by Julia Knight
But that was long ago, and Reyes had changed. Now it was a haven for honest merchants and more disreputable freebooters alike. Reyes didn’t care, as long as no one stole from the city, each ship paid the berthing tax and the clockwork ran. Vocho could almost hear the toll of the god-buoy and the clack of ropes on masts from the flotilla berthed there today. Warships, trading ships, pleasure craft.
Kacha reined in her horse next to him and looked down. Was that a sneer on her lips? Sometimes Vocho wondered if he knew his sister at all. Dom nudged his horse up on the other side, looking earnest and vacant at the same time but at least mercifully silent, while Cospel brought up the rear on his dogged little pony.
Cospel hadn’t managed to find out much about the mysterious Dom – far too little for the supposed son of the local landlord, which tweaked Vocho’s interest. Dom didn’t seem to do much of anything at all except spend money. The only information Cospel had obtained was that he’d gone away “to be educated” a deal of years ago – no one could agree quite when because that was before his father had bought the local manse, but Dom was a good few years older than Vocho, so it must have been a fair while ago. He’d come back when his father moved in and had flitted about, playing at being rich ever since, sometimes in the country, sometimes off travelling in a vast coach that supposedly had all manner of clockwork gizmos for the comfort of the traveller. All in all, there was nothing to indicate they couldn’t trust him, but then again nothing to indicate they could.
“I’ve heard a lot about Reyes,” Dom said now. “Is it all true?”
“Depends which bit,” Vocho said when Kacha didn’t seem inclined.
“Do the streets really move? On clockwork?”
Vocho chuckled – no one ever believed it till they saw it – but said only, “Best just to come at it with an open mind and a steady pair of legs.” One of the joys of being a native of the city was watching what happened when a newcomer experienced the change o’ the clock for the first time. Vocho was prepared to bet quite a bit that Dom would fall flat on his face.
“So, what’s the plan?” Dom asked.
Vocho cursed the hot spring sun. Even in the wane of the day it was too hot for hood and hat, but how else to wander the city streets without anyone recognising him or Kacha? Not that their faces were known everywhere, but it would only take one person to spot them and they’d be back where they started, running from the executioner’s blade as well as trying to dodge Egimont and his magician. More than once Vocho had been tempted to stop at a magistrate’s or a church, anonymously hand over the parchments and ask that they be sent to Eggy at the prelate’s palace in the hope that him and his magician would leave them alone. He’d been tempted, but the lure of his old life back was too strong to ignore. Better dead than some poor bloody farmer, dressed in sackcloth and smelling of pigs. At least Cospel had found the tools to chop up the gold bars into something more manageable, and had spent a few days travelling to various villages to change a bit here, a bit there so they had plenty of actual bulls. Which meant Vocho was no longer wearing sackcloth but a fine new set of breeches with his pilfered coat and matching cloak in scarlet and gold.
Kacha gave him a sideways look and a little hooked grin, a look he knew from old. It said, “Dare you.”
Neither of them could ever resist a dare. He flipped up the hood of his cloak and put the hat on top. At least the feather made him feel a bit jauntier. Kacha followed suit, though her hat was more restrained than his. Still, it shadowed her face well enough, and he could barely make out the giveaway scar under her eye. Maybe they’d get away with it. Maybe they’d live long enough to see tomorrow. Reyes was their only hope of that, if they didn’t fancy living in a cave for the rest of their lives. And Vocho most certainly didn’t.
He sat up straight and looked Reyes right in the eye. “The plan is, Dom, my old friend, that we get in and settled well before midnight and the change o’ the clock. Then we go and find ourselves a nice discreet translator. First lodgings, nothing too flashy, and then Cospel can go and see who he can find.”
“We could try down by the docks,” Kacha said. Then, in a wistful voice, “No, I suppose not.”
