Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

They watched raindrops make craters in the dust. Thunder growled around them, and a cool wind slithered between the trees.

  “Maybe we can find something close to the road,” said Slate, kicking her horse forward. “Keep an eye out.”

  They got about a quarter mile down the road without spotting anything likely, and the sky opened up with a cataclysmic ripping sound.

  Everyone was instantly wet to the skin. Slate’s hair plastered itself to the back of her neck.

  “Damn.”

  “We should have oilcloth cloaks in the bags somewhere,” Caliban said, shouting a little to be heard over the rain.

  “We’re going to have to get off the road,” Brenner called. “We can’t just sit through this.”

  The Learned Edmund opened his mouth to say something—possibly to protest leaving the road at all—and a crack of lightning hit the ground less than a hundred yards away. Thunder smashed around them, not just a sound but a physical weight that rang in Slate’s brain and bowels as well as her ears.

  Her horse bolted.

  Slate was so blinded by the jagged afterimages of the lightning that at first she thought she’d simply fallen off the horse and that the sickening lurch was an after-effect of the thunder. But then a spray of pine needles smacked her in the face and she fell forward, and she realized that the horse was moving under her.

  In a stumbling run.

  Through the dripping forest.

  Ohmygodohmygod

  Its ears were flat against its head. The forest was a wall of black cut-outs, given brief, flickering depth by lightning.

  Can horses even run in forests? Will it hit a tree? Is it about to fall down? Am I about to fall off?

  She flung herself as flat along its back as she could, clinging to the reins and the saddle and the mane, her legs wrapped around the horse’s belly, which she realized, rather too late, it might be taking as a signal to keep running.

  Too late now. If I let go, I’ll fall off. At high speed.

  The world slewed at an angle. The horse put its hindquarters down and skidded down a slope full of wet bracken.

  It occurred to Slate that, suicide mission aside, she was almost certainly going to die right now because no horse could run through dark wet woods without slipping or putting its foot in a hole or breaking a leg in some fashion.

  And this caused her to make quite an unexpected discovery—namely that she didn’t want to die.

  Ohmygod I want to live I want to live I don’t care I want to live!

  And hard on the heels of that thought: Well, this is a helluva time to figure that out!

  The horse stumbled and recovered. Slate’s stomach did not. Wet grasses slapped at her legs and face like whips.

  I could jump off. That’s probably safer, right? Right?

  Part of Slate’s brain agreed. The part that was holding onto the horse was not convinced.

  The slope leveled out. The horse staggered, caught itself, and ran. Rain poured into her eyes again.

  It’s an old river bed. Oh god, we might live after all.

  If I can just get it to slow down—

  She searched her clenched hands for the reins. There weren’t any. Mane, saddle, a chunk of saddle blanket. No reins.

  She’d dropped the reins at some point, or the horse had managed to flip them over its head, or something. Regardless, they weren’t there. Shit.

  If she let go, she could reach down and grab for them.

  If she let go, she was going to fall off.

  If she fell off, she was probably going to die.

  Well, maybe just one hand… She pried her fingers loose.

  The horse hit a patch of rock and skidded on two hooves. Slate shrieked and grabbed tight again.

  I can’t stop it. It’s going to fall down and I’ll break my neck and die or break my legs and die of exposure or—

  There was a yell behind her.

  She looked over her shoulder, and there, as she should have known he would be, riding like a lunatic or a demon, was (former) Knight-Champion Caliban.

  That idiot. That wonderful idiot.

  I take back all the times I thought about letting Brenner kill you.

  His horse pounded down the streambed behind hers. Lightning sizzled, illuminating the whites of its eyes. Caliban didn’t look much calmer himself. He was hunched over his horse, and if his sodden grey cloak hadn’t been glued to his back and the horse’s haunches by the rain, she wouldn’t have known who it was.

  Well, he’s still on the horse, so it’d be a good bet it wasn’t Brenner, and he’s giving chase, so it obviously wasn’t Learned Edmund. Okay, I could have figured it out even without the stupid cloak.

  Her horse skidded again. Coherent thought dissolved briefly into a screaming welter of IdontwanttodieIdontwanttodieshitshitshit—!

  Caliban was shouting something, but she couldn’t make out the words. He was slapping his horse’s rump with something—it looked like the flat of his sword—and it was running, ears back, and somehow, madly, he was gaining.

  He shouted again.

  “I can’t hear you!” she yelled back.

  Thunder smashed anything he might have said in response. Her horse squealed, and she had to stop looking over her shoulder and clutch desperately at it. She was hunched so low that every stride cracked the back of the horse’s neck against the side of her head.

  Could he really catch up to her?

  Hey, it’s a math problem. I’m good at math! If a horse traveling at twenty-six miles an hour going west is intercepted by a horse traveling at twenty-nine miles an hour going northwest, will their paths cross before or after the first horse breaks its rider’s neck?

  She giggled hysterically. Rain and the horse’s mane lashed her face raw, and she giggled anyway.

  Oh god, I don’t want to die…

  There was a shadow next to her. The paladin’s horse was pulling alongside hers, neck to haunches, then neck to knee. She could see his hand, practically next to her face, as he groped forward.

