by Scott Lynch
“Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll show you a thing or three, you son of a bloody silk merchant.”
Locke tore his bedding apart, knotting sheet-ends to blankets, inviting twinges from his injuries. The pain only seemed to drive him on faster. He tightened his last knot, threw open the shutters, and tossed his makeshift rope out the window. He tied the end in his hands to his bed frame. It wasn’t a terribly sturdy piece of furniture, but then, he didn’t weigh all that much.
Out the window he went.
Vel Virazzo was an old, low city; Locke’s impressions as he swung there, three stories above the faintly misted street, came in flashes. Flat-topped, sagging buildings of stone and plaster…reefed sails on black masts in the harbor…white moonlight gleaming on dark water…red lights burning atop glass pylons, in a line receding out toward the horizon. Locke shut his eyes, clung to his sheets, and bit his tongue to avoid throwing up.
It seemed easiest to simply let himself slide downward; he did so in fits and starts, letting his palms grow warm against the sheets and blankets before stopping. Down ten feet…twenty…he balanced precariously on the top sill of the inn’s common-room window and gasped in a few deep breaths before continuing. Warm as the night was, he was getting chilly from the soaking he’d received.
The last end of the last sheet ended about six feet off the ground; Locke slid down as far as he could, then let himself drop. His heels slapped against the cobblestones, and he found that Jean Tannen was already waiting for him, with a cheap gray cloak in his hands. Before Locke could move, Jean flung the cloak around his shoulders.
“You son of a bitch,” cried Locke, pulling the cloak around himself with both hands. “You snake-souled, dirty-minded son of a bitch! I hope a shark tries to suck your cock!”
“Why, Master Lamora, look at you,” said Jean. “Charming a lock, climbing out a window. Almost as though you used to be a thief.”
“I was pulling off hanging offenses when you were still teeth-on-tits in your mother’s arms!”
“And I’ve been pulling off hanging offenses while you’ve been sulking in your room, drinking away your skills.”
“I’m the best thief in Vel Virazzo,” growled Locke, “drunk or sober, awake or asleep, and you damn well know it.”
“I might have believed that once,” said Jean. “But that was a man I knew in Camorr, and he hasn’t been with me for some time.”
“Gods damn your ugly face,” yelled Locke as he stepped up to Jean and punched him in the stomach. More surprised than hurt, Jean gave him a solid shove. Locke flew backward, cloak whirling as he tried to keep his balance—until he collided with a man who’d been coming down the street.
“Mind your fucking step!” The stranger, a middle-aged man in a long orange coat and the prim clothes of a clerk or a lawscribe, wrestled for a few seconds with Locke, who clutched at him for support.
“A thousand pardons,” said Locke, “A thousand pardons, sir. My friend and I were merely having a discussion; the fault is all mine.”
“I daresay it is,” said the stranger, at last succeeding in prying Locke from his coat lapels and thrusting him away. “You have breath like a wine cask! Bloody Camorri.”
Locke watched until the man was a good twenty or thirty yards down the street, then whirled back toward Jean, dangling a little black leather purse in the air before him. It jingled with a healthy supply of heavy coins.
“Ha! What do you say to that, hmmm?”
“I say it was bloody child’s play. Doesn’t mean a gods-damned thing.”
“Child’s play? Die screaming, Jean, that was—”
“You’re mangy,” said Jean. “You’re dirtier than a Shades’ Hill orphan. You’ve lost weight, though where from is a great mystery. You haven’t been exercising your wounds or letting anyone tend to them for you. You’ve been hiding in a room, letting your condition slip away, and you’ve been drunk for two straight weeks. You’re not what you were, and it’s your own damn fault.”
“So.” Locke scowled at Jean, slipped the purse into a tunic pocket, and straightened the cloak on his shoulders. “You require a demonstration. Fine. Get back inside and take down your silly wall, and wait for me in the room. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
“I—”
But Locke had already thrown up the hood of his cloak, turned, and begun to stride down the street, into the warm Vel Virazzo night.
