The Lies of Locke Lamora

Chapter ELEVEN

AT THE COURT OF CAPA RAZA

1

THEY HAD TO steal another little boat, Locke having so profligately disposed of their first. On any other night, he would have had a good laugh.

And so would Bug, and Calo, and Galdo, he told himself.

Locke and Jean drifted south between the Narrows and the Mara Camorrazza, hunched over in old cloaks from the floor of the Wardrobe, locked away from the rest of the city in the mist. The soft flickering lights and murmuring voices in the distance seemed to Locke as artifacts of an alien life he’d left long ago, not elements of the city he’d lived in for as long as he could remember.

“I am such a fool,” he muttered. He lay along a gunwale, aching, feeling the dry heaves rise up again from the battered pit of his stomach.

“If you say that one more time,” said Jean, “I will throw you into the water and row the boat over your head.”

“I should have let us run.”

“Perhaps,” said Jean. “But perhaps not everything miserable that happens to us stems directly from one of your choices, brother. Perhaps bad tidings come regardless of what we do. Perhaps if we’d run, that Bondsmage would have hunted us down upon the road, and scattered our bones somewhere between here and Talisham.”

“And yet…”

“We live,” said Jean forcefully. “We live and we may avenge them. You had the right idea when you did for that Gray King’s man back in the burrow. The questions now are why, and what next? Quit acting like you’ve been breathing Wraithstone smoke. I need your wits, Locke. I need the Thorn of Camorr.”

“Let me know when you find him. He’s a f*cking fairy tale.”

“No, he’s sitting here in this boat with me. If you’re not him now, you must become him. The Thorn is the man who can beat the Gray King. I can’t do it alone; I know that much. Why would the Gray King do this to us? What does it bring him? Think, damn it!”

“Too much to guess at,” said Locke. His voice regained a bit of its vigor as he pondered. “But…narrow the question. Consider the means. We saw one of his men beneath the temple; I saw another man when I was taken for the first time. So we know he had at least two working for him, in addition to the Bondsmage.”

“Right. Does he strike you as a sloppy operator?”

“No.” Locke rubbed his hands together. “No, everything he did seemed to me to be as intricate as Verrari clockwork.”

“Yet he sent only one man down into the burrow.”

“Yes—the Sanzas were already dead, I was thought to be dead, you walked into another trap set by the Bondsmage, and it would have been a crossbow quarrel for Bug. Deftly done. Quick and cruel.”

“But why not send two men? Why not three? To bury us so viciously, why not be absolutely sure of the issue?” Jean gave the water a few gentle strokes to hold their position against the current. “I cannot believe he suddenly became lazy, at the very culmination of his scheme.”

“Perhaps,” said Locke, “perhaps…he needed what other men he had elsewhere, very badly. Perhaps one was all he could spare.” Locke gasped and slammed his right fist into the open palm of his left hand. “Perhaps we weren’t the culmination of his scheme after all.”

“What, then?”

“Not what, who.” Locke sat up and groaned, his head swimming. “Who has he been attacking all these months? Jean, Barsavi believes the Gray King to be dead. So now what will he do tonight?”

“He…he’ll throw a revel. Just like he used to do on the Day of Changes. He’ll celebrate.”

“At the Floating Grave,” said Locke. “He’ll throw the doors open, haul in casks—gods, real ones this time. He’ll summon his whole court. All the Right People, drunk three deep along the causeway and the wharfs of the Wooden Waste. Just like the good old days.”

“So the Gray King faked his own death to lure Barsavi into throwing a revel?”

“It’s not the revel,” said Locke. “It’s…it’s the people. All the Right People. That’s it; gods, that’s it! Barsavi will appear before his people tonight for the first time in months. Do you understand? All the gangs, all the garristas will witness anything that happens there.”

“Which does what for the Gray King?”

“The f*cker has a flair for the dramatic. I’d say Barsavi’s in a heap of shit. Row, Jean. Get me down to the Cauldron right now. I can cross to the Waste myself. I need to be at the Floating Grave, with haste.”

“Have you lost your mind? If the Gray King and his men are still prowling, they’ll kill you for sure. And if Barsavi sees you, you’re supposed to be nearly dead of a stomach flux! You are nearly dead of more than that!”

“They won’t see Locke Lamora,” said Locke, fumbling with some of the items he’d managed to salvage from the Masque Box. He held a false beard up to his chin and grinned. “My hair’s going to be gray for a few days, since the removal salve is burning up as we speak. I’ll throw on some soot and put up the hood, and I’ll be just another skinny nobody with bruises all over his face, come looking for some free wine from the Capa.”

“You should rest; you’ve had your life damn near pounded out of you. You’re a complete mess.”

“I ache in places I didn’t previously realize I owned,” said Locke, gingerly applying adhesive paste to his chin with his fingers. “But it can’t be helped. This is all the disguise gear we have left; we’ve got no money, no wardrobe, no more temple, no more friends. And you only have a few hours, at best, to go to ground and find us a place to stay before the Gray King’s men realize one of their number is missing.”

“But still—”

“I’m half your size, Jean. You can’t pamper me now. I can go unseen; you’ll be obvious as the rising sun. My suggestion is that you find a hovel in Ashfall, clear out the rats, and leave some of our signs in the area. Just scrawl soot on the walls. I’ll find you when I’m done.”

“But—”

“Jean, you wanted the Thorn of Camorr. Well, you’ve got him.” Locke jammed the false beard onto his chin and pressed until the adhesive ceased tingling, letting him know that it was dry. “Take me to the Cauldron and let me off. For Calo, Galdo, and Bug, if not for me! Something’s about to happen at the Floating Grave, and I need to see what it is. Everything that bastard has done to us comes down to the next few hours—if it isn’t happening already.”

2

IT COULD be said, with several levels of truthful meaning, that Vencarlo Barsavi outdid himself with the celebration for his victory over the murderer of his daughter.