  If you think you’re reaching over and pulling me off this horse in mid-run, you’re even farther out of your mind than I think you are…

  He might have been out of his mind, but apparently not that far. The hand passed her, swung down, and there was a sizzle of wet leather as he grabbed the flapping reins.

  If Slate had somehow managed to get the reins, she would undoubtedly have hauled back on them with all her strength, and the horse would have bucked or reared or gone over or all three at once. But Caliban had a somewhat better notion of the stopping distance of a horse on a wet riverbed, and the two horses went pounding along together, side by side, until the desperate run dropped down to a gallop, and the gallop fell to a canter, and the canter became a kind of stiff-legged bouncing trot, and then the horses had stopped and he slid off and Slate fell off and he caught her.

  It occurred to Slate, a few minutes later, that she was clinging to a knight in the middle of a rainstorm, her cheek full of wet chainmail, which wasn’t very comfortable, and that she appeared to be sobbing uncontrollably. She wasn’t actually sure. It was too wet to tell if there were tears. She might have been laughing instead.

  Caliban was holding her upright. He still had his sword in one hand, and the pommel was digging painfully into her shoulder, but she didn’t care, because she wasn’t dead.

  He was saying something, over and over, that she couldn’t make out—it might even have been the demon muttering, for all she knew—but the rumble in his chest was soothing.

  The thunder rattled. She was glad of it, because it meant he couldn’t hear her, either. She had a horrible suspicion that what she was saying, over and over, was, “Oh my god, I don’t want to die.”

  She wrestled herself under control at last, partly out of pride, and partly because the horses were moving restlessly and bumping into them both. She finally got her feet under her.

  Carefully, possibly even reluctantly, Caliban released his hold and stepped back. She look
ed up. Rain sluiced down both their faces. Was he crying too? How could you tell?

  He leaned down, and shouted, next to her ear, “We have to get out of here before it floods!”

  Ah. Good thinking. Now that Slate looked down, the water did seem to be swirling perilously close to the tops of her feet. She nodded to Caliban, who took the tangle of reins in one hand and Slate’s hand in the other and led them all squelching upstream, looking for a place to climb out.

  The rain was still coming down in hard sheets. Visibility was nonexistent. But they found one at last, on the opposite bank, and none too soon. The water was threatening to come in over the tops of Slate’s boots. The horses, already panicky and exhausted, were slipping and snorting and pulling at the reins.

  She let go of his hand and dragged herself up the slope. The knight and the horses followed.

  Her vision was better than his in the dark, and once they were under the trees, she took the lead. There wasn’t a great deal of cover, but she found a fallen tree at last. It had crashed through the canopy and been overgrown by a spreading pine tree.

  It formed a wall on two sides and at least a suggestion of ceiling, and the ground underneath was damp rather than sodden.

  It’ll do.

  There was no real point in trying to start a fire. She crawled into the hollow and pulled her knees up to her chest.

  Caliban tied the horses, draping their saddle blankets over them as best he could, then crawled in after Slate.

  It was pitch black under the tree. Slate could just see make out the outline of the horses, black against grey, and that was all.

  Squish. Squish.

  What the hell…?

  In the next flash of lightning, she caught a glimpse of Caliban trying to wring out his cloak.

  “Well,” he said, after a minute, “it’s not dry, but it’s what we’ve got.”

  With some grumbling and a few curses, and the removal of some armor and his sword, they managed to huddle together under the cloak. It stank of wet horse, but it was wool, so it held warmth in, and that made up for a lot of wet horse.

  She sneezed anyway.

  His sigh seemed to come from his toes.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, and sneezed again. The smell of rosemary was threaded in and around the wet horse.

  He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

  Slate started laughing. She couldn’t help it.

  It caught like a sob in her throat. She was going to cry again. Her hair hung in her face in damp strings, and she shoved at it futilely. Why am I crying?

  I’m cold and exhausted and I don’t want to die, and someone just handed me a handkerchief.

  These seemed like excellent reasons.

  Caliban wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on top of her head, murmuring all the meaningless things that people murmur to console the weeping. As any paladin could have told her, the words didn’t matter nearly so much as the voice.

  The spate of tears passed off quickly. She was too tired to keep it up for long. She lay quietly, feeling his arms around her in the dark.

  It was about the only way to keep them both under the cloak, and there was rather more metal that she liked, but she wouldn’t swear she didn’t enjoy it.

  You’re just giddy from being near death, that’s all. You figured out you don’t want to die. It doesn’t mean anything. You’d feel the same way no matter who was in here with you.

  Well…possibly not the Learned Edmund.

  Still.

  Her heart ached, and her head ached, and her sinuses…well, they always ached. She snuffled into the handkerchief. She tried to think of something clever to say, to deflect the fact that she was shortly going to be quite embarrassed for crying, and couldn’t find anything. Her voice, when it came out, sounded thin in her own ears.

  “Caliban?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I don’t think I want to die.”

  He chuckled. Chain clinked under her ear. “That’s good.”

  “But we’re going to die.”

  “Let’s try not to.”

  “Okay, then.”

