by Julia Knight
No, strange as she was, and weak, it wouldn’t do to underestimate Esti at all. She’d used Kacha and Vocho to steal what she needed from the safe, kept herself hidden from even Sabates’ prying gaze for a long time now. Kept herself alive for long years before that, and that was no easy task among magicians.
“Gerlar, wait here and listen for my call. In the meantime, let no one in or out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Alicia approached carefully, her fan her only defence from the heat that had bludgeoned everyone to stillness. Even the dust that coated the mangroves and hung in the air seemed to droop. The dog panted in its shade and watched her warily, as though expecting a kick at any moment. She stared it down, and it whimpered and slunk off into the darker recesses of the thicket.
The tunnel was low so she had to bend, and deeply shadowed. The air was so close that she found her breath caught in her lungs and sweat dripped from her. The vines seemed to close in on her, and she couldn’t be sure whether it was the heat making her see things, making her think they were trying to clutch at her, or whether Esti’s hand was behind it.
She’d come prepared–half a dozen scraps of paper, folded or rolled, daubed in still-damp blood and kept where the markings wouldn’t smudge and change their meaning. She wouldn’t use them yet. No need to announce herself so early, on the off chance Esti wasn’t aware of her. Along with the more usual tools of her trade was one that was peculiar to her. The leech sat in a little bottle.
A vine fell on her shoulder, and she brushed it away. Another and she drew her knife. The last green-tinted shafts of light shone from the charms that hung from the haft. It cut through the questing vine, causing the plant to drip sap and shiver away. She slashed around her, thinking it at the same time ridiculous but also practical. The twisting vines drew back, and she moved on.
When she looked behind her, she was startled to see she’d barely come a few feet from the open ground–it seemed further–but here was a door under what she could now see was just a thin cloak of vines. She didn’t bother to knock but pulled out a scrap of paper in readiness. The first room, a cramped sort of sitting room full of plants that somehow gave the impression of looking at her, was empty, so she crept through it to the far door and pushed it open.
A kitchen, with a cold range and chimes at the windows. Also empty, but now she could hear sounds coming from further on. It didn’t take long to find the source. She peered through a last door into what looked like a laboratory up at the university. Odd contraptions, a few glass beakers. But a laboratory with a difference. The beakers held soil and plants, not volatile liquids, and other plants grew over and around the contraptions or, in one case, actually was the contraption. Among all this was, at last, Esti. She was shoving random-seeming items into a bag. A toddler sat on the desk, babbling to itself and “helping” by taking things out of the bag when Esti had her back turned.
Esti hesitated, clearly torn between two plants.
“I’d take the purple one, if I were you,” Alicia said from the doorway. “Such a pretty flower.”
Esti whirled to face her, plant in either hand, her face paper-white with eyes like two holes cut into her skin. Her glance slid to the toddler, who’d found a shawl and was busy trying it on as a hat. Then she took a deep breath so the plants in her hands stopped shivering. Not for long, if Alicia had anything to do with it.
“I knew you’d come. You or him,” Esti said.
“And you thought helping those two, getting rid of that tattoo, would stop me?”
A shrug, a sneer. “You always did have an inflated idea of the usefulness of such things. Much like your ideas about yourself.”
Alicia gritted her teeth–she wasn’t going to let Esti get to her. She was above that now, above her. In a blink she was by the toddler, picking the snotty brat up, her scrap of paper at the ready. Not quicker than Esti though, and they tussled over the screaming child for a moment.
A moment that broke when Alicia said the word that unleashed what she’d written on the scrap of paper. A blinding flash–more for show than anything–a push of air, and Esti was in a heap by the far wall and clothes and plants were scattered everywhere. The toddler giggled in Alicia’s arms and shouted, “Again!”
Alicia put him down and ignored him, even when he tried to climb up her leg. Instead she strode over to Esti just as she was struggling to her feet, wrenched the plants she had grabbed from her and ripped their leaves so that sap dripped over her hands. It occurred to her that perhaps Esti used the sap much as she herself used blood.
