Red Seas Under Red Skies gb-2

by Scott Lynch 2007

  “The Guild of Scribes. That cargo boat’s flying a Guild of Letter-Pressers” flag. It must be carrying a printing press from the Artificers” Crescent. You ever seen a press?” “Heard of them. For the first time just a few months ago, in fact.”

  “The scribes don’t like “em. Think they’ll put their trade out of business. So they” ve been running ambushes when the Letter-Pressers try to get one across the bay. There must be six or seven of those new presses on the bottom by now. Plus a few bodies. It’s a big, fat, weeping mess, you ask me.” “I’m inclined to agree.”

  “Well, hopefully they won’t come up with anything that can replace a good team of honest rowers. Here’s your dock, sir, quite a bit ahead of schedule if I’m correct. You want us to wait around?”

  “By all means,” said Jean. “Amusing help is so hard to find. I expect I won’t be but an hour.” “At your service, then, Master de Ferra.”

  2

  The Crescent was not exclusive to the Great Guild of Artificers, though it was where the majority of them chose to settle, and where their private halls and clubs loomed on virtually every street-corner, and where they were most tolerated in their habit of leaving incomprehensible and occasionally hazardous devices out in plain sight. Jean made his way up the steep steps of the Avenue of the Brass Cockatrice, past candle-merchants and blade-sharpeners and ven-iparsifers (mystics who claimed to be able to read the full sweep of someone’s destiny from the pattern of blood vessels visible on their hands and forearms). At the top of the avenue he dodged away from a slim young woman in a four-cornered hat and sun veil walking a valcona on a reinforced leather leash. Valcona were flightless attack-birds, larger than hunting hounds. With their vestigial wings folded back along their stout bodies, they hopped about on claws that could tear out fist-sized chunks of human flesh. They bonded like affectionate babies to one person and were perfectly happy to kill anyone else in the entire world, at any time.

  “Good killer bird,” muttered Jean. “Pretty threat to life and limb. What a lovely little girl or boy or thing you are.”

  The creature chirruped a little warning at him and scampered after its mistress.

  Huffing and sweating, Jean made his way up another set of switchback stairs and made an irritated mental note that a few hours of training would do his spreading gut some good. Jerome de Ferra was a man who viewed exercise solely as a means of getting from bed to the gambling tables and back again. Forty feet, sixty feet, eighty feet… up from the waterfront, up the second and third tiers of the island, up to the fourth and topmost, where the eccentric influence of the artificers was at its strongest.

  The shops and houses on the fourth tier of the Crescent were provided with water by an extremely elaborate network of aqueducts. Some of them were the stones-and-pillars of the Therin Throne era, while others were merely leather chutes supported by wooden struts. Water wheels, windmills, gears, counterweights and pendulums swung everywhere Jean looked. Rearranging the water supply was a game the artificers played among themselves; the only rule was that nobody’s supply was to be cut off at the point of final delivery. Every few days, a new offshoot of some duct or a new pumping apparatus would appear, stealing water from an older duct or pumping apparatus. A few days later another artificer would divert water through another new channel and the battle would continue. Tropical storms would invariably litter the streets of the Crescent with cogs and mechanisms and ductwork, and the artificers would invariably rebuild their water-channels twice as strangely as before. Glassbender Street ran the full length of the topmost tier. Jean turned to his left and hurried along the cobbles. The strange smells of glassmaking wafted out at him from shopfronts; through open doors he could see artisans spinning glowing orange shapes at the ends of long poles. A small crowd of alchemists” assistants brushed past him, hogging the street. They wore the trademark red skullcaps of their profession, and displayed the chemical burns along their hands and faces that were their badges of pride.

  He passed the Avenue of the Cog-Scrapers, where a small crowd of labourers were seated before their shops, cleaning and polishing pieces of metal. Some were under the direct scrutiny of impatient artificers, who grumbled unhelpful directions and stamped their feet nervously. This intersection was the south-western end of the fourth tier; there was nowhere else to go except down — or out along the forty-foot walk to the home of Azura Gallardine.

