5
“YOU…YOU…”
“Stabbed you in the neck. Yes, well, I must confess it gave me pleasure, dear boy. What can I say? You have led us on a trying chase.”
“But…but…Do?a Vorchenza, I do not understand. How have I given offense?”
“You may abandon the Vadran accent. It’s excellent, but I’m afraid you won’t be able to smile and bluff your way out of this one, Master Thorn.”
Locke sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Do?a Vorchenza, if that needle was really poisoned, why the hell should I bother telling you anything?”
“Now that’s a sensible question.” She reached down the front of her tunic and drew out a little glass vial, capped with silver. “In exchange for your cooperation, I’m prepared to offer you the antidote. You will, of course, come peacefully with me. You’re hundreds of feet in the air, and every one of my Midnighters is currently here, dressed as staff. You’d be rather ignominiously treated if you tried to run so much as ten feet past that hallway.”
“Your…Midnighters…You mean—you must be fucking kidding. You’re the Spider?”
“Yes,” she said, “and by the gods, it feels good to finally fling that in the face of someone who can appreciate it.”
“But,” said Locke, “the Spider is…or at least I thought the Spider was—”
“A man? You and all the rest of this city, Master Thorn. I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise—haven’t you?”
“Hmmm.” Locke chuckled morosely. A tingling numbness was spreading around the wound; it definitely wasn’t just his imagination. “Hanged by my own rope, Do?a Vorchenza.”
“You must be brilliant, Master Thorn,” said Do?a Vorchenza. “I shall give you that; to do what you’ve done, to keep my people guessing these past few years…Gods, I wish I didn’t have to put you in a crow’s cage. Perhaps a deal could be arranged, once you’ve had a few years to think it over. It must be very new, and very odd, to finally have someone spring such a trap on you.”
“Oh, no.” Locke sighed and put his face in his hands. “Oh, Do?a Vorchenza, I’m so sorry to disappoint you, but the list of people that haven’t outsmarted me seems to be getting smaller all the fucking time.”
“Well,” said Do?a Vorchenza, “that can’t be pleasant. But come, you must be feeling rather strange by now; you must be unsteady on your feet. Just say yes. Give me the location of the funds you’ve stolen, and perhaps those years in the Palace of Patience can be mitigated. Give me the names of your accomplices, and I’m sure an accommodation can be reached.”
“Do?a Vorchenza,” said Locke forcefully, “I have no accomplices, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t tell you who they were.”
“What about Graumann?”
“Graumann is a hireling,” said Locke. “He thinks I’m really a merchant of Emberlain.”
“And those so-called bandits in the alley beside the Temple of Fortunate Waters?”
“Hirelings, long since fled back to Talisham.”
“And the false Midnighters, the ones who visited the Salvaras?”
“Homunculi,” said Locke. “They crawl out of my ass every full moon; they’ve been a problem for years.”
“Oh, Master Thorn…grief-willow will still that tongue of yours rather permanently. You don’t have to speak your secrets now; just surrender so I can give you this vial, and we can continue this conversation in more pleasant surroundings.”
Locke stared at Do?a Vorchenza for several long seconds; he locked his gaze with those ancient eyes of hers and saw the obvious satisfaction in them, and his right hand curled into a fist of its own accord. Perhaps Do?a Vorchenza was so used to her aura of privilege she forgot their disparity in ages; perhaps she’d simply never conceived that a man of apparent refinement, even a criminal, could do what Locke did next.
He punched her square in the teeth, a whirling right that would have been comical had he thrown it against a younger, sturdier woman. But it snapped Do?a Vorchenza’s head back; her eyes rolled up and she buckled at the knees. Locke caught her as she toppled, carefully plucking the vial from her fingers while he did so. He heaved her back into her chair, then uncapped the vial and poured its contents down his throat. The warm fluid tasted like citrus; he gulped it eagerly and threw the vial aside. Then, working with the utmost haste, he took off his coat and used it to tie Do?a Vorchenza into her chair, knotting the sleeves several times behind her back.
Her head lolled forward and she groaned; Locke gave her a pat on the shoulder. On an impulse, he ran his hands quickly (and as politely as possible) through her waistcoat; he grunted in satisfaction when he turned up a little silk purse, jingling with coins. “Not what I was hoping for,” he said, “but we’ll call it fair payment for a gods-damned needle in the neck, hmmm?”
