The Lies of Locke Lamora

Chapter THREE

IMAGINARY MEN

1

FOR THE SECOND time in two days, Don Lorenzo Salvara found his life interrupted by masked and hooded strangers in an unexpected place. This time, it was just after midnight, and they were waiting for him in his study.

“Close the door,” said the shorter intruder. His voice was all Camorr, rough and smoky and clearly accustomed to being obeyed. “Have a seat, m’lord, and don’t bother calling for your man. He is…indisposed.”

“Who the hell are you?” Salvara’s sword hand curled reflexively; his belt held no scabbard. He slid the door closed behind him but made no move to sit at his writing desk. “How did you get in here?”

The intruder who’d first spoken reached up and pulled down the black cloth that covered his nose and mouth. His face was lean and angular; his hair black, his dark moustache thin and immaculately trimmed. A white scar arced across the man’s right cheekbone. He reached into the folds of his well-cut black cloak and pulled out a black leather wallet, which he flipped open so the don could see its contents—a small crest of gold set inside an intricate design of frosted glass.

“Gods.” Don Salvara fell into his chair, nervously, without further hesitation. “You’re Midnighters.”

“Just so.” The man folded his wallet and put it back in his cloak. The silent intruder, still masked and hooded, moved casually around to stand just a few feet behind Don Lorenzo, between him and the door. “We apologize for the intrusion. But our business here is extremely sensitive.”

“Have I…have I somehow offended His Grace?”

“Not to my knowledge, m’lord Salvara. In fact, you might say we’re here to help prevent you from doing so.”

“I…I, ah…well. Ah, what did you say you did to Conté?”

“Just gave him a little something to help him sleep. We know he’s loyal and we know he’s dangerous. We didn’t want any…misunderstandings.”

The man standing at the door punctuated this statement by stepping forward, reaching around Don Salvara, and gently setting Conté’s matching fighting knives down on the desktop.

“I see. I trust that he’ll be well.” Don Salvara drummed his fingers on his writing desk and stared at the scarred intruder. “I should be very displeased otherwise.”

“He is completely unharmed; I give you my word as the duke’s man.”

“I shall hold that sufficient. For the time being.”

The scarred man sighed and rubbed his eyes with two gloved fingers. “There’s no need for us to begin like this, m’lord. I apologize for the abruptness of our appearance and the manner of our intrusion, but I believe you’ll find that your welfare is paramount in our master’s eyes. I’m instructed to ask—did you enjoy yourself at the Revel today?”

“Yes…” Don Salvara spoke carefully, as though to a solicitor or a court recorder. “I suppose that would be an accurate assessment.”

“Good, good. You had company, didn’t you?”

“The Doña Sofia was with me.”

“I refer to someone else. Not one of His Grace’s subjects. Not Camorri.”

“Ah. The merchant. A merchant named Lukas Ferhwight, from Emberlain.”

“From Emberlain. Of course.” The scarred man folded his arms and looked around the don’s study. He stared for a moment at a pair of small glass portraits of the old Don and Doña Salvara, set in a frame decked with black velvet funeral ribbons. “Well. That man is no more a merchant of Emberlain than you or I, m’lord Salvara. He’s a fraud. A sham.”

“I…” Don Salvara nearly jumped to his feet, but remembered the man standing behind him and seemed to think better of it. “I don’t see how that could be possible. He…”

“Beg pardon, m’lord.” The scarred man smiled, gruesomely and artificially, as a man without children might smile when trying to comfort an upset babe. “But let me ask you—have you ever heard of the man they call the Thorn of Camorr?”

2

“I ONLY steal because my dear old family needs the money to live!”

Locke Lamora made this proclamation with his wineglass held high; he and the other Gentlemen Bastards were seated at the old witchwood table in the opulent burrow beneath the House of Perelandro; Calo and Galdo on his right, Jean and Bug on his left. A huge spread of food was set before them, and the celestial chandelier swung overhead with its familiar golden light. The others began to jeer.

“Liar!” they chorused in unison.

“I only steal because this wicked world won’t let me work an honest trade!” Calo cried, hoisting his own glass.

“Liar!”

“I only steal because I have to support my poor lazy twin brother, whose indolence broke our mother’s heart!” Galdo elbowed Calo as he made this announcement.

“Liar!”

“I only steal,” said Jean, “because I’ve temporarily fallen in with bad company.”

“Liar!”

At last the ritual came to Bug; the boy raised his glass a bit shakily and yelled, “I only steal because it’s heaps of f*cking fun!”

“BASTARD!”

With a general clamor of whooping and hollering the five thieves banged glasses together; light glittered on crystal and shone through the misty green depths of Verrari mint wine. The four men drained their glasses in one go and slammed them back down on the tabletop. Bug, already a bit cross-eyed, handled his somewhat more delicately.

“Gentlemen, I hold in my hands the first fruits of all our long weeks of study and suffering.” Locke held up a rolled parchment embossed with ribbons and a blue wax seal—the color of the lesser nobility of Camorr. “A letter of credit for five thousand full crowns, to be drawn tomorrow against Don Salvara’s funds at Meraggio’s. And, I daresay, the first score our youngest member has ever helped us to bring in.”

“Barrel boy!” the Sanza brothers hollered in unison; a moment later a small almond-crusted bread roll arced from between their seats, hit Bug right between the eyes, and plopped down onto his empty plate. Bug tore it in half and responded in kind, aiming well despite his wobbliness. Locke continued speaking as Calo scowled and rubbed crumbs out of his eyes.

“Second touch this afternoon was easy. But we wouldn’t have gotten so far, so fast, if not for Bug’s quick action yesterday. What a stupid, reckless, idiotic, ridiculous damn thing to do! I haven’t the words to express my admiration.” Locke had managed to work a bit of wine-bottle legerdemain while speaking; the empty glasses were suddenly full. “To Bug! The new bane of the Camorr city watch!”

When the cheering and the guzzling from this toast had subsided and Bug had been smacked upon the back often enough to turn the contents of his skull sideways, Locke produced a single large glass, set it in the middle of the table, and filled it slowly.

“Just one thing more before we can eat.” He held the glass up as the others fell silent. “A glass poured to air for an absent friend. We miss old Chains terribly and we wish his soul peace. May the Crooked Warden ever stand watch and bless his crooked servant. He was a good and penitent man, in the manner of our kind.”

Gently, Locke set the glass in the center of the table and covered it with a small black cloth. “He would have been very proud of you, Bug.”

“I do hope so.” The boy stared at the covered glass in the middle of the opulent glassware and gilded cookery. “I wish I could have met him.”

“You would have been a restful project for his old age.” Jean kissed the back of his own left hand, the benedictory gesture of the Nameless Thirteenth’s priesthood. “A very welcome respite from what he endured raising the four of us!”

“Jean’s being generous. He and I were saints. It’s the Sanza brothers that kept the poor old bastard up late praying six nights out of seven.” Locke reached out toward one cloth-covered platter. “Let’s eat.”

“Praying that you and Jean would grow up quick and handsome like the two of us, you mean!” Galdo’s hand darted out and caught Locke’s at the wrist. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Am I?”

Calo, Galdo, and Jean met this question with a coordinated stare. Bug looked sheepish and gazed up at the chandelier.

“Gods damn it.” Locke slid out of his gold-gilded chair and went to a side cupboard; when he returned to the table he had a tiny sampling-glass in his hand, little more than a thimble for liquor. Into this he let slip the smallest dash of mint wine. He didn’t hold this glass up, but pushed it into the center of the table beside the glass under the black cloth.

“A glass poured in air for an absent someone. I don’t know where she is at the moment, and I pray you all choke, save Bug, thanks very f*cking much.”

“Hardly a graceful blessing, especially for a priest.” Calo kissed the back of his own left hand and waved it over the tiny glass. “She was one of us even before you were, garrista.”

“You know what I do pray?” Locke set his hands on the edge of the table; his knuckles rapidly turned white. “That maybe someday one of you finds out what love is when it travels farther up than the buttons of your trousers.”

“It takes two to break a heart.” Galdo gently placed his left hand over Locke’s right. “I don’t recall her f*cking things up without your able assistance.”

“And I daresay,” said Calo, “that it would be a tremendous relief to us all if you would just have the courtesy to go out and get yourself wenched. Long and hard. Gods, do three at once! It’s not as though we don’t have the funds.”

“I’ll have you know my patience for this topic was exhausted long before—” Locke’s voice was rising to a shout when Jean grabbed him firmly by his left biceps; Jean’s fist wrapped easily all the way around Locke’s arm.

“She was our good friend, Locke. Was and still is. You owe her something a bit more godly than that.”

Jean reached out for the wine bottle, then filled the little glass to its brim. He raised it into the light and took his other hand off Locke’s arm. “A glass poured to air for an absent friend. We wish Sabetha well. For ourselves, we pray brotherhood.”

Locke stared at him for a second that seemed like minutes, then let out a long sigh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin the occasion. That was a poor toast and I…repent it. I should have thought better of my responsibilities.”

“I’m sorry, too.” Galdo grinned sheepishly. “We don’t blame you for the way you feel. We know she was…she was…her.”

“Well, I’m not sorry about the wenching bit.” Calo shrugged in mock apology. “I’m f*cking serious, man. Dip your wick. Drop your anchor. Go see a lady about a sheath for a dagger. You’ll feel better.”

“Isn’t it obvious that I’m just ecstatic right now? I don’t need to feel better, because you and I still have work to do this evening! For the love of the Crooked Warden, can we please just kill this subject and throw its gods-damned corpse in the bay?”

“Sorry,” Calo said after a few seconds and a well-aimed glare from Jean. “Sorry. Look, you know we mean well. We’re both sorry if we push. But she’s in Parlay and we’re in Camorr, and it’s obvious you—”

Calo would have said something else, but an almond roll bounced off the bridge of his nose and he flinched in surprise. Another roll hit Galdo in the forehead; one arced into Jean’s lap, and Locke managed to throw up a hand in time to swat down the one intended for him.

