Swords and Scoundrels

by Julia Knight

  The current changed almost imperceptibly. Smooth waves turned choppy, and eddies dragged at her legs, trying to pull her down, making her panic – the feeling was too familiar. A shout from where she’d wriggled through and dropped into the water got her going. It was dive or stay at the gates until she got shot.

  A deep breath and she plunged, the cold trying to steal her air, trying to make her gasp. She couldn’t see in the blackness, but she could hear great muffled thumps, rhythmic and constant. The waterwheels. That had to be the way – there was no other. She kicked harder, and a rush of bubbles swam past her face, tempting her to suck at them. Eddies swirled and swarmed, tried to pull her down, further, further… Her lungs were hurting from more than just cold when her hand brushed something moving.

  It was as cold as the water – colder, smooth and slick as new steel. It moved round with the flow of the water, seemed to suck it in, tried to suck her in so she kicked away on instinct. Then her lungs weren’t just burning; they were screaming for mercy, and she had to surface, kicking hard to get away from the sucking. In the end she only made it by finding the gate and dragging herself up.

  The force of the current slammed her into the gate, but she had air at last if no way out yet. Not unless she chanced letting the waterwheels drag her under and through, and that was a huge gamble. These days there were smaller waterwheels all along the Reyes river. Some of them interlocked like cogs, and some of the other wheels and cogs they turned were again underwater. Anyone or thing dragged in didn’t come out alive again unless they sacrificed a limb, and these wheels must be four, five times as big, at least. Her only consolation would be that she’d not lose just an arm or leg; she’d be dead as soon as she hit them.

  Shouts erupted behind – they’d seen her and someone was even now wriggling through the gap. He dropped into the water with a splash and a cry, and someone took his place at the hole. Hard to tell in the darkness, but her eyes were getting used to it, and she was pretty sure he had a gun. Definitely something was being wound up. She was glad it was dark, and sank down so only her mouth and nose were above the water, struggling to hold her position in the fast-flowing water.

  Somewhere in the distance the warning chimes began, sounding weird and echoey. Ten minutes to the change o’ the clock. The way the chimes wavered with her ears underwater – it sounded like it had last time she’d been in the river. Strange, billowing noises came from everywhere, voices saying words she couldn’t understand. Can’t breathe! Yes, you can. Get a grip. Ten minutes till things got really bloody crazy in this vicinity – these waterwheels powered the whole change, along with much else. Maybe only the Clockwork God and Bakar knew exactly what would happen, but she could be pretty sure a lot of cogs would be whirling like mad, axles moving, all sorts of things ready to chew her up and spit her out. Ten minutes to find her way out or get mangled trying.

  A bullet zoomed through the water a scant few inches away from her face. Bugger getting mangled. Bugger getting shot as well.

  She took as deep a breath as she could manage and dived again, straight down now, to where she knew the wheels were. There had to be a way. She felt her way down the gate, holding on so she wouldn’t lose her bearings – even though the water was slamming her into it, the sucking eddies kept trying to whirl her around. Better than getting shot. The thought kept her going.

  Her questing hand found the wheel again, which was moving with enough speed to nearly yank her from the gate. This close the sucking was almost too hard to fight. She carried on down, searching with hand and foot for an opening. All the waterwheels on the main river had sluice gates to control the flow of water, and she was hoping to find one here too. Preferably before her breath ran out.

  No good; she had to breathe. She dragged herself up, arms like slack rope, legs kicking feebly. There – a gap – but she couldn’t stop. She tried to be careful surfacing, but panic as the blackness started to run in front of her eyes spasmed her legs and she came up like a breaching dolphin. Briefly she didn’t care; she only cared that she could drag in great clumps of the sweetest air she’d ever tasted. But only briefly. A bullet spanged off the gate next to her hand, just as she saw the man who’d dropped into the water closing in on her. Not just one, either – others must have come in while she was under. They didn’t look friendly.

