The Trials of Trass Kathra (23 page)

A short, squat – that was, shorter and squatter than usual – dwarf, a female of the species, stirred them one by one. Her back was to Kali and she was dressed in a pinny and flowery skirt which looked to have been cut from the same cloth as the curtain that Brundle had pulled aside.

“Hello, dear,” she said, without turning. “Did you have fun blowing up your boat?”

“Er, hi...” Kali said.

The dwarf span, ladles in hands, and some fishy gloop splattered Kali’s face. It was hot but she didn’t move, letting it drip from her chin. The best course of action here, it seemed, was to simply stand there and smile.

“Hammers of Ovilar,” the dwarf gasped. “You almost made me rust me pantaloons.”

“Sorry,” Kali said, cringing.

Brogma, for this was presumably she, waddled forward and prodded her in the chest. It had to be, Kali was beginning to think, a family trait.

“By the gods, who are ye, girl?”

“This,” Jerragrim Brundle announced, slapping Kali in the back and almost sending her face first into a cauldron, “is Kali Hooper. You’ve heard of Kali Hooper, haven’t yer, wife?”

“No.”

“No, neither had I. But she’s –” Brundle moved forward and whispered something in the female dwarf’s ear. Her eyebrows rose. Very high.

“
Is she
?” she said.

Brundle nodded conspiratorially. “But where are me manners?” he declared. “Smoothskin, this is me wife, Brogma. Brogma, this is... well, bugger it, yer know the rest.”

“Sit yourself down, dear,” Brogma said. “You’re just in time for tea.”

“Look, that’s very kind but I don’t have time for tea. I have to help my friends and –” Kali paused, staring daggers at Brundle “– find out what’s going on.”

“Yes, of course, dear. As one of the Four, you must.”

Kali couldn’t hide her surprise. “You know about the Four?”

“Of course!” Brogma declared, ladelling up food. “Keep an
eye
on things, I do. Now, let me see – there’s the shadowmage, Lucius Kane; the Sister of the Order of the Swords of Dawn, Gabriella DeZantez; the mariner, Silus Morlader; and the explorer, Marryme Moo –”

Brundle coughed. “That’ll be enough now, Brogma.”

“I’m sorry,” Kali said. “What?”

“Keep an eye on things, I do.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Kali said. “
What
was that name you said? Who in the hells is Marryme Moo?”

Brundle coughed again and motioned for Kali to bend, so that he might whisper in her ear. “Brogma’s gettin’ on a bit,” he explained. “This Marryme Moo is someone she once knew – someone much like yourself – and she’s a little confused.”

“She’s not the only one,” Kali said. She wasn’t at all sure that Brundle was being truthful with her, but how could she argue? Looking at Brogma, just standing there smiling, she couldn’t deny that she seemed a little, well, challenged. What to do? The obvious answer was to ask the question she hadn’t yet asked, but was becoming the most important of all.

“Jerry – can I trust you?”

The dwarf looked affronted.

“It has been the Caretaker’s job to wait for you since the day the Old Races died,” he replied, as if that were an answer. “Now do as the lady wife asks, and sit.”

Kali hesitated for a second. Two weeks of living off scraps on the Black Ship had left her starving, and she’d be of little use to anyone if she didn’t eat soon. Reluctantly, she did as asked, and Brundle plopped a bowl of grey sludge in her lap. The act was the first of many which would lead to her regretting her decision.

“What is this?” Kali asked.

“Starter.”

“No, I mean,
what
is this?”

“Thrap.”

“Oh. I thought – I mean, from the smell – that the main course was thrap.”

“It is.”

“Ah. The pudding wouldn’t by any chance be thrap?”

“No, smartarse. A big, juicy steak.”

“Steak for pudding?”

“Okay, I lied. It’s thrap.”

It got worse from there. Despite the monotony of the menu, Kali devoured her food, trying to fire off questions between mouthfuls, but getting nowhere. Brundle ate like a pigrat, a series of slurps, chomps, sucks and grunts drowning out her words. His table manners were nowhere near as disturbing as Brogma’s, however, who simply tipped her head back and dropped fish after fish into her gullet, like a seal. Kali almost expected her to oink and clap.

“Essential oils,” Brundle said, smiling.