No. Not because someone down on the docks would be sure to know them, though that would have been the reason Vocho gave. More because he’d have to face the spectre of his dead father, when Vocho could ignore him anywhere else. At the docks he’d see him, hear the echo of him tell Vocho he’d broken his promise, just as his father had expected him to. It’d taken a while, but he’d broken it just the same, when he’d dragged Kacha into being wanted for murder and now this. The thought of the disappointment in his da’s voice made Vocho shiver worse than the thought of being vaporised. Worse was the thought of what would come after – that it was no more than Da had expected of him, because he was only stupid, clumsy, imperfect Vocho, after all.
“Anywhere but the docks,” he muttered and kicked his horse on.
It took a little while to get down onto the main road into Reyes. The dust there was worse, made a sticky choking in the back of Vocho’s throat that he’d forgotten about in his wistful daydreamings. They slid in behind a trade caravan and caused no raised eyebrows. So far, so good.
The guards on the gate looked bored and thirsty in the heat and waved them through without a second glance. Just inside the gate lay the first indication that they were home: two turrets, ticking as they spun in place. A guard held up a warning hand, and the caravan stopped, Vocho and his companions with them. The guard nodded as he counted the ticks, a final clonk and a flurry of spears shot out of each turret right into the centre of the roadway. Three more ticks, the spears withdrew and the guard waved them on. Vocho didn’t hang about – they might have fifty ticks to get through or fifteen. Turret guard was a specialised job, and there’d been more than one accident at the gates when a guard had counted wrong, or misremembered what part of the sequence the turrets were in. Vocho had always assumed that’s why the cobbles beneath were painted red, so as not to show the stains and alarm visitors, and said as much to Dom.
“Stains?” he said faintly.
“Oh, didn’t they teach you that at university? The clockwork isn’t just a wonder – it’s a damned good defence mechanism too, especially the seemingly random parts. Just be careful when you hear ticking.”
They made it through Turret Alley without staining anything, out into a square lined with smoothly whirring mannequins going through their motions, and then the city swallowed them whole.
Narrow cobbled streets ran higgledy-piggledy away from the square. Each was filled to bursting with traders, riders, hawkers, gawkers, buyers and beggars, storytellers and thieves. Houses leaned over the way and at points met in the middle, holding each other up like drunken lovers. Kacha and Vocho’s hats were a decent disguise but also handy for fending off what got thrown out of the windows.
The horses moved slowly in the crush, with the exception of Kacha’s, which cleared a path with teeth and feet, until the street opened up and the crowds spread out. It was market day in Bescan Square beneath the slowly spinning arches. Stalls made of wood and draped with silk and wool or sun-bleached furs. Corrals full of horses or pigs or sheep, stinking the place up, with another pen in a corner for hired bodyguards – men and women dressed in leather and dripping weapons who wished they were in the guild but instead took on petty jobs that no duellist would look twice at, protecting a sausage stall from thieves or some cargo for coppers.
Reyes took in trade from everywhere in the world, or so they said, and while the sailors never made it further into Reyes than the dockside bars, the traders and more wealthy merchants were less superstitious, or at least more likely to put that aside for a sale.
The market brought it home to Vocho that he really was home – the mishmash of faces, of colours and languages. Copper-haired bronze-skinned Nurre, whose women, tall and regal and looking like the world belonged to them, walked two paces ahead of their bowed silent men, and sold a
methyst and opal and agate set in cunning twists of silver and gold. Doe-eyed little spice men and women from Five Islands, hands dyed red by their wares. Hulking great men and women from away inland, who seemed born bearing arms and mostly ended up in the bodyguard pen hiring themselves out by the hour. Tall and rangy men from the deserts away east, with old eyes, solemn smiles and golden rings, whose Castan ancestors had ruled Reyes and the rest of the provinces before the Great Fall. Men from far to the south, from the frozen valley kingdoms, selling furs and oils, little bone trinkets and curses written in pictures scratched onto wooden sticks. Their sailors wore their white-blond hair and reddish beards in braids and sang sad songs, but they only sent their shamans ashore to trade – half a head taller than most Reyes men with legs like tree trunks, shaved heads, bones through their noses and sweat-drenched fur across their shoulders even in the heat, holding poles with beads and dried skulls on they’d rattle at anyone who got close. A very young Vocho had once believed the laughing Nurre woman who’d told him they were ghosts, that’s why they were so pale and strange, and he’d believed it right up until Kacha dared him to touch one and find out for sure. He’d been chased halfway back to the docks by a roaring giant of a man with red whorls painted on his face, and had steered clear of them since.
