by Scott Lynch
It twisted in his mouth. Twisted, physically, as though wrenched by an unseen hand, and scored a burning slash across the inside of his left cheek. Locke cried out, coughed, and spat up the tooth-it lay there in his open palm, flecked with spit and blood.
“Ahhhhh,” said Capa Barsavi as he plucked the tooth up and slipped it back into his waistcoat, blood and all. “So you see-you are bound by an oath of blood to my service. My tooth has tasted of your life, and your life is mine. So let us not be strangers, Locke Lamora. Let us be capa and pezon, as the Crooked Warden intended.”
At a gesture from Barsavi Locke stumbled to his feet, already inwardly cursing the now-familiar sensation of liquor rapidly going to his head. His stomach was empty from the day’s hangover; the room was already swaying a bit around him. When he set eyes on Nazca once again, he saw that she was smiling at him above her ale-jack, with the air of smarmy tolerance the older children in Shades’ Hill had once shown to him and his compatriots in Streets.
Before he knew what he was doing, Locke bent his knee to her as well.
“If you’re the next Capa Barsavi,” he said rapidly, “I should swear to serve you, too. I do. Madam. Madam Nazca. I mean…Madam Barsavi.”
The girl took a step back. “I already have servants, boy. I have assassins. My father has a hundred gangs and two thousand knives!”
“Nazca Belonna Jenavais Angeliza de Barsavi!” her father thundered. “Now it seems you only grasp the value of strong men as servants. In time, you will come to see the value of gracious ones as well. You shame me.”
Nonplussed, the girl glanced back and forth between Locke and her father several times. Her cheeks slowly turned red. After a few more moments of pouting consideration, she stiffly held out her ale-jack to Locke.
“You may have some of my beer.”
Locke responded as though this were the deepest honor ever conferred upon him, realizing (though hardly in so many words) all the while that the liquor was somehow running a sort of rump parliament in his brain that had overruled his usual cautious social interactions-especially with girls. Her beer was bitter dark stuff, slightly salted-she drank like a Verrari. Locke took two sips to be polite, then handed it back to her, bowing in a rather noodle-necked fashion as he did so. She was too flustered to say anything in return, so she merely nodded.
“Ha! Excellent!” Capa Barsavi chomped on his slender cigar in mirth. “Your first pezon! Of course, both of your brothers are going to want some just as soon as they hear about this.”
5
THE TRIP home was a muggy, misty blur to Locke; he clung to the neck of his Gentled goat while Chains led them back north toward the Temple District, frequently cackling to himself.
“Oh, my boy,” he muttered. “My dear, dear charming sot of a boy. It was all bullshit, you realize.”
“What?”
“The shark’s tooth. Capa Barsavi had a Bondsmage enchant that thing for him in Karthain years ago. Nobody can swallow it without cutting themselves. He’s been carrying it around ever since; all those years he spent studying Throne Therin theater have given him a substantial fetish for the dramatic.”
“So it wasn’t…like, fate, or the gods, or anything like that?”
“It was just a shark’s tooth with a tiny bit of sorcery. A good trick, I have to admit.” Chains rubbed his own cheek in sympathy and remembrance. “No, Locke, you don’t belong to Barsavi. He’s good enough for what he is-a powerful ally to have on your side, and a man that you must appear to obey at all times. But he certainly doesn’t own you. In the end, neither do I.”
“So I don’t have to…”
“Obey the Secret Peace? Be a good little pezon? Only for pretend, Locke. Only to keep the wolves from the door. Unless your eyes and ears have been stitched shut with rawhide these past two days, by now you must have realized that I intend you and Calo and Galdo and Sabetha to be nothing less,” Chains confided through a feral grin, “than a fucking ballista bolt right through the heart of Vencarlo’s precious Secret Peace.”
II. COMPLICATION
“I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.”
King Henry VI, Part III
CHAPTER FOUR. AT THE COURT OF CAPA BARSAVI
1
“NINETEEN THOUSAND,” SAID Bug, “nine hundred and twenty. That’s all of it. Can I please kill myself now?”
