The Clockwork King of Orl

by Mike Wild

  "Of course I do. And I know you do. But not now, Hooper. There'll be another time."

  Kali sighed. "Well, at least let's try to see if Makennon gives anything away. She seems to be going our way."

  "Fine," Slowhand said, "we follow her. But don't get too close, and whatever you do, stay under cover."

  "Stunning tactic. Never would have thought of that one."

  "Just move."

  "Yes sir."

  Keeping behind crates, pillars and whatever else could provide cover, Kali and Slowhand pursued the Anointed Lord, gleaning little but nevertheless coming closer to what must have been an exit. Then, suddenly, Querilous Fitch appeared. Kali and Slowhand flattened themselves against a wall and listened in.

  "I am here to report, Madam, as ordered," Fitch said.

  "Sorry not to have been available earlier," Makennon responded, "but we had to seal below."

  "More problems?" Fitch asked. "It has been... three days."

  Makennon nodded. "We lost another two - including Salome. The defences in this dig are formidable."

  Kali looked at Slowhand eagerly, about to speak, but he put his hand to her mouth and shushed her.

  "That is unfortunate," Fitch said. "I'll arrange for disposal of the body."

  "There is no body, Fitch."

  "Ah, indeed." He hesitated for a second. "Madam, have you considered using -"

  "The girl? No, Fitch, she is far too undisciplined, a loose cannon. Besides, following your recent treatment of her I very much doubt she would be sympathetic to our cause."

  "She does not know what happened. And perhaps could be... persuaded?"

  "No. I know her kind. You might beat her but you wouldn't break her. There'd come a time when she'd run into a trap rather than trip it for us. No, Fitch, I'll arrange for another. In the meantime, what did you learn from her?"

  Again, Kali looked at Slowhand. What did Fitch learn? She'd been sure she'd said nothing.

  Fitch paused. "The girl was extremely resilient, unexpectedly so for one so young. I suspect hidden depths with this one."

  "Depths?"

  "Great depths. I... needed to rest after the questioning. Some of the things she recalled were a strain and I needed to collate what I had gathered."

  Makennon stared at him.

  "Well?"

  "The girl no longer possesses the key, nor is she aware of its exact location," Fitch said, his voice slow and tired. "However, there is a friend. An old friend. A relic-monger named Merrit Moon."

  "And you believe that the key lies with him?"

  "Yes," Fitch sighed. "But Moon travels."

  "Where? Where does he travel?"

  "Beyond Pontaine. To the ridge of the world."

  Kali saw Makennon swallow. Even for one in such a powerful position as she, the World's Ridge Mountains instilled a sense of awe and unease. It was a place even the Final Faith did not tread lightly.

  "Munch has arranged things?" Makennon asked.

  "He and his men rode two days ago."

  "Good," Makennon said. "Very good." And with that, she dismissed Fitch. Speaking to herself, unaware she was being overheard, she added: "This time, just bring me the key. I do not want an old man cluttering up my dungeons as well."

  Kali watched Makennon follow Fitch up the corridor, stunned. She spun to face Slowhand, her expression pained. "How could he know that? I didn't say anything!"

  Slowhand looked at her sympathetically. "Pits, you don't know, do you? That man's a psychomancer, Kali. Not so much a mind-reader as someone able to realise memories. I'm afraid he's been inside your head."

  Kali seethed, knowing there'd been something wrong all along. "Munch told me he was there to stop me blacking out."

  "It's a common trick. A dirty trick. While that little bastard was keeping your conscious mind distracted, his psychomancing friend was poking around in your subconscious and, in there, there's nowhere to hide. You couldn't help what they discovered, Kali, or stop them doing it. You literally weren't to know."

  Kali snarled. Munch's abuse of her had gone far beyond the physical and, whatever it might have revealed to her by way of a side-effect, she didn't like that one little bit.

  At the moment, though, that wasn't the issue.

  "They know where Merrit went, and they know he has the key," she said to Slowhand. Her expression hardened. "As of this moment, the exploring's over. I have to get to the old man. You have to get me out of here now."