6
JEAN CLEARED the barrier from the third-floor hallway, left a few more coins (from Locke’s purse) with the bemused innkeeper, and bustled about the room, allowing some of the smell of drunken enclosure to evaporate out the open window. Upon reflection, he went down to the bar and came back with a glass decanter of water.
Jean was pacing, worriedly, when Locke burst back in about four hours later, just past the third hour of the morning. He set a huge wicker basket down on the table, threw off his cloak, grabbed the bucket Jean had used to douse him, and noisily threw up in it.
“My apologies,” he muttered when he finished. He was flushed and breathing heavily, as wet as he’d been when he’d left, but now with warm sweat. “The wine has not entirely left my head…and my wind has all but deserted me.”
Jean passed him the decanter, and Locke slurped from it as shamelessly as a horse at a trough. Jean helped him into the chair. Locke said nothing for a few seconds, then suddenly seemed to notice Jean’s hand on his shoulder, and he recoiled. “Here we are, then,” he gasped. “See what happens when you provoke me? I think we’re going to have to flee the city.”
“What the—what have you done?”
Locke tore the lid from his basket; it was the sort commonly used by merchants to haul small loads of goods to and from a street market. A prodigious assortment of odds and ends lay inside, and Locke began to list them off as he pulled them out and showed them to Jean.
“What’s this? Why, it’s a pile of purses…one-two-three-four of them, all plucked from sober gentlemen in open streets. Here’s a knife, two bottles of wine, a pewter ale mug—dented a bit, but still good metal. A brooch, three gold pins, two earrings—earrings, Master Tannen, plucked from ears, and I’d like to see you try that. Here’s a little bolt of nice silk, a box of sweetmeats, two loaves of bread—the crusty kind with all the spices baked in that you like so much. And now, specially for the edification of a certain pessimistic, peace-breaking son of a bitch who shall remain nameless…”
Locke held up a glittering necklace, a braided band of gold and silver supporting a heavy gold pendant, studded with sapphires in the stylized pattern of a floral blossom. The little phalanx of stones flashed like blue fire even by the light of the room’s single soft lantern.
“That’s a sweet piece,” said Jean, briefly forgetting to be aggravated. “You didn’t snatch that off a street.”
“No,” said Locke, before taking another deep draught of the warm water in the decanter. “I got it from the neck of the governor’s mistress.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“In the governor’s manor.”
“Of all the—”
“In the governor’s bed.”
“Damned lunatic!”
“With the governor sleeping next to her.”
The night quiet was broken by the high, distant trill of a whistle, the traditional swarming noise of city watches everywhere. Several other whistles joined in a few moments later.
“It is possible,” said Locke with a sheepish grin, “that I have been slightly too bold.”
Jean sat down on the bed and ran both of his hands through his hair. “Locke, I’ve spent the past few weeks making a name for Tavrin Callas as the biggest, brightest thing to come along in this city’s sad little pack of Right People for ages! When the watch starts asking questions, someone’s going to point me out…and someone’s going to mention all the time I spend here, and the time I spend with you…and if we try to fence a piece of metal like that in a place this small…”
“As I said, I
think we’re going to have to flee the city.”
“Flee the city?” Jean jumped up and pointed an accusatory finger at Locke. “You’ve screwed up weeks of work! I’ve been training the Coves—signals, tricks, teasing, fighting, the whole bit! I was going to…I was going to start teaching them how to cook!”
“Oooh, this is serious. I take it the marriage proposal wasn’t far behind?”
“Dammit, this is serious! I’ve been building something! I’ve been out working while you’ve been sobbing and sulking and pissing your time away in here.”
“You’re the one who lit a fire under me because he wanted to see me dance. Now I’ve danced, and I believe I’ve made my point. Will you be apologizing?”
“Apologizing? You’re the one who’s been an insufferable little shit! Letting you live is apology enough! All my work…”
“Capa of Vel Virazzo? Is that how you saw yourself, Jean? Another Barsavi?”
“Another anything,” said Jean. “There’s worse things to be—Capa Lamora, for example, Lord of One Smelly Room. I won’t be a bloody knockabout, Locke. I am an honest working thief and I’ll do what I have to, to keep a roof over our heads!”