“What? I’d have thought you’d be enthusiastic about helping us tally the loot, Bug.” Jean sat cross-legged in the middle of the dining area in the glass cellar beneath the House of Perelandro; the table and chairs had been moved away to make room for a vast quantity of gold coins, stacked into little glittering mounds that circled Jean and Bug, nearly walling them in completely.
“You didn’t tell me you’d be hauling it home in tyrins.”
“Well, white iron is dear. Nobody’s going to hand out five thousand crowns in it, and nobody’s going to be dumb enough to carry it around like that. Meraggio’s makes all of its big payouts in tyrins.”
There was a rattling noise from the entrance passage to the cellar; then Locke appeared around the corner, dressed as Lukas Fehrwight. He whipped his false optics off, loosened his cravats, and shrugged out of his wool coat, letting it fall unceremoniously to the floor. His face was flushed, and he was waving a piece of folded parchment affixed with a blue wax seal.
“Seventy-five hundred more, my boys! I told him we’d found four likely galleons, but that we were already having cash flow problems-bribes to be paid, crews to be called back and sobered up, officers to be placated, other cargo-shippers to be chased off…And he just handed it right over, smiling all the while. Gods. I should’ve thought this scam up five years ago. We don’t even have to bother setting up fake ships and paperwork and so forth, because Salvara knows the Fehrwight part of the game is a lie. There’s nothing for us to do except relax and count the money.”
“If it’s so relaxing, why don’t you count it, then?” Bug jumped to his feet and leaned backward until his back and his neck made a series of little popping noises.
“I’d be happy to, Bug.” Locke took a bottle of red wine out of a wooden cupboard and poured himself half a glass, then watered it from a brass pitcher of lukewarm rainwater until it was a soft pink. “And tomorrow you can play Lukas Fehrwight. I’m sure Don Salvara would never notice any difference. Is it all here?”
“Five thousand crowns delivered as twenty thousand tyrins,” said Jean, “less eighty for clerking fees and guards and a rented dray to haul it from Meraggio’s.”
The Gentlemen Bastards used a simple substitution scheme for hauling large quantities of valuables to their hideout at the House of Perelandro. At a series of quick stops, strongboxes of coins would vanish from one wagon and barrels marked as common food or drink would roll off on another. Even a decrepit little temple needed a steady infusion of basic supplies.
“Well,” said Locke, “let me get rid of poor Master Fehrwight’s clothes and I’ll give you a hand dumping it all in the vault.”
There were actually three vaults tucked away at the rear of the cellar, behind the sleeping quarters. Two of them were wide Elderglass-coated shafts that went down about ten feet; their original purpose was unknown. With simple wooden doors mounted on hinges set atop them, they resembled nothing so much as miniature grain-storage towers sunk into the earth and filled to a substantial depth with coins of every sort.
Silver and gold in large quantities went into the vaults; narrow wooden shelves around the periphery of the vault room held small bags or piles of more readily useful currency. There were cheap purses of copper barons, fine leather wallets with tight rolls of silver solons, and small bowls of clipped half-copper bits, all of them set out for the rapid taking for any scam or need one of the gang might face. There were even little stacks of foreign coinage; marks from the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows, solari from Tal Verrar, and so for
th.
Even back in the days of Father Chains there had been no locks on these vaults or on the room that held them. This was not merely because the Gentlemen Bastards trusted one another (and they did), nor because the existence of their luxurious cellar was a closely guarded secret (and it certainly was). The primary reason was one of practicality-not one of them, Calo or Galdo or Locke or Jean or Bug, had anything they could conceivably do with their steadily growing pile of precious metal.
Outside of Capa Barsavi, they had to be the wealthiest thieves in Camorr; the little parchment ledger set aside on one of the shelves would list more than forty-three thousand full crowns when Don Salvara’s second note was turned into cold coin. They were as wealthy as the man they were currently robbing, and far wealthier than many of his peers.
