Swords and Scoundrels

by Julia Knight

  “Just don’t widdle. All right?”

  Vocho was about to answer when things started happening down in the square. On one side there was a squat grey building that gave Vocho the shivers. He didn’t know why, only that the windows were too small and barred and… hopeless. The windows looked dead. It sounded stupid in his head even as he thought it, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. He wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe this building was what they called the Shrive, where his da kept threatening to send him if he misbehaved, which was a lot. It was where they put all the bad men, Ma said, but plenty of good men too, and none ever came out again till they was dead. Just the mention of the place was enough to make all the grown-ups twitch. It looked like that sort of building, sure enough.

  To one side and below the grand staircase a door opened and the crowd fell briefly silent. It was the first time Vocho had seen a crowd so together, so intense – he’d learned that word from one of the priests and liked it lots.

  Five men and two women came up a smaller, meaner set of steps. One of the men had a hood over his face so you couldn’t see it, though it had eyeholes cut in it. The women and one man had their hands tied; the other three men carried pikes. Somewhere someone started banging a drum in a slow beat that made all the hairs stand up on the back of Vocho’s neck. The crowd fell silent, and all he could hear was the drum.

  “Kass…”

  “Shh!”

  On the other side of the square a tall man, a fair-skinned southerner, broad shouldered and with a mane of blond hair that went every which way in the breeze, shoved his way through the crowd, his face all twisted. He shouted something Vocho couldn’t catch, but it stirred the crowd. Other people began shouting, anger swirling through them like ink in water.

  The little procession of men and women came on. Only now they were being buffeted by the crowd. Not the people with their hands tied, but the others, the man with the hood and the other three. Someone reached out and tried to drag the hood off and got a pike in the face for his trouble.

  It was like the crowd had been wound up like clockwork toys, and now someone had pressed the button to release the mechanism. They surged forward, and someone threw something, a rock perhaps, which hit the hooded man right in the face. The tall man whose shouts had started it shoved closer and closer, and he threw something too, which brought a wash of blood to the face of one of the pikemen.

  Kacha grabbed Vocho’s hand tight, too tight. She was white lipped as she stared down, so was her friend. He looked like he might widdle himself, which helped Vocho take his mind off his own pressing need to pee.

  The crowd howled. The little old lady crammed another pie into her face and gummed it happily. Next to her a couple of children a few years older than Kacha were scrabbling around for more rocks to throw. A woman reached into a bag, fished out what looked suspiciously like a tomato and threw that.

  A hollow boom echoed around the square, and the crowd stopped, unsure, nervous. The main door to the squat grey building had slammed open, and through it came a tight wedge of king’s guards. They had their swords out and the crowd fell back before them. One lad wasn’t quick enough, and blood splashed the cobblestones.

  At the back of the square a horse whinnied and there were another two dozen king’s guards, mounted and forcing their way through the crush, laying about them with long sticks. A woman fell trying to get away and was crushed by stamping hooves.

  The crowd wasn’t howling any more; it was screaming, crying, trying to escape, caught between guards on two sides and by walls on the others.

  Through it all the drum kept beating, the hooded man kept going, the tied-up women and man kept getting shoved on. Towards the contraption in the centre. Suddenly to Vocho it didn’t look as harmless as he’d first thought.

  This thing on a pedestal was tall, and black except for the silvery-blue of a piece of metal near the top and a flapping rope. It looked kind of like a doorway with no door in it, and it was scaring Vocho stupid. He really needed to pee.

  The guards fought for control and several minutes later won. One of them climbed the pedestal and surveyed the now-subdued crowd – the big blond who’d started it all was crumpled and bloody, a guard on each arm as they dragged him towards the steps of the grey building.

  “I’m the captain of the king’s guard.” The man on the pedestal glared around at the crowd. “This is the legal execution of three convicted criminals, and you will stand by and let it go ahead, unless you want to go into the Shrive as well.”

  “Murderers!” the blond man shouted. “It’s not a crime to—” He broke off as a guard smacked him in the mouth, and then he was gone into the blackness of the doorway. Vocho had the feeling that doorway was the gate to the hells. Hells were where the bad men went, the priests said, and Ma had said bad men went into the Shrive, so it stood to reason.

