by Scott Lynch
It was a minor wonder on a busy river of wonders, not the least of which was Don and Doña Salvara’s barge. While many nobles hauled trees to and from their orchards on the water, Locke’s hosts were the first to go one step further. Their pleasure barge was a permanent floating orchard in miniature. Perhaps fifty paces long and twenty wide, it was a doublehulled wooden rectangle stuffed with soil to support a dozen oak and olive trees. Their trunks were a uniform night-black, and their rustling cascades of leaves were unnatural emerald, bright as lacquer—an outward testimony to the subtle science of alchemical botany.
Wide circular stairs crisscrossed with patches of leafy shade wound up several of these trees, leading to the don’s silk-topped observation box, comfortably perched within the branches to give the occupants an unobstructed forward view. On each side of this supremely ostentatious sliver of floating forest were twenty hired rowers, seated on outrigger-like structures that kept the top-heavy central portion of the yacht from plunging sideways.
The box could easily hold twenty; this morning it held only Locke and Jean, the don and the doña, and the ever-watchful Conté, currently tending a liquor cabinet so elaborate it might have been mistaken for an apothecary’s lab. Locke returned his gaze to the rope dancers, feeling a strange kinship with them. They weren’t the only ones with ample opportunity to screw up a delicate public act this morning.
“Master Fehrwight, your clothes!” Doña Sofia Salvara shared the forward rail of the observation box with him, her hands scant inches from his. “You would look so very fine in one of your Emberlain winters, but why must you suffer them in our summer? You shall sweat yourself as red as a rose! Might you not take something off?”
“I … my lady, I am, I assure you … most comfortable.” Thirteen gods, she was actually flirting with him. And the little smile that crept on and off her husband’s face told Locke that the Salvaras had planned this in advance. A little close feminine attention to fluster the awkward master merchant; perfectly staged and perfectly common. A game before the game, so to speak. “I find that whatever discomfort these clothes bring me in your … very interesting climate only serves to, to goad me. Into concentrating. Keeps me alert, you see. A better, ah, man of business.”
Jean, standing a few paces behind the two of them, bit his tongue. Throwing blondes at Locke Lamora was not unlike throwing lettuce at sharks, and the Doña Sofia was very blonde; one of those gorgeous Therin rarities with skin like burnt amber and hair the color of almond butter. Her eyes were deep and steady, her curves artfully not concealed by a dark orange summer dress with a cream-white underskirt barely showing at the hem. Well, it was just the Salvaras’ luck to run up against a thief with the most peculiar damned taste in women. Jean could admire the doña for them both; his limited role today (and his “injuries”) would give him little else to do.
“Our Master Fehrwight is made of unusually stern stuff, my dear.” Don Lorenzo lounged in a far corner of the forward rail, dressed in loose white silks and an orange vest matching his wife’s dress. His white neckerchiefs hung rakishly loose, and only the bottom clasp of his vest was fastened. “Yesterday he took the beating of a lifetime; today he wears enough wool for five men and dares the sun to do its worst. I must say, I’m more and more pleased with myself that I’ve kept you out of Jacobo’s grasp, Lukas.”
Locke acknowledged the smiling don with a slight bow and an agreeably awkward smile of his own.
“Do at least have something to drink, Master Fehrwight.” Doña Sofia’s hand briefly settled over Locke’s, long enough for him to feel the assorted calluses and chemical burns no manicure could conceal. She was a true alchemical botanist, then; this barge was her direct handiwork as well as her general design. A formidable talent—by implication, a calculating woman. Lorenzo was obviously the more impulsive one, and if he was wise he’d weigh his wife’s opinion before agreeing to any of Lukas Fehrwight’s proposals. Locke therefore favored her with a shy smile and an awkward cough. Let her think she was getting to him.
“A drink would be very pleasing,” he said. “But, ah, I fear that you shall have no reassurance for my condition, kind Doña Sofia. I have done much business in your city; I know how drinking is done here, when men and women speak of business.”