Yet so far as anyone knew, the Gentlemen Bastards were an unassuming gang of ordinary sneak thieves; competent and discreet enough, steady earners, but hardly shooting stars. They could live comfortably for ten crowns apiece each year, and to spend much more than that would invite the most unwelcome scrutiny imaginable, from every authority in Camorr, legal or otherwise.
In four years, they’d brought off three huge scores and were currently working on their fourth; for four years, the vast majority of the money had simply been counted and thrown down into the darkness of the vaults.
The truth was, Chains had trained them superbly for the task of relieving Camorr’s nobility of the burden of some of its accumulated wealth, but had perhaps neglected to discuss the possible uses of the sums involved. Other than financing further theft, the Gentlemen Bastards really had no idea what they were eventually going to do with it all.
Their tithe to Capa Barsavi averaged about a crown a week.
2
“REJOICE!” CRIED Calo as he appeared in the kitchen, just as Locke and Jean were moving the dining table back to its customary position. “The Sanza brothers are returned!”
“I do wonder,” said Jean, “if that particular combination of words has ever been uttered by anyone, before now.”
“Only in the chambers of unattached young ladies across the city,” said Galdo as he set a small burlap sack down on the table. Locke shook it open and perused the contents-a few lockets set with semiprecious stones, a set of moderately well-crafted silver forks and knives, and an assortment of rings ranging from cheap engraved copper to one made of threaded gold and platinum, set with flecks of obsidian and diamond.
“Oh, very nice,” said Locke. “Very likely. Jean, would you pick out a few more bits from the Bullshit Box, and get me…twenty solons, right?”
“Twenty’s good and proper.”
While Locke gestured for Calo and Galdo to help him set chairs back in place around the dining table, Jean walked back to the vault room, where there was a tall, narrow wooden chest tucked against the left-hand wall. He threw back the lid on its creaky hinges and began rummaging inside, a thoughtful expression on his face.
The Bullshit Box was filled to a depth of about two feet with a glittering pile of jewelry, knickknacks, household items, and decorative gewgaws. There were crystal statues, mirrors in carved ivory frames, necklaces and rings, candleholders in five kinds of precious metal. There were even a few bottles of drugs and alchemical draughts, wrapped in felt to cushion them and marked with little paper labels.
Since the Gentlemen Bastards could hardly tell the Capa about the true nature of their operations, and since they had neither the time nor the inclination to actually break into houses and clamber down chimneys, the Bullshit Box was one of the pillars of their ongoing deception. They topped it off once or twice a year, going on buying sprees in the pawnshops and markets of Talisham or Ashmere, where they could get whatever they needed openly. They supplemented it only slightly and carefully with goods picked up in Camorr, usually things stolen on a whim by the Sanzas or secured by Bug as part of his continuing education.
Jean selected a pair of silver wine goblets, a pair of gold-framed optics inside a fine leather case, and one of the little wrapped bottles. Clutching all of this carefully in one hand, he then counted twenty small silver coins off a shelf, kicked the Bullshit Box shut, and hurried back out to the dining room. Bug had rejoined the group and was ostentatiously walking a solon across the knuckles of his right hand; he’d mastered the trick only weeks previously, after long months of watching the Sanzas, who could each do both hands at once, reversing directions in perfect unison.
“Let us say,” said Jean, “that we have had a somewhat slothful week. Nobody expects much from second-story men when the nights are wet like this anyway; we might look out of place if we haul in too much. Surely His Honor will understand.”
“Of course,” said Locke. “Quite a reasonable thought.” He reached out and took the felt-wrapped bottle for close examination; his handwritten label identified it as sugared milk of opium, a rich ladies’ vice made from dried Jeremite poppies. He removed the label and the felt, then tucked the faceted glass bottle with its brass stopper into the burlap sack. The rest of the loot followed.
“Right! Now, is there any speck of Lukas Fehrwight still clinging to me? Any makeup or mummery?” He stuck out his arms and twirled several times; Jean and the Sanzas assured him that he was entirely Locke Lamora for the moment.
“Well, then, if we’re all our proper selves, let’s go pay our taxes.” Locke lifted the sack of “stolen” items and tossed it casually to Bug; the boy yelped, dropped his coin, and caught the sack with a muffled clatter of shaken metal.
