by Scott Lynch
“I won’t screw it up, Jean.” Bug shook his thoughts like an empty coin purse, searching desperately for something to say that would make him sound as calm and assured as he imagined Jean and all the older Gentlemen Bastards always were—but the mouth of most twelve-year-olds far outpaces the mind. “I just won’t, I bloody won’t, I promise.”
“Good lad,” Jean said. “Glad to hear it. But just what is it that you won’t screw up?”
Bug sighed. “I make the signal when Salvara’s on his way out of the Temple of Fortunate Waters. I keep an eye out for anyone else trying to walk past the alley, especially the city watch. If anybody tries it, I jump down from the temple roof with a longsword and cut their bloody heads off where they stand.”
“You what?”
“I said I distract them any way I can. You going deaf, Jean?”
A line of tall countinghouses slid past on their left, each displaying lacquered woodwork, silk awnings, marble facades, and other ostentatious touches along the waterfront. There were deep roots of money and power sunk into that row of three- and four-story buildings. Coin-Kisser’s Row was the oldest and goldest financial district on the continent. The place was as steeped in influence and elaborate rituals as the glass heights of the Five Towers, in which the duke and the Grand Families sequestered themselves from the city they ruled.
“Move us up against the bank just under the bridges, Bug.” Jean gestured vaguely with his apple. “His Nibs will be waiting to come aboard.”
Two Elderglass arches bridged the Via Camorrazza right in the middle of Coin-Kisser’s Row—a high and narrow catbridge for foot traffic and a lower, wider one for wagons. The seamless brilliance of the alien glass looked like nothing so much as liquid diamond, gently arched by giant hands and left to harden over the canal. On the right bank was the Fauria, a crowded island of multitiered stone apartments and rooftop gardens. Wooden wheels churned white against the stone embankment, drawing canal water up into a network of troughs and viaducts that crisscrossed over the Fauria’s streets at every level.
Bug slid the barge over to a rickety quay just beneath the catbridge; from the faint and slender shadow of this arch a man jumped down to the quay, dressed (as Bug and Jean were) in oil-stained leather breeches and a rough cotton shirt. His next nonchalant leap took him into the barge, which barely rocked at his arrival.
“Salutations to you, Master Jean Tannen, and profuse congratulations on the fortuitous timing of your arrival!” said the newcomer.
“Ah, well, felicitations to you in respect of the superlative grace of your entry into our very humble boat, Master Lamora.” Jean punctuated this statement by popping the remains of his apple into his mouth, stem and all, and producing a wet crunching noise.
“Creeping shits, man.” Locke Lamora stuck out his tongue. “Must you do that? You know the black alchemists make fish poison from the seeds of those damn things.”
“Lucky me,” said Jean after swallowing the last bit of masticated pulp, “not being a fish.”
Locke was a medium man in every respect—medium height, medium build, medium-dark hair cropped short above a face that was neither handsome nor memorable. He looked like a proper Therin, though perhaps a bit less olive and ruddy than Jean or Bug; in another light he might have passed for a very tan Vadran. His bright gray eyes alone had any sense of distinction; he was a man the gods might have shaped deliberately to be overlooked. He settled down against the left-hand gunwale and crossed his legs.
“Hello to you as well, Bug! I knew we could count on you to take pity on your elders and let them rest in the sun while you do the hard work with the pole.”
“Jean’s a lazy old bastard is what it is,” Bug said. “And if I don’t pole the barge, he’ll knock my teeth out the back of my head.”
“Jean is the gentlest soul in Camorr, and you wound him with your accusations,” said Locke. “Now he’ll be up all night crying.”
“I would have been up all night anyway,” Jean added, “crying from the ache of rheumatism and lighting candles to ward off evil vapors.”
“Which is not to say that our bones don’t creak by day, my cruel apprentice.” Locke massaged his kneecaps. “We’re at least twice your age—which is prodigious for our profession.”
“The Daughters of Aza Guilla have tried to perform a corpse-blessing on me six times this week,” said Jean. “You’re lucky Locke and I are still spry enough to take you with us when we run a game.”
