by Mike Wild
There had to be something she could do!
She dug in her saddlebag for something, anything to help, but as she did Moon placed his hand on hers, just as he had in the Warty Witch so long ago. The message now was as clear as it had been then — put your hand down.
"It's too late," Moon said, coughing. "What's important is the key. You have to get the key. But you also have to know what it is you're dealing with."
"Merrit, at least let me — " Kali began, but as she spoke thought: At least let me what?
"Listen to me, young lady." Moon insisted. "I don't know everything about the key, but I haven't told you everything I know. Snippets from across the years. The key you took is one of four, part of a set that unlocks something that should never see the light of day again. Something evil — so evil it is warned against time and time again in Old Race manuscripts written by a hundred different hands."
"What?"
Moon coughed again. "I never found out precisely. If I had I would have done everything in my power to find and destroy it — what the manuscripts refer to repeatedly as an abomination." He paused. "What I do know is that it almost finished the Old Races, wreaked so much death and destruction amongst them that these bitter enemies forged their first alliance in order that they might end its threat."
"But you must have some idea what it is."
Moon nodded. "Oh, yes. Some tales describe it as a kind of giant construct — a supposed marvel of dwarven engineering that became instead a horror — a complex automaton called the Clockwork King of Orl."
"The Clockwork King of Orl?" Kali repeated. "What in the hells do you suppose it does — is meant to do?"
"The important question is what the Final Faith think it can do for them. If I know those zealots, their intent will be to use the king as a figurehead, a rallying icon for the spread of their church across Twilight. But if the old warnings are even half-truths, the people of Twilight will not be rallied, they will be destroyed."
Kali frowned. "I don't understand. This alliance. If they wanted the king stopped, if it was so dangerous, why not just destroy the thing, or at least destroy the keys?"
Moon sighed. "The king itself, I don't know — perhaps they kept it as a reminder of their folly. The keys, however… in the aftermath, when it came to it, neither side trusted the other in the matter of disposal. Even when both parties were present each suspected that magic might deceive the eye, that secretly one or other party would keep the keys for themselves. They decided instead that they should be sealed away, watched, protected by lethal countermeasures that would ensure no one could get their hands on them again."
"The Spiral of Kos," Kali breathed.
"And three similar containment areas. They each built two sites — two dwarven and two elven — and manned them with mixed representatives of their races." There was no blame in Moon's eyes when he added: "Kali, you have no idea what it is that you've unleashed."
"I'm beginning to get the picture." She bit her lip. "Merrit, please, what can I do?"
"If the Final Faith are going after the keys, you have to find them first, make them inaccessible, hide them, destroy them if you have to. If you cannot, then you must discover the location of Orl, destroy the Clockwork King before the Faith reach it."
"But I've no idea where to start!"
"Go to Andon, to the Three Towers, its Forbidden Archive. There are papers within that will tell you more than I know. They will be difficult to get to, Kali — they are protected — but you must reach them, find out what you can. And when you have, when you know what there is to do, you must do it. Make sure the Clockwork King is not reawoken, any way you can."
Kali felt somewhat daunted by her burgeoning responsibility. "Old man, I'm just a… tomb raider."
Moon slid his hand onto hers, visibly worsening. "No," he said, weakly, "you're not. There's something else you need to know. The night you were found as a baby, by the stranger — "
Kali stroked his hand. "It was you, old man. I know. I saw you when Fitch played with my mind. You and me in the Old Race site…"
Moon raised his eyes, surprised, then coughed, and this time there was blood. "Hells of a time for a reunion."
"Hells of a time," Kali nodded, sniffed. "Merrit, I — "
"Don't you dare hug me when I'm down, young lady," Moon warned, though after a second he, too, smiled. "Kali, please listen. You were my greatest ever discovery, believe that. You should know that I love you like a daughter. But that it was me who found you isn't what I was going to say. You have to know about the site itself."
"What? What about the site?"
