Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  “Did no one think to make a copy?”

  “Oh, yes.” Slate’s lip curled. “And if I meet them, they’ll throw me in the dungeons for murder instead of forgery. That useless, motherless, talentless son of a goat!”

  Caliban’s eyebrows went up and he silently topped off her glass.

  “Paraphrased,” said Slate angrily. “And corrected spellings and left out margin notes about the weather and whatnot, because they were clearly unimportant.”

  “I take it they weren’t unimportant?” asked Caliban.

  “It was code,” said Slate, gulping whiskey and stifling her cough with the back of her hand. “A cascading code, which is a thing the Many-Armed God people do sometimes when they want to prove they’re smarter than anyone else. But without all the supposedly unimportant bits, and without the misspellings, we don’t know where to start or what the keys are. The temple sent back a nice note saying that it was now gibberish and did they still have the original? Which they’d sent off with the second group of idiots. I was so mad when the Captain told me about that that I could spit.”

  “So we need to find this journal,” said Caliban.

  Slate sighed, her anger fleeing as rapidly as it had come. “Maybe. And maybe we do and Learned Edmund finally translates it, and it’s mostly recipes for boiled cabbage. I can see why you wouldn’t write, “To Break Clockwork Boy, Hit Here” if you’re in Anuket City, mind you, but just because something’s in a complicated code with scary pictures doesn’t mean it’s going to be any good.”

  Caliban stared into the bottle.

  After a moment, he set it aside and picked up the stone dog.

  “So which way are we going, then?”

  Slate scratched her chin. “I figure we’ll follow the trade road to the army blockade and see what they can tell us. Possibly we’ll find out something about the second group on the way. The Captain’s sent word to expect us. It’s possible they’ll know a route through, or be able to clear us one. At the very least, they’ll have more up to date intelligence than we will.”

  “And then?”

  “We wing it.”

  Caliban put up an eyebrow. He was watching her face in a way that made Slate vaguely uncomfortable. Well, I did just outline a plan that’s nothing less than suicide…

  Any further conversation was drowned out by a loud thumping on the door. Caliban got up and drew his sword again. Slate sighed.

  It was Brenner, with his arms full of metal. Caliban pulled the door open just as he had lifted a foot to kick at it again.

  “Where’d you get that?” said Slate, quite astonished, as the assassin dumped a pile of armor in the middle of the room with an unholy clatter.

  “I mugged a paladin.”

  “You did not.”

  “Fine, but it would have been easier. Took days to find this stuff. I was afraid it wasn’t going to come in before we left.”

  Caliban reached down into the pile and tugged a piece loose. It was a shoulder guard, embossed with the stylized closed eye of the Dreaming God. He turned it over in his hands, his expression unreadable.

  “This is temple armor,” he said.

  Brenner grinned. It wasn’t a kind expression.

  That was meant to be a painful gift. Damn Brenner, anyway. Slate stifled a sigh. Oh, well, they can work it out themselves. I suppose it doesn’t matter if they kill us or we kill us, at this point.

  “I am not allowed to wear this any more,” the paladin said, almost to himself.

  “Well, I’m not going out again,” said Brenner, pouring himself a shot of the whiskey. “Hey, this is the good stuff!”

  “Gift from the Stone Bitches.”

  “Bless their vicious little hearts.” He clinked his glass against Slate’s.

  Caliban crouched in the pile of armor, picking each piece up and setting it down carefully, his fingers lingering over the metal. It didn’t look as heavy as Slate had expected—chain and leather, rather than shiny metal plate. Perhaps that’s just the ceremonial armor. Hmm.

  There was a heavy chain with a silver disc on the end. The closed eye gazed out sightlessly from the center.

  “It’s stolen, if that makes you feel any better,” said Brenner cheerfully.

  Caliban snorted, running the chain through his fingers. “That seems about right…gha, ha, ngha…” He coughed, and covered his mouth with his hand.

