by Scott Lynch
“I’m sure we’re fine, thanks,” said Locke.
“Glad to hear it. Just so we’re clear, though, my guards don’t stand to duty until we line up all our ducklings tomorrow morning. As long as we’re behind walls, your security is your own business. Given that you’re bedding down twenty yards from a watch barracks, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“Nor shall we.” Jean waved farewell, and convinced the horses to take them into the shadow of Camorr’s walls. Rickety overhanging panels topped about a hundred yards’ worth of barren common space in the lee of the wall, where those unwilling or unable to pay for service at the commercial stables could pull in. Sabetha, Calo, and Galdo piled out of the back of the open-topped wagon as it rolled to a stop.
“One quarter of a mile down, a mere two hundred to go,” said Locke. The humid air was heavy with the smells of old hay, animal sweat, and droppings. Other travelers were lighting lanterns, laying out bedrolls, and starting cooking fires; there were at least a dozen wagon parties stopped beside the wall. Locke wondered idly how many of them were bound for Espara as part of Vireska’s caravan.
“Let’s get you fixed up for the night, boys.” Jean hopped down from the wagon and gave a reassuring pat to the flank of the nearest cart-horse. Jean had spent several months in the role of a teamster’s apprentice two years earlier, and had assumed responsibility for driving and tending their animals without complaint. The team represented a significant portion of the money Chains had given them, but could be resold in Espara to flesh out their temporarily thinned finances.
“Sweep beneath the wagon, would you, Giacomo?” said Galdo. “Don’t want turds for pillows.”
“Sweep it your fuckin’ self, Castellano,” said Calo. “Nobody put you in charge.”
“Mind yourself,” whispered Sabetha, grabbing Calo by the arm. “We’ve got ten days on the road ahead of us. Do they have to be a miserable trial for no good reason?”
“I’m not his damn valet,” said Calo.
“That’s right.” Locke stepped between the Sanzas, thinking quickly. “None of us are. We’ll share sweeping duties, all of us. Calo starts tonight—”
“I’m Giacomo.”
“Right, sorry. Giacomo starts tonight. Other brother when we stop tomorrow. I’ll take the night after that, and so on. A fair rotation. Good enough?”
“I can live with it,” muttered Calo. “I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty. Just won’t have him putting on airs.”
Locke ground his teeth together. The Sanzas had spent the last several months steadily discarding their old habits of synchronicity in action and appearance. They took pains to distinguish themselves from one another, and their differences in grooming were the merest outward flourishes of the phenomenon. Locke would never have begrudged the twins an individualistic phase, but their timing was awkward as hell, and their ongoing spats were like fresh wood heaped on an already rising fire.
“Look,” said Locke, realizing that the gang’s mechanisms of fellowship needed oiling rather badly, “with so many taverns close at hand, I don’t see any need for us to torture ourselves with boiled beef and bag water. I’ll fetch us something more pleasing.”
“We have the coin for that sort of luxury?” said Sabetha.
“I might have cut a purse or two while I was out this morning. Just for the sake of, ah, financial flexibility.” Locke shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. “You want to come with?”
“You need me to?”
“Well … I’d like you to.”
“Hmmm.”
She stared at him for a few seconds, during which Locke experienced the curious sensation of his heart apparently sinking several inches deeper into his chest. Then she shrugged.
“I suppose.”
They left Jean with the horses, Galdo watching their supplies, and Calo gingerly cleaning the ground beneath the wagon. There was a well-lit tavern at the end of the lane beside the wall, just past the Andrazi stable, and by unspoken mutual consent they headed toward it in the gathering darkness. Locke stole a glance at Sabetha as they walked.
Her tightly bound hair was further packed beneath a close-fitting linen cap, and all of her clothing was long and loose, disguising her curves. It was the sort of dress a prudent, mild, and unassertive young woman would choose for the road, and as such it suited Sabetha not at all. Still, she wore it as well as anyone could, as far as Locke’s eyes were concerned.
