by Mike Wild
"I don't mean to tackle it at all," Kali responded. "At least, not for you." The truth was, she had already worked out how she might beat this thing, not only for the key but now, also, for the memory of Orlana Dawn, but when she did, it would be on her terms, not those of a certain Konstantin Munch. She'd learned what she needed to know and - it was time to go.
Munch swept back his cloak, revealing the gutting knife once more. Almost friendly in his tone, he sighed and said: "Kali, if I have let you live for nothing, I will kill you."
"Stan," Kali replied, going with his familiar name, "you won't get the chance." Her adrenalin built during Dawn's death - the grips of her captors having weakened in shock, anyway - she knew this was her moment, and took it. Slamming her elbow into the stomach of the brother on her right, she doubled him over and flung him round so that his head rammed into the stomach of the one on the left, then booted the first up the backside so the two of them sprawled to the floor in a heap. That done, she ran like hells.
Munch growled, and Kali heard the unsheathing of his knife echo sharply. She also heard him bark orders to Kallow, and suspecting what might come began to weave to the left and right. Sure enough, a second later, fireballs impacted with the ground on either side of her, detonating bits of the floor and following her as she ran. Kali kept weaving and moving, heading for the shadows at the edge of the Spiral's chamber, where the light from the dome did not reach. Crouching and moving as quickly and silently as she could, she began to manoeuvre herself around the rim, searching for the way in that Munch and his cronies must have used. Not that she had any intention of abandoning the place - hells, no, the key was far too interesting for that - but she needed to reach the surface, and Horse, to get more equipment from the saddlebag before she could even attempt to go for it. The fact that the plants' sap made them impervious to flame did not necessarily mean that they were invulnerable to it, and she figured that if she could create a heat that was intense enough she might be able to burn away some of the plants at the summit of the Spiral and lower herself to the key from above. All she needed was the magnifying mirrors she used to illuminate corridors in the darker sites, then using the sun and the crystal of the dome itself...
Kali stopped dead, realising she had just scrambled by a door - not the exit she sought but another door - an arched door, made of crystal like the dome. She rose slowly, the hairs on her neck rising, thrilled not only by the door itself but what she could see through it, shrouded in gloom - workbenches, strange tools, shelves filled with belljars containing the dried remains of plants.
She spun around, flattening her back against the crystal, a thought striking her. And peering along the vast curve of the Spiral's edge she saw what she suspected she might. More doors like this one, that she supposed led to more rooms like the one she had already seen. Yes, it made sense. The plants that protected the Spiral were no natural species, that was certain, so they had to have been cultivated, engineered, maintained. And it was here that that had been done. These rooms were what made the Spiral tick.
It was incredible. She hadn't come across anything like this before. This vast place, these rooms, all of this effort to protect that key - why?
It was possible the room contained a clue. Kali turned back to examine the door, but there seemed no visible way of opening it. It was thicker than the crystal of the dome, too - too thick to smash. Then she noticed that the frame of the door was traced with a faint runic pattern - not a circle like beneath the dome but a squiggle that surrounded it like a vine - and she brushed her fingertips across it experimentally. There was a sound like a long intake of breath, and on the lower left the curls and strokes lit with a brilliant blue light that began to work its way around the frame as if it were somehow loading it with energy.
Kali staggered back, falling onto her rear, staring at the pattern, so stunned that for a second she didn't realise the light of it was illuminating her as if she were experiencing a visitation from the gods. She would have sat there still were it not for the sound of footsteps approaching. She scrambled up and away from the door but it was too late - drawn by the strange spotlight, Munch and his cronies had found her.
Munch stared at the glowing pattern and sighed.
"Miss Hooper, my job is hazardous enough, and I really cannot afford loose cannons," he said matter-of-factly. "Regrettably, then, I must find my own way to the key." He turned to the shadowmage. "Burn her!"
Kallow raised a hand that still flickered from the volley he'd launched earlier, flexing his fingers to combust it anew. Kali stared at the ball of flame that appeared hovering in his palm and backed away, swallowing. This time, there was nowhere to hide.
"No, wait," she said. "You're making a mistake."
"No," Munch said, already walking back towards the Spiral, "meeting me was your mistake."
Two things happened at once. Kallow punched his palm in Kali's direction, letting fly, and at the very same time the runic pattern completed, the door it surrounded sliding open with a hiss. Kali coughed and gagged as a noxious cloud - the product of the plants and gods knew what other strange materials that had rotted inside the room for years - erupted into the air outside.
Gas. And a lot of it.
The fireball never reached her. It ignited the cloud as soon as it left Kallow's hand and the space between them was engulfed in a sheet of flame that blew her pursuers off their feet, turning them into fireballs themselves. Only Munch escaped the worst of the blast, but even he was slammed across the chamber floor some fifty feet, bouncing and rolling, smoking and charred, even further beyond that.