There were plenty of Reyes traders there too, haggling and hawking, selling little clockwork trinkets or purple flags, pots and pans or spicy sausages whose aroma filled the square. Men and women of the villages around Reyes, mostly swarthy like Vocho himself, with one or two from the south with paler but still golden skin and hair that bleached in the sun, selling fish, squid and whatever else had turned up in their nets. Soothsayers and fortune-tellers, doctors and dentists with their downcast queues who looked on the instruments with a quiet dread. Wood turners with lathes they operated with their feet, carving exquisite bowls and furniture. Bards and storytellers in every aisle, and so many tales of the guild sung or told Vocho often wondered if Eneko paid them. They hurried past those men and women with their heads down.
At the other end of the square, when Kacha took a left towards the more solid, permanent artisans’ shops full of clockwork and swords, Vocho knew where she had in mind to take them and nodded in satisfaction. It might give Dom a bit of a fright, and Cospel would have a fit, but the Hammer and Tongs was just the place for people who didn’t want to be seen and had business they didn’t want anyone to know about. The inn was the centre of Soot Town, inland from the docks and just as seedy but without the benefits of a breeze. What wind Soot Town did get was stained by the reek of the coal fires of blacksmiths and armourers, and lately gunsmiths.
The coal fires were what gave the area its name. Everything was covered in soot. Houses, streets, clothes, horses, people. Smoke curled along the alleys like a browser at a market, looking for things it hadn’t tainted yet. Dom held his handkerchief over his nose, and bleated faintly when it turned sludge grey in minutes.
“I’m sure I could find us somewhere much nicer to stay,” he twittered as his horse splashed through some sewage. “It’s so very basic here.”
Vocho laughed at the look on his face. “At least your father won’t think to look for you here.”
Dom had a minor conniption about that. His father liked to control everything, and Dom wandering off was, apparently, “akin to murdering my mother”. But he had been determined to come with them and hadn’t mentioned any of that until they were three days out and a cohort of men had come sniffing around the inn they were staying at. He’d also refused to elaborate further.
“He might find me wherever I am,” Dom said now. “He owns about half the smithies in Reyes, three clocker factories and a fair few houses in Soot Town. I never thought I’d have to stay in one.”
“Think of it as an addition to your education.”
“They never taught choking to death at Ikaras University, it’s true,” Dom muttered.
By the time they made the inn, Vocho was covered in a fine layer of sticky soot. Cospel looked like he was wearing a mask and Kacha had two white circles around her eyes where the smoke had made her eyes water. Dom, incredibly, had only a grey hanky to show for his trip through Soot Town. The rest of him looked as pristine as ever and as out of place as a diamond in a dung heap, earning him a few looks that seemed to be weighing up how much he’d be worth if they rolled him, versus how much trouble they’d get into for mugging a clocker.
Vocho coaxed his horse under the broken sign and into the mean courtyard at the rear. “Dom, it might be prudent to, well, to look the part a bit. You know, less rich.”
“Whatever do you mean? I’m wearing my oldest clothes and I’ve tucked all my jewellery away. I—”
“Look like a clocker’s son wearing his old clothes.” Despite himself, Vocho found he quite liked Dom, at least when he wasn’t chattering too much. “Come on, let’s get some rooms and we’ll get you looking right.”
Chapter Nine
Egimont rode into Reyes alone as the last of the light left the sky. Alone because in Reyes at least he was the prelate’s man and a lowly one at that, and for now he had to act like it.
