Authors: Scott Lynch
There were hesitant nods from about half the Catchfire orphans.
“The rules are simple! You’ll learn them all in good time. For now, let’s keep it
like this. Anybody who eats, works. Anyone who works, eats. Which brings us to my
fourth … Oh, dear. Children, children. Do an absentminded old man the favor of imagining
that he held up four fingers. This is my fourth important point.
“Now, we’ve got our chores here on the hill, but we’ve got chores elsewhere that
also
need doing. Other jobs … delicate jobs, unusual jobs. Fun and interesting jobs. All
about the city, some by day and some by night. They will require courage, deftness,
and, ahhh, discretion. We would so
love
to have your assistance with these … special tasks.”
He pointed to the one boy he hadn’t paid for, the small hanger-on, now staring up
at him with hard, sullen eyes above a mouth still plastered with tomato innards.
“You, surplus boy, thirty-first of thirty. What say you? Are you the helpful sort?
Are you willing to assist your new brothers and sisters with their interesting work?”
The boy mulled this over for a few seconds.
“You mean,” he said in a high thin voice, “that you want us to steal things.”
The old man stared down at the little boy for a very long time while a number of the
Shades’ Hill orphans giggled behind their hands.
“Yes,” the Thiefmaker said at last, nodding slowly. “I might just mean that—though
you have a very, ahhh,
uncompromising
view of a certain exercise of personal initiative that we prefer to frame in more
artfully indeterminate terms. Not that I expect that to mean anything to you. What’s
your name, boy?”
“Lamora.”
“Your parents must have been misers, to give you nothing but a surname. What
else
did they call you?”
The boy seemed to think very deeply about this.
“I’m called Locke,” he finally said. “After my father.”
“Very good. Rolls right off the tongue, it does. Well, Locke-after-your-father Lamora,
you come here and have a word with me. The rest of you, shuffle off. Your brothers
and sisters will show you where you’ll be sleeping tonight. They’ll also show you
where to empty this and where to put that—chores, if you savvy. Just to tidy this
hall up for now, but there’ll be more jobs for you in the days to come. I promise
it will
all
make sense by the time you find out what they call me in the world beyond our little
hill.”
Locke moved to stand beside the Thiefmaker on his high-backed throne; the throng of
newcomers rose and milled about until larger, older Shades’ Hill orphans began collaring
them and issuing simple instructions. Soon enough, Locke and the master of Shades’
Hill were as alone as they could hope to be.
“My boy,” the Thiefmaker said, “I’m used to having to train a certain reticence out
of my new sons and daughters when they first arrive in Shades’ Hill. Do you know what
reticence
is?”
The Lamora boy shook his head. His greasy dust-brown bangs were plastered down atop
his round little face, and the tomato stains around his mouth had grown drier and
more unseemly. The Thiefmaker dabbed delicately at these stains with one cuff of his
tattered blue coat; the boy didn’t flinch.
“It means they’ve been told that stealing things is bad, and I need to work around
that until they get used to the idea, savvy? Well, you don’t seem to suffer from any
such reticence, so you and I might just get along. Stolen before, have you?”
The boy nodded.
“Before the plague, even?”
Another nod.
“Thought so. My dear, dear boy … you didn’t, ahhh, lose your parents to the
plague
, now, did you?”
The boy looked down at his feet and barely shook his head.
“So you’ve already been, ahhh, looking after yourself for some time. It’s nothing
to be ashamed of, now. It might even secure you a place of some respect here, if only
I can find a means to put you to the test.…”
By way of response, the Lamora boy reached under his rags and held something out to
the Thiefmaker. Two small leather purses fell into the old man’s open palm—cheap things,
stiff and stained, with frayed cords around their necks.
“Where did you get these, then?”
“The watchmen,” Locke whispered. “Some of the watchmen picked us up and carried us.”
The Thiefmaker jerked back as though an asp had just sunk its fangs into his spine,
and stared down at the purses with disbelief. “You lifted these from the fucking city
watch? From the
yellowjackets
?”
Locke nodded, more enthusiastically. “They picked us up and
carried
us.”
