Interlude
A Minor Prophecy
FATHER CHAINS SAT on the roof of the House of Perelandro, staring down at the astonishingly arrogant fourteen-year-old that had grown out of the little orphan he’d purchased so many years before from the Thiefmaker of Shades’ Hill.
“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh, please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
Epilogue
Falselight
1
THE EIGHTEENTH OF Parthis in the Seventy-eighth Year of Aza Guilla; wet Camorri summer. The whole city had a hangover and the sky did, too.
Warm rain was falling in sheets, spattering and steaming in the glow of Falselight. The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.
“Watch-sergeant! Watch-sergeant Vidrik!”
The man yelling outside Vidrik’s station at the south end of the Narrows was another watchman; Vidrik stuck his lean, weathered face out through the window beside the shack’s door and was rewarded with a stream of runoff on his forehead. Thunder boomed overhead. “What is it, son?”
The watchman approached out of the rain; it was Constanzo, the new lad just shifted in from the North Corner. He was leading a Gentled donkey; behind the donkey was an open-topped cart, with two more yellowjacketed watchmen at its rear. They huddled in their oilcloaks and looked miserable, which meant they were sensible men.
“Found something, Sergeant,” said Constanzo. “Something pretty fucked.”
Teams of yellowjackets and blackjackets had been combing the south of Camorr since the previous night; rumors were swirling of some sort of assassination attempt at Raven’s Reach. Gods only knew what the Spider thought his boys should be doing turning over stones in the Dregs and the Ashfall districts, but Vidrik was used to never hearing the whys and the wherefores.
“Define ‘pretty fucked,’” he yelled as he slipped into his own oilcloak and threw up the hood. He stepped out into the rain and crossed to the donkey-cart, waving to the two men standing behind it. One of them owed him two barons from the previous week’s dicing.
“Have a look,” said Constanzo, sweeping back the wet blanket that covered the donkey-cart’s cargo. Beneath it was a man, youngish and very pale, balding, with a fuzz of stubble on his cheeks. He was fairly well dressed, in a gray coat with red cuffs. It happened to be spattered with blood.
The man was alive, but he lay in the cart with his fingerless hands pressed against his cheeks, and he stared up at Vidrik without a speck of sane comprehension in his eyes. “Mahhhhhh,” he moaned as the rain fell on his head, “mwaaaaaaaaah!”
His tongue had been cut out; a dark scar covered the stump at the bottom of his mouth, oozing blood.
“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
“Sweet fucking Perelandro,” said Vidrik, “tell me I don’t see what I see on his wrists.”
“It’s a bondsmage, Sergeant,” said Constanzo. “It is—or it was.”
He threw the soaked blanket back over the man’s face and reached inside his oilcloak. “There’s more. Show it to you inside?”
Vidrik led Constanzo back into his shack; the two men swept their hoods back but didn’t bother taking their cloaks off. Constanzo pulled out a piece of folded parchment.
“We found this fellow tied to a floor over in Ashfall,” he said. “Pretty gods-damned weird. This parchment was on his chest.”
Vidrik took it and unfolded it to read:
PERSONAL ATTENTION OF THE DUKE’S SPIDER
FOR RETURN TO KARTHAIN
“Gods,” he said. “A real Karthani bondsmage. Looks like he won’t be recommending Camorr to his friends.”
“What do we do with him, Sergeant?”
Vidrik sighed, folded the letter, and passed it back to Constanzo.
“We pass the coin, lad,” he said. “We pass this fucking coin right up the chain of command and we forget we ever saw it. Haul him to the Palace of Patience and let someone else give it a ponder.”