To anyone beyond hearing range, Locke and Jean and Bug might have looked like the crew of a for-hire barge, slacking their way toward a cargo pickup at the junction of the Via Camorrazza and the Angevine River. As Bug poled them closer and closer to the Shifting Market, the water was getting thicker with such barges, and with sleek black cockleshell boats, and battered watercraft of every description, not all of them doing a good job of staying afloat or under control.
“Speaking of our game,” said Locke, “how is our eager young apprentice’s understanding of his place in the scheme of things?”
“I’ve been reciting it to Jean all morning,” said Bug.
“And the conclusion is?”
“I’ve got it down cold!” Bug heaved at the pole with all of his strength, driving them between a pair of high-walled floating gardens with inches to spare on either side. The scents of jasmine and oranges drifted down over them as their barge slipped beneath the protruding branches of one of the gardens; a wary attendant peeked over one garden-boat’s wall, staff in hand to fend them off if necessary. The big barges were probably hauling transplants to some noble’s orchard upriver.
“Down cold, and I won’t screw it up. I promise! I know my place, and I know the signals. I won’t screw it up!”
3
CALO WAS shaking Locke with real vigor, and Locke’s performance as his victim was a virtuoso one, but still the moments dragged by. They were all trapped in their pantomime like figures out of the richly inventive hells of Therin theology: a pair of thieves destined to spend all eternity stuck in an alley, mugging victims that never passed out or gave up their money.
“Are you as alarmed as I am?” Calo whispered.
“Just stay in character,” Locke hissed. “You can pray and strangle at the same time.”
There was a high-pitched scream from their right, echoing across the cobbles and walls of the Temple District. It was followed by shouts and the creaking tread of men in battle harness—but these sounds moved away from the mouth of the alley, not toward it.
“That sounded like Bug,” said Locke.
“I hope he’s just arranging a distraction,” said Calo, his grip on the rope momentarily slackening. At that instant, a dark shape darted across the gap of sky between the alley’s high walls, its fluttering shadow briefly falling over them as it passed.
“Now what the hell was that, then?” Calo asked.
Off to their right, someone screamed again.
4
BUG HAD poled himself, Locke, and Jean from the Via Camorrazza into the Shifting Market right on schedule, just as the vast Elderglass wind chime atop Westwatch was unlashed to catch the breeze blowing in from the sea and ring out the eleventh hour of the morning.
The Shifting Market was a lake of relatively placid water at the very heart of Camorr, perhaps half a mile in circumference, protected from the rushing flow of the Angevine and the surrounding canals by a series of stone breakwaters. The only real current in the market was human-made, as hundreds upon hundreds of floating merchants slowly and warily followed one another counterclockwise in their boats, jostling for prized positions against the flat-topped breakwaters, which were crowded with buyers and sightseers on foot.
City watchmen in their mustard-yellow tabards commanded sleek black cutters—each rowed by a dozen shackled prisoners from the Palace of Patience—using long poles and harsh language to maintain several rough channels through the drifting chaos of the market. Through these channels passed the pleasure barges of the nobility, a
nd heavily laden freight barges, and empty ones like that containing the three Gentlemen Bastards, who shopped with their eyes as they sliced through a sea of hope and avarice.
In just a few lengths of Bug’s poling, they passed a family of trinket dealers in ill-kept brown cockleshells, a spice merchant with his wares on a triangular rack in the middle of an awkward circular raft of the sort called a vertola, and a Canal Tree bobbing and swaying on the leather-bladder pontoon raft that supported its roots. These roots trailed in the water, drinking up the piss and effluvia of the busy city; the canopy of rustling emerald leaves cast thousands of punctuated shadows down on the Gentlemen Bastards as they passed, along with the perfume of citrus. The tree (an alchemical hybrid that grew both limes and lemons) was tended by a middle-aged woman and three small children, who scuttled around in the branches throwing down fruit in response to orders from passing boats.