“Now then,” she said. “You can tell me all about Vocho and Kacha later; for now I want to know about your other visitor.”
Esti looked genuinely puzzled, but Alicia knew from years of being lied to just how false that look was.
“Yes, your other visitor. I know he came. He must have done. Tell me all about Dom and his visit.” She picked up the toddler and bounced him at her hip, making him giggle. “Or I shall have absolutely no compunctions whatsoever.”
An hour and one leech later Alicia was sure that Esti had told her all she knew about Dom, which was nothing. She kicked a pot, sending earth and leaves scattering everywhere. The toddler sat where Alicia had left him tied to a table, happily eating spilled soil. Esti had told her what little she knew about Kacha and Vocho too: that they were on their way back to Reyes–for their stupid guild honour, a motto or something. And for Petri. Alicia was surprised. She hadn’t thought Petri Egimont anything like attractive enough to warrant anyone putting themselves in danger.
“Just let me and the baby go,” Esti said.
Alicia considered. “No. I’ll have someone come and take the child to a house more suitable to him. You are going to do a little something for me.”
“For you? I…”
Alicia wagged a finger. “Remember what I told you about the leech?” Esti sagged back into her corner. “Good, much better. Now then, tell me all about what was in the safe.”
Esti blanched, but with the leech on her she didn’t have any choice. Not unless she was a lot stronger-willed than she looked.
“My book,” Esti began. “My book was there and some… Look, please. I won’t cause you any trouble. I’ll leave Ikaras; you can be next in line after Sabates. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be the next head mage?”
“It’s one of the things I wouldn’t mind,” Alicia replied. “But you’re offering me nothing I haven’t already got or could have with just a few words. What else was in there? Do you still have them?”
A grimace as the stupid woman tried to resist, a gust of breath as she failed. “I packed them already.”
Alicia rifled through the bag with a grimace of her own, scattering clothes and plants over the table until she found some woodcuts and a sheaf of what looked like plans. The woodcuts were very revealing. She’d probably never look at Sabates the same way ever again. The plans were what held her attention though.
“Tell me about these,” she said. “The truth, and quickly. I’m running out of patience.”
Esti twisted her hands in her lap. “Sabates sent a copy of those to Eneko. He found the basis for the plans in the archive. Orgull had a new lot opened up last year. A clockwork heart, at least mostly clockwork.”
Did he now? This was something to take a little time over, time that Gerlar might spend on other things. She could think of a use or two for Esti as well.
“Gerlar!”
The life warrior appeared, silent and impassive.
“Gerlar,” she said without taking her gaze from Esti, “catch them up. They won’t be travelling fast.” Vocho would be tender for quite some time–the after-effects of removing the tattoo could even be fatal, she understood.
“When I find them?”
She shrugged. She hoped Dom would find them too, but perhaps he cared as little for them as he seemed to for everyone else. Maybe it would take a more direct threat to flush him out. He was a careful man. She flapped the pla
ns to move the still air and wondered how far she could push Esti under the influence of the leech.
“Follow them. And if you find a nice quiet place…”
“Kill them?” The gleam in his eyes made even Alicia shudder.
She gathered herself and told him what she wanted.
Petri lay back in silent darkness. There was nothing else to be done. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Nothing to feel except the pain of course, which while merely excruciating wasn’t as searing as the regret or the shame.
He’d thought himself brave once, and honourable, someone who could hold a secret to the grave. A man who wasn’t afraid to do what needed to be done, even if it was distasteful or painful. Shameful how quickly Eneko had disabused him of those particular notions. How quickly he’d caved in, told him everything he wanted to know. All he knew about Sabates and Licio, about their plans. About Vocho, and more shameful than all the rest, about Kacha.
He grimaced in the darkness and had to fight back the blinding pain in his face where an eye had once been and the urge to be sick that came with it.