The Floating Grave was thrown open. The guards remained at their posts, but discipline slackened agreeably. Huge alchemical lanterns were hauled up under the silk awnings on the topmost decks of the harbor-locked galleon; they lit up the Wooden Waste beneath the dark sky and shone like beacons through the fog.

Runners were sent out to the Last Mistake for food and wine. The tavern was rapidly emptied of all its edibles, most of its casks, and every single one of its patrons. They streamed toward the Wooden Waste, drunk or sober, united in curious expectation.

The guards on the quay eyed the guests pouring in but did little else. Men and women without obvious weapons concealed beneath their clothes were passed through without so much as a cursory search. Flush with victory, the capa had decided to be magnanimous in more ways than one. This was to Locke’s benefit; hooded and bearded and thoroughly begrimed, he slipped in with a huge crowd of Cauldron cutthroats making their rowdy way across the walkway to Barsavi’s galleon, lit like a pleasure galley from some romantic tale of the pashas of the Bronze Sea.

The Floating Grave was packed with men and women. Capa Barsavi sat on his raised chair, surrounded by all of his inner circle: his red-faced, shouting sons; his most powerful surviving garristas; his quiet, watchful Berangias twins. Locke had to push and shove and utter curses to make his way into the heart of the fortress. He nudged himself into a corner near the main doors to the ballroom and watched the affair from this position, aching and uncomfortable but grateful just to be able to claim a vantage point.

The balconies were spilling over with toughs from all the gangs in Camorr—the rowdiness was growing by the minute. The heat was incredible, and the smell; Locke felt pressed against the wall by the weight of odors. Wet wool and sweated-through cotton, wine and wine breath, hair oils and leather.

It was just past the first hour of the morning when Barsavi suddenly rose from his chair and held up a single hand.

Attentiveness spread outward like a wave. Right People nudged one another into silence and pointed to the capa. It took less than a minute for the echoing chaos of the celebration to peter down to a soft murmur. Barsavi nodded appreciatively.

“I trust we’re enjoying ourselves?”

There was a general outburst of cheers, applause, and foot-stomping. Locke privately wondered how wise that really was in a ship of any sort. He was careful to applaud along with the crowd.

“Feels marvelous to be out from under a cloud, doesn’t it?”

Another cheer; Locke scratched at his temporary beard, now damp with sweat. There was a sudden sharp pain in his stomach, right where one of the younger Barsavis had given him particular consideration with a fist. The heat and the smell were triggering strange tickly feelings of nausea in the back of his throat, and he’d had enough of that particular sensation to last the rest of his life. Sourly, he coughed into his hands and prayed for just a few more hours of strength.

One of the Berangias sisters stepped over beside the capa, her shark’s-teeth bangles shining in the light of the hall’s chandeliers, and whispered into his ear. He listened for a few seconds, and then he smiled.

“Cheryn,” he shouted, “proposes that I allow her and her sister to entertain us. Shall I?”

The answering cheer was twice as forceful (and twice as genuine, to Locke’s ears) as anything yet heard. The wooden walls reverberated with it, and Locke flinched.

“Let’s have a teeth show, then!”

All was chaos for the next few minutes. Dozens of Barsavi’s people pushed revelers back, clearing an area at the center of the floor about ten yards on a side. Revelers were pressed up the stairs until the balconies creaked beneath their weight; observation holes were cranked open so those on the top deck could peer down at the proceedings. Locke was pushed back into his corner more firmly than ever.

Men with hooked poles drew up the wooden panels of the floor, revealing the dark water of Camorr Bay. A thrill of anticipation and alarm passed through the crowd at the thought of what might be swimming down there. The unquiet spirits of eight Full Crowns, for one thing, thought Locke.

As the final panels in the center of the opening square were removed, almost everyone present could see the little support platforms on which they’d rested, not one wider than a man’s hand-spread. They were spaced about five feet apart. Barsavi’s arena for his own private teeth shows—a challenge for any contrarequialla, even a pair as experienced as the Berangias sisters.

Cheryn and Raiza, old hands at teasing a crowd, were stripping out of their leather doublets, bracers, and collars. They took their graceful time while the capa’s subjects hooted approval, hoisted cups and glasses, and in some cases even shouted unlikely propositions.

Anjais hurried forward with a little packet of alchemical powders in his hands. He dumped this into the water, then took a prudent step back. This was the “summons”—a potent mix of substances that would rouse the shark’s ire and maintain it for the duration of the contest. Blood in the water could attract and enrage a shark, but the summons would make it utterly drunk with the urge to attack—to leap, thrash, and roll at the women jumping back and forth across their little platforms.

The Berangias sisters stepped forward to nearly the edge of the artificial pool, holding their traditional weapons: the pick-head axes and the short javelins. Anjais and Pachero stood behind them and just to their left; the Capa remained standing by his chair, clapping his hands and grinning broadly.

A black fin broke the surface of the pool; a tail thrashed. There was a brief splash of water, and the electric atmosphere of the crowd intensified. Locke could feel it washing over him—lust and fear entwined, a powerful, animalistic sensation. The crowd had backed off about two yards from any edge of the pool, but still some in the front ranks were shaking nervously, and a few were trying to push their way farther back through the crowd, to the delight and derision of those around them.

In truth, the shark couldn’t have been longer than five or six feet; some of those used at the Shifting Revel reached twice that length. Still, a fish like that could easily maim on the leap, and if it dragged a person down into the water with it, well, raw size would mean little in such an uneven contest.

The Berangias sisters threw up their arms, then turned as one to the capa. The sister on the right—Raiza? Cheryn? Locke had never learned the trick of telling them apart…. And at the thought his heart ached for the Sanzas. Playing deftly to the crowd, Barsavi put up his hands and looked around at his court. When they cheered him on, he stepped down between the ladies and received a kiss on the cheek from each of them.

