The Clockwork King of Orl

by Mike Wild

  Kali swallowed. There was something familiar there - and the eyes.

  "My gods," she said. "Merrit?"

  "What?" Slowhand exclaimed.

  "It's the old man," Kali said, excitedly. "I don't know how or why but he's here, inside this, this... thing. The cave in the World's Ridge, where I last saw him - he didn't die!"

  "Oh, Hooper, come on -"

  "Your friend is correct," Makennon said. "Munch told me how this happened, about an artefact. Its effects are meant to be temporary but..."

  Kali looked at the ogur, concerned. What had, a moment before, seemed so familiar in its eyes was fading, as if Moon were going away, and as she watched the spark in them faded to something feral - the eyes that she remembered from the beasts in the cave. The ogur emitted a dull growl, then, and as if afraid something worse might follow, roughly shoved her away, rose and stomped along the cliff.

  "We have to do something to help him," Kali said.

  "Hooper, I'm not sure we can," Slowhand cautioned. "It seems to me that in doing what he did he's sacrificed something."

  "Like what?" Kali said.

  Slowhand looked grave. "Like himself."

  "Then let us hope his sacrifice has not been in vain," Makennon said. Her attention had been drawn by a series of quaking thuds from far below. "Because they're coming."

  The three of them turned to look down the steps leading to Martak, and at their base saw that the first units of mechanical warriors had completed their slow march from the throne room and emerged from the cowl. They marched in the same organised lines of five, in rank after rank after rank, filling the jetty with their broad bodies, metal feet pounding into the stone, and, as they gradually drew closer to the steps, rocks at the top of the cliffs began to tremble and shed scree that bounced and skittered below.

  Their assault on the peninsula would soon begin.

  "We have to stop them," Slowhand said.

  "Oh brilliant. Just bloody brilliant."

  "I see the old Hooper is indeed back."

  "Well, honestly..."

  "If you two are finished," Makennon said, "I think someone's already ahead of us on that one." She pointed a little way along the clifftop, where the ogur was pushing its shoulder into a boulder that balanced there, clearly trying to dislodge it and send it crashing below.

  "I think it knows what it's doing," Makennon said.

  "Damn right," Kali said, smiling. "The old man's still in there somewhere."

  "Well, are we just going to stand here or are we going to help it?" Slowhand enquired.

  "Him," Kali corrected.

  "Fine, him. Come on!"

  The three of them joined the ogur behind the boulder and leant their weight to pushing it, and with a dull rumble the giant piece of rock dislodged from its perch and went tumbling away, bouncing first off rocks and then onto the stone steps. With a series of crashes that were audible even over the storm, it continued down, bouncing two then three steps at a time, then more, gathering momentum as it went.

  The mechanical warriors did not even react to its approach, their minds - Munch's mind - intent on their single imperative of reaching the surface and the humans who dwelled there. The boulder smashed into their front rank and sent five warriors staggering back, causing a knock-on effect behind them, and as the giant rock continued to roll through the second and third ranks their relentless march was momentarily thrown into confusion, the affected warriors trying to recover from the impact, those behind attempting to march on around them. Then, in unison, five of the giant dwarven battle hammers were swung at the boulder and it was shattered first to rubble and then, to dust. The warriors' march continued, the damage to them insignificant.

  "We need more boulders," Slowhand declared. He repeated the statement more loudly to the ogur as if, somehow, being an ogur made it deaf. He then pointed at more boulders, just to make himself extra clear, but the ogur had already stomped towards them of his own volition. "Yes, more boulders!" Slowhand agreed needlessly.

  Makennon assessed the ammunition available to them. Short of attempting to smash away the Dragonwings themselves, most of the rocks available to them were smaller than the first. "This isn't going to work," she said. "The last one barely scratched them."

  "Maybe not," Slowhand responded, heaving. "But we can at least slow them down."

  "And what will that achieve? There are no reinforcements coming."

  "I don't know, okay? But I, for one, am not going to just stand here."

  He and the ogur sent another boulder tumbling.

