The Lies of Locke Lamora

Chapter TWELVE

THE FAT PRIEST FROM TAL VERRAR

1

WHEN LOCKE AWOKE, he was lying on his back and looking up at a fading, grime-covered mural painted on a plaster ceiling. The mural depicted carefree men and women in the robes of the Therin Throne era, gathered around a cask of wine, with cups in their hands and smiles on their rosy faces. Locke groaned and closed his eyes again.

“And here he is,” said an unfamiliar voice, “just as I said. It was the poultice that answered for him; most uncommonly good physik for the enervation of the bodily channels.”

“Who the hell might you be?” Locke found himself in a profoundly undiplomatic temper. “And where am I?”

“You’re safe, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say comfortable.” Jean Tannen rested a hand on Locke’s left shoulder and smiled down at him. Usually rather fastidious, he was now several days unshaven, and his face was streaked with dirt. “And some former patients of the renowned Master Ibelius might also take issue with my pronouncement of safety.”

Jean made a quick pair of hand gestures to Locke: We’re safe; speak freely.

“Tut, Jean, your little cuts are fine repayment for the work of the past few days.” The unfamiliar voice, it seemed, came from a wrinkled, birdlike man with skin like a weathered brown tabletop. His nervous dark eyes peeped out from behind thick optics, thicker than any Locke had ever seen. He wore a disreputable cotton tunic, spattered with what might have been dried sauces or dried blood, under a mustard-yellow waistjacket in a style twenty years out of date. His spring-coils of curly gray hair seemed to sprout straight out from the back of his head, where they were pulled into a queue. “I have navigated your friend back to the shores of consciousness.”

“Oh, for Perelandro’s sake, Ibelius, he didn’t have a crossbow quarrel in his brain. He just needed to rest.”

“His warm humors were at a singularly low ebb; the channels of his frame were entirely evacuated of vim. He was pale, unresponsive, bruised, desiccated, and malnourished.”

“Ibelius?” Locke attempted to sit up and was partially successful; Jean caught him by the back of his shoulders and helped him the rest of the way. The room spun. “Ibelius the dog-leech from the Redwater district?”

Dog-leeches were the medical counterparts of the black alchemists; without credentials or a place in the formal guilds of physikers, they treated the injuries and maladies of the Right People of Camorr. A genuine physiker might look askance at treating a patient for an axe wound at half past the second hour of the morning, and summon the city watch. A dog-leech would ask no questions, provided his fee was paid in advance.

The trouble with dog-leeches, of course, was that one took one’s chances with their abilities and credentials. Some really were trained healers, fallen on hard times or banished from the profession for crimes such as grave-robbing. Others were merely improvisers, applying years’ worth of practical knowledge acquired tending to the results of bar fights and muggings. A few were entirely mad, or homicidal, or—charmingly—both.

“My colleagues are dog-leeches,” sniffed Ibelius. “I am a physiker, Collegium-trained. Your own recovery is a testament to that.”

Locke glanced around the room. He was lying (wearing nothing but a breechclout) on a pallet in a corner of what must have been an abandoned Ashfall villa. A canvas curtain hung over the room’s only door; two orange-white alchemical lanterns filled the space with light. Locke’s throat was dry, his body still ached, and he smelled rather unpleasant—not all of it was the natural odor of an unwashed man. A strange translucent residue flaked off his stomach and sternum. He poked at it with his fingers.

“What,” said Locke, “is this crap on my chest?”

“The poultice, sir. Varagnelli’s Poultice, to be precise, though I hardly presume your familiarity with the subject. I employed it to concentrate the waning energy of your bodily channels; to confine the motion of your warm humors in the region where it would do you the most good. To wit, your abdomen. We did not want your energy to dissipate.”

“What was in it?”

“The poultice is a proprietary conglomeration, but the essence of its function is provided by the admixture of the gardener’s assistant and turpentine.”

“Gardener’s assistant?”

“Earthworms,” said Jean. “He means earthworms ground in turpentine.”

“And you let him smear it all over me?” Locke groaned and sank back down onto the pallet.

“Only your abdomen, sir—your much-abused abdomen.”

“He’s the physiker,” said Jean. “I’m only good at breaking people; I don’t put them back together.”

