courtyard garden in the back that was both quiet and not overlooked. A trellis covered in grapevines hid the last of the setting sun as they took a table set with little brass lamps and spread out what they had.
It didn’t take long before the fading heat of the day seemed as cold as winter in the north to Vocho.
“What the hells is this?” he asked at last, though he could see it plain enough. He just wanted to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.
Kacha looked as shaken as he felt. “Well,” she said at last. “This is an agreement between the king and the Ikaran government, handing over certain Reyen mining and trade interests in return for support from the Ikaran army, and promising the death of the prelate’s diplomatic envoy as a show of good faith. I suspect he wouldn’t have given away nearly as much in concessions, so it was worth it to the Ikarans to have him dead. This diplomatic envoy I seem to recall being a certain priest.” She cast Vocho a hard look, but all he could do was shrug and shake his head. “This is a loan agreement with the Bank of Ikaras for a staggering amount of money, and this is a message from Dom’s old university stating that they’d be delighted to assist the king, and that three have been sent. Three what it doesn’t specify.”
“Hopefully not people who think they’re the second coming of the Clockwork God.”
“Voch, you plank, this is serious. If we could at least attempt to keep our wandering minds on it for more than a few seconds?”
He held up his hands. “All right, all right. Bang goes getting any money for this then.”
“Oh, I know a few people who’d pay for this,” Dom said. His eyes had stopped watering and he looked oddly sharp.
“We have to warn the prelate,” Kacha said, “or Eneko. We have to warn someone.”
“Do we?” Vocho said. “It was better for a while, but now the prelate’s no better than the old king was.”
“Voch, this is important, and the prelate is our head of state. He may be going slightly round the twist, but until recently he wasn’t doing so badly. People weren’t starving down on the docks, most people had jobs, and yes the clockers are a bunch of rich arseholes and it wasn’t perfect, but things were better than before. Were. We swore an oath to protect Reyes if it came to it, and I’d say finding out whether the prelate is really cracked counts. As does preventing a bloody revolution. And this is revolution we’re talking here; we can’t just ignore it. Whose heads do you think will top the walls around the Shrive this time? Ours? All those poor buggers in the square today? Do you want a magician behind the ruler of Reyes? We have to warn Bakar, or someone. Eneko maybe. Look at this one.”
Kacha handed over the last translation. Most of it was a lot of legal-sounding words that made little sense to Vocho even if they had been translated. But Kacha tapped a portion at the bottom, and Vocho saw what she meant: “Lord Petri Egimont, Duke of Elona and Master of the Duelling Guild of Reyes”. Dated the day after that bloody priest had died.
Vocho went back to the top of the paper. After a bit of squinting, he realised it was an assurance that the guild wouldn’t get in the way of Ikaras mining the iron seams that were the source of the long-running border dispute, that in fact the guild would remove the duellists that currently guarded said iron seams and instead place them at Ikaras’s disposal. A guild that it looked like Petri bloody Egimont was intent on taking over.
Kacha pinched the bridge of her nose. Vocho hadn’t a clue what she was thinking, but Egimont co-signing this the day after it all went wrong with Kacha stank like week-old shark meat. And the guild – they may have been thrown out, but the guild was everything to Vocho. All he’d wanted from the start of all this was to get back in, get his old name back, his old life back. Fat chance of that with Petri in charge. Any way he sliced it, it looked like Vocho was going to end up on the block, Kacha with him. Unless, of course, they stopped a revolution.
“So, what do you want to do?” he asked faintly. Maybe she was right