The meal ended at last, and Kali was about to fire off her questions once more when Brundle let out an almighty belch and excused himself for the bathroom, farting loudly as he went. Brogma, seemed to have no such need, and instead waddled to a cupboard and extracted a great tangle of what looked like wire. She slumped into an armchair and, from its side, took two large needles and began to play the wire with them, teasing, turning and pulling it up towards her. As she caught two strands, the needles began to clack, and soon the wires were being knitted together with such disturbing dexterity the act was almost a blur.

The strange thing was, Brogma didn’t even look at the wires – not once. Stared straight ahead all the time. Kali frowned and eased herself from her chair, noticing for the first time a strange, silvery tint to the old woman’s eyes. She waved her palm up and down in front of them and there was no reaction. Brogma, it appeared, was blind.

“Is there something I can do for you, dear?”

Kali started. “What are you, erm, knitting?”

“Brains, dear,”

“Brains?”

“Yes, dear.”

“
Right
,” Kali said, and backed off.

She decided that any other queries, knitting-related or not, could and should wait until Brundle returned. To pass the time – and take her mind off the noises emanating from that part of the cave into which Brundle had departed – she examined some of the odder objects she’d spotted earlier. The first was a piece of thin metal which, whichever way it was bent, returned to its original shape, which was always that of a parrot. The second, something that looked like a tuning fork but which shattered a rock when she tried it, she put quickly away. A third object appeared at first glance to be some kind of jack-in-the-box, but when Kali opened the lid it wasn’t a grinning head that popped out but some strange spherical device that flew straight up and began diligently to drill a hole in the cave’s roof. Kali coughed, whistled and walked away.

Her path brought her to an object that was perhaps the oddest of all. The base of a large tree trunk secured to the wall by its splayed, gnarled roots, looking like a wooden sun. The trunk had been cleanly sawn through to reveal its rings, the number of which attested to its great age. It did not seem to have been treated with the respect it was due, however, having been used as a dartboard at some point, and what was even more disturbing was the ‘darts’ were the feathery, desiccated remains of three small skewerbills, their tiny eyes still frozen wide with alarm from the moment of impact.

Kali turned her attention to a number of inscriptions carved into the wood. They were in a very ancient dwarven script she struggled to translate and, when she had, wondered whether she should have bothered.
Brogma 32 Gone Today
,
Miss Her
.
One Thousand Years, Candles Broke the Cake. Fish For Tea Today, Tomorrow an’ the Day After. By Bollocks, I’m Bored...

Kali was, by now, quite convinced that instead of learning something of world-shattering importance from Brundle and his missus, they were in fact inmates of some offshore institution – that this particular part of the island wasn’t Trass Kathra or Trass Kattra, the island of the lost or the Four, but Trass Kuckoo, the island of the insane. She was out of there, she decided. Right now.

Kali wandered the aisles looking for an exit, and at last found a ladder leading up a shaft to, she presumed, open air. But when she reached the top, her way was blocked by a circular metal hatch. The wheel at its centre suggested that it, like everything else here, had been salvaged from some ship, but when Kali tried to turn it, it wouldn’t budge. She tried again, straining, hoping to break whatever was blocking the rotation, but then noticed the entire hatch, and the rock surrounding it, was coated in some substance set as hard as nails. Nothing was blocking the hatch as such – it had been completely sealed over.

Kali slid down the ladder and negotiated more of the maze, coming upon another exit and finding it exactly the same. Then another. She felt a small stab of apprehension, wondering what exactly it was she
had
stumbled into, but then reason took over, along with no little anger, and she stormed her way back to the heart of the maze.

There, Brundle was at last returned from his toilet. Pulling up his pants unselfconsciously, he patted Brogma on the shoulder and asked, “How are the brains comin’, wife?”

“Fine, dear. Just the way you like them.”

“You want to tell me why all the hatches to the surface are sealed?” Kali demanded.

“I –”

“Time to spill the beans, Jerry. What the hells is going on here?”

Brundle stared at her, then nodded.

“Ah suppose ah can’t avoid it for ever. This island you’re standing on – or under – is, or rather was, the generation station for the Thunderflux.”

“Generation station? Thunderflux? That sounds like tech speak to me. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was back at the Crucible of the Dragon God.”

“In a way, you are. Trass Kattra was its sister facility. O’ course, it wasn’t called Trass Kattra then.”

“Then what?”