  The captain ignored the southerner, gave the crowd a last meaningful glare and stepped down.

  “Execution?” Vocho whispered. He really needed to widdle. Really, right now. But he daren’t. Kacha had bet he wouldn’t and she’d no way to pay the debt. He jiggled up and down and tried to think of something else.

  “He’s a… a… herry-something,” Kacha said.

  “Heretic,” Andoni said in a hushed voice. “My da says he reckons that the world is all like clockwork or something.”

  “It needs winding up?” Vocho was rapidly starting to think Andoni was an idiot. The world would need ever such a big winder.

  “No, Voch, you plank,” Kacha said. “That it all… I don’t know, runs the same all the time, on rails or something. Like those toys that always do the same thing every time. Everything we do is already done, or pre… something. You know, like we got no choice in what we do because we’re like clockwork too. He says that the Clockwork God isn’t dead, only sleeping, that we’re the herry-things for using his old temples to pray to the gods. He says we just made them up because the Clockwork God turned away from the Castans, from us. An’ that all that talk from the priests about using clockwork being a sin, that their gods will save us an’ all, well that talk is the sin, cos the Clockwork God says it ain’t true.”

  “Oh.” Vocho spent a minute thinking about that as the group closed in on the contraption. “But why—”

  “Because the king is supposed to be blessed by the gods, right?” Andoni said knowledgeably, looking like he was welcoming the distraction from what was going on in the square. “That’s why he gets to be king. But if there aren’t any gods, or the world is made of clockwork, then, well, who’s to say he gets to be king? My da says this un’s been spouting about it all over, him and his mates. Saying the Clockwork God will rise again. Them’s the ones making the clockwork toys and selling ’em, secret like, because them’s prayers to wake the Clockwork God back up. Fermenting trouble or something, my da says – like beer, I reckon, you know when it goes all frothy. People’re listening and all, getting all stirred up. King don’t like that, so he has ’em done for heresy. Man who’s getting chopped said that him being chucked off the throne is what’s bound to happen. Cogs said so. Or something.”

  “But what if the gods made the clockwork?” Vocho asked. All he got was a “Don’t be daft” look. “Seems a funny reason to kill someone anyway.”

  They all looked down at the contraption.

  “Da says the king is funny, in the head,” Andoni said at last. “Lots of people getting arrested and shoved in the Shrive for all sorts, and lots of times they ain’t even done nothing! Excepting be poor. Lots go in, more every day. No one comes back neither. That bloke they took away, I reckon he was one of them heretics and all, cos my da, he took me to see ’em speak down in Soot Town, and I reckon it was him that did the speaking. He made it sound all proper, like the world made sense if you only looked at it right, and if you did, then everyone could have a nice life and everything and you don’t need no king, ’specially not one that won’t look at the world right and goes around arresting people
for nothing. Bet they’ll kill him too, soon enough. Bet you a bull. Man said it had to happen, and he made it sound sensible, my da said.”

  Oh gods, oh gods. Vocho really had to widdle now. Kacha was scaring him the way she looked, the story Andoni told him, and so was everything else. He wanted to go home, he wanted his ma. He wanted to widdle something bad.

  A low moan from the crowd brought his gaze back to the square. There, in the shadow of the ancient, barely understood clock that ruled the city, the man with tied hands stepped up onto the pedestal. Vocho didn’t want to look, but he had to. Something about the man made Vocho want to look away but made him look too. The man was crying, and Vocho had never seen a man cry before. He wasn’t crying because he was scared, even Vocho knew that, or that wasn’t all of it, or even most of it. The man turned once to the woman behind him, and they shared a look, and Vocho knew that look. It was the look his da gave his ma when they had to move again, or when they could only afford food for one meal a day and that fish-head soup was more water than anything, when Ma scrubbed that step till her hands were raw, when Da talked about pride and dignity in his cups.

