by Julia Knight
“Hello, miss. Glad to see I made it in time.”
She looked down at herself, at the blood everywhere. Shot somewhere in her chest, by the looks. It didn’t hurt yet, which seemed odd, but she was sure it would later.
“Me too, Cospel. Me too. How’s your embroidery? I appear to have a small hole that needs darning.”
That also appeared to be all she had the energy for, because everything went grey after that.
Vocho lay on his back on the dead grass and looked up. It might have been a pleasant enough view of snow-streaked mountains against a looming sky if not for what was left of Petri’s face leaning over him, or the point of Petri’s sword drawing blood at his left shoulder.
Petri smiled–well, it looked like it might be a smile, it was hard to tell–and stood back.
“Get up,” he snapped, and Vocho did his best.
It took him a while because his hip wasn’t cooperating in the slightest. In fact it was making very loud protests, but Vocho wasn’t exactly in a position to listen.
Once he was up, Petri cocked his head. “You weren’t even trying. You let me win.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Didn’t seem wise to antagonise a man who could have me killed at any moment. Despite popular opinion on the matter, I am occasionally sensible.”
Besides, he preferred to think he’d had just let Petri beat him rather than that, with his hip as it was, he probably couldn’t have won anyway. He was never going to think that, never.
Petri growled deep in his throat and came at Vocho again, forcing him back onto a leg that refused to work properly without some serious pain. Vocho parried, kept his point on line and thrust half-heartedly, but Petri wasn’t having any of it. And Vocho was tired, dead tired.
“Come on,” Petri said in his new voice. “Come on and do it properly. Kill me if you can.”
“Oh yes, that’s a grand plan. Kill you while surrounded by all your new friends. I think not. Which is a shame because I’ve often dreamed about it.”
Petri came at him with renewed vigour, very nearly impaling him, and it looked like Vocho had a choice here–be killed by Petri, or kill him and be killed by the woman who was just coming up the slope, her puckered scar twisted by a frown. Petri got his attention again with a well aimed thrust that almost winkled his liver out, and he was under no illusions now. Whatever Petri’s plans, they looked like they included Vocho being dead, but he’d be buggered if Vocho the Great was going to be remembered for dying to a pissant little shit like Petri.
He gritted his teeth and went on the attack, hip be damned. Attack, parry, thrust, riposte. Try to keep on the forward leg as much as he could, but not too much or his balance would be all off. He bore it because there was nothing else to be done.
He held his own, barely, and watched. Petri’s style had changed, and not just because he was using his off hand. He’d always been one for following the proper rules of conduct in a duel–no going for the face or genitals, and blades only. But they weren’t sparring now at the guild under the watchful gaze of the clockwork duellist, or out on the greensward where Vocho had once dumped Kass into the river in a fit of pique. A slash almost had Vocho’s nose off, quickly followed by another that sliced along one cheek and promised Voch the scar he’d always managed to avoid. No time to dwell on that though because Petri was all over him, and Vocho couldn’t do a damned thing about it because his leg wasn’t moving now, even painfully, and he was weary to the bone so that he could barely hold the sword up never mind use it. An elbow into his cheek to open up the gash, a thud of a boot into his bad leg at the knee, and he was on the ground again, staring up at Petri’s mangled face as he crunched a heel onto Vocho’s wrist to make him drop his sword and brought his own sword down to rest on Vocho’s chest. A twisted grin. Bastard was enjoying this.
“I think, dearest Vocho, this could be the end,” Petri said. “I can’t say I’ll be sad to see you go.”
“I’ll be pissed it’s you that finished it,” Vocho managed in reply. “I was always hoping to relieve you of your head.”
Scar came up behind Petri and stared down at Vocho like he was shit on her shoe.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded of Petri.
Petri said nothing, only smiled down at Vocho.
