Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

"Can't let you do that."

Munch paused. "Ah. You have returned to kill me."

"Not here to see if you've grown any higher."

"I am afraid," Munch said haltingly, almost as a gasp, "you are an inconvenience I cannot afford."

"Now, where have I heard that before? I suppose this is the part where you set your dogs on me?"

"Indeed." He blinked, and his four bodyguards snapped to face her, their feet thudding down as they adopted an attack stance.

Kali was ready for them. She'd been ready the moment she'd dropped from the tube to the floor. She only hoped that, in trying to do what she wanted to do, she was as capable as the events of recent days had suggested she could be.

Because if she wasn't, she was dead.

Again.

Four hammers slammed down from her left and from her right, impacting hard with the stone floor of the throne room and cracking it wide. They were clearly only warning blows but nevertheless Kali was already gone, backflipping away and feeling the heavy whoosh of the hammers' mass as she went. She straightened, turned and ran, inviting them to follow, which they duly did, their feet pounding on the damaged floor behind her.

Kali ran almost to the end of the throne room, seemingly intent on fleeing from their pursuit but planning nothing of the kind. For one thing, there was nowhere to go — the gallery steps and corridor were still filled with the mechanical warriors' slowly deploying ranks — but for another she knew exactly where in the throne room she wanted herself, and her would-be butchers, to be.

What she wanted to do, in fact, was let them drive her into a corner.

The mechanical warriors came on, hammers raised and axe blades swinging, while a somewhat weak cackling from Munch echoed in the distance. Kali stood her ground, waiting for her moment. As the four approached, she bounced on the balls of her feet, watching their axes, but, particularly, their hammers, not only for which of the warriors would swing the first blow but how they would swing it. She had, after all, learned a new trick in the Spiral of Kos.

The first two disappointed, and she dodged their downward swings by deftly rolling between them, but the third, swinging its hammer horizontally, was exactly what she'd been hoping for. As the hammer swung towards her, momentum guaranteed to carry it onwards and upwards, she ducked beneath and then instantly sprang onto its upper face from behind, letting it carry her into and then propel her through the air. She landed exactly where she wanted to be, on top of the very water tube she and Slowhand had first used to enter the throne room, but she did not use it to leave, instead simply standing there until her attackers swung at her again. This they did, and Kali glanced over at Munch as the hammers smashed towards her, watching to see if he'd realised his mistake. For at her current height, the deadly bludgeons of the bodyguards could not quite reach her, and instead they smashed into the tube itself. Glass shattered and water exploded, sending the bodyguards staggering back beneath its deluge.

Kali had leapt away at the moment of impact, and now ran further up the tube, in the direction of Munch, where she heard him roar in anger. Yes, he'd realised his mistake but, as was the way of these things, it did not stop him repeating it. The bodyguards pounded after her, hammers and axes swinging all the way, and as they swung they shattered more and more of the tube, so that entire sections of it fell away to the throne room floor. They didn't crash down, however, but splashed and sank, the increasing deluge of water from the ruptured system beginning to flood the throne room, the still rotating fans pulling more and more of it in from the sea. Kali continued her flight along the tubes and the warriors followed, almost berserk now, though their rage — Munch's rage — could do little to help them in what had become a forced wade through the rising waters. Again they swung, though more sluggishly now, their giant hammers slowed as they ploughed through the flood and, again, more sections of the tubes disintegrated before them. The water was deep enough for Kali's purpose now, and she stopped her flight, instead diving into the water herself, and there she clenched her gutting knife as she swam beneath the surface in the direction of her mechanical pursuers. There was always a way, she thought, not only to get into places but to defeat things, and swimming into the midst of the pack of bodyguards she slashed the wiry tendons on the ankles of all four, the water preventing them being able to manoeuvre fast enough to stop her. With a series of mechanical groans they collapsed beneath the ever-rising flood to the throne room floor.

Kali swam, and then waded from the water onto the base of the Clockwork King.

Munch, more feverish and manic-looking than ever now, seemed almost to shrink back before her.

"I knew that you were resourceful," he declared wearily. "I never realised quite how much."

As he spoke, an entire run of the water tubing collapsed from the throne room walls, weakened by the loss of the rest of its network, and beyond it, even more began to buckle. A crack appeared in the throne room wall.

"Yeah, well," Kali said, darkly. She was thinking back to the Flagons. "That slashing the ankle thing? Someone gave me the idea."

"Miss Hooper…"

"Stand up and face me, you bastard."

Blood ran slowly down Munch's forehead. "You know as well as I that I cannot — I will not — leave this seat. I am helpless before you. So, go ahead — what are you waiting for?"

"Aaargh!" Kali roared, plunging the gutting knife downwards. But at the last moment she froze, the tip of the knife shuddering in her grip an inch from Munch's heart.

The dwarf chuckled deeply, and Kali regarded him with a hatred that could not manifest itself.

"You may have become some kind of fighting machine," Munch said, "but you will never be a true warrior. Not so long as you cannot finish your opponent. That is what differentiates the victor from the defeated on the battlefield."

"I can't let you continue this…"

"Then do what you came to do, girl. Stop me. Kill me. Go on — do it!"

Munch sounded almost as if he wanted her to. Kali pulled back her arm, ready to plunge the knife downwards once more, but again desire and conscience clashed, leaving the blade suspended and trembling, her whole body doing the same in furious frustration.

"Do it or all that you know will be gone, girl. Pontaine, Anclas, Vos, Gargas. Everything you know."

"You've already taken enough away from me."

"Soon there will be others who do what you do now — only they will be of the dwarven race. And it will be your bones they will pick over. Your bones, Kali Hooper. The bones of a fleeting and inconsequential speck in history."

"Not if I have anything to do with it."

Munch chuckled again. "Then do what must be done. Only you can't, can you? You have let down all those who trusted you, brought about the end of everyth — "

"No."

"The end of everything. You've lost, girl. You have los — "

There was a dull crunch and Munch's eyes widened suddenly in shock and disbelief, and for a moment Kali simply stared at him, wondering what had happened. Munch was staring back, directly into her eyes, but it took her a few seconds, during which a small tendril of blood ran from his left nostril, to realise that his eyes had already fogged and he was seeing nothing.

The arrow quivered slightly where it was embedded in the centre of his forehead.

Kali turned. How he had managed to get past the clockwork warriors she had no idea, but from the far end of the throne room a battered and bedraggled-looking Killiam Slowhand waded towards her through the rising and increasingly tumultuous water. He lowered Suresight to his side, its job done.