“Honestly!” Bug clutched still more rolls in his outstretched hands, and he pointed them like loaded crossbows. “Is this what I get to look forward to when I grow up? I thought we were celebrating being richer and cleverer than everyone else!”

Locke looked at the boy for just a moment, then reached out and took the full sampling-glass from Jean, a smile breaking out as he did so. “Bug’s right. Let’s cut the shit and have dinner.” He raised the glass as high as he could toward the light of the chandelier. “To us—richer and cleverer than everyone else!”

“Richer and cleverer than everyone else!” came the echoing chorus.

“We toast absent friends who helped to bring us to where we are now. We do miss them.” Locke set the little glass to his lips and took a minuscule sip before he set it back down.

“And we love them still,” he added quietly.

3

“THE THORN of Camorr…is a particularly ridiculous rumor that floats around the dining parlor when some of the more excitable dons don’t water their wine quite thoroughly enough.”

“The Thorn of Camorr,” said the scarred man pleasantly, “walked off your pleasure barge earlier this evening with a signed note for five thousand of your white iron crowns.”

“Who? Lukas Fehrwight?”

“None other.”

“Lukas Fehrwight is a Vadran. My mother was Vadran; I know the tongue! Lukas is Old Emberlain all the way through. He covers himself in wool and flinches back six feet any time a woman blinks at him!” Don Lorenzo pulled his optics off in irritation and set them on his desk. “The man would bet the lives of his own children against the price he could get for barrels of herring guts on any given morning. I’ve dealt with his kind too many times to count. That man is no Camorri, and he is no mythical thief!”

“My lord. You are four and twenty, yes?”

“For the time being. Is that quite relevant?”

“You have no doubt known many merchants in the years since your mother and father passed away, may they have the peace of the Long Silence. Many merchants, and many of them Vadrans, correct?”

“Quite correct.”

“And if a man, a very clever man, wished you to think him a merchant…Well, what would he dress up and present himself as? A fisherman? A mercenary archer?”

“I don’t grasp your meaning.”

“I mean, m’lord Salvara, that your own expectations have been used against you. You have a keen sense for men of business, surely. You’ve grown your family fortune several times over in your brief time handling it. Therefore, a man who wished to snare you in some scheme could do nothing wiser than to act the consummate man of business. To deliberately manifest all of your expectations. To show you exactly what you expected and desired to see.”

“It seems to me that if I accept your argument,” the don said slowly, “then the self-evident truth of any legitimate thing could be taken as grounds for its falseness. I say Lukas Fehrwight is a merchant of Emberlain because he shows the signs of being so; you say those same signs are what prove him counterfeit. I need more sensible evidence than this.”

“Let me digress, then, m’lord, and ask another question.” The scarred man drew his hands within the black folds of his cloak and stared down at the young nobleman. “If you were a thief who preyed exclusively on the nobility of our Serene Duchy of Camorr, how would you hide your actions?”

“Exclusively? Your Thorn of Camorr again. There can’t be any such thief. There are arrangements…the Secret Peace. Other thieves would take care of the matter as soon as any man dared breach the Peace.”

“And if our thief could evade capture? If our thief could conceal his identity from his fellows?”

“If. If. They say the Thorn of Camorr steals from the rich”—Don Salvara placed a hand on his own chest—“and gives every last copper to the poor. But have you heard of any bags of gold being dumped in the street in Catchfire lately? Any charcoal-burners or knackers suddenly walking around in silk waistcoats and embroidered boots? Please. The Thorn is a commoner’s ale-tale. Master swordsman, romancer of ladies, a ghost who walks through walls. Ridiculous.”

“Your doors are locked and all your windows are barred, yet here we are in your study, m’lord.”

“Granted. But you’re men of flesh and blood.”

“So it’s said. We’re getting off the subject. Our thief, m’lord, would trust you and your peers to keep his activities concealed for him. Hypothetically speaking, if Lukas Fehrwight were the Thorn of Camorr, and you knew that he had strolled off with a small fortune from your coffers, what would you do? Would you rouse the watch? Cry for aid openly in the court of His Grace? Speak of the matter in front of Don Paleri Jacobo?”

“I…I…that’s an interesting point. I wonder—”

“Would you want the entire city to know that you’d been taken in? That you’d been tricked? Would men of business ever trust your judgment again? Would your reputation ever truly recover?”

“I suppose it would be a very…difficult thing.”

The scarred man’s right hand reappeared, gloveless and pale against the darkness of the cloak, one finger pointing outward. “Her ladyship the Doña Rosalina de Marre lost ten thousand crowns four years ago, in exchange for titles to upriver orchards that don’t exist.” A second finger curled outward. “Don and Doña Feluccia lost twice as much two years ago. They thought they were financing a coup in Talisham that would have made the city a family estate.”

“Last year,” the scarred man said as a third finger unfolded, “Don Javarriz paid fifteen thousand full crowns to a soothsayer who claimed to be able to restore the old man’s firstborn son to life.” The man’s little finger snapped out, and he waved his extended hand at Don Lorenzo. “Now, we have the Don and Doña Salvara involved in a secret business deal that is both tempting and convenient. Tell me, have you ever heard of the troubles of the lords and ladies I have named?”

“No.”

“Doña de Marre visits your wife in her garden twice weekly. They discuss alchemical botany together. You’ve played cards with the sons of Don Javarriz many times. And yet this is all a surprise to you?”

“Yes, quite, I assure you!”

“It was a surprise to His Grace, as well. My master has spent four years attempting to follow the slender threads of evidence connecting these crimes, m’lord. A fortune the size of your own vanished into thin air, and it took ducal orders to pry open the lips of the wronged parties. Because their pride compelled their silence.”

Don Lorenzo stared at the surface of his desk for a long moment.

“Fehrwight has a suite at the Tumblehome. He has a manservant, superior clothes, hundred-crown optics. He has…proprietary secrets of the House of bel Auster.” Don Salvara looked up at the scarred man as though presenting a difficult problem to a demanding tutor. “Things that no thief could have!”

“Would fine clothes be beyond the means of a man with more than forty thousand stolen crowns at his command? And his cask of unaged brandy—how would you or I or any other man outside the House of bel Auster know what it should look like? Or what it should taste like? It’s a simple fraud.”

“He was recognized on the street by a solicitor, one of the Razona lawscribes who sticks to the walls at Meraggio’s!”

“Of course he was, because he began building the identity of Lukas Fehrwight long ago, probably before he ever met Doña de Marre. He has a very real account at Meraggio’s, opened with real money five years ago. He has every outward flourish that a man in his position should bear, but Lukas Fehrwight is a ghost. A lie. A stage role performed for a very select private audience. I have tracked him for months.”

“We are sensible people, Sofia and I. Surely…surely we would have seen something out of place.”

“Out of place? The entire affair has been out of place! M’lord Salvara, I implore you, hear me carefully. You are a financier of fine liquors. You say a prayer to your mother’s shade each week at a Vadran temple. What a fascinating coincidence that you should chance upon a needy Vadran who happens to be a dealer in the same field, eh?”

“Where else but the Temple of Fortunate Waters would a Vadran pray while visiting Camorr?”

“Nowhere, of course. But look at the coincidences piling heavily upon one another. A Vadran liquor merchant, in need of rescue, and he just so happens to be on his way to visit Don Jacobo? Your blood enemy? A man that everyone knows you would crush by any means the duke hadn’t forbidden you?”

“Were you…observing us when I first met him?”

“Yes, very carefully. We saw you and your man approach that alley to rescue a man you thought to be in danger. We—”

“Thought? He was being strangled!”

“Was he? The men in those masks were his accomplices, m’lord. The fight was staged. It was a means to introduce you to the imaginary merchant and his imaginary opportunity. Everything you value was used to bait the trap! Your sympathies for Vadrans, your sense of duty, your courage, your interest in fine liquors, your desire to best Don Jacobo. And can it be a coincidence that Fehrwight’s scheme must be secret? That it runs on an extremely short and demanding schedule? That it just happens to feed your every known ambition?”

The don stared at the far wall of his study, tapping his fingers against his desk at a gradually increasing tempo. “This is quite a shock,” he said at last, in a small voice without any fight left in it.

“Forgive me for that, my Lord Salvara. The truth is unfortunate. Of course the Thorn of Camorr isn’t ten feet tall. Of course he can’t walk through walls. But he is a very real thief; he is posing as a Vadran named Lukas Fehrwight, and he does have five thousand crowns of your money, with an eye for twenty thousand more.”

“I must send men to Meraggio’s, so he can’t exchange my note in the morning,” said Don Lorenzo.

“Respectfully, my lord, you must do nothing of the sort. My instructions are clear. We don’t just want the Thorn, we want his accomplices. His contacts. His sources of information. His entire network of thieves and spies. We have him in the open, now, and we can follow him as he goes about his business. One hint that his game is unmasked, and he will bolt. The opportunity we have may never present itself again. His Grace Duke Nicovante is quite adamant that everyone involved in these crimes must be identified and taken. Toward that end, your absolute cooperation is requested and required, in the duke’s name.”

“What am I to do, then?”

“Continue to act as though you are entirely taken in by Fehrwight’s story. Let him exchange the note. Let him taste some success. And when he returns to you asking for more money…”

“Yes?”

“Why, give it to him, my lord. Give him everything he asks.”

4

ONCE THE dinner dishes were cleared away, and a tipsy Bug was given the task of setting them a-sparkle with warm water and white sand (“Excellent for your moral education!” Jean had cried as he’d heaped up the porcelain and crystal), Locke and Calo withdrew to the burrow’s wardrobe to begin preparations for the third and most critical touch of the Don Salvara game.

The Elderglass cellar beneath the House of Perelandro was divided into three areas; one of them was the kitchen, another was split into sleeping quarters with wooden partitions, and the third was referred to as the Wardrobe.

