Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

"Don't ask me," Kali said. "But they produce oxygen. The supply's limited but it does gradually refill. Go ahead, chomp down, it'll make a difference."

Slowhand did so, reluctantly. And his eyes widened as the things did what they did, filling his lungs with cool air. "Fwer joo ged theef fings?"

Kali shrugged. "That one? That one I bought from a pirate in a little place called Crablogger Beach." She dug in her belt again. "This one, however, I found in an elven ruin — and I've had it for a long, long time."

Slowhand stared at her questioningly as Kali rolled the icebomb in her hand, remembering her encounter with Merrit Moon all those years ago. "Keep it because one day you might need it," he'd said. Well, old man, guess what…

"If this thing still works, things in this room are about to go from very, very hot to very, very cold very, very quickly. You know what happens when things do that?"

"They blow up in your face?"

"A-ha. So find somewhere to use as cover."

"Hooper, there is no cover."

Kali looked upwards. "Then Killiam Slowhand is going to have to be a little bit faster for once."

Slowhand followed her gaze. "Understood."

"Right, then," Kali said. She pressed the stud on the globe and threw it towards the forge. For a second nothing happened, and then everything before their eyes exploded and turned white.

The old man had not been exaggerating about the power of these things. It might have been tragically effective when he'd used one outside, but in these close confines it was almost elemental in its impact.

The forge frosted, and they waited. The floor cracked beneath their feet. The very air they breathed seemed to be crystals, and still the pair of them waited. The timing had to be perfect.

The two of them were covered in a thin sheen of ice now, and shivering violently. Their breath froze as it left their mouths.

There was a crackling sound from above, perversely sounding as though the forge were on fire.

The glass of the observation chamber frosted from left to right, as if something invisible had painted it white.

"Now, Slowhand!" Kali shouted.

The archer struggled to steady his grip. Kali could hardly blame him. She, too, was shaking like a leaf.

"Slowhand…"

Slowhand let fly three arrows in quick succession, the first spidering the frozen glass, the second cracking it and the third shattering it completely.

The glass blew out at the same time the forge exploded. Sharp slices of death — glass and metal — rained and hurtled at them from above and below.

They didn't hang around to feel their touch. As soon as his final arrow impacted with the wall of the observation chamber behind the glass, Slowhand grabbed Kali about the waist, circling her so his hand could still grab the rope, and then launched the pair of them up towards the broken window, frozen hand alternating with frozen hand as they climbed.

Behind and below them the forge didn't know what to do with itself, the chunks of the mould that had landed on its floor again triggering the heating coils at the same time as they crackled with intense cold. And as Kali and Slowhand reached window level, the stark contrast between temperatures caused a renewed series of explosions, and the whole chamber blew.

Kali and Slowhand were sent hurtling towards the observation area wall, thudded into it and landed on the floor, stunned. But as its floor subsided beneath them, they knew there was no time to waste.

The whole place was going up.

They ran, exiting first the observation area and then the dome itself, the whole place quaking beneath them. Makennon and her party had already left but some guards remained. They were not concerned with Kali and Slowhand, however, as they were too busy screaming and running for their lives.

The reason for this was that the lava lake surrounding the dome had ceased its gentle bubbling and become now a seething, broiling mass that lurched and spat at the rock that contained it. Thick, liquid fire had even begun to spit above its lip and, as Kali and Slowhand looked on one last, unfortunate woman was engulfed in a burning tongue that fried her screeching form to a skeleton in less than a second.

Those same lava spurts hitting them wasn't their main problem, however.

It was the lava spurts that had hit the suspension bridge.

Because as they watched, their only way off the central island warped and twisted in the intense heat, and then its cabling snapped away with a sound like a whiplash.

Almost instantly, the bridge was gone.

"Hooper?" Slowhand said, worriedly.

Kali looked down, her brow beetling. "We're stuffed," she said, succinctly.

What she neglected to mention was what Slowhand had not yet noticed. Because she didn't want to worry him more.

The lava lake was rising.

Resurrection was a second coming. Somewhat more than a second, actually, but in the circumstances Merrit Moon thought it would be churlish to complain about the delay.

The sharp intake of breath with which he returned to life echoed around the cave of the ogur, empty now apart from the ogur themselves, gathered in a tribal huddle where, by the look of the cleanly gnawed bones around them — all of the bones of Munch's people — they had been sitting for some time. They stared at him in silence, their expressions a mix of fascination and fear caused by what was likely the strangest occurrence they had ever seen.

The occurrence was no less strange to Moon himself, this being the first time he had died.

Or not — as the case seemed to be.

That the artefact had worked — albeit in a way and on a subject he would never have anticipated — renewed his faith in the Old Races and the wonders, rather than the horrors, they had once achieved. He doubted, however, that the ogur that had triggered the amulet had found its effects wondrous in any way, and he sighed. Perhaps it was a horror after all.

The poor creature knelt before him, hand outstretched and touching the amulet, but it was not what it had been. Where moments before it had been indistinguishable from the rest of its tribe — solid and formidable, awesome — it was now a shadow of its brothers, wasted and drained. The same ogur that had attempted to approach Kali — likely the alpha — it had obviously been the first to approach his body and it had paid the price.

The creature still breathed, haltingly and raspingly, and stared at him in utter helplessness and confusion, but there was nothing Moon could do to help it, and he felt deeply sorry. It had not, after all, been greed that had motivated the ogur to touch the amulet, just primitive curiosity. It had yet to learn — and he hoped it would have the chance to do so — that all that glistened was not gloob.

Therein lay the simple beauty — and horror — of what the amulet was. Moon thought back to his hidden room in his cellar in Gargas, and the mixed emotions the sight of it had engendered in him. Sitting there on the shelves amidst other acquisitions he had deemed too dangerous for even someone such as Kali to see, its physical beauty was undeniable — a scintillating, perfectly faceted gem inlaid in gloob that could have been used to pay the ransom of a king. It was for that reason that he kept the amulet locked away, because if the wrong eyes were ever to see the gem it would be impossible to resist, taken from his possession with no knowledge of what it truly was and what it truly did. Not that he didn't trust Kali implicitly on that level, of course. It was just that by the amulet's very nature — the fact that in the absence of the direst circumstances it could not be tested — it was unpredictable and therefore potentially very, very dangerous.

He had found the amulet in an elven site many years before, certain as soon as he had that it was more than it seemed, because if there was one thing he had learned in his long career it was that Old Race artefacts generally were. It had taken two years of research following the find to identify what it was, cross-referencing a dozen Old Race manuscripts, until he finally knew that what he had acquired was an example of a battlefield boobytrap that the elves called scythe-stones. Products of their science or their sorcery — or both, he still wasn't sure — they masqueraded as spoils of war, prime to be plucked from the fallen body of an elven victim, but in actuality what they did was transfer the life essence from a victorious warrior to the defeated at the moment of death, reversing their roles and effectively turning the tide of many a battle. The psychological effect on the surrounding enemy was not to be underestimated either, because the host body fleetingly absorbed some of the features of the victim, looking almost as if its soul were being stolen from the body. In a way it was, Moon supposed, and to the enemy — the superstitious dwarves — the supernatural aspect was often far more disturbing than the truth of what had actually happened.