Authors: Scott Lynch
“Yes!”
“You eat well and sleep soundly. Your clothes are clean, you have many diversions,
and you even get to bathe every week.”
“Yes. Yes, I like it a lot, it’s all worth having to bathe, even!”
“Hmmm,” said Chains. “You live long enough for your stones to drop, then tell me if
bathing is really such a hardship when the young women around you have bosoms that
are more than theoretical.”
“What? When my
what
?”
“Never mind. That subject will be sufficiently confusing in its own good time. So,
you like it here. You’re comfortable, you’re protected. Have I behaved badly? Treated
you as you were treated in Shades’ Hill?”
“Well, no … no, not like that at all.”
“Yet none of that buys me any consideration in the matter of last night? Not one speck
of trust? One tiny instant of the benefit of the doubt?”
“I, uh, well, it’s not … uh, crap.” Locke made a desperate grab for eloquence and
came up with empty hands as usual. “I don’t mean … it’s not that I don’t appreciate—”
“Easy, Locke, easy. Just because you’ve been uncouth doesn’t mean you might not have
a point. But hear me now—this is a small home we live in. The temple might seem marvelous
compared to living and sleeping in heaps of dozens, but believe me—walls squeeze the
people who live inside them, sooner or later.”
“They don’t bother me,” said Locke quickly.
“It’s not so much the walls, though, Locke, it’s the
people
. This will be your home for many years to come, gods willing, and you and Sabetha
and the Sanzas are going to be as close as family. You’ll strike sparks off one another.
I can’t have you shoving your thumb up your ass and doing your best impression of
a brick wall every time you get annoyed. Crooked Warden help us, we’ve got to be ready
and willing to talk, or we’re all going to wake up with cut throats sooner or later.”
“I’m … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t hang your head like a kicked puppy. Just keep it in mind. If you’re going to
live here, staying civil is as much a duty as sitting the steps or washing dishes.
Now, while I bask in the glow of another moral sermon delivered with the precision
of a master fencer, hold your applause and let’s get back to last night. You’re upset
because the situation was contrived to give you only one real means of resolving it,
short of curling up into a little ball and crying yourself into a stupor.”
“Yes! It wasn’t like it would have been, if they’d been real guards. If they weren’t,
you know, watching for me.”
“You’re right. If those men had been real agents of the duke, some of them might have
been incompetent, or open to bribery, and they might not have taken their duty to
guard a little girl very seriously. Correct?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Of course, if they’d been real agents of the duke, they might also have taken her
somewhere truly impregnable, like the Palace of Patience. And instead of six there
might have been twelve, or twenty, or the entire Nightglass company, prowling the
streets looking to have an urgent personal conversation with
you
.” Chains leaned forward and poked Locke’s forehead. “That’s how luck works, lad.
You can bitch all you like about how things could have been more favorable for you,
but rest assured things can
always be worse
. Always. Understood?”
“I think so,” said Locke, with the neutral tone of a student gingerly accepting a
master’s assurances on something far beyond personal verification, like the number
of angels that could play handball on the edge of a rose petal.
“Well, if I can even get you thinking about it, that’s a victory of sorts, at your
age. No offense.” Chains cracked his knuckles before continuing. “You, after all,
have publicly vowed to never lose again, which is about as likely as me learning to
crap gold bars on command.”
“But—”
“Let it be. I know your temperament, lad, and I’m too wise to try and give it more
than a few sharp nudges at a time. So, the other thing. You’re upset that I lied about
what needed to be done with Sabetha.”
“Well, yeah.”
“You feel something for her.”
“I … I don’t, um …”
“Quit it. This is important. You
do
feel something for her. There’s more to this than a little wounded pride. Can you
tell me about it?”
Slowly, grudgingly, feeling as though he might be about to get up and run away, Locke
somehow found the will to give Chains the barest sketch of his first encounter with
Sabetha, and of her later disappearance.
“Hells,” said Chains quietly when the tale was finished. The sky and the city beneath
it had darkened while Locke had stumbled through his explanation. “I can see why you
snapped, having that rug pulled out from under you twice. Forgive me, Locke, I honestly
didn’t know you’d grown feelings for her in Shades’ Hill.”
