by Julia Knight
He didn’t get far before the sounds of uproar filtered along the corridors, amplified by the wails of prisoners either not knowing what was going on or joining in the hubbub for the hells of it. By the time the guard had him at the cell that was supposed to hold Kacha, it was clear she wasn’t in it.
Eneko was though, and that Dom fellow that Egimont had reason to regret meeting at Kass’s farmhouse hiding place and again at the taverna. Eneko was blustering and shouting, ordering guards to get lamps and follow him. He noticed Egimont standing quietly watching and strode over like he owned the Shrive.
“What do you want?”
Egimont allowed himself the superior smile of someone who knows he’s in the right. “Me? I’ve come for the prelate’s prisoner. What are you doing here? Letting her go?”
Eneko’s teeth clacked shut. He had no answer. He shouldn’t by rights have been let into the Shrive, and most definitely not into a cell. Dom had no such hesitation. “Hardly. She escaped.”
Egimont raised an eyebrow. “A tall order, even for Kacha. No one’s escaped from here except the prelate.”
“Until now. At least you won’t get your paws on her. Or what she’s got,” Dom said.
The only proof he was working for the king, if it came to it, if everything turned out badly. A thing worth having. “That remains to be seen. You, yes, that guard there. Lock this man back up. I want to ask him a few questions later.”
“Wait,” Dom again, casting a sharp eye on Egimont. “Wait. Why are you here? Come to take Kacha to the prelate? Or somewhere else?”
“The prelate, naturally,” Egimont lied smoothly. “Where else would I take her?”
“To—”
“Before you say anything, do you have any proof?” Egimont asked with a cool cock of his head. “I thought not.”
“I don’t,” Dom said. “But I know who has. Let me go, and I might consider telling you where it is.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Who’s in charge here? Thank you.” The jailer, a hulking great man who looked like he must have to duck half the time when he walked the cramped corridors of the Shrive, moved between them. “You –” he poked a finger at Dom “– are a prisoner until someone in authority says otherwise. You –” he pointed at Egimont “– are a bloody clerk, and not a very important one at that. Stable boys have more clout than you, unless you have a written slip of authority from the prelate’s office. Do you?”
Egimont held back a snarl. It was people like this prick, talking to him like he was just anyone, who’d made him throw in his lot with the king. “I’m acting on behalf of the prelate.”
“Without a signed chit you’ve got as much authority here as this prisoner. In the meantime, if you don’t mind, I’ve got a prisoner to catch.”
“I know where she’s going,” Egimont and Dom said together and then shared a glare.
“Good. Then between the two of you I might keep my job and you might keep yours, Mister Clerk, and you –” to Dom “– might keep your head, if the prelate decides it’s a mitigating circumstance. Now tell me, where’s she going?”
Petri hesitated. If this oik caught her again, there might be nothing he could do.
“He doesn’t know anyway,” Dom said. “She’s heading up. The tower. She thinks that’s how the prelate escaped last time.”
“And why does she think that?” the jailer asked.
“Because I told her.”
It didn’t sound at all likely to Egimont, but he kept quiet for now. Something odd about the man – there was certainly something else to his swordplay, as Petri had found to his cost.
The jailer screwed up his face in thought as though it was something he didn’t have to do very often and finally came to a decision. “Don’t reckon she’ll try it.” He gave a crafty look at Dom. “Ain’t nothing much up there excepting guards’ quarters, and she’ll be caught for sure. So down it is.”
Dom covered well, but the scowl was there even if it was momentary.
The jailer got Dom locked back in his cell and turned to Eneko and Egimont. “We was warned about her when they brought her in. Your apprentice, weren’t she? How good is she, really?”
Eneko sneered, though there was an undercurrent to it, as though he’d just been deeply disappointed. He looked about a dozen years older than he had the last time Petri had seen him, and his face was pinched and hollow-looking as though with grief. The sneer was familiar though, even if it did send Egimont’s stomach into knots of rage. He almost wished he had a gun. It was only with supreme discipline that he managed not to grab one off a guard.
“She’ll slice your guards into ribbons,” Eneko said after a pause, with real pride in his voice. “She’s got my knife and sword, and she knows how to use them, none better.” He slid a nasty glance Petri’s way. “She killed often enough for me.”
She what? Vocho was the assassin, wasn’t he? Licio had depended on it, but now Egimont thought on it, it made a strange kind of sense that it was Kacha. He didn’t have time to think on it now though.
“She’ll have to get close first,” the jailer said, shaking his head. “All you duellists, thinking the world stays the same. Well it don’t, and I got the guns to prove it.”
Eneko smiled and shook his head. “And all you non-duellists think that a gun is all you need. A gun is nothing against a proper master, and she’s that all right.”
The jailer snorted. “So what do you suggest?”
“That myself and young Egimont here help you. We both know her well. Petri’s a fair enough swordsman, and mark my words, you’ll need someone good with a blade. My Kacha is the best. I trained her, lived with her, loved her, raised her as my own near enough, and I know how she fights, how she thinks. We might be able to avoid your blood staining too many walls.”
