by Julia Knight
No. No, he hadn’t. And he’d not told them who he really was for as long as possible and… and, come to think of it, there was more he didn’t know about Dom than there was he did know. Like, what was it he wanted? Why was he so very damned helpful for no reason that Vocho could see?
But the pain in his back was better today, after Dom had done whatever it was, and he said so.
“Because the jollop worked, I suspect,” she said. “Fortuitous timing. It saved you; I saved you. Without that jollop the remnants of that tattoo would be eating your heart right now and I’d be trying to decide where to bury you. Yes, it has side effects, but at least you’re alive to feel them.”
Vocho sat back and tried to think, and Esti let him. It wasn’t easy when most of his brain was thinking so, can we have more jollop now? Just a bit, just a nip. He tried to shake the thought away and partially managed it.
No bugger was telling the truth all the way, that was all he could be sure of. Maybe Esti had tried to poison him, maybe not. He couldn’t think why it would help her at all. After all, if she wanted him dead she could have poisoned him good and proper before they even left Ikaras. And Dom hadn’t been entirely truthful about Alicia, had he? Or quite a lot else, in fact. Besides, if he helped Esti, he might get more jollop. Stop it. Think, man, think. Why would Esti poison him? What would that achieve? Nothing leaped to mind. But helping him so that he’d help her…
“The question is,” she said into the silence, “are you going to go on and leave me here? Or let me help you? I swear on anything you want to name we are on the same side. It’s Alicia I’m after, and so are you now Sabates is dead. She’ll carry on, head for Reyes, do her damnedest to get what she wants. It was always two things with her–she wanted to rule the magicians and get revenge on Eneko. This is her way of getting both at once. Now that Sabates is dead and she’ll probably become leader of the magicians, all that’s left is Eneko, and what does Eneko value the most?”
“The guild, the city, himself. Not necessarily in that order.”
“So she’ll destroy Reyes, or at least threaten to, to get what she wants. Eneko won’t give her what she’s after, give in to her for anything less. Don’t you think she’s tried every other way? If you want to beat Alicia you’re going to need another magician. Got any others willing to help, for free?”
“No, I can’t say we have.”
“You said you still have the antidote. Get it out and let me see.”
Vocho hesitated but not for long. Looked like it didn’t pay to trust anybody, so he wouldn’t. But he might play along for a bit until he could figure out who was lying the least. He grabbed his pack off his horse, but no matter how hard he looked, there was no little bottle.
“Gone?” Esti said with a look of panic. “In the wrong hands… gods damn it in the wrong place… I made that especially for him. Not pleasant but better than being poisoned. For anyone else… If they take it too close to me…”
“I thought you said it was just an antidote.”
Esti scrunched her eyes up. “It is, if you give it to someone poisoned that way. To anyone else it could be fatal, and not just to them. To me, if I’m too close. I put a bit of myself in everything I make, and that… Oh gods. Please, Vocho, you have to find it, make sure Bakar takes it. And I’m not too close. Its effects… leach out to me.” Esti was shaking, hands moving up to her lips in horror and back down to twist in her lap.
“Who could have stolen it?” Vocho asked. “There was only me, Kass, Cospel.”
“And Dom. Her husband. Who has stolen the one thing that might have stopped this war before it properly starts. Now do you believe me?”
The palace loomed ahead, dark and forbidding as it had never been before to Petri. But things had changed and so had he.
Eneko half dragged him through the south gate, past the slumped forms of two palace guards and the more upright forms of a couple of guildsmen who nodded at Eneko but said nothing.
Petri could only guess why Eneko had brought him back here, but none of his guesses gave him cause for hope. The palace was almost the last place he wanted to be, Bakar almost the last person he wanted to see. He’d spent years wanting to be free of them, but he’d ended up in a far worse place than the cage he’d thought himself in.
He stumbled as Eneko pushed him on, head spinning, the eye that was gone nevertheless flashing weird purple blotches in his head. The clock room, he realised at last, they were heading for the clock room.
