on until all three were dead and Andoni had handed over the clockwork duellist, the toy that was a prayer to the dead Clockwork God on the one hand and might send him to burn in hells on the other.
Vocho took his spoils home and put it on a shelf. A reminder of the first bet he ever won, but he never played with it.
Chapter Four
Petri Egimont sauntered into the guild wearing a chilly little smile and with revenge in his heart. Not so long ago the guild master, Eneko, would have had a conniption at the thought of Petri entering. Now, with his two most notorious duellists wanted for the murder of the prelate’s favourite priest, he didn’t have much choice but to let the prelate’s man in.
The guild was just as Petri remembered it. Walls built from huge blocks of mellow ochre stone, rough at the edges, terracotta tiles on the roof, channels worn in the places where rain ran off. The great gatehouse, imposing and dour, the gates always open – they’d been shut only once in living memory, a day that was burned into Petri’s head with fire and blood. The courtyard-cum-sparring arena inside, echoing with the sound of swordplay and the ticking of the clockwork duellist who watched over the yard. She was bronze and brass, wielding a rapier so fine it looked as ephemeral as a lightning bolt in the sun. She ticked and watched, watched and ticked, until the next time someone switched the lever and set her into her motion of whirling sword and flashing eyes. A stern face, keeping all the lessers and journeymen in line, with a hint of compassion, of sadness, for those the guild lost to war, to jobs, to death on a sword. She was the heart of the guild, that nameless duellist.
The aspiring duellists knew better than to stop their practice as Petri strode through the cloister on the south side, but they turned as they fought so they could watch him, and he could hear the rumour of whispers. He clenched his teeth and carried on.
The young lesser who was supposed to be guiding him couldn’t keep up, and he knew the way well enough. Through the cloisters, up stairs, around twists that changed with the change o’ the clock, until he came to Eneko’s door. He didn’t bother to knock but opened the door and went straight in. Eneko wasn’t surprised. Petri thought it would take a lot more than someone barging in to do that.
The guild master sat back in his chair and looked up at Petri from under lidded eyes, hands clasped across a belly that was just now running to fat. The eyes were warier than they had been, the jowls looser, the long dark hair in its neat ponytail more sprinkled with grey, but he’d lost none of his poise.
“Again, Petri?”
A tight smile from Petri as he took a chair he knew would never be offered. “Again, Eneko. And again, and again, until the prelate is sure.” Not that he came from the prelate today, but the questions would be similar. “I know you’ve got some idea where they are. The prelate knows it too, and I’ll keep on coming until he gets what he wants. It’s not like you’ve never betrayed your duellists before now, is it? When you need to, as you will no doubt say. I think you’re going to need to before the prelate loses what little patience he has with you.”
Eneko shifted in his chair but didn’t seem unduly perturbed as he spread his hands in a gesture of innocence that Petri didn’t believe for a second. Eneko hadn’t got to be guild master by being open and honest, or naïve.
“And what will he do about it? What can he? Nothing, or he’d have done it by now, and razed this guild to the ground. But he can’t, not unless he wants a revolt against him. Isn’t that so? Who really rules Reyes? That was always the old question, after the Fall. The king ruled their bodies, and now the prelate does. He gives them their god to believe in, and they do, mostly, but it takes longer than a few years to dim people’s memories that much, and you know it. Old ways live on, not openly perhaps, but in peoples’ minds. A superstition here, a chalked rune that was once a call to the old gods, a half-forgotten tale of how the world