Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

"Oh, now you tell me." Slowhand muttered.

"And the one on those doors?" Kali went on, pointing back along the throne room. "That was the elves and the dwarves combining their symbols to shout the meaning to the world. Because when together they'd finally managed to stop whatever evil came out of this place, they sealed it with the biggest warning sign of all."

For the first time Makennon seemed to waver, and Kali was about to press her advantage when the wagon containing the keys trundled into the throne room. What gave Kali pause, however, was what followed it — the wagon containing the ogur. The ogur spotted her, too, and began to pound against the bars of its cage, its roars clearly audible even across the distance that separated them.

Munch saw what was happening and frowned. The old man's… changes had not lessened and there was surely no way the girl could recognise him, so this reaction made him curious. But, he thought, what did it matter if it had thrown her off guard?

"Is there a problem, Miss Hooper?" he asked.

"No. No, I — "

"Then I suggest we do what we came here to do."

Munch turned to Makennon. The Anointed Lord took her gaze off Kali and looked at him and, after a second, nodded.

"Destiny awaits," Munch said, smiling.

He signalled to some of the soldiers and they unloaded four crates from the first wagon, then carried them forwards to the plinth, breaking the seals and revealing the keys packed safely in straw inside. Munch ran a hand over each with a reverence that made Kali frown. "With your permission, Madam?" he said to Makennon.

The Anointed Lord inhaled, drawing herself up to her full, imposing height. "Go ahead," she said.

Munch lifted the first key from its crate and placed it in its matching template, pressing it home with a sound like a shifting stone slab, then rotated the plinth until it locked into place with a grating thud. It struck Kali that he looked far too much like he knew what he was doing, and she frowned as he expertly did the same with the second, and then the third key, until only the last remained. As he lifted it from its crate she moved to stop him, but with a click of her fingers Makennon had her restrained by the soldiers, along with Slowhand.

"Please — you don't know what you're doing!" Kali hissed.

"On the contrary, Miss Hooper," Munch said, in a tone which made her feel suddenly very cold, "I do."

He inserted the fourth key, repeating the same procedure as before, and then stood back as the plinth took on a life of its own. Each of the keys now turned of its own accord, first clockwise or anti-clockwise, and then back again, and then in a seemingly random pattern that Kali realised had, in fact, to be some kind of combination. Her theory was proven correct when, after a further four or five turns — it varied with the keys — each again locked, but into a different position from which it had started, and then sank further into the plinth with more resounding thuds. A panel opened in its centre and from it rose a patch of what looked to be spikes arranged in the shape of a hand.

"Yes," Munch said. "At last, yes."

He placed his hand gently on the spikes.

Everyone in the chamber looked down as the floor trembled beneath their feet, then up and around as the seawater in the glowing tubes began to bubble and stir, the strange arterial system coming to life. The fans that punctuated their length began to slowly rotate and the detritus that had so long ago been sucked in with the seawater began to flop and toss in the glass tubes, and then began to circulate around the system with greater and greater speed. Bubbles began to bounce in the water now, a sign that more was being sucked in from the sea above, and the mounting speed of the fans increased its circulation and pressure, churning the murky water until it turned opaque and then a milky white. There was no sign of the seaweed or detritus any more, only a seething rush of pressurised liquid that raced through the tubes all around the throne room, heading towards what appeared to be each of the statues against the walls and, ultimately, the Clockwork King.

The roar of it was deafening. The whole of Martak shook.

But it was nothing compared to the shaking to come.

Kali swallowed as the water thundered into the pipes that fed the enormous statue, and as it did, the Clockwork King proved itself to be far more than a statue after all. As Kali and the others watched in amazement, great plates of stone detached themselves from various parts of its body, separating along hairline cracks for the first time in a thousand years. Dust poured from the edges of the rising plates and from the edges of the holes in the statue that remained, and as the dust fell away, the interior of the Clockwork King was revealed. There, powered by the inrushing seawater, great metal cogs and wheels turned and rotated, and pistons thumped, their movements extending the thick metal rams on which all could now see the plates were rising away from the component parts of the statue they had once been. As they did, the cogs and the wheels inside the king began to twist and turn, and then so did the rams, and as each plate followed suit, they slowly moved in different directions towards the walls and ceiling of the throne room. Kali looked up and around and saw that indentations in the stone matched each of the giant plates exactly.

It was at that moment that Kali realised there had been no confusion about the number of keys described in the scrolls in the Three Towers. The mention of a fifth key hadn't made any sense to her back then, but it sure as hells did now. And there was a fifth key, no doubt about it.

The fifth key was the Clockwork King.

And she suspected she knew what it opened.

She looked up again as a series of deep booms signalled that each of the stone plates had locked into their corresponding positions, and then she looked left and right towards the galleries, swallowing. Despite wanting to know all about the wonders of this place earlier, all she could think now was: Let me be wrong. Please, let me be wrong.

But she wasn't. That became clear as soon as the pipes that seemed to feed the statues in the galleries began to churn even more than before, and then a series of deep and prolonged rumblings drew everyone's glances towards the sides of the throne room. One after another, all along the walls, the dwarven statues were sliding upwards, the dust of ages pouring from them, their cobwebs tearing away. Moving slowly, each rose its own height and eventually came to rest with a thud, and revealed behind where each had stood was a space as dark as a tomb. And out of each space came a whiff of something foul.

Makennon's people had begun to scatter as soon as the statues had started to move, but now the Anointed Lord shouted for them to stand their ground. Kali glanced urgently at her and saw, despite the order, that she was looking increasingly uneasy, as if the soldier's part of her mind was weighing up the tactical advantages and disadvantages of what this place might offer, finding them at odds with that part of her that had been driven here by religious zeal. She might have brought a little too much of the warrior to her role of Anointed Lord, but it was highly unlikely she wished to further the Final Faith's cause by endangering all life on the peninsula, including her own.

"Makennon, stop this," Kali said. "I can see in your eyes you suspect what I said is true — or at least worth considering. Look at this place and think. How can anything in this graveyard fulfil the destiny of your church? I don't know what you expected to find but I'd guess this isn't it. This can't be anything good."

She grabbed Makennon by the shoulders, shook her and forced her to look at the tomb-like entrances. More cobwebs shifted slightly where they dangled in front of the darkness, disturbed, perhaps, by a breath of something from within.