Moon didn't answer directly. "There are things happening to you, aren't there? I can feel the changes, see it in the way you move, sense it in your aura. You are more than you were. It's what I always knew, right from the start — that you're somehow different."
"Different?"
"The site where I found you wasn't like the others, Kali. It was uncompromised."
"What? What do you mean uncompromised?"
"You know what I mean. Nobody had been in or out in over a thousand years. It was completely sealed."
Kali stared at him for a moment, speechless.
"It couldn't have been," she said at last. "I mean, how did I get in there? What would that mean?"
"I don't know what it means. Only that it marks you out amongst the people on the peninsula — makes you different from them — and that is something you must remember at all times."
"But what — "
Merrit held up his hand, looked around at the gathered ogur. He was suddenly racked by a spasming cough, and sprayed more blood into his palm. "No more questions," he said. "You have to go — now."
"Old man, I'm not just leaving you like thi — "
Moon grabbed her hand, squeezed it tenderly. "Kali, go. I am dying and there is nothing you can do, and as soon as the ogur sense I have passed they will tear you apart. You have to get out of here before I die."
"I can't do that!"
"You must, young lady." Moon was struck by another fit of coughing and then laid his head back with a sigh, his hand weak around hers. Kali choked back a sob. Dammit, she had to give him a hug whether he liked it or not.
She leaned in — gently, so as not to hurt him — and, as she did, her hand brushed an amulet resting on his chest. She could have sworn it was glowing slightly. She went to touch it but her hand was unexpectedly swatted away.
"No!" Moon shouted with surprising vehemence for a man on his deathbed. "It's too… near the time."
"Merrit, what — ?"
He actually glared at her. The old man actually glared.
"Go, Kali, now," Moon shouted. And then, more weakly: "Go now… and don't… look ba — "
Kali knelt there a second longer, stirring only as a series of grunts from the ogur signalled what she wouldn't, couldn't believe — that Merrit Moon was gone. Keeping her eyes fixed on the creatures she backed slowly away, settling the old man gently to the ground as she went. Then, with a final look at her mentor's body, she raced towards the cave mouth and safety.
She did not see the blue glow that suddenly suffused the cave behind her.
Chapter Eleven
Kali had seen more than enough death in recent days and had no desire to be reminded of it — but in approaching Andon she had little choice.
It was here that Killiam Slowhand had killed John Garrison, but he had been only one warrior amongst thousands, and the fields around the city still bore the scars of the pivotal battle they had fought. Andon had been besieged for almost two years while Pontaine's army had grown strong enough to repel the enemy, driving them back across the land that had become known as the Killing Ground. Such protracted and bloody engagements were not erased easily from a landscape, and the Killing Ground was littered still with half-buried skeletons uncovered by driving rain, the remains of defensive and offensive trench systems, and rotting and ruined engines of war. It was a ghastly and ghostly place, mad
e all the more haunting by banks of slowly drifting fog that alternately concealed and revealed the horrors that remained.
It was before dawn, and Andon's gates were closed to traffic as Kali and the bamfcat appeared in the fog near its defensive walls, suddenly, in a blur. Even at this quiet hour guards patrolled vigilantly, on constant alert as many in the city believed it was only a matter of time before the forces of Vos attacked again, using as their base the forts they had constructed in the once-neutral Anclas Territories, only a few leagues away. Arriving seemingly out of nowhere as she had, some strange phantasm clad still in Slowhand's striped tights and Blossom's mangy furs, Kali had likely spooked the guards, and having no wish to feel the sudden thud of a crossbow bolt in her chest needed to make her business in the city known. She couldn't tell them the whole truth, of course, but a generalisation might do.
Kali got their attention by sticking her fingers in her mouth and whistling. Then she shouted: "Excuse me! I'm trying to save the world. Can I come in, please?"
It was an honest and bafflingly pre-emptive ploy that seemed to work. The guards studied her for a few seconds, shrugged and gave the order for the gates to be opened.