“What happened to me, anyway?”

“Enervation—absolute enervation, as thorough as I’ve ever seen it.” Ibelius lifted Locke’s left wrist while he spoke and felt for a pulse. “Jean told me that you took an emetic, the evening of Duke’s Day.”

“Did I ever!”

“And that you ate and drank nothing afterward. That you were then seized, and severely beaten, and nearly slain by immersion in a cask of horse urine—how fantastically vile, sir, you have my sympathies. And that you had received a deep wound to your left forearm; a wound that is now scabbing over nicely, no thanks to your ordeals. And that you remained active all evening despite your injuries and your exhaustion. And that you pursued your course with the utmost dispatch, taking no rest.”

“Sounds vaguely familiar.”

“You simply collapsed, sir. In layman’s terms, your body revoked its permission for you to continue heaping abuse upon it.” Ibelius chuckled.

“How long have I been here?”

“Two days and two nights,” said Jean.

“What? Gods damn me. Out cold the whole time?”

“Quite,” said Jean. “I watched you fall over; I wasn’t thirty yards away, crouched in hiding. Took me a few minutes to realize why the bearded old beggar looked familiar.”

“I have kept you somewhat sedated,” said Ibelius. “For your own good.”

“Gods damn it!”

“Clearly, my judgment was sound, as you would have had no will to rest otherwise. And it made it easier to use a series of fairly unpleasant poultices to greatly reduce the swelling and bruising of your face. Had you been awake, you surely would have complained of the smell.”

“Argh,” said Locke. “Tell me you have something at hand I can drink, at least.”

Jean passed him a skin of red wine; it was warm and sour and watered to the point that it was more pink than red, but Locke drank half of it down in a rapid series of undignified gulps.

“Have a care, Master Lamora, have a care,” said Ibelius. “I fear you have little conception of your own natural limitations. Make him take the soup, Jean. He needs to regain his animal strength, or his humors will fade again. He is far too thin for his own good; he is fast approaching anemia.”

Locke devoured the proffered soup (boiled shark in a milk-and-potato stew; bland, congealed, many hours past freshness, and positively the most splendid thing he could recall ever having tasted), and then stretched. “Two days, gods. I don’t suppose we’ve been lucky enough to have Capa Raza fall down some stairs and break his neck?”

“Hardly,” said Jean. “He’s still with us. Him and his Bondsmage. They’ve been very busy, those two. It might interest you to know that the Gentlemen Bastards are formally outcast, and I’m presumed alive, worth five hundred crowns to the man that brings me in. Preferably after I stop breathing.”

“Hmmm,” said Locke. “Dare I ask, Master Ibelius, what keeps you here smearing earthworms on my behalf when either of us is your key to Capa Raza’s monetary favor?”

“I can explain that,” said Jean. “Seems there was another Ibelius, who worked for Barsavi as one of his Floating Grave guards. A loyal Barsavi man, I should say.”

“Oh,” said Locke. “My condolences, Master Ibelius. A brother?”

“My younger brother. The poor idiot; I kept telling him to find another line of work. It seems we have a great deal of common sorrow, courtesy of Capa Raza.”

“Yes,” said Locke. “Yes, Master Ibelius. I’m going to put that f*cker in the dirt as deeply as any man who’s ever been murdered, ever since the world began.”

“Ahhh,” said Ibelius. “So Jean says. And that’s why I’m not even charging for my services. I cannot say I think highly of your chances, but any enemy of Capa Raza is most welcome to my care, and to my discretion.”

“Too kind,” said Locke. “I suppose if I must have earthworms and turpentine smeared on my chest, I’m very happy to have you…ah, overseeing the affair.”

“Your servant, sir,” said Ibelius.

“Well, Jean,” said Locke, “we seem to have a hiding place, a physiker, and the two of us. What are our other assets?”

“Ten crowns, fifteen solons, five coppers,” said Jean. “That cot you’re lying on. You ate the wine and drank the soup. I’ve got the Wicked Sisters, of course. A few cloaks, some boots, your clothes. And all the rotting plaster and broken masonry a man could dream of.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yes, except for one small thing.” Jean held up the silver mesh mask of a priest of Aza Guilla. “The aid and comfort of the Lady of the Long Silence.”