  “Try it on,” said Brenner, his eyes bright with malice. “See if it fits.”

  “I’m sure it does. You got the clothing well enough.” His lips twitched. “Have you ever considered giving up killing people and becoming a tailor?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t like people unless I’m stabbing them.”

  Slate snorted and kicked him under the table. Brenner grinned and took another shot.

  The knight glanced at them with ill-concealed contempt. Slate huffed. Fine, if you’re going to be like that, see if I feel sorry for you.

  He started pulling on the armor. It took longer than Slate would have expected. Her mother used to dress the same way, one piece at a time, layered for battle.

  Slate herself had traded skirts for trousers, since they were going to be on the road. It had taken her probably a tenth the time to get dressed as it took Caliban to get his armor on.

  “This is a lot easier with a squire,” he said, trying to get a recalcitrant buckle across his back.

  Slate and Brenner, acting as one, leaned back in their chairs and crossed their legs.

  “Fine,” he muttered.

  Brenner poured out another shot and drained it, then pushed a package toward Caliban with his foot. “Got you a cloak, too.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s white.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Caliban got the last piece on. His back was so straight she could have ruled a column of figures with it.

  He held up the tabard. It had the sigil of the temple on it.

  He looked at it for what seemed like a long time, and then he folded it reverently and set it aside. Slate did not know that she had ever had a lover touch her with as much tenderness as the disgraced knight handled the cloth.

  “This I can no longer wear,” he said simply.

  “Oh, come on—” Brenner began, and Slate kicked him hard under the table.

  “It looks good,” she said. Not a useful observation, but what the hell do I know about armor? It did look good though. He looked more like a heroic statue than an actual human. She could see why the temple knights never lacked for female company. “You look great. A regular ladykiller.”

  Brenner blew whiskey out of his nose, yelped in pain, and clapped his hands over his face.

  Caliban stared at her, his brown eyes draining of warmth until they were the color of cold liver.

  Oh…my…god. Did I just say that? Slate put a hand out as if she could grab the words back. “I didn’t—ah, crap, I can’t believe—I didn’t mean—”

  I’m drunk. Oh god, I’m drunk, and I actually forgot…

  He picked up his sword, and walked out the door without looking back.

  “I can’t believe I said that,” said Slate into her palm.

  Brenner finally stopped choking and howled like a hyena instead. “I can’t believe you did either!”

  “Shut up, Brenner,” said Slate.

  “Oh, relax. It’s not like the stick up his ass can get any stickier.”

  There wasn’t anything much she could say to that. Slate got up and went to her room.

  She paused by the window, which overlooked the yard behind the inn. There was an armored figure below, taking cuts at his shadow in the moonlight.

  She thought of going down and apologizing, then thought better of it. At this point, I’ll just make it worse.

  Oh, well. We probably won’t make it to Anuket City, and even if we do, then we’re all going to die anyway…

  Chapter Seven

  They gathered in the c
ourtyard outside the guardkeep just after dawn. There was a horse for each of them. The Learned Edmund had two mules in addition to his horse, laden with obscure, lumpy baggage, and there was an extra pack mule with supplies. Caliban was wearing the white cloak.

  “You really don’t have to wear that,” Slate murmured. “Brenner’s just being an ass.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll be grey by the time we’re out of the city anyway.”

  The Captain of the Guard had come out to see them off, probably fearing that if he didn’t, he’d come out later to find one of them standing atop the corpses of the other three. Possibly brandishing a severed head in each hand.

  Not that that’s an unreasonable fear, mind you. I’ll put my money on Brenner, with Caliban at an outside chance. I just hope I get a shot at the Learned Edmund first.

  She eyed a spot between the scholar’s shoulder blades longingly. He’d apparently decided that the knight was the only person he was going to talk to. Brenner found this a relief. Slate just found it obnoxious.

