Authors: Scott Lynch
“Like I said, I have some money,” said Jean. “If that can help.”
“It’s not your money anymore. But what does help is that your friend here is already
dying … and from the looks of it, he’ll be pretty damn glad to go.”
“Look, if you’ll just let him stay, he needs rest—”
“I know. That’s why I’m kicking your asses out of Lashain.” Cortessa waved his hands
at his people. “Strip the place. All the food, all the wine. Blankets, bandages, money.
Take the wood out of the fireplace. Throw the water out of the jug. Pass word to the
innkeeper that these two fucks are under the interdict.”
“Please,” said Jean. “Please—”
“Shut up. You can keep your clothes and your weapons. I won’t send you out completely
naked. But I want you gone. By sunrise, you’re out of the city or Zodesti gets to
cut your ears off himself. Your friend can find somewhere else to die.” Cortessa gave
Locke a pat on the leg. “Think fondly of me in hell, you poor bastard.”
“You might not be long in getting there yourself,” said Locke. “I’ll have a big hug
waiting for you.”
Cortessa’s people ransacked the suite. They carefully piled Jean’s weapons on the
floor; everything else was taken or smashed. Locke was left on the empty bed in his
bloodstained breeches and tunic. Jean’s private purse and the one that had contained
their general funds were both emptied. A few moments later, one of Cortessa’s men
stuffed the empty purses into his pockets as well.
“Oh,” said Cortessa to Jean as the tumult was winding down, “one thing more. Leone
gets a minute alone with you in the corner. For his nose.”
“Bleth you, bothss,” muttered Leone, gingerly poking at the swollen bruises that had
spread to his lips.
“And you get to take it, outlander. Lift so much as a finger and I’ll have your friend
gutted.” Cortessa patted Jean on the cheek and turned to leave. “Sunrise. Get the
fuck out of Lashain. Or our next conversation takes place in Scholar Zodesti’s cellar.”
“
JEAN
,”
WHISPERED
Locke as soon as the last of Cortessa’s bruisers had left. “Jean! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” Jean was huddled where the linens table had been before Cortessa’s men
removed it. Leone had been straightforward but enthusiastic, and Jean felt as though
he’d been thrown down a rocky hillside. “I’m just … enjoying the floor. It was kind
enough to catch me when I fell.”
“Jean, listen. I took some of the money when we got here on the boat.… I hid it. Loosened
a floorboard under the bed.”
“I know you did. I unloosened it. Took it back.”
“You eel! I wanted you to have something to get away with when you—”
“I knew you’d try it, Locke. There weren’t many hiding places available within stumbling
distance of the bed.”
“Argh!”
“Argh, yourself.” Jean heaved himself over on his back and stared at the ceiling,
breathing shallowly. Nothing felt broken, but his ribs and everything attached to
them were lined up to file complaints. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll go out and find
some blankets for you. I can get a cart. Maybe a boat. Get you out of here somehow,
before the dawn. We’ve got a lot of darkness to use.”
“Jean, you’ll be watched until you leave. They’re not going to let you”—Locke coughed
several times—“steal anything big. And I’m not going to let you carry me.”
“Not let me carry you? What are you going to fend me off with, sarcasm?”
“You should have had a few thousand solari to work with, Jean. Could have gone anywhere …
done anything with it.”
“I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. Now, you go with me. Or I stay here to
die with you.”
“There’s no reasoning with you.”
“You’re such a paragon of compromise yourself. Pig-brained gods-damned egotist.”
“This isn’t a fair contest. You have more energy for big words than I do.” Locke laughed.
“Gods, look at us. Can you believe they even took our firewood?”
“Very little surprises me these days.” Jean slowly stood up, wincing all the way.
“So, inventory. No money. Clothes on our backs. Mostly
my
back. Some weapons. No firewood. Since I doubt we’ll be allowed to lift anything
in the city, looks like I’ll have to do some highway work.”
“How do you plan on halting carriages?”
“I’ll throw you in the road and hope they stop.”
“Criminal genius. Will they be stopping out of heartfelt sympathy?”
“Revulsion, more likely.”
There was a knock at the front door.
Locke and Jean glanced at one another uneasily, and Jean picked up a dagger from the
small pile of weapons that had been left to him.
