Authors: Scott Lynch
“Of course,” said Locke. “Quite a reasonable thought.” He reached out and took the
felt-wrapped bottle for close examination; his handwritten
label identified it as sugared milk of opium, a rich ladies’ vice made from dried
Jeremite poppies. He removed the label and the felt, then tucked the faceted glass
bottle with its brass stopper into the burlap sack. The rest of the loot followed.
“Right! Now, is there any speck of Lukas Fehrwight still clinging to me? Any makeup
or mummery?” He stuck out his arms and twirled several times; Jean and the Sanzas
assured him that he was entirely Locke Lamora for the moment.
“Well, then, if we’re all our proper selves, let’s go pay our taxes.” Locke lifted
the sack of “stolen” items and tossed it casually to Bug; the boy yelped, dropped
his coin, and caught the sack with a muffled clatter of shaken metal.
“Good for my moral education, I suppose?”
“No,” said Locke, “this time I really am just being a lazy old bastard. At least you
won’t have to work the barge-pole.”
IT WAS the third hour of the afternoon when they set out from the Temple of Perelandro,
via their assorted escape tunnels and side entrances. A warm drizzle was falling from
the sky, which was neatly divided as though by some ruler and stylus of the gods—low
dark clouds filled the north, while the sun was just starting downward in the bright,
clear southwest. The pleasant scent of fresh rain on hot stone welled up everywhere,
briefly washing the usual city miasmas from the air. The Gentlemen Bastards gathered
once again at the southwestern docks of the Temple District, where they hailed a gondola-for-hire.
The boat was long and shallow and heavily weathered, with a freshly killed rat lashed
to the bow spar just beneath a small wooden idol of Iono; this was allegedly a peerless
ward against capsizing and other misfortunes. The poleman perched at the stern like
a parrot in his red-and-orange striped cotton jacket, protected from the rain by a
broad-brimmed straw hat that drooped out past his skinny shoulders. He turned out
to be a canal-jumper and purse-cutter of their acquaintance, Nervous Vitale Vento
of the Gray Faces gang.
Vitale rigged a mildewy leather umbrella to keep some of the drizzle off his passengers,
and then began to pole them smoothly east between the high stone banks of the Temple
District and the overgrown lushness of the Mara Camorrazza. The Mara had once been
a garden maze for a rich
governor of the Therin Throne era; now it was largely abandoned by the city watch
and haunted by cutpurses. The only reason honest folk even ventured into its dangerous
green passages was that it was the heart of a network of footbridges connecting eight
other islands.
Jean settled in to read from a very small volume of verse he’d tucked into his belt,
while Bug continued practicing his coin manipulation, albeit with a copper-piece that
would look much less incongruous in public. Locke and the Sanza brothers talked shop
with Vitale, whose job, in part, was to mark particularly lightly guarded or heavily
loaded cargo barges for the attention of his fellows. On several occasions, he made
hand signals to concealed watchers on shore while the Gentlemen Bastards politely
pretended not to notice.
They drew close to Shades’ Hill; even by day those heights were steeped in gloom.
By chance the rain stiffened and the old kingdom of tombs grew blurred behind a haze
of mist. Vitale swung the boat to the right. Soon he was pushing them southward between
Shades’ Hill and the Narrows, aided by the current of the seaward-flowing canal, now
alive with the spreading ripples of raindrops.
Traffic grew steadily thinner and less reputable on the canal as they sped south;
they were passing from the open rule of the duke of Camorr to the private dominion
of Capa Barsavi. On the left, the forges of the Coalsmoke district were sending up
columns of blackness, mushrooming and thinning out beneath the press of the rain.
The Duke’s Wind would push it all down over Ashfall, the most ill-looking island in
the city, where gangs and squatters contended for space in the moldering, smoke-darkened
villas of an opulent age now centuries past.
A northbound barge moved past on their left, wafting forth the stench of old shit
and new death. What looked to be an entire team of dead horses was lying in the barge,
attended by half a dozen knackers. Some were slicing at the corpses with arm-length
serrated blades while others were frantically unrolling and adjusting bloodstained
tarps beneath the rain.