  At the cul-de-sac end to Glassbender Street was an arc of shopfronts, with one gap like a tooth knocked out of a smile. Jutting beyond this gap was an Elderglass pylon, anchored to the stone of the fourth tier for some unfathomable Eldren reason. The pylon was about a foot and a half wide, flat-topped and forty feet long. It speared out into the empty air, fifteen yards above the rooftops of a winding street down on the third tier.

  The house of Azura Gallardine was perched at the far end of that pylon like a three-storey bird’s nest on the tip of a branch. The Second Mistress of the Great Guild of Artificers had discovered an ideal means of assuring her privacy — only those with very serious business, or very sincere need of her skills, would be mad enough to scamper out along the pylon that led to her front door.

  Jean swallowed, rubbed his hands together and said a brief prayer to the Crooked Warden before stepping out onto the Elderglass. “It can’t be that difficult,” he muttered. “I” ve been through worse. It’s just a short little walk. No need to look down. I’m as steady as a laden galleon.”

  With his hands held out at his sides for balance, he began to make his way carefully along the pylon. It was curious, how the breeze appeared to pick up as he crossed, and how the sky looked suddenly wider above him… He fixed his eyes firmly on the door before him and (unbeknownst to himself) ceased to breathe until his hands were planted firmly on that door. He gasped in a deep breath and wiped his brow, which had sprung an embarrassing quantity of sweat. Azura Gallardine’s house was solidly crafted from white stone blocks.

  It had a high peaked roof crowned with a squeaking windmill and a large leather rain-collection bladder in a wooden frame. The door was decorated with relief carvings of gears and other clockwork mechanisms, and beside it a brass plate was set into the stone. Jean pressed the plate and heard a gong echoing within the house. Smoke from cookfires below curled up past him while he stood there waiting for some response.

  He was about to press the plate again when the door creaked open. A short, scowling woman appeared in the gap between the door and its frame, staring up at him. She had to be on the downside of sixty, Jean thought — her reddish skin was lined like the joints of an aged leather garment. She was heavyset, with a vaguely froglike bulge of flesh at her throat and jowly features drooping like sculptor’s putty from her high cheekbones. Her white hair was tightly braided with alternating rings of brass and black iron, and most of the visible flesh on her hands, forearms and neck was covered in elaborate, slightly faded tattoos.

  Jean set his right foot before his left and bowed at a forty-five-degree angle, with his left hand flung out and his right tucked beneath his stomach. He was about to start conjuring verbal flowers when Guildmistress Gallardine seized him by his collar and dragged him into her house. “Ow! Madam, please! Allow me to introduce myself!”

  “You’re too fat and well dressed to be an apprentice after patronage,” she replied, “so you must be here to beg a favour, and when your kind says hello, it tends to take a while. No, shut up.”

  Her house smelled like oil, sweat, stone dust and heated metal. The interior was one tall, hollow space, the strangest cluttered conglomeration Jean had ever seen. There were man-sized arched windows on the right— and left-hand walls, but every other inch of wall space was taken up with a sort of scaffolding that supported a hundred wooden shelves crammed with tools, materials and junk. At the top of the scaffolding, set upon a makeshift floor of planks, Jean could see a sleeping pallet and a desk beneath a pair of hanging alchemical lamps. Ladders and leather cords hung down in several places; books and s
crolls and half-empty corked bottles covered most of the floor. “If I” ve come at a bad time—” “It’s usually a bad time, Young Master Interloper. A client with an interesting request is about the only thing that ever changes that. So what’s it to be?”

  “Guildmistress Gallardine, everyone I” ve asked has sworn that the most subtle, most accomplished, most imitated artificer in all of Tal Verrar is none other than y—”

  “Stop bathing me with your flattery, boy,” said the old woman, waving her hands. “Look around you. Gears and levers, weights and chains. You don’t need to lick them with pretty words to make them work — nor me.”

  “As you wish,” said Jean, straightening up and reaching within his coat. “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t extend one small courtesy, however.”

  From within his coat he brought forth a small package wrapped in cloth-of-silver. The neat corners of the wrapping were drawn together beneath a red wax seal, stamped into a curled disc of shaved gold.

