by Julia Knight
Petri shook his head. “I can’t pay.”
The calculated smile that answered brought his stomach into his mouth. “Oh, but you will. One way or another. Sit down, unless you have somewhere else to be?”
A bowl of thick beef soup landed on the table next to him, with a plate of hot bread swimming in butter and a pint of foaming ale. His mind was dizzy with hunger, and his stomach told him to agree to any damned thing just to eat. His pride tried to say something but his bloody pride had got him into this mess in the first place.
He sat and shovelled in the soup as fast as he could with his left hand before anyone could take it away, only half listening to what she said. His priorities had changed somewhat over the last months. He’d wanted to be free but not free to starve to death, to be run out of every town and village and inn for the way his face looked, the way his voice sounded. Not free to be hated everywhere.
“So, Petri, what would you rather? A job with me or freezing to death out there, if this lot don’t kill you first?”
He watched her face–the stillness of it, the intensity–and heard the seeming honesty of the offer.
“Come with me and they’ll never dare touch you,” she said as he hesitated. “Teach my lads and lasses how to fight properly. All the soup you can eat, and no one will ever dare lay a hand on you again. Because I bet they have, with that face, haven’t they?”
Heat rushed to what was left of his face, shame for it, that he’d let them too, not fought back. “Yes” was all he said.
“Of course they have. I know, you see, because they used to for the scar on my face. People fear it, I find, fear disfigurement and those that show it, and people attack what they fear. But I found my place and a use for that fear, how to make it work for me. Maybe you can find your place, a use for their fear of you. You could have a chance to get back at all those pathetic peasants who wouldn’t take you in, who ran you out, who hated you, abandoned you. A place among my little band of outcasts.”
He stopped shovelling and stared at the soup. Oh, he was going to pay for this, one way or another, as she said. But there was nowhere else, no one else, and the chance to get some semblance of a life back, maybe even get his revenge, yes, that was tempting. Eneko was dead, but others weren’t. Kass–the word came unbidden, boiling up on the top of a fountain of rage–she’d abandoned him to this, this face, this hand, this fate of being feared wherever he went, of being tolerated at best, beaten more often. The old Petri had been weak and soft. Maybe the new one could be strong, given half a chance.
He gave Valentian–Scar she said later, call me Scar–a terse nod that seemed all he could manage and set to the soup again, trying not to think about how he’d fallen so low a bowl of food was the price of his soul.
Chapter Three
Now
Kass watched dully as various masters stormed out of Eneko’s–no her–office. Not that she used it at all, leaving everything to Vocho. Surprisingly, the guild hadn’t fallen about their ears with him running the place, even if it was in her name. She felt a twinge of guilt that she’d left him to it, but it was short lived before other, deeper guilts that plagued her.
A newspaper lay, as yet unread, on her lap as she ostensibly looked out over Bescan Square. What was in the paper was often at odds with what the storytellers down there shouted out to anyone who’d listen. Of course, the storytellers weren’t above being bribed, which was probably why she heard so many tall stories about Vocho drift up over the walls. She wondered whether he bribed the newspapers as well, or whether they got their news from Bescan Square, but only for a moment. She couldn’t seem to take an interest in anything for long.
She tried the newspaper. At least she could keep up with what went on if nothing else, but it seemed like every page brought to mind old memories. Everything in Reyes did, and that was the trouble. A softly spoken word here, a glimpse of a dark head, hair curled over a shoulder there, the chimes across the city at midnight, even the mists that plagued the city of Reyes at this time of year. Everything reminded her of Petri.
The newspaper, she concentrated on that. The Battle of Red Brook again–even now, months later, it still cropped up. Some kind of hush-up, the paper said, though how they knew was anyone’s guess. The writer went through the whole thing again–the rain of hot blood that had left men and women on both sides screaming, the unnamed clusterfuck that had left almost every Reyen dead. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened there other than two Reyen units had ended up attacking each other, but it didn’t stop them speculating, often at great length. Wild theories, paranoid conspiracies, more measured thoughts–Red Brook was the battle that everyone talked about. Something had been covered up, the paper said, but it was distressingly vague about what that was, apart from the fact that the guild or Bakar had ordered it. The guild hadn’t, as far as she knew, but a lot had happened in that battle and in the run-up to it that people wanted to forget, like they had been right behind Eneko when he tried to take over the city. As for Bakar, it seemed to her that the prelate probably had quite a lot that he wanted kept quiet from the whole debacle, things it wouldn’t do any good at all for the city to know. How close Reyes had come to losing, for a start. What it had cost its citizens.
What it had cost her, and Vocho and all the rest; they never mentioned that in the papers, she noticed. She scrunched the paper up into a ball and threw it as far as she could over the wall. Bunch of suppositions and lies, all of it.
A sound behind her made her turn: Vocho coming up the steps, trying his best not to limp. Probably no one else noticed it, but she couldn’t help but see. Another guilt to add to the rest. She’d been so fired up about getting Alicia and Eneko, she’d not even noticed he hadn’t been right behind her. Left him to face that battle on his own, and now he had a lame leg, which he tried, so very hard, to hide. That he’d never said a word of blame about it only made it worse.
