The Crucible of the Dragon God (27 page)

Despite the fact the k'nid still scrabbled no more than an inch away, she was willing to take her chances outside rather than in, and thumped the booth. But the door did not reopen. She tried again. Nothing.

"Must be on some kind of timer," she said.

"What?
Ow!
"

"Ow?"

"My ears just popped!"

"Ow! Mine too. Hey, Slowhand, you know you're getting fat?"

"Hey,
you
can talk!"

Kali stared at the archer, who was indeed fatter, his face, particularly, bloating to perhaps twice its normal size. She was aware of her own doing so, too. But it wasn't just their faces - their whole bodies were starting to expand now, pressing them even more tightly together. Kali could see Slowhand's blood vessels bulging on his temples and neck even as she felt her own blood beginning to pulse painfully in her veins.
The air's gone!
she tried to say, but nothing came out - no sound at all - and across from her Slowhand's mouth moved uselessly. Kali tried to reach her equipment belt for her breathing conch, but it was too late, their expanded forms too crushed, and instead all she could do was look at Slowhand in panic, noticing how his tongue had begun to swell from his mouth, as she felt her own doing from hers.

Hooper
, Slowhand mouthed, though it was difficult to make out the forming of even that one word. She didn't really need to, though, because the expression on her lover's face said everything that he wanted to say. He was confused and knew they were going to die, but he was also glad he was by her side and wanted to say goodbye.

She mouthed his name in return, so very, very sorry that she had gotten him into this mess. Furious, too. But only with herself. Gods, how could this have happened so quickly? How could she have come so far only to let it end like this. By stupidly stumbling - stupidly dragging them
both
- into something she didn't understand?

Her vision began to flare and darken until she could barely see Slowhand. Then, in that darkness, she felt her brain began to thud in time with her heartbeat, each beat clutching and agonising.

The beats got heavier and slower.

Heavier and slower.

Then her heart seemed to explode, and she no longer felt anything at all.

Chapter Fourteen

"Hooper, can you hear me? Hooper?"

The voice filled her mind, resonant and familiar. All there was in an otherwise deep and dark world. She floated there until the voice spoke again, and this time shook at the sound of it. No, something shook
her
.
Was
shaking her, again and again. The darkness began to swoop about her, blooming and flaring with light, and then her mind seemed to surge upwards, bringing a dizzying confusion, a lurching imbalance and a desperate need to steady the world. But all it did was shake some more.

"Hooper? Hooper, dammit, wake up!"

She sat upright, her eyes snapping open. There was a man in front of her, holding her tightly by the arms. Instinctively, she nutted him.

"
Ow! Dammit!
Steaming pits of... easy, Hooper, it's me."

"Slowhand? Shit, sorry."

"You okay?"

"Think so," Kali said, though from the lump on the side of
her
head she'd taken one hells of a bump. She looked around, saw she was sitting on the floor of the booth. "What the hells happened?"

Slowhand pulled her to her feet. "Dunno. A noise. Don't know how to describe it - wailing, spooky, like the sound of some old elven instrument. Whatever it was, it spooked the k'nid. They left the booth alone, disappeared, and the next thing I knew, the door opened and we were falling out. That's where you got the bump."

"Someone chased away the k'nid and let us out?"

"Looks that way. And that's not all. One of the doors in the corridor - one that was sealed before - that opened, too."

Kali raised an eyebrow. "Then why are we waiting. Let's go meet our saviour."

"Hold on. Our
saviour
could be the one who built that bloody deathtrap in the first place."

"I don't think it
is
a deathtrap."

"Pitsing well feels like one to me. I mean, come on, Hooper, what else could it be?"

"Don't know. But if the other door's open, maybe it's an invitation to find out?"

She moved out and, shaking his head, Slowhand followed. The pair passed through the unsealed door and neared another that was still sealed, seemingly a dead end until, somewhat unnervingly, it opened of its own accord. The same thing happened further on, and then again, their route clearly being manipulated through areas of the complex which, judging by the undisturbed layers of dust and cobwebs, the Final Faith had not been allowed to tread. In fact, these new chambers had a lonely feel to them that suggested to Kali that no one had entered them since the time of the Old Races themselves.

