Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

"Old man, I'm not just leaving you like thi — "

Moon grabbed her hand, squeezed it tenderly. "Kali, go. I am dying and there is nothing you can do, and as soon as the ogur sense I have passed they will tear you apart. You have to get out of here before I die."

"I can't do that!"

"You must, young lady." Moon was struck by another fit of coughing and then laid his head back with a sigh, his hand weak around hers. Kali choked back a sob. Dammit, she had to give him a hug whether he liked it or not.

She leaned in — gently, so as not to hurt him — and, as she did, her hand brushed an amulet resting on his chest. She could have sworn it was glowing slightly. She went to touch it but her hand was unexpectedly swatted away.

"No!" Moon shouted with surprising vehemence for a man on his deathbed. "It's too… near the time."

"Merrit, what — ?"

He actually glared at her. The old man actually glared.

"Go, Kali, now," Moon shouted. And then, more weakly: "Go now… and don't… look ba — "

Kali knelt there a second longer, stirring only as a series of grunts from the ogur signalled what she wouldn't, couldn't believe — that Merrit Moon was gone. Keeping her eyes fixed on the creatures she backed slowly away, settling the old man gently to the ground as she went. Then, with a final look at her mentor's body, she raced towards the cave mouth and safety.

She did not see the blue glow that suddenly suffused the cave behind her.

Kali had seen more than enough death in recent days and had no desire to be reminded of it — but in approaching Andon she had little choice.

It was here that Killiam Slowhand had killed John Garrison, but he had been only one warrior amongst thousands, and the fields around the city still bore the scars of the pivotal battle they had fought. Andon had been besieged for almost two years while Pontaine's army had grown strong enough to repel the enemy, driving them back across the land that had become known as the Killing Ground. Such protracted and bloody engagements were not erased easily from a landscape, and the Killing Ground was littered still with half-buried skeletons uncovered by driving rain, the remains of defensive and offensive trench systems, and rotting and ruined engines of war. It was a ghastly and ghostly place, made all the more haunting by banks of slowly drifting fog that alternately concealed and revealed the horrors that remained.

It was before dawn, and Andon's gates were closed to traffic as Kali and the bamfcat appeared in the fog near its defensive walls, suddenly, in a blur. Even at this quiet hour guards patrolled vigilantly, on constant alert as many in the city believed it was only a matter of time before the forces of Vos attacked again, using as their base the forts they had constructed in the once-neutral Anclas Territories, only a few leagues away. Arriving seemingly out of nowhere as she had, some strange phantasm clad still in Slowhand's striped tights and Blossom's mangy furs, Kali had likely spooked the guards, and having no wish to feel the sudden thud of a crossbow bolt in her chest needed to make her business in the city known. She couldn't tell them the whole truth, of course, but a generalisation might do.

Kali got their attention by sticking her fingers in her mouth and whistling. Then she shouted: "Excuse me! I'm trying to save the world. Can I come in, please?"

It was an honest and bafflingly pre-emptive ploy that seemed to work. The guards studied her for a few seconds, shrugged and gave the order for the gates to be opened.

"'Yup, Horse," Kali said.

That she had referred to the bamfcat as Horse was no slip of the tongue. She wasn't sure when, or quite how, the beast had gained her affections but certainly it had started when she'd found it waiting for her on her descent from the ogur's cave — its welcoming and strangely familiar headbutts a display of companionship she'd needed badly when everything else seemed to have gone away. Their bond had grown during the journey to Andon and, after a while, she'd realised she really couldn't go on calling the beast good boygirl because it was just plain daft. Of course, she'd had some hesitation naming it Horse — Horse Too, to be precise — but the bamfcat was hardly a creature that would suit a name like Fluffy or Rex, and in an odd way it was a reminder of the old boy himself.

Horse, however, could not go everywhere, and inside the city it soon became clear that its narrow environs wouldn't take the bamfcat and he'd need to be stabled for the duration. Kali dismounted and walked him into one of a number of stableyards lining the outskirts, manoeuvring his oversized bulk into two stable enclosures, the beast straddling their low, dividing fence.

The stableman appeared and his jaw dropped open. But he did not let surprise interfere with business.

"Two silver tenths," he said.

"I thought the standard rate was one."

"That thing takes up two stables so it's two silver tenths."

Kali was in no mood. "Horse?" she said.

The bamfcat ate the fence and spat a mouthful of splinters at the stableman.

"One silver tenth," Kali said.

"Done," the stableman said, swallowing. "That's one hells of a mount, lady."

Kali patted the bamfcat, smiled. "He sure is. One word of advice — don't feed him anything that hasn't got a face."

"Face?"

"He likes worgles."

"Worgles?"

"Worgles." She pointed across the yard, where one of the furballs could be seen rolling into an overturned bucket. "Just shake 'em out and he'll handle the rest."

Horse's lizardine tongue whiplashed out and back again, as if to explain. The stableman did a little dance backwards.

"Yew, that's disgusting."

"Yep, that's what I thought, too."

Horse stabled, Kali made her way into Andon proper, working her way through the labyrinth of shadowed streets, alleyways and passages crammed inside its imposing walls. The walls were soon lost to view in the crowded conurbation, and it would have been easy to become disorientated, but as Kali made her way towards the centre of the city she could not have wished for a more obvious guiding beacon. Visible through gaps in the roofline, looming ever larger and more imposing, the beacon had actually been visible from outside the city walls — was visible, in fact, from some leagues away — but it was only now as she grew nearer that the sheer impossible scale of the largest building in Andon — indeed, anywhere on the peninsula — truly made its presence felt. The Three Towers made Scholten Cathedral look like a village church.

The twisting, semi-organic looking headquarters of the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige rose above the city fully forty storeys high, a structure that would have confounded the skills of the finest engineers in Pontaine — perhaps even the finest engineers of the Old Races — and its construction had only been made possible with the aid of the more powerful wizards who now studied within. Its rather incongruous presence in the otherwise somewhat seedy city was due to the fact that at one time, on a lesser scale, it had simply been the home of Andon's Magical Guild, housing parlour magicians and entertainers in the service of Pontaine's wealthiest families but, since the Great War, it had gradually transformed itself into something much darker and now housed an organisation dedicated to the study of the effects of powerful sorceries on armies, and to the practice of war itself. Dark secrets were held within its half-built, half-grown heights — within the minds of those who moved there and within the manuscripts, tomes and artefacts that were said to fill its archives — and somewhere amongst those secrets was the information Kali needed to know.

The Three Towers was not a place, however, where one could walk up to the front door and knock. Even the Final Faith did not wield sufficient influence to enter there.