Swords and Scoundrels Read online

  As Kacha had amply demonstrated last night, they were not cut out for guns. At least out here in the arse end of nowhere guns weren’t so common. Yet they would be, and then he and Kacha would probably have to live like this, as farmers for fuck’s sake, all the time. Unless they could start getting to grips with guns. Or get back into the guild. Or grow bloody wings, which had about the same probability.

  Vocho hated farms. He hated the mud, the shit, the smell of pig pens, the beady little eyes of the chickens. He hated the hours too – up at the crack of sodding dawn, when any right-minded duellist should just be thinking of going to bed. Especially a world-famous duellist like himself. Bloody priests getting mysteriously dead, buggering up his perfectly good life.

  He and Kacha should practise, really. How hard could guns be if even the city watch – a band of men known more for their ability to be bribed than intellectual thought – could figure them out? But that would be like admitting defeat. Twenty years he’d trained at the blade, twenty years man and boy. And he was the best. He’d not been beaten since he was eighteen, and everyone knew his name, which was a byword for being fucking good with a sword. Only Kacha could come close. Privately he knew she was better at technique than he was, was certainly craftier, quicker at times, but, God’s cogs, he had more style, more élan, more… well OK, more height and weight. But it was him they sang about, his name they called. He’d made bloody sure of it, and it rankled to have all that hard work thrown away.

  Because everyone had called his name. Bards had sung of how he and Kacha had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, out of the gutter and into the employ of kings and prelates and great men. They both had, but his was always the name that was sung the loudest. Because he paid the bards to, mostly, but even so. They’d sung of duels he’d fought and won, of great feats of heroism while guarding whoever was paying his wages via the guild that week. Most of it was a load of bollocks, naturally, but there had been one or two occasions where he’d been mildly heroic, like when he’d saved that child from falling out of a window at the change o’ the clock, or he’d foiled that heist on the bank and the resulting swordplay had spread into the market before he’d nailed the ringleader, to a wall as it happened. Mostly it had just seemed like fun at the time, and a great way of showing everyone, particularly Kacha, how great he was.

  The bards had sung about the romance of a guild that no one outside it really understood, about its history as sworn defenders of the old emperors before the Great Fall. They’d sung about how afterwards, when there were no emperors, the guildsmen had changed to swearing their lives to each other and how no man could break them from that swearing. They’d sung about how the empire had fractured into a thousand little kingdoms, and how the guild served them all on its own terms, and they’d sung about the nostalgia for a long-lost age it represented with Vocho as its most powerful icon, and how dashing he looked, which was only to be expected. And then… and then an evening that was vague in his mind, too much wine probably, and that priest. Now they sang about Vocho the priest murderer, who stabbed holy men in the back – only the second person, after the reviled Jokin, ever to be exiled from the guild after he’d taken his master’s test and sworn his oath to be true.

  He stamped across the yard and glared at the chickens. A fucking farmer. What style did a farmer have? Sackcloth trousers and perfume of pig shit. Vocho opened the gate to the coop and flung in the grain, not caring how it bounced off the heads of the hungry birds. The only bright spot in his day was going to be later, when he and Kacha would go through their haul from last night. Silks and jewels and bulls, lots of lovely bulls. Not enough to stop him being a farmer, though he had high hopes of the chest, which had been satisfyingly heavy. The locks looked tough but would yield with time. He’d always been good with locks.

  The chest had been guarded by a magician too. Magicians were so rare they were almost legends, and they could command the ransom of kings as payment, or so the stories went. And what was anyone doing going to those lengths if what was inside wasn’t worth a fortune? Our lad Eggy was an idiot only having the two bodyguards, even if he did have magic on his side. Not that it would have made much difference. They’d still have the chest; there’d just be more dead, or at least denuded, men.

  Muffled exhortations to “Stand! Stand, you ruddy horse,” leaked out of the stable, followed by a massive thunk, a crack, and a puff of splinters exploding into the yard as the horse took exception to Kacha’s tone of voice or perhaps just the world being what it was, it was hard to tell.

