Mike Wild: The Clockwork King of Orl

It had to be the way down. But after ages of disuse, could she trust it? Would the thing even work?

There was only one way to find out. Kali opened the gate and stepped warily into the cage, feeling for any kind of shift beneath her feet, all too aware that under the suspended floor there was nothing but a long, long drop. But she found it solid enough and so turned and closed the gate.

Kali waited. Nothing happened.

She waited more, and still nothing, and she frowned. Then she spotted a dust-shrouded lever on the wall of the cage next to where she had entered. Some kind of switch? Swallowing, she laid her hand on the lever and pulled it down. There was an empty clank.

Again, nothing happened — for a moment. Then, from somewhere inside the walls of the vast chamber, machinery that Kali knew to be older than her civilisation groaned as it stirred into life, filling the place with a bass cacophony as if it were haunted suddenly by its builders' ghosts. The noise resounded around the chamber, growing in volume until Kali felt the walls themselves rumble, and then silence descended abruptly and unexpectedly once more. Dammit, Kali thought.

And then the cage lurched.

Nothing could have prepared her for what happened next, and for a few exhilarating seconds she knew fully why she pursued the things she did. This was Old Race technology she was using, the first living being to have done so in perhaps a thousand years or more, and it was working.

Oh gods, was it working!

Kali laughed out loud.

The cage in which she stood released itself from the platform and swept majestically down along the chamber wall as if it floated freely in the air, the movements of the mechanisms that propelled it barely discernible at all. The passage down the spiralling recess afforded her a constantly rotating view of the Spiral of Kos, travelling so smoothly she could have been flying around it. Down and down and round and round she went, ducking involuntarily as, at what she guessed must have been the halfway point, a vast counterweight swept up the lower recess and beneath the cage with a heavy whooooshh that seemed to take the air away.

Kali watched the counterweight rise away and whooped, the magnitude of what was happening — what she'd found — hitting home. Her biggest find yet, all of this was hers to explore, and hers alone, the first person to tread within these walls since its Old Race occupants had gone. All of this — and that mysterious key.

Gods!

She looked down, almost clapping in anticipation of the cage berthing into a lower platform, and then she saw the light.

Her heart thudded.

It was hardly anything, a flare of whiteness perhaps two hundred feet below, but it was what the flare illuminated that was important.

People.

There were people below.

It couldn't be.

Kali stared at the shadowed figures, unable to distinguish who or what they were, only that a small group were crossing the chamber floor towards the base of the Spiral of Kos, their way lit by the raised hand of one of them. A glowing hand. Were they Old Race? Was it possible that some of them were still alive? Was it possible she was looking down at the builders? It couldn't be. It just couldn't.

One thing was clear. The cage in which she stood was going to deliver her right into their midst. And she couldn't chance that, having no idea if they were friend or foe.

Kali did the only thing she could. She rammed the lever back into its original position and, with a protesting groan, the cage lurched to a sudden halt, throwing her hard against its side. The groan caused the figures below to look up, and Kali threw herself to the cage floor, crawled to its edge and peered down, relieved as she saw them turn away. She'd been lucky — it seemed the figures had dismissed the noise as unexplained.

Nevertheless, she was too exposed where she was. All it would take to reveal her presence above them was another curious glance at the lift, a whim. She had to get out of there and down — and quickly. Keeping her eyes on the unknown group, she crouched and then swung herself quietly out of the front of the cage, twisting so that she could grab onto its side, and from there swung herself onto the metal arm on which it rode. Then she worked her way into the recess, wide and deep enough to accommodate her crouching form. Using it to get down would still leave her exposed but if she kept in its shadows, and her luck held, she would make it unseen.

She began to inch her way down towards the chamber floor. She had perhaps a hundred, a hundred and thirty feet to go.

And it was then that the vision hit her.

Searing agony cut through her mind, as if someone had embedded an axe in her forehead, and suddenly her world was yellow and red and white, everything the colour of raging fire. What had been a shadowy, abandoned chamber a moment before was now consumed by a blaze apocalyptic in intensity, the Spiral of Kos being destroyed in a conflagration beyond imagining. Things lashed and writhed within the flames — strange things that she had no time to identify before agonised screams swept them away. For a second she was outside the dome, staring as a pillar of fire rose high above the darkness of the Sardenne, and then she was back once more, in the fire's raging heart, in its midst. It couldn't be real but it was. She didn't just see it, she could feel it, the heat from the fire strong enough to sear and bubble her skin and to blind her with its bright, bright heat. What the hells am I seeing? she wondered. What the hells am I feeling?

Instinctively she flailed against it, and in that second realised where she was. Where she really was.

But it was too late. Her flailing had taken her too far towards the edge of the recess, beyond balance.

She tumbled out, and fell.

And when she landed, the fire faded to blackness.

And, as shadows loomed over her, so, too, did she.

Kali felt something thudding again and again into her side and, with slowly growing awareness and annoyance, realised that it was a boot. Her eyes snapped open just in time to see the offending article coming at her again, and she instinctively grabbed and twisted it, flipping its wearer heel-over-head to the accompaniment of a startled cry.

"Don't do that!" she growled, without even thinking who it was she might be talking to.

Great, she thought, reprimanding herself. Possible first contact with an Old Race and what does she do? Fling one of them on its arse.

She sat quickly up, bruised, throbbing and disorientated, and looked around. There was no more fire — no more vision — but neither any time to think about where it had come from or where it had gone as the wearer of the boot, a cloaked and hooded figure, had also risen and, snarling, loomed over her again, boot swinging back for another strike.

Kali was about to kick his legs from under him and punch his lights out when a hand moved across the figure's chest and pushed him back to where others stood silently looking down at her.

"Enough, brother," a gruff voice said. "Do you not see that our visitor from on high is awake?"

"My apologies… brother."

The speaker, becloaked and hooded like the rest, knelt by Kali, sighing as if somehow inconvenienced by her presence. The man was short, more accurately squat, and thickly muscled, his powerful bulk evident even beneath the loose folds of his cloak. Pulling back his hood he revealed a mane of grey hair flaring back from a face that was gnarled and scarred, inset with the coldest, grey-tinted eyes she had ever seen. Whoever he was, Kali thought, if he didn't have some Old Race blood in him — and she knew which Old Race — then her name was Fundinblundin Hammerhead.

"Who are you?" the man asked slowly. His tone, civilised, patient and polite, was totally at odds with his appearance. "And what is it you are doing here?"