by Scott Lynch
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 pushing 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.
It was commonly held that one in three of Camorr’s Right People were crammed into the Cauldron—a thousand wasters and cutthroats bickering endlessly and terrorizing their neighbors, accomplishing nothing and going nowhere. Locke had come out of Catchfire, Jean from the comfortable North Corner. Calo and Galdo had been Dregs boys prior to their stay in Shades’ Hill. Only Bug had come out of the Cauldron, and he had never once spoken of it, not in the four years he’d been a Gentleman Bastard.
He was staring at it now, at the sagging docks and layered tenements, at the clothes flapping on washlines, soaking up water. The streets were brown with the unhealthy haze of sodden cookfires. Its floodwalls were crumbling, its Elderglass mostly buried in grime and piles of stone. Bug’s coin had ceased to flow across his knuckles and stood still on the back of his left hand.
A few minutes later, Locke was privately relieved to slip past the heart of the Cauldron and reach the high, thin breakwater that marked the eastern edge of the Wooden Waste. Camorr’s maritime graveyard seemed positively cheerful by comparison once the boat had put the Cauldron to its stern.
A graveyard it was; a wide sheltered bay, larger than the Shifting Market, filled with the bobbing, undulating wrecks of hundreds of ships and boats. They floated hull-up and hull-down, anchored as well as drifting freely, some merely rotting while others were torn open from collisions or catapult stones. A layer of smaller wooden debris floated on the water between the wrecks like scum on cold soup, ebbing and resurging with the tide. When Falselight fell, this junk would sometimes ripple with the unseen passage of creatures drawn in from Camorr Bay, for while tall iron gates shuttered every major canal against intrusion, the Wooden Waste was open to the sea on its south side.
At the heart of the Waste floated a fat, dismasted hulk, sixty yards long and nearly half as wide, anchored firmly in place by chains leading down into the water; two at the bow and two at the stern. Camorr had never built anything so heavy and ungainly; that vessel was one of the more optimistic products of the arsenals of distant Tal Verrar, just as Chains had told Locke many years before. Wide silk awnings now covered its high, flat castle decks; beneath those canopies parties could be thrown that rivaled the pleasure pavilions of Jerem for their decadence. But at the moment the decks were clear of everything but the cloaked shapes of armed men, peering out through the rain—Locke could see at least a dozen of them, standing in groups of two or three with longbows and crossbows at hand.
There was human movement here and there throughout the Waste; some of the less damaged vessels housed families of squatters, and some of them were being openly used as observation points by more teams of hard-looking men. Vitale navigated through the twisting channels between larger wrecks, carefully making obvious hand gestures at the men on guard whenever the gondola passed them.
“Gray King got another one last night,” he muttered, straining against his pole. “Lots of twitchy boys with big murder-pieces keeping an eye on us right now, that’s for damn sure.”
“Another one?” Calo narrowed his eyes. “We hadn’t heard yet. Who got it?”
“Tall Tesso, from the Full Crowns. They found him up in Rustwater, nailed to the wall of an old shop, balls cut off. His blood ran out, is what it looked like.”
Locke and Jean exchanged a glance, and Nervous Vitale grunted.
“Acquainted, were you?”
“After a fashion,” said Locke, “and some time ago.”
Locke pondered. Tesso was—had been—garrista of the Full Crowns; one of Barsavi’s big earners, and a close friend of the capa’s younger son, Pachero. Nobody in Camorr should have been able to touch him (save only Barsavi and the Spider), yet that damned invisible lunatic calling himself the Gray King had touched him in no uncertain terms.
“That’s six,” said Jean, “isn’t it?”
“Seven,” said Locke. “There haven’t been this many dead gods-damned garristas since you and I were five years old.”
“Heh,” said Vitale, “and to think I once envied you, Lamora, even with this tiny little gang of yours.”
Locke glared at him, willing the puzzle to come together in his head and not quite succeeding. Seven gang leaders in two months; all of them given the distance, but otherwise having little in common. Locke had long taken comfort in his own lack of importance to the capa’s affairs, but now he began to wonder. Might he be on someone’s list? Did he have some unguessed value to Barsavi that the Gray King might want to end with a crossbow bolt? How many others were between him and that bolt?
“Damn,” said Jean, “as if things needed to get more complicated.”
“Maybe we should take care of … current business.” Galdo had shifted against the side of the gondola and was looking around as he spoke. “And then maybe we should get lost for a while. See Tal Verrar, or Talisham … or at least get you out, Locke.”
