Swords and Scoundrels

by Julia Knight

  He wanted to tell her. He wanted to but couldn’t. He didn’t give a damn about Vocho. When he’d started on this, he hadn’t cared much for Kacha either, but now that had changed, and so had he. “Don’t go yet. I won’t see you for a long while. Do you know how long?”

  She shrugged, but her smile had widened when he’d asked her to stay. “Who knows? As long as it takes. I don’t even know where we’re going yet. Just that the job involves escorting and protecting this priest.”

  “Stay a while longer?” He shifted his arms and brought her in closer, felt her breath quicken on his neck. He couldn’t tell her, but maybe he could show her how she’d changed him, what a liability her brother was, that she was better off with Petri than him.

  She didn’t take much persuading in the end, and she left at dawn wearing the signet ring his father had given him when he’d joined the guild.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Vocho sat and sweated. He didn’t have a lot of choice chained up next to a brazier with a lot of metal sitting in it glowing a merry red.

  “Honestly, if you just ask nicely, I’ll do it anyway,” he said. “You don’t have to go to all this trouble, really. One dead prelate, and then we can all be friends, right? Murdering people, I can do it in my sleep.”

  “I’m sure you can, and I know you have,” Sabates said smoothly from across the room. “That is, of course, the worry. By the way, do you know that your left eye twitches, just a tiny bit, when you lie?”

  Shit.

  Sabates slid across the room, Alicia behind watching him avidly as though he was a choice little titbit to eat and she was starving. She had her gloves off today, the markings on her hands mirroring those of Sabates.

  The warning bell chimed somewhere in the distance, muffled down here, wherever here was. Ten minutes to the change o’ the clock. Sabates came closer, and Vocho tried to shrink back into the wall with little success.

  “As soon as your sister gets here, we can start. She won’t be long because she’s already in the Shrive. I think Egimont’s looking forward to seeing her again, though not in the way you might imagine. All that effort getting information from her, winding her around his little finger, and she drops him. With some vigour too, I gather. I don’t think he took it too well, and you know how the noble classes love their honour and revenge.”

  Vocho was torn between hoping Sabates was lying about Kacha being in the Shrive and feeling a certain smug satisfaction that he’d been right about Petri bloody Egimont all along.

  “She’ll be safe enough though, if you do as I say. She can take your place here, a guarantee that you’ll behave, while we take a little trip to the palace along with our friend Alicia here. Did you know the prelate had a mistress? Ah, the weakness of the flesh. Rather sad, I always think, that men of a certain age can be tempted by the thought of recapturing their youth. Of course, a little magic always helps, isn’t that so?”

  This last was to Alicia. She came up behind Sabates and slid an arm around his waist. All very cosy. Explained a fair bit too.

  Sabates touched her hand briefly and then moved over to where a stack of parchment waited with a scalpel and a brush.

  “I don’t need any special blood for this to work,” he murmured. “A little bit of cosmic justice, though, to use it against him. ‘Magic has no place in an ordered universe,’ he said. Apparently it plays merry hell with predeterminism because it doesn’t fit in with all his observed laws of the universe. Novatonas was a brilliant man, but he’s got a lot to answer for. So many of us died when Bakar came to power. So many. All because Bakar twisted Novatonas’s work to his own ends, to his own religious theories. Time to make amends, don’t you think? Let’s see if his precious clockwork predicts this.”

  When he turned back, he had the scalpel in his hands. Vocho saw where this was heading and tried to twist away, tried to yank his hands out of the chains while simultaneously not widdling himself. Wasn’t the burning on his back enough?

  “Now, now,” Sabates said. “Not to worry. Just a drop.”

  The scalpel darted out, a quick sting, and drew back, leaving a few drops of blood on Vocho’s arm. He sagged in relief, glad too he’d managed to refrain from wetting his pants.

  Sabates mopped up the drops with his brush and began to draw on the parchment, lines and swirls that seemed to move and change even as Vocho watched. How could he draw so much with so little blood? Vocho didn’t care, mainly because he didn’t want to have to donate any more.

