Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  Once she’d stopped sneezing, anyway.

  Or perhaps she was a perfectly ordinary woman, and he was merely maundering because she was the first one he’d seen in a season. What a thing to wreak on a man—the sky too large, all movements too fast, and all women too interesting.

  He risked another glance at the whirl of activity outside the alley. His stomach churned a bit, but it wasn’t quite as dizzying.

  “If I called us a carriage,” said Slate thoughtfully, “can you make it to the street? It’s—oh, half a block, I’d say.”

  “I think I can make it,” he said, although his stomach knotted at the thought.

  The sky, the sky, I’ll fall into the sky…

  She gave him a concerned look. “I could blindfold you if you like.”

  Caliban had little enough pride left, but the thought at first horrified, then amused him. What a pair they’d make—a short little criminal leading a blind, shambling wreck of paladin. The Dreaming God wasn’t known for his sense of humor, but sometimes you had to wonder.

  “As entertaining as that would be for the locals, no. I can make it. Just…don’t walk too fast.”

  She nodded, and stepped out of the alley.

  They went at a walk. Caliban fastened his eyes on her back. She was wearing a completely unmemorable skirt and tunic, in dull grey-brown. If he lost sight of her, he was going to have a hell of a time finding her again. The seam at her left shoulder was starting to come loose. He could see each individual thread working free.

  Well, she was visiting a prison, not going out dancing.

  I wonder what she did to earn a death sentence?

  The thought was startling. He glanced aside, caught a glimpse of the market swirling around him, and bore it for as long as he could before returning his gaze to Slate’s back. She turned to glance at him, and he gave her a nod. She nodded in return and plunged forward.

  The Dowager’s city didn’t give death sentences for most crimes. The Dowager preferred money and hard labor, in that order, and dead men are notoriously bad at either.

  He doubted she was a murderer. Her stained, elegant hands looked like a scribe or an alchemist. A thief, possibly, which conjured up all sorts of images of daring midnight burglaries, and escapes across the rooftops.

  Caliban almost snorted at the thought. Did anyone really do that? Pickpocketing perhaps, banditry certainly, but that sort of genteel thievery seemed more like a romantic fiction than an actual profession.

  Would they really sentence you to death for it?

  A spy? A traitor? Would they send a traitor out on a job like this?

  Would they put her in charge?

  The cursed tattoo throbbed on his shoulder and he grimaced. It was, he had to admit, an excellent piece of insurance.

  They passed a fishmonger’s stall, and a man carrying several wrapped, dripping packages ran into Caliban’s shoulder. He staggered back, more from the unexpected contact than the force.

  “Hey, watch where you’re going! Are you drunk?”

  “No, I—sorry—” He plunged after Slate, suddenly terrified of losing her in this jumble. She was an unlikely safety, and yet without her—would the tattoo begin chewing at his arm? Would he fall into the sky?

  The man cursed after him, brandishing a fish. Slate glanced back, saw Caliban following, and nodded.

  He was watching her so intently that when she pulled up short, he nearly ran into her, and then she backed up into him anyway, cursing.

  He looked over her head. A space was clearing in the crowd in front of them, as people drew away. He watched a woman trip and fall down, and still keep scuttling backwards with a look of fear and disgust on her face.

  “Shit,” Slate muttered. “Another blighter.”

  In the center of the circle was the prone body of a man. He was well-dressed, but there was something badly wrong with his skin. It peeled away as if he’d been badly burned, revealing bloody grey and yellow shadows beneath it. As the knight watched, one arm ratcheted upward, pawed at the air, then fell back down.

  “That man’s hurt,” he said, starting forward.

  Slate grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts? Stay back!”

  “But that man needs help!” The sky retreated. The dying man in the middle of the pavement took all his attention. “Why isn’t anyone helping?”

  “You’re insane! He’s beyond help!”

  The crowd was very quiet. The sound of the man’s breathing rattled against the stones. He pawed at the air again jerkily, running down.