No Camorri could have asked for a more appropriate match for the sight and stink of
the Cauldron. If the Dregs were poverty-racked, the Snare disreputable, the Mara Camorrazza
openly dangerous, and Ashfall dirty and falling apart, the Cauldron was all of these
things with a compound interest of human desperation. It smelled something like a
keg of bad beer overturned in a mortician’s storage room on a hot summer day. Most
of this district’s dead never made it as far as the pauper’s holes dug by convicts
on the hills of the Beggar’s Barrow. They were tipped into
canals or simply burned. No yellowjackets had dared enter the Cauldron save in platoons
even before the Secret Peace; no temples had been maintained here for fifty years
or more. Barsavi’s least sophisticated and restrained gangs ruled the Cauldron’s blocks;
brawlers’ taverns and Gaze dens and itinerant gambling circles were packed wall to
wall with families crammed into ratholes.
It was commonly held that one in three of Camorr’s Right People were crammed into
the Cauldron—a thousand wasters and cutthroats bickering endlessly and terrorizing
their neighbors, accomplishing nothing and going nowhere. Locke had come out of Catchfire,
Jean from the comfortable North Corner. Calo and Galdo had been Dregs boys prior to
their stay in Shades’ Hill. Only Bug had come out of the Cauldron, and he had never
once spoken of it, not in the four years he’d been a Gentleman Bastard.
He was staring at it now, at the sagging docks and layered tenements, at the clothes
flapping on washlines, soaking up water. The streets were brown with the unhealthy
haze of sodden cookfires. Its floodwalls were crumbling, its Elderglass mostly buried
in grime and piles of stone. Bug’s coin had ceased to flow across his knuckles and
stood still on the back of his left hand.
A few minutes later, Locke was privately relieved to slip past the heart of the Cauldron
and reach the high, thin breakwater that marked the eastern edge of the Wooden Waste.
Camorr’s maritime graveyard seemed positively cheerful by comparison once the boat
had put the Cauldron to its stern.
A graveyard it was; a wide sheltered bay, larger than the Shifting Market, filled
with the bobbing, undulating wrecks of hundreds of ships and boats. They floated hull-up
and hull-down, anchored as well as drifting freely, some merely rotting while others
were torn open from collisions or catapult stones. A layer of smaller wooden debris
floated on the water between the wrecks like scum on cold soup, ebbing and resurging
with the tide. When Falselight fell, this junk would sometimes ripple with the unseen
passage of creatures drawn in from Camorr Bay, for while tall iron gates shuttered
every major canal against intrusion, the Wooden Waste was open to the sea on its south
side.
At the heart of the Waste floated a fat, dismasted hulk, sixty yards long and nearly
half as wide, anchored firmly in place by chains leading down into the water; two
at the bow and two at the stern. Camorr had never built anything so heavy and ungainly;
that vessel was one of the more optimistic products of the arsenals of distant Tal
Verrar, just as Chains had
told Locke many years before. Wide silk awnings now covered its high, flat castle
decks; beneath those canopies parties could be thrown that rivaled the pleasure pavilions
of Jerem for their decadence. But at the moment the decks were clear of everything
but the cloaked shapes of armed men, peering out through the rain—Locke could see
at least a dozen of them, standing in groups of two or three with longbows and crossbows
at hand.
There was human movement here and there throughout the Waste; some of the less damaged
vessels housed families of squatters, and some of them were being openly used as observation
points by more teams of hard-looking men. Vitale navigated through the twisting channels
between larger wrecks, carefully making obvious hand gestures at the men on guard
whenever the gondola passed them.
“Gray King got another one last night,” he muttered, straining against his pole. “Lots
of twitchy boys with big murder-pieces keeping an eye on us right now, that’s for
damn sure.”
“Another one?” Calo narrowed his eyes. “We hadn’t heard yet. Who got it?”
“Tall Tesso, from the Full Crowns. They found him up in Rustwater, nailed to the wall
of an old shop, balls cut off. His blood ran out, is what it looked like.”
Locke and Jean exchanged a glance, and Nervous Vitale grunted.
“Acquainted, were you?”
“After a fashion,” said Locke, “and some time ago.”
Locke pondered. Tesso was—had been—
garrista
of the Full Crowns; one of Barsavi’s big earners, and a close friend of the capa’s
younger son, Pachero. Nobody in Camorr should have been able to touch him (save only
Barsavi and the Spider), yet that damned invisible lunatic calling himself the Gray
King had touched him in no uncertain terms.
