The Republic of Thieves

by Scott Lynch

  “So it was all just … a monumental misdirection?” said Locke. “While we danced for everyone’s amusement, you sharpened your knife and stuck it in somebody’s back?”

  “All those magi that I once described as exceptionalists,” said Patience. “All those brothers and sisters. I mourn them, even as I know there was no convincing them. They will stay in Karthain forever. The rest of us go on.”

  “Why tell us any of this?” said Jean.

  “Because I value your discomfort.” Patience smiled without warmth. “I described the conditions of your employment very succinctly. We are not vanishing from the world, merely from the eyes of ordinary people. Share our business with anyone and you are always in our reach.”

  “Ordinary people,” said Locke. “Well, how ordinary am I, really? What’s the truth of all the tales you spun about my past?”

  “You should look at the painting I brought for Sabetha.” Patience tapped the wrapped object leaning against the wall behind her. “I’m leaving it here, though in a day or two it will be nothing but white ash. It’s the only portrait of Lamor Acanthus ever painted during his life. I ought to tell you, the likeness is impeccable.”

  “A simple answer!” shouted Locke. “What am I?”

  “You’re a man who doesn’t get to know the answer,” said Patience, and now her smile was genuine. She was shaking with the obvious difficulty of containing her laughter. “Look at you. Camorri! Confidence trickster! You think you know what revenge is? Well, here’s mine on you. Before I was Archedama Patience, I was called Seamstress. Not because I enjoy needlework, but because I tailor to fit.”

  Locke could only stare at her, feeling cold and hollow to the depths of his guts.

  “Live a good long life without your answer,” she said. “I think you’ll find the evidence neatly balanced in either direction. Now, one thing more will I tell you, and this only because I know it will haunt and disquiet you. My son preferred to mock my premonitions, but only because he didn’t want to face the fact that they always have substance. I shall give you a little prophecy, Locke Lamora, as best as I have seen it.

  “Three things must you take up and three things must you lose before you die: a key, a crown, a child.” Patience pushed her hood up over her head. “You will die when a silver rain falls.”

  “You’re making all this shit up,” said Locke.

  “I could be,” said Patience. “I very well could be. And that’s part of your punishment. Go forth now and live, Locke Lamora. Live, uncertain.”

  She gestured once and was gone.

  2

  JEAN REMAINED at the door, staring at the gray-wrapped package. Finally, Locke worked up the nerve to seize it and tear away the cover.

  It was an oil painting. Locke stared at it for some time, feeling the lines on his face draw taut as a bowstring, feeling moistness well in the corners of his eyes.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course. Lamor Acanthus. And wife, I presume.”

  He made a noise that was half dour laugh and half strangled sob, and threw the painting on the bed. The black-robed man in the portrait looked nothing like Locke; he was broad-shouldered, with the classically dark, sharp aspect of a Therin Throne patrician. The woman beside him bore the same sort of haughty glamour, down to her bones, but she was much fairer of skin.

  Her thick, flowing hair was as red as fresh blood.

  “I’m everything Sabetha was afraid of,” said Locke. “Tailored to fit.”

  “I’m … I’m sorry as hell I got you into this,” said Jean.

  “Shit! Don’t go wobbly on me now, Jean. I was as good as dead, and the only way out of this was to go through, all the way to Patience’s endgame. Now she’s played it.”

  “We can go after Sabetha,” said Jean. “She’s had half an hour, how far could she get?”

  “I want to,” said Locke, wiping his eyes. “Gods, I can still smell her everywhere in this room. And gods, I want her back.” He slumped onto the bed. “But I … I promised to trust her. I promised to … respect her decisions, no matter how much it fucking cut me. If she has to run from this, if she has to be away from me, then for as long as she needs, I’ll … I’ll accept it. If she wants to find me again, what could stop her?”

  Jean put his hands on Locke’s shoulders and bowed his head in thought.