  Vocho finished his chores moodily and sloshed back across the yard to the house. To the chest. It sat on the table like the world’s biggest birthday present. He itched to get started on the locks, but Kacha had stropped and fretted and pulled the older sister trick, which made him even more determined to open the damned thing. She was the cautious one, comparatively, and she’d said that if a magician had guarded it then they had to make sure there was no magic on the thing before they opened it. Which was all very well, but Vocho was dreaming of the things they could do with whatever money or precious items were inside. It was heavy enough to hold a bloody fortune in gold. Maybe… maybe enough to buy a pardon, get their old lives back. Maybe. Enough money and the good folks of Reyes would forget everything. The prelate’s palace probably would, if he bribed the right person. Then perhaps Kacha would forgive him too. His life wasn’t the only one he’d buggered up. He had things to make up for.

  She caught him just as he was about to try the first of the locks.

  “What in the hells are you doing?”

  He jumped back, red faced and ready with a lie. “Just looking. To see if I could find any magic on it.”

  She snorted disbelief and came to the table, her recently cut ragged blonde hair bouncing indignantly. “And I’m the queen of the pig people. Honestly, Voch, do you think I can’t tell when you’re lying? Your left eye always twitches.”

  “Does not!”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “See, it’s doing it again.”

  He studied her for a moment and wondered how far he could push it. Not far – he never could. She always saw through his bullshit, and it was why he loved her and why she drove him insane too. Kacha the wonderful, Kacha the perfect, Kacha, who could see when he was lying. Kacha, who always believed in him anyway, when no one else would.

  To look at them you’d be hard pressed to say they were related. She was fair-haired and paler-skinned like their mother, and he was dark everywhere. He was taller than most, hulking at the shoulders like their docker father. She only came up to his shoulder – southerner blood, his father always said, like it was a good thing. But there were things that made them the same – the brown eyes, the straight, sharp nose. A grace and speed that showed in every movement, and a quick and ready grin. Her grin had faded just lately though.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “I was trying to open the lock.”

  “Idiot. What if there’s magic on it?” She frowned at the chest. “What if he can trace it? I don’t want to deal with a magician. Who knows what they’re capable of?”

  “You won’t have to deal with one. I got him right in the windpipe. I’d be surprised if he lasted the hour. And if a magician was guarding it, it has to be valuable.”

  “We dump it,” Kacha said, weary from repeating herself.

  Vocho stared out at the mud and shit in the yard, wishing she’d actually listen to him for once. “We dump it, we’re stuck here for… for… for ever. I’m not a fucking farmer. This could be our way back in. Back to what we were meant for, where we belong.”

  “Voch, enough.”

  “Please.” He screwed himself up to say it, because it didn’t come anywhere near naturally, but he owed her. A lot, more than she knew, and he was determined to pay the debt. “Look, I got us into this shitty situation. I admit it. I lost us our jobs, our reputation, our everything. Our lives if they catch us. Let me get it all back. For both of us. Please?”


  She was weakening, he could see it, so he pressed his advantage. He’d always been able to wheedle his way around her if he tried.

  “Look, Kass, with enough money we can pay the right people, get our names restored or at least cleared. You won’t have to wear that fucking rag of a dress any more, just because you’re a ‘farmer’s sister’ and that’s what they wear. I’ll even get you your blades back.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and he made a note to lay it on less thick.

  “You know who has my blades?”

  “I do. And I’ll buy them back just as soon as I have the money. And of course there’s Egimont—”

  “You just shut up about him.” The ice in her voice made him shiver.

  She wouldn’t look at him but played with her hair, hiding her eyes behind a loose lock, considering. Vocho wondered what had happened between her and Eggy. One minute the two of them were a mismatched pair, and he’d never seen her happier. Even if he thought Eggy was too smooth for words, a stuck-up pompous mountebank, too damned quiet, sneaky and devious with it, he’d never have said so to Kacha. He’d had words with Eggy, but he wouldn’t say so to Kacha, because she was happy and under it all he did love her, when he remembered to. The next minute, well it seemed like the next minute Kacha was cursing Eggy like a sailor and then wouldn’t have his name spoken. Vocho had revelled in that for a while, glad that he’d been right about sneaky old Eggy, but Kass was constantly in a bad mood lately, and he was the one getting it in the neck.

