Clockwork Boys: Book One of the Clocktaur War Page 5

  Caliban frowned. “Is there money in that?”

  Brenner laughed, apparently at his ignorance. “A lot more than in jewels and murder, my good knight.” He leaned forward. “Say you’re a merchant with a rival, and you get wind that he’s about to get audited. You hire our dear Slate, and she goes in, takes their account books, makes some numbers dance up and down, puts them back, and presto! Your rival’s dragged up before the courts, you pay Slate a sizeable amount of money, and no one ever knows.”

  “There’s a lot of that going on?”

  Brenner shrugged. “There’s enough. Thieves with cutthroat accounting skills aren’t exactly common. Me, I just cut throats and skip the accounting bit.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “She steals other things, too. Land deeds, proofs of annulment—very popular with the nobility, annulments—quite a busy girl, our Slate. Seen her walk past jewelry boxes, straight for the filing cabinet every time. Quite a set, and I don’t say that lightly.” He grinned. “’Course you know that. Ha! Sent her to get some dumb muscle, and she comes back with Lord Caliban, the mass murderer.”

  I don’t think I like this man very much.

  I don’t think he’s half so dumb as he pretends to be, either.

  There was no question why Brenner was along, at least—Caliban would bet diamonds to road apples that there was a tattoo on the man’s shoulder with its teeth sunk into his flesh.

  “Why didn’t they hang you, anyway?” the assassin asked, dropping into the chair opposite him. The caterpillars spasmed.

  “I was possessed.”

  “Sure you were.”

  What Caliban might have said to this—and he had no idea himself—was cut off by the door opening. Slate emerged, balancing a bundle of papers topped with an inkwell. She jerked her head toward one of the adjoining doors. “Bath’s ready. Brenner, make yourself useful and go find the man some decent clothes and a sword.”

  Brenner executed a mocking salute and slithered out the door.

  “Can we trust him?” asked Caliban.

  We. She and I are a we. When did that happen?

  “Brenner? He’s got a heart of gold…cold, metallic, and made of money. But the tattoo will keep him in line. More or less.”

  “I don’t like him,” said Caliban.

  “Who does?” asked Slate.

  Chapter Four

  Evening came. By the time the sounds of splashing from her room had finally stopped, Slate had changed, eaten, and finished writing a letter to the Stone Bitches. The servant boy had gone in and out five times, carrying hot water. She wondered how long it took to wash off a season’s worth of grime, or to shave off that much beard.

  Brenner had returned after an hour or so, dropping off a pile of clothes. She heard him say something from the next room, and Caliban’s sharp response, but couldn’t make out anything but the tone. Brenner laughed. The door opened and closed again.

  “Baiting him, Brenner?” she asked, bending over her writing.

  “I offered to shave him, since he doesn’t have a mirror. He said he’d do it himself. Acted like a hot towel was a murder weapon.”

  “Can’t imagine why he wouldn’t want you to have a razor near his neck.”

  “I know.”

  The assassin trailed his fingers over her neck as he passed. She hunched away, annoyed. They’d been lovers once, a few years ago, and although they hadn’t resumed the relationship, she got the feeling he hadn’t given up hoping.

  He didn’t press the issue. Instead there was a metallic clunk, and she looked up, startled.

  Brenner slid a sword across the table in front of her. “For our fine knight.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “That’s a big sword.” The blade was wider than her wrist and longer than her arm. It looked like something you’d use to brace a ceiling with, rather than a weapon.

  “Now, now, you know it’s not the size of the sword—”

  “Shut up, Brenner.”

  He grinned, slinging the equally large scabbard across the back of the chair. “Anyway, it’s the kind the temple knights carry. I went and looked.” Another blade, a long knife, hit the table with a clunk. “And here’s the one I think they actually use. I can’t imagine you could swing that bloody thing indoors without taking out half the building.”