  “You’re gonna be fucking miserable to live with for a couple of weeks,” he said at last.

  “Probably,” said Locke with a rueful chuckle. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, we should case this place and pack everything useful we can lay our hands on,” said Jean. “Clothes, food, tools. We don’t have to go after Sabetha, but we’d best have our asses on the road before the sun peeks over the horizon.”

  “Why?”

  “Karthain hasn’t kept up an army or maintained its walls for three hundred years,” said Jean. “In a few hours, it’s going to wake up to discover that the only thing keeping it protected from the world at large has vanished during the night. Do you want to be here when that mess breaks wide open?”

  “Oh, shit. Good point.”

  Locke stood up and looked around the room one last time.

  “Key, crown, child,” he muttered. “Well, fuck you, Patience. Three things must you kiss before I let you spook me for good. My boots, my balls, and my ass.”

  Locke pulled his boots on and followed Jean down the stairs, impatient to have Karthain at his back and slowly sinking into the horizon.

  EPILOGUE

  WINGS

  1

  THE BOY IS six. He stares at the Amathel, breathes the lake air, the wholesome scents of life and freshness. He stares at the glinting lights, the jewels in the blackness, the secrets of the Eldren scattered in the depths. The dock folk claim that fishermen in the water at night have been driven mad by the lights, have dived down toward them, pulling frantically, as if toward the surface, until they drowned. Or vanished.

  The boy is not afraid of the lights. The boy has power the dock folk can only guess at. He feels a pressure in his temples when he stares out across the waters. He hears something lower and lovelier than the steady wash of the waves and the cries of the birds. The power of the hidden things calls to the power of the boy.

  The boy knows the Amathel took his father. He has been told this, but he remembers nothing. He was too young. There is no memory to mourn. The lake of jewels means only life, beauty, soothing familiarity.

  All these things. And the power that waits for his power to match it. To reveal it.

  2

  THE BOY is four, the boy is ten, the man is twenty. His body shifts in this place. Sometimes he is whole, sometimes he is pleased, sometimes his memories are bright and vivid as paintings glowing with the fire of the gods in every speck of pigment.

  Sometimes he speaks in a rich rolling voice. Sometimes he moves his hands and feels the fingers there, feels them brushing over surfaces and picking things up. He does not know why this pleases him, why he feels something like the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, why the joy is so bittersweet.

  Sometimes he walks in a fog. His thoughts are wrapped in dull cotton. Sometimes he is on a street and he is confused. He is bound with rope, throbbing with pain, his hands and his mouth caked with blood. His own blood. The rain comes down and men are staring at him, studying him, afraid.

  Sometimes he is gazing out across the Amathel, feeling the life of the bird for the first time. A gull, an elegant white thing, wheeling in tight circles. The boy feels its needs, its hunger, the elegant simplicity of the thing at the center of it all. The boy visualizes this as a wheel, a piece of clockwork, a logic circle turning without friction or remorse. Strike, eat, live on the wind. Strike, eat, live on the wind.

  The boy moves his fingers to call up his untutored power. He reaches out and takes the life of the bird like a humming thread in the hands that nobody else can see, the hands of power his mother has taught him to use.

  The bird is startled.

&
nbsp; Its wings fold awkwardly. It plummets twenty feet and bounces hard off a rock, then plops into the water, fluttering and squawking agitatedly, lucky its wings aren’t broken.

  The boy needs practice.

  3

  THE BOY is ten. The boy has run across the hills and forests north of Karthain all night with blood in his mouth. The boy has crouched in the center of a web, still as stone, with venom in his fangs and the faintest sensation of movement rippling across his fur, the air currents of prey fluttering ever closer. The boy has swept high into the sky, chased the sun, learned to strike, eat, and live on the wind.

  “You must not,” his mother insists. His mother is powerful, his mother is teaching him her gifts, but she will not let him teach her his own.

  “It is not highly thought of, among our kind,” she says. “You are a man! You will think as a man! There’s no room for a man in those tiny minds.”