Long clothes-racks stretched across every wall of the Wardrobe, holding hundreds of pieces of costuming organized by origin, by season, by cut, by size, and by social class. There were sackcloth robes, laborer’s tunics, and butcher’s aprons with dried bloodstains. There were cloaks of winter weight and summer weight, cheaply woven and finely tailored, unadorned or decorated with everything up to precious metal trim and peacock feathers. There were robes and accessories for most of the Therin priestly orders—Perelandro, Morgante, Nara, Sendovani, Iono, and so forth. There were silk blouses and cunningly armored doublets, gloves and ties and cravats, enough canes and walking sticks to outfit a mercenary company of hobbled old men.

Chains had started this collection more than twenty years before, and his students had added to it with the wealth gained from years of schemes. Very little worn by the Gentlemen Bastards went to waste; even the foulest-smelling sweat-soaked summer garments were washed and dusted with alchemical pomanders and hung carefully. They could always be fouled up again, if needed.

A man-height looking glass dominated the heart of the Wardrobe; another, much smaller glass hung from a sort of pulley system on the ceiling, so that it could be moved around and positioned as necessary. Locke stood before the larger mirror dressed in matching doublet and breeches of midnight velvet; his hose was the scarlet of blood in sunset waters, and his simple Camorri tie was a near match.

“Is this bloody melodrama really such a good idea?” Calo was dressed quite similarly, though his hose and his accents were gray; he pulled his tunic sleeves back above his elbows and fastened them there with black pearl clips.

“It’s a fine idea,” Locke said, adjusting his tie. “We’re Midnighters. We’re full of ourselves. What sort of self-respecting spy would break into a manor house in darkest night wearing green, or orange, or white?”

“The sort that walked up and knocked at the door would.”

“I appreciate that, but I still don’t want to change the plan. Don Salvara’s had a busy day. He’ll be wide open for a nice shock at the end of it. Can’t shock him quite the same in lavender and carmine.”

“Well, certainly not in the way you’re thinking, no.”

“This doublet’s damned uncomfortable in the back,” Locke muttered. “Jean! Jeeeeaaaaaaan!”

“What is it?” came an echoing return shout a long moment later.

“Why, I just love to say your name. Get in here!”

Jean ambled into the Wardrobe a moment later, a glass of brandy in one hand and a battered book in the other.

“I thought Graumann had the night off for this bit,” he said.

“He does.” Locke gestured impatiently at the back of his doublet. “I need the services of Camorr’s ugliest seamstress.”

“Galdo’s helping Bug wash up.”

“Grab your needles, glass-eyes.”

Jean’s eyebrows drew down above his reading optics, but he set down his book and his glass and opened a small wooden chest set against one of the Wardrobe walls.

“What’re you reading?” Calo had added a tiny silver and amethyst clip to the center of his tie and was examining himself in the small glass, approvingly.

“Kimlarthen,” Jean replied, working black thread through a white bone needle and trying not to prick his fingers.

“The Korish romances?” Locke snorted. “Sentimental crap. Never knew you had a taste for fairy stories.”

“They happen to be culturally significant records of the Therin Throne centuries,” Jean said as he stepped behind Locke, seam ripper in one hand and threaded needle in the other. “Plus at least three knights get their heads torn completely off by the Beast of Vuazzo.”

“Illustrated manuscript, by chance?”

“Not the good parts, no.” Jean fiddled with the back of the doublet as delicately as he had ever charmed a lock or a victim’s coat pocket.

“Oh, just let it out. I don’t care how it looks; it’ll be hidden in the back of my cloak anyway. We can pretty it up later.”

“We?” Jean snorted as he loosened the doublet with a few strategic rips and slashes. “Me, more like. You mend clothes like dogs write poetry.”

“And I readily admit it. Oh, gods, much better. Now there’s room to hide the sigil-wallet and a few surprises, just in case.”

“It feels odd to be letting something out for you, rather than taking it in.” Jean arranged his tools as he’d found them in the sewing chest and closed it back up. “Do mind your training; we wouldn’t want you gaining half a pound.”

“Well, most of me is brain-weight.” Locke folded his own tunic sleeves back and pinned them up as Calo had.

“You’re one-third bad intentions, one-third pure avarice, and one-eighth sawdust. What’s left, I’ll credit, must be brains.”

“Well, since you’re here, and you’re such an expert on my poor self, why don’t you pull out the Masque Box and help me with my face?”

Jean paused for a sip from his brandy glass before pulling out a tall, battered wooden box inset with many dozens of small drawers. “What do we want to do first, your hair? You’re going black, right?”

“As pitch. I should only have to be this fellow two or three times.”

Jean twirled a white cloth around the shoulders of Locke’s doublet and fastened it in front with a tiny bone clasp. He then opened a poultice jar and smeared his fingers with the contents, a firm dark gel that smelled richly of citrus. “Hmm. Looks like charcoal and smells like oranges. I’ll never fathom Jessaline’s sense of humor.”

Locke smiled as Jean began to knead the stuff into his brown hair. “Even a black apothecary needs to stay amused somehow. Remember that beef-scented knockout candle she gave us, to deal with Don Feluccia’s damn guard dog?”

“Very droll, that.” Calo frowned as he made further minute adjustments to his own finery. “Stray cats running from every corner of Camorr at the scent. Dropping in their tracks until the street was full of little bodies. Wind shifting all over the place, and all of us running around trying to stay ahead of the smoke…”

“Not our finest moment,” said Jean. His job was already nearly finished; the stuff seemed to sink into Locke’s hair, imparting a natural-looking shade of deep Camorri black, with only the slightest sheen. But many men in Camorr used slick substances to hold or perfume their hair; this would hardly be noteworthy.

Jean wiped his fingers on Locke’s white neck-towel, then dipped a scrap of cloth into another poultice jar containing a pearly gel. This stuff, when applied to his fingers, cleared the residue of hair dye away as though the black gel were evaporating into thin air. Jean dabbed the cloth at Locke’s temples and neck, erasing the faint smudges and drips left over from the coloring process.

“Scar?” Jean asked when he was finished.

“Please.” Locke ran his little finger across the line of his right cheekbone. “Slash right across there if you would.”

Jean withdrew a slender wooden tube with a chalky white tip from the Masque Box and drew a short line on Locke’s face with it, just as Locke had indicated. Locke flinched as the stuff sizzled for a second or two; in the blink of an eye the white line hardened into a raised, pale arc of pseudo-skin, perfectly mimicking a scar.

Bug appeared through the Wardrobe door at that instant, his cheeks a bit ruddier than usual. In one hand he held a black leather folding wallet, slightly larger than that which a gentleman would ordinarily carry. “Kitchen’s clean. Galdo said you’d forget this if I didn’t bring it in and throw it at you.”

“Please don’t take him literally.” Locke held out a hand for the wallet while Jean removed the white cloth from his shoulders, satisfied that the hair dye was dry. “Break that thing and I’ll roll you to Emberlain in a barrel. Personally.”

The sigil inside the wallet, the intricate confection of gold and crystal and frosted glass, was by far the most expensive prop of the whole game; even the 502 cask of Austershalin had been cheaper. The sigil had been crafted in Talisham, four days’ ride down the coast to the south; no Camorri counterfeiter, regardless of skill, could be trusted to be quiet or comfortable about mimicking the badge of the duke’s own secret police.

A stylized spider over the Royal Seal of the Serene Duchy; none of the Gentlemen Bastards had ever seen one, but Locke was confident that few of the lesser nobility had, either. The rough description of the dreaded sigil was whispered by the Right People of Camorr, and from that description a best-guess forgery had been put together.

“Durant the Gimp says that the Spider’s just bullshit,” said Bug as he handed over the wallet. All three older Gentlemen Bastards in the room looked at him sharply.

“If you put Durant’s brains in a thimble full of water,” said Jean, “they’d look like a ship lost in the middle of the sea.”

“The Midnighters are real, Bug.” Locke patted his hair gingerly and found that his hands came away clean. “If you’re ever found breaching the Peace, you’d better pray the capa gets to you before they do. Barsavi’s the soul of mercy compared to the man that runs the Palace of Patience.”

“I know the Midnighters are real,” said Bug. “I just said, there’s some that say the Spider is bullshit.”

“Oh, he exists. Jean, pick out a moustache for me. Something that goes with this hair.” Locke ran a finger over the smooth skin around his lips, shaved just after dinner. “There’s a man behind the Midnighters. Jean and I have spent years trying to figure out which of the duke’s court it must be, but all the leads go nowhere in the end.”

“Even Galdo and I are stumped,” added Calo. “So you know we’re dealing with a devil of singular subtlety.”

“How can you be sure, though?”

“Let me put it like this, Bug.” Locke paused while Jean held up a false moustache; Locke shook his head and Jean went back to digging in the Masque Box. “When Capa Barsavi does for someone, we hear about it, right? We have connections, and the word gets passed. The capa wants people to know his reasons—it avoids future trouble, makes an example.”

“And when the duke does for someone himself,” said Calo, “there’s always signs. Yellowjackets, Nightglass soldiers, writs, trials, proclamations.”

“But when the Spider puts the finger on someone…” Locke gave a brief nod of approval to the second moustache Jean held up for consideration. “When it’s the Spider, the poor bastard in question falls right off the face of the world. And Capa Barsavi doesn’t say a thing. Do you understand? He pretends that nothing has happened. So when you grasp that Barsavi doesn’t fear the duke…looks down on him quite a bit, actually…well, it follows that there’s someone out there who does make him wet his breeches.”

“Oh. You mean other than the Gray King?”

Calo snorted. “This Gray King mess will be over in a few months, Bug. One lone madman against three thousand knives, all answering to Barsavi—the Gray King is a walking corpse. The Spider isn’t so easily gotten rid of.”

“Which,” said Locke, “is exactly why we’re hoping to see Don Salvara jump six feet in the air when he finds us waiting in his study. Because the blue-bloods are no more comfortable with surprise visits from Midnighters than we are.”

“I hate to interrupt,” said Jean, “but did you shave this time? Ah. Good.” With a small stick, he applied a glistening smear of transparent paste to Locke’s upper lip; Locke wrinkled his nose in disgust. With a few quick finger motions Jean placed the false moustache and pressed it home; in a second or two it was set there as firmly as if it had grown naturally.