  Kali, meanwhile, stared down the steps, and then inland, back along the peninsula. She bit her lip. "Slowhand, carry on with what you're doing because it just might help, but Makennon has a point. There's only one way to stop those warriors and that's to destroy what Munch used to animate them - destroy the Clockwork King. But that means first having to finish their general - finish Munch."

  Slowhand and the ogur made another rock roll, and the archer nodded. "Finish Munch," he repeated, breathlessly. "Hooper, you have to be kidding. Even if you had a chance against his bodyguards, how in the hells would you get back down to him? Those things would mince you before you got halfway down the steps."

  "There's one way," Kali said.

  She swept up Munch's gutting knife from the ground and jammed it in her belt. Then, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled. A second later, Horse stood next to her, braying, his broken tether dangling around his neck.

  Kali mounted him and slapped his flank, welcoming his help.

  Now it was Slowhand's turn to stare down the steps, Kali's intention dawning. "Oh, no," he said. "No, no, no. No..."

  "Hyyahh!" Kali shouted.

  She reined Horse around and galloped him towards the top of the steps, kicking his flanks to spur him on. Horse reached them and jumped, soaring in a determined arc over four of the risers before his hooves thudded back onto stone with an impact that made them spark and jarred Kali to the bones.

  "Hyyahh!" she shouted again.

  Horse thundered down the steps before them, Kali keeping her gaze straight ahead in the bouncing, rushing diagonal the world had become, and again kicked his flanks, spurring the bamfcat to greater speed.

  "Hyyahh!"

  They hit the jetty, and the world levelled, and still she kicked, bringing Horse to full gallop, the front ranks of the marching warriors now no more than ten yards ahead. As she'd hoped she would, she heard a distinctive shnak as the horns on Horse's body snapped fully from their housings, the bamfcat reacting instinctively to the danger to come.

  Good boygirl, she thought, good, good boygirl.

  And then they rammed straight into the army of the Clockwork King.

  Kali was aware of little more than a sudden and rapid series of thuds and jarring impacts as Horse ploughed into and then through the advancing warriors, her world skewing this time into a seemingly endless number of fractured tableaux, flashes of hammers and axes and swinging arms, and of red, glaring eyes. There was nothing she could do but ride Horse as a helpless passenger, nothing she could do to affect their progress - all she could do was hope it continued, and that Horse's armour was strong enough to keep him from harm. The great beast ploughed onwards through the warriors, cutting a swathe through their middle, sending them staggering aside, and then, glimpsed through them at last, jarringly and shakingly, was the maw of the cowl. There were still far too many of the warriors between them and it, though, and within it, many, many more, still working their way up from the throne room, and the constant wall of metal and corrupted flesh was beginning to take its toll on Horse, not only in terms of slowing his momentum but in the amount of damage his armour was now taking. She couldn't - and wouldn't - push him any further, but that didn't really matter because it had never been her intention to reach the cowl, anyway. All she'd needed Horse to do was get her close to the water.

  And now she needed to make sure Horse was safe.

  Kali rose high in the saddle so tha
t she touched only his stirrups, and then patted the bamfcat's neck. "It's time to do that thing you do," she said quickly, and hoped to the gods that he understood. "You know, the thing. Do it, Horse. Do it now!"

  The bamfcat roared, and for a second Kali thought that perhaps he hadn't understood, but then she realised it wasn't that at all.

  "Yes, you great lump, I'm fond of you, too, but you need to do the thing! Pits, Horse, do the thing and do it n - "

  Horse reared, and the air cracked, and then the bamfcat vanished from under her, and suddenly Kali was flying over the heads of the marching warriors, all alone. She knew exactly what she was doing, however, and immediately turned what could have been a flailing tumble into an arched dive, taking her over the edge of the jetty. And then, like Horse, she, too, vanished - head first into the churning sea.

