The Crucible of the Dragon God

In memory of Joe Halliwell

2001-2009

His game over far too soon

An Abaddon Books
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Publication

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First published in 2009 by Abaddon Books
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, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

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Editor: Jonathan Oliver

Cover: Mark Harrison

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Twilight of Kerberos
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created by Matthew Sprange and Jonathan Oliver

Copyright © 2009 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

Twilight of Kerberos
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ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-143-0

ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-151-5

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Twilight of Kerberos

The Crucible of the Dragon God

Mike Wild

Chapter One

This is how Kali Hooper would have escaped the things that had slaughtered four men before the first of them could scream. The same things that were coming to slaughter him.

That huge, seemingly unscaleable rock, there, the one just ahead? That she would have scaled with ease. And that frozen vine beyond? The one ready to snap? On that she would have swung without thinking twice. The vine would have snapped at exactly the right moment, of course, and she would have soared with it over the abyss. This would not have worried her, though, because that ledge further on and down - yes really,
that
one
, way over there - she would have flailed towards, rolling like some circus tumbler to soften her impact as she came in to land. And she would not have stopped there - oh no, though she might be grunting now - kicking up scree as she ran on and threw herself towards that crumbling ledge, and then the one beyond that, flipping, twisting and spinning, stretching all ways to grab the next small lump of salvation that would save her from a plummeting, broken death.

She would have made it, too, though rocks might have fallen in her wake - knowing her, perhaps there might even have been an accidental avalanche that would have destroyed half the mountainside - but, as usual, she would make it because she had to
succeed
. There, dangling from that last ledge, she would take a moment to catch her breath before her
piece de resistance
, a full body flip that would take her up and over until she could climb the rockface to safety. Her flight would have been done then and, from her refuge on the clifftop, she would have turned, bitten the cork from a bottle of flummox and downed the beer. And then, with a smile and a burp, she would have spat the cork at her pursuers. If she were feeling particularly mischievous, she might even have shown them her -

No. He did not want to think about that particular part of her anatomy. It seemed, now, somehow... disrespectful. Because this is how Kali Hooper
would
have escaped the things, had Kali Hooper not been dead.

That's right, he thought. Dead. Gone. Twelve hands under. The desperately running, blonde-maned archer had struggled to accept it but had come to realise that it had to be true -
had to be
given the facts. Hooper had been missing for weeks now and in that time there had been no sightings, news or contact other than that over which she'd likely had no control - the return to the
Flagons
, alone, of a half-starved and agitated Horse, and the discovery, washed-up as jetsam on a Nürnian beach, of her equipment belt attached to a blood-stained piece of her dark silk body suit. Where she had met her end he could not -
might never
- know, because she had left the tavern with a frown, telling no one what her destination was. But what he
did
know was that under no circumstances would she have missed the rendezvous she was meant to keep with him eight days before, at the base of the Drakengrat Mountains. He knew that because he knew
she
knew how important to him this expedition was. No, without doubt Hooper was gone, and whether she had met her end in the Razor Ruins of Rarg or the Blood Bogs of Bibblebobble or whatever other malignantly named hellshole had peaked her interest this time, it seemed the secret history of the peninsula she had worked so hard to unearth had, ultimately, buried her instead.

The painful truth was that he missed her like hells but it was what he, Killiam Slowhand, did that mattered now, and frankly, as far his imagined escape for Kali went... well, there wasn't a chance in the hells.

There'd be no impossible leaps up the rockface, no suicidal swings on snapping vines and no fairground acrobatics to leave his pursuers stymied. Because he wasn't Hooper. No, he was just her sometime lover, sometime sidekick and - oh, by the way, mere mortal. If he didn't spot a way out of this that was within his capabilities he wouldn't even be that. All he could do was run for his life. Oblivious to all but the pounding of his feet beneath him and the mountain winds that whistled around him, all he could do was keep moving and hope that something provided him with a means of escape.

The k'nid, he reflected as he ran, spinning occasionally to fire a volley of arrows in their direction, hoping to slow the blurry, crackling things down. Named by a Malmkrug baron after the local term for bogeyman, they had begun to appear near the town about the time of Slowhand's arrival there. Already a number of its inhabitants had fallen victim to them, lost to their sheer speed. They were not only fast, they were deadly and seemingly impervious to harm - and they seemed to be growing in number. People in Malmkrug had already shored up their homes in defence against them and their attacks on the town were as sudden and inexplicable as their origin was unknown.

Or, at least, had been until now.

For as he had ascended higher and higher into the mountains and seen the trails of more of the unnatural creatures - though most, thankfully, from afar - Slowhand knew something those below did not. That the k'nid, whatever the hells they were, seemed to be coming from somewhere around
here
.

It was typical. Pure Slowhand luck. To have fetched up in the apparent spawning ground of a plague of the deadliest things the peninsula had ever seen - and he had no one but himself to blame.