“Nothin’ at all. Strictly speakin’, it didn’t even exist.”

“I think,” Kali said slowly, “that you’d better start at the beginning.”

“You’ve already been to the Crucible, so I’ll spare you its history. Suffice to say it had one purpose, and this island another. Both part of the same plan.”

“The Crucible was meant to launch the
Tharnak
and its k’nid payload, to destroy the deity in the heavens,” Kali said, remembering what the dwelf had told her. “But it never happened. He said nothing about this place.”

“He wouldn’t. It was need to know. Tell me, smoothskin – have your travels ever brought you into contact with Domdruggle’s Expanse?”

“Big, roaring, bearded face? Gob the size of a planet?”

Brundle laughed. “Roldofo Domdruggle. His bark always was worse than his bite.”

“And you’re saying he was part of this plan?”

“Not just part, smoothskin. Its architect.”

Kali took a moment to collect her thoughts, particularly those involving Poul Sonpear and what he’d told her about the Expanse.

“You’re losing me, shorty. The way I heard it the Expanse came about as a result of some great magical ritual. Lives were lost. Sacrifices made.”

“Aye, they were. But not in the way you think.”

“Then Domdruggle wasn’t a wizard?”

“Oh, Roldolfo was a wizard, all right. A wizard of temporal mechanics. Of the threads. He conceived the Expanse as a plane separate from normal time. A kind of –”

“Bolt hole?” Kali finished. “Meant to be used to escape the End Time?”

Brundle smiled. “Catchin’ on, smoothskin. The Expanse was meant to be a hidin’ place for the entire population o’ the planet while the k’nid did their work. But ah don’t need to tell ya that both parts o’ the plan failed...”

“But the Expanse exists,” Kali said. “So what went wrong?”

“Nothin’ went wrong,” Brundle said, and sighed. “The Crucible project failed for its own reasons and we –”

“Something about the dragons dying, right? The lack of their magic?”

“Aye. We just ran out time.”

“What do you mean?”

“We had the heavens themselves thrown at us.”

“I’m sorry?”

Kali hadn’t imagined that a dwarf’s face could become any more gnarled, that its angry furrows could become any deeper or darker, but in this case they did.

“A rain o’ fire. A rain that changed, twisted an’ warped everythin’. Got inside things an’ people an’ turned ’em ta sludge.”

Kali swallowed.

“I encountered something similar at Scholten Cathedral.”

“It wouldn’t be somethin’ similar, lass, it would be the same thing. The Hel’ss. And that beasty out there in the swirlies is what remains of its attack. The Hel’ss Spawn.”

“What?”

“They lasted as long as they could, but that bastard was determined to stop them,” the dwarf said. “Roldofo and his aides stayed at their machines and atop their towers until they were reduced to ruin. The generation field started to break down, closing the expanse, until finally Domdruggle and his people had no choice but to sacrifice themselves to the void in the hope that somehow, from inside, they could keep it open long enough to allow the exodus they’d planned.”

“But it collapsed completely and they became trapped,” Kali said. “Alone and desperate for a way out. Ghosts of themselves.”

“Aye. The Thunderflux lost focus. Dartin’ an’ hoppin’ about it was, until it were startin’ timestorms all over the planet. Those that remained were forced to cap it, workin’ up there at the top o’ the island while that rain continued to pour.” Brundle sighed, as if lost in a distant memory. “A lot o’ good people were lost that day, to the void and to the spawn.”

“Jerry, I’m sorry –”

“When it was over, the Expanse was severed for ever. But in the chaos, the Thunderflux severed the Hel’ss Spawn from its parent, too. The bastard’s remained here ever since, like a great blanket o’ deadly snot.”

“That’s why your hatches are sealed,” Kali realised. “The Hel’ss Spawn comes on the island, doesn’t it?”

“Every now and then. As if, after all these years, it’s still tryin’ to sniff out those the Hel’ss itself missed. Too stupid to realise they all died a long time ago.”

Kali had stopped listening a second ago. “Brundle,” she asked coldly, “is this one of those times?”

The dwarf sighed. “Aye.”

“Oh gods,” Kali said. “The people up there.”

She burst away from the dwarf and climbed back to one of the hatches, starting to hack at its seal with her gutting knife. A second later the knife was pulled from her hand and tossed back down the shaft.