  "Could prove a little difficult," Slowhand said, slowly.

  "What?" Kali protested. "But I thought you - "

  She stopped - because one of the two guards behind her had just discreetly coughed.

  Chapter Eight

  Clearly, the time for stealth was over. Kali informed the guard of the fact by smiling sweetly and punching him hard on the nose. He staggered back against the wall, hands over nostrils pouring with blood, and with a satisfying metallic-cum-fleshy crunch Kali booted him up under his armour, bringing the knee of her other leg up under his chin at the moment he crumpled towards her, howling. The guard flipped onto his back, out cold.

  Slowhand, for his part, performed a kind of spin that was half pirouette and half boxer's dodge that took him behind the guard so fast that the man barely had time to register the manoeuvre. As Slowhand came out of the spin, he wrapped his arm around the guard's neck, bent him double and rammed his head straight into the wall. Twice, to be sure he was out. And then, because he was Final Faith, just once more. The guard slumped and Slowhand dropped his unconscious body to the floor like a sack of wet wort.

  The pair of them stared at each other, he smiling, she inwardly cursing - dammit, they'd always been good as a team.

  Cries of alarm echoed down the corridor and urgent footsteps clattered towards them from all directions. Somewhere far above, they heard the peal of the cathedral's bells changing volume and pitch. The change would mean nothing to pilgrims going about their worshipful business, but to Kali and Slowhand it signalled one disturbing fact - the Final Faith knew they were on the loose.

  They ran, not sure in which direction to head in the underground warren but moving with the surety that if they covered enough ground they must eventually come upon the exit. A number of avenues became blocked to them, however, barred gates sliding down from their niches in the rock to block off doorways to rooms and corridors, and to some degree the pair of them felt they were being herded. But herded or not, they were going to be no easy catch. Helpfully, the corridors here were stacked with equipment and supply boxes, and while they presented some impediment to their flight, forcing them to dodge and weave as they ran, they also provided cover and the means to discourage some of the guards from their pursuit. Three who tried to block off a corridor ahead were flattened as Kali forced over one stack, causing a mini avalanche, another two crushed against a wall as Slowhand hefted, without much difficulty, a crate of armour and tossed it towards them for them to catch. There was little room to manoeuvre in the tight confines of the corridors, however, and more confrontations were inevitable. The two of them refused to allow such inconsiderate encounters to slow them down, kicking, punching, leaping and dodging their way past them all, and as the numbers dwindled they started to believe that their escape might be successful. It simply never occurred to them that there would be nowhere to go.

  The corridor ahead came to an impassable and totally unexpected end. The rock out of which this entire complex had been carved had, it seemed, provided a starting point in the way of natural caverns, and ahead of them now lay one such chamber. Dropping away from the corridor floor to a depth of about fifty feet, stretching away ahead of them perhaps three times that, the stalagmite-layered area was impossible to traverse around its edge, and even if they had been able to climb down to its floor, it would have been impossible to climb out the other side. The Final Faith had provided a solution to this natural hindrance - a slatted bridge that spanned the gap - but at that very moment, powered by the pumping arms of two o
f their people on the other side, it was moving away from Kali and Slowhand at a rate that made it impossible to reach.

  They skidded to a halt, staring at the bridge as it retracted along guide cables in response to the turning of the large spoked wheel on the other side. An identical wheel on their side was of no help as it was impossible to operate while the other was in use. What was worse, the opposing wheel clearly had visible on it a clamp that could be swung down once the retraction operation was complete, effectively making the device on their side useless.

  If they couldn't get across the bridge, they had no way out at all.

  Slowhand summed up the predicament succinctly. "Hooper, we're stuffed."

  Kali, however, wasn't listening. She stared at the retracting bridge, weighing up the widening gap, and then without a word to Slowhand ran back along the corridor down which they'd come. The troubadour looked at her dumbfounded, but then his expression turned to alarm as Kali turned and, taking deep breaths, began to pound back towards him. He looked at her, looked at the gap, and then back at her again.

