Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  “I could kill both of them,” said Brenner. “We could get to Anuket City on our own.”

  He said it rather louder than he intended. Learned Edmund’s eyes widened. Caliban simply shoved trencher bread in front of the assassin and said “You’d have to walk. The Clockwork Boys are supposed to be raiding up and down the southern trade roads. No caravans unless you want to go to a completely different city-state and work your way down from there.”

  Brenner looked at Slate. Slate said “He’s probably right,” and picked at her bread. Poppy-milk killed your appetite, but she knew she should probably eat anyway.

  “I could kill them just a little.”

  “No.”

  “I will never understand,” said Learned Edmund, apparently to Caliban, “why I was not placed in charge of this expedition.”

  “Because you look about twelve,” said Slate, too tired to be diplomatic. “Do you even have to shave yet?”

  The dedicate flushed scarlet. “I am nineteen!”

  “I am thirty-seven,” said Caliban, “and if I can accept Mistress Slate’s leadership, so can you.”

  “She hasn’t been leading!” said Learned Edmund. “She’s been drinking poppy and falling off her horse! You’re the one finding the inns and choosing the route.”

  Caliban locked eyes with Slate. “She has delegated,” he said, his voice a low rumble, in sharp contrast to Learned Edmund’s. “Mistress Slate’s talents lie elsewhere. I assure you, they are considerable.”

  “Damn straight they are,” said Brenner, snickering.

  “Shut up, Brenner.”

  Learned Edmund got up from the table and walked away without speaking.

  Slate groaned and dropped back against the wall again. “Why did they send him on this trip? He hasn’t got a tattoo eating his arm off.”

  “He volunteered,” said Caliban.

  Slate blinked. So did Brenner.

  “Among dedicates of the Many-Armed God, he is considered very…compassionate,” said Caliban.

  “Dear god!”

  Brenner whistled softly.

  “How did you find that out?” asked Slate.

  “I asked the Captain of the Guard.” He looked down at his hands with a small, ironic smile. “The Many-Armed God’s temple were very keen to find their missing scholar in Anuket City, or, if he is dead, to find out what he was working on when he died. They wanted his journal translated very badly. And when Learned Edmund learned that those who accompanied the dedicate were expected to die, his heart was moved by pity at our fate. He offered to go, both to find this scholar and because he knew that he was to be the designated survivor who would bring the information we gathered to the Dowager and the Many Armed God.”

  “Didn’t realize a woman would be in charge, I take it,” said Slate. Her head was clear, but she didn’t have to like it.

  Caliban inclined his head. “He is young and not worldly. I truly do not think it occurred to him or his superiors.”

  “Did he know they expected us all to die before we even got to the city?”

  The paladin sighed. “I believe he was told that it was dangerous. But he is very young, and the young always believe that they are immortal.”

  “Ugh.” Slate rubbed her shoulder and hissed with the pain.

  “It should improve soon,” said Caliban.

  “What, Learned Edmund?”

  “No, the pain. Your body adapts to riding the way it adapts to practicing the sword.”

  “I don’t do that either.”

  He helped them both upstairs. Brenner fell into his room cursing. Slate eased herself onto the bed as if into hot water. Each individual muscle was still furious.

  Without being asked, Caliban reached down and pulled her boots off.

  “Gaaahh!….thanks.” Command. I am in command. Dammit, that child was right. I’ve been letting Caliban do it all. I should have interrogated the Captain of the Guard about Learned Edmund myself, and instead I was maundering around wallowing in my upcoming horrible death.

  Dammit. And now I’m going to ask for even more.

  No. Delegating. I’m delegating.

  “Will you speak to Learned Edmund? Tell him…whatever.” She waved a hand vaguely. “Smooth it over.”

  “I will do my best.” He stood at the foot of the bed in parade rest, apparently waiting to be dismissed.

  “Use the voice on him,” muttered Slate.