  Another chime, the first bells of the change. Sabates carefully put down his brush and parchment and sat down. Alicia sat with him, and they twined together quite sickeningly to wait out the change. The first tremors began, a slight shaking that Vocho didn’t usually even notice, followed by a series of clicks and clunks and the sensation of smooth movement. Nothing out of the ordinary for any resident of Reyes, though it seemed to put both Sabates and Alicia on edge.

  What followed threw Vocho across the floor, chased by the brazier scattering coals everywhere. He rolled out of the way, at the limit of the chains that held him to the wall, and realised that he was dangling at an angle. The walls and floor didn’t quite fit with where his brain said down was. Hot coals danced across the floor to what was now the bottom corner of the chamber, leaving a trail of embers and smouldering straw behind them.

  A great grinding screech battered his ears, and the room juddered again as though it was trying to break free of some great hand that gripped it but couldn’t quite gather the strength. Vocho dangled like a fly in some demented spider’s web waiting to have his juices sucked out. His only consolation was the look on Sabates’ face – of mingled horror and terror. Good.

  It was a short-lived consolation.

  The coals from the brazier in the corner had found something to eat, namely a heap of rancid straw. Smoke began to lick up the wall, blackening the stone and making Sabates’ look of horror grow.

  The two magicians scrambled to their feet, both as pale as wave tops as the shudders carried on, rumbling up through the floor so that everything blurred with the vibration. The scalpel came again, and Vocho had no chance to avoid it. A gout of blood washed out of his forearm. Sabates scrambled for his brush, found a piece of parchment and painted a hasty symbol on it.

  The smoke grew, twisted, spread, little flickers of flame eating the straw and starting on a chair. The growing heat was making the tattoo on Vocho’s back seem like a mild sting. Fire-tinged smoke now obscured everything, colouring the room orange-black and choking Vocho’s throat, burning his lungs, streaming his eyes. The door slammed open, but Vocho couldn’t tell who was there until Licio spoke: “The clockwork’s stuck! Bakar – he must have…” Air from the open door fanned the flames gnawing hungrily at the chair.

  Vocho found he suddenly didn’t give a fig about the prelate or the tattoo on his back. He didn’t give a fig for anything except getting out of these chains and out of the door before he burned to a crisp. Get out, find Kacha, grovel for forgiveness, promise never to lie to her – a promise even he knew he’d break in under a week – and go and live somewhere nice and quiet for the rest of his days.

  Licio grabbed hold of Sabates’ robe and almost yanked him off his feet. “We’re stuck halfway – don’t you realise what that means? Up in the bloody air, fifty feet from the street, or where the street was until the change. Only the mechanism is keeping us here, but it wasn’t built for this! It won’t last, it can’t. You have to get us out, all of us.”

  “I can get you out,” Vocho said. “If you set me free.”

  Licio turned on him with a growl and a kick that was nothing to the panic that was rising in Vocho’s guts. The flames were nibbling at the plaster ceiling. It was only a matter of time before it collapsed, and then Vocho, greatest duellist the guild had ever seen, would die half naked and chained to a wall. Probably having widdled his pants.

  The chains were heating up now, burning at his wrists. A sudden whumph as something in another pa
rt of the building collapsed. Vocho could barely see for sweat in his eyes, couldn’t breathe for smoke choking his throat. Maybe it was time to pray? Nuts to that, but there wasn’t anything else he could do except sit and roast.

  Dear Clockwork God, I realise that I’m not your greatest creation, considering my rather free-form attitude to the truth you find so essential, but if you could see your way clear…

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Kacha dragged herself up through the frozen mechanisms, which groaned and squeaked with the strain, and out of the waterwheel housing. She’d had little idea of what would happen when she shoved the sword into the machinery. It had just seemed like a good idea to stop all the whirring cogs, which could crush her in a heartbeat, so that she could get out alive.

