Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

Ogur.

And as she realised she was kneeling in the middle of their dining room, they sure as hells scared her now.

Despite her fear, Kali moved to protect the old man but he held her where she was. "Don't," he told her. "They won't attack." He looked up as one of them took a tentative step towards Kali but then retreated when, much to her surprise, the old man barked at it in some unknown tongue. "At least," he finished wearily, "while I'm alive."

"You can control them?" Kali said, and remembered his words on his doorstep in Gargas, what seemed an age ago. "Don't tell me — this is your tale for another time."

Moon nodded, winced in pain. "I'd come here in search of Herrick's Passage — a tunnel said to pass under the mountains — but an avalanche meant I never found it. What I found was one of these ogur trapped beneath the ice, and I helped it."

"You're telling me one of these things was grateful?"

Moon half-laughed, half-choked. "Grateful? No. Had it not been so weak, it would have torn me apart. Which is why I shared with it the contents of my backpack."

"A quarrel of crossbow bolts, I hope."

"Eight bottles of flummox."

Kali stared at the old man dubiously. "Are you telling me you got an ogur pissed?"

Moon coughed. "Drank him under the table. But he wasn't used to the stuff. The point is, theirs is an alpha society and after that I was treated with a little more respect."

Kali laughed, but it was strained, redolent of a joke shared for the last time. Of all the tales the old man had told her over the years, she was never sure which he exaggerated, but clearly something had happened for the ogur to defer to him as they did. Something that had made him feel confident enough to lose the key in the lower depths of their cave, where it could never be reached.

In the odd way that these things did, it suddenly occurred to her to ask him why, now that he'd confessed to drinking flummox, he insisted on serving her that atrocious elven wine. She wanted to ask him many things, actually, but as the old man coughed again she realised there was no more time.

There had to be something she could do!

She dug in her saddlebag for something, anything to help, but as she did Moon placed his hand on hers, just as he had in the Warty Witch so long ago. The message now was as clear as it had been then — put your hand down.

"It's too late," Moon said, coughing. "What's important is the key. You have to get the key. But you also have to know what it is you're dealing with."

"Merrit, at least let me — " Kali began, but as she spoke thought: At least let me what?

"Listen to me, young lady." Moon insisted. "I don't know everything about the key, but I haven't told you everything I know. Snippets from across the years. The key you took is one of four, part of a set that unlocks something that should never see the light of day again. Something evil — so evil it is warned against time and time again in Old Race manuscripts written by a hundred different hands."

"What?"

Moon coughed again. "I never found out precisely. If I had I would have done everything in my power to find and destroy it — what the manuscripts refer to repeatedly as an abomination." He paused. "What I do know is that it almost finished the Old Races, wreaked so much death and destruction amongst them that these bitter enemies forged their first alliance in order that they might end its threat."

"But you must have some idea what it is."

Moon nodded. "Oh, yes. Some tales describe it as a kind of giant construct — a supposed marvel of dwarven engineering that became instead a horror — a complex automaton called the Clockwork King of Orl."

"The Clockwork King of Orl?" Kali repeated. "What in the hells do you suppose it does — is meant to do?"

"The important question is what the Final Faith think it can do for them. If I know those zealots, their intent will be to use the king as a figurehead, a rallying icon for the spread of their church across Twilight. But if the old warnings are even half-truths, the people of Twilight will not be rallied, they will be destroyed."

Kali frowned. "I don't understand. This alliance. If they wanted the king stopped, if it was so dangerous, why not just destroy the thing, or at least destroy the keys?"

Moon sighed. "The king itself, I don't know — perhaps they kept it as a reminder of their folly. The keys, however… in the aftermath, when it came to it, neither side trusted the other in the matter of disposal. Even when both parties were present each suspected that magic might deceive the eye, that secretly one or other party would keep the keys for themselves. They decided instead that they should be sealed away, watched, protected by lethal countermeasures that would ensure no one could get their hands on them again."

"The Spiral of Kos," Kali breathed.

"And three similar containment areas. They each built two sites — two dwarven and two elven — and manned them with mixed representatives of their races." There was no blame in Moon's eyes when he added: "Kali, you have no idea what it is that you've unleashed."

"I'm beginning to get the picture." She bit her lip. "Merrit, please, what can I do?"

"If the Final Faith are going after the keys, you have to find them first, make them inaccessible, hide them, destroy them if you have to. If you cannot, then you must discover the location of Orl, destroy the Clockwork King before the Faith reach it."

"But I've no idea where to start!"

"Go to Andon, to the Three Towers, its Forbidden Archive. There are papers within that will tell you more than I know. They will be difficult to get to, Kali — they are protected — but you must reach them, find out what you can. And when you have, when you know what there is to do, you must do it. Make sure the Clockwork King is not reawoken, any way you can."

Kali felt somewhat daunted by her burgeoning responsibility. "Old man, I'm just a… tomb raider."

Moon slid his hand onto hers, visibly worsening. "No," he said, weakly, "you're not. There's something else you need to know. The night you were found as a baby, by the stranger — "

Kali stroked his hand. "It was you, old man. I know. I saw you when Fitch played with my mind. You and me in the Old Race site…"

Moon raised his eyes, surprised, then coughed, and this time there was blood. "Hells of a time for a reunion."

"Hells of a time," Kali nodded, sniffed. "Merrit, I — "

"Don't you dare hug me when I'm down, young lady," Moon warned, though after a second he, too, smiled. "Kali, please listen. You were my greatest ever discovery, believe that. You should know that I love you like a daughter. But that it was me who found you isn't what I was going to say. You have to know about the site itself."

"What? What about the site?"

Moon didn't answer directly. "There are things happening to you, aren't there? I can feel the changes, see it in the way you move, sense it in your aura. You are more than you were. It's what I always knew, right from the start — that you're somehow different."

"Different?"

"The site where I found you wasn't like the others, Kali. It was uncompromised."

"What? What do you mean uncompromised?"

"You know what I mean. Nobody had been in or out in over a thousand years. It was completely sealed."

Kali stared at him for a moment, speechless.

"It couldn't have been," she said at last. "I mean, how did I get in there? What would that mean?"

"I don't know what it means. Only that it marks you out amongst the people on the peninsula — makes you different from them — and that is something you must remember at all times."

"But what — "

Merrit held up his hand, looked around at the gathered ogur. He was suddenly racked by a spasming cough, and sprayed more blood into his palm. "No more questions," he said. "You have to go — now."