The sound of them ticking and tocking the seconds off his life pulled him up short, made him want to scream at the insidious scratching noise they made inside him. Eneko opened the door and shoved Petri so hard he fell to his knees. He tried to save himself with his bad hand, and yelped when it hit the floor. He crouched there, shivering and wondering where all his courage had gone, whether he’d ever had any to start with. If he had, Eneko had burned it all away.
The clocks ticked on.
“Which was it? This one?”
Eneko stood in front of the hideous bone clock with a sneer.
“Do whatever it was he wanted you to do.”
Petri stared up at the clock, at the skull that topped it. If he did what Sabates had wanted… No, he’d decided he wouldn’t. Because of Kass, because she would hate him if he did. Because all he had left was her not to hate him, to come for him. She’d come for him, she would, but she’d be too late. Sudden tears robbed him of breath, washed his face in bitterness and made his eye fire until Eneko kicked him back to the room, to now. A deep hitching breath did little good, another did better.
Eneko was as mad as Sabates was, as mad as Licio, he was sure of it. He’d written so in the letter to Kass, that he’d decided not to do what the magician wanted, what all of them wanted. Instead he’d told her he’d do the good thing, the right thing.
Eneko’s boot ground into his bad hand, and all thought of good or right fled, replaced with doing whatever it took to stop this, whatever he needed to do to survive.
“Weak as dishwater–you always were,” Eneko growled. “Get up and do whatever it was.”
Petri was on his feet. He stared at the clock, at the bones hands moving round, ticking his life away. Unwind it, Sabates had said. Make it stop. Why? What would that achieve?
“No one is coming to save you,” Eneko whispered. “Bakar knows you betrayed him; Sabates is dead, and Alicia, Licio, they don’t care. And Kass… she won’t save you. Why should she? Why would my Kass give a toss about a little shit like you? The answer is, she doesn’t. She’s worth ten of you, and you’re on your own. If you want to stay alive, you do this, now, for me. That’s your only value. Do this or die right now.”
A knife against the back of his neck.
Petri shut his one eye against what Eneko said, how it only confirmed his own fears. She wasn’t coming; why should she? She’d left him to this and in that instant love twisted inside. The good thing, the right thing, had changed. Now it was do what was good for him. No one else was going to. Everyone else had abandoned him. He couldn’t understand why the clock had blurred. He gritted his teeth, blinked to clear his vision and did as Sabates had said and unwound the clock. The bone hands stopped.
“Now what?” Eneko hissed.
“I… I don’t know.”
Now what, was the creak of the door, Bakar walking in looking lost and shaking. Dawn, it must be dawn, when Bakar came to wind the clocks and, lately, talk to them. Eneko dragged Petri back into a far corner still dark with night and hissed at him to be quiet. Petri did as he was told, one hand tracing where an eye had been, and wished, wished… Kass, please…
Bakar began at the end of the room near the door. He greeted the first clock, stroked it lovingly, took a key from the bunch at his waist and wound it before cocking his head as though listening. Finally, after talking to every clock between and winding those that needed it, he came to the bone clock.
“Well, hello, why have you stopped?” He found the key and put it in to
wind the clock back up. Instead, a stream of liquid squirted out from the innards of the clock, turning into a fine greenish mist that Bakar couldn’t avoid inhaling as he gasped in surprise.
Petri found he was holding his own breath as he waited to see what would happen. It didn’t take long. First Bakar frowned as though puzzled, then wiped sweat from his brow. Further sweat followed as he began babbling to the clock, asking it why it had done such a thing. Finally, muttering about petticoats and periwinkles, Bakar ripped his clothes off as though he was too hot to stand them and stood naked in front of the clock.
Not for long–he stared wild-eyed around the room, taking in the ticking and tocking. “I see now,” he whispered. “I see what’s in the gears, what’s behind the clockwork universe.” He ran for the door, threw it open and launched himself into the corridor beyond, shouting all the while that he knew the truth now, that the only comfort was the truth he’d seen in the clocks.