  The Knight-Champion looked startled for just a moment, and then he gave her a genuine smile. “You noticed?”

  “Hard not to. If I could sound that trustworthy, I’d be rich.”

  Well, maybe. Probably it only works if you’re six feet tall and look like a war-god.

  “Most likely not,” he said, sounding a trifle apologetic. “I am afraid it only works if you believe what you’re saying.”

  “You mean you can’t lie?”

  “Normally? Of course I can, though I’m afraid it was never my strong suit. But if you are trying to make people trust you, you must trust your own word first. That’s why it works.”

  “What awful con men you’d make.”

  “That is the general idea.”

  “What if you’re one of those loons who believe every word they’re saying?”

  His smile faded. “People like that are dangerous,” he said. “We try to kill them quickly.” He shut the door behind him, and left Slate alone in the room.

  * * *

  Maybe Caliban had been right about adapting. Maybe it was the awful herbal gunk. Whatever it was, after the third day, it started to get better. Muscles either learned how to grip or stopped trying. Joints loosened up. Slate could get out of the saddle at the end of the day, although she never could get back up into it without a mounting block.

  Caliban took to sleeping in the stable whenever possible, presumably so that his demonic mutterings would bother no one but the horses. Slate got up early one morning—or rather, her allergies to the mold in the room drove her out of bed before she suffocated—and she found the knight in the stable yard, chopping down shadows.

  Slate melted into the shadows of a staircase and sat down. She pulled her knees up to her chin and watched him.

  Forehand…backhand…turn…forehand…sweep…

  It was a repetitive set of motions, oddly hypnotic. The arms moved, the sword swung, the shadows fell back.

  The paladin was a pleasure to watch, she’d admit that. He was not wearing the shell of armor, and it would have taken a better woman than Slate not to admire the play of muscles under his skin. The thin cotton shirt didn’t leave much to the imagination.

  The black ink across his arm was an ugly blotch beneath the fabric. It wriggled with each chop of the sword. Slate stifled a sigh.

  Oh, well. We’re all damaged goods here, I suppose.

  At the end of the sequence, Caliban dropped gracefully to his knees, a practiced move, and clasped both hands on the hilt of the upright sword. He bent his head, forehead pressed against the backs of his hands, and closed his eyes.

  And there he stayed.

  Long minutes slid by, and Slate’s ankles ached with sympathy. Inside his boots, his feet had to be white and bloodless. Unless the temple teaches knight-champions how to do that sort of thing…

  Slate had not ever seen much point to prayer, but the intensity of that silent vigil was painful to watch. It seemed cruel that any god could hear such prayers and not respond at once.

  She slid to her feet and slipped away before he saw her and she could ask what, if anything, he was praying for.

  * * *

  “I’ve never met an assassin before,” said Learned Edmund to Brenner, after they had been several days on the road.

  “Speaking on behalf of assassins everywhere, we were perfectly happy with that.”

  They’d dismounted to lead the horses up a long, winding hill. Brenner plodded along with his eyes forward, apparently hoping that had ended the conversation.

  No such luck.


  “Do you enjoy killing people? If I may ask?”

  Brenner sighed and glanced at Caliban, possibly hoping for rescue. Caliban shrugged. He had little enough chivalry left, he wasn’t going to waste it on Brenner.

  “If I say yes, will you stop asking?”

  “I’m trying to understand what you do, Mister Brenner,” said Learned Edmund stiffly. “I do not believe in judging a man before I know him, and I do not know you well.”

  Brenner gazed up at the sky, apparently looking for divine intervention, or at least rain. Neither was forthcoming. Clouds drifted by in a sky as blue and airy as a butterfly’s wing.

  “I enjoy hunting people,” he said. “I’m good at it.”

  “And the act of killing?”

  “That’s just the bit that happens at the end. Look, why don’t you go bother the paladin? He’s killed at least as many people as I have, and got paid a lot less.”

  “Dig your own grave, Brenner,” said Caliban. “I’m not helping.”

