by Julia Knight
Vocho hesitated, gripped his sword all the harder. Maybe Esti had just saved him, but she’d possibly poisoned him too, lied to him, and by the Clockwork God’s cogs and gears, he wanted a damn hit of that jollop. Once he thought of it, the craving wouldn’t go away. Just a taste. A nip, that’s all. His hand slid inside his tunic and found the flask.
“Help me,” s/he said again.
“I would,” he said. “But you know I’m not sure I want to.”
S/he climbed inside the tent, all jerky like a puppet on strings. Eneko’s hair, Eneko’s face… but her voice.
“I can make you more. Lots more. You’ll never run out.”
“You might kill me too, I hear.”
“Vocho, please.” S/he ripped at the front of Eneko’s guild tabard. Something brown and pulsing sat on her/his chest. “A leech. Alicia… It’s her version of the tattoo. After you left Ikaras, she found me, she made me… It was only moving into Eneko that made it so that I could stop.”
A flash passed across his/her features so that, just for a moment, they were hers alone. Vocho saw something in them that echoed inside him, a dark remembrance of the day he’d killed a priest–hadn’t wanted to, barely even recalled it, but he had. Thanks to the tattoo, the tattoo that Esti had taken off the best she could. No matter what else, she’d done that.
“Can’t you just pull it off?”
“Don’t you think I would have, if I could?”
“What do you need me to do?”
She pulled a scalpel from a sleeve. “We need Alicia’s blood. And then you need to cut it out. Then I can make myself be me again.”
“What about Eneko?”
A shrug, a twitch of the lips. “Do you care?”
“Help me up.”
Between the two of them they got him on his feet and out of the tent. Something was different. He could see down across the plain, even if only dimly because Alicia’s light was fading fast, but there was definitely something. The Ikarans were retreating. Not just retreating; they were running like the hounds of hell were after them. Vocho could make out half a dozen gods following them, picking up stragglers and banging them together before dropping them. Clockwork couldn’t do that, could it? He recalled the heart that Esmuss had showed them, recalled too where he’d seen that before.
“You helped them, helped Eneko?”
“Sabates made me. He planned to use Eneko then kill him. And Alicia hated me because Sabates favoured me. Why do you think she wanted me dead so badly? When she found me, she figured she could use me instead.”
Then it hit him like a wall. “Where’s Kass? And Alicia and Dom and…”
“There.”
Esti pointed over to one side. Someone dead or doing a good impression. A figure slumped nearby. Another getting grimly to her feet with sword in hand. He knew that posture even if he couldn’t see her face.
“Kass.”
Kass saw them, and then she was on Esti/Eneko, her knife arrowing for the throat, what seemed like every vile curse she could think of dripping out of her mouth. She stayed her hand at the last second, to savour the moment if the look on her face was anything to go by. Vocho grabbed for her wrist but she shook him off, almost flattening him again.
“I’m going to kill this bastard if it’s the last thing I do. And you aren’t stopping me, Voch.” She looked down at Eneko’s face and her lips twisted. “And Esti’s no better, is she?”
“Wait! Just wait a second, Kass. Look,” Esti pulled aside her shirt, and the leech pulsed, glistening on her skin. “It’s like Voch’s tattoo.”
“So?”
“So she just saved my life, Kass,” Vocho said. “And she took the tattoo off.”
“She got you hooked on that bloody syrup too, lied through her teeth. And what about the antidote?”
“It really would have worked, if Bakar had taken it,” Esti said. “Later. I’ll tell you later, but you have to help me first. I wanted Alicia and Sabates dead. So did you, and so I wanted to help you. Do the means of her dying matter? If you help me take this off, get me back in my own body, you can have Eneko. If it helps, it’ll be exceptionally painful for him.”
Kass shook herself away from the pair of them. Vocho didn’t have a clue what she was going to do–he’d never seen her even halfway approaching this angry. It was what lay behind that anger that shifted something inside him. He’d never felt sorry for her either, not once, but he did now.
