Authors: Scott Lynch
“De Ferra. Jerome de Ferra, at your service.”
“Quite the opposite, Master de Ferra. What did you want me to do for you?”
“Well—if you’d really prefer to get to the nub of the matter, I don’t have a specific
need just yet. What I have are … questions.”
“About what?”
“Vaults.”
Guildmistress Gallardine cradled her brandy mix like a new baby and said, “Vaults,
Master de Ferra? Simple storage vaults, with mechanical conveniences, or
secure
vaults, with mechanical defenses?”
“My taste, madam, runs more toward the latter.”
“What is it you wish to guard?”
“Nothing,” said Jean. “It is more a matter of something I wish to
un
guard.”
“Are you locked out of a vault? Needing someone to loosen it up a bit for you?”
“Yes, madam. It’s just …”
“Just what?”
Jean licked his lips again and smiled. “I had heard, well, credible rumors that you
might be amenable to the sort of work I might suggest.”
She fixed him with a knowing stare. “Are you implying that you don’t necessarily
own
the vault that you’re locked out of?”
“Heh. Not necessarily, no.”
She paced around the floor of her house, stepping over books and bottles and mechanical
devices.
“The law of the Great Guild,” she said at last, “forbids any one of us from directly
interfering with the work of another, save by invitation, or at the need of the state.”
There was another pause. “However … it’s not unknown for advice to be given, schematics
to be examined … in the interest of advancing the craft, you understand. It’s a form
of testing to destruction. It’s how we critique one another, as it were.”
“Advice would be all that I ask,” said Jean. “I don’t even need a locksmith; I just
need information to
arm
a locksmith.”
“There are few who could better arm such a one than myself. Before we discuss the
matter of compensation, tell me—do you know the designer of the vault you’ve got your
eyes on?”
“I do.”
“And it is?”
“Azura Gallardine.”
The guildmistress took a step away from him, as though a forked tongue had suddenly
flicked out between his lips.
“Help you circumvent my own work? Are you mad?”
“I had hoped,” said Jean, “that the identity of the vault owner might be one that
wouldn’t raise any particular pangs of sympathy.”
“Who and where?”
“Requin. The Sinspire.”
“Twelve gods, you
are
mad!” Gallardine glanced around as though checking the room for spies before she
continued. “That certainly
does
raise pangs of sympathy! Sympathy for myself!”
“My pockets are deep, Guildmistress. Surely there must be a sum which would alleviate
your qualms?”
“There is no sum in this world,” said the old woman, “large enough to convince me
to give you what you ask for. Your accent, Master de Ferra … I believe I place it.
You’re from Talisham, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“And Requin—you’ve studied him, have you?”
“Thoroughly, of course.”
“Nonsense. If you’d studied him thoroughly, you wouldn’t be here. Let me tell you
a little something about Requin, you poor rich Talishani simpleton. Do you know that
woman of his, Selendri? The one with the brass hand?”
“I’ve heard that he keeps no other close to him.”
“And that’s all you know?”
“Ah, more or less.”
“Until several years ago,” said Gallardine, “it was Requin’s custom to host a grand
masque at the Sinspire each Day of Changes. A mad revel, in thousand-solari costumes,
of which his were always the grandest. Well, one year he and that beautiful young
woman of his decided to switch costumes and masks. On a whim.
“An assassin,” she continued, “had dusted the inside of Requin’s costume with something
devilish. The blackest sort of alchemy, a kind of
aqua regia
for human flesh. It was just a powder … it needed sweat and warmth to bring it to
life. And so that woman wore it for nearly half an hour, until she’d just begun to
sweat and enjoy herself. And that’s when she started to
scream
.
“I wasn’t there. But there were artificers of my acquaintance in the crowd, and they
say she screamed and screamed until her voice broke. Until there was nothing coming
from her throat but a hiss, and still she kept trying to scream. Only one side of
the costume was doused with the stuff … a perverse gesture. Her skin bubbled and ran
like hot tar. Her flesh
steamed
, Master de Ferra. No one had the courage to touch her, except Requin. He cut her
costume off, demanded water, worked over her feverishly. He wiped her burning skin
clean with his jacket, with scraps of cloth, with his bare hands. He was so badly
burned himself that he wears gloves to this day, to hide his own scars.”