He entered by the south gate and made his way to the back of what had once been the king’s palace and was now little more than a huge office for the paperwork the prelate seemed determined to drown everyone in. A guard with a long-barrelled rifle barred the way, but subsided as soon as he recognised Egimont. “Beg pardon. Prelate’s orders. Not letting anyone in or out, excepting as we knows them.”
Egimont raised an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“Couldn’t say.” The man’s face spoke volumes though – it was common knowledge within the palace that the prelate was getting a little eccentric lately. Maybe more than a little.
The guard checked the sequence of the mechanism above the way, let him through and fastened the stout gate behind him. Interesting, Egimont thought, but not unexpected. He rode on past empty marble plinths that had once held statues of great kings and princes towards the main building.
It was the most magnificent in the country, a huge thing that loomed over this half of the city on a hill that currently looked out over the harbour to one side and the coastal road to the other. It seemed to stare across at the guild, as though they were challenging each other – who ran the city, really? Who had the love of the population? A rivalry born in the Great Fall, and still ongoing even past the age of kings, an enmity that might never end. Bakar was aware, none better, that any man can be deposed.
The front façade of the palace must have had half a hundred windows on each floor, each of which now spilled light out onto the formal gardens, all neat and orderly how the prelate liked it, a symbol of his rational universe. A glimpse through the window showed Petri lines of clerks bent over their desks in what used to be the ballroom. Its great windows showed no dancing ladies and gentlemen now, no glittering gowns or frock coats. No music had graced that room for long years, unless you thought that the rhythmic rattle-chunk-whirr of counting machines was music. Egimont sometimes wondered if the prelate did. Music certainly didn’t move the man’s soul, but money did, accountability did.
Something soulless about the whole palace now. Egimont had been young when the last king had finally handed over his rule, his crown, his palace and ultimately his head. But Egimont had been old enough to witness some of the balls both here and at his father’s estate. Great, glittering magical things they’d been, full of beautiful women and dashing men dancing, drinking, laughing. Now they were just ghosts flitting among the grey little men behind their grey little desks. Him included. He’d been born for great things. Not to be the duke – that had been his older brother until he’d died of the bleeding sickness – but to be great nonetheless. A master duellist he’d once thought and hoped he’d be, but his brother’s death had put paid to that. After that he was heir to a noble title, destined to be the first duke of the realm, to lead men and win victories for his king, to oversee estates, rally armies, spend money and
hold balls of his own. He’d barely had time to get used to the idea before his title no longer existed and the prelate had filled his head with notions of equality, of predetermination and the reborn Clockwork God.
It had taken time and Kacha to shake off those notions, to realise that the prelate’s vision was a crock of lies. Now he was nothing, less than nothing. Worth no more than the hundred other men, the thousand, who worked here looking at numbers, and for what? For the prelate’s vision of equality for all, a vision that had merely turned great men into clerks, and turned clerks into pompous windbags like his overseer. A sneering, snide little blob of a man who liked nothing better than to remind Egimont that he might have been born to a duchy, but he, the overseer, had been born to a fish gutter and now gave him orders. The realisation he’d been taken for a fool had festered, and had led Egimont to swearing to the king and regretting it later.
In a sour mood Egimont stabled his horse and made for the entrance to the palace.
Some splendour still remained – a bit of gilding around the mouldings, the geometric pattern in the gold and red tiles. The prelate had added one thing to the grandeur though: a mural of the Clockwork God at the moment of his rebirth, casting aside the lesser gods people had made for themselves and taking his rightful place in their hearts again. That and an orrery that moved and bent and ran on clockwork, as the world did, as the universe did, so the prelate preached. The sun sat at the centre, a glowing ball of glass lit up from within. Moons and planets moved on rails around it, each on its prescribed course. Everything predictable, or so he said. No room for free will or dissention, no room for being anything other than what the clockwork said you were. Egimont felt like shoving it off its pedestal, watching its cogs and gears spill out across the floor so he could stamp on them.