  “Oh. Good thinking.” Brenner knew weaponry, she’d give him that. Slate tried to pick up the sword and grunted. She was fairly strong—people kept their documents in some odd places, and she had to climb walls and rain-pipes more often than not—but her wrists started shaking uncontrollably at the weight. “Good lord. They actually swing this thing?”

  “Oh, yes. Our dear paladin could probably chop a bull in half with that sword.”

  “I suppose that’ll come in handy if we need any bulls chopped.”

  Brenner sat down on the edge of the table. Slate moved her letter and her inkwell out of the way. “He’ll be excellent muscle, I imagine, if he doesn’t run mad and chop us up instead.”

  “It’s a quicker death than getting eaten by a tattoo,” she pointed out, sprinkling a thin layer of drying sand over the letter

  “True enough.”

  He fell silent after that. It was one of the restful things about assassins; they knew how to be quiet. He lounged in his chair instead, like a big black cat in front of the fire, doing nothing much, thinking his own thoughts behind his pale blue eyes.

  They were killer’s eyes. Her mother had warned her about men with eyes like that. Granted the line of work her mother had been in, it had been very specific advice: “Get the money up front. They’re fine in a brothel, but don’t go out to his house, whatever you do.”

  It was good advice, and her mother would definitely not have approved of her brief liaison with Brenner. Still, despite his many faults, she’d found him reliable. They’d worked together a few times. Unless someone offered him a great deal of money to kill her, he was trustworthy, which made him the closest thing she had to a friend, and how sad was that?

  But he did know how to be quiet.

  She waited until the ink was dry, then folded up the letter and waved it at him. He plucked it neatly from her fingers, but didn’t try to read it. Like most people, Brenner was the next best thing to illiterate. Sad for him, job security for me.

  “Do the Stone Bitches still operate out of that warehouse on Old Slaughterhouse Row?”

  “Far as I know, yeah.”

  “Will you run that by them? They’re about to get raided.”

  “Your wish is my command.” He saluted with the folded paper, fingers rising to the tattoo on his shoulder. “Doesn’t this count as betraying the crown?”

  “I’m still planning on doing everything in my power to stop the Clockwork Boys. Beyond that, I don’t think it cares.”

  “Interesting.” Brenner tucked the letter into his belt and strolled out.

  Slate slouched down in a chair in front of the fire. It was mid-spring, and the days were warming up, but the evenings were still chilly. She poked up the fire, then curled up in the chair. Her eyelids were heavy.

  Long day. I suppose it’s probably better for your last days to be long ones, but I think I could stand a short one now and again. For variety.

  The door to her room opened. Caliban came out.

  She glanced up sleepily, then sat bolt upright. “Good lord!”

  The bath hadn’t been able to do anything about the dark circles under his eyes, but otherwise, it was hard to imagine that it was the same man.

  Freed of the grime, his hair had lightened to a dark honey, and freed of the ragged growth of beard, he had a strong jawline. He’d kept the beard in front, neatly trimmed, but thinned enough that she could make out a broad lower lip. With his hair pulled back, the ironic eyebrows were much more obvious.

  Brenner, with his usual eye for detail, had judged the man’s size exactly. In decently fitted, well-cut clothes, instead of prison rags, Caliban looked about ten years younger. He looke
d like—well, like a champion of the gods, in fact, if a pale and sardonic one. And not a bad looking one. Raowr.

  Down, girl. He’s a walking corpse anyway. Quit staring.

  He was just an unexpectedly good-looking corpse, that was all.

  “I didn’t cut my nose off shaving, did I?” he asked.

  “No, it’s still there. You, uh, look a lot better.” She tore her eyes away before she said anything embarrassing.

  What, like, “Take me now?”

  Mmm. I realize Brenner set a bad precedent, but I’d just as soon get away from men with a body count.

  Not that it matters anyway. I’ll probably be dead on the road soon, and doubly dead if we ever get to Anuket City. That’s one more complication I really, really don’t need.

  Fortunately, Caliban couldn’t hear what she was thinking. “Thank you, madam.” He sketched a half-bow in her direction. “I feel much better. It’s amazing how four months of dirt drags at you.”