  The man turned back, straightened his shoulders, knelt down and put his head through the gap in the door thing. The hooded man pressed a lever, there was a whirr of ropes and metal in runners that echoed around the square, a chunk sound, and the man’s head rolled away into the crowd. Blood painted the flagstones, and the little old lady grinned and shoved another pie in her face.

  Vocho never needed a widdle more, before or after, as he did right then, but Kacha had believed in him so he managed to hold on until all three were dead and Andoni had handed over the clockwork duellist, the toy that was a prayer to the dead Clockwork God on the one hand and might send him to burn in hells on the other.

  Vocho took his spoils home and put it on a shelf. A reminder of the first bet he ever won, but he never played with it.

  Chapter Four

  Petri Egimont sauntered into the guild wearing a chilly little smile and with revenge in his heart. Not so long ago the guild master, Eneko, would have had a conniption at the thought of Petri entering. Now, with his two most notorious duellists wanted for the murder of the prelate’s favourite priest, he didn’t have much choice but to let the prelate’s man in.

  The guild was just as Petri remembered it. Walls built from huge blocks of mellow ochre stone, rough at the edges, terracotta tiles on the roof, channels worn in the places where rain ran off. The great gatehouse, imposing and dour, the gates always open – they’d been shut only once in living memory, a day that was burned into Petri’s head with fire and blood. The courtyard-cum-sparring arena inside, echoing with the sound of swordplay and the ticking of the clockwork duellist who watched over the yard. She was bronze and brass, wielding a rapier so fine it looked as ephemeral as a lightning bolt in the sun. She ticked and watched, watched and ticked, until the next time someone switched the lever and set her into her motion of whirling sword and flashing eyes. A stern face, keeping all the lessers and journeymen in line, with a hint of compassion, of sadness, for those the guild lost to war, to jobs, to death on a sword. She was the heart of the guild, that nameless duellist.

  The aspiring duellists knew better than to stop their practice as Petri strode through the cloister on the south side, but they turned as they fought so they could watch him, and he could hear the rumour of whispers. He clenched his teeth and carried on.

  The young lesser who was supposed to be guiding him couldn’t keep up, and he knew the way well enough. Through the cloisters, up stairs, around twists that changed with the change o’ the clock, until he came to Eneko’s door. He didn’t bother to knock but opened the door and went straight in. Eneko wasn’t surprised. Petri thought it would take a lot more than someone barging in to do that.

  The guild master sat back in his chair and looked up at Petri from under lidded eyes, hands clasped across a belly that was just now running to fat. The eyes were warier than they had been, the jowls looser, the long dark hair in its neat ponytail more sprinkled with grey, but he’d lost none of his poise.

  “Again, Petri?”

  A tight smile from Petri as he took a chair he knew would never be offered. “Again, Eneko. And again, and again, until the prelate is sure.” Not that he came from the prelate today, but the questions would be similar. “I know you’ve got some idea where they are. The prelate knows it too, and I’ll keep on coming until he gets what he wants. It’s not like you’ve never betrayed your duellists before now, is it? When you need to, as you will no doubt say. I think you’re going to need to before the prelate loses what little patience he has with you.”

  Eneko shifted in his chair but didn’t seem unduly perturbed as he spread his hands in a gesture of innocence that Petri didn’t believe for a second. Eneko hadn’t got to be guild master by being open and honest, or naïve.

  “And what will he do about it? What can he? Nothing, or he’d have done it by now, and razed this guild to the ground. But he can’t, not unless he wants a revolt against him. Isn’t that so? Who really rules Reyes? That was always the old question, after the Fall. The king ruled their bodies, and now the prelate does. He gives them their god to believe in, and they do, mostly, but it takes longer than a few years to dim people’s memories that much, and you know it. Old ways live on, not openly perhaps, but in peoples’ minds. A superstition here, a chalked rune that was once a call to the old gods, a half-forgotten tale of how the world was made there, and us, right where they can see us. We’re legendary, and worshipped, and real, Petri. The guild has protected this city for hundreds of years, maybe longer, and its people know it in their blood and bones. We don’t tell them who to worship or how to live. We just are. We are the city, and the city is us, and yet we are not of the city, and the prelate has no claim on us, cannot rule us and can compel me to say nothing. So tell me, what will the prelate do when his patience runs out? The same as he has all these past years – nothing of any consequence. He can make our lives more difficult perhaps, but not by much, and we’ll weather it as we weathered much worse before now.”