“I was, ah, hoping I could talk to you,” he said.
“Easily done,” said Sabetha. “Open your mouth and let words come out.”
“I— Look, can you not … can you please not be glib with me?”
“Requesting miracles now, are we?” Sabetha looked down and kicked a stone out of her path. “Look, I’m sorry. Contemplating ten days stuck together on the road. And the brothers being … you know. The whole thing has me feeling like a hedgehog, rolled up with my spikes out. Can’t help myself.”
“Oh, a hedgehog is absolutely the last thing I would ever compare you to,” said Locke with a laugh.
“Interesting,” said Sabetha, “that I mention my own feelings, and you seem to think that what I’m after is reassurance concerning your perceptions.”
“But …” Locke felt another knot in his chest. Conversations with Sabetha always seemed to call his attention to malfunctioning internal mysteries he hadn’t previously known he possessed. “Look, come on, do you have to dissect everything I say, pin it up like an anatomist, and sift through it?”
“First I’m too glib, now I’m cutting too fine. Surely you should be pleased to be receiving such close attention to what you’re actually saying?”
“You know,” said Locke, feeling his hands shake nervously with the thought of what he was about to put in the open, “you know that when I’m around you I find it very easy to shove my foot into my mouth. Sometimes both feet. And you do see it.”
“Mmmmm,” she said.
“More than that. You make use of the advantage.”
“I do.” She looked at him strangely. “You fancy me.”
“That,” said Locke, feeling thunderstruck, “that is … really … not how I would have …”
“Not as grand in plain speech as it is up here?” She tapped her forehead.
“Sabetha, I … I value your good opinion more than anything in the world. It kills me not to have it. It kills me not to know whether I have it. We’ve lived together all these years, and still there’s this fog between us. I don’t know what I did to put it there, but I would throw myself under a cart to lift it, believe me.”
“Why do you assume it’s something you’ve done, and something you can undo at will? I’m not some arithmetic problem just waiting for you to show your work properly, Locke. Did you ever think that I might … gods, you’ve got me stumbling now. That I might be actively contributing to this … to our awkwardness?”
“Actively contributing?”
“Yes, as though I might have warm-blooded motives of my own, being as I’m not an oil painting, or some other decorative object of desire—”
“Do you like me?” said Locke, shocked at himself for blurting the question out. It was an invitation to have his heart laid out and smashed on an anvil, and there were a thousand things she could say that would do the hammer’s work. “At all? Do I ever please you with my company? Am I at least preferable to an empty room?”
“There are times when the empty room is a sore temptation.”
“But—”
“Of course I like you,” she said, raising her hands as though to touch him reassuringly. She didn’t complete the gesture. “You can be clever, and enterprising, and charming, though rarely all three at once. And … I do sometimes admire you, if it helps you to hear it.”
“It means everything to hear it,” he said, feeling the tightness in his chest turn to buoyant warmth. “It’s worth a thousand embarrassments, just to hear it. Because … because I feel the same way. About you.”
“You don’t feel the same way about me,” she said.
“Oh, but I do,” he said. “Without qualifying remarks, even.”
“That’s—”
“Hey there!”
A polished club came down on Locke’s shoulder, a gentle tap, yet impossible to ignore. The club was attached to a heavyset man in the leather harness and mustard-yellow coat of the city watch, attended by a younger comrade carrying a lantern on a pole.
“You’re in the middle of a lane,” said the big yellowjacket, “not a bloody drawing-room. Move it elsewhere.”
“Oh, of course, sir,” said Locke in one of his better respectable-citizen voices (this constable, not being agitated, didn’t require the use of Locke’s very best). He and Sabetha moved off the lane and into the shadows beneath the wall, where fireflies sketched pale green arcs against the darkness.
“No one thinks of anyone else without qualifying remarks,” said Sabetha. “I love Chains dearly, and still he and I have … disappointed one another. I’ll always be fond of the Sanzas, but right now I wish they’d go away for a year. And you—”
“I’ve frustrated you, I know.”