“Astonishing,” said Jean.
“He saved her life,” said Gallardine, “what was left of it to save. Surely you’ve
seen her face. One eye evaporated, like a grape in a bonfire. Her toes required amputation.
Her fingers were burnt twigs, her hand a blistered waste. It had to go as well. They
had to cut off a
breast
, Master de Ferra. I assure you, you can have no conception of quite what that means—it
would mean much to me now, and it has been many long years since I was last thought
comely.
“When she was abed, Requin passed the word to all of his gangs, all of his thieves,
all of his contacts, all of his friends among the rich and the powerful. He offered
a thousand solari, no questions asked, for anyone
who could give him the identity of the would-be poisoner. But there was quite a bit
of fear concerning this particular assassin, and Requin was not nearly as respected
then as he is now. He received no answer. The next night, he offered five thousand
solari, no questions asked, and still received no answer. The third night, he repeated
his offer, for ten thousand solari, fruitlessly. On the fourth night, he offered twenty
thousand … and not one person came forward.
“And so the murders started the very next night. At random. Among the thieves, among
the alchemists, among the servants of the Priori. Anyone who might have access to
useful information. One a night, silent work, absolutely professional. Each victim
had his or her skin peeled off with a knife, on their left side. As a reminder.
“And so his gangs, and his gamblers, and his associates begged him to stop. ‘Find
me an assassin,’ he told them, ‘and I will.’ And they pleaded, and they made their
inquiries, and came back with nothing. So he began to kill two people per night. He
began to kill wives, husbands, children, friends. One of his gangs rebelled, and they
were found dead the next morning. All of them. He tightened his grip on his gangs
and purged them of the weak-hearted. He killed and killed and killed, until the entire
city was in a frenzy to turn over every rock, to kick in every door for him. Until
nothing could be worse than to keep disappointing him. At last, a man was brought
before him who satisfied his questions.
“Requin,” said Gallardine with a long dry sigh, “set that man inside a wooden frame,
chained there, on his left side. The frame was filled with alchemical cement, which
was allowed to harden. The frame was tipped up—so you see, the man was half sealed
into a stone wall, all along his left side, from his feet to the top of his head.
He was tipped up and left standing in Requin’s vault to die. Requin would go in himself
and force water down the man’s throat each day. His trapped limbs rotted, festered,
made him sick. He died slowly, starving and gangrenous, sealed into the most perfectly
hideous physical torture I have ever heard of in all my long years.
“So you will forgive me,” she said, taking Jean gently by the arm and leading him
toward the left-hand window, “if Requin is one client with whom I intend to maintain
absolute faith until the Lady Most Kind sweeps my soul out of this old sack of bones.”
“But surely, there’s no need for him to know?”
“And just as surely, Master de Ferra, there is the fact that I would never chance
it. Never.”
“But surely, a small consideration—”
“Have you heard,” interrupted Gallardine, “of what happens to those
caught cheating at his tower, Master de Ferra? He collects their hands, and then he
drops them onto a stone courtyard and bills their families or business partners to
have the bodies cleaned up. And what about the last man who started a fight inside
the Sinspire, and drew blood? Requin had him tied to a table. His kneecaps were cut
out by a dog-leech, and red ants were poured into the wounds. The kneecaps were lashed
back down with twine. That man
begged
to have his throat slit. His request was not granted.
“Requin is a power unto himself. The archon can’t touch him for fear of aggravating
the Priori, and the Priori find him far too useful to turn on him. Since Selendri
nearly died, he’s become an artist of cruelty the likes of which this city has never
seen. There is
no mortal reward
that I would consider worth provoking that man.”
“I take all that very seriously, madam. So can we not carefully minimize your involvement?
Settle for a basic schematic of the vault mechanisms, the most general overview? The
sort of thing that could never be specifically tied to you?”
“You haven’t really been listening.” She shook her head and gestured toward the left-hand
window of her house. “Let me ask you something else, Master de Ferra. Can you see
the view of Tal Verrar out this window?”