  “I am quite clear on the motivations of Knight-Champions,” said Learned Edmund. “I’m asking about yours.”

  Caliban stifled a sigh. Bet you’re not half as clear as you think you are. Hell, these days, I’m not even clear on my motivations most of the time…

  Brenner apparently agreed with him. “My motives? I kill people who have managed to piss somebody else off. I bear them no ill will; it’s strictly business. He goes and persuades poor stupid peasants who think they’re possessed to come back to the temple to have demons tortured out of them. And I’m the bad one?”

  Caliban discovered that his hand was on the hilt of his sword. He looked at it as if it didn’t belong to him, and carefully pried the fingers away.

  “The work of the Knight-Champions is generally recognized as a noble calling—” said Learned Edmund nervously, and licked his lips.

  “Ask him if he enjoys it.”

  The statement made a little silence around itself. Learned Edmund looked back and forth worriedly.

  “Did you enjoy killing that woman with the blighted child?” Caliban asked quietly.

  There was another little silence, while Brenner stared at him.

  “That’s sick,” the assassin said finally.

  “You volunteered to do it,” said Caliban, still gazing straight ahead, to where Slate’s horse was kicking up little puffs of dust from the roadway.

  “Somebody had to! They were going to shoot her anyway, and those idiot butchers in the guard would have made a bloody mess of it!”

  Swish went the horse’s tail ahead of them.

  Caliban nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “Downhill from here,” Slate called back.

  In more ways than one…

  “Pardon me, gentlemen,” said Caliban, lengthening his stride. He stopped beside Slate, knelt, and offered her a hand up into the saddle. She gave him one of her crooked smiles as she mounted.

  He was pretty sure she hadn’t heard the conversation behind her.

  Probably that was just as well.

  * * *

  Another day passed, then two. They passed through miles of carefully tended fields, where some crops were just starting to pull their way up from the soil. It was humble but prosperous land, full of humble but honest people. Slate felt like a fish not just out of water but twenty miles from the nearest puddle.

  No one’s evacuating. No one’s leaving. I suppose you still have to plant seeds even if there’s a war going on, but this seems utterly mad…

  One night there were no inns, and they stayed at a farmhouse, or more accurately, in the barn.

  “I am surprised you did not take the offer of their bed,” said Caliban, as they walked back to the barn, carrying provisions.

  Slate shrugged. “Safer not to. If we have to run in the middle of the night, less chance of being split up.”

  “That hardly seems likely out here, with these people.”

  “I have gotten out of the habit of trusting people,” said Slate. “No matter how harmless they appear.”

  The sun was setting and dyeing the fields crimson. Caliban raised his eyebrows. “That seems a difficult way to live.”

  “You note that I’m still alive, though. At least for another few days.”

  “An unassailable argument. At least until we get to the war zone.”

  Slate shrugged.

  She slept that night at one end of the barn, far enough away that Learned Edmund need not fear her feminine exhalations. Caliban took the stall beside her. She woke in the night to hear the demon muttering, and rolled over and went back to sleep.

  “I cannot get used to this,” said Brenner, looking up the road. They had dismounted and were leading the horses. “That’s an army outpost.”

  “A minor one, yes,” said Learned Edmund.

  “And we’re just walking right up to it.”

  Caliban laughed softly to himself.

  “Something funny, god-boy?”

  “Yes.”

  The assassin’s eyes narrowed. “Be a shame if someone slipped up and dropped your name, Lord Caliban.”

  Caliban controlled his expression as tightly as he could, but he knew that Brenner saw his eyes flicker. “They are expecting criminals. As you enjoy reminding me, I, too, am a criminal.”

  “Damn straight. Try acting like one.”

  Slate turned her head and looked back at them. There was no mistaking her expression. Annoyance crossed her face like clouds casting shadows on a hillside. “I swear to god, if you two don’t stop, I’ll tell the army to give you forty lashes for insubordination.”

