for keeping his mouth shut, but how much of the gossip was actually true was anyone’s guess. Petri no longer cared – the information kept Bakar happy, and him out of his drudging little office and, more importantly, in the company of Kacha. Away from the confines of his office, where he’d spent most of these last years, he began to see more clearly. What a fool he’d been to believe Bakar, believe in his so-called equality and that he had Petri’s interests at heart. Then there was the prelate’s increasingly odd behaviour. A tax on periwinkles? On petticoats? Add to that the realisation that Bakar wanted the guild destroyed rather than given to Petri, as he’d always promised, and he was perilously close to all-out rebellion.
All because of Kacha, who’d shown him things and places and people he hadn’t known existed. Rooftops where people seemed to live on shadows and dust, workers leaving the clocker factories ground down by exhaustion and ground in with soot, dock rats who scurried after them begging for scraps, scrambling after the pennies that she scattered behind her like petals. “They’re like I was once,” she said with a sad smile. She showed him all this and saw how it horrified him. Bakar had told him that everyone was rewarded according to merit, that those who earned more, received more, but it wasn’t working. Petri wasn’t sure it ever could. Then Kacha would smile, shake off the melancholy for them both. They talked – he thought that was what kept drawing him back – and listened to each other long into the night. As different as night and day, she said once, where they’d come from, but the same underneath, and she’d smiled in a way that made him want to burst.
Those thoughts, and a belly full of good wine, ensured he barely noticed that the alley he’d turned down had no lamps lit, or that it was suspiciously empty and at this stage o’ the clock in the wrong end of town, especially for someone like him and even more especially for someone dressed as he was. The whirring click hit him like a bucket of ice water, and he realised where he was, and in how much danger, when three men moved in front of him with another three or four behind from the sounds of it.
They were indistinct in the wavering light of a half-moon behind scudding clouds, so all he could be sure of was that they were there and one had a gun. No longer the preserve of the rich, in recent weeks and months crude versions had flooded the city. Sadly they were just as effective at killing people as the expensive ones, though with a higher chance of the person firing being the person who died.
Two of the men came at him from behind. Something cracked into the back of his head and he fell to his knees, sword partway out of its scabbard. Feet and fists blurred past his face and registered somewhere far off in the back of his mind as they struck.
The leader snarled something that Petri only caught part of, but enough to know he wasn’t getting out of this without broken bones at the least, then, more clearly, “Fucking nobles, and a prelate’s man to boot. The worst of both sides. Let’s see how equal he is with his head kicked in, and I’ll tell the Clockwork God the truth of the gold in his pockets.”
A boot came flying towards him, and that probably would have been the end of his face if not the rest of him if a searing light hadn’t appeared at the end of the alley. It burned Petri’s eyes so that between that and the swelling that loomed over one brow, all he could see were blurs, and all he could hear were mumbling echoes and a series of whirrs and clicks.
Then a kind hand was helping him up, the alley lit with the bright yellow light of many lamps. Guards dressed in the king’s colours were dealing with some very vocal men with blood on their hands – his blood, he was horrified to see, dripping from his head and face all over the golden young man who helped him into a carriage. A young man he recognised, once he’d got over the fact he’d just ruined the man’s clothes. The yellow light of the lamps reflected from golden hair; the limbs were long and loose,