Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

No, she thought, that had to be wrong! Because if it wasn't, what would that mean? That Makennon was right? That she was destined to find Orl?

There was something else that shook her, too — more dwarven text, but text that made no reference to the site being called Orl but… Mor… Mar… no, it was no good, she couldn't make it out.

Pits of Kerberos, she'd come in search of answers and all she'd found were more questions. But at least she had a rough location, and that would do as a start. She zoomed again, searching for landmarks that might help further, but then everything before her eyes suddenly faded. Kali blinked. The Forbidden Archive was a featureless red chamber once more.

"Find anything of interest?" a voice asked.

Kali spun and found herself facing a bearded figure who had to be Mister Duh! Forgot My Head. Only, seeing him from the front, his eyes and expression did not strike her as forgetful at all but instead rather threatening and intense.

Disliking tackling them head on or not, Kali didn't know what else she could do. She rushed the mage, intending to silence him before he could alert others of his kind, but with a sweep of his hand the man did something with the air in front of him and she found herself bouncing back off an invisible field of force that felt like rubbery water. She flung a fist at him instead, hoping that would penetrate, but another sweep of the hand wove a different thread and, this time, she was slammed back and away from him, without any physical contact at all.

Kali yelped as she crashed into the podium and flipped over it, then smashed jarringly and numbingly into the far wall. She picked herself up, wiping blood from her lip.

Again, she ran at the mage, and this time he simply raised an arm and she found herself rising with it, treading air before she could get anywhere near him. The mage smiled, slowly rolled her over in the air and then manoeuvred her helplessly floating body to the side of the chamber. Kali felt herself pressed against the wall and, as she struggled futilely against the invisible grip that held her there, the mage moved his arm again and she found herself being slowly dragged all the way around the circumference of the tower, as if she were dirt to be smeared from his hand.

It was, frankly, embarrassing. But embarrassing was all it seemed to be. Presumably the mage could have flung her around like a doll if he so wished, but he simply continued as he did, smiling, as if this were his way of proving a point.

He even let her down gently, positioning her back on her feet before him.

"Okay, that wasn't fair. You've got me, so what happens now?"

The mage smiled. "Absolutely nothing. I mean you no harm and will defend myself only as and when necessary. I have been employed to provide a client with the same information you now seek, and that employment is now done. It would be churlish of me to censure you for obtaining the same knowledge by your own means, would it not? And I could have turned you in the moment you fell through that hatch."

"It was you watching me."

"I… sensed you, yes."

"You're the sender," Kali realised. "The Final Faith's source."

The mage bowed. "Poul Sonpear at your service. Trusted archivist for the League of Prestidigitation and Prestige. But the Final Faith are quite generous when it comes to persuading people to bend the rules a little. Tell me," he added with genuine intrigue, "just why is it you and they find this material of such great interest?"

"You've seen it. What the hells do you think?"

"I have no opinion. I have seen many thousands of such manuscripts and these, as are they all, are open to subjective interpretation."

You can say that again, Kali thought. People saw what people wanted to see. Never more so than when they pursued their interest with religious zeal. And that remained exactly the problem here.

"What if I were to tell you these things warn against the end of civilisation as we know it? That unless I recover a key that the Final Faith took from a friend of mine, they're a quarter of the way to unleashing something — "

Kali paused, unsure how to go on.

"Something?" Sonpear urged.

"I don't know yet, okay?" Kali shouted at him, piqued. "But something very, very bad. A clockwork king."

Kali frowned, aware, after the intensity of her search, of how unthreatening that sounded.

Sonpear laughed. "Then I would suggest that you will not be able to stop them."

Kali balled her fists. "What are you saying? That this is, after all, where you call your friends to finish me off?"

"Not at all. I wish only to point out to you that the Final Faith's journey along their path of discovery has progressed somewhat further than you think."

"Say again?"

Sonpear sighed heavily. "My… exchanges with the Final Faith's receiver work two ways and, though I do not intend to, it is sometimes hard to avoid absorbing… peripheral information. This key that you refer to — the one taken from your friend and that I believe you originally acquired from the Spiral of Kos? — it is not the first to fall into their hands."

Kali swallowed. Suddenly what Munch had said in the Spiral about hazards he'd recently encountered made sense. "They have more?"

"There have been two previous expeditions — to forgotten sites called, I believe, the Shifting City and the Eye of the Storm."

Names that sounded suitably trap-like, Kali thought. And they must have been two of the sites the map referred to, but she — and, presumably, Merrit — had never heard of them. But then they didn't have the resources the Final Faith had — the bastards.

"And they were successful?"

"I gather so." Sonpear stared at her. "Young lady, the Final Faith are already in possession of three of your keys and are about to acquire possession of the fourth."

"What? Where?" Kali said, urgently.

"A site that has so far caused them considerable problems and loss, and by inference therefore the most dangerous of them all. And it is located beneath the most convenient and unexpected place you can imagine — the Final Faith's headquarters at Scholten Cathedral itself."

Kali's mind flashed back to her and Killiam's escape — the curious lift shaft, the place she had wanted to go.

"Slowhand, you fark," she said.

"Excuse me?"

"I have to go," Kali said, knowing she needed to reach the key first. "Listen, you're the spy — is there a back way out of here?"

Much as Kali had negotiated her conduit above Andon, so the man without clothes negotiated his below Scholten — only here the conduit was constructed not of metal but of stone. Dank stone. The dank stone of a sewer, in fact, sheened and slimed by substances worse than those Kali had encountered at the Three Towers — vile, brown, smelly substances that a man as clean and fastidious as he should not even have to think about, let alone drag himself through.

Somewhere beneath the Scholten Cathedral kitchens Killiam Slowhand tried not to think about the sludge that coated him, especially as there was nothing at all between the sludge and him. Every inch of him.

The archer shuddered.

It could have been worse, he supposed. For one thing, he could be beneath the Final Faith's privies rather than their kitchens. For another, more importantly, he could be dead. The knife that had been lunged at him on the walkway had been intended to deliver a fatal wound but had instead only grazed his side, something to do with the fact that he had grabbed its wielder and thrown him off the towering building as soon as his arm had come towards him. As the guard's scream faded in Scholten's night sky, his friends would probably have avenged him, finished him off, were it not for the fact that the head guard, just caught up, had ordered him to be taken alive. The order came on the specific instruction of Katherine Makennon, but why she wanted him kept alive, he didn't know — perhaps so she could have her Mister Fitch turn him to her cause, or perhaps merely so that she could revel in his reincarceration. She had certainly seemed to revel as she had had him stripped of what little clothing he had, and he wondered whether something had been going on there, whether perhaps a little of his charm had rubbed off on her after all? Because surely she couldn't have rumbled the old abrasive underpants trick?