  “Can they do that?” asked Brenner.

  “They can,” said Caliban. “Though time in the stockade is more usual.”

  “I’ve never had forty lashes. Actually, I’ve never had even one lash.”

  “I have,” said Caliban.

  Slate had turned back around, but missed a step at that. “What?”

  He shrugged. “The demon had a whip.”

  “And?”

  “I had a sword.”

  “Who won?” asked Brenner.

  “We’re having this conversation, so I did.”

  “Ah.”

  Slate waved them to silence, and handed Caliban the reins of her horse. A soldier in dusty blue motioned her toward the guard post. She mounted the steps into the small building, already reaching for the document case at her side.

  Caliban looked over the outpost. A wall of sharpened posts ran around the outside. From what he knew of them, a Clockwork Boy would go through that in about five seconds flat.

  They had taken the precaution of digging a moat around the exterior. The guard post stood at one end of a narrow bridge. If the enemy did arrive, they could destroy the bridges and let the Clockwork Boys fall into the ditch around the palisade. It wouldn’t destroy them, but would at least give the soldiers the ability to attack from above, without being trampled.

  Siege tactics were not part of a Knight-Champion’s training. Caliban couldn’t say if the precautions were brilliant or foolish. Presumably it was the best that could be done with what resources were available.

  Just like we are.

  The sheer awfulness of that thought made him flick his fingers across his eyes in a warding gesture.

  Brenner started to say something, but Slate’s footsteps stopped him. “All right,” she said, coming down the board steps again. “Our papers are in order.”

  “They’re authentic, you mean?” asked Caliban.

  She snorted. “They’re better than authentic, I’ll have you know.”

  They stabled the horses outside the walls, and crossed the bridge to the inside. It was held up with ropes, easily cut. He looked up and saw archers stationed in towers on either side.

  “Will archers stop the Clockwork Boys, do you think?” he murmured.

  “From what I understand, not a chance in hell,” said Slate.

  Learned Edmund made a small distressed so
und, and pulled his robes more tightly around himself.

  The commander of the outpost was a woman with long silver hair tied back into a bun. She looked over the four of them with a dour expression. Slate actually heard Caliban’s spine crackle as he snapped to attention.

  Didn’t think the man’s spine could get any straighter. She probably reminds him of a nun.

  Slate didn’t bother to pretend that she was military. She dropped her papers on the commander’s table with a flourish. Brenner was slouching aggressively. Learned Edmund was looking at a female military commander with the expression of a man having an internal crisis.

  The Commander looked at the papers. She read them. She looked up at Slate.

  “You’re in charge, I take it.”

  “Same as you,” said Slate. The woman snorted.

  “You’re the next batch, then.”

  “Yep,” said Slate.

  “Heard the first ones didn’t do so well.”

  “Yeah, I heard that too.”

  “You run into a column of Clockwork Boys, they’re not sending the army to haul you out.” She steepled her fingers and put her elbows on the desk. “They can’t haul you out, you understand? Those things are walking siege engines.”

  “We’re aware,” said Slate, not looking at her companions. Brenner and Caliban were aware. Learned Edmund…well. Was it even possible to tell a sheltered nineteen-year-old boy that he was going to die and make him believe it?

  The Commander sighed and reached for a stamp. “You’re headed to the front, then?”

  “Nowhere else to go,” said Slate. She was lying through her teeth, but she was pretty sure that she was the only one who knew that.

  Brenner can probably tell, but Brenner will go along with it…

  The Commander stamped the bottom of the document. “See the Quartermaster for anything you require. We don’t have much, but the capital says you’re welcome to what we’ve got.” Her expression indicated what she thought about this.

  “Cigarettes and poppy milk,” muttered Brenner.

  The Commander’s lip curled, but she handed back the paper. Her eyes scanned over the three men, lingering the longest on Caliban. Slate was pretty sure it wasn’t because the paladin was good-looking.