“So let’s go somewhere and get back to something really lucrative,” said Locke. “You want honest crooked work? Fine. Let’s go hook a big fish just like we used to in Camorr. You wanted to see me steal, let’s go out and steal!”
“But Tavrin Callas…”
“Has died before,” said Locke. “Seeker into Aza Guilla’s mysteries, right? Let him seek again.”
“Dammit.” Jean stepped over to the window and took a peek out; there was still whistling coming from several directions. “It might take a few days to arrange a berth on a ship, and we won’t get out by land with what you’ve stolen—they’ll be checking everyone at the gates, probably for a week or two to come.”
“Jean,” said Locke, “now you’re disappointing me. Gates? Ships? Please. This is us we’re talking about. We could smuggle a live cow past every constable in this city, at high noon. Without clothes.”
“Locke? Locke Lamora?” Jean rubbed his eyes with exaggerated motions. “Why, where have you been all these weeks? Here I thought I’d been rooming with a miserable self-absorbed asshole who—”
“Right,” said Locke. “Fine. Ha. Yeah, maybe I deserved that kick in the face. But I’m serious, getting us out is as easy as a bit of cooking. Get down to the innkeeper. Wake him up and throw some more silver at him—there’s plenty in those purses. I’m a mad Camorri don, right? Tell him I’ve got a mad whim. Get me some more dirty cloth, some apples, a hearthstone, and a black iron pot full of water.”
“Apples?” Jean scratched his beard. “Apples? You mean…the apple mash trick?”
“Just so,” said Locke. “Get me that stuff, and I’ll get boiling, and we can be out of here by dawn.”
“Huh.” Jean opened the door, slipped out into the hall, and turned once before leaving for good. “I take some of it back,” he said. “You might still be a lying, cheating, low-down, greedy, grasping, conniving, pocket-picking son of a bitch.”
“Thanks,” said Locke.
7
A DRIZZLE was pattering softly around them as they walked out through Vel Virazzo’s north gate a few hours later. Sunrise was a watery line of yellow on the eastern horizon, under scudding charcoal clouds. Purple-jacketed soldiers stared down in revulsion from atop the city’s fifteen-foot wall; the heavy wooden door of the small sally-port slammed shut behind them as though it too was glad to be quit of them.
Locke and Jean were both dressed in tattered cloaks, and wrapped in bandagelike fragments from a dozen torn-up sheets and pieces of clothing. A thin coating of boiled apple mash, still warm, soaked through some of the “bandages” on their arms and chests, and was plastered liberally over their faces. Sloshing around wearing a layer of the stuff under cloth was disgusting, but there was no better disguise to be had in all the world.
Slipskin was a painful, incurable disease, and those afflicted with it were even less tolerated than lepers. Had Locke and Jean approached from outside Vel Virazzo’s walls, they never would have been let in. As it was, the guards had no interest in how they’d entered the city in the first place; they’d nearly stumbled over themselves in their haste to see them gone.
The outer city was an unhappy-looking place: a few blocks of crumbling one- and two-story buildings, decorated here and there with the makeshift windmill towers favored in these parts for driving bellows over forges and ovens. Smoke sketched a few curling gray lines in the wet air overhead, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Beyond the city, where the cobbles of the old Therin Throne road became a wet dirt track, Locke could see scrubland, interrupted here and there by rocky clefts and piles of debris.
Their coins—and all of their other small goods worth transporting—were tucked into a little bag tied under Jean’s clothes, where no guardsman would dare search, not even if a superior stood behind him with a drawn sword and ordered it on pain of death.
“Gods,” Locke muttered as they trudged along beside the road, “I’m getting too tired to think straight. I really have let myself slouch out of condition.”
“Well,” said Jean, “you’re going to get some exercise these next few days, whether you like it or not. How’re the wounds?”
“They itch,” said Locke. “This damn mush does them little good, I suspect. Still, it’s not as bad as it was. A few hours of motion seems to have had some benefit.”
“Wise in the ways of all such things is Jean Tannen,” said Jean. “Wiser by far than most; especially most named Lamora.”
“Shut your fat, ugly, inarguably wiser face,” said Locke. “Mmmm. Look at those idiots scamper away from us.”