Eneko let out a breath behind him, turned it into a chuckle. “Oh, that Sabates knew what he was about, eh? Let’s go see how this pans out. Favourably for me, I’m thinking.”
Outside the clock room there was chaos in the swirling of clerks and aides roused from their beds by the shouting, fear in the eyes of the guards, who couldn’t seem to decide whether to restrain the prelate or let the man who gave them their orders do as he would. Bakar left a confused and rudderless trail of people behind him; no one noticed Eneko or the ruined man with him. Then the doors of the palace banged open and Bakar ran naked and screaming out into the dawn.
Eneko waved over two guildsmen lurking nearby. He pointed at Petri. “Take him to the Shrive. You know the cell. He’ll have some company soon enough.”
Petri didn’t complain, didn’t say a word as Eneko strode off, looking purposeful, after Bakar. Men and women breathed sighs of relief as the guild master passed, leaving behind a word or two of comfort, that the guild would see that things were put right, not to worry.
Petri was manhandled towards the grey bulk of the Shrive. To struggle was useless; everything was useless. He was lost, dead. He saw Bakar take a hammer to the Clockwork God, saw Eneko gently prise him from it, have Bakar taken away by kindly-looking guildsmen and address the crowd.
A temporary measure to restore order, he called it, in this time of coming war. The stress of command had obviously proved too much for Bakar, who he would have looked after by the best doctors available. In the meantime, the guild stood for the city, had sworn to protect it, and now Eneko would honour that promise.
As a purely temporary measure.
Kacha and Dom hired a barn from a farmer who was packing his things onto a cart ready for morning, when he and his family were making for safer pastures, at least for now. The horses were safe enough, with enough hay and water to last several days. Cospel didn’t like leaving them–neither did Kass–but there wasn’t a lot of choice.
By the time they approached the city, day was twined with dusk, and shadows, the assassin’s friends, grew in all the nooks and corners. Even for that time of day, it seemed unnaturally quiet; usually there’d be a queue of people, carts, wagons, horses, all waiting their turn to move through the clanking gate and brave the vagaries of the clockwork traps inside. Tonight there was no one, no sounds echoing from the other side of the walls. No catcalling, no one hawking their wares, no one fighting, or singing, or anything. Only the quiet of a city waiting for an army. It made Kacha’s shoulders shudder.
They made their wary way to the gate, as watchful as a pair of assassins knew how to be from long and careful habit. By rights she should have heard the grumbling of the guards by now, the whirr of the tower traps that protected the inner city, or used to at any rate. Now there was nothing–no muttering about having drawn the late shift, no jingle of sword harness or crank of gun, no sound at all from the towers through the gates.
Kacha slid round a corner like a shadow and found a dark nook to wait in while she watched, Dom following and finding a similar place the other side of the narrow way, Cospel close behind.
“OK,” Dom whispered after a short while. “This is very strange and a bit creepy. Where is everyone? Why aren’t the towers moving? Trap, do you think?”
“Maybe, but not for us.” She shook her head–they were wasting time. “Come on, up.” She jerked her head towards a ledge above them, and Dom’s grin came swift and sure before he followed her. Cospel muttered a few choice words as he scrambled up behind them and in the end had Dom pull him up.
The walls and roofs of the city were, Kass had often thought, arranged as if to help anyone trying to sneak across them, if only you found the start. To begin with they were just roofs, with the city walls looming on one side. Then, nip around a chimney here, sidestep behind an innocent-looking panel there, and there you were, on a thoroughfare across the city that changed as the rest did with the clock.
Paths ran out before her, shielded from the view of the street. If you followed the paths right, the gaps over streets and alleys were an easy jump. A narrow squeeze between two houses, skirt a flat-roofed building bristling with the shacks of the poorest, who could be relied upon to see nothing in case it got them killed. Even this little village within the city was silent, with not even a candle to light any shack.