That probably would have been the end of it, of Vocho at least, if not for the sudden sound of a gun going off, a gurgling scream followed by another, the crunch of a broken bone reverberating up the slope. Scar and Petri both turned away, and that was all the distraction Vocho needed to get the hell up, grab his sword and put some distance between him and Petri. His hip throbbed so badly he almost fell, but he kept his feet, barely.
By the time he was upright, Scar was halfway down the slope, running towards the hut where Vocho had spent the night, half a dozen men following her, and Petri was turning back towards him.
“We’ll finish our little chat later,” he said and nodded to someone behind Vocho. Hands grabbed him, relieved him, after a brief but heartfelt struggle, of his sword and dumped him face first into the dead grass. A knee was planted in his back, his hands were tied, and then it seemed he was all on his own, except for whichever sadistic bastard was sitting on his back, squeezing the breath out of him.
Which was great. Just bloody great.
Petri ran after Scar, down the hill towards the hut, where he could make out two men lying in the snow in steaming pools of blood. A third stood upright, a stolen sword in each hand, grinning through his straggled beard as though he’d died and gone to heaven. Behind him were two of the people the bandits had brought back with Vocho, a man and a woman, both now armed with knives.
Dom stepped forward to meet Scar with a mocking bow.
“I made a tactical error before,” he said. “But not this time. Your magician isn’t here, is he?”
A tinny boom from away to Petri’s left, and the crewman in front of him went down, spinning into the snow with blood flying from a wound to his throat. A gun, up in the hills somewhere. One of his snipers had come to grief perhaps, their gun stolen and now shooting at his men. A pause while the sniper reloaded, rewound. Enough time to get his men to a point where the hut was between them and the shooter. Which left Scar and Dom circling each other, maybe in range of the gun, maybe not.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
Petri stepped towards the pair of them and stepped back just as quickly when Scar’s sword almost took his head off.
“Mine,” she snarled.
“Oh no,” Dom said. “I beg to differ. You are mine. You first, then that bloody magician, poisoning Maitea’s mind against me, both of you, making her hate me. She was all I had, and you had to take her.”
Another crack, and a bullet passed Scar’s head with an inch to spare and smacked into the lintel of the hut. Seconds later another–the bastard had a second gun.
More of Scar’s men and women poured down the slope towards them. Dom spared them a glance, another at the two behind him, both looking piss scared, and came to a decision. A knife replaced one of the swords in his hands and spun towards Scar. She ducked to avoid it, and when she stood up again Dom was gone.
“What the—”
“He’s an assassin,” Petri said. “I told you to be more careful with him. Quick, back here, where the gun can’t get you.”
They stood with their backs to the hut as her crew drove the other two back inside with swords and guns and a few belts to the face, and Petri tried to think.
“Who is it up there?” Scar asked Petri like he knew.
“Kass?”
She shook her head. “What I came to tell you. Morro sent back a message–their bodies aren’t at the bottom of the cliff. They’re going to follow the tracks, but she’s still alive for now. The man rode back using the trail Morro cleared on their way. Kass is on foot and she might not be at the bottom of that cliff, but there’s no easy way out of that ravine without rope. Even if she did get out, there’s drifts higher than
a man’s head she’ll have to wade through before she gets to Morro’s path.”
“Cospel then, come to rescue Vocho. Killed one of our men and stole a gun. A distraction when he thought Vocho was about to die.”
“Maybe. But whoever it is, they’ve killed at least three of my men. We need to find them and soon.”
Petri looked back up the hill. “Cospel or not, Dom’s at large and he’s going to be a problem. But we have his daughter and Vocho; he won’t leave them behind. One way or another he’ll come back, and we’ll have to be waiting for him. And Kass too. If she’s alive, she’s coming this way.”
Scar smiled. “I’m counting on it.”
It was only later that Petri recalled how tightly Dom had been bound, remembered Maitea in the hut with a knife and thought maybe, just maybe, she was playing some game with all of them.
The grey lifted, and the light it let in brought a pain that almost made Kass wish she was back in the grey. Almost, because there were horrors in there, ones she dimly recalled, about Petri and Vocho and dead bodies.