“This gum is made from the inner hide of a wolf shark,” Jean explained for Bug’s sake, “and last time we used it, we forgot to pick up some of the dissolving spirit—”

“And I had to get rid of the moustache in a hurry,” said Locke.

“And damned if he didn’t scream when Jean did the honors,” said Calo.

“Like a Sanza brother in an empty whorehouse!” Locke made a rude gesture at Calo; Calo mimed aiming and loosing a crossbow at him in return.

“Scar, moustache, hair; are we done here?” Jean packed the last of the disguise implements away in the Masque Box.

“That should do it, yes.” Locke stared at his reflection in the large mirror for a moment, and when he spoke next his voice had altered; subtly deeper, slightly rougher. His intonation was the bored humorlessness of a watch-sergeant dressing down a petty offender for the thousandth time in his career. “Let’s go tell a man he’s got himself a problem with some thieves.”

5

“SO,” SAID Don Lorenzo Salvara, “you wish me to continue deliberately granting promissory notes to a man that you describe as the most capable thief in Camorr.”

“Respectfully, m’lord Salvara, that’s what you would have done anyway, even without our intervention.”

When Locke spoke, there was no hint of Lukas Fehrwight in his voice or in his mannerisms; there was no trace of the Vadran merchant’s restrained energy or stuffy dignity. This new fiction had the fictional backing of the duke’s incontrovertible writ; he was the sort of man who could and would tease a don while invading the sanctity of that don’s home. Such audacity could never be faked—Locke had to feel it, summon it from somewhere inside, cloak himself in arrogance as though it were an old familiar garment. Locke Lamora became a shadow in his own mind—he was a Midnighter, an officer in the duke’s silent constabulary. Locke’s complicated lies were this new man’s simple truth.

“The sums discussed could…easily total half my available holdings.”

“Then give our friend Fehrwight half your fortune, m’lord. Choke the Thorn on exactly what he desires. Promissory notes will tie him down, keep him moving back and forth between countinghouses.”

“Countinghouses that will throw my very real money after this phantom, you mean.”

“Yes. In the service of the duke, no less. Take heart, m’lord Salvara. His Grace is entirely capable of compensating you for any loss you incur while aiding us in the capture of this man. In my opinion, though, the Thorn will have time to neither spend it nor move it very far, so your stolen money should be recovered before that even becomes necessary. You must also consider the aspects of the situation that are not strictly financial.”

“Meaning?”

“His Grace’s gratitude for your assistance in bringing this matter to our desired outcome,” said Locke, “balanced against his certain displeasure if any reluctance on your part should alert our thief to the net drawing tight around him.”

“Ah.” Don Salvara picked his optics up and resettled them on his nose. “With that I can hardly argue.”

“I will not be able to speak to you in public. No uniformed member of the Camorr watch will approach you for any reason related to this affair. If I speak to you at all, it must be at night, in secret.”

“Am I to tell Conté to keep refreshments at hand for men coming in through the windows? Shall I tell the Doña Sofia to send any Midnighters to my study if they should pop out of her wardrobe closet?”

“I give you my word any future appearances will be less alarming, my lord. My instructions were to impress upon you the seriousness of the situation and the full extent of our ability to…bypass obstacles. I assure you, I have no personal desire to anatagonize you any further. Resecuring your fortune will be the capstone to many months of hard work on my part.”

“And the Doña Sofia? Has your master dictated a part for her in this…counter-charade?”

“Your wife is a most extraordinary woman. By all means, inform her of our involvement. Tell her the truth about Lukas Fehrwight. Enlist her very capable aid in our endeavor. However,” Locke said, grinning malignantly,

“I do believe that I shall regretfully leave you the task of explaining this to her on your own, my lord.”

6

ON THE landward side of Camorr, armed men pace the old stone walls of the city, ever vigilant for signs of bandits or hostile armies in the field. On the seaward side, watchtowers and war galleys serve the same purpose.

At the guard stations on the periphery of the Alcegrante district, the city watch stands ready to protect the city’s lesser nobility from the annoyance of having to see or smell any of their actual subjects against their wishes.

Locke and Calo crossed the Angevine just before midnight on the broad glass bridge called the Eldren Arch. This ornately carved span connected the western Alcegrante with the lush semipublic gardens of Twosilver Green—another spot where the insufficiently well-heeled were discouraged from lingering, often with whips and batons.

Tall cylinders of ruby-colored glass shed alchemical light onto the wispy threads of mist that curled and wavered below the knees of their horses; the center of the bridge was fifty feet above the water, and the usual night fog reached no higher. The red lamps swayed gently within their black iron frames as the muggy Hangman’s Breeze spun them, and the two Gentlemen Bastards rode down into the Alcegrante with that eerie light surrounding them like a bloody aura.

“Hold there! State your name and business!”

At the point where the bridge met the Angevine’s north shore there was a low wooden shack with oil-paper windows, through which a pale white glow emanated. A single figure stood beside it, his yellow tabard turned to orange in the light of the bridge lamps. The speaker’s words might have been bold, but his voice was young and a little uncertain.

Locke smiled; the Alcegrante guard shacks always held two yellowjackets, but at this one the more senior had clearly sent his less-hardened partner out into the fog to do the actual work. So much the better—Locke pulled his precious sigil-wallet out of his black cloak as his horse cantered down beside the guard station.

“My name is immaterial.” Locke flipped the wallet open to allow the round-faced young city watchman a glimpse of the sigil by the light of his guard station. “My business is that of His Grace, Duke Nicovante.”

“I…I see, sir.”

“I never came this way. We did not speak. Be sure that your fellow watchman understands this as well.”

The yellowjacket bowed and took a quick step backward, as though afraid to stay too close. Locke smiled. Black-cloaked riders on black horses, looming out of darkness and mist…It was easy to laugh at such conceits in full daylight. But night had a way of lending weight to phantasms.

If Coin-Kisser’s Row was where Camorr’s money was put to use, the Alcegrante district was where it was put to rest. It was four connected islands, each a sort of tiered hill sloping up to the base of the plateau that held the Five Towers; old money and new money mingled crazy-quilt fashion here in mazes of manor houses and private gardens. Here the merchants and money-changers and ship-brokers looked down comfortably on the rest of the city; here the lesser nobility looked up covetously at the towers of the Five Families who ruled all.

Carriages clattered past from time to time, their black lacquered wooden cabins trailing bobbing lanterns and banners proclaiming the arms of whoever traveled within. Some of these were guarded by teams of armed outriders in slashed doublets and polished breastplates—this year’s fashion for rented thugs. A few teams of horses wore harnesses spotted with miniature alchemical lights; these appeared at a distance looking like chains of fireflies bobbing in the mist.

Don Salvara’s manor was a four-story pillared rectangle, several centuries old and sagging a bit under the weight of its years, for it had been built entirely by human hands. It was a sort of island unto itself at the heart of the Isla Durona, westernmost neighborhood of the Alcegrante; surrounded on all sides by a twelve-foot stone wall and enclosed by thick gardens. It shared no party walls with neighboring manors. Amber lights burned behind the barred windows on the third floor.

Locke and Calo quietly dismounted in the alley adjacent to the manor’s northern wall. Several long nights of careful reconnaissance by Locke and Bug had revealed the easiest routes over the alley wall and up the side of the Salvara manor. Dressed as they were, hidden by mist and darkness, they would be effectively invisible as soon as they could hop the outer wall and get off the street.

A moment of fortunate stillness fell upon them as Calo tied the horses to a weathered wooden post beside the garden wall; not a soul was in sight. Calo stroked his horse’s thin mane.

“Hoist a glass or two in memory of us if we don’t come back, love.”

Locke put his back against the base of the wall and cupped his hands. Calo set a foot in this makeshift stirrup and leapt upward, propelled by the mingled strength of his legs and Locke’s arms. When he’d hoisted himself quietly and carefully atop the wall, he reached back down with both arms to hoist Locke up. The Sanza twin was as wiry as Locke was slender, and the operation went smoothly. In seconds they were both down in the wet, fragrant darkness of the garden, crouched motionless, listening.

The doors on the ground floor were all protected from within by intricate clockwork failsafes and steel bars—they simply could not be picked. But the rooftop…well, those who weren’t yet important enough to live with the constant threat of assassination often placed an inordinate degree of faith in high walls.

The two thieves went up the north face of the manor house, slowly and carefully, wedging hands and feet firmly into chinks in the warm, slick stone. The first and second floors were dark and quiet; the light on the third floor was on the opposite side of the building. Hearts hammering with excitement, they hauled themselves up until they were just beneath the parapet of the roof, where they paused for a long interval, straining to catch at any sound from within the manor that would hint at discovery.

The moons were stuffed away behind gauzy gray clouds; on their left the city was an arc of blurred jewel-lights shining through mist, and above them the impossible heights of the Five Towers stood like black shadows before the sky. The threads of light that burned on their parapets and in their windows enhanced rather than reduced their aura of menace. Staring up at them from near the ground was a sure recipe for vertigo.

Locke was the first over the parapet. Peering intently by the faint light falling from above, he planted his feet on a white-tiled pathway in the center of the roof and kept them there. He was surrounded on either side by the dark shapes of bushes, blossoms, small trees, and vines—the roof was rich with the scent of vegetation and night soil. The street-level garden was a mundane affair, if well tended; this was the Doña Sofia’s private botanical preserve.

Most alchemical botanists, in Locke’s experience, were enthusiasts of bizarre poisons. He made sure his hood and cloak were cinched tight around him, and pulled his black neck-cloth up over his lower face.

Soft-stepping along the white path, Locke and Calo threaded their way through Sofia’s garden, more carefully than if they had been walking between streams of lamp oil with their cloaks on fire. At the garden’s center was a roof hatch with a simple tumbler lock; Calo listened carefully at this door for two minutes with his favorite picks poised in his hands. Charming the lock took less than ten seconds.