Over the past few months he'd put out a number of fresh feelers regarding his sister, and while the vast majority of them had returned nothing, the one that had led him here had shown promise. He had learned from a trader in Malmkrug that some two months before, a party of adventurers had purchased sufficient supplies for a prolonged ascent into the Drakengrat range. Despite the fact they seemed to have gone to considerable length to disguise themselves, their attitude, bearing and general demeanour very quickly gave them away as Final Faith. There was nothing, apart from the obvious, wrong with them being Faith, but the fact that they'd felt the need to disguise themselves meant they had to be up to something clandestine. That in itself was worthy of investigation. What was more worthy of investigation, however, was that the trader had said the party was led by a woman - a woman whose description he had found achingly familiar.

Jenna.

Slowhand still felt a burning rod of anger inside him every time he thought of what those bastards had done to his sister - recruiting and forcefully indoctrinating her into the Faith - and the thought that she was involved in something they found necessary to disguise their involvement with, made him as concerned for her safety as he was angered by her involvement in it. Unfortunately, that anger had had more than enough time to cool, the lead that had seemed so promising a week ago turning out to be as much of a wild frool chase as so many had before. Because if Jenna was up here, then she had discovered some chameleon spell that had transformed her into just one more of the endless snow covered rocks. No, there had been no Jenna, not even a
sign
of Jenna, and her presence had been supplanted by the k'nid, and all he could do now was cut his losses and run.

Slowhand's chest felt leaden now, and his breath was hot and rasping; symptoms not only of the altitude but of a speed and distance covered that he had not attempted since what his army passing out class, impressed and more than a little jealous, had dubbed the 'Night of a Hundred Wives.' And
that
had been quite some years ago. He was maintaining his lead on the k'nid, though, if only because one of his volleys of arrows had caused a rockfall on the narrow mountain path along which he fled. The rockfall hadn't harmed the k'nid, or even slowed them down, but it had forced them to take a detour, which was good enough for now. As he continued onward and upward, struggling more and more, he was even starting to think that he might lose them. But that was when he ran out of ground.

Slowhand came to a skidding, skittering stop, gasping with exhaustion and frustration, watching in disbelief as stones pushed by his sliding soles tumbled away only a few inches in front of him over a precipice. What made his predicament a hundred times worse was that not only had the terrain come to an end ahead of him but, unnoticed until now, to his left and right as well. In fact, there was little more than a half foot of rock on either side of him before -

Slowhand's focus zoomed in and out at the same time, and there was a vertiginous rush in his ears.

Oh boy
.

Battered by wind, the archer turned slowly and carefully in a circle, taking in his precarious situation.

He was standing at the tip of a very long, very narrow outcrop of rock that, by all rights, should have collapsed under its own weight. Instead, it thrust itself defiantly and dizzyingly out into the night sky, seemingly ignoring gravity. In profile he guessed it would look like some part constructed bridge, stretching halfway across the deep chasm over which it jutted. But where a bridge might have had supports to stabilise itself, here there was nothing beneath it. Nothing at all. For a very, very,
very
long way down.

As Slowhand looked down at a river that height had reduced to the width of a hair, he realised his perch was impossible. A thing that
should
fall but didn't. And that realisation brought another - where exactly he was.

My Gods, this is Thunderlungs' Cry
.

He recalled Kali telling him how she had travelled here once with Horse - the original Horse, that was - to experience the legend that had been a favourite girlhood tale.

Two tribes, split by this vast chasm in the mountains, had met only once when freak weather had driven them both into the valley far below. That meeting had led to romance between two individuals but war between the tribes themselves. When each tribe had returned to their own side, the two lovers were prohibited from ever meeting again by their elders, and all paths to the valley were barred to them. The man, who became known as Thunderlungs, managed, however, to despatch a message to his lover, Mawnee, using a carrier bird, telling her that if their ancestors favoured their bonding, they would provide a bridge across which the two of them could be reunited.

He had come one Kerberos-lit night, and there she had stood, far across the chasm. He had cried out to the souls who scudded across Kerberos's surface, asking the aid of those who had gone before to unite the pair once more. This they had done, by growing a half bridge of rock from the side of his chasm, and another from that of Mawnee's side, and the two had begun to cross towards each other's outstretched arms. The ancestors had warned, however, that if their love faltered, even for a moment, then the bridge would be no more.

Thunderlungs' love was strong but
something
that night made Mawnee falter. To her lover's horror the bridge beneath her crumbled away, and she fell to her death.

It was said that Thunderlungs roared his heartbreak into the night - a roar that some said those who had lost loved ones could still hear - until he had frozen solid where he stood. Whereupon his ancestors had laid him down and made him part of the bridge itself, so that his shadow might touch, once a day, the place where his love had fallen.

It was a sad story, Slowhand reflected, and one that might have brought tears to his eyes if they hadn't already been streaming from this farking wind. And it was not as sad as his own would be if he didn't get off this rock right now. Because there had been that sudden, strange crackling behind him once more - as if he were listening to a tavern fire - and he had spun to see the k'nid had caught up with him, reaching the start of the Cry in a clammering rush but there coming to a dead stop, as if assessing what lay before them.