“And I’ve returned the favor.” She did touch him now, gently, on his upper left arm, and it took most of his self-control not to jump out of his shoes. “Nobody admires anyone else without qualification. If they do they’re after an image, not a person.”
“Well,” said Locke, “in that case, I harbor a great many resentments, reservations, and suspicions about you. Does that please you better?”
“You’re trying to be charming again,” she said softly, “but I choose not to be charmed, Locke Lamora. Not with things as they stand.”
“Can I make amends for whatever I’ve done to frustrate you?”
“That’s … complicated.”
“I like to think that I take hints as well as anyone,” said Locke. “Why not throw some at my head?”
“Going to be a lot of time to kill between here and Espara, I suppose.”
“Can we … speak again tomorrow night? After we’ve stopped?”
“The gentleman requests the favor of a personal engagement, tomorrow evening?”
“At the lady’s pleasure, before the dancing and iced wine, immediately following the grand sweep beneath the wagon for stray horseshit.”
“I may consent.”
“Then life is worth living.”
“Don’t be a dunce,” she said. “We should do our business at the tavern and get back before the Sanzas try to sneak off to the Guilded Lilies one last time.”
They came away from the tavern with cold boiled chicken, olives, black bread, and two skins of yellow wine with a flavor somewhere between turpentine and wasp piss. Simple as it was, the meal was ducal indulgence compared to the salted meat and hardtack waiting in crates on the back of their wagon. They ate in silence, distracted by the sight of the Five Towers shining in the oncoming night, and by hungry insects.
Jean volunteered to sit first watch (no Camorri ever born, least of all one who’d made it out of Shades’ Hill, would blithely trust to providence even in the literal shadow of a city watch barracks). After acknowledging this noble sacrifice, the other four curled up beneath the wagon, sweaty and mosquito-plagued, to bed down.
It occurred to Locke that this was technically the first time he and Sabetha had ever slept together in any sense of the term, even if they were separated by nothing less than a complete pair of Sanza twins.
“We crawl before we walk,” he sighed to himself. “We walk before we run.”
“Hey,” whispered Galdo, who was curled against his back, “you don’t fart in your sleep, do you?”
“How would you be able to detect a fart over your natural odor, Sanza?”
“For shame,” said Galdo. “There’s no Sanzas here, remember? I’m an Asino.”
“Oh yes,” said Locke with a yawn. “Yes, you certainly are.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE FIVE-YEAR GAME: STARTING POSITION
1
“SABETHA’S IN KARTHAIN,” said Locke.
“She could hardly do the job from elsewhere,” said Patience.
“Sabetha. My Sabetha—”
“I marvel at such a confident assertion of possession.”
“Our Sabetha, then. The Sabetha. How do you people know so gods-damned much about my life? How did you find her?”
“I didn’t,” said Patience. “Nor do I know how it was done. All I know is that her instructions and resources will mirror your own.”
“Except she has a head start,” said Jean, easing Locke back into his chair. The expression on Locke’s face was that of a prizefighter who’d just received a proper thunderbolt to the chin.
“And she’s working alone,” said Patience, “whereas you two have one another. So one might hope that her positional advantage will be purely temporary. Or is she really that much of a tiger, to set you both quaking?”
“I’m not quaking,” said Locke quietly. “It’s just … so gods-damned unexpected.”
“You’ve always hoped for a reunion, haven’t you?”
“On my own terms,” said Locke. “Does she know that it’s us she’s up against? Did she know before she took the job?”
“Yes,” said Patience.
“Your opposition, they didn’t do anything to her?”
“As far as I’m aware, she required no compulsion.”
“This is hard to take,” said Locke. “Gentlemen Bastards, well, we trained against one another, and we’ve quarreled, obviously, but we’ve never, ah, never actually opposed one another, not for real.”