“Gods,” the Thiefmaker whispered. “Oh, gods. You may have just fucked us all superbly,
Locke-after-your-father Lamora. Quite superbly indeed.”
“HE BROKE the Secret Peace the first night I had him, the cheeky little bastard.”
The Thiefmaker was now seated more comfortably in the rooftop garden of the Eyeless
Priest’s temple, with a tarred leather cup of wine in his hands. It was the sourest
sort of secondhand near vinegar, but it was another sign that genuine negotiations
might yet break out. “Never happened before, nor since.”
“Someone taught him to charm a coat, but didn’t tell him that the yellowjackets were
strictly off-limits.” Father Chains pursed his lips. “Very curious, that. Very curious
indeed. Our dear Capa Barsavi would so love to
meet
such an individual.”
“I never found out who it was. The boy claimed he’d just taught himself, but that’s
crap. Five-year-olds play with dead fish and horse turds,
Chains. They don’t invent the finer points of soft-touching and purse-cutting on a
whim.”
“What did you do about the purses?”
“I flew back to Catchfire watch station and kissed asses and boots until my lips were
black. Explained to the watch-captain in question that one of the newcomers didn’t
understand how things worked in Camorr, and that I was returning the purses with interest,
begging their magnanimous apologies and all the gracious etcetera etceteras.”
“And they accepted?”
“Money makes a man mirthful, Chains. I stuffed those purses full to bursting with
silver. Then I gave every man in the squad drink money for five or six nights and
we all agreed they would hoist a few to the health of Capa Barsavi, who
surely
needn’t be, ahhh, troubled by something as inconsequential as his loyal Thiefmaker
fucking up and letting a five-year-old breach the bloody
Peace
.”
“So,” the Eyeless Priest said, “that was just the very first night of your association
with my
very own
mystery windfall bargain boy.”
“I’m gratified that you’re starting to take a possessive bent to the little cuss,
Chains, because it only gets more colorful. I don’t know quite how to put it. I’ve
got kids that
enjoy
stealing. I’ve got kids that don’t think about stealing one way or another, and I’ve
got kids that just
tolerate
stealing because they know they’ve got nothing else to do. But nobody—and I mean
nobody
—has ever been hungry for it like this boy. If he had a bloody gash across his throat
and a physiker was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and
die laughing. He … steals
too much
.”
“Steals too much,” the Eyeless Priest mused. “Of all the complaints I never thought
I’d hear from a man who trains little thieves for a living.”
“Laugh now,” the Thiefmaker said. “Here’s the kicker.”
MONTHS PASSED. Parthis became Festal became Aurim, and the misty squalls of summer
gave way to the harder, driving rains of winter. The Seventy-seventh Year of Gandolo
became the Seventy-seventh Year of Morgante, the City Father, Lord of Noose and Trowel.
Eight of the thirty-one Catchfire orphans, somewhat less than adept at the Thiefmaker’s
delicate
and
interesting
tasks, swung from the Black Bridge before the Palace of Patience. So it went; the
survivors were too preoccupied with their own delicate and interesting tasks to care.
The society of Shades’ Hill, as Locke soon discovered, was firmly divided into two
tribes: Streets and Windows. The latter was a smaller, more exclusive group that did
all of its earning after sunset. They crept across roofs and down chimneys, picked
locks and slid through barred embrasures, and would steal everything from coins and
jewelry to blocks of lard in untended pantries.
The boys and girls of Streets, on the other hand, prowled Camorr’s alleys and cobbles
and canal-bridges by day, working in teams. Older and more experienced children (clutchers)
worked at the actual pockets and purses and merchant stalls, while the younger and
less capable (teasers) arranged distractions—crying for nonexistent mothers, or feigning
illness, or rushing madly around crying “Stop! Thief!” in every direction while the
clutchers made off with their prizes.
Each orphan was shaken down by an older or larger child after returning to the graveyard
from any visit outside; anything stolen or gathered was passed through the hierarchy
of bruisers and bullies until it reached the Thiefmaker, who ticked off names on an
eerily accurate mental list as the day’s catch came in. Those who produced got to
eat; those who didn’t got to practice twice as hard that evening.