  “Damnit, let me go, maybe I can—”

  Slate turned into him, rammed a shoulder into his chest, and threw her full weight against it, like a woman trying to brace up a wall. Since he probably weighed twice what she did, this was spectacularly ineffective, but it did at least convince him that she was serious.

  “Don’t make me use a knife,” she growled.

  My god, I believe she would… “What’s going on?”

  “Where have you been for the past—no, never mind, stupid question.” Slate put a hand to her head. “It’s blight.”

  “Blight? Here? In the capitol?” Caliban frowned over her head. “There were some rumors that it had been seen in the outer cities, but no one thought it would reach the capitol.”

  “Yeah, well, they were wrong. Showed up right at the beginning of the year. The guards should—here we go.”

  A grim-faced guard appeared from the direction of the keep, pushing gawkers back with the shaft of his pike. “Get back, get back, you’ve all seen it already…”

  He hardly needed to say that. The circle around the body was a good twenty feet in diameter. No one was taking any chances with blight.

  A few moments later, the bone-pickers arrived. They wore grey gauze wrapped over every inch, even a thin veil of gauze over the eyes. Two of them leapt down from their cart and produced long poles, lifting the still-twitching body of the blighted man on the ends and ferrying him to the cart.

  One of the grey figures dumped a bucket of water out across the stones. You could track its drainage by watching the ripple as the crowd skittered aside.

  “And that’s that,” muttered Slate. “If you see another one, for god’s sake, don’t touch it. They don’t know how it spreads, but they’re pretty sure skin contact is a bad idea.”

  “I’ll be careful,” said Caliban. His head felt hollow, and the light was giving him a headache.

  Slate plunged back into the crowd, giving the bone-pickers a wide berth.

  She stopped at last on the edge of the street, waving for a cab. Caliban put a hand over his face again. He was horrified to discover that he was on the edge of tears.

  It was too much all at once. The sky, the tattoo, freedom, a suicide mission, the blight victim—too much. He’d spent four months in a cell, four months of changeless days and changeless walls, of praying for something, anything, to happen.

  And now it had. He did not know if he was grateful, but he knew he was overwhelmed.

  Has the god answered my prayers at last, or is this another punishment for my sins?

  It seemed unlikely that it was the god. The Dreaming God’s presence was heat and light and rock-hard certainty. Caliban had not felt it in a very long time, and he no longer felt certain of anything at all.

  Wheels rattled. Slate took his arm again. “Come on, the carriage is here.”

  He climbed into it obediently, and sagged back against the wooden seat when the door closed. The inside was a safely bounded world, the proper size. The knot in his stomach loosened.

  “Seven Crows,” Slate told the driver, leaning out the window.

  “That’s two blocks from here,” the driver said, disgusted. “You could walk it faster than I can drive you.”

  “Just do it,” said Slate. “My friend’s sick.”

  “Drunk, more like…” muttered the driver, but he snapped the reins and called “Heeee-yup!” to the horses. They plodded off. The wheels creaked.

  “I�
�m sorry,” said Caliban again, resting his hands on his thighs. “You must be regretting your choice.”

  She smiled briefly and patted his knee. “No. This’ll pass in a day or two, and you’ll be fine. Or at least no worse off than the rest of us. Or you'll kill us all. Either way, really.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. Her face, when there was nothing passing across it, looked tired.

  And that was another odd thing. She touched him without fear, but he hadn’t seen any interest in her eyes. Caliban wasn’t used to that. Women usually noticed him. Some men, too. He was the god’s own champion, a great demonslayer, and by all accounts a very handsome man.

  Is she a woman for other women, then? He hadn’t gotten that impression.

  There was a strange scar on the ring finger of her right hand. It looked like a wedding ring in reverse, two ridges of blotchy scar tissue around a smooth band of unmarred flesh.

  Caliban looked down at his own hands, at the dirty fingernails and grime between them, and almost snorted at his own arrogance.