Above the watercraft of the Shifting Market rose a field of flags and pennants and billowing silk standards, all competing through gaudy colors and symbols to impress their messages on watchful buyers. There were flags adorned with the crude outlines of fish or fowl or both; flags adorned with ale mugs and wine bottles and loaves of bread, boots and trousers and threaded tailors’ needles, fruits and kitchen instruments and carpenters’ tools and a hundred other goods and services. Here and there, small clusters of chicken-flagged boats or shoe-flagged rafts were locked in close combat, their owners loudly proclaiming the superiority of their respective goods or inferring the bastardy of one another’s children, while the watch-boats stood off at a mindful distance, in case anyone should sink or commence a boarding action.
“It’s a pain sometimes, this pretending to be poor.” Locke gazed around in reverie, the sort Bug would have been indulging in if the boy hadn’t been concentrating on avoiding collision. A barge packed with dozens of yowling housecats in wooden slat cages cut their wake, flagged with a blue pennant on which an artfully rendered dead mouse bled rich scarlet threads through a gaping hole in its throat. “There’s just something about this place. I could almost convince myself that I really did have a pressing need for a pound of fish, some bowstrings, old shoes, and a new shovel.”
“Fortunately for our credibility,” said Jean, “we’re coming up on the next major landmark on our way to a fat pile of Don Salvara’s money.” He pointed past the northeastern breakwater of the market, beyond which a row of prosperous-looking waterfront inns and taverns stood between the market and the Temple District.
“Right as always, Jean. Greed before imagination. Keep us on track.” Locke added an enthusiastic but superfluous finger to the direction Jean was already pointing. “Bug! Get us out onto the river, then veer right. One of the twins is going to be waiting for us at the Tumblehome, third inn down on the south bank.”
Bug pushed them north, straining to reach the bottom of the market’s basin—which was easily half again as deep as the surrounding canals—with each thrust. They evaded overzealous purveyors of grapefruits and sausage rolls and alchemical light-sticks, and Locke and Jean amused themselves with a favorite game, trying to spot the little pickpockets among the crowds on the breakwaters. The inattention of Camorr’s busy thousands still managed to feed the doddering old Thiefmaker in his dank warren under Shades’ Hill, nearly twenty years since Locke or Jean had last set foot inside the place.
Once they escaped from the market and onto the river itself, Bug and Jean wordlessly switched places. The fast waters of the Angevine would be better matched against Jean’s muscle, and Bug would need to rest his arms for his part in the game to come. As Bug collapsed in Jean’s former place at the bow, Locke produced a cinnamon-lemon apparently from thin air and tossed it to the boy. Bug ate it in six bites, dry skin and all, masticating the reddish yellow pulp as grotesquely as possible between his bright, crooked teeth. He grinned.
“They don’t make fish poison from those things, right?”
“No,” Locke said. “They only make fish poison from things that Jean eats.”
Jean harrumphed. “A little fish poison puts hair on your chest. Excepting if you’re a fish.”
Jean kept them nearly against the southern bank of the Angevine, clear of the depths where the pole couldn’t reach. Shafts of hot, pearl-white light flashed down on them as Eldgerglass bridges passed directly between their barge and the still-rising sun. The river was two hundred yards wide, sweating its wetness up into the air along with the smell of fish and silt.
To the north, rippling under the heat-haze, were the orderly slopes of the Alcegrante islands, home to the city’s greater commoners and minor nobles. It was a place of walled gardens, elaborate water sculptures, and white stone villas, well off-limits to anyone dressed as Locke and Jean and Bug were. With the sun approaching its zenith, the vast shadows of the Five Towers had withdrawn into the Upper City and were currently nothing more than a rosy stained-glass glow that spilled just over the northern edges of the Alcegrante.
“Gods, I love this place,” Locke said, drumming his fingers against his thighs. “Sometimes I think this whole city was put here simply because the gods must adore crime. Pickpockets rob the common folk, merchants rob anyone they can dupe, Capa Barsavi robs the robbers and the common folk, the lesser nobles rob nearly everyone, and Duke Nicovante occasionally runs off with his army and robs the shit out of Tal Verrar or Jerem, not to mention what he does to his own nobles and his common folk.”