The fourth floor: Doña Sofia’s workshop, a place where the two intruders wanted even less to stumble or linger than they had in her garden. Quiet as guilty husbands coming home from a late night of drinking, they stole through the dark rooms of laboratory apparatus and potted plants, scampering for the narrow stone stairs that led downward to a side passage on the third floor.

The operations of the Salvara household were well known to the Gentlemen Bastards; the don and doña kept their private chambers on the third floor, across the hall from the don’s study. The second floor was the solar, a reception and dining hall that went mostly disused when the couple had no friends over to entertain. The first floor held the kitchen, several parlors, and the servants’ quarters. In addition to Conté, the Salvaras kept a pair of middle-aged housekeepers, a cook, and a young boy who served as a messenger and scullion. All of them would be asleep on the first floor; none of them posed even a fraction of the threat that Conté did.

This was the part of the scheme that couldn’t be planned with any precision—they had to locate the old soldier and deal with him before they could have their intended conversation with Don Salvara.

Footsteps echoed from somewhere else on the floor; Locke, in the lead, crouched low and peeked around the left-hand corner. It turned out he was looking down the long passage that divided the third floor in half lengthwise; Don Salvara had left the door to his study open and was vanishing into the bedchamber. That door he closed firmly behind him—and a moment later the sound of a metal lock echoed down the hall.

“Serendipity,” whispered Locke. “I suspect he’ll be busy for quite some time in there. Light’s still on in his study, so we know he’s coming back out…. Let’s get the hard part over with.”

Locke and Calo slipped down the hallway, sweating now, but barely letting their heavy cloaks flutter as they moved. The long passage was tastefully decorated with hanging tapestries and shallow wall sconces in which tiny glow-glasses shed no more light than that of smoldering coals. Behind the heavy doors to the Salvaras’ chambers, someone laughed.

The stairwell at the far end of the passage was wide and circular; steps of white marble inset with mosaic-tile maps of Camorr spiralled down into the solar. Here Calo grabbed Locke by one sleeve, put a finger to his lips, and jerked his head downward.

“Listen,” he murmured.

Clang, clang…footsteps…clang, clang.

This sequence of noises was repeated several times, growing slightly louder each time. Locke grinned at Calo. Someone was pacing the solar, methodically checking the locks and the iron bars guarding each window. At this time of the night, there was only one man in the house who’d be doing such a thing.

Calo knelt beside the balustrade, just to the left of the top of the staircase. Anyone coming up the spiral stairs would have to pass directly beneath this position. He reached inside his cloak and took out a folded leather sack and a length of narrow-gauge rope woven from black silk; he then began to thread the silk line through and around the sack in some arcane fashion that Locke couldn’t follow. Locke knelt just behind Calo and kept one eye on the long passage they’d come down—a reappearance of the don was hardly likely yet, but the Benefactor was said to make colorful examples of incautious thieves.

Conté’s light, steady footsteps echoed on the staircase beneath them.

In a fair fight, the don’s man would almost certainly paint the walls with Locke and Calo’s blood, so it stood to reason that this fight would have to be as unfair as possible. At the moment the top of Conté’s bald head appeared beneath him, Calo reached out between the balustrade posts and let his crimper’s hood drop.

A crimper’s hood, for those who’ve never had the occasion to be kidnapped and sold into slavery in one of the cities on the Iron Sea, looks a bit like a tent as it flutters quickly downward, borne by weights sewn into its bottom edges. Air pushes its flaps outward just before it drops down around its target’s head and settles on his shoulders. Conté gave a startled jerk as Calo yanked the black silk cord, instantly cinching the hood closed around his neck.

Anyone with any real presence of mind could probably reach up and fumble such a hood loose in a matter of seconds, which is why the interior is inevitably painted with large amounts of some sweet-scented fuming narcotic, purchased from a black apothecary. Knowing the nature of the man they were attempting to subdue, Locke and Calo had spent nearly thirty crowns on the stuff Conté was breathing just now, and Locke fervently wished him much joy of it.

One panic-breath inside the airtight hood; that would be enough to drop any ordinary person in his or her tracks. But as Locke flew down the stairs to catch Conté’s body, he saw that the man was still somehow upright, clawing at the hood—disoriented and weakened, most definitely, but still awake. A quick rap on the solar plexus—that would open his mouth and speed the drug on its way. Locke stepped in to deliver the blow, wrapping one hand around Conté’s neck just beneath the crimper’s hood. This nearly blew the entire game.

Conté’s arms flashed up and broke Locke’s lackadaisical choke hold before it even began; the man’s left arm snaked out to entangle Locke’s right, and then Conté punched him—once, twice, three times; vicious jabs in his own stomach and solar plexus. With his guts an exploding constellation of pain, Locke sank down against his would-be victim, struggling for balance. Conté brought his right knee up in a blow that should have knocked Locke’s teeth out of his ears at high speed, but the drug was finally, thankfully smothering the old soldier’s will to be ornery. The knee barely grazed Locke’s chin; instead, the booted foot attached to it caught him in the groin and knocked him backward. His head bounced against the hard marble of the stairs, somewhat cushioned by the cloth of his hood; Locke lay there, gasping for breath, still hanging awkwardly by one of the hooded man’s arms.

Calo appeared at that instant, having dropped the line that cinched his crimper’s hood and dashed down the stairs. He slipped one foot behind Conté’s increasingly wobbly legs and pushed the man down the stairs, holding him by the front of his doublet to keep the fall relatively quiet. Once Conté was head-down and prone, Calo punched him rather mercilessly between the legs—once, then again when the man’s legs twitched feebly, and then again, which yielded no response. The hood had finally done its work. With Conté temporarily disposed of, Calo turned to Locke and tried to help him to a sitting position, but Locke waved him off.

“What sort of state are you in?” Calo whispered.

“As though I’m with child, and the little bastard is trying to cut his way out with an axe.” Chest heaving, Locke tore his black mask down off his face, lest he vomit inside it and create an unconcealable mess.

While Locke gulped deep breaths and tried to control his shuddering, Calo crouched back down beside Conté and tore the hood off, briskly waving away the sickly-sweet aroma of the leather bag’s contents. He carefully folded the hood up, slipped it into his cloak, and then dragged Conté up a few steps.

“Calo.” Locke coughed. “My disguise—damaged?”

“Not that I can see. Looks like he didn’t do anything that shows, provided you can walk without a slouch. Stay here a moment.”

Calo slipped down to the foot of the stairs and took a peek around the darkened solar; soft city light fell through the barred windows, faintly illuminating a long table and a number of glass cases on the walls, holding plates and unidentifiable knickknacks. Not another soul was in sight, and not a sound could be heard from below.

When Calo returned, Locke had pushed himself up on his knees and hands; Conté slumbered beside him with a look of comical bliss on his craggy face.

“Oh, he’s not going to keep that expression when he wakes up.” Calo waved a pair of thin, leather-padded brass knuckles at Locke, then made them vanish up his sleeyes with a graceful flourish. “I had my footpad’s little friends on when I knocked him around that last time.”

“Well, I for one have no expressions of sympathy to spare, since he kicked my balls hard enough to make them permanent residents of my lungs.” Locke tried to push himself up off his hands and failed; Calo caught him under his right arm and eased him up until he was kneeling, shakily, on his knees alone.

“You’ve got your breath back, at least. Can you actually walk?”

“I can stumble, I think. I’ll be hunched over for a while. Give me a few minutes and I think I can pretend nothing’s wrong. At least until we’re out of here.”

Calo assisted Locke back up the stairs to the third floor. Leaving Locke there to keep watch, he then began to quietly, slowly drag Conté up the same way. The don’s man didn’t actually weigh all that much.

Embarrassed, and eager to make himself useful again, Locke pulled two lengths of tough cord out of his own cloak and bound Conté’s feet and hands with them; he folded a handkerchief three times and used it as a gag. Locke pulled Conté’s knives out of their sheaths and passed them to Calo, who stashed them within his cloak.

The don’s study door still hung open, shedding warm light into the passage; the bedchamber doors remained locked tight.

“I pray you both may be gifted with a demand and an endurance well beyond your usual expectations, m’lord and lady,” whispered Calo. “Your household thieves would appreciate a short break before continuing with their duties for the evening.”

Calo grasped Conté beneath his arms, and Locke, slouched in obvious pain, nonetheless grabbed the man’s feet when Calo began to drag him all by himself. With tedious stealth, they retraced their steps and deposited the unconscious bodyguard around the far bend in the corridor, just beside the stairs leading back up to the fourth-floor laboratories.

The don’s study was a most welcome sight when they finally stole in a few minutes later. Locke settled into a deeply cushioned leather armchair on the left-hand wall, while Calo took up a standing guard position. More laughter could be heard, faintly, from across the hall.

“We could be here quite a while,” said Calo.

“The gods are merciful.” Locke stared at the don’s tall glass-fronted liquor cabinet—one even more impressive than the collection his pleasure barge carried. “I’d pour us a draught or six, but I don’t think it would be in character.”

They waited ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Locke breathed steadily and deeply, and concentrated on ignoring the throbbing ache that seemed to fill his guts from top to bottom. Yet when the two thieves heard the door across the hallway unbolting, Locke leapt to his feet, standing tall, pretending that his balls didn’t feel like clay jugs dropped onto cobblestones from a great height. He cinched his black mask back on and willed a wave of perfect arrogance to claim him from the inside out.

As Father Chains had once said, the best disguises were those that were poured out of the heart rather than painted on the face.

Calo kissed the back of his left hand through his own mask and winked.

Don Lorenzo Salvara walked into his study whistling, lightly dressed and completely unarmed.

“Close the door,” said Locke, and his voice was steady, rich with the absolute presumption of command. “Have a seat, m’lord, and don’t bother calling for your man. He is…indisposed.”

7

AN HOUR past midnight, two men left the Alcegrante district via the Eldren Arch. They wore black cloaks and had black horses; one of them rode with a leisurely air, while the other led his horse on foot, walking in a curiously bowlegged fashion.

