Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

"Like, erm…"

"No! Not like 'erm'."

Slowhand nodded vigorously, swallowed. "Fine. Fine."

Kali jammed her hands on her hips, regretting even that tiniest of movements when the walkway shifted beneath her and slapped against the side of the steeple, creaking loudly. "Look. Do you have a clue what you're doing up here, or not?"

Slowhand took a moment to reply. He was inching away from her along the precarious platform, his palms pressed against the side of the steeple, presumably for stability against the worst gusts of wind. "Hooper," he shouted back, "have I ever let you down?"

"Yes."

"I mean apart from the Sarcre Islands."

"Slowhand, those things almost had me stuffed. And yes, apart from the Sarcre Islands."

"Okay. Right. But let's get this straight. You have never, have you, actually come to any… permanent harm."

Rain suddenly began to hammer the walkway, soaking the two of them instantly. Standing there in her vest and pants, and from beneath dripping, slicked-down hair, Kali stared hard and ground her teeth. "Nooooo…"

"And that's because," Slowhand shouted slowly, "I always plan ahead."

He plucked a cloth-wrapped bundle seemingly by magic from the steeple's side, and Kali realised he hadn't been pressing his palms there for stability but searching for a hidey-hole. From the shape of the bundle, it contained one of the weapons that had once been Slowhand's tools of the trade.

"You hid a longbow up here? Why on Twilight would you do that?"

Slowhand stripped away the cloth, hefted the impressively sized crescent and pursed his lips. "The amount of anti-Makennon rhetoric I've been spouting of late, I knew it wasn't going to be long before she sent her goons to have a word. I just thought of every eventuality."

"Actually, I meant what use is a bow up here? What are you planning to do — spear a cloud for us to ride away on?"

"Oh, funny," Slowhand said. Acting quickly, he pulled a coil of thin rope from the same hidey-hole and attached one end to an arrow, the other to one of the more secure parts of the walkway. The coil certainly looked long enough to be able reach a cloud.

Slowhand squinted down at distant buildings, eyeing a trajectory, then aimed the bow high into the air.

"What the hells are you doing?"

Slowhand ignored a louder banging on the hatch. It sounded as if the guards were almost through. "Little idea I came up with. Call it a death slide."

"Nice," Kali said, and then put two and two together. "Hold on — you're going to fire that rope at a building down there and expect us to slide down it?"

"Nope. Building's no good — from this height you'd slam right through the wall. Need to hit somewhere open, target it through a ring."

"A ring?"

"Okay, a big, iron ring," Slowhand admitted. "One I tied between the Whine Rack and Ma Polly's, actually." He pulled back on the bow and winked. "There's a pack of supplies down there and a stables nearby so you should be able to find a horse to get you out of the city. Clever little bugger, eh?"

Kali said nothing. She couldn't even make out the places he talked about. She knew Slowhand was good — very good — but to make the shot he planned over such a distance, at such a target, and in this weather? Impossible.

Then Slowhand reminded her why he had gained the sobriquet Slowhand.

In the space of a second her ex-lover seemed to shut the world away. The wind and the rain and the hammering and the shouts seemed no longer to matter to the man at all, and an aura of great calm enveloped him, as if he lived now in a universe entirely his own. Gone was the happy-go-lucky troubadour he had styled himself as of late, and back was the famed archer who for what had seemed like an eternity had tested the hearts of the men he had fought beside at the Battle of Andon eight years before, during the Great War between Vos and Pontaine. Kali had heard the story told in a hundred of Andon's taverns, how their forces were in danger of being overwhelmed — were being overwhelmed — and Slowhand had stayed his hand as his comrades had clamoured at him to loose his arrow and take one more of the invading bastards down. But Slowhand had waited — even as enemy swords and axes had cut and sliced about him, he had waited — because he had chosen his target and would not fire until he knew his aim was true. Finally his arrow flew. Just one arrow across the length of a battlefield that was sheer chaos — through the flailing, bloodied forms of a thousand battling warriors and their dense sprays of blood — unerringly on until it found its home in the forehead of John Garrison, the commanding enemy general. One arrow into one man, but a man on whose survival the morale of the enemy depended. With his death, Slowhand bought Andon's forces the time they needed to gather strength, and the tide of that battle had been turned.

Slowhand let fly. His arrow sang into the sky then arched downwards. He must have calculated its flight perfectly because seconds later the rope it carried with it ran taut.

"After you," Kali said.

Slowhand stared at her, hesitated. "There's just one thing. I'm not going."

"What?"

"There's no time for two runs," he said, looking towards the hatch. "And in this weather it's too dangerous to risk the rope to two."

"I see. But you expect me — "

"Listen to me. I saw how you handled yourself during our escape, your reflexes, your speed — what you could do. There's something different about you, something changing… something better." He tested the tension in the rope that stretched out into the night sky, wiping the moisture from it on his tunic. "I knew it when I came up here. To be honest, in these conditions I don't know if I can make this slide, Hooper. But I know you can."

"I'm not just going to abandon you here."

"Call it payback for the Sarcre Islands."

Kali faltered. Was this Slowhand being serious?

"Use the bow," he said, quickly stripping it of its string then handing it to her, nodding in reassurance. "It'll hold. Go, Kali. Find your friend. Now."

Kali knew there was no other choice, not if she was going to save Merrit Moon. Even if that meant not only abandoning Slowhand, but abandoning him defenceless. She slung the stringless bow over the wire and pulled down until it became a horseshoe, gripping either end as tightly as she could. Then she felt Slowhand's hand in the small of her back, for a second almost tenderly.

"Enjoy the ride," he said. And as he spoke, Kali heard the door to the walkway crash open.

Kali looked down and let her body go loose. "Slowhand, I'll be seeing you again. I'll be — "

Slowhand slapped her off the walkway.

"Bye bye."

Kali gasped, the sky taking her as swiftly and as powerfully as if she had been snatched by a dragon's claw, and though those legendary creatures were now long extinct, she felt for a second what it would have been like to be taken thus. She appreciated also just how powerful they must have been to survive at the heights they had flown, for what she had stepped into was a maelstrom.

Every one of her senses was immediately and utterly overwhelmed as she dropped and the deathslide took her weight, her eyes and ears and flesh battered by the elements, blinding and deafening and, on her skin, as agonising as being slapped by open palms. No one before had been exposed to the heavens at this height — no one had seen Scholten from this unique perspective — but Kali had no opportunity or desire to appreciate the scenery, busy as she was shivering in her underwear and simply clinging on for dear life.

Slowhand's bow slid down the rope with a noise like some large insect, a deep zuzzz that made the muscles in Kali's arms flutter as if tickled but at the same pierced them through with pain, making even her teeth ache. The curve of the bow slick with the rain that pelted down, it was difficult enough to hang on without the added hazard of the wind that threatened to dislodge her with every passing second but, roaring with the effort of keeping her grip, she managed. At one point she even managed to twist her neck to look back towards the roof of the cathedral, but when she did wished she hadn't. The guards that had appeared on the rooftop had moved across and reached Slowhand, and as Kali watched the resultant scuffle she thought that she saw the troubadour go down at the point of a knife and tumble screaming from the steeple. And there was nothing she could do about it. Nothing.