  This was true. Caliban could hardly believe how much better he felt, now that he’d scrubbed himself clean. It had taken the sweating servant half a dozen trips, lugging clean water in and dirty water out, to remove the stink of the prison. He’d had to cut great tangles ruthlessly out of his hair, and he was surprised at how much was left.

  “I’m afraid, madam, I must beg you to leave the servant boy a rather large tip. I have no money, myself.”

  Slate nodded. “I’ll add it to the cost of the room. Our expense account is positively decadent.”

  Caliban nodded. That explained the clothes, then, although the cut was rather alarming. Not because they didn’t fit, but because they fit exactly, practically as if tailored. Even the boots were an excellent fit. That the assassin had looked at him so briefly and judged his size so exactly was a trifle alarming.

  If he can judge a cut of clothes this fine, I wonder how he can judge a cut of the knife?

  It was almost worth it, however, to see the look on Mistress Slate’s face when he entered the room. She’d been draped over the chair—apparently both criminals shared a criminal disregard for furniture—looking half asleep, until she’d seen him.

  Definitely not a woman only for other women, I think. At least I clean up well.

  Gha gha, ngh’aa, ha…

  He grimaced as the demon voice slithered up from someplace between the back of his mind and the pit of his stomach. Stupid. Stupid to be thinking about women at all.

  He did not think he was still dangerous. The demon was dead, even if its corpse was rotting in his brain. He’d realized long ago that the muttering voice was not alive, that it was more like a peculiar spiritual stench of decay.

  But that didn’t matter. The dead novices at his feet had been too large, too irrevocable a thing. He had not been the architect of their deaths, but he had been the instrument, and he could not quite pretend that it had happened to another person, that someone else’s muscles had moved and lifted the sword and swung and lifted the sword again—

  The shudder worked its way up the back of his spine and he turned his head a little as it struck.

  Still. Women should not look at me with anything but revulsion. It is an old habit of thought to think otherwise.

  I must forget old habits.

  “There’s bread and cheese on the table,” said Slate, who was looking back at the fire again. What she might have read in his face was anyone’s guess. Caliban could barely read his own thoughts. “Someone ought to be up with stew in an hour or so.”

  “Thank you.”

  He turned to the table, took a step, and froze.

  A naked sword lay across the table, gleaming in the pool of light cast by the oil lamp beside it.

  It was a large blade, meant to be used one- or two-handed. Light did not so much gleam on the steel as caress it intimately.

  Damn that assassin. His eye had been perfect.

  Is this a cruelty? Did he know how deeply holding such a sword would cut me?

  Was he trying to be friendly?

  The last time he’d held such a sword, blood had dulled the edge—blood and bits of other things. His keepers certainly would not have trusted him with a sword again, whether the demon was gone or not. His blood roared in his ears.

  If I pick the sword up, and the demon isn’t gone—if all that ritual, if the pain and the chanting and the water and the blood wasn’t enough—

  —so much water—

  “Brenner got you a sword,” said Slate behind him.

  He looked over his shoulder. She’d flopped sideways in the chair, peering at him with her head tilted upside-down over the arm. The long column of her throat could not have been more exposed if she’d been on a chopping block.

  If there was still a demon in him, it would take him three strides to cross the room, swinging the blade over his head—the ceilings were high enough that he need turn only a little sideways, rather than straight up—and then down. Necks were harder to cut through than people thought, but with his weight and the weight of the sword, he could hardly fail to cleave through, straight into the overstuffed arm of the chair. The wood and the cloth would probably bind worse than flesh and bone would.

  “Is it the right kind? Brenner said it’s what the temple knights used…” She yawned, stifled it. “Sorry.”

  And we’ll all go to hell in good company…

  Caliban reached out and closed his fingers around the hilt.

  Nothing happened.

  He exhaled, waiting.

  Still nothing.

