Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

She felt a dizzying swoon that was almost a panic. As the cell seemed to heat up and flex around her, she tried to shut her brain down but it was no good. And as the song concluded, she just couldn't help herself. It was like being some small, furry creature, its ears erect, transfixed by the sound of an oncoming cart, oblivious to the rumbling wheels of doom. She just had to listen.

"… so ever since I've been in a stupor. Because of that lass named Kali Hoooooper."

A tin cup rattled on the bars of a cell door somewhere down the corridor. "For the sake of everything that's holy, will you please stop!" a desperate voice yelled.

"Wait — I think he has. Steaming pits, that was worse than the mangling room," said another.

"Something… I need something to stab my eardrums."

There was a very long, unappreciated sigh that echoed off the stone walls. "Fine," its owner said sulkily. "Just trying to cheer everyone up, that's all."

"We're cheerful, honestly!" someone cried, and then laughed manically, as if to prove it. "Really, really cheerful."

"Is it over? Oh, thank Kerberos… I feel I've been reborn."

Kali ignored the voices. Her heart thudding, she moved beneath the small grille that linked her cell to the next, from where the singing had come. She stretched and curled her fingers over its lip and then pulled herself up with a grunt, her soles skittering on the stonework below. It was something of a strain and her arms trembled with the effort, but as long as she held her grip she could see through the bars.

In the cell next door, there was a man wearing nothing but his undershorts. Just sitting there in the middle of the floor, with his legs folded, picking his teeth with a rockroach leg. Lean and muscular with an unkempt thatch of blond hair, many might have confused him with some debonair lord or playboy type, but she knew that nothing could actually be further from the truth.

Kali dropped back down, shook her head, took a breath, then heaved herself back up, unable to believe it.

The man looked up.

"Hello, Kali," he said.

Kali stared.

"'Liam," she said slowly and dubiously, in response.

"How are you doing?" he said, as casually as if they had bumped into each other on Freiport high street.

Kali's voice quavered with the strain of hanging on. "Ohhhh, you know…"

"Yeah."

"You?"

"Oh, fine, just fine."

There was a pause.

"So…"

"So…"

"Here we are."

"Yep. Here we are."

Kali dropped down again, and blinked. She knew full well what she had just seen but she couldn't shake herself of the conviction that it was impossible. The last time she had seen Killiam Slowhand — she slammed her eyes shut with a cringe, blanking out the details — had been on the Sarcre Islands, and that had been over two years earlier. After that night, he had seemingly vanished off the face of Twilight.

That night, she thought again.

Anger bubbled inside her, and she clambered back up, yelping as she saw Slowhand directly in front of her, working away at the grille to loosen it. "What the hells are you doing here, Slowhand? Come to rescue me again?"

"Nope."

"Stop grinning at me inanely."

"Can't help it. But it's still nope."

Kali gestured through the grille, indicating his cell, or rather his imprisonment therein. "Why are you here, then? It is me, I know it is — you heard I'd been taken by the Faith so got yourself taken to give me a helping hand!"

"You are unbelievable," Slowhand said, continuing to work at the metal. "Hooper, believe it or not some of the time I don't think about you at all."

"I'm hurt. Also vastly relieved." Kali's eyes narrowed. "So what the hells are you doing here? Don't tell me the great Killiam Slowhand was bettered by the Final Faith?"

"I have them where they want me. I mean, they have me where I… Oh hells, never mind."

"You were, weren't you! They caught you!"

"On purpose, all right?"

"What? Why in the gods' names would you want to do that?"

Slowhand sighed heavily. "Because I wanted to look around. See what really goes on behind the scenes with the Final Faith."

"From one of their cells?"

"Nooooo, not from one of their cells." He shrugged. "Well, not in the way you mean, anyway. Stand back."

Slowhand punched the grille out of its mounting and Kali instinctively caught it with an oof before it could clang to the floor. Damn, she thought, we still make a team whether I like it or not.

But this was still going a little fast for her. She had no idea what was going on.

"Okaaay," she said. "So, what's that achieved? No, wait, don't tell me — you're going to escape from your cell into mine. Brilliant!"

"I see the wit hasn't deserted you," Slowhand said, wearily. "No, Hooper — it's the other way round. You're going to escape from your cell into mine."

"What?" Kali let the information sink in. "O-hoh, no, no, no," she replied forcefully, looking at herself still in the vest and pants in which she'd awoken upstairs. "If you think you're going to get me in a six foot square cell while we're both wearing nothing but our knickers you've another think coming. This isn't — "

"Because the way out is in my cell."

Kali stopped. She had to admit that had nonplussed her.

"You have a way out?"

Slowhand grinned broadly. "A-ha. Or, to be more accurate, have had a way out for the last week and a half I've been here. I've had to time it with the guard patrols, of course, but, an hour here, an hour there, it's allowed me to have a pretty good look around. Enough, in fact, to make tonight time to go. The escape route's a… little problematic but even in your state you should be able to manage it. So… excellent timing."

Her state, Kali thought. The odd thing was, she had already begun to wonder what her state was. She felt much better than she had when she'd first been dumped in the cell, better, in fact, than anyone who'd endured what she had had any right to feel. She had been here — what? — well, the truth was she didn't know — but surely not that long, and she already felt more than well on the road to recovery. She was tempted to look beneath her bandages but now wasn't really the time. Things had turned strange enough already.

"One tiny problem with your master plan," Kali said. "I'll never squeeze through that hole."

"Course you will. From what I've seen you've lost quite a bit of weight lately."

"Excuse me? Are you saying I was fat?"

"No! Great gods and pits of Kerberos, no. It's just that — well, you seem to have lost a bit of the puppy fat you had. You seem a lot more… lithe."

"Lithe?" Kali repeated. She thought again of her recovery. "Yes, well, I do seem to have developed something of a faster metabolism these days…"

"There you go, then," Slowhand said. He winked. "Besides, if nothing else it'll be fun to watch."

"Fun to watch," Kali repeated. "Wait a minute. Killiam Slowhand, have you been watching me in my cell? Lying here in a dungeon, in my underwear?"

Slowhand threw his hands in the air. "Of course I have, woman! Who wouldn't? No, I mean, how else was I to know you were there? And I–I wanted to know you were all ri — " He stopped suddenly, changed the subject. "Hey, if you're worried about getting through the grille, why don't you smear yourself with oil?"

"I don't have any oil."

"Damn! I'll just do my best to imagine it, then."

"Slowhand…"

"Fine, fine. Okay, look. The guards are going to change shift in fifteen minutes so if you're going to do this, Hooper, do it now. Or I leave you here."

Kali let out an exasperated growl and leapt for the opening, pulling herself up and then forwards on her stomach, her hands gripping the lip of the gap on Slowhand's side. It was a tight squeeze, but with a helping hand from Slowhand she made it through, flipping unsteadily into his cell and then, involuntarily, into his arms.