by Scott Lynch
“Too right. We came in through a sort of crawlway, western canal-side.” Jean slapped his forehead and looked around. “Damn me, I’ve mislaid the Sisters.”
“Never fear,” said Bug, holding them up. “I figured you’d want them back, so I kept a watch on them.”
“Much obliged, Bug,” said Jean. “I’m of a mind to use them on some people before this night is done.”
3
RUSTWATER WAS as dead as ever when they snuck out the crawlway and scrabbled up onto the canal bank just to the west of the Echo Hole. Barsavi’s procession had vanished. And although the three Gentlemen Bastards crouched low and scanned the occulted sky for any hint of a swooping hawk, they caught not a glimpse.
“Let’s make for Coalsmoke,” said Locke. “Past Beggar’s Barrow. We can steal a boat and slip home through the culvert.” The drainage culvert on the south side of the Temple District, just beneath the House of Perelandro, had a concealed slide mechanism within the cage that covered it from the outside. The Gentlemen Bastards could open it at will to come and go quietly.
“Good idea,” said Jean. “I’m not comfortable being about on the streets and bridges.”
They crept south, grateful for the low, warm mists that swirled around them. Jean had his hatchets out and was moving his head from side to side, watchful as a cat on a swaying clothesline. He led them over a bridge, with Locke constantly stumbling and falling behind, then down the southeastern shore of the Quiet. Here the lightless black heap of Beggar’s Barrow loomed in the mists to their left, and the wet stink of pauper’s graves filled the air.
“Not a watchman,” whispered Locke. “Not a Shades’ Hill boy or girl. Not a soul. Even for this neighborhood, that’s damn peculiar.”
“Has anything about tonight been right yet?” Jean set as rapid a pace as he could, and they soon crossed another bridge, south into Coalsmoke. Locke labored to keep up, clutching his aching stomach and ribs. Bug brought up their rear, constantly peering over his shoulder.
On the northeastern edge of Coalsmoke there was a line of weathered docks, sagging stairs, and crumbling stone quays. All the larger, nicer boats and barges were locked and chained, but a few small cockleshells bobbed here and there, secured by nothing more than rope. In a city full of such little boats, no sane thief would bother stealing one—most of the time.
They clambered into the first one that chanced to have an oar; Locke collapsed at the stern, while Bug took up the oar and Jean cast off the rope.
“Thank you, Bug.” Jean squeezed himself down into the wet bottom of the little wooden craft; all three of them made for a tight fit. “I’ll trade off with you in just a bit.”
“What, no crack about my moral education?”
“Your moral education’s over.” Jean stared up into the sky as the dockside receded and Bug took them out into the canal’s heart. “Now you’re going to learn a thing or two about war.”
4
UNSEEN AND undisturbed, Jean quietly paddled them up against the north bank of the canal just south of their temple. The House of Perelandro was nothing more than a dark impression of mass, lightless in the silver fog above their heads.
“Smartly, smartly,” the big man muttered to himself as he brought them abreast with the drainage culvert; it was about a yard up from the water, with an opening five feet in diameter. It led more or less directly to a concealed passage just behind the ladder that led down from the temple itself. Bug slipped a hand past the iron bars at the end of the culvert and tripped the hidden locking mechanism. He then prepared to climb in.
“I’ll go first,” he said, just before Jean grabbed him by the collar.
“I think not. The Wicked Sisters will go first. You sit down and keep the boat steady.”
Bug did so, pouting, and Locke smiled. Jean pulled himself up into the culvert and began crawling into the darkness.
“You can have the honor of going second, Bug,” said Locke. “I might need a hand pulling me up.”
When all three of them were wedged safely into the pipe, Locke turned and nudged the little boat back out into midcanal with his feet. The current would carry it to the Via Camorrazza, lost in the mists, until someone ran into it with a larger boat or claimed it as a windfall. Locke then slid the pipe cover closed and locked it once again. The Gentlemen Bastards actually oiled the hinges on the grate to keep their comings and goings quiet.