“Given that she’s completely removed herself from your company for so many years now,” said Patience, “how can you believe that she still considers herself part of your gang?”
“Thank you for that, Patience,” growled Jean. “Do you have anything else for us? If not, I think we need to—”
“Yes, I’m sure you do. The cabin is yours.”
She withdrew. Locke put his head in his hands and sighed.
“I don’t expect life to make sense,” he said after a few moments, “but it would certainly be pleasant if it would stop kicking us in the balls.”
“Don’t you want to see her again?”
“Of course I want to see her again!” said Locke. “I always meant to find her. I meant to do it in Camorr; I meant to do it after we’d made a big score in Tal Verrar. I just— You know how it’s all gone. She’s not going to be impressed.”
“Maybe she wants to see you,” said Jean. “Maybe she leapt at the chance when the Bondsmagi approached her. Maybe she’d already tried to hunt us down.”
“Gods, what if she did? I wonder what she made of the mess we left behind in Camorr. I just can’t believe … working against her. Those bastards!”
“Hey, we’re just supposed to fix an election,” said Jean. “Nobody’s going to hurt her, least of all us.”
“I hope,” said Locke, brightening. “I hope … damn, I have no idea what to hope.” He spent a few minutes nibbling at his food in a nervous daze, while Jean sipped his warm red plonk.
“I do know this,” Locke said at last. “On the business side of things, we’re already in the shit.”
“Up to our elbows,” said Jean.
“Given a choice, I would have grudged her a ten-minute head start, let alone a few days.”
“Makes me think back to when Chains used to play you two off one another,” said Jean. “All those arguments … all those stalemates. Then more arguments.”
“Don’t think I don’t remember.” Locke tapped a piece of biscuit distractedly against the table. “Well, hell. It’s been five years. Maybe she’s learned to lose gracefully. Maybe she’s out of practice.”
“Maybe trained monkeys will climb out of my ass and pour me a glass of Austershalin brandy,” said Jean.
2
DAWN OVER the Amathel, the next morning. A hazy golden-orange ribbon rose from the eastern
horizon, and the calm dark waters mirrored the cobalt sky. A dozen fishing boats were moving past the Sky-Reacher in a swarm, their triangular white wakes giving the small craft the appearance of arrowheads passing in dreamlike slow motion. Karthain itself was coming up to larboard, not half a mile away.
From the quarterdeck, Jean could see the clean white terraces of the city, bulwarked with thick rows of olive and cypress and witchwood trees, misted with a silver morning fog that gave him an unexpected pang for Camorr. A blocky stone lighthouse dominated the city’s waterfront, though at the moment its great golden lanterns were banked down so that their glow was no more than a warm aura crowning the tower.
Locke leaned against the taffrail, staring at the approaching city, eating cold beef and hard white cheese he’d piled awkwardly into his right hand. Locke had paced the great cabin most of the night, unable or unwilling to sleep, settling into his hammock only to rest his unsteady legs.
“How do you feel?” Patience, wrapped in a long coat and shawl, chose not to appear out of thin air, but approached them on foot.
“Ill-used,” said Locke.
“At least you’re alive to feel that way.”
“No need to drop hints. You’ll get your command performance out of us, never worry about that.”
“I wasn’t worried,” she said sweetly. “Here comes our dock detail.”
“Dock detail?” Jean glanced past Patience and saw a long, low double-banked boat rowed by twenty people approaching behind the last of the fishing boats.
“To bring the Sky-Reacher in,” said Patience, “and mind her lines and sails and other tedious articles.”
“Not in the mood to wiggle your fingers and square everything away?” said Locke.
“One of the few things that we agree upon, exceptionalists and conservatives alike, is that our arts don’t exist for the sake of swabbing decks.”
The dock detail came aboard at the ship’s waist, a very ordinary-looking pack of sailors. Patience beckoned for Locke and Jean to follow her as two of the newcomers took the wheel.
“I do assume you’re carrying your hatchets, Jean? And all of the documents I gave you?”