The jailer looked at them both sideways, but in the end he nodded. “All right, but you just keep out of my lads’ way and remember who’s in charge here, OK?” He set off, shouting orders this way and that, getting his men in order.
It had been many years since Petri had been this close to the guild master. Bakar had forgotten his promise of the guild for Petri, but it was Eneko that Petri really wanted, Eneko who had to suffer. And here he was, outside the protection of the guild’s walls, and Petri with a sword.
“You plan to kill me?” Eneko said now. He didn’t seem unduly perturbed by the thought.
“Not yet,” Petri replied with a shrug. He had time and most likely dark tunnels. “When you have a sword on you. The guild taught me that, at least.”
Eneko’s smile caught him off guard. “Well enough. I had to do it, you know that? There was no other choice, not if I wanted to save the guild. Bakar wanted nobles’ sons to corrupt to his way of thinking, to give himself legitimacy among those still on the fence. He would have destroyed the guild if I hadn’t given you to him. He still can, he still wants to. It was a price I had to pay, and I’d pay it again.”
“You wanted to hide what you were doing, the recruits you were shipping off to slavery in Ikaras, the assassinations. You expected that I’d die. You paid nothing. I paid it all.”
Eneko nodded slowly. “True enough, and yes, you did, and I’m sorry for that. But you should know I’m on your side, or at least not on the prelate’s side. Ah, you thought that was secret, you working for Licio as well as Bakar? I’ve known for some time, and I know the price he offered you. I swear to you now, Licio will fail in his promise to give you the guild, as Bakar has. The guild is not theirs to give, it is mine, and it will stay mine until I die.”
“I look forward to that day,” was all Petri could think to say. The guild was to be his, his, under Licio’s rule, and that was about to snap out of his mouth when the jailer beckoned them on. Petri followed Eneko down into the darker corridors wondering whose side anyone was on.
Interlude
Five months earlier
Petri flipped the collar of his cloak up against the chill of a damp winter wind that couldn�
��t dampen his mood or take his mind from the warm thoughts that enclosed it.
Bakar was well pleased with how he’d managed to infiltrate the guild, but Petri had long since stopped trying to gather information except about that prick Vocho. There was plenty of that to go around because Vocho wasn’t one for keeping his mouth shut, but how much of the gossip was actually true was anyone’s guess. Petri no longer cared – the information kept Bakar happy, and him out of his drudging little office and, more importantly, in the company of Kacha. Away from the confines of his office, where he’d spent most of these last years, he began to see more clearly. What a fool he’d been to believe Bakar, believe in his so-called equality and that he had Petri’s interests at heart. Then there was the prelate’s increasingly odd behaviour. A tax on periwinkles? On petticoats? Add to that the realisation that Bakar wanted the guild destroyed rather than given to Petri, as he’d always promised, and he was perilously close to all-out rebellion.
All because of Kacha, who’d shown him things and places and people he hadn’t known existed. Rooftops where people seemed to live on shadows and dust, workers leaving the clocker factories ground down by exhaustion and ground in with soot, dock rats who scurried after them begging for scraps, scrambling after the pennies that she scattered behind her like petals. “They’re like I was once,” she said with a sad smile. She showed him all this and saw how it horrified him. Bakar had told him that everyone was rewarded according to merit, that those who earned more, received more, but it wasn’t working. Petri wasn’t sure it ever could. Then Kacha would smile, shake off the melancholy for them both. They talked – he thought that was what kept drawing him back – and listened to each other long into the night. As different as night and day, she said once, where they’d come from, but the same underneath, and she’d smiled in a way that made him want to burst.
Those thoughts, and a belly full of good wine, ensured he barely noticed that the alley he’d turned down had no lamps lit, or that it was suspiciously empty and at this stage o’ the clock in the wrong end of town, especially for someone like him and even more especially for someone dressed as he was. The whirring click hit him like a bucket of ice water, and he realised where he was, and in how much danger, when three men moved in front of him with another three or four behind from the sounds of it.
They were indistinct in the wavering light of a half-moon behind scudding clouds, so all he could be sure of was that they were there and one had a gun. No longer the preserve of the rich, in recent weeks and months crude versions had flooded the city. Sadly they were just as effective at killing people as the expensive ones, though with a higher chance of the person firing being the person who died.
Two of the men came at him from behind. Something cracked into the back of his head and he fell to his knees, sword partway out of its scabbard. Feet and fists blurred past his face and registered somewhere far off in the back of his mind as they struck.
The leader snarled something that Petri only caught part of, but enough to know he wasn’t getting out of this without broken bones at the least, then, more clearly, “Fucking nobles, and a prelate’s man to boot. The worst of both sides. Let’s see how equal he is with his head kicked in, and I’ll tell the Clockwork God the truth of the gold in his pockets.”
A boot came flying towards him, and that probably would have been the end of his face if not the rest of him if a searing light hadn’t appeared at the end of the alley. It burned Petri’s eyes so that between that and the swelling that loomed over one brow, all he could see were blurs, and all he could hear were mumbling echoes and a series of whirrs and clicks.
