The Clockwork King of Orl tok-2

by Mike Wild

  In fairness, Kali could see how Makennon had inferred what she had, but there were things here the woman must have been blind not to notice, that leapt off the pages and were simply wrong. For one thing, as had occurred to Slowhand, it seemed to her that the kneeling figures were not human, their physiognomy, though stylised again, more Old Race, elf and dwarf. For another, it struck her that they were not kneeling in worship but in supplication, praying to the marching horde and its leader, not for their help in divine ascension but for their mercy.

  All of this, of course, was a matter of perception, but as Kali studied the text of the illuminated manuscript and then cycled to the bard's account, it became more a matter of interpretation. She was fluent in neither dwarvish or elvish — hells, who was? — but she had over her explorations picked up enough bits and pieces to recognise key words and put together the bones of a story.

  The… middle times? A war between a clan of dwarves and a family of elves… dwarven defeat… no, near-annihilation. Survivors… and a sorcerer. Belatron? Belatron the Black? The Butcher? Anyway… a war machine… a leader… built to avenge… no, to satisfy?… the dwarven dead. But something wrong. Yes… something gone horribly wrong… a massacre. More death than in the war itself… genocide for both elf and dwarf… and a desperate alliance to stop it…

  Kali blew out a breath. That, as far as she was concerned, clinched it — mostly. Everything here tallied with what Merrit Moon had told her, and was, in turn, totally at odds with what Katherine Makennon believed. The only thing she couldn't understand was why the symbol of the Final Faith and its prominence was on not one but two of the manuscripts she studied? Surely this was no representation of the Final Faith's future, it was a warning to everyone on the peninsula from the past.

  So much for the history. Merrit Moon had wanted her to stop this thing and what she needed to do was find the information relevant to the here and now, to the threat they faced. She cycled to the map and studied it. The old man had said that between them the elves and the dwarves had built four containment areas for the keys, and there they seemed to be, marked in four widespread locations by two circles and two crosses, each with a representation of a key drawn in above. Why they were not marked by four circles or four crosses, instead of both, Kali wasn't sure, but she supposed the differing symbols were simply elven and dwarven equivalents of X marks the spot. Yes, she thought, remembering the runic circles at the Spiral of Kos, because as one of the circles here lay in the Sardenne Forest at the approximate location where the Spiral had been, that had to be what they were. Knowing that, even though the map was old and parts of the peninsula coastline looked different, she should be able to extrapolate the locations of the other keys from there. Only one thing confused her — the small amount of text on the map made passing reference to five keys not four. Had the old man been wrong and there was actually another, missing location? No, that didn't make sense — the map itself contradicted it. What, then, if there was a fifth key needed to access Orl itself? Yes, that could be it, even though there was no indication of a location for a fifth key on the map. Dammit, she thought, looking at the text again, she wasn't that good so maybe she'd just interpreted it wrong.

  She had to concentrate on the matter at hand. She possessed the rough locations for the four keys but, for insurance, she needed the location of Orl itself. If this map, for whatever reason, had been meant to be some kind of overall guide, then it had to be here. Somewhere.

  Kali took a deep breath and studied the map again, something nagging at her. Suddenly she pulled it towards her for a closer view of the key in the Sardenne. The whorls in the ornate head of the key looked familiar, and with good reason — the drawing was a stylised map of the topography of the area centred on the Spiral of Kos, a more detailed map of its location! But important as that was, there was something else — some of the whorls on the key seemed extraneous, nothing to do with the local topography and seeming to belong somewhere else entirely. Her heart thudded as she realised she was looking at part of a map within a map.

  She waved her hand, flipping the document from side to side and slightly up and down, pulling it towards her to zoom in on each key in turn. For the moment she ignored the locations of the containment sites each gave, concentrating instead on the extraneous whorls, overlaying each set in her mind. Together, they formed a topography she recognised, part of the peninsula far to the west.

  Kali zoomed to that part of the map. There did appear to be some kind of site marked, but the map was damaged around it, barely legible, and the marking could apply to anywhere within a number of leagues. But what she could make out appeared again to be the symbol of the Final Faith.

  No, she thought, that had to be wrong! Because if it wasn't, what would that mean? That Makennon was right? That she was destined to find Orl?

  There was something else that shook her, too — more dwarven text, but text that made no reference to the site being called Orl but… Mor… Mar… no, it was no good, she couldn't make it out.

  Pits of Kerberos, she'd come in search of answers and all she'd found were more questions. But at least she had a rough location, and that would do as a start. She zoomed again, searching for landmarks that might help further, but then everything before her eyes suddenly faded. Kali blinked. The Forbidden Archive was a featureless red chamber once more.

  "Find anything of interest?" a voice asked.

  Kali spun and found herself facing a bearded figure who had to be Mister Duh! Forgot My Head. Only, seeing him from the front, his eyes and expression did not strike her as forgetful at all but instead rather threatening and intense.

