way into the recess, wide and deep enough to accommodate her crouching form. Using it to get down would still leave her exposed but if she kept in its shadows, and her luck held, she would make it unseen.
She began to inch her way down towards the chamber floor. She had perhaps a hundred, a hundred and thirty feet to go.
And it was then that the vision hit her.
Searing agony cut through her mind, as if someone had embedded an axe in her forehead, and suddenly her world was yellow and red and white, everything the colour of raging fire. What had been a shadowy, abandoned chamber a moment before was now consumed by a blaze apocalyptic in intensity, the Spiral of Kos being destroyed in a conflagration beyond imagining. Things lashed and writhed within the flames — strange things that she had no time to identify before agonised screams swept them away. For a second she was outside the dome, staring as a pillar of fire rose high above the darkness of the Sardenne, and then she was back once more, in the fire's raging heart, in its midst. It couldn't be real but it was. She didn't just see it, she could feel it, the heat from the fire strong enough to sear and bubble her skin and to blind her with its bright, bright heat. What the hells am I seeing? she wondered. What the hells am I feeling?
Instinctively she flailed against it, and in that second realised where she was. Where she really was.
But it was too late. Her flailing had taken her too far towards the edge of the recess, beyond balance.
She tumbled out, and fell.
And when she landed, the fire faded to blackness.
And, as shadows loomed over her, so, too, did she.
Chapter Two
Kali felt something thudding again and again into her side and, with slowly growing awareness and annoyance, realised that it was a boot. Her eyes snapped open just in time to see the offending article coming at her again, and she instinctively grabbed and twisted it, flipping its wearer heel-over-head to the accompaniment of a startled cry.
'Don't do that!' she growled, without even thinking who it was she might be talking to.
Great, she thought, reprimanding herself. Possible first contact with an Old Race and what does she do? Fling one of them on its arse.
She sat quickly up, bruised, throbbing and disorientated, and looked around. There was no more fire — no more vision — but neither any time to think about where it had come from or where it had gone as the wearer of the boot, a cloaked and hooded figure, had also risen and, snarling, loomed over her again, boot swinging back for another strike.
Kali was about to kick his legs from under him and punch his lights out when a hand moved across the figure's chest and pushed him back to where others stood silently looking down at her.
'Enough, brother,' a gruff voice said. 'Do you not see that our visitor from on high is awake?'
'My apologies… brother.'
The speaker, becloaked and hooded like the rest, knelt by Kali, sighing as if somehow inconvenienced by her presence. The man was short, more accurately squat, and thickly muscled, his powerful bulk evident even beneath the loose folds of his cloak. Pulling back his hood he revealed a mane of grey hair flaring back from a face that was gnarled and scarred, inset with the coldest, grey-tinted eyes she had ever seen. Whoever he was, Kali thought, if he didn't have some Old Race blood in him — and she knew which Old Race — then her name was Fundinblundin Hammerhead.
'Who are you?' the man asked slowly. His tone, civilised, patient and polite, was totally at odds with his appearance. 'And what is it you are doing here?'
Old Race blood, but not Old Race, Kali decided, ignoring his question for a moment. The thought that had struck her before her fall — that some of the builders might still be alive — had never really been likely — next to impossible, actually — and now that she'd had chance to see these people close to, it only confirmed the fact. But though their origin was far more prosaic, who these people were came as only slightly less of a surprise than the alternative. Six of them in all, their garb, speech and, most of all, the crossed-circle talismans they wore pinned to their sleeves, left no doubt as to their identity. This bunch were Final Faith, members of the most pervasive, most consuming and most intolerant religion to blight the peninsula, zealots to every woman and every man.
They were not her favourite people.
That, however, was immaterial right now.
What was material was the obvious question. What the hells were the Final Faith doing in the Spiral of Kos?
The key. It seemed to be the only thing in the place so it had to be the key.
Well, if that was the case… Sorry, but she'd got here first.
'I asked you a question, girl,' the apparent leader reminded her. His tone had already hardened somewhat.
Girl? Kali thought, and stared at him. 'Oh, you know,' she said innocently, 'went for walk in the woods, got lost, fell down a sodding great hole…'
The man nodded then abruptly tugged her toolbelt from her waist, tipping out the contents of some of its pockets. Kali shrugged as he picked through a selection of pitons, hammers, clamps and other excavation gear, regarding her questioningly when he also came upon some marbles, a sock and a mouldy, half-eaten pie. Okay, so maybe she should have a clearout once in a while.
'Impressive tools for a walk in the woods,' Mister Nosey nevertheless concluded. He glanced over at the broken, shard-covered bodies of the stickthings, which coincidentally she seemed to have landed on or nearby. 'You managed to survive three brackan, too. Equally impressive.'
Brackan, eh? Kali thought. Have to remember that. 'Yeah, well, I — '
'You are intruding here!'
The statement came so suddenly and so forcefully that it threw her off guard.
'Excuse me?'
'Intruding. This… reliquary is under the jurisdiction of the Final Faith.'
'Oh, really?' Kali said, bristling. 'And since when did your little glee-club extend to the Sardenne?'
The man smiled coldly. 'Since my arrival here.'
Kali stared. She was only just getting over the shock that she had survived that fall — and its cause — let alone finding she had company, but one thing was already abundantly clear to her — this man was serious. And despite his superficial civility, he was dangerous. She could feel it exuding from his every pore.
The fact didn't stop her speaking up, though. That was her trouble, people kept telling her, though it never did any good.
'Well, then — you're a little off the beaten path, aren't you, priest?'
The man's hand — leather-gloved — shot out without warning and clenched itself about her neck. Kali gasped and fumbled to release its grip, but it was strong. Very strong.
The man stood, and, her throat constricting, she actually found herself being lifted from the floor.
'My name,' he told her, 'is Konstantin Munch, and despite your disdain I am not one of the Enlightened Ones.' He used the phrase that described the Final Faith's priesthood with a degree of disdain of his own, which she found peculiar. 'I am, however, an agent of that church, acting on its behalf and that of the Anointed Lord, and so I ask you again — what are you doing here?'
'Actually, I… bought the place,' Kali rasped, choking. She hung a hand vaguely in the direction of the Spiral and its dead plants, twitched it. 'Thought I'd open a herbalist's emporium but… was never very… green- fingered.'
Munch's hand tightened, the leather squeaking. 'Ah, I see.'
'And you?' Kali ventured. 'Mind… telling me what… you're… kaa-hurr… doing here?'
'Actually, yes. Why don't we just say that my friends and I were led here by the Lord of All.'
No surprise, there, Kali thought. These people did everything in his — god's, her? Its? — name, including all the sacking, raping and pillaging, by some accounts. But Lord of All or not, something had led Munch and his mates
