or religiously. Maybe people, whoever they are — or were — are simply drawn here. Actually I've come across a few old manuscripts that suggest there may even be a number of nodes located across the peninsula, nodes that could be part of a network of — '
'Enough, Hooper,' Slowhand said. 'What do you expect we'll find down there?'
'Oh, that's easy. Something deadly.'
'Something deadly,' Slowhand repeated. 'Right, fine, thanks for sharing that with me.'
'My pleasure.' Kali gestured towards the lift. 'After you.'
'No, no, I insist. After you.'
'Slowhand, get on the bloody lift.'
'You are getting quite domineering, you know that?'
'And you love every minute of it.'
The lift was hardly the engineering marvel that Kali had ridden at the Spiral of Kos but it did the job, creaking on a rope as it descended a shaft that had been roughly cut from rock and felt strangely warm. The marks of modern tooling suggested to Kali that the shaft was the work of the Final Faith, which likely meant that the site to which they were heading had another — original — entrance elsewhere, but what or where that was she didn't know. She had never come across anything resembling an entrance in her explorations of the countryside surrounding Scholten, so maybe it had become blocked over the years by rockfalls or subsidence, or maybe had even been deliberately sealed. It didn't really matter because they were heading where they wanted to go.
The question was, where was that? The lower the lift descended, the less the creaking of its supporting rope could be heard, the sound overwhelmed by a growing hissing and pounding coming from below, as if machines were at work in the rock. As the sounds became so loud that the shaft itself began to vibrate, Slowhand looked to Kali for some kind of explanation, but she could only shrug. It was only when — at last — the lift reached bottom and they negotiated a small tunnel that their source became clear. Staggeringly so.
'My gods,' Slowhand said. He, like Kali, was staring into a natural cavern in the bedrock far beneath Scholten that was bigger than the Final Faith's distribution centre, looming above them into shadow and dropping away beneath them to a bubbling lava lake some hundred feet down. The lake surrounded an island of rock that rose out of it to their eye level, and on that island — connected to where they had entered by a narrow and recently suspended bridge — stood a structure that was far from natural and could only be the secure location of the fourth and final key. Looking something like a cross between a kiln and a furnace, its width that of seven men and its height of five, the stone dome sat solidly on the island perch, pistons positioned all around its circumference pumping out great bursts of black smoke while, in the centre of its roof, a round hole, some kind of chimney, belched out thick clouds of steam. If, Kali reflected, the Spiral of Kos had had a distinctly elven feel about it, then this site had dwarf written all over it in letters bigger than the dwarves themselves.
She wondered what kinds of traps dwarves favoured.
As if on cue, a piercing scream emanated from somewhere within the stone dome, and a few moments later Makennon and a bunch of cronies stormed out of the single entrance. Kali and Slowhand hid as the group passed, Makennon clearly cheesed off, and Kali presumed that she had just lost another of the tomb raiders she'd apparently been throwing at this thing.
This was her chance. The trouble was, she couldn't risk using the main entrance because Makennon had likely left guards behind and, as far as she could see, that left her with only one choice.
Slowhand saw her staring at the chimney, timing the gaps between its eruptions of steam.
'Oh, no. No, no, no. No, Hooper, no.'
'Don't worry. You aren't coming with me.'
'Of course I am. But not that way.'
'There is no other way, Slowhand. But no, I need you to stay here. Watch my back in case Makennon returns.'
'You think I'm letting you go in there alone?'
'Listen, you just said — '
'I know what I said — '
'Slowhand, listen. Think back to the night of my escape. Now look at those belches of steam. There's no time for us both to go.'
Slowhand couldn't argue the point, and sighed. 'Fine, I've got your back. But Hooper, this is still suicide.'
'Since when did that ever stop me?'
Kali moved across the bridge, clinging to its cabling and staring down at the bubbling red lake below. Lava, she thought, luvverly. Reaching the dome, she worked her way around the outside rim of the structure until she had moved completely behind it, she wondering idly if this dwarven thing had remained active since the day it was built. That seemed unlikely. It was far more probable that Makennon had either accidentally triggered its mechanisms in her efforts to recover the key or one of the less than capable tomb raiders she'd hired hadn't been able to resist pulling some nice, shiny lever on the wall.
You just couldn't get the staff these days.
Kali wasted no time. She leapt for the side of the dome and scrambled onto its sloping surface, feet scrabbling behind her but maintaining enough purchase to enable her to grab a fingerhold on the rough stone. This done, she pulled herself slowly upwards until she reached the apex of the dome, ducking back as the chimney belched out a cloud of steam. Once it had done so, she peered inside the flue. A shaft dropped away before her, dark, dirty and utterly uninviting — just the way she liked it.
She sat back while another cloud erupted. Two minutes between belches. She was going to have to be very precise in the matter of timing. She would also have to be ready for anything as she would be going in blind, literally plunging into the unknown. But whatever was going on in this fiery hole, it seemed likely that the chimney would take her to the heart of the matter.
She stared across the cavern, found Slowhand and then jabbed her finger downwards, indicating she was going in. The archer's mouth opened, his head shook, and then he was holding it in his hands in disbelief.
Another cloud belched, and Kali scrambled inside.
She anchored herself against the sides of the chimney with her elbows and thighs, shuffling quickly down, estimating it would take her no more than a minute to descend the depth of the dome, more than enough of a safety margin between belches of steam. Quite how she'd exit the chimney near its base she hadn't yet worked out, but that she considered to be one of the challenges of her trade.
Something, though, was wrong — that was already becoming clear. All she could see beneath her was darkness, the perspective of the flue veeing below, and she suddenly realised that the shaft went deeper than she'd anticipated, the heart of the site not within the dome but the pitsing rock itself.
In other words, she'd never make it in time. Already she could hear booms coming out of the darkness below, what she presumed to be precursors of the next release of steam. There was only one thing for it — and that was to let herself freefall as far as she could.
Kali released her grip and immediately plummeted down the flue. She yelped as she slid down, down and down, her body thudding painfully into the sides of the shaft. More than once she crashed against unexpected ridges or bars, and the impacts bounced her sideways and around until she was in danger of becoming utterly disorientated in the dark. She couldn't allow that, however, or she'd be encountering the origin of the steam first- hand, something that just might spoil her day and the rest of her life.
She had to risk it. She jammed herself against the sides of the shaft once more, careering a further ten feet before she came to a jarring halt, and then looked down to see just where in the general scheme of things she'd ended up.
As it turned out, she'd made her move just in time. Not far below her the shaft widened and then branched off in a number of directions, splitting to envelop some central core. Had Kali continued down any one of them she would have been dead, because in each a lapping red glow was reflected from what could only have been the lava lake itself.
Kali didn't want to go there. But she did want to get inside the central core.
She eased herself down what remained of the shaft before it split, aware of the limited time she had but also that one slip would bring the same instant death as being consumed in a belch of steam. She dropped onto the roof of the central core and quickly heaved open a metal panel she found there. Dropping into a shaft of about her own