She tried to piece together where she was and why in hell it hurt to breathe so much. Cospel’s face looming over her brought most of it back.
“I sewn you up best I could, miss. Won’t hold out against much though. I don’t suppose you’ll be looking to take it easy?”
“You suppose correctly.” She tried to sit up and revised her ideas. “Maybe we won’t go straight away. Tell me.”
Cospel’s face twisted into the ugliest grin Kass had ever seen. “Got the bugger good and proper, knocked him out cold. Gave him a kick or two for you too, for good measure. Tied him up and left him, covered our tracks best I could. Petri’s people will find him soon enough–they were getting close anyway.”
“How did you not get caught?”
“Easy, miss. A misspent youth. Spent years not getting caught. Comes in dead handy. When we came across Scar and Petri, me and Danel, we was like, you know, biding our time, out of the way, and they missed us in all the hullabaloo. So Danel followed them, Petri and all that lot, when they took Vocho. And I stayed here to find you. Good job I did, isn’t it?”
“Yes. A very good job. Vocho, is he…?” She didn’t want to voice the thought that Petri might have killed him.
“Not so good, miss. Danel says he can hardly walk on that gimpy leg of his, and they got him trussed up in a hovel of a hut where he’s currently freezing his bits off. But he’s alive, so that’s a start. They ain’t all that far away. Danel came back once they reached their camp, so’s I know where it is, and then he went back to it to make sure Vocho stays being alive. He said he’d do what he can to find a way for us to get him out of there. Good news is, they got our horses, so if we nick them it’ll help, but with only two of us, three now, it’s not going to be easy.”
Neither was getting up when every time she moved it felt like someone was twisting a knife up under her ribs. She lifted up her bloodied shirt, peeled away the sodden dressing–part of another shirt, one of hers naturally–Cospel had put on and cautiously took a peek. And that was a very bad idea, she decided when she saw the mess underneath. Cospel had done his best given they were in the middle of bloody nowhere. She dreaded to think–and was afraid to look too hard to find out–what he’d used to sew her up with. But he had, and while it looked like some demented artist had tried to carve a picture into her breast, at least she was no longer bleeding. On the outside anyway. She raised her eyebrows at the thought of Cospel patching her up just there and decided not to think about it.
Cospel seemed to read her not-thoughts. “I kept my eyes shut where I could, miss, and my hands to myself, because I like them where they are. The dressing’s only temporary, best I could do, and so’s the stitches, and I can’t say what state your inside’s going to be. You still got the bullet in there, somewhere. Hopefully it didn’t go too far in, but I didn’t want to start poking about, making things worse. I put some of this on.” He handed her a small pot with something greasy and vile-smelling in it. “I use it on the horses for girth galls, clears them right up. It might help. But you were lucky, I reckon. You, er, you got a bit of padding about there; might have stopped you getting your insides torn up.”
A cheerful thought but one that was going to have to wait.
“How far did Danel say they were?”
“About five mile, give or take. And we need to climb up out of here first. Danel was going to meet me up this way later, with the rope. Ain’t no other way in or out so far as I can see, and I wasn’t leaving the rope for them to find.”
“Them? How many?”
A shrug that was almost as expressive as Cospel’s eyebrows. “Enough. Think they got that magician of theirs with them as well–there was a path melted into the snow, pretty as you like. But he ain’t on his own, and they ain’t so far behind as all that. Speaking of which, we’d best get moving. I don’t doubt they’ve found Eder by now, but he won’t slow them down much, and trying not to leave a trail in snow when you’re carrying someone about ready to bleed to death isn’t easy, miss. Come on, up you get.”
He helped her up to agonising standing, where it was all she could do to breathe properly and the back of her throat tasted metallic with blood. She probed her mouth with a gentle tongue and found her lip cracked and swollen and a missing tooth at the back from where Eder had cracked her with the gun. It could have been worse. A lot worse. She tried to console herself with that thought.
It was easier once they were moving, and she could sink into the pain so that it throbbed in the background as an accompaniment to every halting step and hitching breath.