They crawled forward into blackness, surrounded by the gentle echoes of their own breathing and the soft noise of scuffing cloth. There was a quiet click as Jean operated the hidden entrance into the burrow; then a line of pale silver light spilled in.
Jean stepped out onto the wooden floor of the dim passage; just to his right, the rungs ran up into the hidden entrance beneath what had once been Father Chains’ sleeping pallet. Despite Jean’s best effort to move quietly, the floor creaked slightly as he moved forward. Locke slipped out into the passage behind him, his heart pounding.
The illumination was too dim. The walls had been golden for as long as he’d known the place.
Jean crept forward, hatchets bobbing in his fists. At the far end of the passage, he whirled around the corner, crouched low—and then stood straight up, growling, “Shit!”
The kitchen had been thoroughly trashed.
The spice cabinets were overturned; broken glass and shattered crockery littered the floor. The storage cupboards hung open, empty; the water barrel had been dumped on the tiles. The gilded chairs were torn apart, thrown into a heap in one corner. The beautiful chandelier that had swung above their heads for as long as any of them had lived within the glass burrow was a total ruin. It dangled now by a few wires, its planets and constellations smashed, its armillary paths bent beyond all possible repair. The sun that had burned at the heart of it all was cracked like an egg; the alchemical oils that had lit it from within had seeped onto the table.
Locke and Jean stood at the edge of the entrance passage, staring in shock. Bug rounded the corner, hot for action against unseen foes, and came up short between them. “I … gods. Gods.”
“Calo?” Locke abandoned all thoughts of sneaking about. “Galdo! Calo! Are you here?”
Jean swept aside the heavy curtain to the door that led to the Wardrobe. He didn’t say anything or make any noise, but the Wicked Sisters fell out of his hands and clattered against the floor tiles.
The Wardrobe, too, had been ransacked. All the rows of fine clothing and costume garments, all the hats and cravats and breeches and hose, all the waistcoats and vests and thousands of crowns worth of accessories—all of it was gone. The mirrors were smashed; the Masque Box was overturned, its contents strewn and broken across the floor.
Calo and Galdo lay beside it, on their backs, staring upward in the semidarkness. Their throats were slashed from ear to ear, a pair of smooth gashes—identical twin wounds.
5
JEAN FELL forward onto his knees.
Bug tried to squeeze past Locke, and Locke shoved him back into the kitchen with all the feeble strength he could muster, saying, “No, Bug, don’t …” But it was already too late. The boy sat down hard against the edge of the witchwood table and broke into sobs.
Gods, Locke thought as he stumbled past Jean into the Wardrobe. Gods, I have been a fool. We should have packed up and run.
“Locke …,” Jean whispered, and then he sprawled forward onto the ground, shaking and shuddering as though he were having some sort of fit.
“Jean! Gods, what now?” Locke crouched beside the bigger man and placed a hand beneath his round, heavy chin. Jean’s pulse was pounding wildly. He looked up at Locke with wide eyes, his mouth opening and closing, failing to spit out words. Locke’s mind raced.
Poison? A trap of some sort? An alchemical trick left behind in the room? Why wasn’t he affected? Did he feel so miserable already that the symptoms hadn’t caught his attention yet? He glanced frantically around the room, and his eyes seized on a dark object that lay between the sprawled Sanza t
wins.
A hand—a severed human hand, gray and dried and leathery. It lay with its palm toward the ceiling and its fingers curled tightly inward. A black thread had been used to sew a name into the dead skin of the palm; the script was crude but nonetheless clear, for it was outlined with the faintest hint of pale blue fire:
JEAN TANNEN
The things I could do to you if I were to stitch your true name. The words of the Falconer returned unbidden to Locke’s memory; Jean groaned again, his back arched in pain, and Locke reached down toward the severed hand. A dozen plans whirled in his head—chop it to bits with a hatchet, scald it on the alchemical hearthslab, throw it in the river … He had little knowledge of practical sorcery, but surely something was better than nothing.
New footsteps crunched on the broken glass in the kitchen.
“Don’t move, boy. I don’t think your fat friend can help you at the moment. That’s it, just sit right there.”