The water stirred just before the three of them; a sleek black shadow swept past the edge of the pool, then dove down into the lightless depths. Locke could feel five hundred hearts skip a beat, and the breath in five hundred throats catch. His own concentration seemed to peak, and he caught every detail of that moment as though it were frozen before him, from the eager smile on Barsavi’s round red face to the rippling reflection of chandelier light on the water.

“Camorr!” cried the Berangias sister to the capa’s right. Again, the noise of the crowd died, this time as though one gigantic windpipe had been slit. Five hundred pairs of eyes were fixed on the capa and his bodyguards.

“We dedicate this death,” she continued, “to Capa Vencarlo Barsavi, our lord and patron!”

“Well does he deserve it,” said the other.

The shark exploded out of the pool immediately before them—a sleek dark devilish thing, with black lidless eyes and white teeth gaping. A ten-foot fountain of water rose up with it, and it half somersaulted in midair, falling forward, falling…

Directly atop Capa Barsavi.

Barsavi put up his arms to shield himself; the shark came down with its mouth wide open around one of them. The fish’s muscle-heavy body slammed hard against the wood floor, yanking Barsavi down with it. Those implacable jaws squeezed tight, and the capa screamed as blood gushed from just beneath his right shoulder, running out across the floor and down the shark’s blunt snout.

His sons dashed forward to his aid. The Berangias sister to the right looked down at the shark, shifted her weight fluidly to a fighting stance, raised her gleaming axe, and whirled with all the strength of her upper body behind the blow.

Her blade smashed Pachero Barsavi’s head just above his left ear; the tall man’s optics flew off and he staggered forward, his skull caved in, dead before his knees hit the deck.

The crowd screamed and surged, and Locke prayed to the Benefactor to preserve him long enough to make sense of whatever happened next.

Anjais gaped at his struggling father and his falling brother. Before he could utter a single word the other Berangias stepped up behind him, reached around to press her javelin shaft up beneath his chin, and buried the spike of her axe in the back of his head. He spat blood and toppled forward, unmoving.

The shark writhed and tore at the capa’s right arm, while he screamed and beat at its snout until his left hand was scraped bloody by the creature’s abrasive skin. With a final sickening wrench, the shark tore his right arm completely off and slid backward into the water, leaving a broad red streak on the wooden deck behind it. Barsavi rolled away, spraying blood from the stump of his arm, staring at the bodies of his sons in uncomprehending terror. He tried to stumble up.

One of the Berangias sisters kicked him back to the deck.

There was a tumult behind the fallen Capa; several Red Hands rushed forward, weapons drawn, hollering incoherently. What happened next was a blurry, violent mystery to Locke’s untrained eyes, but the two half-clothed Berangias dealt with half a dozen armored men with a brutality the shark would have envied. Javelins flew, axes whirled, throats opened, and blood spurted. The last Red Hand was slumping to the deck, his face a jagged scarlet ruin, perhaps five seconds after the first had charged forward.

There was brawling on the balconies, now—Locke could see men pushing their way through the crowds, men in heavy gray oilcloaks, armed with crossbows and long knives. Some of Barsavi’s guards stood back and did nothing; some attempted to flee; others were taken from behind by their cloaked assailants and killed out of hand. Crossbow strings sang; bolts whirred through the air. There was a resounding bang to Locke’s left. The great doors to the ballroom had slammed shut, seemingly of their own accord, and the clockwork mechanisms within were whirring and clicking. People battered at them uselessly.

One of Barsavi’s men pushed his way out of a crowd of panicking, shoving Right People and raised a crossbow at the Berangias sisters, who stood over the wounded capa like lionesses guarding a kill. A dark streak fell on him from out of the shadowy corners of the ceiling; there was an inhuman screech, and the shot went far awry, hissing above the sisters’ heads to strike the far wall. The guard batted furiously at the brown shape that flapped back into the air on long curving wings—then he put a hand to his neck, staggered, and fell flat on his face.

“Remain where you are,” boomed a voice with an air of assured command. “Remain where you are and attend.”

The command had a greater effect than Locke would have expected. He even felt his own fear dimming down, his own urge to flee vanishing. The wailing and screaming of the crowd quieted; the pounding on the great doors ceased; an eerie calm rapidly fell on what had been the exultant court of Capa Barsavi, not two minutes earlier.

The hairs on the back of Locke’s neck stood up; the change in the crowd was not natural. He might have missed it, but that he’d been under its influence before. There was sorcery in the air. He shivered despite himself. Gods, I hope coming here was as wise an idea as it seemed.

The Gray King was suddenly there with them.

It was as though he’d stepped out of a door that opened from thin air, just beside the capa’s chair. He wore his cloak and mantle, and he stepped with a hunter’s easy assurance across the bodies of the Red Hands. At his side strode the Falconer, with a gauntleted fist held up to the air. Vestris settled upon it, pulled in her wings, and screeched triumphantly. There were gasps and murmurs in the crowd.

“No harm will come to you,” said the Gray King. “I’ve done what harm I came to do tonight.” He stepped up between the Berangias sisters and looked down at Capa Barsavi, who was writhing and moaning on the deck at his feet.

“Hello, Vencarlo. Gods, but you’ve looked better.”

Then the Gray King swept back his hood, and once again Locke saw those intense eyes, the hard lines of the face, the dark hair with streaks of gray, the lean rugged countenance. And he gasped, because he finally realized what had nagged him during his first meeting with the Gray King, that odd familiarity.

All the pieces of that particular puzzle were before him. The Gray King stood between the Berangias sisters, and it was now plain to Locke’s eye that they were siblings—very nearly triplets.

3

“CAMORR,” SHOUTED the Gray King, “the reign of the Barsavi family is at an end!”

His people had taken firm control of the crowd; there were perhaps two dozen of them, in addition to the Berangias sisters and the Falconer. The fingers of the mage’s left hand curled and twisted and flexed, and he muttered under his breath as he gazed around the room. Whatever spell he was weaving did its part to calm the crowd, but no doubt the three black rings visible on his exposed wrist arrested the attention of the revelers as well.