“Nonsense.” Locke spat over the side of the boat. “Sorry, Galdo. I know it seems like wisdom, but do the sums. The capa would never forgive our running out in his desperate hour. He’d rescind the distance and put us under the thumb of the most graceless pig-hearted motherfucker he could find. We can’t run as long as he stays. Hell, Nazca would break my knees with a mallet before anyone else did anything.”
“You have my sympathy, boys.” Vitale shifted his pole from hand to hand, using precise shoves to warp the gondola around a chunk of debris too large to ignore. “Canal
work ain’t easy, but at least nobody wants me dead for more’n the usual reasons. Did you want me to leave you at the Grave or at the quay?”
“We need to see Harza,” said Locke.
“Oh, he’s sure to be in a rare mood today.” Vitale began poling hard for the northern edge of the Waste, where a few stone docks jutted out before a row of shops and rooming houses. “The quay it is, then.”
4
THE PAWNSHOP of No-Hope Harza was one of the major landmarks of the reign of Capa Barsavi. While there were many shops that paid slightly more and a great many with less surly proprietors, there were no others located a bare stone’s throw from the very seat of the capa’s power. Right People cashing in their creatively acquired loot with Harza could be sure that their presence would be reported to Barsavi. It never hurt to reinforce the impression that one was an active, responsible thief.
“Oh, of course,” said the old Vadran as Jean held the barred and armored door open for the other four Gentlemen Bastards. “Figures only the least important garristas would dare show their faces on a day like this. Come in, my ill-looking sons of Camorri bitches. Rub your oily Therin fingers on my lovely merchandise. Drip water on my beautiful floors.”
Harza’s shop was always closed up like a coffin, rain or shine. Dusty canvas sheets were drawn over the narrow, barred windows; and the place smelled of silver polish, mildew, stale incense, and old sweat. Harza himself was a snow-skinned old man with wide, watery eyes; every seam and wrinkle on his face seemed to be steadily sliding toward the ground, as though he’d been shaped by a slightly drunk god who’d pressed the mortal clay just a little too far down. No-Hope had earned his moniker with his firm policy against extending credit or loaning coin; Calo had once remarked that if he ever took an arrow in the skull he’d sit around and wait for it to fall out on its own before he’d pay a physiker for so much as a gauze scrap.
In the right-hand corner of the shop a burly, bored-looking young man with cheap brass on all of his fingers and greasy ringlets hanging in his eyes shifted his position on the tall wooden stool he occupied. An iron-studded club swung from a loop at his belt, and he nodded slowly at the visitors, unsmiling, as though they were too stupid to comprehend his function.
“Locke Lamora,” said Harza. “Perfume bottles and ladies’ smallclothes. Tableware and drinking goblets. Scraped and dented metal I can’t sell to anyone with any class ever again. You breakers and second-story boys think you’re so clever. You’d steal shit from a dog’s asshole if you had the right sort of bag to bring it home with you.”
“Funny you should say that, Harza, because this bag here”—Locke plucked the burlap sack from Bug’s hands and held it up—“happens to contain—”
“Something other than dogshit; I can hear it jingling. Give over and let’s see if you accidentally brought in anything worth buying.”
Harza’s nostrils flared as he opened the sack and slid it along a leather pad atop his shop counter, gently spilling the contents. The appraisal of stolen goods seemed to be the only form of sensual gratification left to the old man, and he dove into the task with enthusiasm, long crooked fingers wiggling.
“Crap.” He lifted the three lockets secured by Calo and Galdo. “Fucking alchemical paste and river agates. Not fit for goat feed. Two coppers apiece.”
“Harsh,” said Locke.
“Fair,” said Harza. “Yes or no?”
“Seven coppers for all three.”
“Two times three is six,” said Harza. “Say yes or go twist a shark’s balls, for all I care.”
“I suppose I’ll say yes, then.”
“Hmmm.” Harza perused the silver goblets Jean had selected from the Bullshit Box. “Dented, of course. You idiots never see a pretty silver thing you don’t want to stuff inside a scratchy fucking bag. I suppose I can polish them and send them upriver. One solon three coppers apiece.”
“One solon four per,” said Locke.
“Three solons one copper total.”
“Fine.”
“And this.” Harza picked up the bottle of opium milk, unscrewed the cap, sniffed, grunted to himself, and sealed the vial once again. “Worth more than your life, but I can’t hardly do much with it. Fussy bitches like to make their own or get an alchemist to do it for them; they never buy premixed from strangers. Maybe I can pass it off on some poor fucker that needs a vacation from grapes or Gaze. Three solons three barons.”
“Four solons two.”
“The gods wouldn’t get four and two from me. Morgante himself with a flaming sword and ten naked virgins yanking at my breeches might get four solons one. You get three and four and that’s final.”
“Fine. And only because we’re in a hurry.”
