Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War

by T. Kingfisher

  A dark figure appeared behind the circle of rats. It walked forward with excruciating slowness, approaching the edge of the circle.

  Shaman. Has to be.

  The music stopped. The rats dropped simultaneously, as if dead, which many of them already were. A wave of tiny bodies fell at the figure’s feet, a sweeping rodent obeisance. Their bones crunched under the shaman’s hooves.

  “NGGHAAAA—!” Caliban’s demon clawed at him, screaming so loudly that the knight bit his tongue to keep from yelling aloud. Blood welled up under his teeth and filled his mouth with salt.

  Along the walls, the rune shuddered, their ears drooping.

  The shaman stepped down into the circle.

  At first, Caliban thought it was another stag-man. The rack of antlers over its head was huge, twice the size of that of any of the other males, hung with bones. Round stones with holes in them clicked against something that looked disturbingly like human fingerbones. It wore a cloak of woodpecker feathers that dazzled the eye with spots and stripes until the shape under them seemed to swim in the firelight.

  Then it spread its arms, and the stag-man behind them rushed to take its cloak away, and he saw that it was a female.

  An antlered doe. Shaman—and judging by the number of points, a very old one.

  The doe’s face did not wrinkle like a human’s would, but the long planes of her muzzle were sunken, the bones in fine relief, and the hairs had gone white, turning her skin a frosted green. Her spine was bent slightly forward, possibly under the weight of those magnificent antlers, and her breasts were flat sacks against her chest.

  The doe’s eyes were milky with cataracts, but they narrowed with unnerving clarity on his face.

  Caliban swallowed a mouthful of blood. The demon had gone so silent that it was like being alone in his head for the first time in months.

  “You,” said the antlered doe, in a low, throbbing voice, mourning dove rather than sparrow. “Why here, you?”

  Caliban had to swallow again before he could speak. “It was an accident. We were on the road, and the storm drove us off.”

  “Lie, you.”

  “No lie.”

  “Bring demons here, you.”

  Uh-oh.

  “We didn’t mean—”

  She took a step forward, her eyes narrowing, and struck him across the face. The strength in those delicate limbs was astonishing. His head snapped back. The demon yammered, briefly, and then fell back into that terrified silence.

  “Lie, you! Demon inside you, you!”

  Despite the fear and the pain and everything else, Caliban felt a sense of vindication so powerful that it was practically a venial sin. He turned his head and stared at Brenner.

  The assassin said “Heh,” and made a kind of full facial shrug. He had the decency to look embarrassed.

  “The one inside me is dead,” Caliban said, turning back to the rune. “I swear, it is no harm to anyone.”

  The rune-shaman’s nostrils flared. She put her face down practically next to his and inhaled.

  “Could be, you. Or could be lies, you.”

  “No lie. I swear it.”

  She tilted her head. “Ye-e-es. Maybe, you. What other demons though, you?”

  Is she asking if I have any other demons? God, isn’t one enough?

  “What other demons?” asked Brenner.

  The antlered doe turned and looked at him, then stepped forward, her head darting forward. She walked like a bird or a lizard, oddly jerky. “Others, you. Clanking, clicking, tearing. Four-leg, six-leg. Know, you?”

  Brenner inhaled. “I think she means the Clockwork Boys.”

  “The Clockwork Boys? Have they come here?”

  She glowered. “Not know clokwerk, me. Know demons. Demons come, rune territory, my territory. Kill rune. Want kill me. Know, you?”

  “We’re not with them,” said Caliban. “Not our demons. We want to stop them.”

  Her ears went back. “Lie, you.”

  “No. We’re going to where these demons come from. To stop them.”

  The antlered doe fell back and paced around them in a circle. Caliban got a crick in his neck trying to watch her, and looked at Brenner instead. The assassin shook his head minutely.

  “I wonder why she thinks they’re demons,” Caliban murmured.

  “Maybe they are.”

  Her face thrust next between them. “Those demons kill me, take territory. Kill me, take territory, you?”