“In fact,” said the Gray King, “the Barsavi family is at an end. No more sons or daughters, Vencarlo. I wanted you to know, before you died, that I had wiped the disease of your loins from the face of the world.

“In the past,” he shouted, “you have known me as the Gray King. Well, now I am out of the shadows. That name is not to be spoken again. Henceforth, you may call me…Capa Raza.”

Raza, thought Locke. Throne Therin for “vengeance.” Not subtle.

Very little about the Gray King, he was learning to his sorrow, actually was.

Capa Raza, as he now styled himself, bent over Barsavi, who was weak with blood loss, whimpering in pain. Raza reached down and pried the capa’s signature ring from his remaining hand. He held this up for all the crowd to behold, then slid it onto the fourth finger of his own left hand.

“Vencarlo,” said Capa Raza, “I have waited so many years to see you like this. Now your children are dead, and your office is passed to me, along with your fortress and your treasure. Every legacy you thought to leave to someone of your name is in my hands. I have erased you from history itself. Does that suit your fancy, scholar? Like an errant chalk mark upon a slate. I have wiped you clean away.

“Do you remember the slow death of your wife? How she trusted your Berangias sisters to the very end? How they would bring her meals to her? She didn’t die of stomach tumors. It was black alchemy. I wanted to do something to whet my appetite, during the long years I spent building this death for you.” Capa Raza grinned with demonic mirth. “Lingered in pain, didn’t she? Well, it wasn’t an act of the gods, Vencarlo. Like everyone else you loved, she died because of you.”

“Why?” Barsavi’s voice was weak and small.

Capa Raza knelt beside him, cradled his head almost tenderly, and whispered in his ear for several long moments. Barsavi stared up at him when he was finished, jaw slack, eyes wide with disbelief, and Raza nodded slowly.

He yanked Barsavi’s head up and backward by his beards. A stiletto fell into his other hand from within his sleeve, and he rammed it into the underside of Vencarlo Barsavi’s exposed chins, all the way to the hilt. Barsavi kicked weakly, just once.

Capa Raza stood up, withdrawing the blade. The Berangias sisters grabbed their former master by his lapels and slid him into the dark water of the bay, which received his body as readily as it had taken his victims and his enemies, over all the long years of his rule.

“One capa rules Camorr,” said Raza, “and now it is me. Now it is me!” He raised the bloody stiletto over his head and gazed around the room, as though inviting disagreement. When none came forth, he continued.

“It is not my intention merely to remove Barsavi, but to replace him. My reasons are my own. So now there is business between myself and all the rest of you, all the Right People.” He gazed slowly around the room, his arms folded before him, his chin thrust out like a conquering general in an old bronze sculpture.

“You must hear my words, and then come to a decision.”

4

“NOTHING THAT you have achieved shall be taken from you,” he continued. “Nothing that you have worked or suffered for will be revoked. I admire the arrangements Barsavi built, as much as I hated the man who built them. So this is my word.

“All remains as it was. All garristas and their gangs will control the same territories; they will pay the same tribute, on the same day, once a week. The Secret Peace remains. As it was death to breach under Barsavi’s rule, so shall it be death under mine.

“I claim all of Barsavi’s offices and powers. I claim all of his dues. In justice, I must therefore claim his debts and his responsibilities. If any man can show that he was owed by Barsavi, he will now be owed the same by Capa Raza. First among them is Eymon Danzier…. Step forward, Eymon.”

There was a murmur and a ripple in the crowd to Capa Raza’s right; after a few moments, the skinny man Locke remembered very well from the Echo Hole was pushed forward, obviously terrified. His bony knees all but knocked together.

“Eymon, be at ease.” Raza held out his left hand, palm down, fingers splayed, as Barsavi had once done for every single person watching. “Kneel to me and name me your capa.”

Shaking, Eymon dropped to one knee, took Raza’s hand, and kissed the ring. His lips came away wet with Barsavi’s blood. “Capa Raza,” he said, in an almost pleading tone.

“You did a very brave thing at the Echo Hole, Eymon. A thing few men would have done in your place. Barsavi was right to promise you much for it, and I will make good on that promise. You will have a thousand crowns, and a suite of rooms, and such comforts that men with many long years of life ahead of them will pray to the gods to put them in your place.”

“I…I…” Tears were actually pouring out of the man’s eyes. “I wasn’t sure what you would…thank you, Capa Raza. Thank you.”

“I wish you much pleasure, for the service you have given me.”

“Then…it wasn’t…it wasn’t you, at the Echo Hole, if I may ask, Capa Raza.”

“Oh, no, Eymon.” Raza laughed, a deep and pleasant sound. “No, that was but an illusion.”

In the far corner of the Floating Grave’s ballroom, that particular illusion fumed silently to himself, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Tonight you have seen me with blood on my hands,” Raza shouted, “and you have seen them open in what I hope will be seen as true generosity. I am not a difficult man to get along with; I want us to prosper together. Serve me as you served Barsavi, and I know it will be so. I ask you, garristas, who will bend the knee and kiss my ring as your capa?”

“The Rum Hounds,” shouted a short, slender woman at the front of the crowd on the ballroom floor.

“The Falselight Cutters,” cried another man. “The Falselight Cutters say aye!”

That doesn’t make any gods-damned sense, thought Locke. The Gray King murdered their old garristas. Are they playing some sort of game with him?

“The Wise Mongrels!”

“The Catchfire Barons.”

“The Black Eyes.”

“The Full Crowns,” came another voice, and an echoing chorus of affirmations. “The Full Crowns stand with Capa Raza!”

Suddenly Locke wanted to laugh out loud. He put a fist to his mouth and turned the noise into a stifled cough. It was suddenly obvious. The Gray King hadn’t just been knocking off Barsavi’s most loyal garristas. He must have been cutting deals with their subordinates, beforehand.

