Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

Kali didn't question how the bamfcat did what it did or how it fuelled itself, however, because it got her where she needed to be and faster than she would have dreamt possible. But with Munch having had such a head start, they still had a lot of ground to make up. Thankfully, the journey so far had been the easy part, and the hard part was yet to come — and with some luck it would slow the bastard down. Kali looked up as they began to near the mountains, and felt the same sense of awe and insignificance that she always did when she came within riding distance of the range. Yes, if anything was going to slow Munch down, the mountains would.

Accessible only at the southern tip of the Sardenne Forest, the World's Ridge Mountains loomed massively ahead and above of her, a forbidding wall of rock that in places seemed to reach higher than the sky. Not just rock, either — the lower peaks of the range were dotted with live volcanic craters that belched lava onto their tortuous slopes, while the upper peaks were sheer faces of ice, glistening white in stark contrast to the orangey-reds of the fires below. Where the two met, and clashed, great steaming geysers blasted upwards, periodically disintegrating the ice and causing it and the rock behind to crumble and fall, the avalanches creating a roar that seemed to be that of the mountains themselves. No one knew what lay beyond the World's Ridge, and if anyone had ever attempted to traverse it, they had not returned. Like the Sardenne Forest, it was a barrier to the inhabitants of the peninsula, but in this case one that daunted even Kali, and she wondered, on occasion, whether there was anything to be made of the fact that the barrier was composed of earth, air, fire and water — the four elements themselves.

They reached the lower slopes, and the bamfcat slowed as it began to climb. It sniffed at her and then at the air, apparently picking up a human scent, and so Kali allowed the animal to lead her, negotiating gorges, precarious trails and natural rock bridges over bubbling streams and billowing pools, hot from the mountains' insides.

At least for part of the way. During the past few days, the bamfcat, apart from being inexhaustible, had manifested an absolute absence of reluctance to do anything it was asked, but after almost a day and a half climbing beyond the foothills there came a point which even the bamfcat would not go further. As she watched the beast's nostrils flaring, Kali suspected why. Wafted down to them from the higher slopes on the occasional blast of bitter, whistling wind, came a stench that could only belong to whatever denizens called these mountains home. The stench was utterly feral, bestial, so strong it was almost sickening. Of all the sights, sounds and smells that they had encountered on their journey, Kali didn't know why this, of all things, should unnerve the bamfcat, but perhaps the inhabitants it sensed were its racial enemy, or perhaps even its natural predator in the place from where it had originally come. She wondered whether the beast that had become her new companion hailed originally not from the Drakengrats but from these mountains — or even beyond.

But that was a question for another time. For now it didn't really matter because the animal had served her well — had got her here when no other beast possibly could — and she had no right to push it any further against its will, even if such an act would be physically possible.

Kali found a suitable spot and dismounted, stripped the bamfcat of its saddle and then slapped the beast on its flanks.

It didn't go anywhere.

"What?" Kali said. "Don't tell me you're going to wait for me?"

The bamfcat flipped out its tongue, perhaps searching in vain for worgles, then hung its head, saying nothing.

"You're not going to be here when I get back, and we both know it. So go."

The bamfcat snorted and lifted its head to stare dolefully at her. There was a certain insanity its eyes that she found disturbingly familiar — and quite comforting.

"Okay, fine!" Kali relented. "Stay there — but something further up has obviously given you the spooks so don't try to follow me, okay?"

Kali left the saddle but flung the saddlebags over her shoulder. She started to climb, hesitated, then turned and patted the beast three times on its neck. "I'll… see you when I get back," she said.

She continued on alone, the foothills behind her, the true slopes of the World's Ridge rising precipitously before her. Snow covered the ground at her feet in increasingly larger and thicker patches, but here and there pools and rivulets of lava broke through the rocks and stained the whiteness, making it seem as if the jagged landscape was slowly haemorrhaging. She climbed higher and, despite the lava, the temperature dropped considerably, and while she had been too intent on getting here to feel the cold until now, Kali was forced to dig into Blossom's saddlebag for an extra layer of clothing, pulling out a ragged fur coat that looked as if it had seen too many trapping expeditions. That, or its donor had been trapped on a particularly bad hair day. She slung it on. The thing stank to the high heavens but did the job.

In the absence of the bamfcat, Kali had to rely on her own tracking skills to keep on Merrit Moon's trail, secure in the knowledge that as no one dared venture far up into these mountains the signs of passage indicated by dislodged rocks, broken branches and disturbed patches of scree — eliminating those caused by whichever wild animals lived on the mid-slopes — were most likely his. It was possible that as humans were such rare visitors to these heights, those same wild animals were wary of approaching for fear of their place in the food chain, and for the most part Kali managed to avoid encounters with local predators, driving off the odd pack of shnarls or curious bugbear with a wave of her knife and suitable warning noises. Only once did she pause warily, when from far above she heard the haunting echo of what sounded like prolonged screams. They, though, could equally have been the carrion calls of the strange birds that circled high above. In this place, it was difficult to tell.

Birds or not, Kali picked up her pace. Thankfully, tracking the old man became even easier when, after a further three hours' climb, she came across convergent tracks coming in by a different route, vaguely to the west. Seven people, six men and the smaller, slightly lighter tread of a woman — and horses — heavily equipped. It did not take her long to work out who they might be. Munch was probably using one or more shadowmages to track Merrit Moon, and, despite her fears for him, for once she was grateful for the presence of threadweavers as from there on in their talents resulted in the old man's trail being overlaid by the footprints of his pursuers, making it as obvious to follow as a flaming torch in the dark.

A flaming torch would have been something she'd have been very grateful for at that moment, because Kali was approaching the ice-slopes now, the snow that had become thick beneath her tread taking on the greater solidity of permafrost. A blizzard had begun to howl about her, too, and she huddled inside her furs as she tramped ever upwards, squinting to see past the needle-like flurries that threatened to white-out everything before her. Then, suddenly, she spotted something in a rockface ahead — the dark and variously shaped outlines of what could only be cave mouths. What was more, the trails of the old man and his pursuers — plain on the slight plateau that led to the caves — vanished right into one of them.

Kali's heart thudded and she hurried forwards, relief that she had at last caught up with the old man tempered by the worry that Munch's trail appeared to be only minutes behind his, and she hoped to the gods that she wasn't too late. But she had only taken a couple of paces when her foot crunched on something on the ground, and what she saw when she looked down made her momentarily pause.