Night after night, the Thiefmaker would parade around the warrens of Shades’ Hill
laden down with money pouches, silk handkerchiefs, necklaces, metal coat buttons,
and a dozen other sorts of valuable oddments. His wards would strike at him from concealment
or by feigned accident; those he spotted or felt in the act were immediately punished.
The Thiefmaker preferred not to beat the losers of these training games (though he
could work a mean switch when the mood was upon him); rather, they were forced to
drink from a flask of unalloyed ginger oil while their peers gathered around and chanted
derisively. Camorri ginger oil is rough stuff, not entirely incomparable (as the Thiefmaker
himself opined) to swallowing the smoldering ashes of poison oak.
Those who wouldn’t open their mouths had it poured into their noses while older children
held them upside down. This never had to happen twice to anyone.
In time, even those with ginger-scalded tongues and swollen throats learned the rudiments
of coat-teasing and “borrowing” from the wares of unwary merchants. The Thiefmaker
enthusiastically instructed them in the architecture of doublets, waistcoats, frock
coats, and belt pouches, keeping up with all the latest fashions as they came off
the docks. His
wards learned what could be cut away, what could be torn away, and what must be teased
out with deft fingers.
“The point, my loves, is not to hump the subject’s leg like a dog or clutch their
hand like a lost babe. Half a second of actual contact with the subject is often too
long by far.” The Thiefmaker mimed a noose going around his neck and let his tongue
bulge out past his teeth. “You will live or die by three sacred rules: First, always
ensure that the subject is nicely distracted, either by your teasers or by some convenient
bit of unrelated bum-fuckery, like a fight or a house fire. House fires are
marvelous
for our purposes; cherish them. Second, minimize—and I damn well mean
minimize
—contact with the subject even when they are distracted.” He released himself from
his invisible noose and grinned slyly. “Lastly, once you’ve done your business, clear
the vicinity even if the subject is as dumb as a box of hammers. What did I teach
you?”
“Clutch once, then run,” his students chanted. “Clutch twice, get hung!”
New orphans came in by ones and twos; older children seemed to leave the hill every
few weeks with little ceremony. Locke presumed that this was evidence of some category
of discipline well beyond ginger oil, but he never asked, as he was too low in the
hill’s pecking order to risk it or trust the answers he would get.
As for his own training, Locke went to Streets the day after he arrived, and was immediately
thrown in with the teasers (punitively, he suspected). By the end of his second month,
his skills had secured him elevation to the ranks of the clutchers. This was considered
a step up in social status, but Lamora alone in the entire hill seemed to prefer working
with the teasers long after he was entitled to stop.
He was sullen and friendless inside the hill, but teasing brought him to life. He
perfected the use of over-chewed orange pulp as a substitute for vomit; where other
teasers would simply clutch their stomachs and moan, Locke would season his performances
by spewing a mouthful of warm white-and-orange slop at the feet of his intended audience
(or, if he was in a particularly perverse mood, all over their dress hems or leggings).
Another favorite device of his was a long dry twig concealed in one leg of his breeches
and tied to his ankle. By rapidly going down to his knees, he could snap this twig
with an audible noise; this, followed by a piercing wail, was an effective magnet
for attention and sympathy, especially in the immediate vicinity of a wagon wheel.
When he’d teased the crowd long enough, he would be rescued from further attention
by the arrival of several other
teasers, who would loudly announce that they were “dragging him home to Mother” so
he could see a physiker. His ability to walk would be miraculously recovered just
as soon as he was hauled around a corner.
In fact, he worked up a repertoire of artful teases so rapidly that the Thiefmaker
had cause to take him aside for a second private conversation—this after Locke arranged
the inconvenient public collapse of a young lady’s skirt and bodice with a few swift
strokes of a finger-knife.
“Look here, Locke-after-your-father Lamora,” the Thiefmaker said, “no ginger oil this
time, I assure you, but I would
greatly
prefer your teases to veer sharply from the entertaining and back to the practical.”