“Good for my moral education, I suppose?”
“No,” said Locke, “this time I really am just being a lazy old bastard. At least you won’t have to work the barge-pole.”
3
IT WAS the third hour of the afternoon when they set out from the Temple of Perelandro, via their assorted escape tunnels and side entrances. A warm drizzle was falling from the sky, which was neatly divided as though by some ruler and stylus of the gods-low dark clouds filled the north, while the sun was just starting downward in the bright, clear southwest. The pleasant scent of fresh rain on hot stone welled up everywhere, briefly washing the usual city miasmas from the air. The Gentlemen Bastards gathered once again at the southwestern docks of the Temple District, where they hailed a gondola-for-hire.
The boat was long and shallow and heavily weathered, with a freshly killed rat lashed to the bow spar just beneath a small wooden idol of Iono; this was allegedly a peerless ward against capsizing and other misfortunes. The poleman perched at the stern like a parrot in his red-and-orange striped cotton jacket, protected from the rain by a broad-brimmed straw hat that drooped out past his skinny shoulders. He turned out to be a canal-jumper and purse-cutter of their acquaintance, Nervous Vitale Vento of the Gray Faces gang.
Vitale rigged a mildewy leather umbrella to keep some of the drizzle off his passengers, and then began to pole them smoothly east between the high stone banks of the Temple District and the overgrown lushness of the Mara Camorrazza. The Mara had once been a garden maze for a rich governor of the Therin Throne era; now it was largely abandoned by the city watch and haunted by cutpurses. The only reason honest folk even ventured into its dangerous green passages was that it was the heart of a network of footbridges connecting eight other islands.
Jean settled in to read from a very small volume of verse he’d tucked into his belt, while Bug continued practicing his coin manipulation, albeit with a copper-piece that would look much less incongruous in public. Locke and the Sanza brothers talked shop with Vitale, whose job, in part, was to mark particularly lightly guarded or heavily loaded cargo barges for the attention of his fellows. On several occasions, he made hand signals to concealed watchers on shore while the Gentlemen Bastards politely pretended not to notice.
They drew close to Shades’ Hill; even by day those heights were steeped in gloom. By chance the rain stiffened and the old kingdom of tombs grew blurred behind a haze of mist. Vitale swung the boat to the right. Soon he was pu
shing them southward between Shades’Hill and the Narrows, aided by the current of the seaward-flowing canal, now alive with the spreading ripples of raindrops.
Traffic grew steadily thinner and less reputable on the canal as they sped south; they were passing from the open rule of the duke of Camorr to the private dominion of Capa Barsavi. On the left, the forges of the Coalsmoke district were sending up columns of blackness, mushrooming and thinning out beneath the press of the rain. The Duke’s Wind would push it all down over Ashfall, the most ill-looking island in the city, where gangs and squatters contended for space in the moldering, smoke-darkened villas of an opulent age now centuries past.
A northbound barge moved past on their left, wafting forth the stench of old shit and new death. What looked to be an entire team of dead horses was lying in the barge, attended by half a dozen knackers. Some were slicing at the corpses with arm-length serrated blades while others were frantically unrolling and adjusting bloodstained tarps beneath the rain.
No Camorri could have asked for a more appropriate match for the sight and stink of the Cauldron. If the Dregs were poverty-racked, the Snare disreputable, the Mara Camorrazza openly dangerous, and Ashfall dirty and falling apart, the Cauldron was all of these things with a compound interest of human desperation. It smelled something like a keg of bad beer overturned in a mortician’s storage room on a hot summer day. Most of this district’s dead never made it as far as the pauper’s holes dug by convicts on the hills of the Beggar’s Barrow. They were tipped into canals or simply burned. No yellowjackets had dared enter the Cauldron save in platoons even before the Secret Peace; no temples had been maintained here for fifty years or more. Barsavi’s least sophisticated and restrained gangs ruled the Cauldron’s blocks; brawlers’ taverns and Gaze dens and itinerant gambling circles were packed wall to wall with families crammed into ratholes.