  He lifted the sword. It was a heavy blade, not beautiful, but that was correct. There were beautiful swords for parades and temple services. This was for the butchery of demons. It needed to be strong and sharp and brutal.

  His muscles did not fire with alien strength. He did not turn around and paint the walls with Slate’s blood.

  The exorcism worked. The demon’s really dead.

  Be damned. Or not.

  It occurred to him that his face was wet. He set the sword down, very carefully, and wiped his eyes.

  He looked over, and saw that Slate wasn’t looking at him, very deliberately, and took that, as perhaps it was intended, as a kindness.

  * * *

  “So tell me about yourself,” Caliban said to Slate, the next evening. Brenner had gone off on some unknown errand of his own, seeing to whatever odd supplies an assassin needed, and they were eating a quiet meal together in the common room of the suite.

  She paused, her spoon in midair. “Me?”

  “We’re going to be on the road together for what—two weeks?—and in Anuket City for quite a while after that. I might as well know who I’m traveling with.”

  She set her spoon down and picked up a piece of bread, chasing the remnants of the soup around her bowl with it. “Um. My name is Slate, I’m thirty, and I have a tattoo that’s going to eat me unless I find out how to stop the Clockwork Boys. I’ve never actually met a Clockwork Boy.” She took a bite of bread. “But apparently the only way to stop them is in Anuket City, which no one on this side of the mountains has been able to get to for months. I think those are the important bits.”

  Caliban sighed, leaning back in his chair. He had gone out earlier, and while he still jumped away from sudden movements, the sky had not been so huge, and the world not quite so incomprehensible. He’d stayed close to the walls and doorways nonetheless.

  The sword across his back seemed to anchor him. Perhaps that wasn’t a surprise.

  He ran his fingers down it now, slung over the back of the chair. “Brenner said you were some kind of…guerrilla accountant.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Did he? Damnit.”

  “Is it true?”

  “It was. I suppose I’m not much of one now.”

  “How do you go from stealing paperwork to a sentence of death?”

  She smiled. It was a surprisingly charming smile. “So if you alter the wrong papers, they charge you with aiding and abetting the enemy. Who knew?”

 
; His eyebrows went up. “And they sent you out on this jaunt anyway?”

  “It was years ago,” she said defensively. “I was young and dumb and didn’t know better than to fool around with defense contract paperwork. I haven’t done that for years, but some bright young clerk—may his pens leak eternally—managed to trace my handwriting. I hadn’t learned to disguise it very well back then.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t a big deal, really—tampered with some paperwork to make it appear to be under budget, but—well, anyway. With the latest war on, they apparently have people going through all the old contracts, and…you know.”

  Caliban did indeed know. He would have been very surprised if they’d gotten so far as executing Slate. Skilled forgers were too valuable to waste.

  She took another bite of bread. “So anyway, I got charged with a count of treason, and I thought they’d hang me, but the Dowager had this wild idea. I lived in Anuket City for a few years, so I’m supposed to know the lay of the land.” She dismissed the land and its lay with a flick of her wrist. “Never mind that I was gone long before the Clockwork Boys were invented…or grown…or discovered…or whatever.”

  “So they chose you.”

  “Uh-huh. I think she figures there might be some complicated recipe for making Clockwork Boys, and I might need to steal it.”

  “Is it likely to be a recipe, do you think?”

  She shook her head. “It could be anything. It could also be a person—some kind of sorcerer or wonderworker or something—and we’re hoping Brenner can kill him. Or her, or them. It could be an artifact, in which case one of us can probably lift it.”

  “What if it’s a process? Something that a lot of people know?”

  Slate shrugged. “Well, then, we try to learn it, and come back and tell the Dowager. Maybe her pet wonderworkers can figure out a weakness. Maybe they’d all melt if you throw live chickens at them or something.”

  “They’re supposed to be eight-foot-tall killing machines. Do you really think chickens would work?”

  “I don’t know that it’s been tried.”

  Caliban contemplated this for a few moments. “This all assumes we can make it to the city at all, now that there’s a war in the way.”