  The first thing to hit her was the heat. She was dripping with freezing water, and the heat of Reyes in late spring, even at midnight, made steam rise off her in clouds and warmed her hands back to something approaching normality. Which was good because instead of coming out near the bridge to the guild she was above the Clockwork God. By many feet. She grabbed hold of the first thing that came to hand – one of the rails usually hidden under the streets but now laid bare for all to see.

  Everything was laid bare – cogs, rails, counterweights, gears and springs and delicate mechanisms she didn’t know the name for. They spiralled out in front of her, above her, below her, the heart and guts of Reyes still now and looking like nothing so much as a great net of metal holding everyone in, keeping them in their predetermined place, if the Clockwork God – if Bakar – was right.

  The silence that had greeted her exit gave way to whispers, cries, the odd scream. People were hanging in odd places – dangling from cogs, tangled in springs – as their world had tilted and instead of moving smoothly had upended them into a nightmare of bits of metal. Somewhere behind and below her Petri called her name, but she ignored him to concentrate on the moonlit darkness. The king’s house was here somewhere, and somewhere close, but it was hard to tell the buildings and streets apart when they weren’t in any one of their usual places.

  She wiped water out of her eyes, shook it from her hair and tried to work out exactly where she was. Above the god, OK. The guild was away to her left, the Shrive behind and below her. The two constants in the city. Which meant, given which change this was, that the king’s house had been over there, but had been stopped on its way to joining the palace, which was… there. Hard to miss, it was so vast with its hundreds of now wavering lamplit windows.

  Which meant that the street where the king had his house – where she hoped like hells Vocho was because if not she was buggered – was the one with the fire. Smoke plumed out of it, backlit in faint and flickering orange, and while it was hard to see in the darkness, there looked to be some sort of statue by its gate. Shit.

  It was going to be a hell of a climb, and it didn’t help that her muscles still protested against every movement, possibly because she’d banged every single one of them on the way through the sluice gate. The burn from where the bullet had scored a line across her ribs wasn’t helping either, but that was nothing compared to getting Vocho out alive. Movement beneath – Petri climbing up behind her. She had to be as quick as she could, not least because flames were beginning to leak out of the windows of the king’s house.

  Vocho had better bloody well appreciate this.

  She took a firmer grip on the rail, which ran away at shoulder height, and moved out along another, over a gap blacker than death beneath her, a handspan of steel between her and it. She’d wondered before, that time she fell beneath the streets, what lay at the bottom and how far it would be, but decided then, as now, it was probably best not to think of it. What-ifs had never worried her; it was the right-nows that held her attention.

  All that practice Eneko had made her do – running roofs, chasing up and along walls, quick and quiet even during the change – now stood her in good stead. A few steps to get the measure of it – the steel was slippery under her sodden boots, so she kept one hand on the rail by her shoulder – and she started to move more quickly, gliding over the gap.

  A sudden burst of swearing behind her told her Petri had made it outside and was now not happy at the prospect before him.

  “Kacha! For god’s sake, will you stop?”

  She ignored him and carried on, faster now as she grew more confident with her footing. Smoke was billowing out of one side of the house now, and guards were trying to get out but were hampered by the fact the street wasn’t level. One fell, rolling over and over before he managed to break his fall, more by luck than judgement, by slamming into a gatepost. From the crunch of bone and his strangled scream, it didn’t seem all that lucky. The rest held on or moved gingerly from handhold to handhold.

  As she approached the angle got steeper. Her foot slipped off the rail. She hung on for dear life, and tried to do it quietly, which wasn’t easy. The guards hadn’t seen her yet, and she wanted to keep it that way, until either she could find a way around them or she decided it was time they saw her, preferably at the other end of Eneko’s dagger in her belt.

  The two rails converged as she approached the street, the one by her shoulder dipping and the one she stood on rising to meet it. A noise below caught her attention. A sort of muffled whimper, followed by, “Miss? Miss!”

  She tried to ignore it, before she realised the voice was familiar.

  “Miss!”

