Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

"Makennon, wait," she said. "You're the head of the Final Faith — a church — how can you countenance this?"

The Anointed Lord smiled. "I don't. I just ignore it."

With Makennon gone, Kali stared at Munch and he stared back, saying nothing but slowly rubbing his hand over large black bruises on his face, what looked like a broken nose, a stitched gash above his eye. He breathed shallowly and Kali noticed that bandages wrapped his ribs. She'd given him a good drubbing, all right, but right now it didn't make her feel much better. The bloody mouth Makennon had given her was nothing compared to the damage Munch could inflict while she was as helpless as she was.

But she was not going to let it matter what he did to her. She couldn't. Because if she told him about the key then she would have to tell him about Merrit Moon, and there was no way she was dragging the old man into this.

All she could hope for was that she blacked out quick.

Unfortunately, it seemed that oblivion was not going to be. As Kali swallowed in expectation of what was to come, it wasn't Munch who made the first move but the tall, thin man. With no expression showing on his sunken, sallow face he walked behind her, cupped her skull in his hands and then tipped it from side to side, fingers rubbing gently. The incongruity of what he was doing made her swallow harder still, her unease made all the worse by the fact that she couldn't see a thing. "What's with the massage, Munch?" she asked, sounding calmer than she felt. "You think maybe I need to relax?"

Munch spoke for the first time. He sounded calm and in control but Kali caught a flash of bloodlust in his eyes that belied his manner — the little bastard was looking forward to this. "This gentleman's name is Querilous Fitch," he said. "Mister Fitch is here to ensure our session lasts as long as is necessary. It is his job to ensure that you remain attentive and do not lapse into unconsciousness, a technique at which he is particularly adept."

"Then I'd better warn you I drop like a stone at the sight of blood," Kali said. "I don't think Fitch's massage is going to help very much."

Munch smiled. "His technique is a little more than a mere massage."

"Oh? What's he going to — " Kali began, and then stopped suddenly, gasping. It seemed to her that the fingers that a moment before had been caressing the back of her skull had somehow just slipped inside it, and while she was pretty sure the sensation couldn't actually be physical, it sure as hells felt like it. She felt cold and woozy and sick at the same time, and the really creepy thing was that she could feel different parts of her brain throb one after the other, as if the fingers were feeling their way around.

Thread magic, it had to be. Fitch was weaving inside her head.

Kali groaned loudly, and as she did Munch wheeled a small iron trolley into the room and locked it into place by the side of her chair. She flicked her eyes towards it. It looked innocuous enough but she somehow doubted it was there to provide her with a manicure to go with the massage. Too disorientated for a wisecrack, she found Munch speaking for her.

"I imagine you're expecting a selection of instruments crafted to cause you physical injury," he said slowly. "Branding irons? Pincers? Thumbscrews?" He lifted the lid. "Unfortunately, the Anointed Lord has decreed that such tools are only to be used should there be a failure in our more advanced techniques. I find these techniques rather uninspiring personally, but who am I to argue? The Anointed Lord has, after all, engaged some of our best alchemical minds to develop both these and their effects."

Kali looked numbly at what Munch had revealed. The trolley held a number of vials of coloured liquids, greens and oranges and reds, some of which looked more viscous than others, and each of which was marked with a strange symbol she did not recognise. They could have been reptile venoms or plant toxins or some other kind of poison and, though some bubbled of their own accord, what worried her most was that each sat next to a strip of needlereed, the hard, strawlike growth that, filled with a dart and the right ingredients, was a favourite tool of the assassins guilds.

But they were not going to poison her, surely.

So what?

Munch picked up a strip of needlereed and dipped it into one of the vials, the green, and then again, into the red. He tapped the end so that the viscous fluids mingled and slipped down inside, then raised and examined the reed, smiling in satisfaction.

"The dosage and combinations of these distillations have to be quite specific," he explained, "or can prove instantly lethal. But used correctly their effect is wondrously telling — though I'm told quite unpleasant — making your mind as pliant and as loose as I wish it to be. They do, however, cause some dizziness and lack of muscular control."

Kali swallowed. "Hey, then why don't you just give me a bottle of flummox? No, make that a case." She eyed the needlereed. "Is this going to hurt?"

Munch smiled. "This… no. But you may still feel some little pricks."

He flicked a lever on the side of the chair and the iron collars holding her clamped tighter, the pins piercing her ankles, wrists and neck. She bucked in her seat but found she could now barely move at all. Her limbs stung and blood flowed into the nape of her neck.

"Uuurngh!"

"As I said, they may cause some dizziness or delirium," Munch reiterated, "and it is essential for Mister Fitch's work that you remain absolutely still."

He dug the needlereed into the bend in her elbow, shoving it hard into her flesh, and Kali felt sick to the stomach as she saw the vein on her arm pulse and tinge green, the colour spreading up.

The noxious substance coursed quickly through her bloodstream, and there was nothing she could do to stop it, no way she could even try. Whatever it was Munch had given her, she felt instantly as if she had been on a week-long bender in the Flagons, the room about her tipping and swaying like a ship on the Sarcrean Sea. Sweat broke from every pore, her skin began to tingle, and as her stomach cramped agonisingly she vomited foam onto her chin. But however bad what was happening to her body was, it was nothing compared to what was happening to her mind. Her vision exploded suddenly with great bomb-blasts of orange and yellow and red that detonated and then spread like spilled paint, coating the inside of her eyes with a vibrant, cloying sea. Her head tipped back deliriously, and that part of her neck that thrust out as a result was pierced more deeply by the pins, making her blood run ever more freely. But she didn't care — the red of her blood was simply part of a rainbow that wrapped itself now around the inside of her skull, dizzying and disorientating, swooping and sick. As the colours swam, so too did her thoughts, and images of anything and everything began to flood her inner eye. Lost inside her own head, aware that she was dribbling and moaning, there was nothing she could do now but listen to the voice.

"The key, Miss Hooper — where is the key?"

"Told you… don't know…"

"Of course you know. The key, girl, where is the key?"

Kali tried to fight, to pull her thoughts into some kind of order, but the awareness of what the voice wanted produced precisely the opposite effect. An image of Merrit Moon flashed unbidden amongst a kaleidoscope of others and Kali railed against it, lest she blurt out his name. She tried desperately to make her mind go blank but it was a feat she had never been able to master — she wondered if anyone had — because there was always something in there, nagging away, even if it was only the panicked assertion to make her mind go blank, which perversely and inevitably conjured up the very images she wanted to forget. Kali consciously summoned other memories instead, the sights and sounds of previous adventures, but Merrit Moon hovered like a spectre in them all, smiling, advising, telling her when to run. She concentrated as hard as she could and shoved him away, back, into the darkness, and in his stead a cryptographic stone wheel loomed before her, set in a vine-strewn wall. Three turns to the right and two to the left. No. Oops. Boulder, big boulder. Run!