The city had never been this quiet, not even at the dead of night during a storm. There was always someone moving around. Only tonight it was just them, and it was starting to get disturbing.
They halted on a ledge where they could see the guild–lit up like the starry night–and the palace, which lay in darkness but for one lamp at a high window. Shapes passed in front of the light, jittery and agitated. And not without cause. Come dawn, the Ikaran army would be in sight, but Kacha had the feeling that all would be decided before then if they were even half right about Eneko.
She slid a glance towards the guild, to where Eneko plotted and planned, and had for years in secret. Not so secret now. The farmer who’d rented them his barn hadn’t known much, but he’d known enough to make her sick that she’d once looked up to Eneko as she had her da. No one knew what, but something had happened in the palace, something that had turned the prelate from a paranoid fool into a ravening madman. No longer concerned with bizarre edicts and swingeing taxes on the oddest things, he’d burst naked like an avenging angel from the rooms he’d imprisoned himself in, shouting about spies and subversives everywhere. He’d had his guards execute a half-dozen of his own staff before he’d turned to the thing that had made him, that had held him in power and regard all these years.
As citizens watched aghast and guards hesitated to obey his order to attack the god that sat between palace and guild, Bakar had taken a hammer to his own Clockwork God. The farmer had been distressingly vague after that and had started shoving all his cured ham into a sack for his cart. Kacha thought she could guess. Eneko would have been on hand, being overtly dependable, trading on the history and good name of the guild, and on people’s fear. Bakar would have gone to the Shrive, or perhaps been dealt with right there, in blood and blade.
The city was quiet because Eneko wanted it quiet. That was all she could think. They were too late.
“Where to?” Dom whispered beside her, but he knew the answer as well as she did. Too late, she thought again. If they took down Eneko now, what would become of the city come the morning when an army came across the plain? The city needed someone, and he was as devious a fighter as they came. What seemed good to her, for the good of Reyes? And yet that wasn’t her only thought. Petri was here somewhere, and Eneko had never had any love for him. Had he sent Petri with Bakar to the Shrive, or to the blade? She shook that away or tried to.
“We can’t do anything against an army that Eneko’s not already doing. We need to know exactly what’s going on. The guild,” she said in the end. One way or another, this would end in the guild.
Dom twitched at that, but his nod was firm enough. “My thought entirely. And nothing to do with revenge at all.”
It was eerily quiet all the way to the little plinth between the palace and guild where the mangled remnants of the Clockwork God stood, surrounded tonight by a dozen lamps that made what was left of him shine like gold. Surrounded too by silent men and women, heads bowed as a priest spoke in low tones. Some sort of blessing for the day ahead, from what Kacha could gather.
Mingling with the crowd were guildsmen in their green tabards with crossed swords, their fine shirts and foppish hair. Comforting the crowd or controlling it? She couldn’t be sure, but there were tight mouths, tense hands, nervous feet.
They slid through the crowd, heading for the guild gates.
Kacha peered up at the guild walls and the two men hanging from them. Or rather, what was left of two men. But she could still recognise the faces, just. Blood ran down their mangled legs to drip into Reyes’ river. A few children were throwing stones at the corpses from the bridge.
“Spies?” Dom asked.
“I know those men. If they were spies, it wasn’t willingly.”
Dom fingered the blood-splattered collar of his coat. “Possibly not.”
The crowd struck Kacha as very different from the mob they’d left behind when they’d fled Reyes that last time. Then the city had seethed with anger, just waiting for something to spark it off. Bakar had been the spark. Bakar going mad because he was being poisoned. OK, maybe Bakar hadn’t been the best ruler a city had ever seen, but sure as shit stank, he was better than Eneko, a man for whom morals were a handy tool to manipulate people with and for whom slavery and assassination were simply means to an end.
This crowd wasn’t angry–nervous maybe, but that was no surprise when you considered the approaching army. And that was better than seething resentment or panic as the city’s ruler went mad. Especially given that army.