“Un-f*cking-believable,” said Calo. “It really did work out just as you planned. It’s a pity we can’t brag about this to anyone. Our biggest score ever, and all we had to do was tell our mark exactly what we were doing to him.”

“And get kicked around a bit,” muttered Locke.

“Yeah, sorry about that. What a beast that man was, eh? Take comfort that he’ll feel the same way when he opens his eyes again.”

“How very comforting. If reassurances could dull pain, nobody would ever go to the trouble of pressing grapes.”

“By the Crooked Warden, I never heard such self-pity dripping from the mouth of a wealthy man. Cheer up! Richer and cleverer than everyone else, right?”

“Richer and cleverer and walking funny, yes.”

The pair of thieves made their way south through Twosilver Green, toward the first of the stops where they would gradually lose their horses and shed their black clothes, until they were finally heading back to the Temple District dressed as common laborers. They nodded companionably at patrols of yellowjackets, stomping about in the mist with lanterns swaying on pike-poles to light their way. Not once were they given any reason to glance up.

The fluttering shadow that trailed them on their way through the streets and alleys was quieter than a small child’s breath; swift and graceful, it swooped from rooftop to rooftop in their wake, following their actions with absolute single-mindedness. When they slipped back into the Temple District, it beat its wings and rose into the darkness in a lazy spiraling circle, until it was up above the mists of Camorr and lost against the gray haze of the low-hanging clouds.





INTERLUDE

The Last Mistake

1

Locke’s first experience with the mirror wine of Tal Verrar had even more of an effect on the boy’s malnourished body than Chains had expected. Locke spent most of the next day tossing and turning on his cot, his head pounding and his eyes unable to bear anything but the most gentle spark of light.

“It’s a fever,” Locke muttered into his sweat-soaked blanket.

“It’s a hangover.” Chains ran a hand through the boy’s hair and patted his back. “My fault, really. The Sanza twins are natural liquor sponges. I shouldn’t have let you live up to their standard on your first night with us. No work for you today.”

“Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?”

“A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems. Unless you’re drinking Austershalin brandy.”

“Auffershallow?”

“Austershalin. From Emberlain. Among its many other virtues, it doesn’t cause a hangover. Some sort of alchemical component in the vineyard soil. Expensive stuff.”

Falselight came after many hours of half-sleep, and Locke found himself able to walk once again, though the brain within his skull felt like it was attempting to dig a hole down through his neck and escape. Chains insisted that they would still be visiting Capa Barsavi (“The only people who break appointments with him are the ones that live in glass towers and have their pictures on coins, and even they think twice”), though he consented to allow Locke a more comfortable means of transportation.

It turned out that the House of Perelandro had a small stable tucked around the back, and in this smelly little stall there lived a Gentled goat. “He’s got no name,” Chains said as he set Locke atop the creature’s back. “I just couldn’t bring myself to give him one, since he wouldn’t answer to it anyway.”

Locke had never developed the instinctive revulsion most boys and girls felt for Gentled animals; he’d already seen too much ugliness in his life to care about the occasional empty stare from a docile, milky-eyed creature.

There is a substance called Wraithstone, a chalky white material found in certain remote mountain caverns. The stuff doesn’t occur naturally; it is found only in conjunction with glass-lined tunnels presumably abandoned by the Eldren—the same unsettling race that built Camorr, ages past. In its solid state, Wraithstone is tasteless, nearly odorless, and inert. It must be burned to activate its unique properties.

Physikers have begun to identify the various means and channels by which poisons attack the bodies of the living; this one stills the heart, while this one thins the blood, and still others damage the stomach or the intestines. Wraithstone smoke poisons nothing physical; what it does is burn out personality itself. Ambition, stubbornness, pluck, spirit, drive—all of these things fade with just a few breaths of the arcane haze. Accidental exposure to small amounts can leave a man listless for weeks; anything more than that and the effect will be permanent. Victims remain alive but entirely unconcerned by anything. They don’t respond to their names, or to their friends, or to mortal danger. They can be prodded into eating or excreting or carrying something, and little else. The pale white sheen that fills their eyes is an outward expression of the emptiness that takes hold in their hearts and minds.

Once, in the time of the Therin Throne, the process was used to punish criminals, but it has been centuries since any civilized Therin city-state allowed the use of Wraithstone on men and women. A society that still hangs children for petty theft and feeds prisoners to sea-creatures finds the results too disquieting to bear.

Gentling, therefore, is reserved for animals—mostly beasts of burden intended for urban service. The cramped confines of a hazard-rich city like Camorr are ideally suited to the process. Gentled ponies may be trusted never to throw the children of the wealthy. Gentled horses and mules may be trusted never to kick their handlers or dump expensive cargoes into a canal. A burlap sack with a bit of the white stone and a slow-smoldering match is placed over an animal’s muzzle, and the human handlers retreat to fresh air. A few minutes later the creature’s eyes are the color of new milk, and it will never do anything on its own initiative again.

But Locke had a throbbing headache, and he was just getting used to the idea that he was a murderer and a resident of a private glass fairyland, and the eerily mechanical behavior of his goat didn’t bother him at all.

“This temple will be exactly where I left it when I return later this evening,” said Father Chains as he finished dressing for his venture outside; the Eyeless Priest had vanished entirely, to be replaced by a hale man of middle years and moderate means. His beard and his hair had been touched up with some sort of brown dye; his vest and cheap cotton-lined half-cloak hung loosely over a cream-colored shirt with no ties or cravats.

“Exactly where you left it,” said one of the Sanzas.

“And not burned down or anything,” said the other.

“If you boys can burn down stone and Elderglass, the gods have higher aspirations for you than a place as my apprentices. Do behave. I’m taking Locke to get his, ahh…”

Chains glanced sideways at the Lamora boy. He then mimed taking a drink, and held his jaw afterward as though in pain.

“Ohhhhhhhhhhhh,” said Calo and Galdo in pitch-perfect unison.

“Indeed.” Chains settled a little round leather cap on his head and took the reins of Locke’s goat. “Wait up for us. This should be interesting, to say the least.”

2

“THIS CAPA Barsavi,” Locke said as Chains led the nameless goat across one of the narrow glass arches between the Fauria and Coin-Kisser’s Row, “my old master told me about him, I think.”

“You’re quite right. That time you got the Elderglass Vine burned down, I believe.”

“Ah. You know about that.”

“Well, once your old master started telling me about you, he just sort of…didn’t shut up for several hours.”

“If I’m your pezon, are you Barsavi’s pezon?”

“That’s a plain, neat description of our relationship, yes. All the Right People are Barsavi’s soldiers. His eyes, his ears, his agents, his subjects. His pezon. Barsavi is…a particular sort of friend. I did some things for him, back when he was coming to power. We rose together, you might say—I got special consideration and he got the, ah, entire city.”

“Special consideration?”

It was as pleasant a night for a stroll as Camorr ever produced during the summer. A hard rain had fallen not an hour before, and the fresh mist that spread its tendrils around buildings like the grasping hands of spectral giants was slightly cooler than usual, and its odor wasn’t yet saturated with the redolence of silt and dead fish and human waste. Other people were few and far between on Coin-Kisser’s Row after Falselight, so Locke and Chains spoke fairly freely.

“I’ve got the distance. Which means—well, there are a hundred gangs in Camorr, Locke. A hundred and more. Certainly I can’t remember them all. Some of them are too new or too unruly for Capa Barsavi to trust them as well as he might. So he keeps a close eye on them—insists on frequent reports, plants men in them, reins their actions in tightly. Those of us that don’t suffer such scrutiny”—Chains pointed to himself, then to Locke—“are sort of presumed to be doing things honestly until proven otherwise. We follow his rules and pay him a cut of our take, and he thinks he can more or less trust us to get it right. No audits, no spies, no bullshit. ‘The distance.’ It’s a privilege worth paying for.”

Chains stuck a hand in one of his cloak pockets; there was the pleasing jingle of coins. “I’ve got a little show of respect for him right here, in fact. Two-tenths of this week’s take from the charity kettle of Perelandro.”

“More than a hundred gangs, you said?”

“This city has more gangs than it has foul odors, boy. Some of them are older than many families on the Alcegrante, and some of them have stricter rituals than some of the priestly orders. Hell, at one point there were nearly thirty capas, and each one had four or five gangs under his thumb.”

“Thirty capas? All like Capa Barsavi?”

“Yes and no. Yes, that they ran gangs and gave orders and cut men open from cock to eyeballs when they got angry; no, that they were anything like Barsavi otherwise. Five years ago, there were the thirty bosses I talked about. Thirty little kingdoms, all fighting and thieving and spilling each other’s guts in the street. All at war with the yellowjackets, who used to kill twenty men a week. In slow weeks.

“Then Capa Barsavi walked in from Tal Verrar. Used to be a scholar at the Therin Collegium, if you can believe it. Taught rhetoric. He got a few gangs under his thumb and he started cutting. Not like a back-alley slasher, but more like a physiker cutting out a chancre. When Barsavi took out another capa, he took their gangs, too. But he didn’t lean on them if he didn’t have to. He gave them full territories and let them choose their own garristas, and he cut them in on his take.

“So—five years ago, there were thirty. Four years ago, there were ten. Three years ago, there was one. Capa Barsavi and his hundred gangs. The whole city—all the Right People, present company included—in his pocket. No more open war across the bloody canals. No more platoons of thieves getting strung up all at once at the Palace of Patience. Nowadays they have to do them two or three at a time.”

“Because of the Secret Peace? The one I broke?”

“The one you broke, yes. Good guess, presuming I’d know about that. Yes, my boy, it’s the key to Barsavi’s peculiar success. What it comes down to is, he has a standing agreement with the duke, handled through one of the duke’s agents. The gangs of Camorr don’t touch the nobles; we don’t lay a finger on ships or drays or crates that have a legitimate coat of arms on them. In exchange, Barsavi is the actual ruler of a few of the city’s more charming points. Catchfire, the Narrows, the Dregs, the Wooden Waste, the Snare, and parts of the docks. Plus the city watch is much more…relaxed than they ought to be.”

