“I believed you the whole fucking time, and you were lying. I told Petri where to shove his ring because I believed you when you told me you didn’t do it. I should have known better, shouldn’t I, than to trust you about anything at all. Tell me now, all of it, every last scrap, or so help me I’ll scalp you.”
He hesitated a long time. If he said nothing she’d leave. If he told her she’d leave. If he lied she’d leave. Him and Kacha, always the two of them even when they grated on each other like two rusty cogs. Even when he hated her, always so damned perfect and expecting him to be exactly the same sort of perfect. Yet they always had each other’s back, always had the weight of years, of their whole lives, behind them. Just the two of them against the world.
“I owe a lot,” he said in the end. “Maybe three, four thousand in total. That much is true enough, I think, though it’s all hazy, that whole time. But I only owe people I know, friends. No one was calling it in. And I didn’t sell anyone out. I don’t think.”
“What then? If not that, then exactly what did happen?”
“I…” He almost couldn’t say it. He barely even wanted to think it, but the look on her face told him he had to. “The magician on the coach. I saw him before, though it took me a while to remember. I didn’t know what he was then, not until the coach. I saw him at the priest’s house. I was there, and he came, I think, and… and… the shapes on his hands kept moving. That’s all I really remember, that the shapes on his hands kept moving, and blood, lots of it. A pain on my back. Hurt a lot – still does sometimes, like in the coach when I saw him.”
Now he’d started, it spurted out of him like springs from a broken clock. He had to tell her it all before she went and left him alone.
“Then he was gone, and everything was, I don’t know, all kind of dark and fuzzy, but the stupid priest was there. Praying to a little whirring shrine, with his back to me. A woman too, I remember her…” He suddenly recalled who the woman in the bar downstairs had been. “I saw my sword go in, saw all the blood. God’s cogs, blood everywhere, made me sick like it never had before. But I don’t remember why I did it. It didn’t feel like me doing it; it wasn’t me. I’d swear it, Kass, I’d swear it on anything you like, on the clockwork duellist, even on my sword, on anything you want to name. It wasn’t me even if it was.”
“So you did what you always do and lied. Even to yourself this time.” She stared at him for a long time, and he couldn’t look back. Finally she stirred and, quick as mercury, she was spitting mad and as pissed off as he’d ever seen her. He didn’t even blame her.
“I believed you. I lost everything because I fucking well believed you – you, you, clocking arsehole! Petri, I told Petri to shove his ring up his backside because he thought you’d done it. I lost the guild, Eneko, my blades… everything, every damned thing in my life worth anything, and what did I get to keep? An arsehole lying shit of a brother who couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me the truth, who’s dogged my steps my whole fucking life. Well, not any more he won’t. You started this, you finish it – on your own. Because I haven’t got a brother.”
Before he could do anything, before he could even reach out an arm to stop her, she was gone in an echo of slammed door. He couldn’t seem to move, not to run after her, not to open the window and call out, not to do anything. He deserved this. All of it.
He was still standing there staring at the shut door when the room changed from being empty but for him to having someone else in it. A soft hissing sounded behind him, a rustled movement, a silky voice that echoed around his head and made the place on his back burn.
“Hello again, Vocho. I hope we haven’t come at an inopportune moment?”
He didn’t want to turn, he didn’t want to look at the