Jean stepped forward to gaze out through the pane of glass. The view was southward,
over the western tip of the Artificers’ Crescent, across the anchorage and the glimmering
silver-white water to the Sword Marina. There the archon’s navy rode at anchor, protected
by high walls and catapults.
“It’s a … very lovely view,” he said.
“Isn’t it? Now, you must consider this my final statement on the matter. Do you know
anything of counterweights?”
“I can’t say that I—”
At that moment, the guildmistress yanked on one of the leather cords that hung down
from her ceiling.
The first notion Jean had that the floor had opened up beneath his feet was when the
view of Tal Verrar suddenly seemed to move up toward the ceiling; his senses conferred
hastily on just what this meant, and were stumped for a split second until his stomach
weighed in with nauseous confirmation that the
view
wasn’t doing the moving.
He plunged through the floor and struck a hard square platform suspended just beneath
Gallardine’s house by iron chains at the corners. His first thought was that it must
be some sort of lift—and then it began to plummet toward the street forty-odd feet
below.
The chains rattled and the sudden breeze washed over him; he fell
prone and clung to the platform with white-knuckled alarm. Roofs and carts and cobblestones
rushed up toward him and he braced himself for the sharp pain of impact—but it didn’t
come. The platform was slowing down with impossible smoothness: sure death slowed
to possible injury and then to mere embarrassment. The descent ended a bare few feet
above the street, when the chains on Jean’s left stayed taut while the others went
slack. The platform tilted with a lurch and dumped him in a heap on the cobbles.
He sat up and sucked in a grateful breath; the street was spinning slightly around
him. He looked up and saw that the chain platform was rapidly ascending back to its
former position. A split second before it drew home into the underside of Gallardine’s
floor, something small and shiny tumbled out of the trap door above it. Jean managed
to flinch away and cover his face just before glass shards and liquor from the exploding
bottle of brandy mix sprayed over him.
He wiped a good few solari worth of White Plum Austershalin out of his hair as he
stumbled to his feet, wide-eyed and cursing.
“A fine afternoon to you, sir. But wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Proposal not
accepted by the guildmistress?”
Jean, befuddled, found a smiling beer seller not five feet to his right, leaning against
the wall of a closed and unmarked two-story building. The man was a tanned scarecrow
with a broad-brimmed leather hat that drooped with age until it nearly touched his
bony shoulders. He drummed the fingers of one hand on a large wheeled cask, to which
several wooden mugs were attached by long chains.
“Um, something like that,” said Jean. A hatchet slipped out of his coat and clattered
against the cobblestones. Red-faced, he bent, retrieved it, and made it vanish again.
“You might call this self-serving, and I’d certainly be the first to agree with you,
sir. But you look to me like a man in need of a drink. A drink that won’t bust open
against the cobbles and damn near break your skull, that is.”
“Do I? What have you got?”
“Burgle, sir. Presuming you’ve heard of it, it’s a Verrari specialty, and if you’ve
had it in Talisham you haven’t had it at all. Nothing at all against Talishani, of
course. Why, I’ve got family in Talisham, you know.”
Burgle was a thick dark beer usually flavored with a few drops of almond oil. It had
a kick comparable to many wines. Jean nodded. “A full mug, if you please.”
The beer seller opened the tap on his cask and filled one of the chained
mugs with liquid that looked almost black. He passed this to Jean with one hand and
tipped his cap with the other.
“She does it a few times a week, you know.”
Jean quaffed the warm beer and let the yeasty, nutty flavor flow down the back of
his throat. “A few times a week?”
“She’s a mite impatient with some of her visitors. Doesn’t wait to terminate conversation
with all the usual niceties. But then you knew that already.”
“Mmm-hmmm. This is pretty tolerable stuff.”
“Thank you kindly, sir. One centira the full mug … thank you, thank you kindly. I
do a brisk business with folks falling out of Madam Gallardine’s floor. I usually
try to stake this spot out just in case it rains a customer or two. I’m very sorry
you didn’t find satisfaction in your meeting with her.”