Not quite all about Kacha. He’d managed to keep one small kernel to himself. Everything else had been laid bare like the bone in his cheek.
Silence slowly drugged him, as did darkness, taking his thoughts and twisting them into mad patterns. He never knew if it was day or night, never saw light, never heard the thrum of the city around him, except three times he’d felt or thought he’d felt a rattle through the floor. But he couldn’t be sure because he was seeing and hearing things that could not be there. A faint rumble again, and he was sure, as sure as he could be of anything. The change o’ the clock, the slick movement of the city through its turns. He groped around him with his left hand–his working hand–tied now in front of him, and relished the touch of stone under his fingers, the scent of the rank straw that lined the cell floor. His only points of reference, the two things he knew were real, and he wasn’t sure about the straw.
His questing hand found the bottle. They’d left him a bottle of foul-tasting water which left a greasy film inside his mouth and a scrap of bread so stale he couldn’t eat it without his face screaming for mercy, even when he tried softening it with the water. Not even if he broke it up, and that wasn’t so easy to do with one hand, so he went hungry, and that made the images ever more vivid as they danced in front of his eyes, crept up his arm, sat on his shoulder, whispered in his ear.
Strange thoughts had begun to torment him down there in the dark, odd visions that couldn’t be real. Could they? Sometimes he thought he heard things–the ticking of Bakar’s bone clock, slicing seconds off his life. The hiss of hot blood, the rattle of the clockwork duellist at the guild, the soft warm sounds of Kacha as she slept in his bed. He couldn’t be hearing any of them, but his mind insisted that he did. Then it wasn’t just sounds, but voices, and he knew they couldn’t be real because they were the voices of dead people.
He became aware of a hectoring voice that he knew and shrank from–his father’s. “Show some backbone, boy. You’re above that guild, above that classless oik Eneko. You’re a duke, not some wretched dock rat, like that whore-spawned fishwife you insist on hankering after. Eneko should have been proud to have you in that guild of his. Now show me what you’re worth, that you’re my son, because this is where you will be forged.”
Should have been, should have been… The thought echoed around Petri’s head long after his father’s voice had faded back into blackness. Should have been a duke, should have been a master duellist. Should have been making a good marriage to some woman he was probably related to, should have been what his father wanted. Should have been loyal to Bakar, should have been smarter than to get mixed up with a magician. Should have been honest with Kacha when he had the chance. Should have beens were the bane of his life. Never quite measuring up to what people expected of him–his father, Eneko… Kacha. Never given the chance to show what he knew was inside him.
“A good man. A brave man,” a voice said. It took a moment to recognise it because Petri had barely known him despite the fact his presence, or absence, had ruled much of his life.
“Kemen?”
“You were a good man, a brave one despite your circumstances, and you can be again.”
“Why am I talking to dead men?” His brother had been dead for years, like his father, yet now he heard them as plain as the sun that he hadn’t seen in days.
“Who else is there?” Kemen said. “Who else is in your head, wanting to talk?”
He fell silent then, no matter how Petri called for him, no matter how the panic grew and coiled in his gut, how he grabbed frantically at the stone–the real, all that he could be sure of.
A good man. He hadn’t been that for a long time, if he ever had. Now he didn’t even have the illusion of being a brave one, or a noble one. Eneko had taken even that, sliced it away with his hot knife, taken it so easily that Petri couldn’t believe it was ever there in the first place.
“A pumped-up mountebank,” Vocho said. “Too quiet you are, Petri bloody Egimont. Too sneaky, too underhanded. A backstabbing double-dealing little prick, not near enough to a man for my sister. So why don’t you fuck off, my dearest duke, and leave her be?”
Under usual circumstances Petri would have rather put out one of his own eyes than agree with Vocho, but going quietly mad in the dark was not usual circumstances and besides he only had one eye left, a thought that left Petri suddenly weak with laughter that had a metal edge to it.
