Legends and Liars

by Julia Knight

  Cospel appeared at the doorway, semaphoring desperately with his eyebrows. Vocho had been studying those eyebrows for a long time now, and was fairly sure that Cospel used them to articulate things he dare not say out loud to his employers. This time they seemed to say, “Over here, you stupid bastards.”

  Vocho went, though Kass hesitated. “But Dom?”

  He grabbed her arm and yanked her over to the doorway and Cospel.

  “Said he’d provide a distraction for you, miss.” Cospel had a heavy pewter tankard in one hand and looked about ready to brain anyone who came too close. “And not to let you be stupid and stay in here.”

  A thundering crack came from across the room. Haval seemed to have realised what Dom was about, but too late. His heavy sword had burst open the shutter, and with a wink and a wave Dom flipped through the opening and out into the night. Haval roared after him, but the others seemed less keen to follow. Given that four of them were bleeding out onto the floor, Vocho couldn’t blame them.

  That said, there were eight Ikarans left upright and only three of them, armed with a tankard and some shoes, and the Ikarans seemed to like the odds of that much better. Two of the bolder ones began to advance, and the others fell in behind. Where in hells was his sword? There, half obscured by bleeding bodies where Bear had dropped it. Well, he wasn’t leaving without it. Vocho gave Kass a shove through the doorway, spun and dropped, grabbed the sword and bounced back up–just in time for the lead two Ikarans to slash at his face. The rest came round, trying to flank him.

  He flashed them a bright grin, saluted with his sword as though about to launch himself at them, then stepped back through the doorway. As soon as he was through Kacha slammed it shut and turned the key in the lock. Which just left them with a bar full of curious and not especially friendly-looking drunks. When the barman pulled out a thick slab of wood with some nails driven through it, followed by some of his patrons whipping out some impromptu but serious-looking weapons, Vocho made a snap decision.

  “I say we run.”

  Kass winced–shying from a fight didn’t come naturally–but said, “I don’t think I ever heard you say that before, but you could be right. You’ve got the sword. You keep them busy while we clear a path. Make it quick, OK?”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “You’re welcome.” She was still smarting about the dress, he could tell.

  Then there was no more time for talk. Two hulking great bruisers, the worse for wear but still steady enough on their feet, lumbered in front of Vocho.

  “Here, ain’t you that Vocho bloke?” one asked, and Vocho couldn’t help but preen a little that they knew him.

  “Nah, he’s too little,” the second one said.

  “’T’s him. I seen the pictures in the paper, and besides Bear said so. This here bloke caused all that ruckus in Reyes. Vocho the Imbècil, Bear said–that was it.”

  Vocho the what? His Ikaran wasn’t up to much, but that certainly didn’t sound like Vocho the Great, because he’d learned that word almost first of all. He swished the sword in front of their stupid eyes and prepared to show them that whatever imbècil meant, he wasn’t one. Nothing like a good—

  Kass yanked the back of his shirt. “God’s cogs, will you come on? The guards’ll be here any second, and you’ve got a ruddy great sword in your hand.”

  The two lumberers came for him brandishing a wicked set of brass knuckles and a foot-long metal spike, but a swipe of his sword kept them back. A clonk behind him–Cospel using the tankard to good effect–a muffled scream as Kass’s shoe caught a man somewhere painful, and the doorway to the street was free. Lumberer number one looked like he’d just worked out that being a good foot taller than Vocho was probably all the advantage he needed, so Vocho didn’t need any encouragement to throw himself through the door after Kass and Cospel.

  Then they were running down the street as fast as they could, with a swiftly dwindling crowd after them. A few twists and turns, and they were on their own and out of breath. They stopped. Cospel bent over his knees, gasping. The multicoloured lights that shone from every building, leaked from all the stored sunlight of the glass that covered the city, made his face look like that of a demented clown.

  “I could have taken them, no problem,” Vocho said, leaning against the cool throbbing blue glass of an upmarket tailor’s. “What does imbècil mean?”

  Cospel hesitated, and his eyebrows didn’t know where to look. “Sort of… renowned. Infamous? Yes, that’s it.” His Ikaran was far better than either Vocho’s or Kass’s, though none of them was fluent yet.