  “We haven’t killed any rune. We don’t want your territory. We’re just passing through.”

  “Lie, you! Else bring demon why, why, you?”

  “I swear, I don’t want your territory. My demon is dead. It doesn’t want anything.” Except maybe to be left alone.

  She wrinkled her muzzle. “Not believe, me.”

  “I don’t know how I can prove it to you.”

  She grinned. Her teeth were flat and herbivorous, but she had wickedly sharp canines. “Know, me.” She turned away, leaping out of the sunken circle, kicking up the bodies of dead rats like dust.

  And just like that, watching her move, he knew.

  Oh, Dreaming God…

  “There’s a demon in her,” he said aloud.

  “What?” Brenner stared at him.

  Caliban tried to swallow, found his throat tight, and spat blood on the dirt floor. “There’s a demon in her. A live one. I should have realized from the rats—some of them can control vermin, but I never saw anything like this. She’s possessed.”

  Shit, I must be out of practice. A year ago I would have known the minute I looked in her eyes.

  There was a slim possibility that the rune shaman had accepted possession willingly. It did happen. Not often, but it did happen. Such demons were nearly impossible to spot, as Caliban knew to his sorrow.

  “I wonder if they know,” said Brenner, glancing at the other rune. They were as silent as the rats.

  “I doubt it.” Caliban’s heart ached for the rune, that their shaman, who should have been wise, was host to a monster instead.

  “Well, so, you’re a demonslayer, then,” said Brenner eagerly. “What do we do now?”

  Caliban sighed. “We die.”

  “What? You’re the bloody Knight-Champion!”

  “I’m the former bloody Knight-Champion, and I don’t have a sword to kill her, or salt and holy water to exorcise her, and my purity of heart with which to exhort her has been pretty shaky lately, as somebody keeps reminding me!”

  “Bloody hell,” said Brenner, with feeling.

  The rune returned. She was carrying an abalone shell which trailed a thin stream of smoke.

  A collective moan went up from the rune watching. They were sagging where they stood, their mouths open and panting. Whatever force had slain the rats did not seem to be treating them much better.

  The demon rune crouched before Caliban, her antlers hanging over him. Bands of shadow crossed his face like bars. He could see inside the abalone shell now, a pile of leaves burning atop a bed of clear white salt.

  Nghaaaaaa…!

  For the first time, the knight felt a rush of almost camaraderie for his demon. I’m scared too, believe me…

  He licked his lips. Salt and holy water were only there to focus the mind. If your heart was pure, you didn’t need them.

  The sword…well, the sword would have been very useful.

  He had not felt the Dreaming God’s presence in a very long time. Without it, what use was he?

  Still…

  He took a deep breath and said, in the paladin’s voice, “Halt.”

  She paused. Just for an instant, just long enough to hope.

  Then: “Think you command me, you?”

  “Well, it was worth a try,” he said, not looking at Brenner.

  “See now, me,” she said, and grinned with those wicked sharp teeth. Far down in her pupils, something alien looked out at him and laughed.

  The antlered doe bent her muzzle to the abalone shell
and inhaled deeply. Smoke rushed into those broad nostrils, and the coals flared.

  She lifted her head and exhaled the smoke in twin streams into his face.

  Caliban tried to hold his breath, instinctively. The rune behind him caught his hair and jerked his head sharply back. He gasped at the unexpected pain, and smoke rushed in.

  It smelled sweet and acrid, like burning hay. He coughed and with each cough the world lurched sideways and farther away, as if he were moving backward, except that he was still kneeling in the dirt, unmoving.

  Darkness closed around him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Slate had followed the line of dancing rats for what she thought was over a mile. She wasn’t used to thinking in such distances, particularly not when they twisted and turned and doubled back, but it had definitely been a long, scrambling way. Her face had been slapped by so many pine needles that she felt as if she’d been flogged by miniature whips.

  It would have been a dozen or so blocks, anyway. About the distance from the gutterside docks to Archivist Street, I’d say.

  The moon was out, but she hardly needed it. The drums drew her on, and the slithering line of rodents was as clear as a signpost.