  “I share,” said the boy. “I command. I don’t feel small. If they really are tiny, perhaps I make them big whenever I go inside!”

  “You will grow more and more sensitive,” says his mother. “You will tie yourself more and more tightly to them, do you understand? Their lives will become yours, their feelings yours. If they are hurt, you will share all their pain. If they are killed … you may be lost as well.”

  The boy doesn’t understand. His mother tells him these things as though there were no compensations. The boy knows that he is alone, among all the magi his mother has presented him to, in his willingness to share the lives of animals.

  There is no dissuading the boy. He has tasted life without regrets, life without remorse, life lived on the wind. It is what he is; he returns to himself after each communion feeling that part of the wild has come with, to live inside him.

  His mother could make him stop. Even at ten, the boy knows what she holds over him, burns with shame at it. But she will not use it. She lectures and begs and threatens, but she will not speak the thing that would lock his will in an iron strongbox.

  She cannot, or will not, but it doesn’t make the boy forgive her. He casts his awareness into hidden places for owls, ravens, hawks. He hurls himself into the sky carrying anger from the ground, and hot blood runs on his talons. He soars to forget he has legs. He kills to forget he has rules and expectations. He never shares this experience with anyone else. He goes alone to the woods, and dead songbirds fall like rain. When he is shamed in his studies or rebuked for his attitude, he remembers the blood on his talons, and he endures with a smile.

  4

  THE BOY is gone, the man is twenty-five, the man is … lost.

  Sometimes he is in the dead gray place. His legs refuse to move. His hands feel like crippled lumps. His tongue throbs with a phantom pain, an electric tingle. He is trapped on a bed as though nailed to it. He cannot remember how he came to be in this place. He sobs, panics, tries to claw his way to freedom with his missing fingers.

  Only the smell of the lake relaxes him, the cool fresh scent of the water, the occasional piquancy of dead fish or gull shit. When the wind blows these things to him he can bear the confusion and the torture of the dead place.

  When the wind is wrong the shadows around him pour something cold and bitter down his throat, and he goes into the darkness cursing them wordlessly.

  5

  THE LAKE air blows through the dead place. He takes it in as though no other air will sustain him. It is night; the darkness is offset by the light of a single lamp. Everything is strange; he feels a buoyant force inside his chest, something rising through him like bubbles in a spring. The room is clarifying, as though layer after layer of gauze is being removed from his face.

  The light stings his eyes; the new clarity is unnerving. There are shadows moving near the light, two of them.

  The man tries to speak, and a strangled wet moan startles him. It takes a moment to realize that the noise is his own, that his tongue is a scrap of cauterized stump.

  His hands! He remembers Camorr, remembers steel coming down, remembers the shared pain of Vestris’ last moments washing over him in unbearable waves. He remembers Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen. He remembers Luciano Anatolius.

  He is the Falconer, and the air in the room is heavy with the smell of the Amathel. He is alive and back in Karthain.

  How long? He feels stiff, light, weak. Significant weight has vanished from his body. Has it been weeks, months?

  Nearly three years, whispers a soft voice in his head. A familiar voice. A hated voice.

  “Mnnnnghr,” he rasps, the best he can do. The frustration comes on like a physical weight. He can sense the currents of magic in the room, feel the strength of his mother nearby, but his tools are missing. The power is there to be wielded, but his will slides from it like sand off smooth glass.

  I’ll take care of it for both of us.

  Cold fingers of force slide across his mind, and the impotence, blessedly, is lifted. He feels the words as he crafts them, feels them going out to her, mind to mind, his first orderly communication in … three years?

  THREE YEARS!

  As I said.

  Camorr …

  Yes, the Anatolius contract.

  How badly was I injured? What did they do to me?

  Not enough to cause your present condition.

  The Falconer ponders the import of these words, flips desperately through his memories like the pages of a book.