“It’s okay,” mumbled Locke.
“You have a crush, I think.”
“Do I?” Locke had a vague idea of what that word meant, and somehow it didn’t seem
right. It didn’t seem
enough
.
“It’s not meant to belittle your feelings, lad. A crush can come on hot and sharp
like an illness. I know exactly what it’s like. Years to go before your body will
even be ready for, ah, what comes between men and women, but a crush doesn’t care.
It’s got a power all its own. That’s the bad news.”
“What’s the good news?”
“Crushes fade. Sure as you and I are sitting here now. They’re like sparks thrown
from a fire—hot and bright for a moment, then gone.”
Locke frowned, not at all sure he wanted to be released from his feelings for Sabetha.
They were a bundle of mysteries, and every attempt to unravel them in his own mind
seemed to send a pleasant warm shiver to every nerve in his body.
“Heh. You don’t believe me, or you don’t want to. Fair enough. But you’re going to
be living with Sabetha day in and day out anytime one of you isn’t away for training.
My guess is, she’ll be like a sister to you in a few years. Familiarity has a way
of filing the sharp edges off our feelings for other people. You’ll see.”
TIME PASSED
, days and months chaining together into years, and Jean Tannen joined the Gentlemen
Bastards. In the summer of the seventy-seventh Year of Perelandro, two years after
Jean’s arrival, a rare dry spell came over the city-state of Camorr, and the Angevine
ran ten feet below its usual height. The canals went gray and turgid, thickening like
blood in the veins of a ripening corpse.
Canal trees, those glorious affectations that usually roamed and twirled on the city’s
currents with their long float-threaded roots drinking the filth around them, now
bobbed in sullen masses, confined to the river and the Floating Market. Their silk-bright
leaves dulled and their branches drooped; their roots hung slack in the water like
the tentacles of dead sea-monsters. Day after day the Temple District was shrouded
in layers of smoke, as every denomination burned anything that came to mind in sacrifices
pleading for a hard, cleansing rain that wouldn’t come.
In the Cauldron and the Dregs, where the lowest of the low slept ten to a room in
windowless houses, the usual steady flow of murders became a torrent. The duke’s corpse-hunters,
paid as they were by the head, whistled while they fished putrefying former citizens
out of barrels and cesspits. The city’s professional criminals, more conscientious
than its impulsive killers, did their part for Camorr’s air by throwing the remains
of their victims into the harbor by night, where the predators of the Iron Sea quietly
made the offerings vanish.
In this atmosphere, in the hot summer evening heavy with smoke and the stink of a
hundred distinct putrefactions, the temple roof was out of the question for meetings,
so Father Chains let his five young wards gather in the dank coolness of the glass
burrow’s kitchen. Their recent meals, by Chains’ orders, had been lukewarm affairs,
with anything cooked brought in from stalls near the Floating Market.
They had come together that week, as a complete set, for the first time in half a
year. Chains’ interwoven programs of training had taken on the complexity of an acrobat’s
plate-spinning act as his young wards were shuffled back and forth between apprenticeships
in assorted temples and trades, learning their habits, jargon, rituals, and trivia.
These excursions were arranged by the Eyeless Priest via a remarkable network of contacts,
extending well beyond Camorr and the criminal fraternity, and they were largely paid
for out of the small fortune that the citizens of Camorr had charitably donated over
the years.
Time had begun to work its more obvious changes on the young Gentlemen Bastards. Calo
and Galdo were dealing with a growth spurt that had given their usual grace a humbling
dose of awkwardness, and their voices were starting to veer wildly. Jean Tannen was
still on the cherubic side, but his shoulders were broadening, and from scuffles like
the Half-Crown War he had acquired the confident air of someone well versed in the
art of introducing faces to cobblestones.
Given these evident signs of physical progress around him, Locke was secretly displeased
with his own condition. His voice had yet to drop, and while he was larger than he’d
ever been, all this did was maintain him in the same ratio as before, a medium child
surrounded on all sides by the taller and the wider. And while he knew the other boys
depended upon him to be the heart and brains of their combined operations, it was
a cold comfort whenever Sabetha came home.