“So that makes us robbers of robbers,” said Bug, “who pretend to be robbers working for a robber of other robbers.”
“Yes, we do sort of screw the pretty picture up, don’t we?” Locke thought for a few seconds, clicking his tongue against the insides of his cheeks. “Think of what we do as, ah, a sort of secret tax on nobles with more money than prudence. Hey! Here we are.”
Beneath the Tumblehome Inn was a wide and well-kept quay with half a dozen mooring posts, none of them currently occupied. The smooth gray embankment was about ten feet high here; broad stone steps led up to street level, as did a cobbled ramp for cargo and horses. Calo Sanza was waiting for them at the edge of the quay, dressed only slightly better than his fellows, with a Gentled horse standing placidly behind him. Locke waved.
“What’s the news?” Locke cried. Jean’s poling was skilled and graceful; the quay was twenty yards away, then ten, and then they were sliding up alongside it with a gentle scraping noise.
“Galdo got all the stuff packed into the room—it’s the Bowsprit Suite on the first floor,” Calo whispered in response, bending down to Locke and Bug as he picked up the barge’s mooring rope.
Calo had dark liquor-colored skin and hair like an inky slice of night; the tautness of the flesh around his dark eyes was broken only by a fine network of laugh-lines (though anyone who knew the Sanza twins would more readily describe them as smirk-lines). An improbably sharp and hooked nose preceded his good looks like a dagger held at guard position.
Once he had made the barge fast to a mooring post, Calo tossed to Locke a heavy iron key attached to a long tassel of braided red and black silk. At a quality rooming house like the Tumblehome, each private suite’s door was guarded by a clockwork lockbox (removable only by some cunning means known to the owners) that could be swapped out from a niche in the door. Each rented room received a random new box and its attendant key. With hundreds of such identical-looking boxes stored behind the polished counter in the reception hall, the inn could pretty much guarantee that copying keys for later break-ins was a practical waste of a thief’s time.
This courtesy would also give Locke and Jean guaranteed privacy for the rapid transformation that was about to take place.
“Wonderful!” Locke leaped up onto the quay as spryly as he had entered the boat; Jean passed the steering pole back to Bug, then made the barge shudder with his own leap. “Let’s go on in and fetch out our guests from Emberlain.”
As Locke and Jean padded up the steps toward the Tumblehome, Calo motioned for Bug to give him a ha
nd with the horse. The white-eyed creature was utterly without fear or personal initiative, but that same lack of self-preservation instincts might lead it to damage the barge very easily. After a few minutes of careful pushing and pulling, they had it positioned in the center of the barge, as calm as a statue that just happened to have lungs.
“Lovely creature,” said Calo. “I’ve named him Impediment. You could use him as a table. Or a flying buttress.”
“Gentled animals give me the bloody creeps.”
“Whereas,” said Calo, “they give me the fucking creeps. But tenderfoots and softies prefer Gentled packhorses, and that’s our master merchant of Emberlain in a nutshell.”
Several more minutes passed, and Calo and Bug stood in amiable silence under the punishing sun, looking the part of an unremarkable barge crew waiting to receive a passenger of consequence from the bosom of the Tumblehome Inn. Soon enough, that passenger descended the stairs and coughed twice to get their attention.
It was Locke, of course, but changed. His hair was slicked back with rose oil, the bones of his face seemed to shadow slightly deeper hollows in his cheeks, and his eyes were half concealed behind a pair of optics rimmed with black pearl and flashing silver in the sun.
He was now dressed in a tightly buttoned black coat in the Emberlain style, almost form-fitted from his shoulders down to his ribs, then flaring out widely at the waist. Two black leather belts with polished silver buckles circled his stomach; three ruffled layers of black silk cravats poured out of his collar and fluttered in the hot breeze. He wore embroidered gray hose over thick-heeled sharkskin shoes with black ribbon tongues that sprang somewhat ludicrously outward and hung over his feet with the drooping curl of hothouse flowers. Sweat was already beading on his forehead like little diamonds—Camorr’s summer did not reward the intrusion of fashions from a more northerly climate.