Locke slid one of Jean’s hatchets off the ground, placed it in his left hand, and stepped to the Wardrobe door.
A man was standing at the lip of the entrance hall—a complete stranger to Locke’s eyes. He wore a long brownish red oilcloak with the hood thrown back, revealing long stringy black hair and drooping black moustaches. He held a crossbow in his right hand, almost casually, pointed at Bug. His eyes widened when Locke appeared in the Wardrobe doorway.
“This ain’t right,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“You’re the Gray King’s man,” said Locke. His left hand was up against the back of the wall beside the door, as though he were holding himself up, concealing the hatchet.
“A Gray King’s man. He’s got a few.”
“I will give you any price you name,” said Locke. “Tell me where he is, what he’s doing, and how I can avoid the Bondsmage.”
“You can’t. I’ll give you that one for free. And any price I name? You got no such pull.”
“I have forty-five thousand full crowns.”
“You did,” said the crossbowman, amiably enough. “You don’t anymore.”
“One bolt,” said Locke. “Two of us.” Jean groaned from the floor behind him. “The situation bears thinking on.”
“You don’t look so well, and the boy don’t look like much. I said don’t move, boy.”
“One bolt won’t be enough,” said Bug, his eyes cold with an anger Locke had never before seen in him. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”
“One bolt,” repeated Locke. “It was for Bug, wasn’t it? If I weren’t here, you’d have shot him first thing. Then done for Jean. A commendable arrangement. But now there’s two of us, and you’re still armed for one.”
“Easy, gents,” said the Gray King’s man. “I don’t see either of you eager for a hole in the face.”
“You don’t know what you’re up against. What we’ve done.” Bug flicked his wrist, slightly, and something fell into it from his sleeve. Locke only barely caught the motion—what was that thing? An Orphan’s Twist? Oh, gods … that wouldn’t do any good against a crossbow quarrel.…
“Bug …,” he muttered.
“Tell him, Locke. Tell him he doesn’t know who he’s fucking with. Tell him he doesn’t know what he’s going to get! We can take him.”
“First one of you moves an inch, I let fly.” The crossbowman backed off a stride, braced his weapon with his left arm, and swung his aim back and forth between Locke and Bug.
“Bug, don’t.…”
“We can take him, Locke. You and I. He can’t stop both of us. Hell, I bet he can’t stop either of us.”
“Bug, listen.…”
“Listen to your friend, boy.” The intruder was sweating nervously behind his weapon.
“I’m a Gentleman Bastard,” said Bug, slowly and angrily. “Nobody messes with us. Nobody gets the best of us. You’re going to pay!”
Bug sprang upward from the floor, raising the hand that held the Orphan’s Twist, a look of absolute burning determination on his face. The crossbow snapped, and the whip-crack of its unleashed cord echoed sharply from the enclosed glass walls of the kitchen.
The bolt that was meant to catch Bug between the eyes took him in the neck instead.
He jerked back as though stung by an insect; his knees buckled only halfway into his leap, and he spun backward, his useless little Orphan’s Twist arcing out of his hands as he fell.
The Gray King’s man threw down his crossbow and reached for a blade at his belt, but Locke was preceded out the doorway by the hatchet he’d concealed, flung with all of his rage. Jean could have split the man’s head with the blade; Locke barely managed to crack him hard with the ball side of the weapon. But it was enough. The ball caught him just beneath his right eye and he flinched backward, crying out in pain.
Locke scooped up the crossbow and fell upon the intruder, howling. He swung the butt-stock of the weapon into the man’s face, and the man’s nose broke with a spray of blood. He fell backward, his head cracking against the Elderglass of the passage wall. As he slid down, he raised his hands before him in an attempt to ward off Locke’s next blow. Locke smashed his fingers with the crossbow; the screams of the two men mingled and echoed in the enclosed space.
Locke ended the affair by slamming one curved end of the bow into the man’s temple. The assassin’s head spun, blood spattered against the glass, and he sagged into the passage corner, motionless.
Locke threw down the crossbow, turned on his heel, and ran to Bug.