  You haven’t bathed or shaved in a season. A woman hardly has to prefer her own sex not to find you attractive. You’re not exactly the elite Knight-Champion of the Dreaming God any more, if you haven’t noticed.

  Perhaps she’s simply not attracted to mass murderers.

  The carriage rumbled to a halt. “Just a little farther,” said Slate apologetically.

  The last leg of the journey passed without notice. There was an inn, a blur of empty tables, a flight of blessedly enclosed stairs. Slate opened the door to a suite, and ushered him inside.

  * * *

  “He’s a knight?”

  The man who spoke was a wiry, compact fellow with heavy eyebrows and shoulder-length hair. He had been slouching with his booted feet over the arm of a chair.

  He had not actually been flipping a knife, because hardly anyone really did that, but he looked like the knife-flipping type. A pile of cigarette ends in the ashtray showed what he’d been doing instead.

  When Slate informed him of their new acquaintance’s identity, he sat bolt upright. “Have you lost your mind? The pick of the Dowager’s prisons—the finest cutthroats and criminals in the kingdom—and you bring us a knight?”

  “They’re not the finest,” she said, “or they wouldn’t have gotten caught. Yes, I picked him. His name is Sir Caliban. Caliban, this is Brenner. He’s an assassin.”

  He could be at that, Caliban decided, looking Brenner over. The man moved with more strength than grace, and yet, despite pacing wildly back and forth across the room (as he leapt up and began to do) his feet made no sound. He wore dusty black clothing, and his boots were very fine.

  It was funny in a way, that a man who could forget how huge the world was could still recognize good boots.

  The inn was not so good as the boots, but it could still have been a lot worse—a suite of rooms, one narrow window, chairs and a fireplace in the sitting room. Someone was paying rather a lot of money for it.

  The fireplace had a smoldering fire in it. Caliban stumbled to it, feeling the warmth on the backs of his legs. He had not warmed himself at a fire in a long time.

  “Good god, a knight? Why not bring some watchmen along too?”

  “They had some,” said Slate. “I didn’t much care for their looks.”

  “Yes, but—gods! I thought you were going to get us a half-dozen thugs, some muscle for the trip, not a knight.” Brenner stopped in front of Caliban, raking his eyes up and down. His eyebrows moved like angry caterpillars.

  A season or a lifetime ago, Caliban would have drawn his sword and shown the man muscle. He might be an assassin, but few assassins were terribly good at a straight assault. The way this one moved said that he was probably a more-than-competent knife fighter—he had that unconscious tendency to present only a profile to the enemy—but a sword gave you a good bit of advantage in reach (although not as much as one might think.)

  A straightforward attack, then, right down the middle, butchery rather than swordplay. It would have the advantage of surprise. If the man got a knife out, he could adjust tactics accordingly.

  Caliban did none of these things. He had not held a sword for months. He could not even think of a response to the man’s words, and his wits were generally the last thing to desert him. Possibly they’d fallen into the sky.

  Ngha, ngha, hggahnmama halikalikali… muttered the demon.

  His hands were shaking. Caliban put them behind him. He looked up and met Brenner’s eyes, which were blue, with pale rings around the pupil, and knew the man had seen him trembling.

  Of course. Assassins were an observant lot, or they didn’t last very long. Little things like trip wires and the changing of the guard could really put a damper on one’s career.

  “He’s a complete wreck,” said Brenner, displaying his grasp of the obvious. The caterpillars slammed together over his nose.

  “Shut up, Brenner,” said Slate tiredly. “And sit down, too. The poor man’s been in a cell for months, he’s hardly at his best. You know how people get when they’ve been on the inside for too long. Some rest and decent food, and he’ll be fine.”

  “I just don’t see why,” said Brenner. “Do you have some kind of armor fetish you never mentioned before?”

  A whining assassin. Caliban had seen everything now.

  “I had a feeling, okay?”

  Brenner turned away from his quarry and toward Slate. Caliban felt a shameful flush of relief that the man was leaving him alone, and an immediate twinge of guilt. The assassin looked half again as large as Slate, and he descended on her like a stooping hawk.

