Authors: Scott Lynch
“Time is precious,” she said. “I lift my ban upon you, Jean Tannen. This is my real
flesh against yours. I
might
be able to stop you if you try to harm me, but now the matter is much less certain.
So what will you do? Must we fight now, or can we talk?”
Jean shook; the urge to take her at her word, to smash her down, was rising hot and
red within him. He would have to strike as fast as he ever had in his life, as hard
as muscle and sinew could allow. Break her skull, throttle her, bear her down beneath
his full weight, and pray to the gods he did enough damage to postpone whatever word
or gesture she would utter in return.
They stood there for a long, tense moment, perfectly still, with her dark eyes meeting
his unblinkingly. Then his right hand darted up and closed around her left wrist,
savagely tight. He could feel thin bones under thin skin, and he knew that one good
sharp twist—
The woman flinched. Real fear shone out from the depths of those eyes, the briefest
flash before her vast self-possession rolled in again like resurging waters to drown
her human weakness. But it had been there, genuine as the flesh beneath his fingers.
Jean loosened his grip, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I don’t think you’re lying.”
“This is very important,” she whispered.
Jean kept his right hand where it was, and reached up with his left to push back the
silver lace that sprouted from her jacket cuff. Black rings were tattooed around her
wrist, precise lines on pale skin.
“Five rings,” said Locke. “All I ever heard was that more is better. Just how many
can one of you people have, anyway?”
“This many,” said the woman with a hint of a smirk.
Jean released her arm and took a step back. She held her left hand up beside her head
and stroked the tattoos gently with the fingers of her other hand. The blackness became
silver, rippling silver, as though she wore bracelets of liquid moonlight.
As he stared at the eerie glow, Jean felt a cold itch behind his eyes, and a hard
pressure against the fingertips of his right hand. Reeling, he saw images flash in
his mind—fold upon fold of pale silk, needles punching in and out of delicate lace,
the rough edge of a cloth unraveling into threads—the pressure on his fingers was
an actual needle, moving up and down, in an endless steady dance across the cloth.…
“Oh,” he muttered, putting a hand to his forehead as the sensations receded. “What
the hell was that?”
“Me,” said the woman. “In a manner of speaking. Have you ever recalled someone by
the scent of their tobacco, or a perfume, or the feel of their skin? Deep memories
without words?”
“Yeah,” said Locke, massaging his temples. Jean guessed that he’d somehow shared the
brief vision.
“In my society, we speak mind to mind. We … announce ourselves using such impressions.
We construct images of certain memories or passions. We call them
sigils
.” She hitched her laced sleeve back up over her wrist, where the black rings had
entirely lost their ghostly gleam, and smiled. “Now that I’ve shared mine with you,
you’re less likely to jump out of your skin if I ever need to speak mind to mind,
rather than voice to ear.”
“What the hell are you?” said Jean.
“There are four of us,” said the woman. “In an ideal world, the wisest and most powerful
of the fifth-circles. If nothing else, we do get to live in the biggest houses.”
“You rule the Bondsmagi,” said Locke, incredulously.
“Rule is too strong a term. We do occasionally manage to avert total chaos.”
“You have a name?”
“Patience.”
“What, you have some rule against telling us now?”
“No, it’s what I’m called. Patience.”
“No shit? Your peers must think pretty highly of you.”
“It doesn’t mean anything, any more than a girl named Violet needs to be purple. It’s
a title. Archedama Patience. So, have we decided that nobody’s going to be murdering
anyone here?”
“I suppose that depends on what you want to talk about,” said Jean.
“The pair of you,” said Patience. “I’ve been minding your business for some time now.
Starting with the fragments I could pull out of the Falconer’s memories. Our agents
retrieved his possessions from Camorr after he was … crippled. Among them a knife
formerly belonging to one of the Anatolius sisters.”
“A knife with my blood on it,” said Jean.
“From that we had your trail easily enough.”
“And from that you fucked up our lives.”
“I need you to understand,” said Patience, “just how
little
you understand. I saved your lives in Tal Verrar.”
