It was a vast, Old Race city. An elven city. The warm breeze from it was fresh.
It was real.
The conclusion was inescapable. Somehow she and the tower in which she stood were in the past. It was incredible, not only the wonders she could see but the sorceries that must have brought it about. Maybe that was what Redigor had done with the tower, she thought. Maybe it wasn't concealed from Fayence with a glamour field because it didn't need to be. Maybe it projected itself further into the past the higher it rose.
My Gods, I'm there, she realised. The time of the Old Races. The temptation to climb out of the window, regardless of the insane height, was almost irresistible. But why would Bastian Redigor have done this? Why would he have expended the vast amounts of energy needed to stare out over a vista long gone? Maybe he just had a thing for elven architecture, she thought. Or maybe he couldn't stand looking out over the depravity in which Fayence excelled. Or maybe -
Maybe it simply made him feel at home.
Kali's heart thudded, and she spun back to face the inside of the chamber. That was what had been missing from all this, why she hadn't been able to make any sense out of what she'd studied, because all along she'd been trying to work out the plans of your average human, world-dominating necromancer. But there was much more to him than that, wasn't there?
Kali raced to the portrait, tearing away cobweb to reveal more of its detail. Of course. In pictures of himself elsewhere, Redigor had appeared as he wanted to appear, but here, in a portrait that would be seen by no eyes other than his own, he seemed almost to have taken pride in sweeping back his hair.
It was an ear thing.
Bastian Redigor was an elf.
Kali swallowed. It wasn't just the revelation that somehow this bastard had survived down the long years but what she saw in the rest of the exposed portrait.
The woman next to him bore a striking resemblance to Katherine Makennon. It wasn't her, of course, because even had she been alive when the picture was painted, there was no way Makennon would allow herself to be pictured garbed as this woman was — which was to say, in very little at all. That Redigor, smiling slightly, also held a fine chain attached to a collar about her neck, put paid to the possibility fully.
Kali's mind reeled. The woman was clearly mu'sah'rin — in human terms, somewhere between forced consort and slave — and that could mean only one thing. Redigor wasn't only an elf, he was Ur'Raney. The most misogynistic, cold-hearted, sadistic so-called 'family' of the elves there had ever been. The Ur'Raney were the same family who had relentlessly pursued and slaughtered the dwarves at Martak, who had brought both Old Races to the brink of war, and who, because of their gleeful, unremitting cruelty, were reviled even by their own kind.
Most contemporaneous texts had been of the opinion that Twilight would be better off without them.
Kali calmed herself. So, Redigor was an elf. The fact was, she couldn't say she felt that surprised, because something had occurred to her in Scholten that seemed to have been missed by everyone else. The Engines of the Apocalypse being what they were, lost to and forgotten by countless generations, should have been exactly that — lost and forgotten. Unless the Pale Lord had stumbled upon their control centre while out for a walk one day — an unlikely turn of events, to say the least — they had to have been activated by someone old enough to know it was there. Well, that was Redigor, all right. He had revealed his true heritage at last. But the question remained, what the hells was he up to?
Here They Lie Still.
Kali replayed the phrase Slowhand had quoted in the library through her mind, analysing it in a different light now she knew Redigor's true identity. As she did, she studied the assorted papers again, trying to piece together the jigsaw that was the Pale Lord's experimentation. Why should an ancient elf wish to unleash an army of soul-stripped onto the peninsula? What the hells was he going to get out of that? Unless, as she had suspected, that wasn't what he was planning at all. Her gaze rose back to the portrait of Redigor and the woman and once more she asked herself — what the hells did the Pale Lord want with Makennon or the other 'dignitaries' his soul-stripped had snatched from all over the peninsula? What was special about those thirteen people?
Another question. With so much power at his disposal, why had Bastian Redigor allowed himself to be banished? From what she had seen here, he could have wiped the floor with any mage on Twilight, and certainly the berobed fops and jesters who made up Lord Fayence's court wouldn't have stood a chance in the hells against him, and he could have taken the town any time he wanted. So why? Why move from what was clearly his home, as well as a well-equipped base, to the unforgiving wilds of the Sardenne? And just why did he already have a map showing the Sardenne and Bellagon's Rip?
Kali studied the map again. If she expected to see any previously unseen feature she was soon disappointed, but her eyes were drawn once more to Redigor's flowing script. Bellagon's Rip. It was written there as plain as day and yet there was something not quite right about it. She suddenly realised that her mind had been filling in the gaps and she was reading what she expected to read, because that was the name by which that area of the forest had always been known. But what if it was misnamed? What if some more modern cartographer had chanced upon some previously scrawled notation of Redigor's on some other map, and had misinterpreted it as she was doing now? Maybe this was a matter of perception rather than interpretation, because although Redigor had used human script on everything she had so far read there was still an elvish flourish to his hand that potentially gave a whole new meaning to what was written. Bearing that in mind, Kali reread the name, seeing each letter on its own rather than as a component part of a word, and gradually they began to flow together. That was it. It wasn't a name at all but an elven phrase. Not Bellagon's Rip but Bel'A'Gon'Shri. She concentrated hard, eyes closed, trying to pull together all the elvish she knew to make sense of the phrase, and her eyes snapped open in alarm.
Bel'A'Gon'Shri.
Here They Lie, Still.
Gabriella DeZantez hadn't been far wrong in her theory about its meaning. But the phrase wasn't referring to the Engines and it wasn't suggesting that anything was lying idle. It was suggesting that 'they' were lying where they'd lain for a long time and were waiting. And Kali suspected she knew who.
The charts, the maps, the diagrams, the calculations, they suddenly all made sense. Rather in the manner of an Eye of the Lord, she imagined herself descending from the sky into the map, the image no longer two-dimensional but a living canopy of trees through which she swept down, down, down. And waiting for her beneath was a structure of gothic horror overgrown with the vegetation of thousands of years, a structure that she knew was sitting deep in the Sardenne.
An elven necropolis.
An Ur'Raney necropolis.
Oh Gods.
The Faith, as she'd suspected, and as farking usual, had got it all wrong. There was going to be an invasion, all right, but not in the way they thought. She had to shut down the Engines of the Apocalypse and then get to the Faith, let them know what was really going on.
She ran for the stairwell, trying to ignore the staring eyes of Bastian Redigor, and heard a click beneath her feet. She looked down.
Trap, she thought. Dammit.
In her eagerness to leave she'd triggered something she'd missed, and as a result could already sense that something was coming. Something from outside.