The Crucible of the Dragon God

device reached its apex and the two of them found themselves dangling beneath the walkway, having come to a dead stop. They stared at each other as, beneath their combined weight, the line creaked above them, and then in unison yelped as the arrow holding it loosened slightly from where it was embedded.

'I think we'd better — yaaaarrgh!' Slowhand said.

They fell.

Kali didn't hesitate, swinging her legs up so that they wrapped Slowhand about the middle, and then flipping backwards in mid air so that her feet hooked over a small rail on the underside of the walkway. Then, with a grunt, she jacknifed herself upwards and grabbed onto the same rail, lowering her legs until Slowhand dangled between them, beneath her. The archer stared up from between her thighs.

'This,' he said, 'is like a dream.'

'You want me to open them?'

'Er, not right now, no.'

There was a moment's pause.

'Right.'

A few seconds later, Kali had manoeuvred the pair of them onto the walkway and they stared at what lay in front and beneath them.

'Slowhand,' Kali said, bending to place her palms on her thighs and taking a deep breath. 'I think we're here.'

'Hoooo, boy.'

As the highest point amongst the whole, strange series of structures, the walkway afforded the two of them their first proper view of the complex. Kali realised then that she hadn't been far wrong with her first impression that the valley was full of worlds.

A number of spheres of various sizes — though all massive — dotted the hidden place, some projecting ornate walkways to their neighbour, others on, or attached to, huge metal tracks or arms — one of which bore cradles and the rotted remains of more airships like those at the waystation — all sitting there amidst the overgrown trees. Literally complex and wondrous, Kali could see no reason why such should be its purpose but she couldn't help be reminded of something she had once seen used by the Sisters of Long Night. A mechanical contraption they told her was meant to emulate the movement of the celestial bodies on and around which they lived — something they called an orrery. That was what the Crucible reminded her of — a giant orrery, constructed for reasons she couldn't yet begin to imagine.

There, roughly speaking, was Kerberos, the largest sphere and the one beneath them, there, in its shadow, Twilight, and there, further out, its size perhaps representative of its actual distance, Twilight's sun. The only sphere Kali could not reconcile with what she knew of the heavens was one that was positioned somehow jarringly amongst the others — a sphere constructed of a darker material than its companions that looked as if had once drawn ever closer to them on a perfectly straight track through the trees. Kali frowned — in all her explorations she had never come across anything like this, and the only way she was going to discover the purpose of the spheres was to get inside them. Fortunately, there appeared to be a gap in Kerberos — as if once upon a time the upper half of the sphere had, for some reason, opened to the skies. Its edges now browned with great patches of rust, it seemed jammed in that position, but it was wide enough for their purposes. The only problem would be in reaching it without a repeat of her recent, almost fatal mishap.

'Remember Scholten?' Slowhand asked, winking.

He unslung Suresight and strung an arrow with a wire attached. Kali nodded. She wouldn't easily forget that stormy night and the suicide slide from the heights of the Cathedral. A slide that had come to a rude end when Katherine Makennon's guards had cut the line.

'You joining me this time?' she queried.

'Wouldn't miss it for the, er, world,' Slowhand told her, nodding at the sphere.

He raised Suresight, aiming the arrow on a shallow trajectory, and then fired it through the gap. A second later he tested its tension and then attached the zipline. 'Grab hold.'

Kali did as instructed, wrapping her arms around Slowhand's torso and her legs around his, ignoring some ribald comment as the archer shuffled himself against her. Then he lurched and the two of them began to speed down the wire towards the shadowy gap.

As they slid through it into a dark and still interior, the metallic zuzz of the zipline sounded suddenly sharp, though not as sharp as would have been their cries of pain had they struck any of the odd, unidentifiable shapes that whizzed by them in the gloom. Thankfully, the interior of the sphere was vast, and none were in their way. Exactly what they were sliding into remained a mystery but, as was her habit on entering any Old Race site, Kali sniffed as she descended, trying to take in the odour of the place. There was metal and oil and the rough, sour tang of machinery. An odour she had smelled before in a site called Kachanka, one of her finds that had been some kind of dwarven factory. She never had discovered what it made. For all she knew it could have been dwarven razorblades, in which case, no wonder it had gone out of -

'End of the line!' Slowhand warned suddenly, and the two of them released their grips, dropping with a clang onto metal where they rolled to soften their impact.

Unexpectedly, they continued to roll, and — after mutual yelps of surprise — they realised they had landed on a sloping surface and were apparently sliding now towards the base of some huge bowl. When at last they came to a stop, they were up and ready to defend themselves, Slowhand panning a primed Suresight around him, Kali the same with her crackstaff. They saw nothing coming at them out of the dark, however, and reslung the weapons. Now, they listened, but the only sounds they heard were those of their own, heavy breathing and of the sphere itself — loud, eerie creaks and groans of metal shifting and settling. One such shift was so pronounced that the sphere actually shook, and the pair rocked on the soles of their feet.

'Whatever this place is,' Slowhand commented, 'it feels as if it's coming apart at the seams.'

'It's ancient, Slowhand. What do you expect?'

'I've a feeling it's more than just age that's caused this.'

Their eyes began slowly adjusting to the gloom and, as they did, they gasped.

Because they seemed to have landed on a walkway that curved along the base of the sphere, and off to their left and their right. The trouble was, as their slide had testified, it didn't stop to their left and their right. Instead it curved up the sides of the sphere and then, disorientatingly, not least because of the dizzying height involved, curved across its top, crossing the gap through which they had entered, and down again in a complete loop, coming full circle back to the spot where they stood. Nor was it the only walkway to do so. The interior of the sphere was criss-crossed with them, weaving a web-like pattern over its cathedral sized interior, as if the terms up, down, above and below had no meaning here. To be certain what she was seeing was true, Kali attempted to renegotiate the curve of the walkway but made it only so far before its incline slid her back. Craning her neck and turning on the spot, she gazed open mouthed, tracing all the walkways and wondering whether some sorcery that had enabled people to traverse these impossible ways had, once upon a time, been at play here. This remained a possibility until Slowhand noticed that the walkways were suspended a little way above the shell of the sphere, and that between the two a series of tracks, gears and gimbals hinted that they had been designed to move around its inside. A latticework sphere within a sphere, apparently rotatable through three hundred and sixty degrees in every direction so that any point of any walkway could rapidly shift into any position it needed to be in. It was a more prosaic explanation than sorcery, for sure, but was no less staggering for it. An incredible achievement of Old Race engineering unlike any they had ever seen. One question nagged at Kali, though. What exactly was it for?

Maybe part of the answer lay in what slowly became visible between the walkways. The vague shapes that had had whizzed by them during their descent were revealing themselves now to be tools and machines of various shapes, unknown purposes and sizes, all of which were aligned towards or — on their own independent tracks — capable of being aligned towards the centre of the sphere. Strange instruments like giant thrusting lances and claws, huge lenses and multiple-jointed things that looked like nothing less than upturned metallic spiders. The central focus of these tools made Kali rethink her initial impression of the place, feeling now that this was no razorblade factory but designed to build something big and she suddenly desired to see the ancient machinery in action. The huge inner sphere whirling and swirling about its task — whatever it was — and all of those various machines and tools at play, perhaps flashing and sparking with unknown energies, would have been of such complexity that it would have made the mechanics of the Clockwork