He shuffled over to her, put out a placating hand but dropped it when he caught the glare. “We won, Kass. Look down there. Bakar’s striding about like he owns the place, and he does. Owns the people again too. They’ll trust him, for a while. Ikaras is retreating.”
“Ikaras has no king either,” she said.
“Even better. They’ll probably spend months arguing over who gets to be the next one. Reyes is safe. You did what you said you were going to do. You did what seemed good, right?”
Her face cracked at that, but she soon had it under control, gripping her sword and knife like they were the only things keeping her upright or sane. “Didn’t save Petri though, did I? And you were right, and that’s why I came.”
“I know, Kass. And I thought you were stupid, and I still came with you. You couldn’t save Petri.” That at least wasn’t a lie. “I think it was too late for him a long time ago. What Eneko did…”
She twitched at that, and he shut up about it.
“Esti helped us, in the end. In the beginning too.” He caught sight of Dom slumped on the ground, staring at his hands as they opened and closed. “And maybe she can help him too. Look, Bakar’s going to want to put Eneko on trial. Let everyone know that he was poisoned, that he wasn’t really mad. That’s for the good of Reyes too, right? And you can watch his head bounce across the cobbles. Because you told me you were sick of killing. I don’t think doing this will make you less sick of it, or any less angry. And it’s not the good thing, is it? You swore to that. You didn’t unswear later.”
She glanced over at Dom and her breath hitched before she nodded.
Vocho let out a breath. He hadn’t been sure she wouldn’t try to get to Eneko, and the state he was in a small puppy could have got past him. “Good. Now get some of Alicia’s blood and help me cut this damned leech off.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
The room made Vocho’s stomach churn for many reasons. The first reason being he’d seen what had happened to Petri. Dom stood next to him as they looked down at the bloodied chair in a long silence.
“Do we know…” Vocho began and hesitated.
“He got out of the Shrive, we know that. Pretty much everyone did, as far as I can make out. Other than that, no. No idea where he is.”
Vocho picked up the knife on top of the brazier. Kass’s stiletto. An extra twist just to grind it into Petri, and grind it into her too perhaps. Eneko thought she’d betrayed him somehow, and this had been some twisted sort of revenge. Maybe. They’d probably never know the truth of it because there wasn’t much left of the mind of the guild master. Esti had been as good as her word there, which was why Vocho and Dom were looking to see what they could find in his rooms. It wasn’t making for a pleasant experience, but by unspoken agreement they’d decided not to tell Kass they were here. She’d have insisted on coming too, and even Vocho had enough empathy not to put her through that.
Besides there were a few questions he wanted to ask Dom, and he felt easier doing it without Kass butting in every two seconds. They left the room, much to Vocho’s relief, and found a stairway going down. Dom led the way, Vocho hobbling along behind, his still-mending hip a constant pain that made his back feel fine. It was easier asking the questions of Dom’s back than having to see his face. “Alicia,” was all he needed to say. Dom stopped on the stairs, one hand braced on the wall, the other doing that odd opening and closing, opening and closing.
“What about her?” he said in the end.
“Her and Esti and why do you keep popping up? Not that I�
��m not grateful or anything, only, well…”
A funny little laugh under his breath, and Dom started down the stairs again. “Lots of reasons really, but mostly me and Alicia wanted the same thing. We wanted information from Eneko, and he’s a canny bastard who gives away nothing for free. Me and Alicia, we just went about it in different ways.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs and Dom groped around until he found a torch and the means to light it.
“Cogs, looks like his own personal Shrive down here.”
Dom wasn’t wrong. They were in a short corridor with four doors along it. The stench of no sanitation, the grim feeling of inevitability. Vocho shivered. The door at the end was open, and Dom headed for it.
