Authors: Scott Lynch
“It’s a hangover.” Chains ran a hand through the boy’s hair and patted his back. “My
fault, really. The Sanza twins are natural liquor sponges. I shouldn’t have let you
live up to their standard on your first night with us. No work for you today.”
“Liquor does this? Even after you’re sober?”
“A cruel joke, isn’t it? The gods put a price tag on everything, it seems. Unless
you’re drinking Austershalin brandy.”
“Auffershallow?”
“Austershalin. From Emberlain. Among its many other virtues, it doesn’t cause a hangover.
Some sort of alchemical component in the vineyard soil. Expensive stuff.”
Falselight came after many hours of half-sleep, and Locke found himself able to walk
once again, though the brain within his skull felt like it was attempting to dig a
hole down through his neck and escape. Chains
insisted that they would still be visiting Capa Barsavi (“The only people who break
appointments with him are the ones that live in glass towers and have their pictures
on coins, and even they think twice”), though he consented to allow Locke a more comfortable
means of transportation.
It turned out that the House of Perelandro had a small stable tucked around the back,
and in this smelly little stall there lived a Gentled goat. “He’s got no name,” Chains
said as he set Locke atop the creature’s back. “I just couldn’t bring myself to give
him one, since he wouldn’t answer to it anyway.”
Locke had never developed the instinctive revulsion most boys and girls felt for Gentled
animals; he’d already seen too much ugliness in his life to care about the occasional
empty stare from a docile, milky-eyed creature.
There is a substance called Wraithstone, a chalky white material found in certain
remote mountain caverns. The stuff doesn’t occur naturally; it is found only in conjunction
with glass-lined tunnels presumably abandoned by the Eldren—the same unsettling race
that built Camorr, ages past. In its solid state, Wraithstone is tasteless, nearly
odorless, and inert. It must be burned to activate its unique properties.
Physikers have begun to identify the various means and channels by which poisons attack
the bodies of the living;
this
one stills the heart, while
this
one thins the blood, and still others damage the stomach or the intestines. Wraithstone
smoke poisons nothing physical; what it does is burn out personality itself. Ambition,
stubbornness, pluck, spirit, drive—all of these things fade with just a few breaths
of the arcane haze. Accidental exposure to small amounts can leave a man listless
for weeks; anything more than that and the effect will be permanent. Victims remain
alive but entirely unconcerned by anything. They don’t respond to their names, or
to their friends, or to mortal danger. They can be prodded into eating or excreting
or carrying something, and little else. The pale white sheen that fills their eyes
is an outward expression of the emptiness that takes hold in their hearts and minds.
Once, in the time of the Therin Throne, the process was used to punish criminals,
but it has been centuries since any civilized Therin city-state allowed the use of
Wraithstone on men and women. A society that still hangs children for petty theft
and feeds prisoners to sea-creatures finds the results too disquieting to bear.
Gentling, therefore, is reserved for animals—mostly beasts of burden intended for
urban service. The cramped confines of a hazard-rich city
like Camorr are ideally suited to the process. Gentled ponies may be trusted never
to throw the children of the wealthy. Gentled horses and mules may be trusted never
to kick their handlers or dump expensive cargoes into a canal. A burlap sack with
a bit of the white stone and a slow-smoldering match is placed over an animal’s muzzle,
and the human handlers retreat to fresh air. A few minutes later the creature’s eyes
are the color of new milk, and it will never do anything on its own initiative again.
But Locke had a throbbing headache, and he was just getting used to the idea that
he was a murderer
and
a resident of a private glass fairyland, and the eerily mechanical behavior of his
goat didn’t bother him at all.
“This temple will be exactly where I left it when I return later this evening,” said
Father Chains as he finished dressing for his venture outside; the Eyeless Priest
had vanished entirely, to be replaced by a hale man of middle years and moderate means.
His beard and his hair had been touched up with some sort of brown dye; his vest and
cheap cotton-lined half-cloak hung loosely over a cream-colored shirt with no ties
or cravats.
“Exactly where you left it,” said one of the Sanzas.
“And not burned down or
anything
,” said the other.