  There was a lot more that she wanted to say, about Anuket City and what was waiting for her there. But it was all horribly complicated, and she would have had to explain what she had done and who wanted her dead, and about the Shadow Market and the Grey Church and the crow-cages. And she was very tired and the city was very far away.

  The wet wool of his tabard was beginning to dry under her cheek. He’d unbuckled both shoulder guards and his gloves and either she was cold or his skin was as hot as a brand against hers.

  She rather hoped he’d make a move of some sort. Hell, Brenner would have been smoking a post-coital cigarette by now, if she’d been curled up in his lap like this.

  She could have used…well…something.

  But Caliban was a former knight-champion, once sworn to temple service, and that meant either that he did not take advantage of mildly hysterical women who had just been dragged back from the brink of death or that he was incapable of recognizing a hint when it crawled into his lap.

  One of the two, anyway.

  Nothing ventured…

  She stretched up a hand and touched his face in the dark. A day worth of beard stubble rasped under her fingertips.

  She traced the long line of his jaw downward, then across. Her finger lay across his lower lip. She could feel his breath against her skin, sharply indrawn, and then released.

  He folded his hand very gently around hers and drew it down, to lie loosely on his chest. And then, a moment later, he patted her hand, and withdrew his.

  Or he’s completely uninterested. Son of a bitch.

  Slate’s face burned in the dark.

  She was too drained to be angry for long. She wanted to be furious and embarrassed but that would take energy and she had so little left to spare. It was dark under the tree, and very warm under the wet wool. She was either comfortable or too exhausted to feel physical discomfort.

  The rain dragged on. They existed in a small, warm place outside of time. Slate dozed off with her hand clenched in an undyed tabard that was by now very much the worse for wear.

  Knight-Champion Caliban—who had indeed been known to recognize hints, and who was clinging to what was left of his vows by will alone—leaned his head back against the damp wood of the tree stump and waited for the rain to pass.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Well,” said Brenner, in a voice that could have etched glass, “isn’t this cozy.”

  Slate pried her eyelids open. They felt dry and itchy. She was in somebody’s arms, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Brenner’s? It’d been his voice, and it wouldn’t be the first time, but she didn’t recall him being so sarcastic afterwards. Usually he just wanted to get breakfast.

  It appeared to be early evening, and the rain had passed off. The world swam into focus, revealing pine needles, dirt, someone’s arm, Brenner, the Learned Edmund, two horses and three mules, in that order.

  Brenner looked furious, and wasn’t hiding it well. Learned Edmund looked appalled. The horses looked like horses, and the mules looked bored.

  By process of elimination, therefore, the arm I am using as a pillow belongs to…

  Ah. Yes.

  She sat up. Former Knight-Champion etc. Caliban lifted his arm politely to release her and got to his feet, scrubbing at his eyes.

  Okay. We’ve both got all our clothes on. I didn’t do anything stupid.

  Not for lack of wanting.

  Still, it’s good. It’s a good thing. The last thing I need is Brenner getting jealous, or any more complications on this bloody death march anyway.

  It might be too late on the first count. Brenner was watching Caliban with death in his eyes, possibly wondering if he could get a knife into the knight before anyone moved.

  Learned Edmund was also watching Caliban with something like pity. Had his bowels turned to water and his genitals withered alrea
dy? Was it a gradual process?

  Slate stood up, slapping bark dust off her clothes. She felt cold. The paladin’s body had been very warm, with the cloak over them both like a blanket.

  This was a line of thought that did not bear pursuing. “How did you find us?” she asked.

  “The horses,” said Learned Edmund, not meeting her eyes rather more obviously than usual. “When we got close, they whinnied to each other. We just followed them.”

  “Ah. Didn’t hear it. Must have been more tired than I thought.”

  Learned Edmund stared at the ground. Brenner’s stare grew even more lethal. Slate replayed the last statement in her head and winced internally.

  Still, there were bigger concerns than the priest’s assumptions or Brenner’s petty jealousies. One big, serious, pressing concern.

  “So!” said Slate. “What’s for dinner?”

  * * *

  Learned Edmund was setting up camp. Brenner was starting a fire. Slate went to go help unload the horses, grabbed a pack, turned around, and found herself nose to nose with Knight-Champion Caliban.

  They looked at each other. It became uncomfortable very quickly. He dropped his eyes first.

  Slate felt her face get hot. She was blushing hard enough that even her dark complexion could save her.

  What am I embarrassed about? Crying? That’s nothing, lots of people cry.

  That I offered, and he didn’t want anything I had to offer.

  No. I didn’t say anything. Nothing that’d stand up in court.

  Caliban cleared his throat.

  But you know. And he knows. And you both know that the other one knows.

  “Madam—” he began.

  Slate raised a hand, opened her mouth, found absolutely nothing to say, and closed it again.

  He looked up at her finally, saw that she was burning scarlet, and his eyes widened.

  “Ma—Slate—there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  It’s an interesting conundrum, Slate thought, as blood pounded in her ears. I am more embarrassed because I have nothing to be embarrassed about than I would be if I’d actually managed to do something embarrassing.

  “I haven’t thanked you,” she said, not looking at him. “You saved my life.”