You can say that again, Kali thought. People saw what people wanted to see. Never more so than when they pursued their interest with religious zeal. And that remained exactly the problem here.
'What if I were to tell you these things warn against the end of civilisation as we know it? That unless I recover a key that the Final Faith took from a friend of mine, they're a quarter of the way to unleashing something — '
Kali paused, unsure how to go on.
'Something?' Sonpear urged.
'I don't know yet, okay?' Kali shouted at him, piqued. 'But something very, very bad. A clockwork king.'
Kali frowned, aware, after the intensity of her search, of how unthreatening that sounded.
Sonpear laughed. 'Then I would suggest that you will not be able to stop them.'
Kali balled her fists. 'What are you saying? That this is, after all, where you call your friends to finish me off?'
'Not at all. I wish only to point out to you that the Final Faith's journey along their path of discovery has progressed somewhat further than you think.'
'Say again?'
Sonpear sighed heavily. 'My… exchanges with the Final Faith's receiver work two ways and, though I do not intend to, it is sometimes hard to avoid absorbing… peripheral information. This key that you refer to — the one taken from your friend and that I believe you originally acquired from the Spiral of Kos? — it is not the first to fall into their hands.'
Kali swallowed. Suddenly what Munch had said in the Spiral about hazards he'd recently encountered made sense. 'They have more?'
'There have been two previous expeditions — to forgotten sites called, I believe, the Shifting City and the Eye of the Storm.'
Names that sounded suitably trap-like, Kali thought. And they must have been two of the sites the map referred to, but she — and, presumably, Merrit — had never heard of them. But then they didn't have the resources the Final Faith had — the bastards.
'And they were successful?'
'I gather so.' Sonpear stared at her. 'Young lady, the Final Faith are already in possession of three of your keys and are about to acquire possession of the fourth.'
'What? Where?' Kali said, urgently.
'A site that has so far caused them considerable problems and loss, and by inference therefore the most dangerous of them all. And it is located beneath the most convenient and unexpected place you can imagine — the Final Faith's headquarters at Scholten Cathedral itself.'
Kali's mind flashed back to her and Killiam's escape — the curious lift shaft, the place she had wanted to go.
'Slowhand, you fark,' she said.
'Excuse me?'
'I have to go,' Kali said, knowing she needed to reach the key first. 'Listen, you're the spy — is there a back way out of here?'
Chapter Thirteen
Much as Kali had negotiated her conduit above Andon, so the man without clothes negotiated his below Scholten — only here the conduit was constructed not of metal but of stone. Dank stone. The dank stone of a sewer, in fact, sheened and slimed by substances worse than those Kali had encountered at the Three Towers — vile, brown, smelly substances that a man as clean and fastidious as he should not even have to think about, let alone drag himself through.
Somewhere beneath the Scholten Cathedral kitchens Killiam Slowhand tried not to think about the sludge that coated him, especially as there was nothing at all between the sludge and him. Every inch of him.
The archer shuddered.
It could have been worse, he supposed. For one thing, he could be beneath the Final Faith's privies rather than their kitchens. For another, more importantly, he could be dead. The knife that had been lunged at him on the walkway had been intended to deliver a fatal wound but had instead only grazed his side, something to do with the fact that he had grabbed its wielder and thrown him off the towering building as soon as his arm had come towards him. As the guard's scream faded in Scholten's night sky, his friends would probably have avenged him, finished him off, were it not for the fact that the head guard, just caught up, had ordered him to be taken alive. The order came on the specific instruction of Katherine Makennon, but why she wanted him kept alive, he didn't know — perhaps so she could have her Mister Fitch turn him to her cause, or perhaps merely so that she could revel in his reincarceration. She had certainly seemed to revel as she had had him stripped of what little clothing he had, and he wondered whether something had been going on there, whether perhaps a little of his charm had rubbed off on her after all? Because surely she couldn't have rumbled the old abrasive underpants trick?
Whatever the reason, it had led him to his present unsavoury predicament. Makennon had returned him to a cell but this time somewhere she could keep an eye on him, a small oubliette she just happened to maintain in her private courtyard, which was obviously used only for very special guests. He had felt quite flattered by this and had returned the favour by singing romantic ballads night and day — his very own Eternal Choir. But all good things had to come to an end and, after two weeks, she had ordered his execution at the earliest opportunity.
This was fine by him, as he had never intended hanging around. He'd have been gone the first night had he not needed to lose a little weight first. Not that he was overweight, of course, just — well, a little big. A little big for the hole in the oubliette floor, that was.
It was a flaw in security but a necessary one, because with the amount of rain over Scholten, without it he or anyone else kept in the oubliette would have drowned. The hole had probably once been too small for anyone to pass through but it was also long unmaintained — its grate rusted — and, over time, the draining water had worn away its edges, providing a smooth-edged if extremely tight squeezeway through the floor. The fact was, if he had been fully clothed, he'd have had to strip anyway to get through.
Definitely. Yes, without a doubt.
Slowhand shook his head. Hooper would never have believed that he'd done it again. Once — just once — he'd like to catch her losing her clothes in the line of duty. Then she'd know that these things just had a way of happening. But no — there was no chance of that, was there? Not with little Miss Prissy Knickers.
Slowhand continued crawling forwards, estimating he'd pass beyond the cathedral walls in about ten more minutes. Ahead of him, he could actually see a dim circle of azure night sky that was the sewer's outlet.
Unfortunately, that same light was also partly obscured, silhouetting something coming straight towards him. And down here it could have been anything.
Slowhand cursed. Feeling somewhat vulnerable in his present state, he looked for somewhere to hide. His eyes darted ahead of him, behind him, down and up, but he was in a sewer and there was nowhere to go. He was actually so involved in doing what he did that he failed to notice how quickly the something was coming at him. And the something was so involved in getting where it wanted to be that it didn't notice him.
Heads collided.
'Ow, dammit!'
'Jeeeeshhh!'
A face popped up right in front of his.
'Slowhand?' Kali Hooper said.
He strained to see in the dark. 'Hooper? Oh hells, don't tell me — you can see better in the dark, too?'
'Looks like it. So… how are you doing?'
'Oh, you know…'
'Mmm.'
'Mmm.'
The usual exchange went on for a while until Kali suggested they backtrack slightly in her direction, where an