  “Renowned? Are you sure?” The way the lumberers had said it, Vocho wasn’t so certain.

  “Er, yes. Pretty sure. Anyway, look what I got.” Cospel held up a clinking bag. “Once Dom got started, it was easy to pick up all the winnings.”

  Vocho took a look in the bag. Not bad for a night’s work. “Cospel, have I ever told you that you’re a marvel?”

  “No, but you can say it again if you like, preferably in cold hard cash.”

  They made their way through the pulsing lights of the foreign city to the cramped rooms above a cobbler’s that were their current home. Kass was unnaturally quiet all the way, and Vocho got the feeling it wasn’t just because she was wearing a dress and sulking about it.

  “Two things,” she said when they got home and Vocho broached the subject. “One, how did Dom know where we were? Two, if he knows, who else does, and do they want to kill us?”

  Chapter Two

  Alicia laid her hands on the table, where Orgull, king of Ikaras, could see the markings that swirled over them. His eyes glazed as she showed him wealth and power falling into his lap, if only he listened to her.

  “Reyes is weak,” she murmured, a view echoed by the men and women around the king–his advisers, hangers-on and a few relatives. “And I–we–can help you make it weaker, so that you could just breathe on it and Reyes will fall. All that it has can be yours.”

  Orgull blinked hard and shook his head. Alicia smiled and the markings changed, faded away. Subtle, that was the way. Don’t let him think he’s being manipulated. She glanced at the life-warriors who stood, implacable as mountains, behind him, ready to die for him, trained from birth to know that he was the god of their world.

  Orgull sat up straighter, his ceremonial knife glittering with every kind of jewel known to man, the folds of his opulent silks stretching over his pudgy form. He thought the silks made him look kingly, that the knife, even blunted, showed how much power he had. Instead they merely reinforced Alicia’s impression of a soft and weak-willed fool, who valued surface appearances over substance. A man easily swayed by appeals to his vanity.

  “Licio will be coming to negotiate. He’s naïve at best, a pawn for you to play with,” she said. “He wants your help to take back Reyes and make himself king. But if we do this right, Reyes and Ikaras will have one king. You. No less than your eminence deserves. Maybe not a king any more; with two countries you’ll be an emperor for an empire.”

  The tang of blood tainted the air, and she could see the idea take root in his head. An Ikaran empire with him at its head. Control over whole mountain ranges rich in coal and iron, which other states would clamour to buy. And the city of Reyes–a harbour that could withstand any storm, the technology and resources to make things Ikaras could only dream of, and the guild. With the duelling guild within his borders, in his pocket, together with the life-warriors and a source of good steel, expansion towards the rest of the nearby states would be only a matter of time.

  Orgull narrowed his eyes, but she didn’t mistake the wistful look at her hands, the king maybe hoping that the markings would show him an even grander future.

  “What are you suggesting? And does Sabates know that you’re here?”

  “It was Sabates who sent me,” she said truthfully enough. She hadn’t yet gathered enough power to topple the bastard from his position as head magician. Soon, though. Very soon, and then s
he’d show everyone. “He offers you our full support. The prelate of Reyes will fall, leaving Reyes even weaker. The guild will have a master of our choosing–Licio–who will do as we ask. All you then need to do is wait for the proper moment and leave everything else to us.”

  Orgull glanced at his advisers, but their answer was a foregone conclusion. She let a few markings writhe across her hands: Reyes in flames, Ikaras ascendant, Orgull triumphant. A nod from Orgull was all she needed.

  “And our previous matter?”

  “Ikaras has responded with commendable patriotism to your request,” Orgull said and waved forward one of his advisers. “I suspect we have every Reyen in the city in custody. They’re costing me a fortune to feed. Here’s a full list, as requested, though none appear to match your descriptions.” A sly look. “Might I ask why you want these two in particular?”

  “All the better to help you, of course.”

  Alicia pulled on her gloves and made her way out of the audience chamber past starry-eyed guards and blindly grinning advisers. It was really all so easy if you had magic at your fingertips. A drop of blood here, a moving mark on her hand there to mesmerise the target, and then they would do precisely as you asked. Not for long, not unless you had some serious blood to play with, but long enough, especially if you were experienced, and Alicia was very experienced. She’d made it her business to be, her life’s work with only two purposes in mind.