"I told you you were making a mistake," Kali said.
She ran - because there was nothing else she could do. Behind her, the open room boomed as the gas remaining within ignited, and Kali felt the floor quake not once but thrice, the explosion starting a chain reaction that was beginning to work its way around each room on the rim of the chamber. As she ducked and weaved, the arched crystal doors blew out of their frames one after the other, shattering around her. Great plumes of flame erupted from where they'd been, carrying inside them vials and bottles that then also shattered, spreading who knew what upon the floor, but something flammable that added to and combined with the plumes to create a ring of fire in the heart of the Spiral - a ring of fire that was rapidly turning into an inferno. Kali looked for the exit, and with relief spotted it, but she did not run towards it yet, instead veering towards Munch, and aiming beyond him. The recovering psychopath loomed before her, and, without even thinking, Kali leapt upwards and somersaulted over his surprised form, twisting in mid-air and plucking his gutting knife from its sheath as she went. It was a move that rather surprised her, too. Whoahh, she thought, you're getting good!
But she was going to need to be. Because she wasn't leaving without the key.
Okay, it wasn't exactly the plan she'd had in mind, but the imminent destruction of the Spiral had forced a rethink. The sea of flame wasn't killing the plants at the base of the Spiral - not yet - but it wasn't sparing them, either. Already burning furiously beneath the lower steps - and refusing to go away - it had sent them into a sweating, writhing paroxysm that Kali hoped would keep them distracted while she did what she needed to do. Suicide, she knew, but since when had that ever stopped her? And unless she wanted the key to disappear forever in this conflagration, what choice did she have?
She sprinted straight for the Spiral and up, her footfalls clanging rapidly on its steps, gaining as much height as quickly as she could. All around her the lethal vegetation lashed and snapped as though it had a hundred victims in its malignant grip, tendrils twisting and twining with each other all about her, their needles locking and causing sudden, frantic struggles between them. Kali didn't wait around to see which won, the fire hot on her heels, spreading now not only with its own momentum but flicked ever higher by the panicked whiplashing of those plants it had already consumed. It was actually starting to damage them, the tendrils' outer flesh splitting in th
e intensifying heat, spurting their sap until they became slick with their own green juices. The resultant friction between them made them sound as if they were screaming - and perhaps they were.
Disgusting as it was, the sap was exactly what Kali needed. The acrid smoke that poured now from the plants she could just about cope with, but the heat was another thing, and the sap was as welcome as a mountain waterfall, enabling her to keep going. And keep going she did, using Munch's gutting knife to slice at any tendril that flopped in her path, not so much harming them as batting them out of the way to die. And the Spiral was dying, from the bottom up.
Still, it seemed neverending and Kali was starting to think that it would make one hells of a morning workout when, at last, she reached the top.
The key sat on its plinth before her, bigger than it had seemed from above, a peculiar thing - an oddly disturbing thing - carved in the style of gristle and bone. But far too unwieldy to carry, especially in current circumstances. Thinking quickly, Kali loosened her toolbelt, slung it over one shoulder, then hefted the key and stuffed it behind the strap.
Hells, it was heavy. But whatever it was, it was hers. She had done it. All she had to do now was get back down.
Kali took in two deep lungfuls of air and was about to begin her descent when the Spiral shifted beneath her. She stumbled and picked herself up. Then the thing shifted again, and she realised what she had been afraid would happen was happening. The heat of the fire was weakening - perhaps even melting - some of the Spiral's lower superstructure, and the whole thing was starting to collapse beneath her.
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.
Chapter Three
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.
Kali had known Merrit Moon almost all her adult life, since the day he had introduced himself in the Warty Witch in Freiport. What had always stuck in her mind - become part of what drove her, in many ways - were the words he had imparted to her at the time. She had just returned from one of her first expeditions, only slightly less naïve than the day she'd been born, and had been sitting in the tavern bruised, battered and exhausted with a much-needed jug of ale and the artefact she had managed to extract from a ruined site some miles outside that town. As she sat there examining her prize, turning it in her hands, caressing it with a great deal of curiosity and no small sense of wonder, she'd been oblivious to the stares that the small, scintillating sphere was attracting from the Witch's other clientele. They, too, were curious about it, though their curiosity had little to do with the archaeology that motivated her and everything to do with lining their empty purses with gold. Two of what were presumably the more desperate among them, licking their lips, had begun to move over to her table when a hand had swept slowly across her own, pressing it down and hiding the object it held from view. At the same time, another hand waved the curious back towards the bar. The owner of both obviously possessed sufficient gravitas because the men left without question.