Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

There was some kind of junkyard jammed between the backs of four surrounding tenements, accessed through a covered passage between two of them. A tilting, half-chained sign declared it to be the business premises of one Poombar Blossom, Importer and Exporter of Exotica. And sure enough, the yard was piled high with exotica — if, that was, one considered rusted hunks of metal, old beds and broken cartwheels to be the mysterious produce of distant lands.

A ramshackle bank of three stables suggested that Poombar ran a little sideline in horse trading but, it seemed, his definition of what constituted a horse was about as accurate as his definition of the exotic. Only two of the stables were filled and then just barely, two emaciated nags who looked as if they'd snap in two if mounted chewing half-heartedly on carrots that were, themselves, thin and knackered. One of the horses — Flash, according to a sign on his stable — wheezed so badly that Kali suspected he'd drop dead at the merest mention of the word gallop. Dammit, she thought, this has been a complete waste of time.

She was about to drop back down from the fence when three things happened. Firstly, two men exited a shed that she presumed served as some kind of office and walked towards what looked like a tackroom near the stables themselves, apparently doing business. Secondly, something in the tackroom didn't like the sound of their approach, and suddenly the ramshackle structure all but exploded, every panel, including the roof, crashing outwards and upwards, shook by violent impacts from within. Thirdly, Flash and his mate reared in panic, snorting so badly that they hyperventilated and, with two loud thuds, fainted to the stable floors.

Kali guessed that, whatever was being kept in the tackroom, it was not a fellow horse. And when a moment later its door was opened and she heard a rattling rumble from within, she knew it for sure. She smiled, because if she was right about what she'd heard then these stables might indeed provide her with a mount, as it appeared that Poombar Blossom dealt in exotica after all.

She leapt the fence and crept into the yard, hiding behind a pile of junk opposite where the men now stood. Through the open door of the tackroom she could now see its inhabitant as well as hear the exchange of the two men attempting to calm it.

"Easy, easy," the rotund thing that must have been Blossom said, and somewhat surprisingly the beast quietened. "There — ya see what I mean?"

"Bloody 'ells, you wasn't kiddin'. Where'dya find this fing?"

"Drakengrat Mountains. Came out o' nowhere an' got caught in the sweepnets o' the roob 'erders. Crippled five of 'em afore they managed to rope it. Me bro' didn't know what else to do so brought it to me."

"Bloody 'ell, Blossom. You know what it is?"

"Not a clue. You?"

"I've never seen anything like it in my life."

"You've never seen anything like it?"

"Never seen anything like it in my life."

"Make a nice addition to your menagerie, eh? Fifty full silver an' it's yours."

"You're 'aving a larf. Twenty."

"Forty."

The two men might never have seen anything like it, but Kali had. Seen and heard, once, and from a distance. And she would, in fact, be doing the man who was currently offering thirty full silver a very big favour by taking it off his hands. Slowhand, unfortunately, had left her nowhere near enough money to join in the bidding and that left her only one way of acquiring it. She debated some distraction to draw the two men away — even contemplated clobbering them both with a rusty horseshoe that lay on the muddy ground — but Blossom was clearly eager to sell the only sellable thing he had and the bartering was over before she knew it. Conveniently for her, part of the price was a tankard in the local tavern and, as the men departed wiping spit-slimed hands, she suddenly found that she had the now quiet junkyard to herself.

At least briefly. One second she could hear Flash's comatose wheezing and the next it seemed that she had somehow timeslipped back to the Great War and Scholten was again being blitzed by elemental bombs. The noise and the thudding made her pause for a moment, until she realised its cause. The tavern nearby — the one where Blossom had taken his punter to seal the deal — was the Knotted Noose, and the Knotted Noose was the home of the Hells' Bellies. Kali imagined the scene and cringed — the only tavern that sober people avoided bursting to life as customers entered its doors, its resident dance troupe dropping their pies and pounding gleefully to the stage to entertain the audience they never had. Great gods, she could hear the cannon-like snapping of their garters now…

The horror that was within the Knotted Noose would, however, work to her advantage, as Kali suspected that in the next few minutes she would be making rather a lot of noise of her own. Because breaking in a bamfcat was going to be far from easy.

A real live bamfcat, she thought. No one had ever got near one before, and whatever turn of events had led to this specimen being caught in the herders' nets was a fluke indeed. Bamfcats were found nowhere on the peninsula other than around the higher slopes of the Drakengrat Mountains, but the sheer incongruity of their presence there, together with their utter difference to the other indigenous species, had before now led her to wonder whether they were native to those mountains at all. Had someone or something brought them from elsewhere at some point in the past? Or had they, for some reason, migrated themselves? And if so, from where?

Wherever it was, they had evidently needed protection there. Approximately one and a half times the size of a normal horse, the bamfcat resembled such a beast in all but one very important respect — it was heavily armoured. It didn't wear armour, it was just the way it was built. Great plates of a glistening black shell-like material curved around its flanks, haunches, back and shoulders, and where the plates did not cover, on its legs and those parts of its body that needed flexibility, its hide was composed of a shiny, hard and knobbly substance that Kali could only equate to dried and bubbled tar. But as its defences went, that was not all. On the rear of its legs, all the way up the crest of its neck and down along its nose, the bamfcat grew sharp protrusions that were and were not quite horns, by the look of their slightly layered appearance retractable or extendable as a situation might demand. One thing was sure, it would win no beauty contests, despite its big green eyes.

"Easy, boy," Kali said as she eased into the shed to undo the beast's tethers. "Or should that be girl?"

There was a low, rattling rumble of indeterminate response. It would have to do as an answer because there was no way Kali was going to check. Slowly — very slowly — she eased it out of the tackroom into the yard, whispering in its ear, "Tell you what, why don't I call you boygirl? And boygirl, guess what? We're going for a little ride…"

Her statement was a little premature she knew because, before she could ride anywhere, she had two practicalities to overcome. The first was that there was no way any ordinary saddle was going to fit this thing, but she solved that by plucking two from the tackroom wall, slinging one above and below and using both sets of straps to circle the bamfcat's girth before cutting the main parts of the lower saddle away. The second was a matter of height — it would take a ladder to climb on the bamfcat's back — but that solved itself when she realised that she already had a ladder — the bamfcat itself.

Kali took a deep breath, muttered more soothing words to the beast and then ran up the horns on its legs. Throwing herself onto its back, she immediately grabbed another horn on its neck — the closest thing she had to reins.