  Caliban took a step forward, despite himself. He had thought that he had slaughtered chivalry on that red morning four months ago, but perhaps there was a little left after all.

  Slate seemed unimpressed. She waved Brenner off with a backhanded gesture, a slap at the air, and stalked over to the room’s narrow window. “Relax, Brenner.”

  “Tell me why!”

  “I told you! I had a feeling!”

  “If you think I’m traipsing over half the countryside with a bloody knight-errant based on some kind of woman’s intuition—”

  She growled, turned around, and planted a hand in the middle of the assassin’s chest. She pushed. He fell back a step, probably out of courtesy. “A feeling, you idiot!”

  Brenner opened his mouth, shut it again, and said, in a rather different tone, “Oh.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like that one time—”

  “Yes.”

  “With the sneezing—”

  “Yes.”

  He folded his arms and leaned against the wall, looking deflated. “You should’ve said.”

  “I thought I did!”

  There was some shared knowledge here that was lost on Caliban. He found that he didn’t care. The world was starting to spin again. He looked around for another chair, found one in front of the fire, and sat down. The world slowed, jerking rather than spinning. He put his face in his hands.

  “All right,” said Brenner, behind him, “if that’s the way it is. I still think—well, never mind.”

  “I’m not a knight-errant,” someone said. Caliban realized after a moment that it had been him. He dropped his hands.

  “What?” Brenner turned around.

  “I’m not a knight-errant. Errants are questing knights. I don’t. Didn’t.” He cleared his throat.

  Brenner’s eyebrows didn’t know whether to pull down in a scowl or go up in astonishment. The caterpillars did a complicated jig across his forehead instead.

  “I was a paladin, actually. A holy champion of the Dreaming God. I killed demons. No questing.” It sounded strange to say it. It seemed so unlikely now. He had once kept vigils in white marble halls, his nostrils full of the scent of incense and holiness. It was a long way from this small, cramped room over an inn, and the only thing he could smell were cheap candles and his own sweat.

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I
t’s a minor theological difference, I grant you.”

  The assassin stared at him then swung around and stared at Slate, who spread her hands helplessly.

  There was a silence, except for the rustling of cloth as the other two shifted their feet. Then a loud bark of male laughter rang by his ear.

  “Good lord,” said Brenner. “You’re kidding. Is this Lord Caliban?”

  “Yes,” said Slate.

  “The one who—”

  “Yes.”

  “With the guards and the nuns—”

  “Yes.”

  Brenner grinned hugely. He had excellent teeth. “I take back everything I said, Slate, darlin’.”

  “Shut up, Brenner,” said Slate, a well-polished phrase if Caliban had ever heard one. He wondered if they were lovers. They seemed more like siblings who did not entirely care for one another.

  “Lord Caliban! Ha! You’ve got quite a set, girl. I always said.” A heavy hand fell on Caliban’s shoulder. The knight controlled a flinch.

  “Sir Caliban, actually,” he said. And when Brenner whooped again, “Or just Caliban.”

  “You planning on killing our Slate some night on the road, Sir Caliban?”

  The knight smiled sourly. “Not if you’re closer.”

  Apparently this was the right response. Brenner slapped him on the back and went back to his chair. “Excellent! At least we’ll all go to hell in good company.”

  Caliban traded a brief, ironic glance with Slate. The question of why she was the one in charge of their little jaunt into death’s jaws had been answered.

  She turned toward the door. “You can use my room. I’ll have them draw you a bath.”

  The door closed behind her.

  Silence filled up the room, broken by Brenner snickering to himself.

  “What did she do?” asked Caliban, when he couldn’t take it any more.

  “Do?” Brenner slung his legs over the arm of the chair again.

  “You know. What crime…?” His hand moved toward the tattoo on his arm.

  “Oh!” Brenner grinned again. “She works in documents, our Slate.”

  “Documents?”

  “Making them, taking them…She steals paperwork, and changes it.”