Gods, there had been more Gray King’s men in the room out of costume than in…waiting for the evening’s real show to commence.

A half dozen men and women stepped forward and knelt before Raza at the edge of the pool, wherein the shark hadn’t shown so much as a fin since forcibly relieving Barsavi of his arm.

The damned Bondsmage certainly has a way with animals, Locke thought, with mixed anger and jealousy. He found himself feeling very small indeed before each display of the Falconer’s arts.

One by one the garristas knelt and made their obeisance to the Capa, kissing his ring and saying “Capa Raza” with real enthusiasm. Five more stepped forward to kneel directly afterward, apparently giving in to the direction they felt events to be slipping. Locke calculated rapidly. With just the pledges he’d already received, Raza could now call three or four hundred Right People his own. His overt powers of enforcement had increased substantially.

“Then we are introduced,” said Raza to the entire crowd. “We are met, and you know my intentions. You are free to return to your business.”

The Falconer made a few gestures with his free hand. The clockwork mechanisms within the doors to the hall clattered in reverse, and the doors clicked open.

“I give the undecided three nights,” Capa Raza shouted. “Three nights to come to me here and bend the knee, and swear to me as they did to Barsavi. I devoutly wish to be lenient—but I warn you, now is not the time to anger me. You have seen my work; you know I have resources Barsavi lacked. You know I can be merciless when I am moved to displeasure. If you are not content serving beneath me, if you think it might be wiser or more exciting to oppose me, I will make one suggestion: pack what fortune you have and leave the city by the landward gates. If you wish to part ways, no harm will come to you from my people. For three nights, I give you my leave and my parole.

“After that,” he said, lowering his voice, “I will make what examples I must. Go now, and speak to your pezon. Speak to your friends, and to other garristas. Tell them what I have said; tell them I wait to receive their pledges.”

Some of the crowd began to disperse out the doors; others, wiser perhaps, began to line up before Capa Raza. The former Gray King took each pledge at the bloody heart of a circle of corpses.

Locke waited for several minutes until the press had lessened, until the solid torrent of hot, smelly humanity had decreased to a few thick streams, and then he moved toward the entrance. His feet felt as heavy as his head; fatigue seemed to be catching up with him.

There were corpses here and there on the floor—Barsavi’s guards, the loyal ones. Locke could see them now as the crowds continued to thin. Just beside the tall doors to the hall lay Bernell, who’d grown old in Capa Barsavi’s service. His throat was slashed; he lay in a pool of his own blood, and his fighting knives remained in their sheaths. He’d not had time to pull them.

Locke sighed. He paused for a moment in the doorway and stared back at Capa Raza and the Falconer. The Bondsmage seemed to stare right back at him, and for the tiniest instant Locke’s heart raced, but the sorcerer said nothing and did nothing. He merely continued to stand watch over the ritual as Capa Raza’s new subjects kissed his ring. Vestris yawned, snapping her beak briefly open, as though the affairs of the unwinged bored her terribly. Locke hurried out.

All the guards who watched the revelers as they left the galleon and filed up the walkway toward the quay were Raza’s men; they hadn’t bothered to move the bodies that lay on the ground at their feet. Some merely stared coldly; others nodded companionably. Locke recognized more than a few of them.

“Three nights, ladies and gents, three nights,” said one. “Tell your friends. You’re Capa Raza’s now. No need to be alarmed; just do as you’ve always done.”

So now we have some answers, thought Locke. Forgive me again, Nazca. I couldn’t have done anything even if I’d had the courage to try.

He clutched his aching stomach as he shambled along, head down. No guard spared a second glance for the skinny, bearded, dirty old beggar; there were a thousand in Camorr just like him, a thousand interchangeable losers, hopeless and penniless at the very bottom of the many levels of misery the underworld had to offer.

Now to hide. And to plan.

“Please yourself with what you’ve stolen tonight, you son of a bitch,” Locke whispered to himself when he’d made his way past the last of Raza’s guards. “Please yourself very well. I want to see the loss in your eyes when I put the f*cking dagger in your heart.”

5

BUT ONE can only get so far on thoughts of vengeance alone. The sharp pains in his stomach started up again about halfway through his slow, lonely walk to the Ashfall district.

His stomach ached and churned and growled. The night seemed to turn darker around him, and the narrow, fog-softened city horizons tilted strangely, as though he were drunk. Locke staggered and clutched at his chest, sweating and mumbling.

“Damned Gazer,” said a voice from the darkness. “Probably chasing dragons and rainbows and the lost treasure of Camorr.” Laughter followed this, and Locke stumbled on, anxious to avoid becoming a target for mischief. He’d never felt such weariness. It was as though his vigor had burned down to a pile of embers within him, fading and cooling and graying with every passing second.

Ashfall, never hospitable, was a hellish conglomeration of shadow-shapes to Locke’s decreasing concentration. He was breathing heavily, and sweating rivers. It felt as though someone were steadily packing more and more dry cotton in behind his eyeballs. His feet grew heavier and heavier; he urged them forward, one scraping step after another, on into the darkness and the jagged looming shadows of collapsed buildings. Unseen things skittered in the night; unseen watchers murmured at his passing.

“What the…gods, I…must…Jean,” he mumbled as he tripped against a man-sized chunk of fallen masonry and sprawled in the dusty shadows behind it. The place smelled of limestone and cookfires and urine. He lacked the strength to push himself back up.

“Jean,” he gasped, one last time; then he fell forward onto his face, unconscious even before his head struck the ground.

6

THE LIGHTS became visible in the third hour of the morning, perhaps a mile out to sea due south of the Dregs, where a nucleus of greater darkness slid low against the water, tacking slowly and gracelessly. The ship’s ghostly white sails flapped in the breezes as it made its way toward the Old Harbor; the bored watch in the three-story tower at the tip of the South Needle were the first to spot it.

