“Has its limits,” Sabates interjected smoothly. “I can use it to overpower his own better instincts for ten, maybe twelve minutes, though his instincts tend to run in our direction if you’re right about him being Eneko’s assassin. Any longer than that, it’ll burn him to a husk, though he might prove useful in the future if only as a scapegoat. The tattoo’s too powerful rather than not powerful enough. So he’ll do what I want, whether he likes it or not, when I need him to, but I have to get him to where he can do it first, and without bloodshed or we’ll be discovered. For that we need persuasion, and there are only two things Vocho cares about – notoriety and his sister. Offer him one and threaten the other. He’ll see sense soon enough.”
“And after?”
Sabates smiled, and Petri didn’t like the look of that smile in the least. “Then we kill her. She knows more than is good for her health. So does Vocho, but I can manage that. DUELLIST KILLED BY GUARDS AFTER ASSASSINATING PRELATE. Maybe she can be his co-conspirator.”
“You could put a tattoo on her?” Licio said.
Petri was sure Sabates could see right into his heart, that the thought of that made him shudder.
“Sadly, it takes a vast amount of power, and blood, to perform the initial spell, and it has to be a certain kind for this particular tattoo. I drained four magicians for the one that Vocho wears. Do you see four magicians anywhere?”
Licio stood up and strode over to Petri. He looked more regal than ever, yet boyish and golden in the dim light, but even so there was something about his eyes that told Petri he was utterly determined to do this and maybe a little bit mad too.
“I’m sure this won’t be a problem for our ever-loyal Egimont. Will it? I mean, you only used her for information about her brother. It wasn’t serious. Was it?”
Petri stared straight ahead, afraid that any move would give him away, afraid that if it did he’d end up as his father had done. “It won’t be a problem.” He thought he could feel the heat of Sabates’ gaze on him, which was ridiculous but unnerving nonetheless.
“I can kill them both, if you like,” Alicia purred from the corner. “Dom, as he styles himself now, is an old friend. More than a friend.”
“And he’s still alive?” Sabates asked with a flick of an amused eyebrow. “You surprise me.”
She flipped a fan out of one copious sleeve and wafted it next to her pale-marble face. “We all make mistakes. That won’t be one I’ll repeat. It would be my pleasure to kill him, as you well know.”
Petri stared at her, at the face that looked carved from angels, and thought he saw the heart that beat beneath the pretty dress, the heart that was as black as she was pale. He thought too of Vocho asking him if he would do it. Would he kill Kacha, if he had to? No, no, a hundred times no, but he couldn’t say that here. Sabates would see only weakness in that, and Sabates was the man to beware of. Petri wasn’t as indispensable as all that.
If it seems good to you. The motto he’d been brought up on, that lived, always, inside him, guiding everything he’d done. Each individual thing had seemed good to him: joining the king against the prelate, the thought of a new, fair society. Falling for Kacha when he was supposed to be using her, and all the rest – the lying and thieving, the betrayals, the killing when he’d had to – they had all seemed good, or for a good cause at least, but had led him here, to agreeing that killing the woman he’d been in love with wouldn’t be a problem in order to save his own neck.
A choice then. He still believed the prelate needed to go, and his Clockwork God with him. He still believed that life didn’t run on any rails, that he could change it if he wanted to. He still wanted the guild to be back among them, to lead them and have Eneko’s head on a pike. Against that, Kacha, who’d opened his eyes and made the clockwork fall from his head. The choice wasn’t hard at all.
“Well then,” Licio said. “Let’s not waste any more time. Egimont, go and get Kacha, bring