  Disliking tackling them head on or not, Kali didn't know what else she could do. She rushed the mage, intending to silence him before he could alert others of his kind, but with a sweep of his hand the man did something with the air in front of him and she found herself bouncing back off an invisible field of force that felt like rubbery water. She flung a fist at him instead, hoping that would penetrate, but another sweep of the hand wove a different thread and, this time, she was slammed back and away from him, without any physical contact at all.

  Kali yelped as she crashed into the podium and flipped over it, then smashed jarringly and numbingly into the far wall. She picked herself up, wiping blood from her lip.

  Again, she ran at the mage, and this time he simply raised an arm and she found herself rising with it, treading air before she could get anywhere near him. The mage smiled, slowly rolled her over in the air and then manoeuvred her helplessly floating body to the side of the chamber. Kali felt herself pressed against the wall and, as she struggled futilely against the invisible grip that held her there, the mage moved his arm again and she found herself being slowly dragged all the way around the circumference of the tower, as if she were dirt to be smeared from his hand.

  It was, frankly, embarrassing. But embarrassing was all it seemed to be. Presumably the mage could have flung her around like a doll if he so wished, but he simply continued as he did, smiling, as if this were his way of proving a point.

  He even let her down gently, positioning her back on her feet before him.

  "Okay, that wasn't fair. You've got me, so what happens now?"

  The mage smiled. "Absolutely nothing. I mean you no harm and will defend myself only as and when necessary. I have been employed to provide a client with the same information you now seek, and that employment is now done. It would be churlish of me to censure you for obtaining the same knowledge by your own means, would it not? And I could have turned you in the moment you fell through that hatch."

  "It was you watching me."

  "I… sensed you, yes."

  "You're the sender," Kali realised. "The Final Faith's source."

  The mage bowed. "Poul Sonpear at your service. Trusted archivist for the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige. But the Final Faith are quite generous when it comes to persuading people to bend the rules a little. Tell me," he added with genuine intrigue, "
just why is it you and they find this material of such great interest?"

  "You've seen it. What the hells do you think?"

  "I have no opinion. I have seen many thousands of such manuscripts and these, as are they all, are open to subjective interpretation."

  You can say that again, Kali thought. People saw what people wanted to see. Never more so than when they pursued their interest with religious zeal. And that remained exactly the problem here.

  "What if I were to tell you these things warn against the end of civilisation as we know it? That unless I recover a key that the Final Faith took from a friend of mine, they're a quarter of the way to unleashing something — "

  Kali paused, unsure how to go on.

  "Something?" Sonpear urged.

  "I don't know yet, okay?" Kali shouted at him, piqued. "But something very, very bad. A clockwork king."

  Kali frowned, aware, after the intensity of her search, of how unthreatening that sounded.

  Sonpear laughed. "Then I would suggest that you will not be able to stop them."

  Kali balled her fists. "What are you saying? That this is, after all, where you call your friends to finish me off?"

  "Not at all. I wish only to point out to you that the Final Faith's journey along their path of discovery has progressed somewhat further than you think."

  "Say again?"

  Sonpear sighed heavily. "My… exchanges with the Final Faith's receiver work two ways and, though I do not intend to, it is sometimes hard to avoid absorbing… peripheral information. This key that you refer to — the one taken from your friend and that I believe you originally acquired from the Spiral of Kos? — it is not the first to fall into their hands."

  Kali swallowed. Suddenly what Munch had said in the Spiral about hazards he'd recently encountered made sense. "They have more?"

  "There have been two previous expeditions — to forgotten sites called, I believe, the Shifting City and the Eye of the Storm."

  Names that sounded suitably trap-like, Kali thought. And they must have been two of the sites the map referred to, but she — and, presumably, Merrit — had never heard of them. But then they didn't have the resources the Final Faith had — the bastards.

  "And they were successful?"

  "I gather so." Sonpear stared at her. "Young lady, the Final Faith are already in possession of three of your keys and are about to acquire possession of the fourth."

  "What? Where?" Kali said, urgently.

  "A site that has so far caused them considerable problems and loss, and by inference therefore the most dangerous of them all. And it is located beneath the most convenient and unexpected place you can imagine — the Final Faith's headquarters at Scholten Cathedral itself."

  Kali's mind flashed back to her and Killiam's escape — the curious lift shaft, the place she had wanted to go.

  "Slowhand, you fark," she said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I have to go," Kali said, knowing she needed to reach the key first. "Listen, you're the spy — is there a back way out of here?"

  Chapter Thirteen

  Much as Kali had negotiated her conduit above Andon, so the man without clothes negotiated his below Scholten — only here the conduit was constructed not of metal but of stone. Dank stone. The dank stone of a sewer, in fact, sheened and slimed by substances worse than those Kali had encountered at the Three Towers — vile, brown, smelly substances that a man as clean and fastidious as he should not even have to think about, let alone drag himself through.

  Somewhere beneath the Scholten Cathedral kitchens Killiam Slowhand tried not to think about the sludge that coated him, especially as there was nothing at all between the sludge and him. Every inch of him.

  The archer shuddered.