  Kali hit smoothly, slicing beneath the surface like a knife. There, however, her smoothness came to an end, the churning maelstrom that was battering the side of the jetty flinging her around like a worgle in a whirlpool. It took her some time to orientate herself, arms and legs slapping and kicking against the currents, but finally she swam in the direction she wished. But she did not head for the surface, as might be expected. Instead, she swam towards the dark foundations of the entrance cowl to Martak. Slowhand had been right - there was no way to reach Munch through the warriors - but there was a way to reach him.

  And there it was. Or, rather, they were.

  The intakes for the water pipes loomed before her in the murky depths, the churning water around them exacerbated by the pumps somewhere inside Martak that drew it in. Kali had to fight against the pull so that she was not sucked against the grilles she saw protecting the pipe's mouths, and, thrashing and kicking again, manoeuvred herself so that she was able to grab both sides of one of the pipes, and there, amidst a cloud of bubbles as blinding as fog, tugged and wrenched at the grille until it came away. She let it fall to the seabed and then - her breath short - dug in her belt for her breathing conch before she thrust herself upwards and in.

  It was almost peaceful inside the tube, the distant thudding of the pumps like a heartbeat, the rotation of the fans - slower now that their job in releasing the king and his army was done - a relaxing thrum. This was the first chance she'd had to appreciate the complex network of pipes that seemed to power the mechanics of the place, and, while she found it an achievement, she also found it rather odd because it was so distinctly un-dwarven. But then, she supposed, they hadn't had much lava to drive their engines here at the edge of the sea.

  There was nothing peaceful about what was occurring beneath her, however, and as Kali wiped away the grime on the inner surface of the tube, and looked out, she saw the vaguely distorted forms of the advancing army of clockwork warriors marching in rank after rank along Martak's exit corridor. But she had no interest in them. They were the responsibility of Slowhand and the others now, and her concern was in reaching the man who controlled them and what he, in turn, controlled.

  Kali swam along the tube, timing her strokes through the slowly rotating fanblades, heading horizontally and then downwards, rubbing the glass occasionally to determine how far into the complex she was. Eventually the light outside became shadowed and she realised she was passing through the section of tubing that ran through the surroundings of the first door, which meant there was only one short section of corridor remaining. There was, however, a problem. Her breathing was becoming laboured, and she realised the conch symbiotes had almost exhausted their current supply of oxygen. She would need to pick up her pace, get out of the tube quickly, or she'd become part of the flotsam floating around this hellhole for the rest of time.

  She swam faster, ignoring her surroundings until a second batch of shadow told her she had at last returned to the throne room of the Clockwork King. But her breathing was becoming desperate now, and she could taste the toxic taint of her own used breath. She'd poison herself if she didn't get out of there right away.

  Bubbles exploding from the sides of her mouth, Kali felt desperately around on the base of the tube, searching for some weakness in its length. She found a seal that linked sections and then pulled Munch's gutting knife from her belt, working at the strange, almost organic seal. It was more difficult than she expected, and her movements became increasingly jerky, imprecise, but at last a downwards spiral of bubbles indicated the seal was coming apart, water leaking into the throne room below.

  She wondered if Munch would notice - notice that she was coming for him.

  She stabbed his knife into the weakened seal, and a sudden lurch in the base of the tube warned her that it was about to give. Just in time she jammed herself inside the tube as the whole section dropped away from the rest of the network and hung down at an angle, water slamming into and over her back as it poured down into the throne room.

  Kali released herself and went with the flow which, quite conveniently, washed her right in front of Munch, sitting there, on his throne.

  "Miss Hooper," the dwarf resurgent said. "Even I have to confess this is something of a surprise."

  "Hi, Stan," Kali said. "Have to say, you look a little rough."

  He did, too. Munch was almost slumped in the throne he had so arrogantly adopted, looking drained and fevered. His eyes seemed unable to focus on her - or were, perhaps, focusing on a thousand things - and he involuntarily spasmed every few seconds. The blood that had leaked from where the spikes had stabbed into his skull had not dried, because the sweat that ran from his every pore wouldn't let it.

  "Controlling the Thousand is proving to be something of a challenge," he said, wearily. "But one that I will master."

  "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 spra
ng 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.