“That’s six,” said Jean, “isn’t it?”
“Seven,” said Locke. “There haven’t been this many dead gods-damned
garristas
since you and I were five years old.”
“Heh,” said Vitale, “and to think I once envied you, Lamora, even with this tiny little
gang of yours.”
Locke glared at him, willing the puzzle to come together in his head and not quite
succeeding. Seven gang leaders in two months; all of them given the distance, but
otherwise having little in common. Locke had long taken comfort in his own lack of
importance to the capa’s affairs, but now he began to wonder.
Might
he be on someone’s list? Did he have some
unguessed value to Barsavi that the Gray King might want to end with a crossbow bolt?
How many others were between him and that bolt?
“Damn,” said Jean, “as if things needed to get more complicated.”
“Maybe we should take care of … current business.” Galdo had shifted against the side
of the gondola and was looking around as he spoke. “And then maybe we should get lost
for a while. See Tal Verrar, or Talisham … or at least get
you
out, Locke.”
“Nonsense.” Locke spat over the side of the boat. “Sorry, Galdo. I know it seems like
wisdom, but do the sums. The capa would
never
forgive our running out in his desperate hour. He’d rescind the distance and put
us under the thumb of the most graceless pig-hearted motherfucker he could find. We
can’t run as long as he stays. Hell, Nazca would break my knees with a mallet before
anyone else did anything.”
“You have my sympathy, boys.” Vitale shifted his pole from hand to hand, using precise
shoves to warp the gondola around a chunk of debris too large to ignore. “Canal work
ain’t easy, but at least nobody wants me dead for more’n the usual reasons. Did you
want me to leave you at the Grave or at the quay?”
“We need to see Harza,” said Locke.
“Oh, he’s sure to be in a rare mood today.” Vitale began poling hard for the northern
edge of the Waste, where a few stone docks jutted out before a row of shops and rooming
houses. “The quay it is, then.”
THE PAWNSHOP of No-Hope Harza was one of the major landmarks of the reign of Capa
Barsavi. While there were many shops that paid slightly more and a
great
many with less surly proprietors, there were no others located a bare stone’s throw
from the very seat of the capa’s power. Right People cashing in their creatively acquired
loot with Harza could be sure that their presence would be reported to Barsavi. It
never hurt to reinforce the impression that one was an active, responsible thief.
“Oh, of course,” said the old Vadran as Jean held the barred and armored door open
for the other four Gentlemen Bastards. “Figures only the least important
garristas
would dare show their faces on a day like this. Come in, my ill-looking sons of Camorri
bitches. Rub your oily Therin fingers on my lovely merchandise. Drip water on my beautiful
floors.”
Harza’s shop was always closed up like a coffin, rain or shine. Dusty
canvas sheets were drawn over the narrow, barred windows; and the place smelled of
silver polish, mildew, stale incense, and old sweat. Harza himself was a snow-skinned
old man with wide, watery eyes; every seam and wrinkle on his face seemed to be steadily
sliding toward the ground, as though he’d been shaped by a slightly drunk god who’d
pressed the mortal clay just a little too far down. No-Hope had earned his moniker
with his firm policy against extending credit or loaning coin; Calo had once remarked
that if he ever took an arrow in the skull he’d sit around and wait for it to fall
out on its own before he’d pay a physiker for so much as a gauze scrap.
In the right-hand corner of the shop a burly, bored-looking young man with cheap brass
on all of his fingers and greasy ringlets hanging in his eyes shifted his position
on the tall wooden stool he occupied. An iron-studded club swung from a loop at his
belt, and he nodded slowly at the visitors, unsmiling, as though they were too stupid
to comprehend his function.
“Locke Lamora,” said Harza. “Perfume bottles and ladies’ smallclothes. Tableware and
drinking goblets. Scraped and dented metal I can’t sell to anyone with any class ever
again. You breakers and second-story boys think you’re
so
clever. You’d steal shit from a dog’s asshole if you had the right sort of bag to
bring it home with you.”
“Funny you should say that, Harza, because this bag here”—Locke plucked the burlap
sack from Bug’s hands and held it up—“happens to contain—”