Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

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 their 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.

"So," Slowhand shouted casually above the winds that roared and buffeted here, taking a moment to sweep back his hair, "you're a tomb raider these days?"

Kali steadied herself on the swaying wood, positioning her feet with great care. Through a triangular gap between two planks she could see the toy-like rooftop of a Scholten steam factory belching a tiny plume of white fog in her direction. It was indeed a long way down. "A-ha."