Mike Wild - The Clockwork King of Orl

She looked down. The lower levels were folding in on themselves to create one mass of red-hot metal and superheated mulch. It was a giant furnace in the making.

There was no way down. Unless she got out of there now, the Spiral of Kos would become her funeral pyre.

Kali spun, searching for an alternative route. She could barely see anything, the explosions beneath her growing in their intensity and height. But then above the roar of the flames and the intensity of the heat haze she heard a peculiar clanking, looked down and saw the lift she had abandoned a seeming eternity ago bucking against its brake. But why? Another explosion drew her attention and, looking up, she saw it had reached almost as high as the observation platform — but obviously hadn't been the first explosion to do so — because the lift's counterweight was bucking against its own brake, the rail in which it sat mangled beneath it. And as she watched, the counterweight broke free.

It was coming down.

And as it did, the lift began coming up. Fast.

Once again, Kali didn't even think. Acting instinctively, surrounded by fire, the summit of the Spiral ringed by the thrashing tendrils of the last plants to die, she leapt into space, allowing one of the tendrils to smack her away through the air.

And she flew, in exactly the direction she wished. Her trajectory and timing must have been perfect because she slammed onto the lift's roof as it passed her by, falling heavily so as not to slide over the edge.

She stood, legs apart, riding it upwards, the wind of acceleration blowing back her hair.

The counterweight hurtled by like some heavenly hammer.

Kali looked down. In the light of the conflagration, the last thing she saw was the counterweight smashing through the buffers of the lower platform and screeing across the Spiral's floor towards a pursuing and furiously roaring Munch.

And then the lift impacted with the buffers of the upper platform, and she flew again.

Out, through the dome.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Kali had to give Horse his due — the old boy could move when he needed to. When he really, really, really needed to. And Hells, did he need to now!

Her explosive departure from the Spiral of Kos had not been quite the relief it should have been. Sure, she had escaped relatively unscathed and, sure, she had been glad to see Horse waiting faithfully where she had left him, but as she had flailed through the air, crash-landed and rolled to what she thought would be safety, what she had not been glad to see was the dome erupting with fire behind her. A great, roiling mass of it, the biggest fire she had ever seen, every second punching explosively higher and higher into the air.

It wasn't the explosions, or the fire, that was the problem — it was what they did. They shook that part of the Sardenne Forest to its core, and lit it up for leagues around. As a result, it seemed that every crawling, slithering, squelching, squawking, flying or ground-pounding denizen that lurked in that vast expanse was coming to see what was going on.

Coming towards them.

There was nowhere to hide, the billowing flames casting their light deep under the canopy and making it as clear as day. Kali and Horse were therefore not only able to see what horrors came, they could be seen by the horrors in return.

They were exposed. Which meant that if they didn't get out of the forest right away, they would be dead.

"Hyyyah!" Kali shouted, totally unnecessarily, to Horse, as he once again thundered through the trees. He was not so much mount any more as a battering ram, his bulk crashing through wood and foliage, crushing small rocks and undergrowth, uprooting smaller trees. Kali squeezed her calves hard into his flanks and Horse responded without protest, but she could see the sweat breaking out on him and hear how heavily he breathed. She slapped his neck proudly. There'd be one of his favourite bacon stews in this for him — if they made it out alive. "Hyyyah!" she shouted again. "Hyyyah!"

Kali rode, covering in minutes a distance that, on their way in, had taken half a day. She considered it wise not to look at the creatures they passed, but those she glimpsed out of the corner of her eye were dark, rotting or slimy things, things of bone and things of glowing hide. Those of them that dared an assault, Horse barged through or she booted swiftly away, their tumbling, misshapen forms crashing into their counterparts and torn apart in an instant, for food or for fun. The two of them had to swerve in their flight once as what appeared to be a black puddle oozed up from the forest floor — and then again, narrowly avoiding instant death as a giant fist came swinging down at them from behind the trees.

At last the glow from the conflagration began to fade, and the horrors that surrounded them retreated once more into the dark. Instinctively, Horse slowed, but Kali rode him on for another ten minutes or so before she felt safe enough to rein him around and look back on what they had left behind.

In the distance, visible even through its canopy, a giant pillar of fire still rose above the Sardenne, identical to the one she had seen in the vision that had caused her fall. The moments she spent staring at it were the first chance she'd had time to think about what had happened to her, and she frowned. There was no doubt now that the conflagration she had witnessed was that of the Spiral itself, and that meant she had seen the future — how could that possibly be explained? Gods, she thought, how could the whole bloody day be explained? Death traps, the Final Faith, the giant key still slung across her back — everything about it posed a question.

Thankfully, she knew someone who could help her find the answers. She reined Horse around again, and together the two of them began the long trek back out of the forest. When they emerged from it, she knew, they would be taking the road to Gargas.

Their exit from the Sardenne — and subsequent trek across the eastern plains of Pontaine — took four days, and while it was a relief to be amongst such dramatically different scenery, the endless fields dotted by the occasional hamlet that comprised this far eastern part of the peninsula made for a wearisome journey. But at least Kali was able to make camp each night relieved that she did not have to watch the movements of every shadow, and by the final night's rest she had visibly relaxed.

"You ever wonder, Horse," she mused as she lay by her campfire nursing her sixth bottle of flummox, "if your ancestors are trotting around, looking down on you from up there?" She was gazing at the azure mass of Kerberos, where, common belief had it, souls went when the body died. There, they were meant to soar in endless majesty through the gas giant's clouds — but only if they'd been good, gods-fearing boys and girls — condemned to its pits, the hells, if they had not. Kali suspected she knew where she was going. She took a swig from her bottle and waved it around. "I'm asking only because then they'd have to have been believers, wouldn't they? You a believer, Horse? Is there some horsey church you go to when I'm not looking? Where you go clip-clopping up the neeiigghhve?" She giggled and yawned, stared at the distant sun. There was an eclipse coming. "No, I'm serious — wouldn't it be nice to just drift around as light as a feather?"

Horse chomped his bacon stew, ignoring her.

"Speaking of light as a feather. You're not listening, are you?"

Chomp, chomp, chomp.

"Thought not," Kali said, and promptly fell asleep.

The next morning they resumed their journey, the final leg, and reached the outskirts of Gargas by late afternoon. As they passed the sign to the market town, Horse perked up considerably, his trot breaking spontaneously into a canter without any prompting at all. Kali smiled and patted him on the neck. She was looking forward to seeing the old man too.