  Even less friendly was the bullet that followed on the heels of the first, which slammed along her ribs and twisted her to hit the gate face first, sending her precious breath out in a pained rush and making spots run across her eyes. For a few seconds it was all she could do to breathe. Then the first man was on her, hands yanking her from the gate, spinning her back round. She saw the blow coming half a second too late and only dodged enough to take the worst out of it. The fist careened off her cheekbone and into the gate with a crack that brought a scream from the man. Rather than put him off, this seemed to enrage him past reason. With a kick that sent him half a pace back in the water, he drew his sword, and that’s when Kacha snapped. Really? You want to use your sword in the water. Well, OK then!

  Kacha shoved herself up so she was half out of the water, yanking Eneko’s sword out of the scabbard, which she’d tied to her waist. The movement and weight of the sword in her hand dragged at the wound in her side.

  The water made the man slow to move and prevented any complicated thrust so all he could try was an overhead slash, which she blocked easily. Eneko’s knife was in her other hand – she didn’t remember pulling it out, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was it was there as she parried, ready to shove straight up into his armpit. The man stared at her in surprise, making him look stupid as his blood warmed her hand and spread out into the water. A sucking sound came from just under the surface – a punctured lung. His breathing hitched as he flailed to get away from her, dropping his sword so that he could use the arm to swim. She let him go, partly because her ribs were hurting like buggery and it hurt to breathe, partly because she’d had her fill of killing people, but mostly because in the light of a lamp she could see three more men coming her way, plus the man holding the lamp had the gun in his other hand and looked like he was ready to use it again now his comrade was clear of her.

  She had no choice. It was dive or die.

  The lamp shone dimly through the water, making it a little easier. It showed up a thread of blood too, though she couldn’t be sure if it was hers or her attacker’s. Didn’t really matter. All that mattered was holding her breath, holding on. Telling herself this wasn’t like the last time; no, it was worse because she had no Vocho to pull her out.

  She dragged herself down to where she’d felt the gap, water rushing through like it had nowhere else to go, trying to pull her with it. It had to be the way. A hand grabbed her foot, but she kicked it off, asked the Clockwork God for some help here, please, and let the current drag her in.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Petri swam down after Kacha, his heart beating so hard he thought it might burst the air out of his lungs. He followed a trail of blood into murky depths where all colour was leached clean by darkness. The waterwheels loomed over him, cutting off the faint light of Eneko’s lamp above as he was pulled ever onward by the rushing water.

  What did she think she was doing? Bakar had blocked the sluice gate years ago. He’d done it himself, not trusting anyone else to know the details of his escape route. All anyone knew was that he’d found the waterwheels, figured out the clockwork, found the Clockwork God’s heart and heard his words, and then, once prelate, had made sure no one else could leave this tunnel except through the grille into the Shrive. Alive at least. Only he had access to the wheels, though plenty of people had ended up in the Shrive after trying to find them from above. He came down here once a month to check the wheels and sometimes brought out the corpse of some hapless soul who’d drowned while trying to find the secret. At least he said that’s where the corpses came from, though Petri had begun to have his doubts.

  All of which meant Kacha was h
eading nowhere except to a watery end.

  The guards with him gave up but he kicked harder, reached out and had her foot for just a second, and lost her again. The water rushed faster here, pulling him along whether he wanted it or not. Bubbles obscured everything, though the grating hum of the wheels to his left seemed far too close.

  The force of the water caught him by surprise, tumbled him over and slammed him into something soft – Kacha. It took him a second to get his bearings before he realised they were hard up against the grate of the sluice that fed the wheels. This was where Bakar had escaped and what he’d blocked with dense mesh so no one else could do the same. The water felt solid here, a cold, slithering mass that held them to the mesh no matter how they tried to fight it.