“The thing is,” Dom said as they stared into a space that was hardly large enough for a man to lie down. The floor was a mess of rotting straw and human waste. “The thing is, up to a point I was working for Eneko. In return for said information. I’d tried everything else, you see. So, when we first met I was keeping an eye on you two for him.”
“Spying on us? We seem to have been popular.”
“Spying, yes, I suppose so. Then everything got complicated, and I found I was enjoying myself. Remembering what it was like to be a guildsman. And he kept saying just one more thing and then I’ll give you what you want, and I’d do the one thing, and it would be just one more thing. So I stopped telling him everything. Just the bits I wanted to. When Eneko found out about Bakar being poisoned, about the antidote, he sent me to Ikaras to get it–one more job before he’d tell me what I needed to know. I thought I knew Esti, you see. I knew a lot about her anyway. As it turns out, quite a lot of it was wrong. I think that antidote would have worked on Bakar much better than what we managed to cobble together, would certainly have been quicker.”
While Bakar had managed to pull himself together for the defence of Reyes, there were still lingering after-effects. Every time he saw a clock he screamed, and he still had a tendency to mutter about periwinkles, but he was getting there. Esti had offered to help, but he’d seemed happy to let things take their course. Even if it meant destroying all the clocks in the palace so he could sleep at night.
Dom turned a faded smile on Vocho and answered his next question before he could ask it. “I had a long talk with Esti after she separated from Eneko. Alicia found out about the antidote when she caught Esti. Found some magic to make it all go wrong, only it went wrong with Eneko instead of Bakar. A bit of luck that, I think, and the truth as Esti knows it. I found a herbalist to take a look at that jollop she gave you too. I was wrong. Nothing in there that would kill you. But Alicia was always a very determined individual. She murdered Sabates for his position to get what she wanted, tried to sabotage us curing Bakar, but it all went wrong. I got it in the end, what we both wanted, the last known whereabouts of my, our, daughter. Or rather Esti got it for me. She had rather intimate access to Eneko’s mind for a while.”
A long silence followed. Dom had what he wanted, and Vocho had a pardon, and Kass–what did Kass have? Vocho stared down at the reeking straw where it seemed Petri had been kept for some time.
“Do you think we ought to tell Kass about Petri?”
“No,” Dom said at last. “No, I don’t think so. How would it help? Either of them? Besides he asked you not to, and you gave your word.”
“That’s never bothered me much before.”
“But it does this time?”
Vocho looked down and tried to still the roiling in his gut. A small square of paper, half hidden in the straw. He ignored the painful twanging in his hip as he bent to pick it up. Kass’s name was on it, very faint. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, this time it bothers me. When are you leaving?”
“As soon as we’re finished here. What I told you–about working for Eneko–would you not tell her that too? I’d prefer she didn’t think too badly of me.”
“If you like.” Vocho left the tiny space. What had gone through Petri’s head in here, in the room above? What was going through his head now? Vocho was pretty glad he didn’t know. “What’s one more lie to add to all the rest, eh?”
Kacha sat on the wall of the guild and looked down over the harbour, as she’d spent so much time doing in her days in the guild. It didn’t look much different. Boats still crammed every jetty; the god-buoy still rang out in the harbour; longshoremen hurried to and fro loading and unloading, though mostly today they were unloading people who had fled the city and were now returning.
It didn’t look much different, but it felt it. Or rather she did. She’d barely seen Vocho for days, hadn’t sparred for as long and couldn’t work up the effort to care much. Instead she sat and watched and wondered, too tired to stir. She was unable, or unwilling, to sleep for what she found in her head. She looked over at the Shrive, hulking on the other side of the guild. Half the city had turned out for Eneko’s trial, so they’d had to conduct it in the main square. The truth had come out, at least mostly. Bakar was restored. The councillors had cheered outwardly and no doubt cursed inwardly.
A bustle down there in the square today. Setting up the guillotine. The man she’d looked on as her father was going to die this morning, and she still didn’t know why he’d done all the things he had.