“Maybe they’re back for the bed,” said Locke.
“Why would
they
bother knocking?”
Jean kept most of his body behind the door as he opened it, and he tucked the dagger
just out of sight behind his back.
It wasn’t Cortessa, or a dog-leech, or even the master of the Villa Suvela, as Jean
had expected. It was a woman, dressed in a richly embroidered oilcloak streaming with
water. She held an alchemical globe in her hands, and by its pale light Jean could
see that she was not young.
Jean scanned the curb behind her. No carriage, no litter, no escort of any sort—just
misty darkness and the patter of the rain. A local? A fellow guest of the Villa Suvela?
“I, uh … can I be of assistance, madam?”
“I believe we can be of assistance to one another. If I might come in?” She had a
soft and lovely voice, with something very close to a Lashani accent. Close, but not
exact.
“We are … that is, I’m sorry, but we have some difficulty at the moment. My friend
is ill.”
“I know they took your furniture.”
“You do?”
“And I know that you and your friend didn’t have much else to begin with.”
“Madam, you seem to have me at a disadvantage.”
“And you seem to have me out in the rain.”
“Um.” Jean shuffled the dagger and made it vanish up his tunic sleeve. “Well, my friend,
as I said, is gravely ill. You should be aware—”
“I don’t mind.” She entered the instant Jean’s resolution wavered, and gracefully
got out of the way as he closed the door behind her. “After all, poison is only contagious
at dinner parties.”
“How the hell … are you a physiker?”
“Hardly.”
“Are you with Cortessa?”
The woman only laughed at that, and threw back the hood of her oilcloak. She was about
fifty, the well-tended sort of fifty that only wealth could make possible, and her
hair was the color of dry autumn wheat with currents of silver at the temples. She
had a squarish face, with disconcertingly wide, dark eyes.
“Here, take this.” She tossed the alchemical globe to Jean, who caught it by reflex.
“I know they took your lights, too.”
“Um, thank you, but—”
“My, my.” The woman unclasped her cloak and spun it off her shoulders as she strolled
into the inner apartment. Her coat and skirts were richly brocaded with silver threads,
and puffs of silver lace from beneath her cuffs half-covered her hands. She glanced
at Locke. “Ill would seem to be an understatement.”
“Forgive me for not getting up,” said Locke. “And for not offering you a seat. And
not being dressed. And for not … giving a damn.”
“Down to the last dregs of your charm, I see.”
“Down to the last dregs of my everything. Who are you, then?”
The woman shook out her oilcloak, then threw it over Locke like a blanket.
“Th-thank you.”
“It’s difficult to have a serious conversation with someone whose dignity is compromised,
Locke.”
The next sound in the room was that of Jean slamming home the bolt on the front door.
In an instant he returned to the inner apartment, knife in hand. He tossed the light-globe
onto the bed, where Locke prevented it from bouncing onto the floor.
“In faith,” said Jean, “my patience for mysterious shit went out that door with the
money and the furniture. So you explain how you know that name, and I won’t have to
feel guilty for—”
“I doubt you’d survive what would happen if you acted on that impulse, Jean Tannen.
I know your pride wouldn’t. Put your blade away.”
“Like hell!”
“Poor Gentlemen Bastards,” said the woman softly. “So far from home. But always in
our sight.”
“
No
,” said Jean in a disbelieving whisper.
“Oh, gods,” said Locke. He coughed and closed his eyes. “It’s you. I suspected you’d
kick our door down sooner or later.”
“You sound disappointed.” The woman frowned. “As though you’d just failed to avoid
an awkward social call. Would you really find death preferable to a little conversation,
Locke?”
“Little conversations with Bondsmagi never end well.”
“You’re the reason we’re here,” growled Jean. “You and your games in Tal Verrar. Your
damned letters!”
“Not entirely,” said the woman.
“You didn’t scare us in the Night Market.” Jean’s grip tightened on the hilt of his
blade, and the pain of his recent beating was entirely forgotten. “You don’t fucking
scare us now!”
“Then you don’t know us at all.”
“I think I do. And I don’t give a damn about your gods-damned
rules
!”
