The Crucible of the Dragon God

more. So it was now — as they felt the seed of an answer within them — the words of the angry-spirit-who-had- come-to-live-beneath-them came once more:

'Owww! Rollocks! Count to ten. One-two… no, soddit… You farking hoooor!'

Far below, through a labyrinthine series of tunnels and diggings, through galleries and chambers that had never seen the light of day, and past tools and carts like those above, Kali Hooper grunted with pain as she pulled the lengths of cloth she held in each fist as taut as she could. The binding around the splints on her leg pulled tight, pressing the splintered bone in her shin tightly but agonisingly together. Causing her to bite down hard on the gutting knife she had clenched between her teeth. Her groan echoed dully, joining the still audible reverberations of her earlier cry and reminding the solitary, bedraggled figure sitting pained, sweating and slumped in a small antechamber again and again of the mess she'd gotten herself into.

No, not exactly her, she reflected, but a certain completely mad little bastard whom Killiam Slowhand, in her stead, had long since despatched to the hells. Damn the man, she thought. Even dead Konstantin Munch continued to cause her pain.

The fact was, her current predicament was all the fault of Katherine Makennon's one-time right hand man. It might have been months since her final battle with him at the dwarven outpost of Martak, and the dwarf-blooded resurgent might even now be floating decomposed in the still and murky waters of its collapsed ruins, but that didn't stop his misconceived plan to resurrect dwarven glory from endangering her life yet again. Indirectly, at least. She should have known nothing good would come of it when one of Makennon's agents had contacted her with a set of papers which he explained the Anointed Lord wished to gift her in return for helping her with that affair. She should have said 'no thanks' there and then, but the fact was she hadn't been able to resist, had she? Oh no, because the papers turned out to be directions and maps to stores that Munch had established across the peninsula, and there was always a chance that there was going to be something more than a little interesting in there.

There hadn't been, as it turned out — the weapons and tools that Munch had collected to equip his fantasised army were as warped and useless as his masterplan — but in growing desperation to unearth at least one artefact, she had decided to give it one last stab, to follow one last set of directions. That stab and those directions had brought her here.

She really had no idea how long ago that had been, now, and she had all but forgotten that, ultimately, the trip had proven useless again, but that wasn't the problem. No, the problem this time was that it had turned out that it wasn't so much what Munch had stored away but where he had stored it away.

That this hellshole had been a mine at some point in its history — though mining what, she didn't know — was clear, but equally clearly the mine had become exhausted at some point and become… something else.

Maybe it was why Munch had chosen the place. Because, apart from its total remoteness, it was, as she had so painfully learned, a deathtrap. Not just neglected and unsafe and falling apart but a bloody deathtrap. The thought had even crossed her mind that Makennon had included the map to its location because she knew that and thought it a convenient way to be rid of her. Maybe she was being paranoid but she'd interfered once in the Final Faith's grandiose plans — even if in doing so she had saved the world — and with future plans likely in the offing maybe the Anointed Lord considered her too much of a loose cannon to be allowed to live. Not that she had any wish to get involved with that lot again.

Kali slumped against the rock wall and made a brubbing sound with her lips. The fact was, it had become increasingly unlikely that she'd be getting involved with any lot again if she didn't get out of here soon, not since she'd accidentally flicked that lever by stumbling over it in the dark.

One small mistake, that's all it was — an amateurs blunder — but that lever had been the key to this whole damned mess. It had transformed the mine's galleries in a loud and seemingly endless rattle of ancient chains and cranking of antique gears from the harmless tunnels they had been, into a deadly labyrinth constructed with one purpose in mind. To kill, as horribly and painfully as it could.

A testing ground was what it turned out to be. An ancient arena for dwarven rites of passage, designed to test their mettle to the full. She knew this because, whilst her own mettle was being tested by a selection of swinging blades and giant axes, she had come across a torn and blood-browned journal she could only presume had been written by a dwarf whose own rite of passage had come to a sudden end. As she had translated it, it told the whole sorry story of Be'Trak'tak, roughly translated as 'the beginning or end.'

Originating, she'd guessed, in the middle period of dwarven history — when their engineering skills were first beginning to evolve from the simple to the complex — it was to this place that the dwarven young were despatched at a certain age, sealed within the complex to face a series of elaborately designed traps and challenges whose survival would prove them to be warriors, or kill them in the process.

Gods, she'd wondered, what the hells was it with those dwarves? Why couldn't they just go out on the twattle when they came of age like everyone else?

Not that the dwarven traps would have proven too much of a challenge for her — not under any normal circumstances, anyway. The trouble was, it was the unimaginable length of time since any of them had stirred into life, because in that intervening age most of the materials from which the traps had been constructed had become rotten, making them dangerously unpredictable and unstable. It was the very reason why she was slumped here binding her broken leg right now.

She had successfully negotiated her way through all but the last of a series of swinging hammer traps — itself just one more of an endless series of swinging, slicing or rolling something traps — when the beam that carried the final deadly bludgeon had splintered away as it swung, flinging the hammer where it was not meant to be when it was not meant to be. Kali remembered the agony as, halfway through a perfectly timed somersault manoeuvre, the hammer had sheared from its mounting and crushed her leg against the wall of the mine. Gods, that had hurt — and it had also proven to her that she was not quite as impervious to harm as events of the previous months had begun to lead her to believe. It was a salutary lesson and one she was not likely to forget so long as this farking splint remained on her leg.

Kali shivered, not so much from cold, but a combination of exhaustion, slight fever and a hunger that came from subsisting only on the edible, though thoroughly revolting, fungus that grew on the mine walls. Of course, the state of her dark silk bodysuit didn't help. Having improved on the original thieves guild design by having it retailored to incorporate pockets for artefacts — it now hung in virtual tatters about her, having fallen victim not only to her need for cloth to tie her splint but to the various traps she'd found lying in wait. That wasn't the worst of it, though. The gaping patch of flesh around her hip was a constant reminder that somewhere along the way she had also lost her equipment belt, torn from her body and flung into some deep, dark and, by the sound of it, watery pit by an intricate whirlwind of jagged blades that someone, once upon a time, must have thought: Whirling and jagged, eh? Oh, go for it, that's a good one.'

She had lost Horse, too. She could certainly no longer sense him above, waiting patiently for her return as she expected he'd done for at least the first few days of her entrapment. No, Horse had become her faithful companion as much as the old Horse had been, but even he must have come to realise that Kali Hooper was not going to be returning to him anytime soon. She wondered where he had gone. Back to the Drakengrats where he had originally been captured? Or was he running free across the plains, the wind whistling through his horns? No, more likely he was galloping after some poor pack of worgles, terrorising them with his tongue.

Kali sniffed. Dammit, she missed him and she was getting maudlin. Hells, it really was time to get out of here, to beat these farking traps once and for all.

Kali heaved herself up against the chamber wall, thrusting a hand forward for balance as her bad leg took her weight, then hobbled out into the main tunnel, turning left and down rather than right and up. She knew that on the surface that seemed to make little sense but she also knew that there was no up — not since the landslide on the first day — and so she was going to gamble her survival on another possibility. Even the dwarves, with all their sadistic tendencies, surely couldn't expect any of their kind who had been 'warrior' enough to survive their traps to then renegotiate them on the way out. So it seemed logical that there had to be another way out, deeper into the mine.

There was only one problem with that. What was in the way.

Kali could hear it even from here. That rhythmic thumping, pounding and hissing that heralded the presence of the final trap. She had returned to it day after day for at least the last week, studying its timings and its intricacies and its foibles but making no attempt to pass. The reason for that was simple — this was the 'big one'