“How the hell did you arrange that?”

“Right after I dropped you off at the edge of the Cauldron,” said Jean, “I decided to row back to the Temple District and make myself useful.”

2

THE FIRE within the House of Perelandro had yet to finish burning when Jean Tannen threw himself down, half-dressed, at the service entrance to the House of Aza Guilla, two squares northeast of the temple the Gentlemen Bastards had called their home.

Elderglass and stone could not burn, of course, but the contents of the House of Perelandro were another matter. With the Elderglass reflecting and concentrating the heat of the flames, everything within the burrow would be scorched to white ash, and the rising heat would certainly do for the contents of the actual temple. A bucket brigade of yellowjackets milled around the upper temple, with little to do but wait for the heat and the hideous death-scented smoke to cease boiling out from the doors.

Jean banged a fist on the latched wooden door behind the Death Goddess’ temple and prayed for the Crooked Warden’s aid in maintaining the Verrari accent he had too rarely practiced in recent months. He knelt down, to make himself seem more pathetic.

After a few minutes, there was a click, and the door slid open a fraction of an inch. An initiate, in unadorned black robes and a simple silver mask, so familiar to Jean, stared down at him.

“My name is Tavrin Callas,” said Jean. “I require your aid.”

“Are you dying?” asked the initiate. “We can do little for those still in good health. If you require food and succor, I would suggest the House of Perelandro, although there seem to be…difficulties, this evening.”

“I’m not dying, and I do require food and succor. I am a bound servant of the Lady Most Kind, an initiate of the Fifth Inner Mystery.”

Jean had judged this lie carefully; the fourth rank of the order of Aza Guilla was full priesthood. The fifth would be a realistic level for someone assigned to courier important business from city to city. Any higher rank, and he would be forced to deal with senior priests and priestesses who should have heard of him.

“I was dispatched from Tal Verrar to Jeresh on the business of our order, but along the way my ship was taken by Jeremite raiders. They took my robes, my seals of office, my papers, and my Sorrowful Visage.”

“What?” The initiate, a girl, bent down to help Jean up. She was a quarter of his weight, and the effort was slightly comical. “They dared interfere with an envoy of the Lady?”

“The Jeremites do not keep the faith of the Twelve, little sister,” said Jean, who allowed himself to be dragged up to his knees. “They delight in tormenting the pious. I was chained to an oar for many long days. Last night, the galley that captured me weighed anchor in Camorr Bay; I was assigned to dumping chamber pots over the side while the officers went ashore to debauch themselves. I saw the fins of our Dark Brothers in the water; I prayed to the Lady and seized my opportunity.”

One thing the brothers and sisters of Aza Guilla rarely advertised to outsiders (especially in Camorr) was their belief that sharks were beloved of the Goddess of Death, and that their mysterious comings and goings and their sudden brutal attacks were a perfect encapsulation of the nature of the Lady Most Kind. Sharks were powerful omens to the silver-masked priesthood. The High Proctor of Revelation House had not been joking with his suggestion that Jean feel free to swim in the ocean after dark. Only the faithless, it was said, would be attacked in the waters beneath Revelation House.

“The Dark Brothers,” said the initiate with rising excitement. “And did they aid you in your escape?”

“You mustn’t think of it as aid,” said Jean, “for the Lady does not aid, she allows. And so it is with the Dark Brothers. I dove into the water and felt their presence around me; I felt them swimming beneath my feet, and I saw their fins cutting the surface of the water. My captors screamed that I was mad; when they saw the Brothers, they assumed that I was soon to be devoured, and they laughed. I laughed, too—when I crawled up onto the shore, unharmed.”

“Praise the Lady, Brother.”

“I do, I have, and I shall,” said Jean. “She has delivered me from our enemies; she has given me a second chance to fulfill my mission. I pray, take me to the steward of your temple. Let me meet with your Father or Mother Divine. I need only a Visage, and robes, and a room for several nights while I put my affairs in order.”

3

“WASN’T THAT the name you apprenticed under,” said Locke, “all those years ago?”

“It was indeed.”