It took longer than it should have to get to where Cospel had arranged to meet Danel, and Kass was sure she could hear sounds from back down the ravine, voices echoing from the cliffs, back and forth, faint with distance but getting closer.
Cospel helped her to sit, close under the wall of cliff, and rummaged in his pack. Kass never quite knew what he was going to pull out of it. This time he started with a small bottle that looked suspiciously familiar and a gun. He gave the bottle to her, checked the gun over and began to wind it.
“Took this off Eder, miss, and if it’s all the same to you, I think I should be the one using it.”
“You’re never going to let me forget that, are you? It was one silly mistake.”
“Yes, and mistakes with guns get very messy, very quickly. Drink up.”
She took the stopper from the bottle and sniffed at it warily. “Cospel…”
“Drink it, it’ll help with the pain.”
“Cospel, is this the same drink that Esti got Voch hooked on?”
He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Close enough. I had her teach me how to make it.”
“And you just happened to have some on you? Any particular reason for that you’d like to share with me?”
The gun clicked as it wound to its fullest extent. “You ain’t been watching, miss. You know what he’s like: he wants everyone to think he’s all great and everything. You noticed he had a bit of a limp, I know that. Well, with that hip wound, the pain of it, he can barely walk without that syrup, never mind sparring and all the rest. He thinks without being able to duel he’s nothing, no one. Vocho the Limping, Vocho the Ex-Great. So’s I’ve been giving it to him, secret like. He don’t know it’s me doing it; he just knows it keeps turning up. A bottle a week–I make sure to ration it. Then he can duel and everything and keep on being Vocho the Great. It makes him a bit funny sometimes, but he’s always been that anyway, the great pillock, so I thought it was worth it if he could still think of himself like that. Anyway, I’d drink it if I were you, for the pain. It’s good for that, and no better nor worse for you than a tot of rum, really. The only reason he’s hooked is because without it he’s not him, and he can’t bear that.”
Kass stared at him, everything else forgotten in a blinding flash of realisation. “Cospel,” she said at last, “how is it you know my brother better than I do?”
Another shrug as he sighted down the gun. “You ain’t been with us much recently, in the head. I’m hoping in the coming clusterfuck you’ll remember who stuck with you and that Petri didn’t. I’m hoping you start seeing things again, miss. No shooting them though. I like my ears where they are.”
Kass’s head whirled, and she stared at the bottle. Her head was swimming, probably from lack of blood; her breathing was little more than short red-hot pangs of agony. There was no way she would make it up to the top of the ravine without something. And how, how had she missed all that about Voch? Because she’d had her head stuffed up her own backside, thinking about Petri. She still did, or maybe that fall had shaken that loose in her. Petri had Voch, and there was no telling what he’d do to him. Nothing nice, she could pretty well guarantee that–no love lost between the two of them, ever, and this Petri wasn’t the old one she’d known. He was very far from that lost man struggling to do the right thing.
The echoes grew closer. She could pick out individual voices just as the end of a rope landed next to her, and Danel’s earnest face appeared, far, far above.
Clockwork God, help me now, she thought and took a good glug of Esti’s jollop.
Chapter Twenty-three
Scar paced up and down, and Petri watched. Like watching a stranger who wore a familiar face, he thought. She was no longer the hard woman with the soft centre, the sucker for waifs and strays who’d taken pity on Petri. No longer the woman who’d told him she could see past the wreck of his face, had kissed what was left of his cheek and taken him to bed. When she looked at him now there was no pity in her glance, no softness for anyone. She had hardened all the way through.
Maitea came into the hut and shed her cloak. Every time Petri looked at her she seemed darker, more insubstantial, as though she was becoming a shadow of herself. She eyed Scar warily, and the look she gave Petri was unfathomable.
Scar stopped her pacing and turned on a beaming smile as she indicated Maitea should sit. The younger woman did so, smoothing her skirts underneath her and putting her gloved hands primly in her lap.