  She was going to try to make the jump.

  "Hooper, don't be stu -" he began, but Kali had already drawn even with him, then was panting past him, and then she was in the air. Yelling with exertion as she took flight, legs pinwheeling beneath her, she flew forwards, describing a long arc that took her towards the ever-distancing bridge.

  Her hands stretched out for a handhold before her - and missed.

  But only just. Kali twisted, forcing an extra inch, and slammed into the lip of the retracting edge with an explosive grunt. She dangled there by her elbows as she took a second to recover before heaving herself up onto its walkway. One of the guards was already coming towards her but, as he approached, Kali slid aside, around him, then slapped him in the back with her arm, sending him careering over the lip to the unwelcoming rock floor below. The other guard, seeing what was happening, flung the lock onto the wheel and grabbed a pike from against the corridor wall, charging at Kali and intending to impale her. As he came, she grabbed both rails of the bridge and flipped herself upwards, the guard and his pike passing harmlessly beneath her. Spinning in mid-air, Kali landed behind his back, roared into him and, using his own momentum, rammed the wailing guard into the air to join his friend below.

  She took a deep, satisfied breath, walked to the wheel and flipped off the lock, then began to swing it into reverse.

  The bridge began to move towards Slowhand and she watched him fighting off those who caught up while it arrived, echoing her tactic of discarding them one by one into the rocky drop - so many of them, in fact, that with only a few more additions they'd be forming their own bridge across the gap. Kali smiled. He was enjoying himself, she could tell. At last the gap was narrow enough for him to make the jump, and as soon as he leapt for and landed on the walkway she began to retract it again, blocking the path of future waves of guards - perhaps mercifully - from their sweaty but grinning potential despatcher.

  Slowhand joined her on the other side. They had escaped the complex but still had a way to go before they were out of danger. Forcing their way up the stairs was a running battle but finally they passed the dungeon level where Kali had been interrogated and reached ground level, bursting forth into the cathedral itself - right in the path of a group of advancing guards.

  "This way, move!" Slowhand said urgently.

  He raced down a corridor that branched off to the left, and then another to the right, heading towards the heart of the cathedral. Kali glanced more guards moving quickly along adjacent corridors, clearly manoeuvring to block off their route of escape.

  "Where the hells are we going?" she shouted. She had to because of the bells and the singing.

  "Up," Slowhand responded.

  "Further up?"

  "Further up."

  "And how do we get further up?"

  Slowhand snapped his head to the left and the right, then instead pointed ahead. "Through here. I think."

  The troubadour burst through a large set of double doors into a transept, and Kali followed.

  The pair of them stopped dead, stared.

  Approximately two hundred people stared back. And as one they raised their eyebrows.

  What else could the Eternal Choir do faced with a heavily sweating man and a panting woman dressed only in their underwear in the heart of Scholten Cathedral?

  Kali had to give them their due. They kept on singing.

  "Slowhand?" she said, dubiously.

  "Okay, that might not have been quite right," he admitted. He listened to the heavy footfalls approaching from behind and bundled Kali into the left rank of choristers before taking up a position on the right. "Sing," he mouthed across the aisle.

  "What?" Kali mouthed back.

  He gesticulated in front of his mouth. "Sing!"

  Kali cursed but did as she was bidden, or at least moved her lips in time with the others. Across from her, though, Slowhand went at it with gusto. But though he was apparently oblivious to the guards who clamoured in through the door, Kali wasn't, and she had to remind herself to keep her gaze rigidly forwards as they moved up the aisle, heads turning to study the singers, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

  It almost worked. Would have worked if the Eternal Choir hadn't chosen that moment to segue from one hymn to another. Because in the fleeting quiet between the two a broken baritone that had become utterly carried away - including from any key - was heard declaring, "... of that lass named Kali Hoooperrr..."

  The game was clearly up.