“Would you do otherwise, if you saw a pair of real slipskinners by the side of the road?”
“Eh. I suppose not. Damn these aching feet, too.”
“Let’s get a mile or two outside town, then find a place to rest. Once we’ve put some leagues under our heels, we can ditch this mush and pose as respectable travelers again. Any idea where you want to strike out for?”
“I should’ve thought it was obvious,” said Locke. “These little towns are for pikers. We’re after gold and white iron, not clipped coppers. Let’s make for Tal Verrar. Something’s bound to present itself there.”
“Mmm. Tal Verrar. Well, it is close.”
“Camorri have a long and glorious history of kicking the piss out of our poor Verrari cousins, so I say, on to Tal Verrar,” said Locke. “And glory.” They walked on a ways under the tickling mist of the morning drizzle. “And baths.”
CHAPTER TWO
REQUIN
1
THOUGH LOCKE SAW that Jean remained as unsettled by their experience in the Night Market as he was, they spoke no further of the matter. There was a job to be done, and they were up at the crack of dusk the next day.
The close of the working day for honest men and women in Tal Verrar was just the beginning of theirs. It had been strange at first, getting used to the rhythm of a city where the sun simply fell beneath the horizon like a quiescent murder victim each night, without the glow of Falselight to mark its passing. But Tal Verrar had been built to different tastes or needs than Camorr, and its Elderglass simply mirrored the sky, raising no light of its own.
Their suite at the Villa Candessa was high-ceilinged and opulent; at five silver volani a night nothing less was to be expected. Their fourth-floor window overlooked a cobbled courtyard in which carriages, studded with lanterns and outriding mercenary guards, came and went with echoing clatters.
“Bondsmagi,” muttered Jean as he tied on his neck-cloths before a looking glass. “I’ll never hire one of the bastards to do so much as heat my tea, not if I live to be richer than the duke of Camorr.”
“Now there’s a thought,” said Locke, who was already dressed and sipping coffee. A full day of sleep had done wonders for his head. “If we were richer than the duke
of Camorr, we could hire a whole pack of them and give them instructions to go lose themselves on a desolate fucking island somewhere.”
“Mmm. I don’t think the gods made any islands desolate enough for my tastes.”
Jean finished his neck-cloths with one hand and reached for his breakfast with the other. One of the odder services the Villa Candessa provided for its long-term guests was its “likeness cakes”—little frosted simulacra fashioned after the guests by the inn’s Camorr-trained pastry sculptor. On a silver tray beside the looking glass, a little sweetbread Locke (with raisin eyes and almond-butter blond hair) sat beside a rounder Jean with dark chocolate hair and beard. The baked Jean’s legs were already missing.
A few moments later, Jean was brushing the last buttery crumbs from the front of his coat. “Alas, poor Locke and Jean.”
“They died of consumption,” said Locke.
“I do wish I could be there to see it when you talk to Requin and Selendri, you know.”
“Hmmm. Can I trust you to still be in Tal Verrar by the time I get finished?” He tried to leaven the question with a smile, only partially succeeding.
“You know I won’t go anywhere,” said Jean. “I’m still not sure it’s wise. But you know I won’t.”
“I do. I’m sorry.” He finished his coffee and set the cup down. “And my chat with Requin isn’t going to be that terribly interesting.”
“Nonsense. I heard a smirk in your voice. Other people smirk when their work is finished; you grin like an idiot just before yours really begins.”
“Smirking? I’m as slack-cheeked as a corpse. I’m just looking forward to being done with it. Tedious business. I anticipate a dull meeting.”
“Dull meeting, my ass. Not after you walk straight up to the lady with the brass bloody hand and say, ‘Excuse me, madam, but…’”
2
“I HAVE been cheating,” said Locke. “Steadily. At every single game I’ve played since my partner and I first came to the Sinspire, two years ago.”
Receiving a piercing stare from Selendri was a curious thing; her left eye was nothing but a dark hollow, half-covered with a translucent awning that had once been a lid. Her single good eye did the work of two, and damned if it wasn’t unnerving.