'Kali Hooper. Remember it.'
'Kali Hooper, good. So, Kali Hooper — explain to me how it is you mean to tackle the little problem that presents itself before us.' Konstantin said, throwing her tool belt back to her.
'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 the 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