“Funny, I don’t recall seeing you there,” said Jean.
“The Falconer has friends,” said Patience. “Cohorts, followers, tools. For all of
his flaws he was very popular. You saw their parlor tricks in the Night Market, but
that was all I permitted. Without my intervention, they would have killed you.”
“You can call that mess ‘parlor tricks,’ ” said Jean. “That interference in Tal Verrar
still made a hell of a problem for us.”
“Better than death, surely,” said Patience. “And kinder by far than I might have been,
given the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?”
“The Falconer was arrogant, vicious, misguided. He was acting in obedience to a contract,
which we consider a sacred obligation, but I won’t deny that he amplified the brutality
of the affair beyond what was called for.”
“He was going to help turn hundreds of people into empty shells. Into gods-damned
furniture. That wasn’t brutal enough?” said Jean.
“They were part of the contract. You and your friends were not.”
“Well, if this is some sort of apology, go to hell,” said Locke, coughing. “I don’t
care what a humane old witch you think you are, and I don’t care how or why the Falconer
went wrong in the head. If I’d had
more time I would have used every second of it to bleed him. All he got was the thinnest
shred of what he really deserved.”
“That’s more true than you know, Locke. Oh, so much truer than you know.” Patience
folded her hands together and sighed. “And no one comprehends it quite as well as
I do. After all, the Falconer is my son.”
THE WORLD BROADENED
for Locke Lamora in the summer of the seventy-seventh Year of Sendovani, the summer
after Beth vanished, the summer he was sold out of the Thiefmaker’s care and into
that of Father Chains, the famous Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro. Suddenly
his old worries and pains were gone, though they were replaced by a fresh set of bafflements
on a daily basis.
“And what if a priest or priestess of another order should walk by?” asked Chains,
adjusting the hooded white robe the Sanza twins had just thrown over Locke’s head.
“I make the sign of our, um, joined service.” Locke enfolded his left hand within
his right and bowed his head until it nearly touched his thumbs. “And I don’t speak
unless spoken to.”
“Good. And if you cross paths with an initiate of another order?”
“I give the blessing for troubles to stay behind them.” Locke held out his right hand,
palm up, and swept it up as though he was pushing something over his left shoulder.
“And?”
“Um, I greet if greeted … and say nothing otherwise?”
“What if you meet an initiate of Perelandro?”
“Always greet?”
“You missed something.”
“Um. Oh yeah. Sign of joined service. Always greet. Speak, ah, cordially with initiates
and shut my mouth for anyone, um, higher.”
“What about the alternate signals for when it’s raining on a Penance Day?” said one
of the Sanza twins.
“Um …” Locke coughed nervously into his hands. “I don’t … I’m not sure …”
“There
is
no alternate signal for when it’s raining on a Penance Day. Or any other day,” muttered
Chains. “Well, now you look the part. And I think we can trust you with exterior ritual.
Not bad for four days of learning. Most initiates get a few months before they’re
trusted to count above ten without taking their shoes off.”
Chains stood and adjusted his own white robe. He and his boys were in the sanctuary
of the Temple of Perelandro, a dank cave of a room that proclaimed not only the humility
of Perelandro’s followers but their apparent indifference to the smell of mildew.
“Now then,” said Chains, “twit dexter and twit sinister—fetch my namesakes.”
Calo and Galdo scrambled to the wall where their master’s purely ceremonial fetters
lay, joined to a huge iron bolt in the stone. They raced one another to drag the chains
across the floor and snap the manacles on the big man.
“Aha,” said the first to finish, “you’re slower than an underwater fart!”
“Funny,” said the second. “Hey, what’s that on your chin?”
“Huh?”
“Looks like a fist!”
In an instant the space in front of Locke was filled with a mad whirl of Sanza limbs,
and for the hundredth time in his few days as Chains’ ward, Locke lost track of which
brother was which. The twins giggled madly as they wrestled with one another, then
howled in unison as Chains reached out with calm precision and caught them each by
an ear.