“So we can rob anyone who isn’t a noble?”

“Or a yellowjacket, yes. We can have the merchants and the money-changers and the incoming and the outgoing. There’s more money passing through Camorr than any other city on this coast, boy. Hundreds of ships a week; thousands of sailors and officers. We don’t have any problem laying off the nobility.”

“Doesn’t that make the merchants and the money-changers and the other people angry?”

“It might if they knew about it. That’s why there’s that word ‘Secret’ in front of ‘Peace.’ And that’s why Camorr’s such a lovely, fine, safe place to live. You really only need to worry about losing your money if you don’t have much of it in the first place.”

“Oh,” said Locke, fingering his little shark’s-tooth necklace. “Okay. But now I wonder…You said my old master bought and paid for, um, killing me. Will you get in trouble with Barsavi for not…killing me?”

Chains laughed. “Why would I be taking you to see him if that’d get me in trouble, boy? No, the death-mark’s mine to use, or not, as I see fit. I bought it. Don’t you see? He doesn’t care if we actually use ’em, only that we acknowledge that the power of granting life or death is his. Sort of like a tax only he can collect. You see?”

Locke nodded, then allowed himself to be trundled along silently for a few minutes, absorbing all of this. His aching head made the scale of what was going on a bit difficult to grasp.

“Let me tell you a story,” said Father Chains after a while. “A story that will let you know just what sort of man you’re going to meet and swear fealty to this evening. Once upon a time, when Capa Barsavi’s hold on the city was very new and very delicate, it was an open secret that a pack of his garristas was plotting to get rid of him just as soon as the chance presented itself. And they were very alert for his countermoves, see; they’d helped him take over the city, and they knew how he worked.

“So they made sure he couldn’t get all of them at once; if he tried to cut some throats the gangs would scatter and warn each other and it’d be a bloody mess, another long war. He made no open moves. And the rumors of their disloyalty got worse.

“Capa Barsavi would receive visitors in his hall—it’s still out there in the Wooden Waste; it used to be a big Verrari hulk, one of those fat wide galleons they used for hauling troops. It’s just anchored there now, a sort of makeshift palace. He calls it the Floating Grave. Well, at the Floating Grave, he made a big show of putting down this one large carpet from Ashmere; a really lovely thing, the sort of cloth the duke would hang on a wall for safekeeping. And he made sure that everyone around him knew how much he liked that carpet.

“It got so that his court could tell what he was going to do to a visitor by watching that carpet; if there was going to be blood, that carpet would be rolled up and packed away safe. Without exception. Months went by. Carpet up, carpet down. Sometimes men who got called to see him would try to run the moment they saw bare floor beneath his feet, which of course was as good as admitting wrongdoing out loud.

“Anyhow. Back to his problem garristas. Not one of them was stupid enough to enter the Floating Grave without a gang at their back, or to be caught alone with Barsavi. His rule was still too uncertain at this point for him to just throw a tantrum about it. So he waited…and then one night he invited nine of his troublesome garristas to dinner. Not all the troublemakers, of course, but the cleverest, and the toughest, and the ones with the biggest gangs. And their spies brought back word that that lovely embroidered carpet, the capa’s prize possession, was rolled out on the floor for everyone to see, with a banquet table on top of it and more food than the gods themselves had ever seen.

“So those stupid bastards, they figured Barsavi was serious, that he really wanted to talk. They thought he was scared, and they expected negotiations in good faith; so they didn’t bring their gangs or make alternate plans. They thought they’d won.

“You can imagine,” said Chains, “just how surprised they were when they sat down at their chairs on that beautiful carpet, and fifty of Barsavi’s men piled into the room with crossbows, and shot those poor idiots so full of bolts that a porcupine in heat would have taken any one of them home and f*cked him. If there was a drop of blood that wasn’t on the carpet, it was on the ceiling. You get my meaning?”

“So the carpet was ruined?”

“And then some. Barsavi knew how to create expectations, Locke, and how to use those expectations to mislead those who would harm him. They figured his strange obsession was a guarantee of their lives. Turns out there are just some enemies numerous enough and powerful enough to be worth losing a damn carpet over.”

Chains pointed ahead of them and to the south.

“That’s the man waiting to talk to you about half a mile that way. I would strongly recommend cultivating a civil tongue.”

3

THE LAST Mistake was a place where the underworld of Camorr bubbled to the surface; a flat-out crook’s tavern, where Right People of every sort could drink and speak freely of their business, where respectable citizens stood out like serpents in a nursery and were quickly escorted out the door by mean-looking, thick-armed men with very small imaginations.

Here entire gangs would come to drink and arrange jobs and just show themselves off. In their cups, men would argue loudly about the best way to strangle someone from behind, and the best sorts of poisons to use in wine or food. They would openly proclaim the folly of the duke’s court, or his taxation schemes, or his diplomatic arrangements with the other cities of the Iron Sea. They would refight entire battles with dice and fragments of chicken bones as their armies, loudly announcing how they would have turned left when Duke Nicovante had gone right, how they would have stood fast when the five thousand blackened iron spears of the Mad Count’s Rebellion had come surging down Godsgate Hill toward them.

But not one of them, no matter how far doused in liquor or Gaze or the strange narcotic powders of Jerem—no matter what feats of generalship or statecraft he credited himself with the foresight to bring off—would dare suggest to Capa Vencarlo Barsavi that he should ever change so much as a single button on his waistcoat.

4

THE BROKEN Tower is a landmark of Camorr, jutting ninety feet skyward at the very northern tip of the Snare—that low and crowded district where sailors from a hundred ports of call are passed from bar to alehouse to gaming den and back again on a nightly basis. They are shaken through a sieve of tavern-keepers, whores, muggers, dicers, cobble-cogs, and other low tricksters until their pockets are as empty as their heads are heavy, and they can be dumped on ship to nurse their new hangovers and diseases. They come in like the tide and go out like the tide, leaving nothing but a residue of copper and silver (and occasionally blood) to mark their passing.

Although human arts are inadequate to the task of cracking Elderglass, the Broken Tower was found in its current state when humans first settled Camorr, stealing in among the ruins of an older civilization. Great gashes mar the alien glass and stone of the tower’s upper stories; these discontinuities have been somewhat covered over with wood and paint and other human materials. The sturdiness of the whole affair is hardly in question, but the repairs are not beautiful, and the rooms for let on the upper six floors are some of the least desirable in the city, as they are accessible only by rank upon rank of narrow, twisting exterior stairs—a spindly wooden frame that sways nauseatingly in high winds. Most of the residents are young bravos from various gangs, to whom the insane accommodations are a strange badge of honor.

The Last Mistake fills the first floor at the wide base of the Broken Tower, and after the fall of Falselight, it rarely has less than a hundred patrons in it at any given time. Locke clung tightly to the back of Father Chains’ half-cloak as the older man elbowed his way past the crowd at the door. The outward exhalation of the bar’s air was full of smells Locke knew quite well: a hundred kinds of liquors and the breath of the men and women drinking them, sweat both stale and fresh, piss and vomit, spiced pomanders and wet wool, the sharp bite of ginger and the acrid fog of tobacco.

“Can we trust that boy to watch our goat?” Locke cried above the din.

“Of course, of course.” Chains made some elaborate hand sign in greeting to a group of men arm-wrestling just inside the bar’s main room; those not locked in bitter struggles grinned and waved back. “First, it’s his job. Second, I paid well. Third, only a crazy person would want to steal a Gentled goat.”

The Last Mistake was a sort of monument to the failure of human artifice at critical moments. Its walls were covered in a bewildering variety of souvenirs, each one telling a visual tale that ended with the phrase “not quite good enough.” Above the bar was a full suit of armor, a square hole punched through at the left breast by a crossbow quarrel. Broken swords and split helmets covered the walls, along with fragments of oars, masts, spars, and tatters of sails. One of the bar’s proudest claims was that it had secured a memento of every ship that had foundered within sight of Camorr in the past seventy years.

Into this mess Father Chains dragged Locke Lamora, like a launch being towed at the stern of a huge galleon. On the south wall of the bar was an elevated alcove, given privacy by rows of partially drawn curtains. Men and women stood at attention here, their hard eyes constantly sweeping across the crowd, their hands never far from the weapons they carried openly and ostentatiously—daggers, darts, brass and wooden clubs, short swords, hatchets, and even crossbows, ranging from slender alley-pieces to big horse-murderers that looked (to Locke’s wide eyes) as though they could knock holes in stone.

One of these guards stopped Father Chains, and the two exchanged a few whispered words; another guard was dispatched into the curtained alcove while the first eyed Chains warily. A few moments later the second guard reappeared and beckoned; thus it was that Locke was led for the first time into the presence of Vencarlo Barsavi, Capa of Camorr, who sat in a plain chair beside a plain table. Several minions stood against the wall behind him, close enough to respond to a summons but far enough to be out of earshot for quiet conversation.

Barsavi was a big man, as wide as Chains but obviously a bit younger. His oiled black hair was pulled tight behind his neck, and his beards curved off his chin like three braided whipcords of hair, one atop the other, neatly layered. These beards flew about when Barsavi turned his round head, and they looked quite thick enough to sting if they struck bare skin.

Barsavi was dressed in a coat, vest, breeches, and boots of some odd dark leather that seemed unusually thick and stiff even to Locke’s untrained eyes; after a moment, the boy realized it must be shark hide. The strangely uneven white buttons that dotted his vest and his cuffs and held his layered red silk cravats in place…they were human teeth.

Sitting on Barsavi’s lap, staring intently at Locke, was a girl about his own age, with short tangled dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She, too, wore a curious outfit. Her dress was white embroidered silk, fit for any noble’s daughter, while the little boots that dangled beneath her hem were black leather, shod with iron, bearing sharpened steel kicking-spikes at the heels and the toes.

“So this is the boy,” said Barsavi in a deep, slightly nasal voice with the pleasant hint of a Verrari accent. “The industrious little boy who so confounded our dear Thiefmaker.”