“ ‘Morning’s for sweat, and night’s for regret,’ ” Don Salvara said as he stepped from the rail and gestured to his servant. “Conté, I do believe Master Fehrwight has just requested nothing less than a ginger scald.”
Conté moved adroitly to fill this request, first selecting a tall crystal wine flute, into which he poured two fingers of purest Camorri ginger oil, the color of scorched cinnamon. To this he added a sizable splash of milky pear brandy, followed by a transparent heavy liquor called ajento, which was actually a cooking wine flavored with radishes. When this cocktail was mixed, Conté wrapped a wet towel around the fingers of his left hand and reached for a covered brazier smoldering to the side of the liquor cabinet. He withdrew a slender metal rod, glowing orange-red at the tip, and plunged it into the cocktail; there was an audible hiss and a small puff of spicy steam. Once the rod was stanched, Conté stirred the drink briskly and precisely three times, then presented it to Locke on a thin silver plate.
Locke had practiced this ritual many times over the years, but when the cold burn of the ginger scald hit his lips (limning every tiny crack with stinging heat, and outlining every crevice between teeth and gums in exquisite pain—even before it went to work on tongue and throat), he was never able to fully hold back the memories of Shades’ Hill and of the Thiefmaker’s admonishments; of a liquid fire that seemed to creep up his sinuses and burn behind his eyes until he wanted to tear them out. Expressing discomfort at his first sip of the drink was much easier than feigning interest in the doña.
“Incomparable.” He coughed, and then, with quick jerky motions, he loosened his black neck-cloths just the slightest bit; the Salvaras smirked charmingly together. “I’m reminded again why I have such success selling gentler liquors to you people.”
2
ONCE PER month, there was no trading done in the Shifting Market. Every fourth Idler’s Day, the merchants stayed clear of the great sheltered circle abutting the Angevine River; instead, they drifted or anchored nearby while half the city came out to see the Shifting Revel.
Camorr had never possessed a great stone or Elderglass amphitheater, and had fallen instead into the curious custom of rebuilding its spectator circle anew at each Revel. Huge multistoried observation barges were towed out and anchored firmly against the stone breakwaters surrounding the Shifting Market, like floating slices cut from the heart of great stadiums. Each barge was operated by a rival family or merchant combine and decked in unique livery; they competed fiercely with one another to fill their seats, and intervessel brawls between the habitual customers of particularly beloved barges were not unknown.
When properly aligned, these barges formed an arc about halfway around the circumference of the Shifting Market. A channel was left clear for boats entering and leaving the center of the calm water, and the rest of the periphery was reserved for the pleasure barges of the nobility. A good hundred or so could be counted on at any Revel, and half again as many for major festivals, such as this one; less than three weeks remained until the Midsummer-mark and the Day of Changes.
Even before the entertainments began the Shifting Revel was its own spectacle—a great tide of rich and poor, floating and on foot, jostling for position in a traditional contest much loved for its lack of rules. The yellowjackets were always out in force, but more to prevent hard words and fisticuffs from escalating than to prevent disturbances altogether. The Revel was a citywide debauch, a rowdy public service the duke was happy to underwrite from his treasury. There were few things like a good Revel to pull the fangs from any unrest before it had time to fester.
Feeling the fire of the approaching noon despite the silk awning over their heads, Locke and his hosts compounded their situation by drinking
ginger scalds as they stared out across the rippling heat haze at thousands of Camorri packing the commoner barges. Conté had prepared identical drinks for his lord and lady (though with a touch less ginger oil, perhaps?), which “Graumann” had served them, as Camorri etiquette dictated in these situations. Locke’s glass was half-empty; the liquor was a ball of expanding warmth in his stomach and a vivid memory in his throat.
“Business,” he said at last. “You have both been … so kind to Grau and myself. I agreed to repay this kindness by revealing my business here in Camorr. So let us speak of it, if that would please you.”
“You have never had a more eager audience in your life, Master Fehrwight.” The don’s hired rowers were bringing them into the Shifting Revel proper, and closing on dozens of more traditional pleasure barges, some of them crammed with dozens or hundreds of guests. The don’s eyes were alive with greedy curiosity. “Tell on.”