He was already in motion, and her back was to him. She had no chance to speak or gesture
with her hands; his left arm went around her neck and he slammed the dagger home as
hard as he could, directly between her shoulder blades.
THE WOMAN
’
S
flesh was warm and solid beneath Jean’s arm one moment, and in the next his blade
bit empty air.
Jean had faced many fast opponents in his life, but never one that dissolved instantly
at his touch. That wasn’t human speed; it was sorcery.
His chance was gone.
He inhaled sharply, and a cold shudder ran down his back, the old familiar sensation
of a misstep made and a blow about to fall. His pulse beat like a drum inside his
skull, and he waited for the pain of whatever reprisal was coming—
“Oh yes,” said their visitor mildly from somewhere behind him. “That would have been
very clever of me, Jean Tannen. Leaving myself at the mercy of a strong man and his
grudges.”
Jean turned slowly, and saw that the woman was now standing about six feet to his
left, by the window where the linens table had once been.
“I hold your true name like a caged bird,” she said. “Your hands and eyes will deceive
you if you try to harm me.”
“Gods,” said Jean, suddenly overcome by a vast sense of weary frustration. “Must you
play with your food?” He sat down on the edge of Locke’s bed and threw his knife at
the floor, where it stuck quivering in the wood. “Just kill me like a fucking normal
person. I won’t be your toy.”
“What will you be?”
“I’ll stand still and be boring. Get it over with.”
“Why do you keep assuming I’m here to kill you?”
“If not kill, then something worse.”
“I have no intention of murdering either of you. Ever.” The woman folded her hands
in front of her chest. “What more proof do you need than the fact that you’re still
alive? Could you have stopped me?”
“You’re not gods,” said Locke, weakly. “You might have us at your mercy, but we’ve
had one of you at ours before.”
“Is that meant to be some poor cousin to a threat? A reminder that you just happened
to be present when the Falconer’s terrible judgment finally got the best of him?”
“How is dear Falconer these days?” asked Locke.
“Well kept. In Karthain.” The woman sighed. “As he was when agents of Camorr brought
him home. Witless and comatose.”
“He didn’t seem to react well to pain,” said Jean.
“And you imagine it was your torture that drove him mad?”
“Can’t have been our conversation,” said Locke.
“His real problem is self-inflicted. You see, we can deaden our minds to any suffering
of the flesh. But that art requires caution. It’s extremely dangerous to use it in
haste.”
“I’m delighted to hear that,” said Locke. “You’re saying that when he tried to escape
the pain—”
“His mind jailed itself, in a haze of his own making,” said the woman. “And so we’ve
been unable to correct his condition.”
“Marvelous,” said Locke. “I don’t really care how or why it happened, I’m still glad
that it did. In fact I encourage the rest of you to use that power in haste.”
“You do many of us an injustice,” said the woman.
“Bitch, if I had the power I’d pull your heart out of your chest and use it for a
handball,” said Locke, coughing. “I’d do it to all of you. You people kill anyone
you like and fuck with the lives of those that treat you fairly for it.”
“Despising us must be rather like staring into a mirror, then.”
“I despise you,” said Locke, straining to heave himself up, “for Calo and Galdo, and
for Bug, and for Nazca and Ezri, and for all the time we … wasted in … Tal Verrar.”
Red-faced and shuddering, he fell back to the empty bed.
“You’re murderers and thieves,” said the woman. “You leave a trail of confusion and
outrage wherever you go. You’ve brought down at least one government, and prevented
the destruction of another for sentimental reasons. Can you really keep a straight
face when you damn us for doing as we please?”
“We can,” said Jean. “And I can take the matter of Ezri very personally.”
“Would you even have met the woman if we hadn’t intervened in your affairs? Would
you have gone to sea?”
“That’s not for any of us to say—”
“So we own your misfortunes entirely, yet receive no credit for happier accidents.”
“I—”
“We’ve interfered here and there, Jean, but you’re flattering yourself
if you imagine that we’ve drawn such an intricate design around you. The woman died
in battle, and we had nothing to do with that. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Are you
capable
of feeling sorry for anything?”
The woman came toward Jean, reaching out with her left hand, and it took every ounce
of his self-control not to fling himself away. He rose to his feet and stared fiercely
down at her as she set warm fingers gently against his cheek.