“Well, won’t they send messages? Won’t they make inquiries and find out that Tavrin Callas was moved by divine curiosity to fling himself off a cliff?”

“Of course they will,” said Jean. “But it’ll take weeks to send one and get a reply…and I don’t mean to keep the disguise for quite that long. Besides, it’ll be a bit of fun for them. When they eventually discover Callas is supposed to be dead, they can proclaim all sorts of visions and miracles. A manifestation from beyond the shadelands, as it were.”

“A manifestation straight from the ass of a magnificent liar,” said Locke. “Well done, Jean.”

“I suppose I just know how to talk to death priests. We all have our little gifts.”

“I say,” interrupted Ibelius, “is this wise? This…flaunting of the robes of office of the priests of the Death Goddess herself? Tweaking the nose of…of the Lady Most Kind?” Ibelius touched his eyes with both hands, then his lips, and then entwined his fingers over his heart.

“If the Lady Most Kind wished to take offense,” said Jean, “she has had ample opportunity to crush me flatter than gold leaf for my presumptions.”

“Furthermore,” said Locke, “Jean and I are sworn into the divine service of the Benefactor, Father of Necessary Pretexts. Do you hold with the Crooked Warden, Master Ibelius?”

“It never hurts to have a care, in my experience. Perhaps I do not light hearth candles or give coin, but…I do not speak unkindly of the Benefactor.”

“Well,” said Locke, “our mentor once told us that the initiates of the Benefactor are strangely immune to consequences when they find they must pass as members of other priesthoods.”

“Made to feel strangely welcome, I’d say,” added Jean. “And, in the present circumstances, there are precious few practical disguises for a man of my size.”

“Ah. I do see your point, Jean.”

“It seems that the Death Goddess has been very busy of late,” said Locke, “with a great many people other than ourselves. I’m quite awake now, Jean, and very comfortable, Master Ibelius. No need to get up—I’m quite positive my pulse is right where I left it, safe inside my wrist. What else can you tell me, Jean?”

“The situation is tense and bloody, but I’d say Capa Raza’s carried it. Word’s out that all of us are dead, except myself, with that pretty price on my head. Supposedly, we refused to swear allegiance to Raza and tried to fight back on Barsavi’s behalf, and were justly slain in the process. All the other garristas are sworn; Raza didn’t wait three days before he hit. The most recalcitrant got their throats slit tonight; five or six of them. Happened a few hours ago.”

“Gods. Where do you hear this from?”

“Some from Ibelius, who can get around a bit provided he keeps his head down. Some from ministering. I happened to be in the Wooden Waste when a lot of people suddenly turned up needing death prayers.”

“The Right People are in Raza’s pockets, then.”

“I’d say so. They’re getting used to the situation. Everyone’s like to pull knives at the drop of a pin or the bite of a mosquito, but he’s got them coming round. He’s operating out of the Floating Grave, same as Barsavi did. He’s keeping most of his promises. It’s hard to argue with stability.”

“And what about our…other concern?” Locke made the hand gesture for Thorn of Camorr. “Heard anything about that? Any, ah, cracks in the facade?”

“No,” whispered Jean. “Seems like Raza was content to kill us off as sneak thieves and leave us that way.”

Locke sighed in relief.

“But there’s other strangeness afoot,” said Jean. “Raza hauled in about half a dozen men and women last night, from different gangs and different districts. Publicly named them as agents of the Spider.”

“Really? You think they were, or is it another damn scheme of some sort?”

“I think it’s likely they were,” said Jean. “I got the names from Ibelius, and I had a good long ponder, and there’s just nothing linking them all. Nothing that signifies to me, anyway. So, Raza spared their lives, but exiled them. Said they had a day to put their affairs in order and leave Camorr for good.”

“Interesting. I wish I knew what it meant.”

“Maybe nothing, for once.”

“That would certainly be pleasant.”

“And the plague ship, Master Lamora!” Ibelius spoke up eagerly. “A singular vessel. Jean has neglected to speak of it so far.”

“Plague ship?”

“A black-hulled vessel from Emberlain; a sleek little piece of business. Beautiful as all hell, and you know I barely know which part of a ship goes in the water.” Jean scratched his stubble-shadowed chin before continuing. “It pulled into plague anchorage the very night that Capa Raza gave Capa Barsavi his own teeth lessons.”