  Her feet bumped into something on the rail, and she looked down. A hand gripping the rail in white-knuckled terror. A face below that, one that was as familiar as her own.

  “Cospel, what are you doing?” she whispered. The guards were close enough to hear anything louder. “Stop pissing about and get up here.”

  “I was coming to find you, and then everything went sideways, and here I am. And I would, only I’ve got your bags and everything in the other hand. Could you pull me up?”

  She knelt carefully on the rail, keeping one hand out to steady herself. The street was closer than it had been but far enough that a fall would mean broken bones at the least. Petri was gaining on her – she could hear his muted swearing more clearly. Not much time but enough with luck. She held on to the upper rail, which was now, as she knelt, about shoulder height. With her other hand she grabbed Cospel’s wrist and heaved till her eyes popped. Cospel barely even moved.

  “Are you made of lead or something?”

  Sweat beaded on Cospel’s forehead with the strain. “No, gold. He’ll kill me if I drop the gold.”

  Vocho and his bloody gold – that was what had got them into this mess, his love of money. Cospel wasn’t much better. She didn’t have time to argue or give it another try. Petri came into view along the rail, dripping darkly in the moonlight. She didn’t have time to piss about at all.

  “Cospel, listen very carefully. I will kill you if you don’t drop the bags. And bear in mind that I am here and Vocho is not.”

  A squeak as Cospel’s fingers slipped a little on the steel.

  “A valid point, miss,” he said after only a second’s consideration. He dropped the bags, which clanked and rolled along the tilted street sounding like a muted brass band needing a good tuning. It took about ten seconds for someone to realise what was leaking out of the bag and then there was confusion aplenty as a couple of the braver ones tried their best to grab a lifetime’s worth of gold as it tumbled past.

  Cospel was up on the rail in seconds. “Going to kill me,” he said, looking mournfully after several years’ wages as it disappeared over the edge of the street.

  Kacha was already moving – no time to waste. “Depends if he manages to survive himself, really. Come on.”

  It was chaos underneath them, which was good. People running in and out of houses, shouting men and women, crying children, everyone at a loss. Or most of them. Even here, in Nob Town, especially in Nob Town, the rich clockers who’d taken over from the nobles weren’t above a bit of sneaky acquisition when their
neighbours’ backs were turned. A little bit of anarchy was always helpful if it meant they might not look too closely at her.

  She swung down from her slippery perch, Cospel close behind, and just made the edge of the street where it was bound in brass to slide smoothly along the rails. In seconds she was in the shadows one house over from the king’s place. Smoke swelled out of its ground-floor windows, and the orange flickering came with a faint but ominous crackle. The scented bushes near the front door were crisping nicely. If she was going to do this, she had to be quick before Vocho burned to a cinder.

  A quick look behind. Where had Petri gone? Last she’d checked he was behind her on the rails, and now he wasn’t anywhere.

  “What happened?” Cospel gasped out next to her. He looked around with wide eyes, but she could see the other look too – he was a master of taking advantage of a bit of confusion, and she’d bet a bullshit to a bull he was valuing everything in sight to see if he might make a little of that money back. Some of the gold was still littering the far end of the street, but not for long.

  “Cospel, wait here. Look out for Petri, and if you see him try to stop him, all right?”

  “Stop him.” Cospel peered up at the rails, where the dark form of Petri now appeared, now disappeared, in the smoke pouring from the house. “With what?”

  She’d already gone on, trusting that Cospel would be able to look after himself, even if she doubted he’d stop Petri for long. The outer garden walls were topped with high, spiked railings that even a monkey would have trouble climbing. She worked her way around, checking for entrances, other points she might get in – there was a back gate here somewhere. The fire was working in her favour in one respect. Men poured out of the front door, which meant once she was in, with luck she’d be on her own. It worked against her too, because she could barely see the walls. Eventually, she found the back gate, and the guards were all at the front shouting at each other to make a bucket chain, find the king and mind the magician – solid advice, that last, and something Kacha fully intended to do.