  A groom handed her the reins to a horse, and vanished before she could say something like, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

  Caliban went over and spoke to the Captain quietly for a moment. They both vanished inside the building.

  Slate looked at her horse. It was large and brown and had a black nose. It glanced at her, then gazed off in the distance in resignation.

  Her mother had arranged for riding lessons for her approximately a thousand years ago, because courtesans catering to the nobility were catering to the mounted nobility, and sometimes you needed to go out for a ride with a patron. Whatever her faults, Slate’s mother had certainly done her best to groom her daughter for a better life, which had involved endless rounds of lessons. As a result, Slate could dance reasonably well, read beautifully, and play the harp badly.

  And ride.

  Theoretically.

  It didn’t come up a lot in the city. You called carriages, or you walked, but you never rode anywhere. When she left the city, she went by stage. She hadn’t actually been on a horse since she was eleven.

  Slate rubbed her damp palms on her trousers and gazed up.

  There was certainly a lot of horse there.

  Slate had remembered that horses had been very, very large when she was a girl, but she had secretly hoped that this was because she had been so small by comparison. Unfortunately, either horses had grown or she hadn’t.

  Caliban re-emerged, wearing an undyed tabard over his armor. There was no device on it. The Captain of the Guard was behind him, looking more unhappy than usual, and judging by the way the paladin was stalking away, the Captain had managed to offend him somehow.

  Granted, that’s not a hard thing to do. I’m amazed he’s even talking to me after last night.

  Slate tried to get a foot into the stirrup, just about managed it, and then realized immediately that the stirrups were so long that it was only going to get her partway up the horse, and she’d have to scrabble at the thing’s back like she was climbing a wall.

  Would it stand for that? How patient was a horse, anyway?

  She tried again. The horse took a step to the side once she had a foot in the stirrup, sending her hopping after it with her legs at an angle that she hadn’t achieved in recent memory.

  God, I hate being short.

  She looked around to see how everyone else was doing. Caliban, naturally, was sitting on his horse, looking ready to pose for an illuminated manuscript. Brenner, who had never been on a horse in his life, had taken out his dagger and was showing it meaningfully to his mount. The horse did not look impressed.

  Learned Edmund was checking the packs on his mules. He looked over at her and then away. Slate gritted her teeth and reached for the saddle. She’d bloody well climb the horse with a grappling hook if that’s what it took.

  This would be much easier if horses came with rain gutters. You give me a good rain gutter, I can be in the window in under a minute.

  Horses did not come with windows either.

  Before she could make another abortive attempt at mounting, Caliban dismounted and appeared on the other side of the horse, doing something to the complicated welter of snaps and buckles that she vaguely recalled was “tack.” Slate figured that it was probably too much to hope that he was lowering a ladder.

  He came around the other side, ducking under the horse’s head with a murmured word, and did the same thing on this side. Glory be, it seemed to involve shortening the stirrups.

  While that will undoubtedly be much more comfortable once I’m on the horse, I still don’t know how I’m going to get up there in the first place…

  The knight finished what he was doing, turned to her, and dropped to one knee as if he was offering fealty. Slate recoiled, then saw that he was actually offering her his interlaced hands as a mounting block.

  “Ohthankyougod,” she said, stepping into his hands.

  “Not a god, just a paladin,” he muttered, then belied his irritated tone by waiting patiently while she used his shoulder as a stepladder and ascended the heights of Mt. Equine.

  Slate might have been inclined to suspect something other than chivalry—after all, a lot of men might enjoy being climbed on by a woman—but he then went over and did the exact same thing for Brenner.

  This was quite a sight. Learned Edmund stopped even pretending to pay attention to the mules.

  The assassin eventually got into the saddle, and Caliban—looking distinctly the worse for wear, and with boot prints crossing his new tabard—went back to his own horse.

  “Is the circus ready to leave town, then?” asked Learned Edmund.

  They rode out.