  “OK, I’ll shut up about him. But your blades, our lives, we can get them back. Or go somewhere else and live like kings and queens. If we get this chest open and find out what it is someone wants so much. Aren’t you even a little bit curious? And with a pardon maybe you could—”

  “Don’t even suggest it.”

  He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just a thought. I mean, with you restored to the guild, maybe he’d—”

  “I said, don’t even suggest it. I’m well rid of him, if that’s where his priorities lie.”

  What the hells had happened there? He didn’t dare ask. “Fine, fine, don’t say I didn’t offer. But your blades. With money, we could get them back, get our guild places back, everything we had. Everything. If we open this chest.”

  She cocked an eyebrow his way, but he could see the distaste no matter how she tried to hide it. “Still. How can we find out if he’s done something to it?”

  Vocho shrugged – he didn’t know much more than she did. “Blood on it, probably. They use blood for their spells.”

  “That is creepy as hell.”

  “Isn’t it?” A voice from the doorway startled Vocho so much he tried to pull a sword that wasn’t there. Kacha groaned quietly.

  The man that Kacha referred to as the “gibbering ninny” stood in the doorway. Vocho couldn’t agree with her – simpering was a much better word for him. A vain, twittering fool in the best fashion of high-society Reyes. Only they weren’t in Reyes, and he stood out like a chorus girl in a hen house among the local farmers, wheelwrights and blacksmiths. Still, he had his uses.

  His full name, often repeated by him, probably because it was the only way he could remember it, was Narcis Donat Chimo Ne Farina es Domenech, though in an effort to appear friendly to the locals he had asked them to call him Dom. Mostly they called him Ninny, only not to his face – his father, a prominent clocker, had bought the local manse after the revolt and was a lot of people’s landlord. He was also a controlling tyrant and no better or worse than the previous noble landlord. He’d lately developed a penchant for having his employees, of whom there were many, flogged for minor transgressions. So no one was willing to say openly the slightest thing against him or his son. Sadly for Kacha and Vocho, Dom had taken a liking to Kacha despite the fact she was supposedly just a farmer’s sister and as such not good marriage material for someone like him. The revolt may have demoted a hells-ton of nobles, but old habits died hard and in effect they’d been replaced by clockers with no titles but lots of money. Supposedly this was fine by the prelate, because a self-made man showed merit and the good blessings of the Clockwork God, who rewarded truth and industry. Or so all the newspapers and storytellers said.

  Kacha seemed to have an odd effect on men, though Vocho could never really see why. Five years ago the fashion had been for stick-thin ethereal women strapped into plain black dresses that went straight up and down, with deathly pale faces and long lank ringlets. Thanks to a new artist who’d painted portraits of the prelate’s wife and others, the fashion was now for plumply voluptuous women, hair piled up and puffed out to the size of a small pumpkin, in ridiculous dresses that swept the floor behind them, usually with lots of frilly things around the neck and wrists that Vocho couldn’t name.

  Kacha had managed to never quite fit into either category, being what Vocho thought of as sturdy and not giving a fig about fashion anyway, except in a “Can I fight in it, or will it just get in the way?” manner. Not skinny, not plump, but somewhere in between where her muscles tended to show a little through whatever shirt – or farmer’s sister’s dress – she wore. Above all, she was his sister. All he usually saw was a pain in the arse – too ruddy perfect. But while even in a poor light after a couple of beers only a compulsive liar would call her beautiful, he grudgingly supposed there was something about her. He just had no idea what attracted men like flies. If he’d known, or if he hadn’t been her brother, perhaps everything would have been different, he supposed.

  “What’s he doing here?” Kacha hissed under her breath.

  “I, er, I asked him to come – sent a message as soon as we got back,” Vocho whispered back.