“I concur: a craven coward and no more,” Eneko said in Petri’s other ear. “I knew it as soon as you joined the guild. Oh I took your father’s money and agreed to train you, but there was always a flaw inside you waiting for a knife to slide in, twist and fracture you. You were too much like the worst parts of your father, and none of the good parts, none of the incisiveness, none of the determination. Only the vanity, the cruelty, the ability to sacrifice anyone for what you wanted.”
The laughter stopped in Petri’s throat. “No, I—”
“Why do you think I let you go to Bakar so easily, why I gave you away? The least worthy of being a duellist of all I had. I want no weakness in the guild, Petri, not among my masters. And you are weakness.”
Strange shapes reared in front of Petri’s eyes. He tried to ignore them, told himself they were just phantoms in his head born of too much silence and darkness, which had lived with him almost from the start of his time here. Little spiders of fire, crawling up his arms, across his face to burn the marks there, burrowing into his now useless hand.
Now they crawled over his eye, blinding him with light. He tried to slap them away, but a hand stopped him. A real hand, warm and strong on his. He grabbed it with his own, hung on to it as the one real thing in this place of delusions and opened his eye.
He was in light, in warmth. A lamp dazzled his eye, then the wavering shape in front of him resolved into Eneko… but was he real or just another part of Petri’s fevered mind?
“Weakness,” Eneko said again and showed Petri a knife that glowed red at the edges. “If I find that flaw in you, slide this in and twist, you’ll shatter like glass and tell me everything. Shall we see?”
And yet Petri’s new screams were better than the darkness of his own mind.
Chapter Fourteen
It was three days’ hard ride from Ikaras to the edge of Reyes, another two to the city itself. Vocho wasn’t sure he was going to last that long. They’d reached the foothills of the mountains that split Ikaras from Reyes and were the source of much of their bickering, lately turning to the prospect of war. Iron, coal, gold–all and more could be found in some measure at one point or another along their length. The iron in particular was a sticking point because neither country had any deposits anywhere else.
It was getting harder to move. In the lowlands, among the sugar plantations that gave Ikaras much of its wealth, the road had been oddly lonely. The only people they’d seen were slaves working the crops and an o
ccasional overseer, and slaves wouldn’t say a word they weren’t bidden to. They’d now left that behind and entered a poorer part of the country where they stood out like nuns in a brothel. They rode horses, and no one had more than a donkey, and that for pulling a cart. Yet they weren’t dressed right for nobility, and besides the swords were hard to hide in a country where no one carried them. The few people they passed looked at them askance and whispered among themselves.
If Vocho had any doubt that they needed to do something other than hide away somewhere until this whole mess blew over, it vanished at a dusty crossroads between two narrow valleys. The sugar had given way to tea as the land crumpled into steep hills punctuated by knife-sharp ridges and hidden valleys. And here between two of them was the first real indication of what Ikaras–with the help of Licio and that bastard Sabates no doubt–was up to.
Around the crossroads a swathe of tea plants had recently been cleared and sat in fragrant burning piles. The sweet smell of the smoke permeated the air. In the clearing little clots of men and women clustered together, armed as no one was armed in Ikaras, with guns at hips, or holstered on their back with slip-rings to bring them in hand in a blink. Not just guns either–along with the gaudy ceremonial knives that every free Ikaran wore, there were long daggers and swords that looked ill-balanced and hastily forged. Some had armour, though if any armour was proof against a gun or even a good sword at close range, it wasn’t these cobbled-together affairs made out of bits of leather. Who knew what these people had been last week or last month, but Vocho was prepared to bet it wasn’t soldiers. They were soldiers now though, or playing at it, picketed in wonky rows, and so many of them. The emptiness of the plantations they’d passed through made more sense now.
To one side, two men sat on scrawny horses with faces to match.
“Officers, if I’m any judge, and I’ve met a few. Not many good ones neither,” Cospel muttered and Vocho agreed. These two didn’t look confident though, more scared with a veneer of swaggering bravado.