  I hope I’m actually going the right way, and that this isn’t some kind of random phenomenon—the Running of the Rat Bits—that happens occasionally in this part of the world.

  Seriously, though, what are the odds?

  She was standing in the middle of the rune village before she actually saw it. The sunken mud huts were so far from her idea of houses that if she hadn’t seen the rats vanish into a doorway, she would have taken them for hills. Once she realized that she was standing in front of a door—and that there were a good dozen huts around her—she stepped back into the shadows, heart pounding.

  No one seemed to be moving. If anyone had seen her, they were keeping quiet about it.

  She examined the building beside her carefully. It was some kind of mud-and-straw construction, like a bird’s nest. The walls looked thick and knobbly. When she dug her fingers into one, experimentally, it didn’t give at all.

  I could climb on one of these if I need to.

  Slate made a careful circuit of the village. There were eighteen houses all told, although some of them were so small they looked like storage sheds rather than living quarters. There didn’t seem to be any people in the village, except for the largest earth lodge.

  This final lodge was a good forty feet across. The music was definitely coming from inside, and she could see a dull red glow through the doorway. If there were people in the village, they were likely inside.

  The rats had finally stopped entering the doorway. Perhaps it had filled up. Instead the newcomers formed circles around the perimeter, six or seven deep.

  It didn’t follow, however, that if Brenner and Caliban were prisoners, they were inside as well. Possibly they’d been dumped in one of the other huts.

  Slate slunk from doorway to doorway, peering inside. Each hut had been dug down, some of them quite deep and surprisingly spacious. A few had hide curtains in the doorways, and she had to twitch them aside a fraction to peer inside.

  The smoke holes at the top of each building provided a circle of moonlight, and a good thing, too, or she would have had to go through and check by feel, and that didn’t bear thinking about. Slate got through eleven houses, seeing nothing but firepits, bedding, baskets, and all the various flotsam of people’s lives. No one appeared to have thoughtfully left an assassin and a paladin out.

  She peered into the twelfth, saw what looked like a pile of rags in the moonlight, and was dropping the curtain back when the rags said, “Hssst!”

  There was a knife in her hands. She didn’t actually remember drawing it.

  “Brenner?”

  “Hey, lady! Help me out here!”

  Slate winced. That’s definitely not Brenner. Whatever it is, it’s seen me…

  She couldn’t risk it yelling and raising the alarm. She let the curtain fall behind her and slid quickly into the circle of moonlight, where the pile of rags was sitting up.

  It wasn’t human. It looked like a cross between a badger and a haystack. It had a broad striped head, small almost-human ears, and a dozen layers of different bits of clothing. They were wrapped and tied and bound together in an intricately knotted tangle. Slate had never seen anything quite like it.

  “Do you live here?” she whispered.

  “God’s claws, lady, do I look like I live here?”

  “I have no idea! What are you?”

  “I’m a gnole.”

  “What’s a gnole?”

  “One of me! Please, lady, untie me quick before the rune come back.”

  “What’re rune?”

  The gnole rolled its eyes wildly and wiggled. Its hands emerged briefly from the tangle of rags. They looked to be roped together, although the gnole’s eccentric clothing made it hard to tell what was rope and what was more rags. “Rune are the things that live here, and they’ve gone crazy, lady! Now untie me and let’s get out of here!”

  “I’m looking for some friends of mine—”

  “You come back to Anuket City with me, lady, I’ll get you all the friends you want! Hurry up!”

  Slate’s lips twitched. She crouched down and cut the creature’s bonds.

  It rolled to its feet, wringing its hands frantically. “Thanks!” It was only about three feet tall, which put them at eye level when she was on her haunches.

  It leaned in and a tongue swiped over her cheek, a warm, doggy kiss. Slate choked back a laugh and raised her hands to fend the gnole off. His breath stank of garbage and old meat. Also, it tickled.

  “Come on!”

  “I can’t leave yet, I have to find my friends.”