“Right sloppy sailor, that one,” said the younger watchman, looking-glass in hand.

“Probably Verrari,” muttered the senior, who was methodically torturing a piece of ivory with a slender carving knife. He wanted it to come out like a sculpted terrace he’d seen at the Temple of Iono, alive with lovely relief and fantastical representations of drowned men taken by the Lord of the Grasping Waters. What he seemed to be producing more closely resembled a lump of white dogshit, life-size. “Sooner trust a sailing ship to a blind drunkard with no hands than a Verrari.”

Nothing else the vessel did warranted much attention until the lights suddenly appeared, and their deep yellow glow could be seen rippling on the dark surface of the water.

“Yellow lights, sergeant,” said the younger watchman. “Yellow lights.”

“What?” The older man set down his piece of ivory, plucked the spyglass from the younger man’s hands, and gave the incoming ship a good long stare. “Shit. Yellow it is.”

“A plague ship,” whispered the other watchman. “I’ve never seen one.”

“Either it’s a plague ship, or some bum-fancier from Jerem who don’t know proper colors for harbor lights.” He slid the spyglass casing shut and stepped over to a brass cylinder, mounted sideways on the rim of the watch station’s western wall, pointed toward the softly lit towers on the shore of the Arsenal District. “Ring the bell, boy. Ring the damn bell.”

The younger watchman reached over the other side of the little tower’s parapet to grasp a rope that dangled there. He began ringing the station’s heavy brass bell, a steady repetition of two pulls: ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding.

Flickering blue light flashed out from one of the Arsenal towers. The watch-sergeant worked the knob on the brass cylinder, turning the shutters that concealed the light of the unusually powerful alchemical globe within the cylinder. There was a list of simple messages he could flash to the Arsenal stations; they would flash it in turn to other ready sets of eyes. With luck, it might reach the Palace of Patience, or even Raven’s Reach, within two minutes.

Some time did pass; the plague ship grew larger and more distinct.

“Come on, half-wits,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Rouse yourselves. Quit pulling that damn bell, boy. I think we’ve been heard.”

Echoing across the mist-shrouded city came the high whistles of the Quarantine Guard. This noise was joined in short order by the rattle of drums: a night-muster of yellowjackets. Bright white lights flared to life in the towers of the Arsenal, and the watch-sergeant could see the tiny black shapes of men running along the waterfront.

“Oh, now we’ll see something,” he muttered. More lights appeared to the northeast; little towers dotted the South Needle and the Dregs, overlooking the Old Harbor, where Camorr set its plague anchorage by law and custom. Each little tower held a stone-throwing engine that could reach out across the water with fifty-pound loads of rock or fire-oil. The plague anchorage was one hundred and fifty yards south of the Dregs, directly over sixty fathoms of water, well within the throwing arcs of a dozen engines that could sink or burn anything afloat in minutes.

A galley was sliding out of the Arsenal gate, between the brightly lit towers—one of the swift little patrol vessels called “gulls,” for the winglike sweep of their oars. A gull carried twenty oars on a side, rowed by eighty paid men; on its deck it carried forty swordsmen, forty archers, and a pair of the heavy bolt-throwers called scorpia. It had no provisions for cargo and only one mast with a simple, furled sail. It was meant to do just one thing—close with any ship that threatened the city of Camorr and kill every man aboard, if its warnings were not heeded.

Smaller boats were putting out from the northern edge of the South Needle; harbor pilots and crews of yellowjackets, with red and white lanterns blazing at their prows.

On the opposite side of the long breakwater, the gull was just getting up to speed; the rows of graceful oars dipped and cut white froth in the black sea. A trail of rippling wake grew behind the galley; a drumbeat could be heard echoing across the water, along with the shouts of orders.

“Close, close,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Going to be close. That poor bastard don’t sail well; might have to get a stone across the bows before she slows up.”

A few small dark shapes could be seen moving against the pale billow of the plague ship’s sails; too few, it seemed, to work them properly. Yet as the vessel slid into Old Harbor, it began to show signs of slowing down. Its topsails were drawn up, albeit in a laggardly and lubberly fashion. The remaining sails were braced so as to spill the ship’s wind. They slackened, and with the creak of rope pulleys and the muted shouts of orders, they too began to draw up toward the yards.

“Oh, she’s got fine lines,” mused the watch-sergeant. “Fine lines.”

“That’s not a galleon,” said the younger watchman.

“Looks like one of those flush-deckers they were supposed to be building up in Emberlain; frigate-fashion, I think they call it.”

The plague ship wasn’t black from the darkness alone; it was lacquered black, and ornamented from bow to stern with witchwood filigree. There were no weapons to be seen.

“Crazy northerners. Even their ships have to be black. But she does look damn fine; fast, I’ll bet. What a heap of shit to fall into; now she’ll be stuck at quarantine for weeks. Poor bastards’ll be lucky to live.”

The gull rounded the point of the South Needle, oars biting hard into the water. By the galley’s running lamps, the two watchmen could see that the scorpia were loaded and fully manned; that the archers stood on their raised platforms with longbows in hand, fidgeting nervously.

A few minutes later the gull pulled abreast with the black ship, which had drifted in to a point about four hundred yards offshore. An officer strode out onto the gull’s long bow spar, and put a speaking trumpet to his mouth.

“What vessel?”

“Satisfaction; Emberlain,” came a return shout.

“Last port of call?”

“Jerem!”

“Ain’t that pretty,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Poor bastards might have anything.”

“What is your cargo?” asked the officer on the gull.

“Ship’s provisions only; we were to take cargo in Ashmere.”

“Complement?”

“Sixty-eight; twenty now dead.”

“You fly the plague lights in real need, then?”

“Yes, for the love of the gods. We don’t know what it is…. The men are burning with fever. The captain is dead and the physiker died yesterday! We beg assistance.”