  * * *

  Twelve hours later, Slate was praying for the sweet release of death.

  Her legs felt like…like…possibly there weren’t words in the language for what they felt like.

  They had been riding for hours. They left the city, the suburbs, the fields. They crossed several bridges. They passed more fields. Trees swept in from the sides and swept out again. Farmers went past in carts. Brenner clung to his mare like grim death, and with much the same expression.

  Caliban tried to talk to her once or twice, either to tell her that he’d forgiven her for what she’d said last night, or to tell her that he’d never forgive her for what she’d said last night. Slate bounced along in the saddle, sneezing, and had to ask him to repeat himself so many times that he gave up. The knight-champion rode ahead and talked to Learned Edmund instead. Apparently the two religious types had found something in common.

  Well, the one hates women in general and the other one hates me in particular. Maybe that’s a conversation starter.

  This would have annoyed Slate, but she had other things to worry about, like whether her legs were going to fall off.

  Fortunately, her horse seemed inclined to follow the other horses, or steering would have been an issue.

  She was covered in sweat. Dust stuck to the sweat and made a thin layer of grey grime that covered her from head to toe. Everyone else was also the same vague dust color. Caliban’s cloak had gone dingy grey practically before they were out of the courtyard.

  She would have found that amusing if she’d had the strength.

  She discovered that whoever had packed her horse had thoughtfully included a waterskin. She aimed a stream of water into her mouth. It tasted like ambrosia.

  How would you know? You’ve never had ambrosia.

  It couldn’t be better than this.

  Hours passed, like a kidney stone.

  Slate stopped thinking, stopped feeling anything. It was easier to do that. If she wasn’t there, she wasn’t feeling the horrible chafe against her thighs, the ache in her hip joints, the dryness of her eyes and nose and tongue. She went away inside her head for a while, in a kind of meditative misery.

  There was nothing but the horse. There had never been anything but the horse. Possibly she had been born on a horse. She was und
oubtedly going to die on one.

  When she came back, it was because Caliban was tapping her on the knee and saying, “You going to get down, or are you posing for an equestrian statue?”

  “Huh?” She looked around. They were at a ferry station on one side of the Highmelt River, a little town of a few small houses, a tradehouse, and a stable. Judging by the light, it was early evening. They seemed to be in the stable yard of the tradehouse. “Are we crossing?”

  “Not tonight. We’re stopping here.”

  “Oh.”

  He waited. She looked at him. Surely he’s not waiting for me to get down from this thing.

  Learned Edmund appeared out of the gloom, his arms full of saddlebags. “They’ve got two rooms. There’s enough stable space, though. Barely.”

  The fact that he was addressing Caliban and not her was not lost on Slate, but she really didn’t care at the moment. Her hip joints appeared to have locked in place like blocks of cement.

  “Excellent,” said the paladin, nodding. He turned back up to Slate. “Madam?”

  “Get him out of here,” she hissed under her breath.

  His eyebrows arched.

  “Do it.”

  Brenner bounced by, stiffly, an expression of frozen horror on his face. He hadn’t been able to get down, either, and apparently any attempt to control his horse had failed utterly. The mare smelled food, and was roaming the yard looking for it.

  Learned Edmund looked at Brenner. Brenner smiled horribly at him. His mare made another circuit of the yard.

  Slate’s horse sidled as the mare passed. Caliban put his fingers around the stirrup to hold it in place—Slate noticed with mild interest that she couldn’t feel her ankles, and was wretchedly grateful—and turned back to the scholar. “Perhaps, Learned Edmund, you could bespeak us a meal and see when the ferry first runs tomorrow morning?”

  The dedicate gave all three of them a suspicious glance, as if expecting them to be plotting behind his back, then inclined his head and went inside.

  Caliban waited until he was gone, then dove for Brenner’s reins, and managed to catch them. The horse brought up short, and Brenner lurched in the saddle and let out a sound that was just sort of a sob.