"'Yup, Horse," Kali said.
That she had referred to the bamfcat as Horse was no slip of the tongue. She wasn't sure when, or quite how, the beast had gained her affections but certainly it had started when she'd found it waiting for her on her descent from the ogur's cave — its welcoming and strangely familiar headbutts a display of companionship she'd needed badly when everything else seemed to have gone away. Their bond had grown during the journey to Andon and, after a while, she'd realised she really couldn't go on calling the beast good boygirl because it was just plain daft. Of course, she'd had some hesitation naming it Horse — Horse Too, to be precise — but the bamfcat was hardly a creature that would suit a name like Fluffy or Rex, and in an odd way it was a reminder of the old boy himself.
Horse, however, could not go everywhere, and inside the city it soon became clear that its narrow environs wouldn't take the bamfcat and he'd need to be stabled for the duration. Kali dismounted and walked him into one of a number of stableyards lining the outskirts, manoeuvring his oversized bulk into two stable enclosures, the beast straddling their low, dividing fence.
The stableman appeared and his jaw dropped open. But he did not let surprise interfere with business.
"Two silver tenths," he said.
"I thought the standard rate was one."
"That thing takes up two stables so it's two silver tenths."
Kali was in no mood. "Horse?" she said.
The bamfcat ate the fence and spat a mouthful of splinters at the stableman.
"One silver tenth," Kali said.
"Done," the stableman said, swallowing. "That's one hells of a mount, lady."
Kali patted the bamfcat, smiled. "He sure is. One word of advice — don't feed him anything that hasn't got a face."
"Face?"
"He likes worgles."
"Worgles?"
"Worgles." She pointed across the yard, where one of the furballs could be seen rolling into an overturned bucket. "Just shake 'em out and he'll handle the rest."
Horse's lizardine tongue whiplashed out and back again, as if to explain. The stableman did a little dance backwards.
"Yew, that's disgusting."
"Yep, that's what I thought, too."
Horse stabled, Kali made her way into Andon proper, working her way through the labyrinth of shadowed streets, alleyways and passages crammed inside its imposing walls. The walls were soon lost to view in the crowded conurbation, and it would have been easy to become disorientated, but as Kali made her way towards the centre of the city she could not have wished for a more obvious guiding beacon. Visible through gaps in the roofline, looming ever larger and more imposing, the beacon had actually been visible from outside the city walls — was visible, in fact, from some leagues away — but it was only now as she grew nearer that the sheer impossible scale of the largest building in Andon — indeed, anywhere on the peninsula — truly made its presence felt. The Three Towers made Scholten Cathedral look like a village church.
The twisting, semi-organic looking headquarters of the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige rose above the city fully forty storeys high, a structure that would have confounded the skills of the finest engineers in Pontaine — perhaps even the finest engineers of the Old Races — and its construction had only been made possible with the aid of the more powerful wizards who now studied within. Its rather incongruous presence in the otherwise somewhat seedy city was due to the fact that at one time, on a lesser scale, it had simply been the home of Andon's Magical Guild, housing parlour magicians and entertainers in the service of Pontaine's wealthiest families but, since the Great War, it had gradually transformed itself into something much darker and now housed an organisation dedicated to the study of the effects of powerful sorceries on armies, and to the practice of war itself. Dark secrets were held within its half-built, half-grown heights — within the minds of those who moved there and within the manuscripts, tomes and artefacts that were said to fill its archives — and somewhere amongst those secrets was the information Kali needed to know.
The Three Towers was not a place, however, where one could walk up to the front door and knock. Even the Final Faith did not wield sufficient influence to enter there.
To get inside, Kali needed help. And she knew exactly where she was going to find it.