The scuff of limping feet on the stairs. She looked around, and there was Vocho. He looked different as well, she thought. Less swagger. He hobbled over–the surgeon had done her best with the hip but it was still early days–and plumped down next to her.
“Though I’d find you lurking up here. What are we looking at?”
“Does it look any different to you?”
He gave her an odd look and a sly grin. “Yeah. Looks peaceful.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. Got something for you. Couple of somethings actually. Firstly there’s this.”
He handed over an important-looking paper, all smooth with an embossed Reyes crest at the top: “The council requests the presence of Kacha of the Duellists’ Guild to be rewarded for services rendered.”
“I got one too,” Vocho was saying. “Going to get a special title or something to go with the pardon.”
The smug look on his face made her smile for the first time in what felt like weeks. Typical Voch. “Vocho the Great?”
“Well, why not? We did save the city, didn’t we? Deserve a little something for it, I say.”
“What about Dom? Doesn’t he get one?”
Vocho shifted guiltily. “If he was here. Gone again. Full of surprises, that Dom, wouldn’t you say?” An edge to that, and Kacha took a good look at him. He gazed out over the docks as though he didn’t care what her answer was, which was his normal way of showing that actually he cared quite a lot.
“Full of them,” she said. “But you can never depend on him being there when you need him.”
The slightest relaxation of his shoulders.
“Good point. Oh yes. The other thing.”
This paper was nowhere near as impressive. A scruffy scrap, ragged at the edges, much folded.
“Down under Eneko’s rooms…” he began, then hesitated, gauging the way she was looking at him. When she didn’t say anything he went on in a rush, “… there was a little room. Looked like, er, someone had lived there a while. Sort of lived anyway. Um, and I found this. I thought you might want it.”
He studiously looked the other way as she took it and read it: “Kass. Regret nothing, remember everything. Petri.”
She stared at it while the words blurred and came true again.
“Voch…” she started, but she couldn’t finish the sentence. He put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed, and she thought maybe he did love her sometimes, when he remembered. If nothing else, she always had Voch, even when she didn’t want him.
After a minute or two he pulled away awkwardly and cleared his throat. “So, uh, they’re going to elect a new guild master later.”
“And?”
That sly grin again. “Fight
you for it? Found your blades in Eneko’s rooms too. But I’m still going to beat your behind. Because I can.”
That grin, always in the background of her life, always taunting her, always lightening her whether she wanted it or not. She’d missed that grin and was glad it was back, found a tentative one in return on her own lips.
“God’s cogs, Voch, if you become guild master the city’ll fall to bits in a week.”
“So you want the job then? Oh, but you’d have to beat me, and you’re out of shape with all this sulking about up here. Tell you what, I’ll let you have a point on account. At least give you half a chance.”
A full-blown smile then, a brief lifting of the ache. It’d be back later, but for now that was enough. If nothing else, she had Voch. “Bloody well will not. Besides, you’re still not right on that leg. I should give you a point. Bet you I can have you on your arse in under a minute. Bet you a bull. If only to save the city from you. For the good of Reyes and all that.”
“Now that is the sister I know.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Petri sat back in the surgeon’s chair and gripped the arm with the one hand that still worked. A knife came towards him and he flinched back–he had no good memories of knives. Fever sweat slicked him head to toe, and pain pulsed through his face, or what was left of it.
“Keep still,” the surgeon said, and tried again.
The surgeon’s hands shook, with drink perhaps, or age. He stank too, of piss and blood and rum. But Petri had no choice, no money, no nothing but the clothes he stood up in and a face that had been stripped of skin down one side, thick now with the infection that surged through him, made him hot and cold and sick with it. He had nothing to pay with but a good pair of boots and the buttons on his tunic. All he could get for that was a surgeon who reeked of piss, and nothing for the pain.
“Keep still,” the surgeon said again, and came for his face with the knife to cut away the infected skin and muscle. Cut away his life, kill Petri Egimont stone dead and leave someone else in his place.