  It could have been worse, he supposed. For one thing, he could be beneath the Final Faith's privies rather than their kitchens. For another, more importantly, he could be dead. The knife that had been lunged at him on the walkway had been intended to deliver a fatal wound but had instead only grazed his side, something to do with the fact that he had grabbed its wielder and thrown him off the towering building as soon as his arm had come towards him. As the guard's scream faded in Scholten's night sky, his friends would probably have avenged him, finished him off, were it not for the fact that the head guard, just caught up, had ordered him to be taken alive. The order came on the specific instruction of Katherine Makennon, but why she wanted him kept alive, he didn't know — perhaps so she could have her Mister Fitch turn him to her cause, or perhaps merely so that she could revel in his reincarceration. She had certainly seemed to revel as she had had him stripped of what little clothing he had, and he wondered whether something had been going on there, whether perhaps a little of his charm had rubbed off on her after all? Because surely she couldn't have rumbled the old abrasive underpants trick?

  Whatever the reason, it had led him to his present unsavoury predicament. Makennon had returned him to a cell but this time somewhere she could keep an eye on him, a small oubliette she just happened to maintain in her private courtyard, which was obviously used only for very special guests. He had felt quite flattered by this and had returned the favour by singing romantic ballads night and day — his very own Eternal Choir. But all good things had to come to an end and, after two weeks, she had ordered his execution at the earliest opportunity.

  This was fine by him, as he had never intended hanging around. He'd have been gone the first night had he not needed to lose a little weight first. Not that he was overweight, of course, just — well, a little big. A little big for the hole in the oubliette floor, that was.

  It was a flaw in security but a necessary one, because with the amount of rain over Scholten, without it he or anyone else kept in the oubliette would have drowned. The hole had probably once been too small for anyone to pass through but it was also long unmaintained — its grate rusted — and, over time, the draining water had worn away its edges, providing a smooth-edged if extremely tight squeezeway through the floor. The fact was, if he had been fully clothed, he'd have had to strip anyway to get through.

  Definitely. Yes, without a doubt.

  Slowhand shook his head. Hooper would never have believed that he'd done it again. Once — just once — he'd like to catch her losing her clothes in the line of duty. Then she'd know that these things just had a way of happening. But no — there was no chance of that, was there? Not with little Miss Prissy Knickers.

  Slowhand continued crawling forwards, estimating he'd pass beyond the cathedral walls in about ten more minutes. Ahead of him, he could actually see a dim circle of azure night sky that was the sewer's outlet.

  Unfortunately, that same light was also partly obscured, silhouetting something coming straight towards him. And down here it could have been anything.

  Slowhand cursed. Feeling somewhat vulnerable in his present state, he looked for somewhere to hide. His eyes darted ahead of him, behind him, down and up, but he was in a sewer and there was nowhere to go. He was actually so involved in doing what he did that he failed to notice how quickly the something was coming at him. And the something was so involved in getting where it wanted to be that it didn't notice him.

  Heads collided.

  "Ow, dammit!"

  "Jeeeeshhh!"

  A face popped up right in front of his.

  "Slowhand?" Kali Hooper said.

  He strained to see in the dark. "Hooper? Oh hells, don't tell me — you can see better in the dark, too?"

  "Looks like it. So… how are you doing?"

  "Oh, you know…"

  "Mmm."

  "Mmm."

  The usual exchange went on for a while until Kali suggested they backtrack slightly in her direction, where an access shaft meant the roof of the sewer opened up. They moved to it, and Kali and Slowhand stood.

  As he rose, the sewer's detritus slipped off his body, and Kali saw what was beneath. Or rather wasn't.

  She turned quickly away. "Oh gods, you're naked again
, Slowhand. How in the hells do you manage it?"

  "Hey — don't blame me, blame Makennon," he defended himself. "Or maybe even yourself — in case you've forgotten you're the reason I got locked up again." He waved at himself. "Like this."

  "You told me to go!"

  "Of course I did — but I didn't expect you to come back! What the hells are you doing here, Hooper? Did you forget something?"

  Kali's expression became serious. "I was too late to save the old man."

  Slowhand faltered. "Gods, I'm sorry."

  "I know you are. But before he died, he told me what's going on. Sent me to Andon. This whole mess is worse than we thought."

  Slowhand bowed his head, sighed. "When is it ever anything else? Tell me."

  Kali explained the gist of what she'd learned, omitting only those parts she was still working out in her own head, and, as she did, the expression in the archer's eyes changed from anticipation to resignation, and he rested his palms on the sewer wall, slowly banging his head against them. "I suppose this means I'm not escaping any more?"

  "I… might be grateful for a little help."

  Slowhand punched the sewer wall. "I knew it!" He pointed ahead, would have jumped up and down like a petulant brat if he could. "Do you realise I'm only a hundred yards from the exit! A hundred yards, Hooper. I see the light at the end of the tunnel!"

  "I know. I came in that way. Slowhand, what can I say? The outside world's not all it's cracked up to be?"

  "Aaarrgh!" Slowhand roared in frustration.

  "Oh, will you stop it," Kali chided him. "Look, I hardly expected to find you crawling about down here, all right? In fact, I thought you were dead." She paused, quietened, and added softly, "I'm glad you're not, by the way."