  Egimont could see her dimly in the bubble-lit darkness. She ignored him and thumped away at a corner of the mesh, her movements jerky, panicked. He felt the first flutterings of it himself – from here there was no way out except through that mesh. The water was too strong to fight back up to the surface, and his head was starting to buzz with the need to breathe. Kacha stopped thumping and started on the mesh with a knife, sliding it under the edge and yanking. He found a corner she’d lifted and yanked with her. He felt more than saw her surprised look, but they pulled together, and just when Egimont thought he had to breathe, had to or die, the mesh gave way. He was pulled through, snagging his tunic on the mesh so that he ripped it off and fell through the centre of the waterwheel.

  At least there was air here among the falling water. He flailed at a strut as it passed his face, managed to grab it, and almost had his arm yanked out of its socket as it took his weight. He didn’t care though because, thank any god that might be listening, clockwork or otherwise, he could breathe. Sheets of water hammered across his head, but if he angled it just right, he could take in great shuddering breaths of cold, damp air.

  For long seconds that was all he could do – hold on and marvel that he was still alive.

  A shift in the creaking of the wheel brought him back to the world. That, and the final warning chime somewhere far up above. The change o’ the clock, not a good time to be at the centre of all the clockwork in the city. He’d no idea what would happen down here, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good to be in it. As if in answer to that thought, things began moving above and below him. Struts trembled, axles slid across on rails, cogs moved in various directions, gears changed. The whole city spun around this one point.

  Where the hells was Kacha?

  The answer came immediately with a crunching sound as some piece of machinery failed to move as it should. Cogs twice the size of a cartwheel juddered to a stop by his head. Axles screamed under stress. Everything seemed to come to a grinding, howling halt with him in the middle of it. Petri peered up through the falling water and found her, cold and drenched and utterly determined, hanging onto a wheel, watching the sword she’d just stuck in between two massive cogs. They strained and trembled, tried to chew the sword up, but to no avail. It bent but didn’t break.

  “Kacha!”

  He didn’t know what he expected – whether she’d try to kill him, climb down and kiss him or just send a rude gesture his way before she left him dangling. Maybe join him and try to get out of this infernal machine – which would be the sensible thing – and while she could be hot-headed, Kacha was pragmatic to her core. So he wasn’t prepared for the sad smile or the way it made him twist inside.

  She might have said something, but the roar of the water swallowed it. Then she didn’t climb down, but up into the water-soaked shadows of the main mechanism. His gaze followed her as far as it could, past gleaming cogs, smooth rails and bobbing counterweights that seemed to waver and merge as he looked. Where was she going? Stupid question. The last place she wanted to be going but always went. She was going to find Vocho.

  Interlude

  Three months earlier

  Petri lay back and luxuriated in the feel of Kacha as she twined one naked leg around his, laid her head on his shoulder and a soft hand on his chest. They were sweat-streaked and spent on a midwinter night in his lodgings at the prelate’s offices. Freezing fog hung over the city in a fume of smoke and oily tendrils of cloud that always disappeared before they could squeeze any water out. Even the usually reliable winds from the sea had died, leaving the city gasping for breath.

  They didn’t say much – they’d gone past the need for that long since – but Kacha twirled her hand across his chest and fidgeted. It made him smile. She was never at rest, not even when she was asleep. Always shifting, moving, either in body or mind. By now he was used to getting woken by an errant foot or hand as she dreamed. She wasn’t sleeping now though, and bar that one hand she was still, which meant her mind was working faster than a whirring cog.

  He ran a hand down her back and said, “What’s the matter?”

  Her head came up off his shoulder and if he twisted a little he could see the shine of her eyes in the faint lamplight that slanted through the windows.

  “How do you know there’s anything the matter?”

  “There is though – you’re thinking about asking me something.” He’d known this would come tonight and welcomed it. He was playing a dangerous game, he knew it, but was too lost in this, in her, to care. Tonight he’d taken her down King’s Row to where his father had lived when he was in Reyes, a painful task but one he felt he needed to perform. He wanted to show her – what? He wasn’t sure, only that they’d gone past the sharing of superficial things. Dangerous it might be, all things considered, but Petri had never shied away from dangerous before, and Kacha was worth it. He wanted to tell her now, before he spilled all his suspicions about Vocho into Bakar’s ear, before Vocho was arrested as he went to his latest assassination for Eneko.

