads together, disabling them before they could sound the alarm. The action had been necessary because, out of all the towers in the Anclas line, it was this one that overlooked her destination. Or, to be more accurate, the entrance to her destination; one of the huge roundels to which she had given the name dropshaft.

That was the thing about the Lost Canals of Turnitia — they were not lost in the sense that no one had been able to find them. They were only lost in the sense that they had been long abandoned. Long, long abandoned by Kali's reckoning. Because, as far as she could make out, the inscriptions on the dropshafts were neither elven nor dwarven and seemed to her old enough to predate both. What exactly the implications of that were, she had no more clue than she had to what purpose the dropshafts served. In all the time she had been planning an expedition to the canals, she had located three of the dropshafts, one south east of Scholten, one west, near Malmkrug, and the third here, near the coastal city of Turnitia. That Turnitia had been honoured with giving its name to the canals was not, though, in reference to this particular dropshaft but rather that — unique among the canal network — this part of the coast had once had an entrance to the canals leading in from the sea.

Kali trained the surveillance scope to the north east, and it was from that direction, from the Flagons, that she expected her companion to come. Anytime now.