bridge, seeming almost to float in his long robe. His relaxed attitude made her presume that he was not about to be frozen, incinerated or generally done to death by any of the traps so, like his brothers below, he had to have some kind of protection about him.
Normally, she would not have welcomed his presence at all, but this, she hoped, was her way through. She had to take the gamble, there was no other choice. She had to stick to him as close as a second skin. Used as she was to sneaking about places, she was about to find out just how stealthy she could be.
As the mage moved past her, Kali moved into step behind him, a living shadow, crouched but moving on tiptoe, matching his every move. As his left leg moved, so did hers, as his right, the same. Every pause, every hesitation and every subtle twist and turn of the mage's body was matched perfectly as he — and she — passed through the first of the defensive curtains and she felt nothing other than a slight fluttering in her muscles. But that she felt even that while she was protected proved her suspicion of how powerful these final traps were.
Two curtains, three curtains, four. Her plan was working — and then it wasn't. She was one curtain away from the end of the bridge when the mage stopped dead in his tracks, causing Kali to wobble and almost bump into him it was so unexpected.
There was what seemed to be an eternal pause. What are you doing? she thought. Come on, come on, tell me what you're doing.
The mage patted a pocket of his robe, shook his head in self reprimand and tutted loudly.
He's forgotten something, Kali thought. The bloody idiot's forgotten -
Oh, cra -
She moved as he did, a hundred and eighty degrees in perfect silence and synchronisation, staying in the same position behind him all the time. She couldn't believe she managed it, but she did, and the mage didn't even have a clue she was there. Though outwardly calm and in control, as Kali watched him walk back the way that he had come, she was surprised he didn't hear her heart threatening to burst out of her chest.
He disappeared through the door and she was left trapped between the last two curtains.
She threw her hands in the air and walked quickly around in a circle. There was no way forwards, no way back — and absolutely nowhere to hide when Mister Duh! Forgot My Head returned.
Idiot!
There had to be a way through — and she had to work out what it was fast. The first step was finding out what kind of trap she was looking at. Kali quickly tore a small patch from her dark silk bodysuit and tossed it at the curtain. There was a zuzzz, a puff of smoke and then nothing — the patch was gone. This was some kind of electrical trap and if she tried to step through she'd end up doing a dance that would put the Hells' Bellies to shame.
A very brief dance.
Dammit! She wasn't going to find out the location of the keys this way.
The keys, she thought, something nagging at the back of her brain. These differently coloured curtains with their different magics — surely the mages couldn't constantly invoke protection against each? What, then, if they instead carried with them some kind of key? She hadn't seen anything actually being used and so what could it — ?
She looked down. The pattern on her stolen robe scintillated slightly, more so when she moved closer to the curtain. Gods, she thought, was that why the mages still wore them — because the robes themselves were the keys?
Again, it was a gamble, but if she didn't take it she was stuffed anyway. Kali took a deep breath and walked slowly forwards, passing through the energy field with ease.
She cringed. All the effort she'd put into marking Mister Duh! Forgot My Head when she could have passed through any time.
Idiot!
She opened the door ahead of her and she was inside at last. The Forbidden Archive.
Her eyes narrowed.
Or… not.
What in the hells was this? Kali wondered, aghast. There was nothing here. After all her effort, the upper half of the third tower was an empty chamber, completely featureless apart from a solitary, podium-like structure at its centre and a red glow that suffused the place and seemed to emanate from the walls.
Okay — if this had been a guided tour, then she'd have demanded her money back.
She moved towards the podium, her footfalls clattering despite the fact she wore shnarl-hide soles. Of all the things she had encountered so far it was the clattering that made her shiver. This place was weird.
Kali mounted the podium and found it inscribed with a number of symbols, none of which she recognised, the symbols being magical not linguistic, and not her area of expertise. She pressed one, then another, and then each in turn, but nothing happened. She tried a different order and, again, nothing. On her fourth unsuccessful attempt she threw up her arms in frustration, then quickly stepped back as the air in front of her seemed suddenly to change. Then, spiralling down seemingly from thin air above came a number of tiny shapes that began to gather before her eyes, and as they did an object began to assemble itself from these tiny building blocks. Some kind of container — elven by the look of it — marked with the familiar circular symbol of their race.
Kali moved her hand forwards to touch the container but found nothing there.
An idea struck her, and she waved her hands again. As rapidly as it had appeared, the container disassembled itself and spiralled back towards the heights of the chamber, replaced by another object spiralling down and assembling itself in its place. This time it was a manuscript containing, by the look of it, some kind of outlawed spell.
Kali's gesticulations became more varied, and she dismissed and summoned more and more objects, each redolent to some degree of evil and possessed of an ominous aura. She had no idea what magics were involved, but it was becoming clear to her what was happening here — the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige obviously considered the collection of the Forbidden Archive too dangerous to keep physically in one location and so had devised this method of virtually retrieving each object for study from elsewhere — perhaps some plane that could not be physically reached at all.
It was an indication of their power and it was wondrous, but it did her very little good. How out of all the collection was she meant to find what she needed, because if she had managed to summon the items she had at random then the collection itself had to be immense, with infinite combinations of symbology. And hells — she didn't even really know what it was she was looking for.
There had to be a way of narrowing it down. Kali looked at the symbols on the podium again, reasoning that not even the League's mages could reasonably be expected to remember every combination, and that maybe they were subdivisions — some kind of cataloguing system. Instead of pressing it this time, she replicated the first symbol on the podium with arm movements, feeling what she had missed before, some kind of receptive magical field slightly thickening the air, and a second later a box not dissimilar to the first she had summoned assembled itself. Kali took a gamble and tried waving it on, and to her surprise the gesture worked — another curiosity assembling itself in its place. But she was clearly in the section for artefacts when what she wanted was manuscripts. She replicated the next symbol — spells — and the next — ancient relics. Only on the fourth and last did she find what she was looking for, or at least a place to begin.
Kali's gesticulations increased in pace and she began to summon, study and dismiss manuscript after manuscript, growing more and more adept with the practice until she looked as if she were conducting some complex symphony. She found she was able to pull writings towards her for closer study, turn them around or upside down to seek hidden illuminations and, in the case of actual tomes, flip from page to page with ease. The number of ancient documents stored astounded her, but her joy at discovering such a treasure trove was tempered by the knowledge that she had no time to truly study any but those she sought. Having still not found them and increasingly aware that the forgetful mage could return at any time, her efforts became more urgent, a degree of frustration creeping in as she hurled each document on with a snap of her hand.
Then suddenly, there. Images similar to those Slowhand had described from Makennon's archive in Scholten. There, on the first manuscript she saw, and on more following, diverse and variously decomposed references presumably collected here from different sources and different times.
Kali stopped cycling, hands moving slowly so that she could fold back and forth between the most telling documents, an illuminated manuscript, a map, and what appeared to be some ancient bard's tale of events. It was