  She propped herself up on her elbows and considered him gravely. “All right. What am I going to ask?”

  “Why did I take you there tonight? Or any night?”

  “Yes. No. Perhaps. More. When Bakar came for you, why did you go with him? Why did you end up working for him? What happened?”

  More to the questions than that, of course. Eneko, her guild master and friend, like a father to her. He’d been like a father to Petri once too, but it seemed a long time ago. He had to tread carefully here, but he didn’t want to lie either.

  “Because he was right. I mean…” No, don’t tell her about Eneko and his betrayal. No one knew, it seemed. No one except Eneko, Bakar and Petri. Maybe some others who’d seen or heard some of it, but they’d never breathed a word. Eneko was good at invoking guild duty to keep secrets. And Petri had never told anyone because who would believe it? “Bakar was right about the nobles, about me. My father wasn’t a good man by any measure, I see that now. But before…”

  He hesitated. “My father always doted on my brother. I was an afterthought, a spare. That’s why he didn’t care about me being in the guild. I told him I wanted to stay, to take my master’s, and he waved a hand, said all right, and that was it. That was probably the most he said to me in years. He had his heir, he had Kemen, so I didn’t really matter. Only Kemen died. No, it’s all right, really – we weren’t close. He was a good ten years older than me, and I think I met him a handful of times, though he was probably around when I was young. He seemed nice enough. He used to bring me sweets and ruffle my hair, but I don’t remember much else about him. Anyway, I joined the guild and that was it. Then he died, of the bleeding sickness, they said. Only my father grieved before his death. Funny, I suppose. I hated my brother then because I’d have to leave the guild, and I didn’t want to. Then I found out. Bakar told me why and how my brother had died, that my father was complicit in it. His own son and heir, the only thing other than his title he cared about, and he killed him. Bakar told me what I was about to become. I was what, thirteen? Fourteen? And everything was black and white at that age, and I knew, knew, I wasn’t going to be my father and that I hated him, that he’d betrayed me. And I knew the best way to hurt
him, even after he was dead, was to take his title, his lands, take them and throw them away. A fourteen-year-old boy is a vengeful thing. And I knew Bakar was right about the rest. I saw you and Vocho the day you turned up at the guild. God alive, you couldn’t have been skinnier if you tried. Others too, all beaten down and eyes to the ground, though you weren’t even then.”

  “I’ve never been one for looking at the ground. Nothing interesting happens there.”

  “I’ve noticed that about you.” He shifted, uneasy at what he was leaving out. He’d never been good at lies, even lies of omission, but he’d had to learn.

  Kacha cocked her head. She didn’t care what you were, but who you were inside. Just as well, or she’d not have looked twice at an ex-noble exiled from the guild with nothing but a tiny room to his name and that not truly his. It was good that he wasn’t noble now; if he was he’d have to marry to continue his line, and Kacha couldn’t because of the oath she’d taken for her master’s.

  She was smiling at him, not amused but wanting to hear the rest, maybe wanting just to hear him talk. How to tell it? How to tell her his good intentions had all turned to shit? That he’d been supposed to spy on her but couldn’t? Or tell her what it was that Eneko had done – was still doing most likely – sending recruits to the guild to slavery in Ikaras, having people assassinated for some plan that Petri could only guess at.

  He couldn’t, any more than he could tell her why he didn’t want her to leave tonight, why he’d asked her to stay. Because Licio had asked him to. The king wanted to prove that Vocho was Eneko’s assassin, catch him in the act, and Petri had thought it best to keep Kacha as far away as possible. If there was one thing she was irrational about, it was that irritating tick she called her brother.

  She glanced over at the clock on his washstand. “I really need to go. Vocho will be wondering where I am, and it’s a long day tomorrow.”