At last they came to a spiral staircase winding up the wall of an otherwise featureless chamber and both paused at its base, peering through thick and foreboding strings of cobweb to darkness above. The fact that the sphere shook at that moment seemed somehow appropriate.

"I think we're there," Kali said. She brushed the web aside and placed a tentative foot on the first riser. "Lair of the Dragon God, anyone?"

"Hooper, are you sure you -?"

Kali gave him a look and Slowhand shut up. Because he knew that look -
the
look - the one of girlish excitement she couldn't contain when she knew she was near some significant find. Sometimes he wondered why she just didn't jump up and down, clapping her hands ...

"There's something here, 'Liam. I feel it. There's
intelligence
here."

Slowhand nodded, and the pair of them took the steps slowly, one at a time, until they emerged into a spacious, yet almost featureless chamber. The one feature it
did
contain, however, was another sphere. In this case a large, membranous one filled with a liquid clearer though not dissimilar to that in the birthing wells. Stirring within it was what appeared to be some kind of plant. A fragile, multi-stranded, frond-like affair that made Kali think of some wavering growth on the ocean floor.

"It's a fish tank," Slowhand said flatly, pulling a face. "Gotta say, bit anticlimactic."

"Probably not a fish tank, Slowhand..." Kali said, patiently. She hoped not, anyway.

"Oh,
come on
. Can't you just see some little gogglefish darting in and out of that water feature ther -"

The archer quietened as Kali touched the sphere and, in response, another voice overrode his own, booming around them.

"Welcome, Kali Hooper. I have awaited your arrival for a very long time."

Kali and Slowhand stared at each other as the greeting resonated through the chamber, but while both waited in expectation of what might follow, no more words came. Kali stared around the chamber, hoping to discern the origin of the voice but, failing, fixed her attention back on the sphere. She guessed some reply to the greeting might be in order but, in the circumstances, she wasn't quite sure what she should say.

"Really?" she hazarded, after a second. "That's nice."

"That's nice?" Slowhand repeated, incredulous. The more cautious archer was already readying Suresight to loose an arrow at anything that came at them. "You may have been around a bit but don't you find the fact that something in this graveyard knows your name just a little disturbing?"

Kali couldn't deny that she did find it disturbing. But not because she had been referred to by name - as far as she knew her name could simply have been overheard sometime during their explorations. No, what disturbed her was the fact that the voice had said she had been
awaited
. Because this reminded her once again of her conversation with the fish-thing in the ruins of Martak, and its comment then that she was
where she should be
. Ever since that encounter, she had railed against what that meant, and to be faced with a similar comment now brought back all the worries that somehow, without her knowledge or consent, her life was following a preordained path.

"Who are you?" she asked. "Where are you?"

"My being, all around you. My physical form, before you."

"You? You're -?"

"Hooper," Slowhand said worriedly, "maybe that bump did more harm than we thought. You do know you're talking to a plant?"

Kali ignored him and studied the sphere again. What she saw could easily be mistaken for a plant, that was for sure, but there was something more to it. A complexity about the hairy fronds and an energy
inside
them that suggested something more advanced, more
alive
.

"I don't think it's a plant. I mean it
looks
organic, yes it
is
organic, only not in that way."

"Not in what way?"

Kali stroked the sphere, tracing the outline of the shape within. "Strip away our flesh and our bone," she said, "our veins, organs, muscle, sinew, tendons, and what do you think you get?"

"A bloody mess?"

"I mean what's
left
, Slowhand. The very core of our being."

"Your companion shows a knowledge beyond that of her world, archer," the voice said, startling them both. "You see before you the nervous mesh central to the body of everything that lives. The threads, if you will, within us all."

"
Right
. So, your sphere, it's some kind of grow bag?"

"Slowhand!"

"
Joke
, Hooper. Breaking the ice with the plant is all."