“If you boys can burn down stone and Elderglass, the gods have higher aspirations
for you than a place as my apprentices. Do behave. I’m taking Locke to get his, ahh …”
Chains glanced sideways at the Lamora boy. He then mimed taking a drink, and held
his jaw afterward as though in pain.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhh,” said Calo and Galdo in pitch-perfect unison.
“Indeed.” Chains settled a little round leather cap on his head and took the reins
of Locke’s goat. “Wait up for us. This should be interesting, to say the least.”
“THIS CAPA Barsavi,” Locke said as Chains led the nameless goat across one of the
narrow glass arches between the Fauria and Coin-Kisser’s Row, “my old master told
me about him, I think.”
“You’re quite right. That time you got the Elderglass Vine burned down, I believe.”
“Ah. You know about that.”
“Well, once your old master started telling me about you, he just sort of … didn’t
shut up for several hours.”
“If I’m your
pezon
, are you Barsavi’s
pezon
?”
“That’s a plain, neat description of our relationship, yes. All the Right People are
Barsavi’s soldiers. His eyes, his ears, his agents, his subjects. His
pezon
. Barsavi is … a particular sort of friend. I did some things for him, back when he
was coming to power. We rose together, you might say—I got special consideration and
he got the, ah, entire city.”
“Special consideration?”
It was as pleasant a night for a stroll as Camorr ever produced during the summer.
A hard rain had fallen not an hour before, and the fresh mist that spread its tendrils
around buildings like the grasping hands of spectral giants was slightly cooler than
usual, and its odor wasn’t yet saturated with the redolence of silt and dead fish
and human waste. Other people were few and far between on Coin-Kisser’s Row after
Falselight, so Locke and Chains spoke fairly freely.
“I’ve got the
distance
. Which means—well, there are a hundred gangs in Camorr, Locke. A hundred and more.
Certainly I can’t remember them all. Some of them are too new or too unruly for Capa
Barsavi to trust them as well as he might. So he keeps a close eye on them—insists
on frequent reports, plants men in them, reins their actions in tightly. Those of
us that don’t suffer such scrutiny”—Chains pointed to himself, then to Locke—“are
sort of
presumed
to be doing things honestly until proven otherwise. We follow his rules and pay him
a cut of our take, and he thinks he can more or less trust us to get it right. No
audits, no spies, no bullshit. ‘The distance.’ It’s a privilege worth paying for.”
Chains stuck a hand in one of his cloak pockets; there was the pleasing jingle of
coins. “I’ve got a little show of respect for him right here, in fact. Two-tenths
of this week’s take from the charity kettle of Perelandro.”
“More than a hundred gangs, you said?”
“This city has more gangs than it has foul odors, boy. Some of them are older than
many families on the Alcegrante, and some of them have stricter rituals than some
of the priestly orders. Hell, at one point there were nearly thirty capas, and each
one had four or five gangs under his thumb.”
“Thirty capas? All like Capa Barsavi?”
“Yes and no. Yes, that they ran gangs and gave orders and cut men open from cock to
eyeballs when they got angry; no, that they were anything like Barsavi otherwise.
Five years ago, there were the thirty bosses I talked about. Thirty little kingdoms,
all fighting and thieving and spilling each other’s guts in the street. All at war
with the yellowjackets, who used to kill twenty men a week. In
slow
weeks.
“Then Capa Barsavi walked in from Tal Verrar. Used to be a scholar at the Therin Collegium,
if you can believe it. Taught
rhetoric
. He got a few gangs under his thumb and he started
cutting
. Not like a back-alley slasher, but more like a physiker cutting out a chancre. When
Barsavi took out another capa, he took their gangs, too. But he didn’t lean on them
if he didn’t have to. He gave them full territories and let them choose their own
garristas
, and he cut them in on his take.
“So—five years ago, there were thirty. Four years ago, there were ten. Three years
ago, there was one. Capa Barsavi and his hundred gangs. The whole city—all the Right
People, present company included—in his pocket. No more open war across the bloody
canals. No more platoons of thieves getting strung up all at once at the Palace of
Patience. Nowadays they have to do them two or three at a time.”
“Because of the Secret Peace? The one I broke?”
