Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

But uneasy as she was, Kali could barely control her other feelings. On the one hand, the sheer scale of this place and its contents made her feel like a starving mouse beneath a feast-laden table, and she longed to explore, to investigate, to catalogue the things she'd found — to touch them, the first person to do so for literally ages. On the other hand, however, she knew that was not why she was here, and the feeling of elation she felt at her greatest find to date was marred by the fact not only that — strictly speaking — she hadn't found it, but that, incidentally, she had to destroy it, too. Or, at the very least, stop it doing what it did.

Whatever it was that was.

Doubts resurfaced once more — that what the old man had told her was partly wrong, that perhaps Makennon's destiny did lie where she said — but the doubts were fleeting. She knew what she had seen and read in the Three Towers, knew what ideas of her own were forming, and most of all, she knew how this place felt — and it felt wrong. No, more than wrong. Troubled. Tainted. Bad. Something truly awful had happened within these walls, a long, long time ago, and its aura remained and resonated still.

She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder. "Nice place they've got here," Slowhand said. "Cosy."

Kali nodded, only half-listening, and walked further up the aisle until she came close enough to study the giant, seated figure at its end. No, not seated, bethroned. The idea that the Clockwork King might have been some kind of giant walking automaton had always verged on the edge of preposterous in her mind, but even so she'd been ready for anything. But looking at it now it was clear that the King was not designed as a giant that would arise from its throne, have a quick stretch, and pound across the peninsula sweeping all in its path aside. No, in actual fact, it seemed to be just a statue — a towering and staggering and very pitsing imposing statue, it had to be said, but a statue nonetheless.

Kali craned her neck, staring up to study it, and found herself being stared back at by a pair of giant stone eyes set in a gnarled, bearded and cruel dwarven face. Though the eyes were only stone, their stare was distinctly unsettling, made all the more so by the fact the face was draped in the same lengthy cobwebs as the statues against the walls, and Kali pulled her own gaze away, examining the rest of the statue instead. The giant figure wore — or had been sculpted wearing — the kind of studded leather armour she recognised as being from dwarven middle history, and in one hand held a like-period battle hammer, in the other a spiked dwarven shield. Again, cobwebs dangled from the shield's spikes, so long that Kali found she could walk through them like a curtain. It was only as she did that she noticed one of the less obvious features of the statue — one around the side.

Around the side and, then, to the rear, actually. For there the same kind of seawater tubes that ran into the cowl ran around and into the back of the Clockwork King. No, she realised, tracing the tubes back, they weren't the same kind of tubes — they were the same tubes, splitting and terminating here and in other places throughout the throne room as they ran around its walls like arteries.

Now that, Kali thought, was odd. And there was something else that was odd — now that she had seen that the statue was just a statue, why was it called the Clockwork King?

She sighed, moving to the part of the massive construction that she had purposefully saved for last. Directly in front of the throne was a large stone plinth inlaid with what looked like templates for the four keys, a complex-looking mechanism that seemed, in parts, to rotate and, presumably, lock into place.

There was a sound like a prolonged roll of thunder, and distracted as she was Kali had difficulty placing its source until Slowhand tapped her gently on the shoulder and, when he had her attention, pointed back the way they had come. It seemed that Makennon and her mages had managed to release the runelock, and the vast doors were opening. They were about to have company.

Makennon's soldiers came first, and then the Anointed Lord herself, sweeping into the throne room with a regal stride that suggested she had already claimed the place as her own. Nevertheless, for a few seconds she displayed the same reactions to the scale and content of the place as Kali and Killiam had, nodding to herself in approval. But then she spotted their distant figures standing before the king, and her brow furrowed in disbelief and annoyance. She gestured to the front members of her entourage, despatching them to various tasks around the chamber, and then strode up through the wide aisle towards the throne.

Kali's heart thudded, though not because the Anointed Lord approached. The reason for her sudden burst of adrenalin was the doors through which Makennon had passed — or rather what was now revealed upon them. Opened towards her and showing their outside face, Kali could see the remains of the fire runic that Makennon's mages had dismissed to gain entry, an embery half-circle that as she watched slowly extinguished and faded away into nothing. Suddenly everything became clear, and all the confused pieces fell into place. Gods — how could she have been so blind!

She turned to Slowhand, saw that he too stared and wondered if he had realised the same thing. But he hadn't. In actual fact, Slowhand was fighting a potentially embarrassing twitch of excitement. Hells, Katherine looked good in her tight and shiny battle armour, he thought. That walk, the way those hips swivelled when she moved…

He swept back his hair, waiting.

And Makennon walked right past him without even a glance.

"Kali Hooper," she declared with a long sigh. "The Spiral of Kos, Scholten, the World's Ridge Mountains, Andon, Scholten again, and now, finally, here in Orl. Tell me — for the record — just how many of you are there?"

Kali remembered her first encounter with Makennon, and her questioning. "Oh, just the one — but enough to mess with your head."

"She does that a lot," Slowhand said, leaning in with a grin.

"And I'm about to do it again," Kali said, silencing him with a glance. "Makennon, listen to me, this place isn't what you think. It hasn't got anything to do with the Final Faith, and never has had, I know that now. Coming here was a big mistake."

"For you, perhaps, Miss Hooper," another voice said as its owner approached, boots thudding on stone. Kali scowled. "The girl does not know what she is talking about," Munch continued. "Like anyone young she adopts an overfamiliarity with things older than herself that is, at best, arrogant and, at worst, offensive in the extreme."

"Speaking of offensive…" Slowhand said.

"Makennon, listen to me," Kali went on, ignoring both. "This place isn't called Orl, it's called Martak. And Martak isn't a dwarven word, it's a dwarven phrase — M'Ar'Tak. You know what it means, Katherine? An eye for an eye."

"The girl spouts nonsense," Munch interrupted. "You have seen the evidence with your own eyes. Anointed Lord, we have worked hard for this moment — please, order the activation of the keys."

"Katherine, no — "

Makennon held her gaze for a few seconds. "The signs are clear," she said after some consideration. She turned and signalled for the remainder of her entourage to enter the throne room, prompting a smile from Munch. "Bring them forwards."

Kali spun in frustration. "Dammit, Makennon, you want to know about signs? Then let me tell you about the one on those doors, the one that was so difficult to break because it was so obviously there to keep you — to keep everyone — out. That runic wasn't the symbol of the Final Faith because it's actually two runics, one overlaid on the other. A circle and a cross, Katherine, different symbols but ones used by the elves and the dwarves to mean the same thing. That's why there were two of each on the map showing the sites of the four keys, because the elves and the dwarves built two sites each. They're warning symbols, woman! They mean stay away, danger. They mean death."