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