“That’s a very interesting coincidence.”

“Isn’t it? The gods do love their omens. Supposedly, there’s twenty or thirty dead already. But here’s the very odd part. Capa Raza has assumed responsibility for the charitable provisioning.”

“What?”

“Yes. His men escort the proceedings down to the docks; he’s giving coin to the Order of Sendovani for bread and meat. They’re filling in for the Order of Perelandro since, well, you know.”

“Why the hell would his men escort food and water down to the docks?”

“I was curious about that myself,” said Jean. “So last night I tried to poke around a bit, in my official priestly capacity, you see. It’s not just food and water they’re sending out.”

4

THE SOFTEST rain was falling, little more than a warm wet kiss from the sky, on the night of Throne’s Day—the night following the ascension of Capa Raza. An unusually stocky priest of Aza Guilla, with his wet robes fluttering in the breeze, stood staring out at the plague ship moored in Camorr Bay. By the yellow glow of the ship’s lamps, it seemed that the priest’s mask glowed golden bronze.

A decrepit little boat was bobbing in the gentle water beside the very longest dock that jutted out from the Dregs; the boat, in turn, had a rope leading out to the plague ship. The Satisfaction, anchored out at the edge of bow-shot, was looking strangely skeletal with its sails tightly furled. A few shadowy men could be seen here and there on the ship’s deck.

On the dock, a small team of burly stevedores was unloading the contents of a donkey-cart into the little boat, under the watch of half a dozen cloaked men and women, obviously armed. No doubt the entire operation could be seen by looking-glass from any of the guard stations surrounding Old Harbor. While most of those stations were still manned (and would stay that way, as long as the plague ship remained), not one of them would much care what was sent out to the ship, provided nothing at all was sent back.

Jean, on the other hand, was very curious about Capa Raza’s sudden interest in the welfare of the poor seafarers from Emberlain.

“Look, best just turn right around and get your ass back…oh. Ah, beg pardon, Your Holiness.”

Jean took a moment to savor the obvious disquiet on the faces of the men and women who turned at his approach; they seemed like tough lads and lasses, proper bruisers, seasoned in giving and taking pain. Yet the sight of his Sorrowful Visage made them look as guilty as children caught hovering too close to the honey crock.

He didn’t recognize any of them; that meant they were almost certainly part of Raza’s private gang. He tried to size them up with a glance, looking for anything incongruous or unusual that might shed light on their point of origin, but there was very little. They wore a great deal of jewelry; earrings, mostly—seven or eight of them per ear in one young woman’s case. That was a fashion more nautical than criminal, but it still might not mean anything.

“I merely came to pray,” said Jean, “for the intercession of the Lady Most Kind with those unfortunates out there on the water. Pay me no heed, and do continue with your labors.”

Jean encouraged them by putting his back mostly to the gang of laborers; he stood staring out at the ship, listening very carefully to the sounds of the work going on beside him. There were grunts of lifting and the tread of footfalls; the creaking of weathered, water-eaten boards. The donkey-cart had looked to be full of little sacks, each about the size of a one-gallon wineskin. For the most part, the crew handled them gingerly, but after a few minutes—

“Gods damn it, Mazzik!” There was a strange clattering, clinking noise as one of the sacks hit the dock. The overseer of the labor gang immediately wrung his hands and looked over at Jean. “I, uh, begging your pardon, Your Holiness. We, uh, we swore…we promised we would, uh, see these supplies safely to the plague ship.”

Jean turned slowly and let the man have the full, drawn-out effect of his faceless regard. Then he nodded, ever so slightly. “It is a penitent thing you do. Your master is most charitable to undertake the work that would ordinarily fall to the Order of Perelandro.”

“Yeah, uh…that really was too bad. Quite the, uh, tragedy.”

“The Lady Most Kind tends the mortal garden as she will,” said Jean, “and plucks what blossoms she will. Don’t be angry with your man. It’s only natural, to be discomfited in the presence of something…so unusual.”

“Oh, the plague ship,” said the man. “Yeah, it, uh, gives us all the creeps.”