  Jean’s informants had all mentioned Gallardine’s single human failing: a taste for presents as strong as her distaste for flattery and interruptions. She knitted her eyebrows, but did manage a ghost of an anticipatory smile as she took the package in her tattooed hands.

  “Well,” she said, “well, we must all certainly be able to live with ourselves…”

  She popped the disc-seal and pried the cloth-of silver apart with the eagerness of a little girl. The package contained a rectangular bottle with a brass stopper, filled with milky white liquid. She sucked in her breath when she read the label.

  “White Plum Austershalin,” she whispered. “Twelve gods. Who have you been speaking to?”

  Brandy mixes were a Tal Verrar peculiarity: fine brandies from elsewhere (in this case, the peerless Austershalin of Emberlain) mixed with local liquor from rare alchemical fruits (and there were none rarer than the heavenly white plum), bottled and aged together to produce cordials that could blast the tongue into numbness with the richness of their flavour. The bottle held perhaps two glasses of White Plum Austershalin, and it was worth forty-five solari.

  “A few knowledgeable souls,” said Jean, “who said you might appreciate a modest draught.” “This is hardly modest, Master…” “De Ferra. Jerome de Ferra, at your service.”

  “Quite the opposite, Master de Ferra. What do you want me to do for you?”

  “Well — if you” d really prefer to get to the nub of the matter, I don’t have a specific need just yet. What I have are… questions.” “About what?” “Vaults.”

  Guildmistress Gallardine cradled her brandy mix like a new baby and said, “Vaults, Master de Ferra? Simple storage vaults, with mechanical conveniences, or secure vaults, with mechanical defences?” “My taste, madam, runs more toward the latter.” “What is it you wish to guard?”

  “Nothing,” said Jean. “It is more a matter of something I wish to unguard.”

  “Are you locked out of a vault? Needing someone to loosen it up a bit for you?” “Yes, madam. It’s just…” “Just what?”

  Jean licked his lips again and smiled. “I had heard, well, credible rumours that you might be amenable to the sort of work I might suggest.”

  She fixed him with a knowing stare. “Are you implying that you don’t necessarily own the vault that you’re locked out of?” “Heh. Not necessarily, no.”

  She paced around the floor of her house, stepping over books and bottles and mechanical devices.

  “The law of the Great Guild,” she said at last, “forbids any one of us from directly interfering with the work of another, save by invitation, or at the need of the state.” There was another pause. “However… it’s not unknown for advice to be given, schematics to be examined… in the interest of advancing the craft, you understand. It’s a form of testing to destruction. It’s how we critique one another, as it were.”

  “Advice would be all that I ask,” said Jean. “I don’t even need a locksmith; I just need information to arm a locksmith.”

  “There are few who could better arm such a one than myself. Before we discuss the matter of compensation, tell me — do you know the designer of the vault you” ve got your eyes on?” “I do.” “And it is?” “Azura Gallardine.” f

  The guildmistress took a step away from him, as though a forked tongue had suddenly flicked out between his lips. “Help you circumvent my own work? Are you mad?”

  “I had hoped,” said Jean, “that the identity of the vault-owner might be one that wouldn’t raise any particular pangs of sympathy.” “Who and where?” “Requin. The Sinspire.”

  “Twelve gods, you are mad!” Gallardine glanced around as though checking the room for spies before she continued. “That certainly does raise pangs of sympathy! Sympathy for myself!”

  “My pockets are deep, Guildmistress. Surely there must be a sum that would alleviate your qualms?”

  “There is no sum in this world,” said the old woman, “large enough to convince me to give you what you ask for. Your accent, Master de Ferra… I believe I place it. You’re from Talisham, are you not?” “Yes.” “And Requin — you” ve studied him, have you?” “Thoroughly, of course.”

  “Nonsense. If you” d studied him thoroughly, you wouldn’t be here. Let me tell you a little something about Requin, you poor rich Talishani simpleton. Do you know that woman of his, Selendri? The one with the brass hand?” “I” ve heard that he keeps no other close to him.” “And that’s all you know?” “Ah, more or less.”