Sabetha (who, if she objected to being the only Gentle-lady Bastard, had never said
so out loud) was freshly returned from weeks of immersive training as a court scrivener’s
apprentice, and bore new signs of physical progress herself. She was still taller
than Locke, and the natural color of her tightly plaited hair remained hidden by a
brown alchemical wash. But her slender figure seemed to be pressing outward, ever
so slightly, against the front of her thin chemise, and her movements around the glass
burrow had revealed the hints of other emerging curves to Locke’s vigilant eyes.
Her natural poise had grown in direct proportion to her years, and while Locke held
firm sway over the three other boys, she was a separate power, neither belittling
his status in the gang nor overtly acknowledging it. There was a seriousness to her
that Locke found deeply compelling, possibly because it was unique among the five
of them. She had embarked upon a sort of miniature adulthood and skipped the wild
facetiousness that defined, for example, the Sanzas. It seemed to Locke that she was
more eager than the rest of them to get to wherever their training was taking them.
“Young lady,” said Father Chains as he entered the kitchen, “and young gentlemen,
such as you are. Thank you for your prompt attention to my summons, a courtesy which
I shall now repay by setting you on a path to frustration and acrimony. I have decided
that you five do not fight amongst yourselves nearly enough.”
“Begging your pardon,” said Sabetha, “but if you’ll look more closely at Calo and
Galdo you’ll see that’s not the case.”
“Ah, that’s merely communication,” said Chains. “Just as you and I speak by forming
words, the natural, private discourse of the Sanza twins appears to consist entirely
of farts and savage beatings. What I want is all five of you facing off against one
another.”
“You want us to start … hitting each other?” said Locke.
“Oh, I volunteer to hit Sabetha,” said Calo, “and I volunteer to be hit by Locke!”
“I would also volunteer to be hit by Locke,” said Galdo.
“Quiet, you turnip-brained alley apes,” said Chains. “I don’t want you boxing with
one another. Not necessarily. No, I’ve given you all a great many tasks that have
pitted you against the world, as individuals and as a group, and for the most part
you’ve trounced my expectations.
I think the time has come to pry you out of your comfortable little union and see
how you fare in competition against one another.”
“What sort of competition?” said Jean.
“Highly amusing competition,” said Chains, raising his eyebrows. “From the perspective
of the old man who gets to sit back and watch. It’s been three or four years of steady
training for most of you, and I want to see what happens when each of you tries to
pit your zest for criminal enterprise against an opponent with a similar education.”
“So, uh, just to be clear,” said Calo, “none of us are going to be fighting Jean?”
“Not unless you’re inconceivably stupid.”
“Right,” said Calo. “What’s the plan?”
“I’m going to keep you all here for the rest of the summer,” said Chains. “A break
from your apprenticeships. We can enjoy the marvelous weather together, and you can
chase each other across the city. Starting with—” He lifted a finger and pointed it
at Locke. “You. Aaaaaaand …” He slowly shifted his finger until it was pointed at
Sabetha. “You!”
“Um, meaning what, exactly?” said Locke. Butterflies instantly came to life in his
stomach, and the little bastards were heavily armed.
“A bit of elementary stalking and evasion, on Coin-Kisser’s Row. Tomorrow at noon.”
“Surrounded by hundreds of people,” said Sabetha coolly.
“Quite right, my dear. It’s easy enough to follow someone when you’ve got the whole
night to hide in. I think you’re ready for something less forgiving. You’ll begin
at the very southern end of Coin-Kisser’s Row, carrying a handbag with an open top.
Inside the bag will be four small rolls of silk, each a different color. Easily visible
from ten or twenty feet away. You’ll take a leisurely stroll up the full length of
the district.
“Somewhere in your wake will be Locke, wearing a jacket with a certain number of brass
buttons, also easily counted from a fairly narrow distance. The game is simple. Locke
wins if he can tell me the colors of the silk. Sabetha wins if she crosses the Goldenreach
Bridge from Coin-Kisser’s Row to Twosilver Green without revealing the colors. She
can
also
win if Locke is clumsy enough for her to count the number of buttons on his coat.
Each of you wishing to report to me
will have only one chance to be accurate, so you can’t simply keep guessing until
you get it right.”