“I shall leave you to your work,” said Jean. “Call for us at the House of Aza Guilla if the men aboard that ship should chance to need us.”

“Uh…sure. Th-thank you, Your Holiness.”

As Jean walked slowly along the dock, back toward shore, the crew finished loading the small boat, which was then unlashed from its mooring.

“Haul away,” bellowed one of the men at the end of the dock.

Slowly, the rope tautened, and then as the little black silhouettes aboard the Satisfaction picked up the rhythm of their work, the boat began to draw across Old Harbor toward the frigate at good speed, leaving a wavering silver wake on the dark water.

Jean strolled north into the Dregs, using the dignified pace of a priest to give himself time to roll one question over and over in his mind.

What could a ship full of dead and dying men reasonably do with bags of coins?

5

“BAGS OF coins? You’re absolutely sure?”

“It was cold spending metal, Locke. You may recall we had a whole vault full of it, until recently. I’d say we both have a pretty keen ear for the sound of coins on coins.”

“Hmmm. So unless the duke’s started minting full crowns in bread since I fell ill, those provisions are as charitable as my gods-damned mood.”

“I’ll keep nosing about and see if I can turn anything else up.”

“Good, good. Now we need to haul me out of this bed and get me working on something.”

“Master Lamora,” cried Ibelius, “you are in no shape to be out of bed, and moving around under your own volition! It is your own volition that has brought you to this enervated state.”

“Master Ibelius, with all due respect, now that I am conscious, if I have to crawl about the city on my hands and my knees to do something useful against Capa Raza, I will. I start my war from here.”

He heaved himself up off the sleeping pallet and tried to stand; once again, his head swam, his knees buckled, and he toppled to the ground.

“From there?” said Jean. “Looks damned uncomfortable.”

“Ibelius,” said Locke, “this is intolerable. I must be able to move about. I require my strength back.”

“My dear Master Lamora,” said Ibelius, reaching down to help pick Locke up. Jean took Locke’s other side, and the two of them soon had him back atop the sleeping pallet. “You are learning that what you require and what your frame may endure can be two very different things. If only I could have a solon for every patient who came to me speaking as you do! ‘Ibelius, I have smoked Jeremite powders for twenty years and now my throat bleeds, make me well!’ ‘Ibelius, I have been drunk and brawling all night, and now my eye has been cut out! Restore my vision, damn you.’ Why, let us not speak of solons, let us instead say a copper baron per such outburst…I could still retire to Lashain a gentleman!”

“I can do precious little harm to Capa Raza with my face planted in the dust of this hovel,” said Locke, his temper flaring once again.

“Then rest, sir; rest,” snapped Ibelius, his own color rising. “Have the grace not to lash your tongue at me for failing to carry the power of the gods about in my fingertips! Rest, and regain your strength. Tomorrow, when it is safe to move about, I shall bring you more food; a restored appetite will be a welcome sign. With food and rest, you may achieve an acceptable level of vigor in but a day or two. You cannot expect to skip lightly away from what you’ve endured. Have patience.”

Locke sighed. “Very well. I just…I ache to be about the business of keeping Capa Raza’s reign short.”

“And I yearn to have you about it as well, Master Lamora.” Ibelius removed his optics and polished them against his tunic. “If I thought you could slay him now, with little more strength in you than a half-drowned kitten, why, I’d put you in a basket and carry you to him myself. But that is not the case, and no poultice in my books of physik could make it so.”

“Listen to Master Ibelius, Locke, and quit sulking.” Jean gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Look on this as a chance to exercise your mind. I’ll gather what further information I can, and I’ll be your strong arm. You give me a plan to trip that f*cker up and send him to hell. For Calo, Galdo, and Bug.”

6

BY THE next night, Locke had recovered enough of his strength to pace about the room under his own power. His muscles felt like jelly, and his limbs moved as though they were being controlled from a very great distance—the messages transmitted by heliograph, perhaps, before being translated into movements of joint and sinew. But he no longer fell on his face when he stood up, and he’d eaten an entire pound of roast sausages, along with half a loaf of bread slathered in honey, since Ibelius had brought the food in the late afternoon.