  The king’s palace was a fine one, a relic of the Castan empire, which had fallen centuries ago. It was full of golden sunlight, which streamed in the huge windows, lying in fat yellow stripes across ochre floors inlaid with all sorts of coloured stone. Fans powered by, she was given to understand, the sun-filled glass that covered every building, moved the air around in lazy swirls but managed to dull the molten-copper heat of an Ikaran summer.

  It hadn’t taken much persuading to hammer out the few last details. A nudge here, a prod there at an ambition the man already held dear, so the king would have no idea that he hadn’t proposed everything himself. Sabates would be very pleased–a previous audience had paved the way, led to an edict that all Reyens in the city were to be turned over for a hefty reward. Vocho and Kacha couldn’t help but be found. Neither could speak Ikaran worth a damn, and Kacha with her blonde southerner hair, Vocho and his big mouth, they’d stick out like plums in cream.

  Sabates would be pleased with this further agreement too, but Alicia was content for reasons of her own, the same reasons that had led a distraught and penniless girl to the renowned Ikaras University nearly two decades ago. She stopped for a moment by one of the vast windows and looked through glass that tinted the world a deep blue.

  The spires of the university sat atop the tallest building in Ikaras, peaks covered with silver-white glass that shattered the sunlight and drew it in, absorbed it, reused it to power lights and fans and kitchens. No one knew quite how, or if they did they were keeping quiet about it. A prosperous suburb had sprung up in the shadow of the university, making the most of the protection from the glare of the summer sun, and making the most, too, of the employment the university brought.

  Ikaras was home to the single remaining university in the thirteen provinces, the only one that had survived the Great Fall when the Castans had left their spires and glass, their whirring Reyen clockwork. They’d left for no one knew where and, in every other province at least, had taken all their knowledge, all their engineers and artisans, with them, leaving those behind in ignorance and darkness. All except the custodians of the university, who jealously guarded their knowledge, the papers they kept that were said to go back a thousand years. And jealously kept the other part of the university secret, or at least more secret.

  Behind the twisting spires of glass lay a darker scholarship, one hidden away among dour, dim buildings beyond the velvet lawns and regimented hedges. Alicia couldn’t see it from where she stood, but out there, behind the dreaming face of the university, was where she’d nursed her hate, where she’d found another with as much as she had and hitched her star to his. Sabates had taught her much, taught her how to be a magician, how to use blood and manipulate people to her will.

  Almost two decades she’d studied for this. It would be worth it. Both her dreams could come true in one great manipulation. Subtlety, that was the key.

  She made her way along the corridors of the king, the man who traditionally held the keys to the archives that held the secrets of the Castan–if only they could decipher them all. It was only this latest king who’d shown much interest or even allowed the opening of the archives, and they were finding new things every day, it seemed. Orgull was a man obsessed–he had to know how and why the glass worked, how it took in the sun and kept it, giving off heat when wanted, light when it was dark. The puzzle of it worried at his mind, wore it down like the constant movement of sand will wear down a rock, and he’d got as many scholars as he could find working on the problem, almost to the exclusion of all other study. It made it all the easier to nudge his mind towards where she wanted.

  Alicia passed down mellow ochre steps to the plaza, then through a leaping arch of dazzling glass and into the quadrangle of the university. The centre was a geometrically designed and stringently kept pattern of many-coloured bushes, logs and gravel that, while pleasing enough to the eye, could only be truly appreciated from the highest towers. It was said, though Alicia refused to believe it, that if one were to get high enough to see straight down, the answer to Ikaras’s glass, to everything in fact, would be revealed in its structure. More than one person had fallen to their death trying to reach the very pinnacle of the highest spire, up among the sacred magpies, in order to discover the secret.

  Students strolled along the pathways or dashed, robes flying, to lectures. Alicia drew a few glances but not many, and everyone averted their eyes when they noted her gloves.

  The buildings where the mages trained were dark and covered in creeping vines and poisonous shrubs, which sprouted, unchecked, from gaps in the stonework. Little light made it into these recesses or lit the half-hidden windows. The magicians weren’t a secret, but not many came to their doors, and that suited them just fine. Alicia didn’t even have to knock before one of the doors opened to admit her, and a shadowy figure greeted her with the words, “Everything is just as you asked in the bone room.”