The bolt had pierced the boy’s neck to the right of his windpipe, toward the outer edge of his neck, where it was buried up to its rounded feathers in a spreading pool of dark blood. Locke knelt and cradled Bug’s head in his hands, feeling the tip of the crossbow quarrel on the back of Bug’s neck. Slick warmth poured out over Locke’s hands; he could feel it coursing out with every ragged breath the boy took. Bug’s eyes were wide, and they fixed on him.
“Forgive me,” Locke mumbled through his tears. “Gods damn me, Bug, this is my fault. We could have run. We should have. My pride … you and Calo and Galdo. That bolt should have been me.”
“Your pride,” the boy whispered. “Justified. Gentleman … Bastard.”
Locke pressed his fingers against Bug’s wound, imagining he could somehow dam the flow of blood, but the boy cried out, and Locke withdrew his shaking fingers.
“Justified,” Bug spat. Blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. “Am I … not a second. Not … apprentice. Real Gentleman Bastard.”
“You were never a second, Bug. You were never an apprentice.” Locke sobbed, tried to brush the boy’s hair back, and was aghast at the bloody handprint he left on Bug’s pale forehead. “You brave little idiot. You brave, stupid little bastard. This is my fault, Bug, please … please say this is all my fault.”
“No,” whispered Bug. “Oh gods … hurts … hurts so much …”
The boy said nothing more. His breathing came to one last ragged halt while Locke held him.
Locke stared upward. It seemed to him that the alien glass ceiling that had shed warm light on his life for so many long years now took a knowing pleasure in showing him nothing but dark red: the reflection of the floor on which he sat with the motionless body of Bug, still bleeding in his arms.
He might have stayed there, locked in a reverie of grief for the gods only knew how long—but Jean groaned loudly in the next room.
Locke remembered himself, shuddered, and set Bug’s head down as gently as he could. He stumbled to his feet and lifted Jean’s hatchet up off the ground once more. His motions were slow and unsteady as he walked back into the Wardrobe, raised the hatchet above his head, and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the sorcerous hand that lay between the bodies of Calo and Galdo.
The faint blue fire dimmed as the hatchet blade bit down into the desiccated flesh; Jean gasped loudly behind him, which Locke took as an encouraging sign. Methodically, maliciously, he hacked the hand into smaller
pieces. He chopped at leathery skin and brittle bones until the black threads that had spelled Jean’s name were separated and the blue glow faded entirely.
He stood staring down at the Sanzas until he heard Jean moving behind him.
“Oh, Bug. Oh, gods damn it.” The big man stumbled to his feet and groaned. “Forgive me, Locke. I just couldn’t … I couldn’t move!”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” Locke spoke as though the sound of his own voice pained him. “It was a trap. It had your name on it, that thing the mage left for us. They guessed you’d be coming back.”
“A … a severed hand? A human hand, with my name stitched into it?”
“Yes.”
“A Hanged Man’s Grasp,” said Jean, staring at the fragments of flesh, and at the bodies of the Sanzas. “I … read about them, when I was younger. Seems they work.”
“Neatly removing you from the situation,” said Locke, coldly. “So one assassin hiding up above could come down, kill Bug, and finish you.”
“Just one?”
“Just one.” Locke sighed. “Jean. In the temple rooms up above. Our lamp oil … please fetch it down.”
“Lamp oil?”
“All of it,” said Locke. “Hurry.”
Jean paused in the kitchen, knelt, and slid Bug’s eyes closed with his left hand. He buried his face in his hands and shook, making no noise. Then he stumbled back to his feet, wiping away tears, and ran off to carry out Locke’s request.
Locke walked slowly back into the kitchen, dragging the body of Calo Sanza with him. He placed the corpse beside the table, folded its arms across its chest, knelt, and kissed its forehead.
The man in the corner moaned and moved his head. Locke kicked him once in the face, then returned to the Wardrobe for Galdo’s body. In short order, he had the Sanzas laid out neatly in the middle of the ransacked kitchen, with Bug beside them. Unable to bear the glassy stare of his dead friends’ eyes, Locke covered them with silk tablecloths from a smashed cabinet.