“Master Ibelius,” said Locke as the physiker counted off Locke’s pulse for what Locke suspected must be the thirteen thousandth time. “We are of a like size, you and I. Do you by chance have any coats in good care? With suitably matching breeches, vests, and gentleman’s trifles?”

“Ah,” said Ibelius, “I did have such things, after a fashion, but I fear…I fear Jean did not tell you…”

“Ibelius is living with us here for the time being,” said Jean. “Around the corner, in one of the villa’s other rooms.”

“My chambers, from which I conducted my business, well…” Ibelius scowled, and it seemed to Locke that a very fine fog actually formed behind his optics. “They were burned, the morning after Raza’s ascension. Those of us with blood ties to Barsavi’s slain men…we have not been encouraged to remain in Camorr! There have already been several murders. I can still come and go, if I’m careful, but…I have lost most of my finer things, such as they were. And my patients. And my books! Yet another reason for me to earnestly desire that some harm should befall Raza.”

“Damnation,” said Locke. “Master Ibelius, might I beg just a few minutes alone with Jean? What we have to discuss is…well, it is of the utmost privacy, and for very good reason. You have my apologies.”

“Hardly necessary, sir, hardly necessary.” Ibelius rose from his seat and brushed plaster dust from his waistjacket. “I shall conceal myself outside, until required. The night air will be invigorating for the actions of the capillaries; it will quite restore the full flush of my balanced humors.”

When he had gone, Locke ran his fingers through his greasy hair and groaned. “Gods, I could do with a bath, but right now I’d take standing in the rain for half an hour. Jean, we need resources to take on Raza. The f*cker took forty-five thousand crowns from us; here we sit with ten. I need to kick the Don Salvara game back into life, but I’m deathly afraid it’s in tatters, what with me being out of it for these past few days.”

“I doubt it,” said Jean. “I spent some coin the day before you woke up for a bit of stationery and some ink. I sent a note to the Salvaras by courier, from Graumann, stating that you’d be handling some very delicate business for a few days and might not be around.”

“You did?” Locke stared at him like a man who’d gone to the gallows only to have a pardon and a sack of gold coins handed to him at the last minute. “You did? Gods bless your heart, Jean. I could kiss you, but you’re as covered in muck as I am.”

Locke circled around the room furiously, or as close to furiously as he could manage, still jerking and stumbling as he was. Hiding in this damned hovel, suddenly torn away from the advantages he’d taken for granted for many years—no cellar, no vault full of coins, no Wardrobe, no Masque Box…no gang. Raza had taken everything.

Packed up with the coins from the vault had been a packet of papers and keys, wrapped in oilcloth. Those papers were documents of accounts at Meraggio’s countinghouse for Lukas Fehrwight, Evante Eccari, and all the other false identities the Gentlemen Bastards had planted over the years. There were hundreds of crowns in those accounts, but without the documents, they were beyond mortal reach. In that packet, as well, were the keys to the Bowsprit Suite at the Tumblehome Inn, where extra clothing suitable to Lukas Fehrwight was neatly set out in a cedar-lined closet…locked away behind a clockwork box that no lock-charmer with ten times the skill Locke had ever possessed could tease open.

“Damn,” said Locke. “We can’t get to anything. We need money, and we can get that from the Salvaras, but I can’t go to them like this. I need gentleman’s clothes, rose oil, trifles. Fehrwight has to look like Fehrwight, and I can’t conjure him for ten crowns.”

Indeed, the clothes and accessories he’d worn when dressed as the Vadran merchant had easily come to forty full crowns—not the sort of sum he could simply tease out of pockets on the street. Also, the few tailors that catered to appropriately rarefied tastes had shops like fortresses, in the better parts of the city, where the yellowjackets prowled not in squads but in battalions.

“Son of a bitch,” said Locke, “but I am displeased. It all comes down to clothes. Clothes, clothes, clothes. What a ridiculous thing to be restrained by.”

“You can have the ten crowns, for what it’s worth. We can eat off the silver for a long time.”

“Well,” said Locke, “that’s something.” He heaved himself back down on the sleeping pallet and sat with his chin resting on both of his hands. His eyebrows and his mouth were turned down, in the same expression of aggrieved concentration Jean remembered from their years as boys. After a few minutes, Locke sighed and looked up at Jean.