She continued on, breaking at last from the warren of small streets and out into the centre of Andon, a thronged circular marketplace filled with stalls, vendor carts and street performers surrounding the towers in a hub. Already gearing up for the day's trade, it was where the true hubbub of Andon was to be found and, as a consequence, where those who fed upon that hubbub could also be found. The largest and most successful thieves guild in Andon — the Grey Brigade — were based somewhere here, and it was no small measure of their presence and influence in the area that their playful nickname for it had been adopted by the city's inhabitants, thereafter referring to the place as the Andon Heart.
Kali weaved her way through the milling crowds with no particular destination, at least none she yet knew. Her attention fixed seemingly on the endless array of gaudy stalls and goods, in actuality she had her senses trained on every subtle movement around her. She felt herself accidentally jostled or pushed once, twice, three times, and on each occasion felt hands slide gracefully into the pockets of her furs or vest, each of which she had filled with some coin. She had to admit that the dippers working this patch were very good, but when someone knew what to expect — in fact, hoped for it to happen — they had to be very, very good indeed if they wanted to go unnoticed.
Kali let the plunder continue until the fifth dipper made his move, and then she made hers. The boy's hand was sliding towards her side when her own lashed out and grabbed it tightly by the wrist.
"That's ten full silver your people have taken from me," she said, smiling. "Even accounting for your share, that's enough to buy me an audience with your boss, don't you think?"
"B-boss, Missus?" the boy said, struggling against her grip. "Don't know what you're talking about."
"Jengo," Kali said. "I'm here to see Jengo."
"Jengo?"
"Jengo Pim."
The boy smiled slyly. "So, you knows his name, eh? That counts for something, I suppose. But who's to say you ain't bringin' him some business old Jengo might not be inclined to undertake?"
"Who says I'm here on business? I'm his sister."
The boy guffawed. "Jengo ain't got no sister. Everyone knows he ain't got no kin and was dumped on the streets like the bastard he is."
Kali leaned closer, looming down on the boy, and tightened her grip. "Then I guess that makes me a bitch."
The boy swallowed. "A-all right, Missus — ah'll take you to him. But I tells you, it ain't no worry of mine if he slits you from ear to ear."
&nbs
p; "From where to where?" Kali said, smiling.
"Eh? Oh, never mind. Just follow me."
Kali did, finding that the entrance to the Grey Brigade's den was hidden almost in plain sight, yards from where she stood. Nevertheless, it would have been impossible to take advantage of without her escort. She was led between two market stalls, the owners of which were obviously guild stationed as sentries, and then along a tight alleyway that jinked away behind them. Kali looked up as she walked, saw that she was being watched from a number of windows above. Clearly, no one who wasn't welcome could approach the guild unseen, and Kali suspected that for any particularly unwelcome visitor those who stared at her now, casually crunching fruit, might simply substitute the fruit for a loaded needlereed and the unwanted visitor would be incapacitated before they could take two steps. She guessed the resultant body — unconscious or otherwise — would be spirited away into one of the apparently sealed doorways she passed, there to be stripped, dumped in the river and never seen again.
She reached the end of the alleyway safely, however, and after the boy gave three irregular raps on the solid wooden door that terminated it, found herself inside the den of the Grey Brigade.
Impressive, she thought, as she was led through its busy interior, not only in the number of guild members she passed but also in the facilities provided for them. Everything the Andon thief could desire was provided here, from equipment and training areas to common lounges, dormitories and bar, all of them converted to their present use from the rooms of what looked to have been at one time a large hotel, an enterprise she imagined had been starved of business during the siege.
Grandly enough, Jengo Pim had chosen what had once been the hotel's ballroom for his court, and it was obvious which of those gathered within was he. The thieves guild leader was draped in an ornate, red upholstered chair in the middle of the room, swigging from a bulb of wine and gnawing meat he skewered on a dagger from a serving table beside him. As Kali was brought in, the appropriately roguish-looking man was conferring with two of his lieutenants, but as she approached he dismissed them and turned his attention to her. He jabbed the dagger into the table and wiped his mouth before speaking.