“The Kingdom of the Seven Marrows is coming apart at the seams.” Locke sighed. “This is no secret.”
The don and the doña nonchalantly sipped their drinks, saying nothing.
“The Canton of Emberlain is peripheral to the major conflict. But the Graf von Emberlain and the Black Table are both working—in different, ah, directions—to place it in the way of substantial harm.”
“The Black Table?” asked the don.
“I beg pardon.” Locke took the tiniest sip of his drink and let new fire trickle under his tongue. “The Black Table is what we call the council of Emberlain’s most powerful merchants. My masters of the House of bel Auster are among them. In every respect save the military and the matter of taxes, they run the Canton of Emberlain. And they are tired of the Graf, and tired of the Trade Guilds in the other six cantons of the Marrows. Tired of limitations. Emberlain grows rich on new means of speculation and enterprise. The Black Table sees the old guilds as a weight around their neck.”
“Curious,” said the doña, “that you say ‘their’ and not ‘our.’ Is this significant?”
“To a point.” Another sip of the drink; a second of feigned nervousness. “The House of bel Auster agrees that the guilds have outlasted their usefulness; that the trade practices of centuries past should not be set in stone by guild law. We do not necessarily agree”—he sipped the drink yet again, and scratched the back of his head—“that, ah, the Graf von Emberlain should be deposed while he is out of the canton with most of his army, showing his flag on behalf of his cousins in Parlay and Somnay.”
“Holy Twelve!” Don Salvara shook his head as though to clear it of what he’d just heard. “They can’t be serious. Your state is … smaller than the Duchy of Camorr! Exposed to the sea on two sides. Impossible to defend.”
“And yet the preparations are under way. Emberlain’s banks and merchant houses do four times the yearly business of the next richest canton in the Marrows. The Black Table fixates upon this. Gold should certainly be considered potential power; the Black Table errs by imagining it to be direct power, in and of itself.” He finished his drink in one long, deliberate draught. “In two months, civil war will have broken out anyway. The succession is a mess. The Stradas and the Dvorims, the Razuls and the Strigs—they are all sharpening knives and parading men. Yet, as we speak, the merchants of Emberlain are moving to arrest the remaining nobility while the Graf is away. To claim the navy. To raise a levy of ‘free citizens.’ To hire mercenaries. In short, they will now attempt to secede from the Marrows. It is unavoidable.”
“And what, specifically, does this have to do with you coming here?” The doña’s knuckles were white around her wine flute; she grasped the full significance of Fehrwight’s story. A fight larger than anything seen in centuries—civil war mixed with possible economic disaster.
“It is the opinion of my masters, the House of bel Auster, that rats in the hold have little chance to take the wheel of a ship that is about to run aground. But those same rats may very easily abandon the ship.”
3
IN THE center of the Shifting Revel, a great many tall iron cages had been sunk into the water. Some of these served to support wooden slats on which performers, victims, fighters, and attendants could stand; a few particularly heavy cages restrained dark shapes that circled ominously under the translucent gray water. Platform boats were rowed around at a steady clip, showing off rope dancers, knife throwers, acrobats, jugglers, strongmen, and other curiosities; the excited shouts of barkers with long brass speaking trumpets echoed flatly off the water.
First up at any Revel were the Penance Bouts, where petty offenders from the Palace of Patience could volunteer for mismatch combat in exchange for reduced sentences or slightly improved living conditions. At present, a hugely muscled nichavezzo (“punishing hand”), one of the duke’s own household guard, was handing out the beatings. The soldier was armored in black leather, with a gleaming steel breastplate and a steel helmet crested with the freshly severed fin of a giant flying fish. Scales and spines scintillated as the soldier stepped back and forth under the bright sun, striking out seemingly at leisure with an iron-shod staff.
