"Ow! Hey!"
"Shush!"
Both of them crouched on the steps, observing what was going on. The reason that Makennon and her people could not get the doors open was clear, and seeing what it was Slowhand stared at Kali, his expression questioning and concerned. But the expression on Kali's face told him that exactly the same concerns were running through her mind.
The huge doors had been sealed shut with a massive, glowing rune. A rune in the shape of a crossed circle.
"Hooper, isn't that — ?"
Kali swallowed. Pulsating slowly with a red fire, the giant rune was the symbol of the Final Faith, all right, but she could not believe that she was seeing it. There had to be another reason for its presence here, because otherwise all of Makennon's babblings about the Final Faith's destiny threatened to prove right. No, there had to another reason. Had to be!
One thing was clear. If it was the symbol of the Final Faith then Makennon was nevertheless having problems bending it to her will — and it was obviously not going to be wiped away with a wave of the Anointed Lord's hand. As they continued to watch, Makennon gestured to the mages in her party and the men and women congregated in front of the rune, beginning to weave their magical threads that would dispel it.
Makennon and company had clearly reached a temporary impasse and, as they worked out how to get the doors open, Kali realised it was her and Slowhand's chance to get ahead of their party. She looked around for a way to do so, certain with the knowledge of experience that there was always a way past these things, if you looked beyond the obvious. Her gaze fastened on one of the higher seawater tubes that ran along the corridor close to the ceiling. Where the tube met the wall in which the door was set, there was a small crawlspace around it. She nudged the archer, indicated it.
Slowhand knew what she had in mind. Quietly, he unslung his bow and took a roped arrow from his quiver, aiming upwards. The arrow flew and arced perfectly over the tube, taking the rope with it and wrapping it round and round until it was fixed firmly. Slowhand tested its grip and then indicated for Kali to climb.
She did, and he followed, and the two of them moved silently along the top of the tube in a crouched position, high above the oblivious Makennon and her people. There, they ducked into the crawlspace and through the wall. They passed through about twenty feet of darkness carved from the rock beneath the seabed and emerged finally into a space that was detectable only by their sudden freedom of movement as it was almost totally devoid of light.
Then their eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness, and they both gasped out loud.
Because the scale of the statues in the corridor outside was nothing compared to the scale of this room.
The first people to do so in over a thousand years, they had just entered what they, and Makennon, had journeyed to the edge of their world to find.
The throne room of the Clockwork King.
Chapter Seventeen
The throne room was vast. That such an excavation could exist here, hewn from rock beneath the waves, was mind-boggling enough, but made even more so by the fact that as they stared around it in wonder the sea hung above them like a sky.
This — a bit to Kali's disappointment but to Slowhand's huge relief — turned out to be an illusion, the huge, stone buttresses of the throne room walls reflecting and magnifying the glowing seawater in the tubes, so that it seemed to ripple and shift in kind. But Kali's disappointment was mollified by the fact that the glow served a useful purpose, providing an effective, if haunting, illumination, bathing in a blue-green light this marvel of dwarven engineering that had been lost from sight and mind since before her own civilisation was born. What their eyes beheld as they further adjusted to the light was no illusion, however — but they could have been forgiven for thinking that it was.
The throne room stretched out ahead of them, bigger even than the inside of Scholten Cathedral, an immense rectangular chamber that could once have welcomed titans and giants as courtiers, and which, for all they knew, perhaps once had. A central aisle that was as wide as a road, inlaid with dwarven mosaics, led forwards, and at its end — distant but nonetheless still dominating the room — a huge and shadowed, seated figure loomed high in the dark. As compelling as it was, though, it was not the only figure in the room, and as Kali dropped from the pipe and began to wander slowly up the aisle, her head turned from left to right, staring up at three raised galleries, accessed by broad interconnecting stairways, that ran the entire length of the throne room on either side. As the corridor outside had been lined with dwarven statues, so were these, but in this case with many, many more, each and every one of them draped in cobwebs but otherwise identical and separated from the next only by their own width again. Kali swallowed as she studied one statue after another, the unease she had started to feel on the surface growing with each frozen visage she passed.
But uneasy as she was, Kali could barely control her other feelings. On the one hand, the sheer scale of this place and its contents made her feel like a starving mouse beneath a feast-laden table, and she longed to explore, to investigate, to catalogue the things she'd found — to touch them, the first person to do so for literally ages. On the other hand, however, she knew that was not why she was here, and the feeling of elation she felt at her greatest find to date was marred by the fact not only that — strictly speaking — she hadn't found it, but that, incidentally, she had to destroy it, too. Or, at the very least, stop it doing what it did.
Whatever it was that was.
Doubts resurfaced once more — that what the old man had told her was partly wrong, that perhaps Makennon's destiny did lie where she said — but the doubts were fleeting. She knew what she had seen and read in the Three Towers, knew what ideas of her own were forming, and most of all, she knew how this place felt — and it felt wrong. No, more than wrong. Troubled. Tainted. Bad. Something truly awful had happened within these walls, a long, long time ago, and its aura remained and resonated still.
She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder. "Nice place they've got here," Slowhand said. "Cosy."
Kali nodded, only half-listening, and walked further up the aisle until she came close enough to study the giant, seated figure at its end. No, not seated, bethroned. The idea that the Clockwork King might have been some kind of giant walking automaton had always verged on the edge of preposterous in her mind, but even so she'd been ready for anything. But looking at it now it was clear that the King was not designed as a giant that would arise from its throne, have a quick stretch, and pound across the peninsula sweeping all in its path aside. No, in actual fact, it seemed to be just a statue — a towering and staggering and very pitsing imposing statue, it had to be said, but a statue nonetheless.
Kali craned her neck, staring up to study it, and found herself being stared back at by a pair of giant stone eyes set in a gnarled, bearded and cruel dwarven face. Though the eyes were only stone, their stare was distinctly unsettling, made all the more so by the fact the face was draped in the same lengthy cobwebs as the statues against the walls, and Kali pulled her own gaze away, examining the rest of the statue instead. The giant figure wore — or had been sculpted wearing — the kind of studded leather armour she recognised as being from dwarven middle history, and in one hand held a like-period battle hammer, in the other a spiked dwarven shield. Again, cobwebs dangled from the shield's spikes, so long that Kali found she could walk through them like a curtain. It was only as she did that she noticed one of the less obvious features of the statue — one around the side.