"It
isn't
a plant."

"
I know that
, for fark's sake. Of all the steaming pits - you really do think I'm thick, don't you?"

"No, no, of course I don't. Not at all."

Slowhand stared challengingly and found Kali couldn't hold his gaze. He shook his head in resignation and ran his own palm over the sphere. "What I don't get is, are you saying it was once one of us. Human?"

Kali looked around at the decay of ages, and smiled. "Oh, I wouldn't think human, no."

She was only just beginning to appreciate the possible nature of the being whose presence they were in, and despite the gravity of the situation that had brought them here she couldn't help but almost giggle with the thrill of it. The mummified corpse in Be'Trak'tak was the closest she ever thought she would come to meeting a member of the Old Races, but now?

"Why don't you ask him?"

"Him? How do you know it's a him?"

Kali was getting a little tired of questions when so many of her own were clamouring to be asked. "Maybe because if it was a her
-
maybe someone called Endless Passion - you'd already be working on some unlikely contrivance to make your pants disintegrate."

"Hey. That is below the belt."

"No, we know what's below the belt. And where it's been."

"
Hey!
"

"
Hey!
"

They stopped, remembering where they were. Kali turned towards the sphere to apologise but then stood back, gasping.

"What the hells...?" Slowhand said.

Inside the sphere, the liquid had begun to flood with clouds of grey. They were clearly more than clouds, however, as not only did their mass seem to be made up of tiny organisms but they moved with purpose, variously wrapping, obscuring and agitating the fronds of the 'plant' until they began to change, thicken and grow. What their unexpected host had described as 'the threads within us all' were beginning to take on a fuller form, one gradually becoming more recognisable as a living being.

First came a skeleton, one bit of bone at a time, the bones lengthening to join others, creating joints, limbs, ribs, a skull. Next came sinews, organs, tendons and muscle, these growths in turn becoming interlaced and overgrown with capillaries, blood vessels and arteries, which, when whole and connected, began to flow with blood the colour of sky. Over these vessels grew tissue and then flesh, a body forming before their eyes. And, lastly, came eyes, hair, features, until both Kali and Slowhand found themselves staring at a fully formed being, floating before them in the sphere.

But it was like no being either of them had seen before.

At least, not quite.

The thing was, Kali recognised elements of the creature she saw before her - the musculature of the limbs, the shape of the torso, the physiognomy of the face - but what confused her was that they seemed to come from two different anatomies. She was familiar with this creature and yet wasn't at the same time. Because while it had always been her dream to meet a living, breathing member of one of the Old Races, she had never, ever dreamt she would meet a living, breathing member of both Old Races
simultaneously
. It was hardly what she'd expected the Dragon God to be.

"You?" she said breathlessly. "You're -"

"The first of the dwelf. The last of the dwelf."

"My Gods!"

"Dwelf?" the archer said, confused.

"Work it out, Slowhand."

"Are you telling me this thing is half dwarf, half elf. A hybrid?"

"Yup."

"Glad I wasn't hiding in the wardrobe in
that
boudoir."

Kali raised her eyes. "I doubt it happened like that."

"No? You wanna tell me another way you know of making," Slowhand paused and shuddered, "little dwelfs?"

"I am not the result of physical procreation," the dwelf explained, "but of other processes."

Slowhand wasn't sure what that meant. "Are they as much fun?"

"
Slowhand!
"

"Sorry, sorry"

"You said 'other processes.'" Kali said to the dwelf. "You mean those birthing pools? Is that what this sphere is - your own birthing pool? Were you
created
here?"

"Created when your race was young."

"Looking good on it, pal," Slowhand said, then pulled a face as he visualised the frond thing the dwelf had first been. "Now, anyway."

"Actually, I doubt he's as old as we are," Kali corrected the archer. "That's right, isn't it? When we saw you grow, you were being created all over again, just like the first time, weren't you? The liquid in this sphere is the same as that in the pools but... more complex, somehow. It enables you to form and reform at will?"