He plunked down next to her with a weary sigh. She knew what he was going to ask, to say, before he said it. What he always asked, and she couldn’t give. Not now. Not yet.
“I’m going to kill one of them soon,” he said. “Kass, you have to—”
“I’ll talk to them.” She could manage that at least.
“Kass, no. Look, you took the bloody title, you should be doing the mastering! Not me.”
“I delegated. I’m allowed to do that.”
“Well, yes, technically this is true. Technically you could have every damn one of us shot, if you wanted to. You’re the guild master–what you say goes. Only you aren’t saying anything.”
She looked out over the city, then down at her hands in her lap rather than at him. “I can’t, Voch. I tried. I did. I managed for a while, but I couldn’t keep up the pretence. Soon perhaps, but I’m not ready yet.”
He grabbed her shoulder and forced her round. Deadly serious for once. “Yes, you can. You have to, for the sake of my nerves if nothing else. Please, Kass. It’s been months. I didn’t mind to start with but I can’t carry on like this. Seriously, I’ll kill one of them. Maybe more than one.”
She shook him off, angry at the both of them. “Not yet. I hear them talk, you know. I know what they say about me, about you. They say I killed him, Voch.” No need to say who–they said she’d killed Petri. “They say it was my putting that piece of paper into the Clockwork God that was the evidence Bakar used. That without it he’d still be alive.”
“So? Get down there and give them what for. Tell them good and proper that it was Eneko who killed him, not you, and, if they recall, they were taking their orders from that bastard and never said a bloody word. They’re saying that to absolve themselves of blame.”
She shook her head and ran a hand over her eyes. “I thought I could do it; that’s why I took the title. Thought I could, thought it would help me forget, that I could lose myself in it. But I can’t–the stares, the whispers–because they’re right, Voch. And I can’t forget. This place won’t let me.” Petri was in e
very echo of steel on stone, every change o’ the clock, every movement of the Clockwork God, in every sight, every sound.
Vocho stood up and laid a hand on her shoulder before he left her to look out over the city she loved and wonder if she could bring herself to leave.
Vocho stared at his washstand. A bottle of jollop stood where one hadn’t been when he’d left. Every time he came to the end of a bottle, he told himself he would stop, he’d give it up. It’d be easy, he lied to himself, though his hands shook at the thought. And every time another bottle would appear on his washstand, and he’d weaken and fall on it like a starving man reaching for bread, would take a first swig and let all his cares fly away into numbness.
The worst thing was he didn’t even know where the stuff was coming from. He had to assume from Esti, who had magical ways with plants and concoctions made from them, and a certain sympathy for his wound and how he’d got it, but he didn’t know. The bottles just turned up in his rooms, on his washstand, one a week. And he’d tried to be strong, tried to give it up, and maybe he’d have managed to if not for the limp. A sword thrust to a hip is not a pleasant experience, he’d come to discover, but it paled in comparison to the weeks-long, possibly lifelong pain that followed. So it was limp around like an old man and not be able to even spar never mind duel properly, or it was the syrup that he couldn’t give up, which made his hands shake and his head throb when he was without it.
He stared at the bottle and willed himself to look away, to not pick it up. He didn’t need it. He could be himself, be great without it. But his hands fumbled his shirt buttons, his head swam with need, his hip sang a raucous tune of pain, and he gave in. He always gave in. A swig of green-tasting jollop and he was himself again, dashing as ever and no trace of a limp as he made his way through the city to see the prelate.
There was one part of his surrogate position that Vocho appreciated: how every master stood a little straighter when he walked by, whether they were sniping at him in whispers or not. It was much the same at the prelate’s palace. As he walked past the guards they snapped to attention and cut a salute sharp enough to draw blood. He could live with that.
Cospel had come with him, possibly just to avoid the next lot of lessers, but he didn’t go in with Vocho. Instead he loitered outside, fishing for gossip among the hordes of servants, soldiers, traders and clerks as Vocho made his way to Bakar’s rooms.
The room Vocho was ushered into had once been a sumptuous affair, a leftover from the days of kings and nobles. Velvet hangings, ornate little tables, chairs that Vocho had always worried he would break if he so much as looked at never mind sat on. Bakar hadn’t removed many of the old king’s extravagances but had added his own–clocks. Vocho had been here a few times before, and always he’d been all but deafened by the sound of clocks, the susurration of their cumulative tickings and tockings audible from halfway down the wide corridor. But the prelate’s love of the things had almost been his undoing. Since Bakar had come back into his right mind, the clocks had gone–all but one, a truly hideous affair of what looked like bones and human skin. It couldn’t possibly be, Vocho told himself, and then recalled his mostly slept-through history lessons about the old king and the magicians that had ruled in his name, and thought, Maybe it could.
“I keep it as a reminder,” Bakar said into these thoughts, making Vocho jump.
He pulled himself together. Be tactful, lad. “Death comes to us all in time?”