  “Until several years ago,” said Gallardine, “it was Requin’s custom to host a grand masque at the Sinspire each Day of Changes. A mad revel, in thousand-solari costumes, of which his were always the grandest. Well, one year he and that beautiful young woman of his decided to switch costumes and masks. On a whim.

  “An assassin,” she continued, “had dusted the inside of Requin’s costume with something devilish. The blackest sort of alchemy, a kind of aqua regia for human flesh. It was just a powder… it needed sweat and warmth to bring it to life. And so that woman wore it for nearly half an hour, until she’d just begun to sweat and enjoy herself. And that’s when she started to scream.

  “I wasn’t there. But there were artificers of my acquaintance in the crowd, and they say she screamed and screamed until her voice broke. Until there was nothing coming from her throat but a hiss, and still she kept trying to scream. Only one side of the costume was doused with the stuff… a perverse gesture. Her skin bubbled and ran like hot tar. Her flesh steamed, Master de Ferra. No one had the courage to touch her, except Requin. He cut her costume off, demanded water, worked over her feverishly. He wiped her burning skin clean with his jacket, with scraps of cloth, with his bare hands. He was so badly burned himself that he wears gloves to this day, to hide his own scars.” “Astonishing,“said Jean.

  “He saved her life,” said Gallardine, “what was left of it to save. Surely you” ve seen her face. One eye evaporated, like a grape in a bonfire. Her toes required amputation. Her fingers were burned twigs, her hand a blistered waste. It had to go as well. They had to cut off a breast, Master de Ferra. I assure you, you can have no conception of quite what that means — it would mean much to me now, and it has been many long years since I was last thought comely.

  “When she was abed, Requin passed the word to all of his gangs, all of his thieves, all of his contacts, all of his friends among the rich and the powerful. He offered a thousand solari, no questions asked, for anyone who could give him the identity of the would-be poisoner. But there was quite a bit of fear concerning this particular assassin, and Requin was not nearly as respected then as he is now. He received no answer. The next night, he offered five thousand solari, no questions asked, and still received no answer. The third night, he repeated his offer, for ten thousand solari, fruitlessly. On the fourth night, he offered twenty thousand… and still not one person came forward.

  “And so the murders started the very next night. At random. Among the thieves, among the al
chemists, among the servants of the Priori. Anyone who might have access to useful information. One a night, silent work, absolutely professional. Each victim had his or her skin peeled off with a knife, on their left side. As a reminder.

  “And so his gangs, and his gamblers, and his associates begged him to stop. “Find me an assassin,” he told them, “and I will.” And they pleaded, and they made their inquiries, and came back with nothing. So he began to kill two people per night. He began to kill wives, husbands, children, friends. One of his gangs rebelled, and they were found dead the next morning. All of them. Every attempt to slay him in return failed. He tightened his grip on his gangs and purged them of the weak-hearted. He killed and killed and killed, until the entire city was in a frenzy to turn over every rock, to kick in every door for him. Until nothing could be worse than to keep disappointing him. At last, a man was brought before him who satisfied his questions.

  “Requin,” said Gallardine with a long, dry sigh, “set that man inside a wooden frame, chained there, on his left side. The frame was filled with alchemical cement, which was allowed to harden. The frame was tipped up — so you see, the man was half-sealed into a stone wall, all along his left side, from his feet to the top of his head. He was tipped up and left standing in Requin’s vault to die. Requin would go in himself and force water down the man’s throat each day. His trapped limbs rotted, festered, made him sick. He died slowly, starving and gangrenous, sealed into the most perfectly hideous physical torture I have ever heard of in all my long years.

  “So you will forgive me,” she said, taking Jean gently by the arm and leading him toward the left-hand window, “if Requin is one client with whom I intend to maintain absolute faith until the Lady Most Kind sweeps my soul out of this old sack of bones.” “But surely, there’s no need for him to know?”

  “And just as surely, Master de Ferra, there is the fact that I would never chance it. Never.” “But surely, a small consideration—”