  Petri sat blandly. This was Eneko’s standard response, and while true enough, he’d heard it too many times before. But what came next startled him.

  “I told her, you know. Told her that you were using her. Because you were, weren’t you? Using her to try to winkle information for the prelate. Spying on her, and me, the guild.”

  He smiled at the look of shock that must be written all over Petri’s face. It explained everything – why Petri’s note offering Kacha comfort after that idiot Vocho had killed the priest had been returned so vehemently with his ring, why she’d taken such a delight in their duel by the carriage. Why she seemed to hate him when once she’d said she loved him. She’d found out the truth he’d worked so hard to hide, a truth that had rapidly become false as he’d got to know her, but how would he ever make her believe that? He couldn’t, and not just because she’d probably skewer him if he got too close. He’d betrayed her even before they knew each other.

  “You think I didn’t guess? That I wouldn’t tell her, make her see?” Eneko said into these thoughts. “A prelate’s man cosying up to my personal apprentice? A blind man could see what you were about, but you blinded her well enough. Did you find anything out?”

  Petri pulled himself together, but all thoughts of trying to get Eneko to tell him something, anything, fled. It had been a faint hope at best, but one that had to be tried. “I found out enough.”

  Eneko laughed. “I rather doubt that, or not from Kacha. Vocho on the other hand… You may as well leave now. The prelate can set his men to watch me all he likes, open my messages – no don’t deny it, he has – do whatever he feels he needs to. I don’t know where they are. If I did, I’d hardly hand them over to you for execution, no matter what they’ve done. They’re no longer part of the guild, which is punishment enough for both of them, and no longer my responsibility.”

  Eneko turned aw
ay to some papers on his desk, effectively dismissing Petri, as he’d always done. Dismiss, disown, destroy. It was Eneko who had made his life the misery it was.

  Petri swept the papers off Eneko’s desk and was gratified to see a crack in the calm façade. “Soon enough,” he said. “Soon enough this won’t be your guild. I look forward to the day I can return the favour you once did me, and shut the gates on you.”

  They stared at each other for long moments before Petri straightened up smartly and left. His boots clicked on the stone floor in a staccato rhythm that echoed in his head. Not long now, and this guild would be his, and Eneko would be the one staring at a guild that had betrayed him.

  Not long, provided he could find Kacha and Vocho and the damned chest.

  Egimont rode into the horse dealer’s yard with ten good men behind him. It was a ramshackle place with falling-down fences, a barn with more holes than roof and what seemed like acres of mud. One of the early clockwork combination hay scyther/stookers lay in pieces in the shade of the barn, straggles of grass growing through it as though in mockery. The horses dealt here didn’t seem much better – a group of underfed nags fetlock deep in mud looked up dully as they rode in.

  A woman came out of the hovel that seemed to pass for a house, though she was spruce enough in a homely kind of way. She gave them an appraising glance and perked up instantly at the flash of colour on the lapels of Egimont’s men.

  “Prelate’s guard, eh? Well, if you’re looking, I’ve got some fine horses for sale. Not that sorry lot over there, I keep the best in the stables around the back. How many do you want?”

  “None.” Egimont slid down from his horse and tried – and failed – not to step in any shit. “You have a horse with one ear?”

  Once he’d ascertained from Eneko that he’d get no help there, it hadn’t taken too long to find the previous victims of Kacha and Vocho since they started their new life of crime. Half a dozen men and women had told him everything they could, happy to help the prelate’s man apprehend the vicious highwaymen of Fusta Wood. One of the women had told him how, during the robbery, one of her attackers had shot the ear off the other’s horse. Egimont was certain both horses had the full complement of ears when the siblings had ambushed him, and so a trip to all the horse traders in the area seemed a good place to start.