  She nodded her answer and made her way there, sure-footed in the dark of one place a lamp would not stay lit in this city, not Ikaran glass lamps anyway. The bone room was instead lit with more traditional methods–oil lamps in holders around the wall, whose flickering bars of light and shadow, unlike the strident Ikaran lamps, seemed to hide as much as they showed. Alicia had always preferred them.

  The bone room wasn’t named idly, and it wasn’t for the faint-hearted either. Magicians studied years to be allowed in here. Table legs, window frames, shelves, everything was made from bones, either as they came or carved, polished, slotted together to make surfaces–the inevitable by-products of using blood to power their magic. Contrary to popular belief, the bones weren’t all human either. A handy subterfuge, that had been, from long ago. Tell everyone that only human blood would do, make them fear, make them beg, make them respect. For many magicians, and Sabates especially, manipulation of people was the key to magic.

  A table was set in the centre of the room, a shining circle of blood on its top. She peeled off her gloves and threw them onto a chair, then breathed gently on the circle.

  He must have been waiting for her, impatient as always. No sooner had she breathed on the blood than Sabates appeared, reflected in it.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Well, he’ll do as we ask, of course. Did you doubt me?”

  “Never.”

  Alicia raised an eyebrow but said no more. She’d cultivated Sabates for years now, leeched knowledge and power and prestige from him. Even murdered to keep her place as his favourite. No sense ruining it when her true goals were so close. “He’ll do as we ask.
In fact he’s already started–I have a list of every Reyen arrested. Too many perhaps, and none that I think might be Kacha and Vocho. But his cells are bursting with Reyens, and who knows who’s been missed? For all Ikaras and Reyes look to be about to go to war, there’s many men and women looking to take advantage of it. Prices are up everywhere, and Reyens are doing a good trade in guns, among other things. What’s two more among all those?”

  A frown from Sabates. “I’m too far away; I can’t find them at this distance. That tattoo on Vocho’s back—”

  “If you could just tune me in to it, I could try. I’m here, and so is Vocho, somewhere. If I could track him, then I can make sure he and his sister aren’t around to bother you.”

  For some seconds she wasn’t sure whether he’d do it, but in the end she got a measured nod. “Very well. Come closer.”

  She held in a smile and bent her head closer to the blood.

  Petri Egimont stood in the prelate’s receiving room with a drink in one hand, feeling like a spare part from one of Bakar’s beloved clocks.

  At least the clockwork of the city was finally working again, after weeks of hammering, forging and the Clockwork God knew what else. That had cheered Bakar, but not the news that he was no longer the only one who knew how it all worked. “Knowledge is power, Novatonas used to say,” Bakar had said to Petri one morning. “And now what power do I have? None. Every damned clocker in the city has seen the workings now and is probably turning dreams of better ones in their head.”

  Petri had no answer to that. He’d always been a man who thought more than he spoke, but he found he had no answer to many things since Licio’s plot to assassinate Bakar and wrest the rule of Reyes from him had been foiled. A plan Petri had, half unwittingly, been involved in.

  The plan had disappeared in smoke, but many of the reasons for Petri joining with Licio remained. Some of those reasons had got worse in the meantime. Bakar had seemed to come to his senses a little–no more odd edicts or erratic behaviour, at least not openly–but his madness had burrowed under his skin. In private he was as obsessed and paranoid as ever, and was perhaps getting worse. Once a week or more Petri was summoned in the middle of the night to Bakar’s rooms to find him wide-eyed and sweating, seeking reassurances that Petri was still there, that the Clockwork God still stood, that he was a good man, that no one plotted against him. Oh, he was paranoid all right, and perhaps not without cause, but how this manifested itself was almost beyond Petri’s endurance, who’d not left this building in almost two months. No one was allowed in or out except with Bakar’s explicit written permission. Bakar’s own wife had been kept in her rooms for almost as long. No food but bread and cold meats–Bakar believed them difficult to poison, and fed a piece of everything to his cat before he tasted them in any case–and not much of those. “The Clockwork God says a little abstinence is good for the soul,” Bakar had said.