2
THE NEXT day, Locke walked the length of the Temple District on his own for the very first time, hooded in a clean white robe of Perelandro’s order with silver embroidery on the sleeves, waist-high to virtually everyone around him. He was astonished at the courtesy given to the robe (a courtesy, he clearly understood, that in many cases only partially devolved on the poor fool wearing the robe).
Most Camorri regarded the Order of Perelandro with a mixture of cynicism and guilty pity. The unabashed charity of the god and his priesthood just didn’t speak to the rough heart of the city’s character. Yet the reputation of Father Chains as a colorful freak of piety paid certain dividends. Men who surely joked about the simpering of the Beggar God’s white-robed priests with their friends nonetheless threw coins into Chains’ kettle, eyes averted, when they passed his temple. It turned out they also let a little robed initiate pass on the street without harassment; groups parted fluidly and merchants nodded almost politely as Locke went on his way.
For the first time, he learned what a powerful thrill it was to go about in public in an effective disguise.
The sun was creeping upward toward noon; the crowds were thick and the city was alive with the echoes and murmurs of its masses. Locke padded intently to the southwest corner of the Temple District, where a glass catbridge arched across the canal to the island of the Old Citadel.
Catbridges were another legacy of the Eldren who’d ruled before the coming of men: narrow glass arches no wider than an ordinary man’s hips, arranged in pairs over most of Camorr’s canals and at several places along the Angevine River. Although they looked smooth, their glimmering surfaces were as rough as shark’s-hide leather; for those with a reasonable measure of agility and confidence, they provided the only convenient means of crossing water at many points. Traffic was always one-directional over each catbridge; ducal decree clearly stated that anyone going the wrong direction could be shoved off by those with the right-of-way.
As he scuttled across this bridge, pondering furiously, Locke recalled some of the history lessons Chains had drilled into him. The Old Citadel district had once been the home of the dukes of Camorr, centuries earlier, when all the city-states claimed by the Therin people had knelt to a single throne in the imperial city of Therim Pel. That line of Camorri nobility, in superstitious dread of the perfectly good glass towers left behind by the Eldren, had erected a massive stone palace in the heart of southern Camorr.
When one of Nicovante’s great-great-predecessors (on finer points of city lore such as this, Locke’s undeniably prodigious knowledge dissolved in a haze of total indifference) took up residence in the silver glass tower called Raven’s Reach, the old family fortress had become the Palace of Patience; the heart of Camorr’s municipal justice, such as it was. The yellowjackets and their officers were headquartered there, as were the duke’s magistrates—twelve men and women who presided over their cases in scarlet robes and velvet masks, their true identities never to be revealed to the general public. Each was named for one of the months of the year—Justice Parthis, Justice Festal, Justice Aurim, and so forth—though each one passed judgment year-round.
And there were dungeons, and there were the gallows on the Black Bridge that led to the Palace gates, and there were other things. While the Secret Peace had greatly reduced the number of people who took the short, sharp drop off the Black Bridge (and didn’t Duke Nicovante love to publicly pin that on his own magnanimity), the duke’s servants had devised other punishments that were spectacular in their cruel cleverness, if technically nonlethal.
The Palace was a great square heap of pitted black and gray stone, ten stories high; the huge bricks that formed its walls had been arranged into simple mosaics that had now weathered to a ghostly state. The rows of high arched windows that decorated every other level of the tower were stained glass, with black and red designs predominating. At night a light would burn ominously behind each one, dim red eyes in the darkness, staring out in all directions. Those windows were never dark; the intended message was clear.
There were four open-topped circular towers jutting out from each corner of the Palace, seemingly hanging in air from the sixth or seventh level up. On the sides of these hung black iron crow cages, in which prisoners singled out for special mistreatment would be aired out for a few hours or even a few days, with their feet dangling. Yet even these were seats in paradise compared to the spider cages, a spectacle that became visible to Locke (between the backs and shoulders of adults) as he stepped off the catbridge and into the crowds of the Old Citadel.
From the southeastern tower of the Palace of Patience there dangled a half dozen cages on long steel chains, swaying gently in the wind like little spiders on cords of silk. Two of these were moving, one slowly headed up and the other rapidly descending. Prisoners condemned to the spider cages were not to be allowed a moment’s peace, so other prisoners condemned to hard labor would toil at the huge capstans atop the tower, working in shifts around the clock until a subject in a cage was deemed to be sufficiently unhinged and contrite. Lurching and creaking and open to the elements on all sides, the cages would go up and down ceaselessly. At night, one could frequently hear the occupants pleading and screaming, even from a district or two away.
The Old Citadel wasn’t a very cosmopolitan district. Outside the Palace of Patience there were canal docks and stables reserved for the yellowjackets, offices for the duke’s tax collectors and scribes and other functionaries, and seedy little coffeehouses where freelance solicitors and lawscribes would try to drum up work from the families and friends of those being held in the Palace. A few pawnshops and other businesses clung tenaciously to the northern part of the island, but for the most part they were crowded out by the grimmer business of the duke’s government.
The district’s other major landmark was the Black Bridge that spanned the wide canal between Old Citadel and the Mara Camorrazza: a tall arch of black human-set stone adorned with red lamps that were fixed up with ceremonial black shrouds that could be lowered with a few tugs on a rope. The hangings were conducted from a wooden platform that jutted off the bridge’s south side. Supposedly, the unquiet shades of the condemned would be carried out to sea if they died over running water. Some thought that they would then be incarnated in the bodies of sharks, which explained why Camorr Bay had such a problem with the creatures, and the idea was not entirely scoffed at. As far as most Camorri were concerned, turnabout was fair play.
Locke stared at the Black Bridge for a good long while, exercising that capacity for conniving that Chains had so forcefully repressed for many long months. He was far too young for much self-analysis, but the process of scheming gave him real pleasure, like a little ball of tingling warmth in the pit of his stomach. He had no name for what he was doing, but in the collision of his whirling thoughts a plan began to form, and the more he thought on it the more pleased he became with himself. It was a fine thing that his white hood concealed his face from most passersby, lest anyone should see an initiate of Perelandro staring fixedly at a gallows and grinning wildly.