“You may have a plague anchorage,” shouted the Camorri officer. “You must not approach our shore closer than one hundred and fifty yards, or you will be sunk. Any boats put out will be sunk or burned. Any man who attempts to swim to shore will be shot down—assuming he makes it past the sharks.”

“Please, send us a physiker. Send us alchemists, for the love of the gods!”

“You may not throw corpses overboard,” continued the officer. “You must keep them on board. Any packages or objects somehow conveyed to shore from your vessel will be burnt without examination. Any attempt to make such conveyance will be grounds for burning or sinking. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but please, is there nothing else you can do?”

“You may have priests on shore, and you may have freshwater and charitable provisions sent forth by rope from the dockside—these ropes to be sent out by boat from shore, and to be cut after use if necessary.”

“And nothing else?”

“You may not approach our shore, on pain of attack, but you may turn and leave at will. May Aza Guilla and Iono aid you in your time of need; I pray mercy for you, and wish you a swift deliverance in the name of Duke Nicovante of Camorr.”

A few minutes later the sleek black ship settled into its plague anchorage with furled sails, yellow lights gleaming above the black water of the Old Harbor, and there it rocked, gently, as the city slept in silver mists.





INTERLUDE

The Lady of the Long Silence

1

Jean Tannen entered the service of the Death Goddess about half a year after Locke returned from his sojourn in the priesthood of Nara, with the usual instructions to learn what he could and then return home in five or six months. He used the assumed name Tavrin Callas, and he traveled south from Camorr for more than a week to reach the great temple of Aza Guilla known as Revelation House.

Unlike the other eleven (or twelve) orders of Therin clergy, the servants of Aza Guilla began their initiation in only one place. The coastal highlands that rose south of Talisham ended at vast, straight white cliffs that fell three or four hundred feet to the crashing waves of the Iron Sea. Revelation House was carved from one of these cliffs, facing out to sea, on a scale that recalled the work of the Eldren but was accomplished—gradually and painstakingly, in an ongoing process—solely with human arts.

Picture a number of deep rectangular galleries, dug straight back into the cliff, connected solely by exterior means. To get anywhere in Revelation House, one had to venture outside, onto the walkways, stairs, and carved stone ladders, regardless of the weather or the time of day. Safety rails were unknown to Revelation House; initiates and teachers alike scuttled along in light or darkness, in rain or bright clear skies, with no barrier between themselves and a plunge to the sea save their own confidence and good fortune.

Twelve tall excised columns to the west of Revelation House held brass bells at the top; these open-faced rock tubes, about six feet deep and seventy feet high, had slender hand- and footholds carved into their rear walls. At dawn and dusk, initiates were expected to climb them and ensure that each bell was rung twelve times, once for each god in the pantheon. The carillon was always somewhat ragged; when Jean thought he could get away with it, he rang his own bell thirteen times.

Three initiates plunged to their deaths attempting to perform this ritual before Jean had passed his first month at the temple. This number struck him as surprisingly low, given how many of the devotional duties of Aza Guilla’s new servants (not to mention the architecture of their home) were clearly designed to encourage premature meetings with the Death Goddess.

“We are concerned here with death considered in two aspects: Death the Transition and Death Everlasting,” said one of their lecturers, an elderly priestess with three braided silver collars at the neck of her black robe. “Death Everlasting is the realm of the Lady Most Kind; it is a mystery not intended for penetration or comprehension from our side of the Lady’s shroud. Death the Transition, therefore, is the sole means by which we may achieve a greater understanding of her dark majesty.

“Your time here in Revelation House will bring you close to Death the Transition on many occasions, and it is a certainty that some of you will pass beyond before you finish your initiation. This may be achieved through inattentiveness, lassitude, ill fortune, or the inscrutable will of the Lady Most Kind herself. As initiates of the Lady, you will be exposed to Death the Transition and its consequences for the rest of your lives. You must grow accustomed to it. It is natural for living flesh to recoil from the presence of death, and from thoughts of death. Your discipline must overcome what is natural.”

2

AS WITH most Therin temples, initiates of the First Inner Mystery were mostly expected to train their scribing, sums, and rhetoric to the point that they could enter higher levels of study without distracting more advanced initiates. Jean, with his advantages in age and training, was inducted into the Second Inner Mystery a bare month and a half after arrival.

“Henceforth,” said the priest conducting the ceremony, “you will conceal your faces. You will have no features of boy or girl, man or woman. The priesthood of the Lady Most Kind has only one face, and that face is inscrutable. We must not be seen as individuals, as fellow men and women. The office of the Death Goddess’ servants must disquiet if those we minister to are to compose their thoughts to her properly.”

The Sorrowful Visage was the silver mask of the order of Aza Guilla; for initiates, it bore a crude resemblance to a human face, with a rough indentation for the nose and holes for the eyes and mouth. For full priests, it was a slightly ovoid hemisphere of fine silver mesh. Jean donned his Sorrowful Visage, eager to get to work cataloguing more secrets of the order, only to discover that his duties were little changed from his month as an initiate of the First Inner Mystery. He still carried messages and scribed scrolls, swept floors and scoured the kitchens, still scurried up and down the precarious rock ladders beneath the Bells of the Twelve, with the unfriendly sea crashing far below and the wind tugging at his robes.

Only now he had the honor of doing all these things in his silver mask, with his peripheral vision partly blocked. Two more initiates of the Second Inner Mystery fell to a firsthand acquaintance with Death the Transition shortly after Jean’s elevation.

About a month after that, Jean was poisoned for the first time.

3

“CLOSER AND closer,” said the priestess, whose voice seemed muffled and distant. “Closer and closer to Death the Transition, to the very edge of the mystery—feel your limbs growing cold. Feel your thoughts slowing. Feel the beating of your heart growing sluggish. The warm humors are banking down; the fire of life is fading.”

She had given them some sort of green wine, a poison that Jean could not identify; each of the dozen initiates of the Second Inner Mystery in his morning class lay prostrated and twitching feebly, their silver masks staring fixedly upward, as they could no longer move their necks.