Then a kind hand was helping him up, the alley lit with the bright yellow light of many lamps. Guards dressed in the king’s colours were dealing with some very vocal men with blood on their hands – his blood, he was horrified to see, dripping from his head and face all over the golden young man who helped him into a carriage. A young man he recognised, once he’d got over the fact he’d just ruined the man’s clothes. The yellow light of the lamps reflected from golden hair; the limbs were long and loose, and he exuded charm and grace and, somehow, rightness.
“Some men deserve equality,” King Licio drawled as his guards outside bestowed a certain form of equality on the men who’d jumped Petri. “And some don’t, don’t you think?” He opened a small compartment in the carriage; inside tinkled crystal glasses and a fine decanter of brandy. He sloshed a generous measure into a glass and handed it to Petri.
“Petri Egimont, isn’t it? Duke of Elona, or that’s who you were born to be. I often wondered why you threw that away to join Bakar. Why would anyone do that?”
Petri didn’t answer for the moment – couldn’t, and not just because his mouth was swollen. He took a swig of the brandy, found it to be better than any he’d had, ever, and took another gulp to steady his hands.
Licio looked at him, and Petri couldn’t help but notice the difference between him and Bakar, remembering not for the first time how Bakar’s eyes had begun to jump around the room when no one was there, how his hands shook and he often couldn’t quite get a grip on his words. How when he did speak the words would sometimes come out garbled nonsense before he gathered himself.
“There are some who don’t deserve equality,” Licio said, his voice low and soothing. “You know it, I know you do. And what equality does Bakar espouse just lately? My guards will take those men to the Shrive, and maybe Bakar will set them free in the morning on a whim because the crime wasn’t great, because they are just poor men, and even poor men deserve something. But what about you? Don’t you deserve justice for what they did to you? Don’t you deserve the equality in justice he reserves for others? Bakar keeps some men and women in the Shrive for years, murderers and the like, and yes, that is what they deserve. But take a trip down to the lower levels. Find the men and women there just because they didn’t agree with Bakar, because they refuse to believe in his Clockwork God. Is that equality? Or even justice?”
The carriage jerked into motion.
“What do you want?” Petri asked, because it seemed clear to him that the king wanted something, though what help a lowly clerk like him could give he had no idea.
Licio leaned back as though suddenly relieved and took a sip of brandy. “Oh, the same things as you, Petri, the same things as you, even if you don’t know it yet. Our fathers were terrible men, that’s true, but that doesn’t make us terrible men, does it? Not as terrible as who replaced our fathers, the greedy little clockers without any propriety, any honour to fall back on. No sense of history, of building things to live on after them. All out for themselves, for here and now and never mind the future.”
Petri’s head was swimming. He couldn’t be sure if it was the knock on the head, the brandy on top of the wine or whether what Licio was saying was stirring something inside. Things were wrong, he knew that; he’d known for a while even if he’d not admitted it to himself. But what Licio was hinting at… He felt excited and sick with guilt at the same time.
“Just a little thing to start,” Licio said into these thoughts. “That’s all I want. Just a little look into what has gone so badly wrong. Now, what do you know about that little tit Vocho?”
Chapter Twenty-two
It took every scrap of courage Kacha had to go into the water that surged dark and cold under the Shrive. She put it off as long as she could, dragging out the papers that were her only proof, the only hint even that something was wrong. The guards had taken her weapons but left almost everything else, including a pouch of oiled leather she used for keeping tinder dry when they travelled or at the farm. That gave her a pang. Always her and Vocho. Always, no matter where they went, what they did. He might be as unreliable as the wind, but he always had her back in a fight. All she could rely on, even when she couldn’t.
She’d light the fire and see to the horses as he made up stupid stories to get her laughing while he skinned a rabbit or mended a harness. He was always there, and she’
d hated that pretty much her whole life until now, when he wasn’t.
She stuffed the papers into the pouch, hoped it would be up to the job and took a deep breath. The waters oiled past her, black and deadly, but not as deadly as what was coming behind. She could have sworn she heard Petri’s voice, Eneko’s with him, and it was that which decided her. She didn’t dare think on why they were together.
Instead she took all her courage in both hands and let herself drop into the water. It was colder even than she expected, cold enough to numb her hands almost straight away. She spluttered back to the surface and tried not to think about how badly she swam or the last time she’d been in the river. No Vocho here to pull her out, not this time, because she’d left him on his own, and that’s why they’d got him. The water closed back over her head and she kicked to get her chin above water. She spat out a mouthful of water and tried to see where the current was taking her. Nowhere good, it looked like.
Part of the Reyes river had been diverted this way long ago, before the Great Fall, into a long, narrow channel that sped past the Shrive, through a tunnel and two sets of gates with locks that were rusted shut, and then back to the river. She was between the gates, and the fast-flowing current was hurrying her along to the lower set.
The gates themselves, a thick latticework of metal with gaps a cat would have struggled to squeeze through, were made of some sort of metal that didn’t rust past a fine layer of grey powdery residue on its surface. Clockers and smiths had tried to replicate it for years to no avail. The upper gates had to be cleared regularly of rubbish, but the lower gates had no such problem. Unless she got this wrong, in which case her body would form a nice blockage for a while. Yet there had to be a way past because Bakar had come this way, and the only way she could think of was down.