  A dreamsteel model of a city. Its towers falling into flat silvery nothingness.

  Archedama Patience, in the Sky Chamber, warning him that he is headed into danger.

  Steel rising and falling. Cauterizing heat, white bolts of pain in his mind unlike anything he has ever imagined. Vestris, dead. Before the blade can come for his tongue he tries to work the spell of pain-deadening, the old familiar technique, but on the other side of it … not welcome relief. Fog, madness, prison.

  Now see it all.

  Patience speaks a word, and something comes loose in his mind. A patina cracks over an old memory, revealing the truth within the shell.

  Archedama Patience. The night of his departure, a brief private audience. She warns him again. Again, he scoffs at the transparency of her ploys. She speaks another word then, and the word is urgent and irresistible. The word is his name, his true name, uttered as the cornerstone of a spell. He is bound to it, then made to forget.

  You … you did it.

  A subtle compulsion. A trap. An irrevocable order sleeping in his mind until the next time he used the art of deadening pain.

  YOU did this to me.…

  You did it to yourself.

  YOU DID THIS TO ME!

  I gave you the chance to avoid it.

  NO. THE CHANCE TO SHOW MY THROAT.

  Your arrogance again. Can’t you see that you were a problem in want of a solution?

  AND YOUR SOLUTION … ASSASSINATION. FAR FROM HOME.

  I suppose that’s the only honest way to look at it.

  I’M YOUR GODS-DAMNED SON!

  I wear five rings. You put yourself on the wrong side of them.

  Well. He forces himself to lower his mental voice, to think coolly. There must be danger here. Why is she telling him this, revealing all after three years? You certainly fucked things up, didn’t you?

  All I could foresee was that you were headed into serious pain. Therefore I assumed that you would be in extreme danger … that you would do the obvious thing.

  Paralyze myself, you mean! And then it would all be over.

  Except your opponents were … scrupulous.

  Ah. Is this what scrupulous treatment feels like? Lucky, lucky me.

  I told you, it’s not what I wanted!

  You and your gods-damned prescience. Your snide little hints. The way you tried to control everyone around you with them. What good was it, if you couldn’t even see THIS coming at us? Tell me, Mother, have you ever managed to have a vision of your OWN future?

  No.

  Well, that must be pleasant for y
ou. To be the only real person in your whole damned world, and all the rest of us puppets for your private stage. How does it feel NOW?

  “It’s over,” says Patience, switching to actual speech. She is beside his bed now, looking down at him. “All of it. Your associates are dead. Archedama Foresight is dead.”

  How?

  “Irrelevant. You are the sole survivor of your faction. All questions between us have been settled. We’re leaving Karthain, entering the time of quiet as planned. You are my final item of business before I go.”

  Come to kill me last? Come to bring an end to three years of cowardice?

  “Part of me wishes you were dead,” she says. “Wishes you’d died cleanly, as you would have had you been healthy and abroad in Karthain tonight. I can’t imagine wanting to live on in your … condition. And I will end your suffering, if it’s what you desire. But I felt that I had to ask. I owe you at least this much.”

  She points to the other figure in the room, a burly man, balding, with a black mustache that droops to the collar of his brown tunic. There are no rings visible on either of his wrists.

  “This is Eganis, your caretaker.” She offers images and impressions, revealing to the Falconer how it has been for three years.

  Eganis moving him, rolling him from side to side, turning him to avoid weeping bedsores.

  Eganis feeding him, gruel and pap and milk.

  Eganis emptying his chamber pot.

  Eganis walking him, leading the doddering Falconer by a length of leather around his neck.

  A mage of Karthain … leashed …

  It was necessary to preserve your health.

  Like a dog …

  It was necessary!

  LIKE A GODS-DAMNED DOG!

  You’re the one who always sought to know the spirits of animals more intimately.

  He sends no words, but an unrelieved outpouring of hatred so hot and acidic he sees her stagger before she can manage to gird her mind against it.