Their instructor hadn’t quite managed to explain what the wine would do before she ordered them to drink it; Jean suspected that the willingness of the initiates around him to dance gaily on the edge of Death the Transition was still more theory than actuality.

Of course, look who knows so much better, he thought to himself as he marveled at how tingly and distant his legs had become. Crooked Warden…this priesthood is crazy. Give me strength to live, and I’ll return to the Gentlemen Bastards…where life makes sense.

Yes, where he lived in a secret Elderglass cellar beneath a rotting temple, pretending to be a priest of Perelandro while taking weapons lessons from the duke’s personal swordmaster. Perhaps a bit drunk on whatever drug was having its way with him, Jean giggled.

The sound seemed to echo and reverberate in the low-ceilinged study hall; the priestess turned slowly. The Sorrowful Visage concealed her true expression, but in his drug-hazed mind Jean was certain he could feel her burning stare.

“An insight, Tavrin?”

He couldn’t help himself; he giggled again. The poison seemed to be making merry with the tight-lipped inhibition he’d feigned since arriving at the temple. “I saw my parents burn to death,” he said. “I saw my cats burn to death. Do you know the noise a cat makes, when it burns?” Another damn giggle; he almost choked on his own spit in surprise. “I watched and could do nothing. Do you know where to stab a man, to bring death now, or death in a minute, or death in an hour? I do.” He would have been rolling with laughter, if he could move his limbs; as it was, he shuddered and twitched his fingers. “Lingering death? Two or three days of pain? I can give that, too. Ha! Death the Transition? We’re old friends!”

The priestess’ mask fixed directly on him; she stared for several drug-lengthened moments while Jean thought, Oh, gods damn this stuff, I’ve really done it now.

“Tavrin,” said the priestess, “when the effects of the emerald wine have passed, remain here. The High Proctor will speak to you then.”

Jean lay in mingled bemusement and dread for the rest of the morning. The giggles still came, interspersed with bouts of drunken self-loathing. So much for a full season of work. Some false-facer I turned out to be.

That night, much to his surprise, he was confirmed as having passed into the Third Inner Mystery of Aza Guilla.

“I knew we could expect exceptional things from you, Callas,” said the High Proctor, a bent old man whose voice wheezed behind his Sorrowful Visage. “First the extraordinary diligence you showed in your mundane studies, and your rapid mastery of the exterior rituals. Now, a vision…a vision during your very first Anguishment. You are marked, marked! An orphan who witnessed the death of his mother and father…You were fated to serve the Lady Most Kind.”

“What, ah, are the additional duties of an initiate of the Third Inner Mystery?”

“Why, Anguishment,” said the High Proctor. “A month of Anguishment; a month of exploration into Death the Transition. You shall take the emerald wine once again, and then you shall experience other means of closeness to the precipitous moment of the Lady’s embrace. You shall hang from silk until nearly dead; you shall be exsanguinated. You shall take up serpents, and you shall swim in the night ocean, wherein dwell many servants of the Lady. I envy you, little brother. I envy you, newly born to our mysteries.”

Jean fled Revelation House that very night.

He packed his meager bag of belongings and raided the kitchens for food. Before entering Revelation House, he’d buried a small bag of coins beneath a certain landmark about a mile inland from the cliffs, near the village of Sorrow’s Ease, which supplied the cliffside temple’s material wants. That money should suffice to get him back to Camorr.

He scrawled a note and left it on his sleeping pallet, in the fresh new solitary chamber accorded to him for his advanced rank:



GRATEFUL FOR OPPORTUNITIES, BUT COULD NOT WAIT. HAVE ELECTED TO SEEK THE STATE OF DEATH EVERLASTING; CANNOT BE CONTENT WITH THE LESSER MYSTERIES OF DEATH THE TRANSITION. THE LADY CALLS.



—TAVRIN CALLAS



He climbed the stone stairs for the last time, as the waves crashed in the darkness below; the soft red glow of alchemical storm-lamps guided him to the top of Revelation House, and thence to the top of the cliffs, where he vanished unseen into the night.

4

“DAMN,” SAID Galdo, when Jean had finished his tale. “I’m glad I got sent to the Order of Sendovani.”

The night of Jean’s return, after Father Chains had grilled Jean in depth on his experiences at Revelation House, he’d let the four boys head up to the roof with clay mugs of warm Camorri ale. They sat out beneath the stars and the scattered silver clouds, sipping their ale with much-exaggerated casualness. They savored the illusion that they were men, gathered of their own accord, with the hours of the night theirs to spend entirely at their own whim.

“No shit,” said Calo. “In the Order of Gandolo, we got pastries and ale every second week, and a copper piece every Idler’s Day, to spend as we wished. You know, for the Lord of Coin and Commerce.”

“I’m particularly fond of our priesthood of the Benefactor,” said Locke,

“since our main duties seem to be sitting around and pretending that the Benefactor doesn’t exist. When we’re not stealing things, that is.”

“Too right,” said Galdo. “Death-priesting is for morons.”

“But still,” asked Calo, “didn’t you wonder if they might not be right?” He sipped his ale before continuing. “That you might really be fated to serve the Lady Most Kind?”

“I had a long time to think about it, on the way back to Camorr,” said Jean. “And I think they were right. Just maybe not the way they thought.”

“How do you mean?” The Sanzas spoke in unison, as they often did when true curiosity seized the pair of them at once.

In reply, Jean reached behind his back, and from out of his tunic he drew a single hatchet, a gift from Don Maranzalla. It was plain and unadorned, but well maintained and ideally balanced for someone who’d not yet come into his full growth. Jean set it on the stones of the temple roof and smiled.

“Oh,” said Calo and Galdo.





IV

DESPERATE IMPROVISATION


“I pitch like my hair’s on fire.”





Mitch Williams