  “Lady, you don’t want to stick around here—”

  Something happened. The air seemed to change, pressing down around them. It took Slate a minute to realize what it was.

  The music had stopped.

  The gnole flattened himself to the floor and moaned. Fur spiked along the thick neck.

  “Oh, god, she’s doing it again…”

  “Who’s doing it again?”

  “The rune! Rune in charge is wicked bad, got them all worked up.”

  “I’ve seen it.” Slate rose, looking around the earthlodge. If they kept the prisoner here, perhaps there was something else useful. “At least, some of the magic, I think.”

  “Wicked boss rune doing it. It’s bad, lady.”

  Aha! A tangle of irregular shapes resolved itself into a familiar pile of weaponry. Caliban’s scabbarded sword was nearly buried under Brenner’s personal armory, and both pairs of boots.

  I suppose they must not expect them to walk anywhere, then.

  “What were you doing out here?” Slate asked, strapping knives to her belt.

  “Oh, well, you know. Whole column of clocktaurs, so a couple gnoles go along.”

  “What the hell’s a clocktaur?” Slate tried to belt the broadsword to her waist and smacked herself painfully on the ankle.

  The gnole rolled its eyes at her. “God’s stripes, lady, where you been? You know, eight feet tall, coupla extra legs, made out of little fiddly machine bits?”

  “A—you came with the Clockwork Boys?”

  My god. My god. It works for the Clockwork Boys.

  I’ve found one of the enemy.

  It didn’t look like much of an enemy. It looked like a lost dog that had wandered off and didn’t know how to get home.

  The tattoo on her shoulder seemed to throb. “How are they made? How do you control them? What are they made of?”

  “You get me out of here, lady, a gnole will bring you a clocktaur! We don’t have time for this!”

  “Right…right…” Slate grabbed for the next lump on the floor, picked it up…and paused.

  It was a helmet.

  Caliban didn’t wear a helmet.

  She turned it in her hands, baffled. There was something fam
iliar about it, but what was it doing here?

  “Lady…!”

  “Where’s this from?”

  “God’s scat, lady, it was here when I got here. You want to know about the rugs, too?”

  There was a shout from elsewhere in the village. It sounded like Caliban and it sounded like pain.

  Slate peered out the flap of the door and thrust the helmet in front of her, into the moonlight.

  It was a perfectly ordinary metal helm, round, with a short nose guard and a coat of arms stamped on the side. Slate had seen dozens of them. Hundreds. She’d looked down at the top of them from drainpipes and rooftops.

  She’d had occasion to examine one most closely, recently, when the wearer had her pinned down in the Captain of the Guard’s office, while she sneezed and sneezed and sneezed.

  She rubbed her nose and stared at the Dowager’s guardsman’s helmet.

  She started laughing. She couldn’t help it.

  Well. Now I know what happened to the last group they sent out, anyway.

  She slid back inside the hut and dug through the gear on the floor. Swords, knives, a mapcase.

  The mapcase was locked, but with the kind of simplistic lock that Slate could have cracked in her sleep. She popped it, one-handed, and went back to the strip of moonlight.

  It opened like a clamshell to reveal a rolled map and a worn leather book. Slate flipped the book open to reveal cramped, nearly unreadable handwriting and drawings of everything under the sun.

  Brother Amadai’s journal. Well, well, well.

  Slate shoved the mapcase in her pack and left the rest.

  I could take the gnole and run. Let these rune break their teeth on Caliban and Brenner. By the time they crack those nuts, the gnole and Learned Edmund and I can be well out of here, and it knows something about the Clockwork Boys. I have Brother Amadai’s journal and the scholar to translate it. The odds of success just went up amazingly.

  I could do it.

  I should do it.

  The tattoo eased. There was no question what course of action it approved.

  She couldn’t do it.

  Brenner was a rat bastard and she trusted him as far as she could throw him, and he’d still never failed her, never sold her out, never turned her in. And Caliban was an arrogant jerk and he’d ridden down a flooding streambed with lightning crashing down around him and caught her horse and saved her life.