“If I’m fit to move, I suppose I’ll take seven or eight crowns and go out on the town tomorrow, then.”

“Out on the town? You have a plan?”

“No,” said Locke. “Not even a speck of one. Not the damnedest idea.” He grinned weakly. “But don’t all of my better schemes start like this? I’ll find an opening, somehow…and then I suppose I’ll be rash.”





INTERLUDE

The White Iron Conjurers



It is said in Camorr that the difference between honest and dishonest commerce is that when an honest man or woman of business ruins someone, they don’t have the courtesy to cut their throat to finish the affair.

This is, in some respects, a disservice to the traders, speculators, and money-lenders of Coin-Kisser’s Row, whose exertions over the centuries have helped to draw the Therin city-states (all of them, not merely Camorr) up out of the ashes of the collapse of the Therin Throne and into something resembling energetic prosperity…for certain fortunate segments of the Therin population.

The scale of operations on Coin-Kisser’s Row would set the minds of most small shopkeepers spinning. A merchant might move two stones on a counting-board in Camorr; sealed documents are then dispatched to Lashain, where four galleons crewed by three hundred souls take sail for the far northern port of Emberlain, their holds laden with goods that beggar description. Hundreds of merchant caravans are embarking and arriving across the continent on any given morning, on any given day, all of them underwritten and itemized by well-dressed men and women who weave webs of commerce across thousands of miles while sipping tea in the back rooms of countinghouses.

But there are also bandits, warned to be in places at certain times, to ensure that a caravan flying a certain merchant’s colors will vanish between destinations. There are whispered conversations, recorded in no formal minutes, and money that changes hands with no formal entry in any ledger. There are assassins, and black alchemy, and quiet arrangements made with gangs. There is usury and fraud and insider speculation; there are hundreds of financial practices so clever and so arcane that they do not yet have common names—manipulations of coin and paper that would have Bondsmagi bowing at the waist in recognition of their devious subtlety.

Trade is all of these things, and in Camorr, when one speaks of business practices fair or foul, when one speaks of commerce on the grandest scale, one name leaps to mind above and before all others—the Meraggio.

Giancana Meraggio is the seventh in his line; his family has owned and operated its countinghouse for nearly two and a half centuries. But in a sense the first name isn’t important; it is always simply the Meraggio at Meraggio’s. “The Meraggio” has become an office.

The Meraggio family made its original fortune from the sudden death of the popular Duke Stravoli of Camorr, who died of an ague while on a state visit to Tal Verrar. Nicola Meraggio, trader-captain of a relatively fast brig, outraced all other news of the duke’s death back to Camorr, where she expended every last half-copper at her command to purchase and control the city’s full stock of black mourning crepe. When this was resold at extortionate prices so the state funeral could take place in proper dignity, she sank some of the profits into a small coffeehouse on the canal-side avenue that would eventually be called (thanks largely to her family) Coin-Kisser’s Row.

As though it were an outward manifestation of the family’s ambitions, the building has never remained one size for very long. It expands suddenly at irregular intervals, consuming nearby structures, adding lodges and stories and galleries, spreading its walls like a baby bird slowly pushing its unhatched rivals from the nest.

The early Meraggios made their names as active traders and speculators; they were men and women who loudly proclaimed their ability to squeeze more profit from investors’ funds than any of their rivals could. The third Meraggio of note, Ostavo Meraggio, famously sent out a gaily decorated boat each morning to throw fifty gold tyrins into the deepest part of Camorr Bay; he did this every day without fail for a complete year. “I can do this and still have more fresh profit at the end of any given day than any one of my peers,” he boasted.

The later Meraggios shifted the family’s emphasis from investing coin to hoarding, counting, guarding, and loaning it. They were among the first to recognize the stable fortunes that could be had by becoming facilitators of commerce rather than direct participants. And so the Meraggio now sits at the heart of a centuries-old financial network that has effectively become the blood and sinews of the Therin city-states; his signature on a piece of parchment can carry as much weight as an army in the field or a squadron of warships on the seas.

Not without reason is it sometimes said that in Camorr there are two dukes—Nicovante, the Duke of Glass, and Meraggio, the Duke of White Iron.