  "Idiot!" she hissed at Slowhand as the guards shoved their way through the choristers towards him. The guards snapped their gaze to her. "Idiot!" she hissed again, but this time to herself.

  "Up there!" Slowhand yelled. He pointed to a balcony accessed by stairways sweeping up on either side of an organ positioned at the end of the transept, overlooking the cathedral nave. The curving archway the stairs formed there was lined with the organ's airpipes and draped with Final Faith pennants slung from the balcony's railings, and as Kali's gaze travelled up them she saw that another archway led off the balcony itself, stairs beyond leading upwards again.

  "Oh, right," Kali said. "You mean where those other guards are?"

  "What?"

  Slowhand looked again. Four guards had appeared on the balcony, and each had a crossbow aimed directly at their hearts.

  "Dammit!" Slowhand cursed. "Where did they -"

  "Never mind," Kali sighed, peering at the organ. "You got us into this, I'll get us out."

  "What?" Slowhand said. "Hooper, no, they'll -"

  As with the bridge, he was too late to stop her. Kali burst from the choristers' ranks and sprinted along the aisle, leaping upwards, towards the organ. She used its keyboard as the first in a flight of makeshift steps - filling the transept with a discordant wail - and the organist's head as the second, eliciting a different kind of wail entirely. From there, she leapt onto the top of the organ, and then into the air, throwing herself forward and stretching to reach one of the pennants that hung from the balcony railing. It tore slightly as she grabbed it but the sudden downward jerk of the cloth granted Kali the extra manoeuvrability she wanted, allowing her to kick off from the balcony wall and use the pennant as a swing to run up and around the inside of the archway's curve. The soles of her feet danced across the organ's airpipes until her increasing speed took her out of the curve and she sailed into the open, first above the organ and then the choristers' heads, gaining height until she began to swing back towards the balcony itself. The guards positioned there tried to target her with their crossbows but the truth was they barely had time to register her coming before the pennant finally tore from its mooring and Kali slammed into them, booting them over the railing in a single yelling and flailing mass.

  The organist scarpered as four heavy and heavily armoured bodies crashed like a ton of bricks onto the organ below, making it erupt with dust and buckling its wooden frame. Then one by one, each producing th
eir own prolonged and discordant wail, the bodies slipped down over the keys and thudded to the floor. Their weight being the only thing that held the buckled instrument together, the organ creaked and groaned as each fell away, and as the last joined the pile it emitted a death rattle and gave up the ghost entirely. The organ fell apart.

  There was a sharp intake of two hundred breaths, and for the first time in nobody knew how long the Eternal Choir fell silent.

  "Er, sorry about that," Kali said in the pregnant pause that followed. "Slowhand, you coming?"

  The troubadour ran, dodging the other guards whose mouths still hung open as widely as his had a moment before, and joined Kali on the balcony. They entered the archway and found themselves at the base of a spiral staircase that rose up into a tower, the purpose of which was unknown. But Slowhand again seemed to know where he was going and so Kali followed. And followed. And followed.

  It was only as they burst at last through the door at the top of the stairs that she had cause to think her faith might - to say the least - have been a little misguided.

  Kali looked down and couldn't believe it. This was Slowhand's escape route? Bloody great steaming pits of Kerberos, there were birds below!

  Their flight from Makennon's guards had taken them up to the highest accessible point of the cathedral, a rope-and-plank walkway that at some point had been strung around the outside of its main steeple and hung there now as loosely as a whore's belt. Some fifty feet below, where the steeple's tapering spire took over, the narrow, drunkenly undulating and half-rotten platform had perhaps once been used for repairs because as far as any other purpose went it was good for nothing, led nowhere.

  Damn Slowhand! She should have known better than to trust him. What the hells did the idiot expect them to do now - run round and round the thing until the guards following fell off, either through dizziness or exhaustion?

  She stared at Slowhand as he slammed the hatch behind them and barred it. No more than a second passed before there was an insistent hammering on its other side. If the hatch were as neglected as the walkway they balanced upon, it would not be long before they had company.