Harza was keeping a running total with a goose quill and a scrap of parchment; he ran his fingers over the small pile of cheap rings from Calo and Galdo and laughed. “You can’t be serious. This crap is as welcome as a pile of severed dog cocks.”
“Oh come on …”
“I could sell the dog cocks to the knackers, at least.” Harza flung the brass and copper rings at the Gentlemen Bastards one by one. “I’m serious. Don’t bring that crap around; I’ve got boxes on boxes of the fucking things I won’t sell this side of death.”
He came to the threaded gold and platinum ring with the diamond and obsidian chips. “Mmmm. This one signifies, at least. Five solons flat. Gold’s real, but the platinum’s cheap Verrari shit, genuine as a glass eye. And I crap bigger diamonds five or six times weekly.”
“Seven and three,” said Locke. “I went to pains to get that particular piece.”
“I have to pay extra because your ass and your brains switched places at birth? I think not; if that were the case I’d have heard about it before. Take your five and consider yourself lucky.”
“I can assure you, Harza, that nobody who comes to this shop considers himself particularly …”
And so it went—the apparently summary judgment, the two-way flow of abuse, the grudging assent from Locke, and the gnashing of the old man’s remaining teeth when he took each item and set it down behind the counter. In short order Harza was sweeping the last few things he had no interest in back into the burlap sack. “Well, sweetmeats, looks as though we’re quits at sixteen solons five. I suppose it beats driving a shit-wagon, doesn’t it?”
“Or running a pawnshop, yes,” said Locke.
“Very amusing!” cried the old man as he counted out sixteen tarnished silver coins and five smaller copper discs. “I give you the legendary lost treasure of Camorr. Grab your things and fuck off until next week. Assuming the Gray King doesn’t get you first.”
5
THE RAIN had faded back to a drizzle when they emerged from Harza’s shop, giggling to themselves. “Chains used to claim that there’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated,” said Locke.
“Gods, yes.” Calo rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue. “If we were any freer we’d float away into the sky and fly like the birds.”
From the northern edge of the Wooden Waste, a long, high wooden bridge, wide enough for two people, ran straight out to the capa’s water-bound fortress. There were four men on guard at the shore, standing around in the open with weapons clearly visible under their lightweight oilcloaks. Locke surmised there would be at least as many concealed nearby, within easy crossbow shot. He made the month’s proper hand signs as he approached with his gang behind him; everyone here knew each other, but the formalities were nonnegotiable, especially at a time like this.
“Hullo, Lamora.” The oldest man in the guard detail, a wiry old fellow with faded shark tattoos running up his neck and his cheeks all the way to his temples, reached out; they grasped left forearms. “Heard about Tesso?”
“Yeah, hullo yourself, Bernell. One of the Gray Faces told us on the way down. So it’s true? Nailed up, balls, the whole bit?”
“Balls, the whole bit. You can imagine how the boss feels about it. Speaking of
which, Nazca left orders. Just this morning—next time you came by she wanted to see you. Said not to let you pay your taxes until she’d had a word. You are here for taxes, right?”
Locke shook a little gray purse; Jean’s twenty solons plus Harza’s sixteen and change. “Here to do our civic duty, indeed.”
“Good. Not passing many folks for any other reason. Look, I know you’ve got the distance and Nazca’s a friend and all, but maybe you want to take it real easy today, right? Lots of pezon around, obvious and not so obvious. Tight as it’s ever been. Capa’s making inquiries with some of the Full Crowns right now, as regards their whereabouts last night.”
“Inquiries?”
“In the grand old fashion. So mind your manners and don’t make any sudden moves, right?”
“Savvy,” said Locke. “Thanks for the warning.”
“No trouble. Crossbow bolts cost money. Shame to waste them on the likes of you.”
Bernell waved them through, and they strolled down the wooden walkway, which was about a hundred yards long. It led to the stern of the wide, motionless vessel, where the timbers of the outer hull had been cut away and replaced with a pair of iron-reinforced witchwood doors. Another pair of guards stood here, one male and one female, the dark circles under their eyes plainly evident. The woman knocked four times at their approach, and the doors swung inward just a few seconds later. Stifling a yawn, the female guard leaned back against the outer wall and pulled the hood of her oilcloak up over her head. The dark clouds were sweeping in from the north, and the heat of the sun was starting to fade.
The reception hall of the Floating Grave was nearly four times Locke’s height, as the cramped horizontal decks of the old galleon had been torn out long ago, save for the upper castle and waist decks, which now served as roofs. The floor and walls were coffee-colored hardwood; the bulkheads were hung with black and red tapestries on which shark’s-teeth border patterns were embroidered in gold and silver thread.