“The very one, Your Honor, now happily confounding myself and my other wards.” Chains reached behind himself and pushed Locke out from behind his legs. “May I present Locke Lamora, late of Shades’ Hill, now an initiate of Perelandro?”

“Or some god, anyway, eh?” Barsavi chuckled and held out a small wooden box that had been resting on the table near his arm. “It’s always nice to see you when your sight miraculously returns, Chains. Have a smoke. They’re Jeremite blackroot, extra fine, just rolled this week.”

“I can’t say no to that, Ven.” Chains accepted a tightly rolled sheaf of tobacco in red paper; while the two men bent over a flickering taper to light up (Chains dropped his little bag of coins on the table at the same time), the girl seemed to come to some sort of decision about Locke.

“He’s a very ugly little boy, Father. He looks like a skeleton.”

Capa Barsavi coughed out his first few puffs of smoke, the corners of his mouth crinkling upward. “And you’re a very inconsiderate little girl, my dear.” The Capa drew on his sheaf once more and exhaled a straight stream of translucent smoke; the stuff was pleasantly mellow and carried the slightest hint of burnt vanilla. “You must forgive my daughter Nazca; I am helpless to deny her indulgences, and she has acquired the manners of a pirate princess. Particularly now that we are all afraid to come near her deadly new boots.”

“I am never unarmed,” said the little girl, kicking up her heels a few times to emphasize the point.

“And poor Locke most certainly is not ugly, my darling; what he bears is clearly the mark of Shades’ Hill. A month in Chains’ keeping and he’ll be as round and fit as a catapult stone.”

“Hmmph.” The girl continued to stare down at him for a few seconds, then suddenly looked up at her father, absently toying with one of his braided beards while she did so. “Are you making him a pezon, Father?”

“Chains and I did have that in mind, sweetling, yes.”

“Hmmph. Then I want another brandy while you’re doing the ceremony.”

Capa Barsavi’s eyes narrowed; seams deepened by habitual suspicion drew in around his flinty gray stare. “You’ve already had your two brandies for the night, darling; your mother will murder me if I let you have another. Ask one of the men to get you a beer.”

“But I prefer—”

“What you prefer, little tyrant, has nothing to do with what I am telling you. For the rest of the night, you can drink beer or air; the choice is entirely yours.”

“Hmmph. I’ll have beer, then.” Barsavi reached out to lift her down, but she hopped off his lap just ahead of his thick-fingered, heavily calloused hands. Her heels went clack-clack-clack on the hardwood floor of the alcove as she ran to some minion to give her order.

“And if just one more of my men gets kicked in the shin, darling, you’re going to wear reed sandals for a month, I promise,” Barsavi shouted after her, then took another drag of tobacco and turned back to Locke and Chains. “She’s a keg of fire-oil, that one. Last week she refused to sleep at all unless we let her keep a little garrote under her pillows. ‘Just like Daddy’s bodyguards,’ she said. I don’t think her brothers yet realize that the next Capa Barsavi might wear summer dresses and bonnets.”

“I can see why you might have been amused by the Thiefmaker’s stories about our boy here,” Chains said, clasping both of Locke’s shoulders as he spoke.

“Of course. I have become very hard to shock since my children grew above the tops of my knees. But you’re not here to discuss them—you’ve brought me this little man so he can take his first and last oath as a pezon. A few years early, it seems. Come here, Locke.”

Capa Barsavi reached out with his right hand and turned Locke’s head slightly upward by the chin, staring down into Locke’s eyes as he spoke. “How old are you, Locke Lamora? Six? Seven? Already responsible for a breach of the Peace, a burnt-down tavern, and six or seven deaths.” The Capa smirked. “I have assassins five times your age who should be so bold. Has Chains told you the way it is, with my city and my laws?”

Locke nodded.

“You know that once you take this oath I can’t go easy on you, ever again. You’ve had your time to be reckless. If Chains needs to put you down, he will. If I tell him to put you down, he will.”

Again, Locke nodded. Nazca returned to her father’s side, sipping from a tarred leather ale-jack; she stared at Locke over the rim of this drinking vessel, which she had to clutch in both hands.

Capa Barsavi snapped his fingers; one of the toadies in the background vanished through a curtain. “Then I’m not going to bore you with any more threats, Locke. This night, you’re a man. You will do a man’s work and suffer a man’s fate if you cross your brothers and sisters. You will be one of us, one of the Right People; you’ll receive the words and the signs, and you’ll use them discreetly. As Chains, your garrista, is sworn to me, so you are sworn to me, through him. I am your garrista above all garristas. I am the only duke of Camorr you will ever acknowledge. Bend your knee.”

Locke knelt before Barsavi; the Capa held out his left hand, palm down. He wore an ornate ring of black pearl in a white iron setting; nestled inside the pearl by some arcane process was a speck of red that had to be blood.

“Kiss the ring of the Capa of Camorr.”

Locke did so; the pearl was cool beneath his dry lips.

“Speak the name of the man to whom you have sworn your oath.”

“Capa Barsavi,” Locke whispered. At that moment, the capa’s underling returned to the alcove and handed his master a small crystal tumbler filled with dull brown liquid.

“Now,” said Barsavi, “as has every one of my pezon, you will drink my toast.” From one of the pockets of his waistcoat the capa drew a shark’s tooth, one slightly larger than the death-mark Locke wore around his neck. Barsavi dropped the tooth into the tumbler and swirled it around a few times. He then handed the tumbler to Locke. “It’s dark-sugar rum from the Sea of Brass. Drink the entire thing, including the tooth. But don’t swallow the tooth, whatever you do. Keep it in your mouth. Draw it out after all the liquor is gone. And try not to cut yourself.”

Locke’s nose smarted from the stinging aroma of hard liquor that wafted from the tumbler, and his stomach lurched, but he ground his jaws together and stared down at the slightly distorted shape of the tooth within the rum. Silently praying to his new Benefactor to save him from embarrassment, he dashed the contents of the glass into his mouth, tooth and all.

Swallowing was not as easy as he’d hoped—he held the tooth against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, gingerly, feeling its sharp points scrape against the back of his upper front teeth. The liquor burned; he began to swallow in small gulps that soon turned into wheezing coughs. After a few interminable seconds, he shuddered and sucked down the last of the rum, relieved that he had held the tooth carefully in place—

It twisted in his mouth. Twisted, physically, as though wrenched by an unseen hand, and scored a burning slash across the inside of his left cheek. Locke cried out, coughed, and spat up the tooth—it lay there in his open palm, flecked with spit and blood.

“Ahhhhh,” said Capa Barsavi as he plucked the tooth up and slipped it back into his waistcoat, blood and all. “So you see—you are bound by an oath of blood to my service. My tooth has tasted of your life, and your life is mine. So let us not be strangers, Locke Lamora. Let us be capa and pezon, as the Crooked Warden intended.”

At a gesture from Barsavi Locke stumbled to his feet, already inwardly cursing the now-familiar sensation of liquor rapidly going to his head. His stomach was empty from the day’s hangover; the room was already swaying a bit around him. When he set eyes on Nazca once again, he saw that she was smiling at him above her ale-jack, with the air of smarmy tolerance the older children in Shades’ Hill had once shown to him and his compatriots in Streets.

Before he knew what he was doing, Locke bent his knee to her as well.

“If you’re the next Capa Barsavi,” he said rapidly, “I should swear to serve you, too. I do. Madam. Madam Nazca. I mean…Madam Barsavi.”

The girl took a step back. “I already have servants, boy. I have assassins. My father has a hundred gangs and two thousand knives!”

“Nazca Belonna Jenavais Angeliza de Barsavi!” her father thundered. “Now it seems you only grasp the value of strong men as servants. In time, you will come to see the value of gracious ones as well. You shame me.”

Nonplussed, the girl glanced back and forth between Locke and her father several times. Her cheeks slowly turned red. After a few more moments of pouting consideration, she stiffly held out her ale-jack to Locke.

“You may have some of my beer.”

Locke responded as though this were the deepest honor ever conferred upon him, realizing (though hardly in so many words) all the while that the liquor was somehow running a sort of rump parliament in his brain that had overruled his usual cautious social interactions—especially with girls. Her beer was bitter dark stuff, slightly salted—she drank like a Verrari. Locke took two sips to be polite, then handed it back to her, bowing in a rather noodle-necked fashion as he did so. She was too flustered to say anything in return, so she merely nodded.

“Ha! Excellent!” Capa Barsavi chomped on his slender cigar in mirth. “Your first pezon! Of course, both of your brothers are going to want some just as soon as they hear about this.”

5

THE TRIP home was a muggy, misty blur to Locke; he clung to the neck of his Gentled goat while Chains led them back north toward the Temple District, frequently cackling to himself.

“Oh, my boy,” he muttered. “My dear, dear charming sot of a boy. It was all bullshit, you realize.”

“What?”

“The shark’s tooth. Capa Barsavi had a Bondsmage enchant that thing for him in Karthain years ago. Nobody can swallow it without cutting themselves. He’s been carrying it around ever since; all those years he spent studying Throne Therin theater have given him a substantial fetish for the dramatic.”

“So it wasn’t…like, fate, or the gods, or anything like that?”

“It was just a shark’s tooth with a tiny bit of sorcery. A good trick, I have to admit.” Chains rubbed his own cheek in sympathy and remembrance. “No, Locke, you don’t belong to Barsavi. He’s good enough for what he is—a powerful ally to have on your side, and a man that you must appear to obey at all times. But he certainly doesn’t own you. In the end, neither do I.”

“So I don’t have to…”

“Obey the Secret Peace? Be a good little pezon? Only for pretend, Locke. Only to keep the wolves from the door. Unless your eyes and ears have been stitched shut with rawhide these past two days, by now you must have realized that I intend you and Calo and Galdo and Sabetha to be nothing less,” Chains confided through a feral grin, “than a f*cking ballista bolt right through the heart of Vencarlo’s precious Secret Peace.”





II

COMPLICATION


“I can add colours to the chameleon,





Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,





And set the murderous Machiavel to school.”





King Henry VI, Part III