The nichavezzo stood on a platform that was small but rock-steady; a series of circular wooden flats surrounded him, separated by an arm’s-length span of water. These wobbly, unstable platforms were occupied by about two dozen slender, grimy prisoners, each armed with a small wooden cudgel. A concerted rush might have overwhelmed their armored tormentor, but this lot seemed to lack the temperament for cooperation. Approaching the nichavezzo singly or in little groups, they were being dropped, one after another, with skull-rattling blows. Little boats circled to fish out unconscious prisoners before they slipped under the water forever; the duke, in his mercy, did not allow Penance Bouts to be deliberately lethal.
“Mmmm.” Locke held his empty wine flute out for just a second; Conté plucked it out of his fingers with the grace of a swordsman disarming an opponent. When the don’s manservant stepped toward the liquor cabinet, Locke cleared his throat. “No need to refill that particular glass just yet, Conté. Too kind, too kind. But with your permission, my lord and lady Salvara, I should like to offer a pair of gifts. One as a matter of simple hospitality. The other as a … well, you’ll see. Graumann?”
Locke snapped his fingers, and Jean nodded. The heavyset man moved over to a wooden table just beside the liquor cabinet and picked up two heavy leather satchels, each of which had iron-reinforced corners and small iron locks sewn into their covers. Jean set these down where the Salvaras could easily see them, and then stepped back so Locke could unseal the satchels with a delicate key of carved ivory. From the first satchel, he withdrew a cask of pale aromatic wood, perhaps one foot in height and half that in diameter, which he then held out for Don Salvara’s examination. A plain black brand on the surface of the cask read:
Brandvin Austershalin 502
Don Lorenzo’s breath hissed in between his teeth; perhaps his nostrils even flared, though Locke kept the face of Lukas Fehrwight politely neutral. “Twelve gods, a 502. Lukas, if I seemed to be teasing you for your refusal to part with your goods, please accept my deepest—”
“You needn’t apologize, my lord.” Locke held up a hand and mimicked the don’s gesture for shooing words down out of the air. “For your bold intervention on my behalf, Don Salvara, and for your excellent hospitality this morning, fair doña, please accept this minor ornament for your cellars.”
“Minor!” The don took the cask and cradled it as though it were an infant not five minutes born. “I … I have a 506 and a pair of 504s. I don’t know of anyone in Camorr that has a 502, except probably the duke.”
“Well,” said Locke, “my masters have kept a few on hand, ever since the word got out that it was a particularly good blend. We use them to … break the ice, in matters of grave business importance.” In truth, that cask represented an investment of nearly eight hundred full crowns and a sea trip up the coast to Ashmere, where Locke and Jean had contrived to win it from an eccentric minor noble in a rigg
ed card game. Most of the money had actually gone to evade or buy off the assassins the old man had later sent after his property; the 502 vintage had become almost too precious to drink.
“What a grand gesture, Master Fehrwight!” Doña Sofia slipped a hand through the crook of her husband’s elbow and gave him a possessive grin. “Lorenzo, love, you should try to rescue strangers from Emberlain more often. They’re so charming!”
Locke coughed and shuffled his feet. “Ahh, hardly, my lady. Now, Don Salvara—”
“Please, do call me Lorenzo.”
“Ah, Don Lorenzo, what I have to show you next relates rather directly to my reason for coming here.” From the second satchel, he drew out a similar cask, but this one was marked only with a stylized ‘A’ within a circle of vines.
“This,” said Locke, “is a sample drawn from last year’s distillation. The 559.”
Don Salvara dropped the cask of 502.
The doña, with girlish agility, shot out her right foot to hook the cask in midair and let it down to the deck with a slight thump rather than a splintering crash. Unbalanced, she did manage to drop her ginger scald; the glass vanished over the side and was soon twenty feet underwater. The Salvaras steadied one another, and the don picked his cask of 502 back up, his hands shaking.
“Lukas,” he said, “surely—surely you must be kidding.”
4
LOCKE DIDN’T find it particularly easy to eat lunch while watching a dozen swimming men being pulled apart by a Jereshti devilfish, but he decided that his master merchant of Emberlain had probably seen worse, in his many imaginary sea voyages, and he kept his true feelings far from his face.