  “You what?” She didn’t have time for more than that so contented herself with trying to kill Vocho by glaring at him.

  Dom came in, a soft-looking little man with a pale, watery sort of face, a handkerchief often pressed to his nose and washed-out brown hair dressed in the latest style – a loose pigtail worn pretend-carelessly over one shoulder and powdered to make the hardiest man sneeze. Maybe that explained the handkerchief. He was dressed for a ball, not a trek across a muddy farmyard, but to Vocho’s annoyance he didn’t seem to have a splash of mud anywhere on his exquisitely made shoes, and his breeches were a pristine white. His clothes were worth more than this all-but-derelict farm and everything in it – silk, more silk than Vocho had seen this side of a Reyes whorehouse, embroidered and studded with sequins, feathers, tinkling trinkets and who knew what else until the man fair rattled when he walked. Vocho itched to turf him out on his ear, maybe liberating some of those clothes in the process, but this was their disguise and he had to keep to it. Besides, having a rich friend with a powerful father couldn’t hurt, and Vocho had invited him for a very specific purpose. He just hoped he wasn’t going to regret it later, when Kacha said all the words that by the looks of her mouth, clamped so thin it had almost disappeared, were demanding to be said. Vocho was pretty sure his ears would be bleeding by the end of it.

  Dom fluttered the hand with the handkerchief Vocho’s way, took Kacha’s hand with the other and bent low over it. “My dearest Kassinda.”

  They’d had to come up with new names, as the old ones were so hotly sought after, but had managed it so that they could still call each other Kass and Voch, as they always had. Saved on unintentional slip-ups. Only now those were short for Kassinda and Ranvoschan.

  By the way Kacha’s nose wrinkled, it was taking all her control not to whip her hand away or cuff Dom around the ear. This was not how you treated a lady of the guild, if you liked your face the same way it started. People had been thrown in the Shrive for less. Dom didn’t seem to notice – he never did, not the looks and glares, not the whispers behind his back or the occasional plain words. Instead he smiled his watery smile and turned to the chest.

  A look of mild interest, the closest he ever got to an actual expression, crossed his face, and Vocho wondered how much he’d heard of what they’d said. Not that it mattered
– a lot of things seemed to pass straight through Dom’s skull without pausing.

  “Is this what you were asking about, Ranvoschan?” he asked, peering more closely at the chest. Vocho belatedly hoped like hells Egimont didn’t have any identifying crest on it.

  “My… er… my mother’s chest,” Kacha said. “She always said to be careful opening it.”

  He took that well enough. Considering he believed everything Vocho told him, it was a fair bet he couldn’t tell a lie from a hole in the ground.

  “Well, I can’t see any magic on it. And if it’s been sitting around a while, any magic would have faded a long time ago in any case.” He looked up at Kacha like a dog hoping for a bone. “My father made me study all this sort of thing, you see. Sent me to Ikaras University. Such an interesting country. Do you know the thirteen provinces each used to be the private estate of one family, before the Great Fall? There are a few records left, you see, in Ikaras. The families used to compete, and built each capital after their own expertise. So not much clockwork in Ikaras – that family were more scholars than engineers – but they actually still have magicians, if only a few. Scary sorts, to be honest. Need to be careful of looking at the patterns on their hands. Anyway, I think my father always sort of hoped the prelate would get around to making a few new nobles out of the clockers, and wanted me to be prepared. Old stories, histories, why the old empire fell, the war to establish the city-states and the lines of kings, famous magicians, he had me study everything. Total bore, but some of it stuck. Magic uses blood, for example. A magician can store a spell, such as a ward for this chest, but once the blood is dry it doesn’t last long. Not unless they permanently mark it into skin, like a tattoo. That’s the only way it lasts, you see? Constant blood supply. And the skin ones tend to be very limited, and specific, unless they’re actually on a magician. Anyway, without a blood supply, this wood wouldn’t hold a spell for long.” Dom stopped to take a breath – the man could talk for Reyes when he had a mind.