Locke stood up and paced for a few moments. He turned back to Do?a Vorchenza, knelt before her, and said, “My lady, it wounds me to have to treat someone such as yourself so crudely; the truth is, I admire you very much and at any other time I’d be very curious to hear just where I fucked up and tipped you off. But you must admit, I’d have to be crazy to go with you; the Palace of Patience simply does not suit. So thank you for the very interesting afternoon, and give my regards to Don and Do?a Salvara.”
With that, he pushed the wooden shutter as wide as it would go and stepped out the window.
The exterior of Raven’s Reach, considered up close, was actually covered with irregularities, with little indentations and ledges, circling the tower at virtually every level. Locke slipped out onto a slender ledge about six inches wide; he pressed his stomach up against the warm glass of the tower and waited for the pounding of the blood within his temples to cease sounding like a pummeling from a heavy man’s fists. It didn’t, and he sighed.
“I am the king idiot,” he muttered, “of all the world’s fucking idiots.”
The warm wind pushed at his back as he inched to his right; the ledge grew wider a few moments later, and he found an indentation in which to place his hand. Confident that he was in no immediate danger of falling, Locke glanced downward over his shoulder, and immediately regretted it.
Seeing Camorr spread out behind glass offered a layer of insulation between the viewer and the vista; out here, it seemed as though the whole world fell away in a vast arc. He wasn’t six hundred feet in the air, he was a thousand, ten thousand, a million—some incomprehensible number of feet that only the gods were fit to dare. He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at the glass wall as though he could pour himself into it, like mortar into stones. The pork and capon in his stomach made enthusiastic inquiries about coming up in a nauseous torrent; his throat seemed to be on the verge of granting the request.
Gods, he thought, I wonder if I’m on one of the transparent sections of the tower? I must look pretty fucking funny.
There was a creaking noise from overhead; he looked up and gasped.
One of the elevator cages was coming down toward him; it would be in line with him on the face of the tower, and it would pass by about three feet from the wall he was clinging to.
It was empty.
“Crooked Warden,” Locke whispered, “I’ll do this, but the only thing I ask, the only thing, is that when this is done, you make me fucking forget. Steal this memory out of my head. And I will never climb more than three feet off the ground as long as I draw breath. Praise be.”
The cage creaked down; it was ten feet above him, then five feet, and then its bottom was even with his eyes. Breathing in deep, ragged, panicky gasps, Locke turned himself around on the tower, so that his back was against the glass. The sky and the world beneath his feet both seemed too big to fit into his eyes; gods, he didn’t want to think about them. The cage was sliding past; its bars were right there, three feet away over fifty-some stories of empty air.
He screamed, and pushed himself off the glass wall of the tower. When he hit the blackened iron sidebars of the cage, he clung as desperately as any cat ever clung to a tree branch; the cage swayed back and forth, and Locke did his best to ignore the incredible things that did to the sky and the horizon. The cage door; he had to slip the cage door. They closed tight but didn’t have elaborate locks.
Working with hands that shivered as though the air were freezing, Locke slipped the bolt on the cage’s door and let it fall open. He then swung himself gingerly around the corner, from the exterior to the interior, and with one last burst of dreadful vertigo reached out and slammed the door shut behind him. He sat down on the floor of the cage, gasping in deep breaths, shaky with relief and the aftereffects of the poison.
“Well,” he muttered, “that was fucking hideous.”
Another elevator cage full of noble guests drew upward, twenty feet to his right; the men and women in the cage looked at him very curiously, and he waved.
He half dreaded that the cage would lurch to a halt before it reached the ground and start to draw back up; he decided if it did that he would take his chances with the Palace of Patience. But the cage continued all the way down; Vorchenza must still be tied to her chair, out of the action. Locke was on his feet when the cage settled against the ground; the liveried men who opened the door peered in at him with wide eyes.
“Excuse me,” said one of them, “but were you…did you…were you in this cage when it left the embarkation platform?”
“Of course,” said Locke. “That shape you saw, darting out from the tower? Bird. Biggest gods-damned bird you ever saw. Scared the piss right out of me, let me tell you. I say, are any of these carriages for hire?”
“Go to the outer row,” said the footman, “and look for the ones with the white flags and lanterns.”
“Much obliged.” Locke rapidly perused the contents of Do?a Vorchenza’s coin purse; there was a very satisfactory quantity of gold and silver inside. He tossed a solon apiece to the liveried men beside the cage as he stepped out. “It was a bird, right?”
“Yes, sir,” said the other man with a tip of his black cap. “Biggest gods-damned bird we ever saw.”