“You two savants,” he said, “can go put your own robes on, and carry the kettle out
after Locke and I take our places.”
“You said we weren’t going to sit the steps today!” said one of the brothers.
“You’re not. I’m just not in the mood to carry the kettle. After you bring it out,
you can go downstairs and mind your chores.”
“Chores?”
“Remember those customs papers I said I was forging up last night? They weren’t customs
papers, they were arithmetic problems. A couple pages for each of you. There’s charcoal,
ink, and parchment in the kitchen. Show your work.”
“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.” The sound of simultaneously disappointed Sanza brothers was
curiously tuneful. Locke had already heard the twins practicing their singing voices,
which were quite good, and by accident or design they often harmonized.
“Now, get the door, Locke.” Chains tied on the last and most important part of his
costume: the blindfold precisely adjusted to suggest his total helplessness while
still allowing him to avoid tripping over the hem of his robe. “The sun is up, and
all that money out there won’t steal itself.”
Locke worked the mechanism concealed behind one of the room’s moldering tapestries,
and there was a faint rumble within the temple walls. A vertical line of burning gold
appeared on the eastern wall as the doors creaked apart, and the sanctuary was quickly
flooded with warm morning light. Chains held out a hand, and Locke ran over to take
it.
“Ready?”
“If you say I am,” whispered Locke.
Hand in hand, the imaginary Eyeless Priest and his newest imaginary initiate walked
out of their imaginary stone prison, into a morning heat so fierce that Locke could
smell it baking up from the city’s stones and taste it on his tongue.
For the first of a thousand times, they went out together to rob passersby, as surely
as if they were muggers, armed with nothing more than a few words and an empty copper
kettle.
IN HIS
first few months with Father Chains, Locke began to unlearn the city of Camorr he’d
once known and discover something entirely
different in its place. As a Shades’ Hill boy, he’d known daylight in flashes, exploring
the upper world and then running back to the graveyard’s familiar darkness like a
diver surfacing before his breath ran out. The Hill was full of dangers, but they
were
known
dangers, while the city above was full of infinite mysteries.
Now the sun, which had once seemed to him like a great eye burning down in judgment,
did nothing but make his head warm as he sat the temple steps in his little white
robe. A happier boy might have been bored by the long hours of begging, but Locke
had learned patience in the surest way possible—by hiding for his own survival. Spending
half a night hugging the same shadow was nothing extraordinary to him, and he luxuriated
in the idea of lazing around while people actually brought money to him.
He studied the rhythms of daily life in the Temple District. When nobody was near
enough to eavesdrop, Chains would quietly answer Locke’s questions, and slowly the
great mass of Camorri revealed themselves to him. What had once been a sea of mystifying
details resolved bit by bit until Locke could identify the priests of the twelve orders,
sort the very rich from the merely wealthy, and make a dozen other useful distinctions.
It still made his heart jump to see a patrol of yellowjackets walking past the temple
steps, but their polite indifference was a pure delight. Some of them even
saluted
. It amazed Locke that the thin cotton robe he wore could provide him with such armor
against a power that had previously seemed so arbitrary and absolute.
Constables.
Saluting
him! Gods above.
Inside the temple, down in the secret burrow that lay beneath its façade of poverty,
further transmutations were under way. Locke ate well for the first time ever, sampling
all the cuisines of Camorr under Chains’ enthusiastic direction. Although he started
as an inept hindrance to the more experienced Sanzas, he quickly learned how to shake
weevils out of flour, how to slice meats, and how to tell a filleting knife from an
eel-fork.
“Bless us all,” said Chains one night, patting Locke on the belly. “You’re not the
ragged little corpse that came to us all those weeks ago. Food and sunlight have worked
an act of necromancy. You’re still small, but now you look like you could stand up
to a moderate breeze.”
“Excellent,” said one of the Sanzas. “Soon he’ll be fat, and we can butcher him like
all the others for a Penance Day roast.”
“What my brother means to say,” said the other twin, “is that all the others died
of purely natural causes, and you have nothing to fear from us. Now have some more
bread.”