A smile from Bakar, of the serene sort that made Vocho keep a close watch for any signs of madness or clock-talking. “To not trust what the clocks say, but to trust instead to people.”
Vocho wasn’t sure what to say to that without putting his foot in it in some way, so he said nothing, only returned the smile, though possibly his was less serene. Bakar extended a hand to a chair, inviting him to sit. He looked a different man to the one who’d lost his sanity months ago to a magician’s poison. Then he’d been thin and furtive as well as completely mad, but now he looked back to his old, sleek self, if rather whiter in hair and more wrinkled in skin. The old poise was back, the confidence that had helped him lead a revolution against the old king and not only win but become the new head of state and keep that position in the face of all the rivalries that plagued the councillors.
“I’m glad you came.” Bakar spread some of the dreaded paperwork on the table in front of him. Even upside down, Vocho recognised copies of a couple of bits he’d, er, disposed of.
“I’ve had three petitions this week. And that’s not counting two rather upset pairs of parents. Last week I had six petitions, so I suppose that could be called an improvement?”
“Petitioning about what?” Vocho dragged his gaze away from the papers and their implied guilt.
“You mostly. You’ve upset a lot of people, and they are not shy about complaining to me about it. I know I have no real jurisdiction over the guild—”
“No jurisdiction at all, in fact.”
“Indeed. But I was planning on asking, very politely, if the guild master would consent to come and visit me so we could talk. While I’m happy to help the guild when required, this is taking up more of my time than I can afford.”
“She’s, er, busy. Very busy. Lots of paperwork. You know how it is.”
“I know a liar when I see one as well. No matter how well you forge her signature on the papers I get, Kass isn’t running the guild; you are. And making a piss-poor job of it too, if these petitions are anything to go by.”
They looked one another up and down for a long moment. Vocho could recall when the man in front of him had been, for want of a better term, a complete loony thanks to some artfully applied poison. There was no trace of that now though, only a firm and frank gaze.
“It’s not a job I’m cut out for,” he said at last, an admission that burned.
“Indeed. Your talents lie in other directions, as you have so ably demonstrated in the past. The guild may not be under my jurisdiction, but unrest there isn’t something I can ignore either. We depend on each other. So you need to get on top of things, or Kass does.”
“Exactly why I came. I think we can both agree that I’m really rubbish at being guild master. Kass got the job, and she’s far better suited. If she’d do it. Only… Look, the whole thing with Alicia, Eneko… She took everything rather deeply. She always does. That business with Petri—”
“Ah yes.” Bakar flushed slightly and looked out of the window towards the orrery that took up what had once been formal gardens. A planet whizzed past on its rail, spinning gently, and Bakar sighed. “I thought I was being kind to him, giving him to Eneko rather than the Shrive. Of course I had no idea, but still the fault was mine. Poor Petri.”
Poor Petri indeed, but Vocho wasn’t going to get led into that conversation.
“Which isn’t what everyone is saying, or what she’s thinking. And she’s thinking too much. She needs something, something physical to expend her energy on. Something to wake her up, something she can get her teeth into, take her out of her own head and remind her that the rest of the world exists. She needs to get out of the guild for a bit, get out of Reyes and all its reminders.”
“Ah, things become clear. Such a tragedy, and those newssheets do print some terrible things. Rumour and supposition for the most part. I can see how they might have affected her, but it’s been months. Hasn’t she…?” A polite enquiring look.
“Not really.” Vocho knew what it was, of course, because he knew his sister. She’d wanted to save Petri and had failed, had been less than perfect when it really mattered, and that was what was eating at her even if she never said it. But he wasn’t going to tell Bakar that. “She needs something to remind her why she’s in the guild. What seems good to you, protecting Reyes if it comes to it, and all that.” Someone perhaps she could save.
“What do you suggest?”
Vocho leaned forward. “Well, as the prelate of Reyes, you are our foremost employer. Find her a job, a puzzle to fi
gure out, one that others have tried and failed at. Appeal to her perfectionism and her professional pride. Ask her, personally, to take care of it, say she’s your only hope. If you can make it sound like a good thing, so much the better. Honestly, I want her in charge of the guild more than you do.” More than that, he wanted his sister back. What was the point of being bloody marvellous in a duel if you couldn’t crow about it to your sister?
Bakar sat back and tapped his teeth with a pen, watching the grand orrery outside as it slid around. Planets and stars, fate and life and death, if what the priests said was true. Which it probably wasn’t, Vocho reminded himself, because he was pretty sure Bakar had invented the Clockwork God out of thin air.
“Everything on its course in a clockwork universe,” Bakar said at last. “Predetermined, like the course of the planets. I always preached it, though I didn’t always believe it. But sometimes the clockwork surprises us all. I may have just the thing for you. I was considering asking for a few masters for it, but perhaps, yes, perhaps it is important enough for me to request the guild master to intervene personally. From what I can gather, there may be links to the guild. Besides, your sister isn’t the only one needing a little help to forget last summer. Maybe the two of them can help each other.”
