Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

You just couldn't get the staff these days.

Kali wasted no time. She leapt for the side of the dome and scrambled onto its sloping surface, feet scrabbling behind her but maintaining enough purchase to enable her to grab a fingerhold on the rough stone. This done, she pulled herself slowly upwards until she reached the apex of the dome, ducking back as the chimney belched out a cloud of steam. Once it had done so, she peered inside the flue. A shaft dropped away before her, dark, dirty and utterly uninviting — just the way she liked it.

She sat back while another cloud erupted. Two minutes between belches. She was going to have to be very precise in the matter of timing. She would also have to be ready for anything as she would be going in blind, literally plunging into the unknown. But whatever was going on in this fiery hole, it seemed likely that the chimney would take her to the heart of the matter.

She stared across the cavern, found Slowhand and then jabbed her finger downwards, indicating she was going in. The archer's mouth opened, his head shook, and then he was holding it in his hands in disbelief.

Another cloud belched, and Kali scrambled inside.

She anchored herself against the sides of the chimney with her elbows and thighs, shuffling quickly down, estimating it would take her no more than a minute to descend the depth of the dome, more than enough of a safety margin between belches of steam. Quite how she'd exit the chimney near its base she hadn't yet worked out, but that she considered to be one of the challenges of her trade.

Something, though, was wrong — that was already becoming clear. All she could see beneath her was darkness, the perspective of the flue veeing below, and she suddenly realised that the shaft went deeper than she'd anticipated, the heart of the site not within the dome but the pitsing rock itself.

In other words, she'd never make it in time. Already she could hear booms coming out of the darkness below, what she presumed to be precursors of the next release of steam. There was only one thing for it — and that was to let herself freefall as far as she could.

Kali released her grip and immediately plummeted down the flue. She yelped as she slid down, down and down, her body thudding painfully into the sides of the shaft. More than once she crashed against unexpected ridges or bars, and the impacts bounced her sideways and around until she was in danger of becoming utterly disorientated in the dark. She couldn't allow that, however, or she'd be encountering the origin of the steam first-hand, something that just might spoil her day and the rest of her life.

She had to risk it. She jammed herself against the sides of the shaft once more, careering a further ten feet before she came to a jarring halt, and then looked down to see just where in the general scheme of things she'd ended up.

As it turned out, she'd made her move just in time. Not far below her the shaft widened and then branched off in a number of directions, splitting to envelop some central core. Had Kali continued down any one of them she would have been dead, because in each a lapping red glow was reflected from what could only have been the lava lake itself.

Kali didn't want to go there. But she did want to get inside the central core.

She eased herself down what remained of the shaft before it split, aware of the limited time she had but also that one slip would bring the same instant death as being consumed in a belch of steam. She dropped onto the roof of the central core and quickly heaved open a metal panel she found there. Dropping into a shaft of about her own height, she slammed the panel shut just as a final boom heralded a release of steam that made the metal above her rumble with the force of its release. Kali sighed with relief, but it was a short sigh, because as much of a challenge as getting this far had been, she suspected the hard part was yet to come. This was, after all, the site that Makennon had been trying to access since last she'd been in Scholten — and it was whatever lay below the second panel — the one she now found under her feet — that was going to be the true test of her mettle.

Kali pulled a rope from her toolbelt and secured it to the side of the shaft, dangling from it as she booted the panel open. Then she moved herself around until her head peeked through a hole on one side of a curving ceiling.

Well, she thought, this is interesting.

She was looking down into what appeared to be a dwarven forge, a circular chamber whose floor and walls were plated with metal panels decorated with the same repetitive runic shapes as had been at the Spiral of Kos, except here they were crosses instead of circles. The design of the walls made them look as if they might rotate, allowing access in and out, but for now they were tightly shut. Beyond this, the chamber was featureless apart from the forge itself, a raised and central metal mould carved with a complex coil design, in which lay the fourth of the keys. The parallel was obvious — other than for the fact this chamber was claustrophobic rather than vast, it was a dwarven version of the Spiral of Kos, right down to the presence of an observation area built into a curve of the wall behind a window of what appeared to be reinforced glass.

It was also, quite clearly, designed to be equally deadly. What Kali had ignored until now was the fact that the floor of the forge was blackened here and there by the twisted and charred remains of Makennon's unsuccessful tomb raiders, all of whom appeared to have been roasted alive, and one of whom still smoked where he or she had recently fallen.

It hadn't been too hard to work out that the trap here was going to be heat-based, but now it was time for her to find out exactly what she was up against. And if she was right…

Kali dug in her toolbelt and pulled out a small, polished stone she kept for such occasions, then dropped it towards the forge's floor. It struck one of the metal panels and bounced onto another, then another, and, with a moment's gap between them, the first and third panels sank slightly into the floor with a grating sound.

Kali smiled. She knew it. The panels were weight-sensitive, probably rotating at random to provide a false sense of security but in actuality trapping anyone who thought they'd found a safe path to the forge. All she had to do now was find out what they did.

On the subject of which…

She felt the heat before she saw it, the carved coils on the side of the mould turning first a dull red, then brighter, and then brighter still until they were almost white-hot. Kali knew now the reason for the dome's pistons and steam chimney — they had to be part of some elaborate mechanism that pumped lava into the dome from the lake surrounding the island, probably pressurising and concentrating its flow before delivering it here, to the forge itself. The carvings on the mould were not simple decorative patterns, they were sophisticated heating coils.

And what heat! Kali had to draw back into the shaft as the mould itself began to glow, gradually matching the intensity of the coils, and as it heated up, so too did the key inside. And after perhaps half a minute, watched through a heat haze, the key seemed to start receding away in her vision.

Only it wasn't receding, she realised, it was melting.

A few seconds later she stared down at a key that had become completely molten.

It wasn't what Kali had been expecting, but she had to admit it was ingenious. This place hadn't been built so much as a trap as a preventative, the mechanisms involved designed not to stop anyone stealing the key but to stop them leaving with it. The fact that that same anyone would die horribly, roasted alive by the heating coils, was simply a side effect.

The weight-sensitive panels reset themselves with a metallic chuk and the key started to cool again. Fitting exactly into the mould as it did, it started to regain its form in no time.