“The one you broke, yes. Good guess, presuming I’d know about that. Yes, my boy, it’s
the key to Barsavi’s peculiar success. What it comes down to is, he has a standing
agreement with the duke, handled through one of the duke’s agents. The gangs of Camorr
don’t touch the nobles; we don’t lay a finger on ships or drays or crates that have
a legitimate coat of arms on them. In exchange, Barsavi is the actual ruler of a few
of the city’s more charming points. Catchfire, the Narrows, the Dregs, the Wooden
Waste, the Snare, and parts of the docks. Plus the city watch is much more … relaxed
than they ought to be.”
“So we can rob anyone who isn’t a noble?”
“Or a yellowjacket, yes. We can have the merchants and the money-changers and the
incoming and the outgoing. There’s more money passing through Camorr than any other
city on this coast, boy. Hundreds of ships a week; thousands of sailors and officers.
We don’t have any problem laying off the nobility.”
“Doesn’t that make the merchants and the money-changers and the other people angry?”
“It might if they knew about it. That’s why there’s that word ‘Secret’ in front of
‘Peace.’ And that’s why Camorr’s such a lovely, fine, safe place to live. You really
only need to worry about losing your money if you don’t have much of it in the first
place.”
“Oh,” said Locke, fingering his little shark’s-tooth necklace. “Okay. But now I wonder … You
said my old master bought and paid for, um, killing me. Will you get in trouble with
Barsavi for not … killing me?”
Chains laughed. “Why would I be taking you to see him if that’d get me
in trouble, boy? No, the death-mark’s mine to use, or not, as I see fit. I bought
it. Don’t you see? He doesn’t care if we actually use ’em, only that we acknowledge
that the
power
of granting life or death is his. Sort of like a tax only he can collect. You see?”
Locke nodded, then allowed himself to be trundled along silently for a few minutes,
absorbing all of this. His aching head made the scale of what was going on a bit difficult
to grasp.
“Let me tell you a story,” said Father Chains after a while. “A story that will let
you know just what sort of man you’re going to meet and swear fealty to this evening.
Once upon a time, when Capa Barsavi’s hold on the city was very new and very delicate,
it was an open secret that a pack of his
garristas
was plotting to get rid of him just as soon as the chance presented itself. And they
were very alert for his countermoves, see; they’d helped him take over the city, and
they knew how he worked.
“So they made sure he couldn’t get all of them at once; if he tried to cut some throats
the gangs would scatter and warn each other and it’d be a bloody mess, another long
war. He made no open moves. And the rumors of their disloyalty got worse.
“Capa Barsavi would receive visitors in his hall—it’s still out there in the Wooden
Waste; it used to be a big Verrari hulk, one of those fat wide galleons they used
for hauling troops. It’s just anchored there now, a sort of makeshift palace. He calls
it the Floating Grave. Well, at the Floating Grave, he made a big show of putting
down this one large carpet from Ashmere; a really lovely thing, the sort of cloth
the duke would hang on a wall for safekeeping. And he made sure that
everyone
around him knew how much he liked that carpet.
“It got so that his court could tell what he was going to do to a visitor by watching
that carpet; if there was going to be blood, that carpet would be rolled up and packed
away safe.
Without exception
. Months went by. Carpet up, carpet down. Sometimes men who got called to see him
would try to run the moment they saw bare floor beneath his feet, which of course
was as good as admitting wrongdoing out loud.
“Anyhow. Back to his problem
garristas
. Not one of them was stupid enough to enter the Floating Grave without a gang at
their back, or to be caught alone with Barsavi. His rule was still too uncertain at
this point for him to just throw a tantrum about it. So he waited … and then one night
he invited nine of his troublesome
garristas
to dinner. Not all the troublemakers, of course, but the cleverest, and the toughest,
and the ones with the biggest gangs. And their spies brought back word that that lovely
embroidered carpet, the capa’s prize possession, was rolled out on the floor for everyone
to see, with a banquet table on top of it and more food than the gods themselves had
ever seen.
“So those stupid bastards, they figured Barsavi was serious, that he really wanted
to talk. They thought he was scared, and they expected negotiations in good faith;
so they didn’t bring their gangs or make alternate plans. They thought they’d won.