Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

She continued her inexorable descent, her momentum gaining, and with it the wind resistance against her. Her arms were now corded with the effort of gripping the bow but her increasing speed meant that the length of time before she reached safety was lessening dramatically with every yard she slid. The rooftops of Scholten were coming at her as blurs now, and above the roar of the wind and rain she could actually begin to hear the noises of the city and its people below. Soon she would be on the ground and be able to lose herself in their ranks. Soon she would be safe.

Suddenly, though, something felt different.

There was a lack of tension in the slide.

There could be only one explanation for that, and Kali felt a hard knot of fear in her gut.

Because she was still far from the ground. Far too far to survive the fall she was plummeting into now that the rope had been cut.

Kali estimated she was seventy or so feet from the rooftops, no longer hurtling towards Killiam's ring but dropping back and down, her forward momentum cancelled out by the sudden loss of tension in the slide. Letting go of the bow — a surprise present or a sore head for someone below — her hands flailed for the whipping rope, hoping to use it as a swing to at least get her closer to the ground, but her greater weight had already caused her to fall from its reach, and the lifeline was snatched away into the darkness, signalling its departure by momentarily blinding her with a few heavy drops of rain that had clung to the hemp. There was nothing now that would slow her descent — nothing, of course, but the impact that would inevitably come — and she plummeted towards Scholten like a rejected soul from Kerberos, spat back to Twilight on this dark and stormy night.

It was the Spiral of Kos all over again, only a hells of a lot worse. There, at least, the bones of the brackan had softened her landing, but here there was nothing between her and the hard stone streets except a packed and undulant layer of the city's jagged and sharply angular rooftops, all bedecked with a collection of chimneystacks, guttering and assorted pointy protrusions that from Kali's unique perspective seemed to have been cruelly designed to bounce her back and forth and shatter all of her bones before the ultimate pleasure she had to come.

She was, as Slowhand might have put it, stuffed. Actually going to die. The realisation brought with it a peculiar calm, and as time seemed to slow around her — prolonging her fall until it became almost dreamlike, relaxing even — Kali reflected that at least for this imminent demise no blame could be attached to the archer, for he had done all that he possibly could do to help her. Fine, she was still having problems getting her head around the fact that the bloody man could actually be so selfless, but the one thing she could not deny was that on the walkway he had bought her a little more time, by the look of things sacrificing his own life to give her a few more seconds on the slide. She wished — though very much doubted — that she was wrong about what she had seen, hoping for a second that even Katherine Makennon would not sanction cold-blooded murder on her holy premises, but then she remembered the way Makennon had left her to Munch, and immediately thought otherwise.

Munch. A memory of the courtyard outside the Flagons again flashed into her mind, the blood-soaked picture turning even redder with suddenly returned rage. Horse and now Slowhand, she thought — with Merrit Moon, a man who had never harmed and would never dream of harming anyone in his life, hunted down as well. Makennon and her murderous damned lackey seemed intent not only on ruining her life but of stripping it of everything she held dear.

Well, she wasn't going to let them do that.

No more, damn them both.

No pitsing more!

Kali's awareness of her immediate predicament returned to her, suddenly and vitally, but also differently than before, as if every one of her senses had burst into greater life. Though she still fell in the same slow and almost dreamlike way, every facet of what was around her and, more importantly, rapidly looming beneath her, seemed more distinct, the wind, rain and approaching rooftops separate parts of a jigsaw that she suddenly thought she could piece together in order to survive.

There was just one problem. There didn't seem to be time to open the box the jigsaw came in.

Time returned to normal and Kali dropped, the air above Scholten buffeting her as it whistled past at an ever-increasing rate. But then, instinctively, she turned in the updraught, angling and stiffening her body so that it sliced rather than fell through the firmament, causing her to nosedive towards — and at the same sloping angle as — the nearest and highest roof. The manoeuvre felt like suicide, and she herself figured that it very probably was, but some newly awakened part of her also figured that as reaching the ground was an inevitable given, why not do it in her own way, and in whatever style she could muster?

Hells. What did she have to lose?

The first roof came at her a split-second later, granted the honour of being the first to welcome her to town by the fact it appeared to cover the home of someone rich, building upwards rather than outwards in the cramped streets until the property was five storeys high. The tiles that coated it were a further sign of the owner's affluence, expensive redslate, and recently replaced or repaired. Sadly, whoever lived beneath them would have to give the slate quarry another visit.

Kali relaxed her body as she slammed into the roof, but the impact still sent jarring waves of agony through her and winded her severely, her loud explosion of breath drowning out the sound of shattering tiles as well as splintering timbers as the roof beneath them buckled to accommodate her form. From below came a screech of alarm and the sound of a shattering pot — perhaps some servant in the attic — but Kali could only apologise in passing as it soon became obvious she wasn't staying there for long. Loose tiles skittered down the roof before her, and she with them, sliding forwards on her front, hands clawing at gaps in an attempt to slow her descent towards the lip of the roof, but one that was to little avail. Her momentum uncontrollable, she skidded down, tiles snagging at her vest and pants and scraping her skin so that she felt as if she'd been thrown onto some giant cheese grater, the rough surface threatening to do her more damage than the impact itself. Grunting, she rolled onto her back as she slid but then realised she was heading towards the edge of the roof backwards and upside down, which was no good at all. She quickly flung her legs around at the hips, performing a kind of half-turn, half-roll manoeuvre that righted her so that she now slid feet first and on her behind, but with only a second to spare before she reached the roof's edge.

A hazardous rain of broken tiles and mortaring preceded her over the lip and tumbled towards the street below, soliciting another cry of alarm, and then Kali felt the soles of her feet slam into the iron guttering that lined the lip of the roof, the bolts holding it there loosening from the stonework with her impact. She didn't attempt to halt her descent as she was still sliding far too fast and the impact would have flipped her over and sent her flailing towards the street herself, so instead she used the disintegrating guttering to her advantage. She quickly scanned the buildings opposite, their roofs perhaps fifteen feet away and a storey or so below and, calculating the way the guttering was breaking, chose her target, the chimneystack-crowded roof of a seedy-looking boarding house called Dorweazle's. As the bolts on the guttering sheared Kali dug in her heels and — arms outstretched for balance — stood and rode it as it came away from the roof, using it and the drainpipe it served as a giant stilt to stride the gap between buildings.