Authors: Scott Lynch
“Surely,” she began, “you’ve heard of Austershalin brandy, Doña Vorchenza?”
“More than heard of, my dear. I may even have a few bottles hidden away in my wine
cabinets.”
“And you know how it is made? The secrets surrounding it?”
“Oh, I believe I understand the essence of the Austershalin mystique. The fussy black-coated
vintners of Emberlain are, shall we say, well served by the stories surrounding their
wares.”
“Then you can understand, Doña Vorchenza, how Lorenzo and I reacted as we did when
the following opportunity supposedly fell into our laps by an act of the gods.…”
THE CAGE containing Doña Salvara creaked and rattled toward the ground, growing ever
smaller and fading into the background gray of the courtyard. Doña Vorchenza stood
by the brass rails of the embarkation platform, staring into the night for many minutes,
while her team of attendants pulled at the machinery of the capstan. Gilles wheeled
the silver cart with the near-empty pot of tea and the half-eaten Amberglass cake
past her, and she turned to him.
“No,” she said. “Send the cake up to the solarium. That’s where we’ll be.”
“Who, m’lady?”
“Reynart.” She was already striding back toward the door to her terrace-side apartments;
her slippered feet made an echoing slap-slap-slap against the walkway. “Find Reynart.
I don’t care what he’s doing. Find him and send him up to me, the moment you’ve seen
to the cake.”
Inside the suite of apartments, through a locked door, up a curving stairway … Doña
Vorchenza cursed under her breath. Her knees, her feet, her
ankles
. “Damn venerability,” she muttered. “I piss on the gods for the gift of rheumatism.”
Her breathing was ragged. She undid the buttons on the front of her fur-trimmed coat
as she continued to mount the steps.
At the top—the very peak of the inner tower—there was a heavy oaken door reinforced
with iron joints and bands. She pulled forth a key that hung around her right wrist
on a silk cord. This she inserted into the silver lockbox above the crystal knob while
carefully pressing a certain decorative brass plate in a wall sconce. A series of
clicks echoed within the walls and the door fell open, inward.
Forgetting the brass plate would be a poor idea; she’d specified a rather excessive
pull for the concealed crossbow trap, when she’d had it installed three decades earlier.
This was the solarium, then, another eight stories up from the level of the terrace.
The room took up the full diameter of the tower at its apex, fifty feet from edge
to edge. The floor was thickly carpeted. A long curving brass-railed gallery, with
stairs at either end, spread across the northern half of the space. This gallery held
a row of tall witchwood shelves divided into thousands upon thousands of cubbyholes
and compartments. The transparent hemispherical ceiling dome revealed the low clouds
like a bubbling lake of smoke. Doña Vorchenza tapped alchemical globes to bring them
to life as she mounted the stairs to her file gallery.
There she worked, engrossed, heedless of the passage of time as her narrow fingers
flicked from compartment to compartment. She pulled out some piles of parchment and
set them aside, half considered others and pushed them back in, muttering remembrances
and conjecture under her breath. She snapped out of her fugue only when the solarium
door clicked open once more.
The man who entered was tall and broad-shouldered; he had an angular
Vadran face and ice-blond hair pulled back in a ribbon-bound tail. He wore a ribbed
leather doublet over slashed black sleeves, with black breeches and tall black boots.
The little silver pins at his collar gave him the rank of captain in the Nightglass
Company; the blackjackets, the Duke’s Own. A rapier with straight quillons hung at
his right hip.
“Stephen,” said Doña Vorchenza without preamble, “have any of your boys or girls paid
a recent visit to Don and Doña Salvara, on the Isla Durona?”
“The Salvaras? No, certainly not, m’lady.”
“You’re sure?
Absolutely
sure?” Parchments in hand, eyebrows arched, she stalked down the steps, barely keeping
her balance. “I need certain truth from you right now as badly as I ever have.”
“I know the Salvaras, m’lady. I met them both at last year’s Day of Changes feast;
I rode up to the Sky Garden in the same cage with them.”
“And you haven’t sent
any
of the Midnighters to pay them a visit?”
“Twelve gods, no. Not one.”
“Then someone is abusing our good name, Stephen. And I think we may finally have the
Thorn of Camorr.”
Reynart stared at her, then grinned. “You’re joking. You’re not? Pinch me, I must
be dreaming. What’s the situation?”
“First things first; I know you think fastest when we nurse that damned sweet tooth
of yours. Peek inside the dumbwaiter; I’m going to have a seat.”
“Oh my,” said Reynart, peering into the chain-hoist shaft that held the dumbwaiter.
“It looks as though someone’s already made a merry work of this poor spice cake. I’ll
put it out of its misery. There’s wine and glasses, too—looks like one of your sweet
whites.”
“Gods bless Gilles; I’d forgotten to ask him for that, I was in such haste to get
to my files. Be a dear dutiful subordinate and pour us a glass.”
“Dear dutiful subordinate, indeed. For the cake, I’d polish your slippers as well.”
“I’ll hold that promise in reserve for the next time you vex me, Stephen. Oh, fill
the glass, I’m not thirteen years old. Now, take your seat and listen to this. If
everything signifies, as I believe it shall, the bastard has just been delivered to
us right in the middle of one of his schemes.”
“How so?”
“I’ll answer a question with a question, Stephen.” She took a deep draught of her
white wine and settled back into her chair. “Tell me, how much do you know of the
body of lore surrounding Austershalin brandy?”
“POSING AS one of us,” Reynart mused after she’d finished her tale. “The sheer fucking
cheek. But are you sure it’s the Thorn?”
“If it isn’t, then we could only presume that we now have
another
equally skilled and audacious thief picking the pockets of my peers. And I think
that’s presuming a bit much. Even for a city crammed as full of ghosts as this one.”
“Mightn’t it be the Gray King? He’s the right sort of slippery, by all reports.”
“Mmmm. No, the Gray King’s been murdering Barsavi’s men. The Thorn’s mode of operation
is plain trickery; not a drop of real blood shed yet, as near as I can tell. And I
don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
Reynart set aside his empty cake plate and took a sip from his glass of wine. “So
if we can trust Doña Salvara’s story, we’re looking at a gang of at least four men.
The Thorn himself—let’s call him Lukas Fehrwight, for the sake of argument. His servant
Graumann. And the two men who broke into the Salvara estate.”
“That’s a beginning, Stephen. But I’d say the gang is more probably five or six.”
“How do you figure?”
“I believe the false Midnighter was telling the truth when he told Don Salvara that
the attack near the Temple of Fortunate Waters was staged; it would have to be, for
a scheme this complex. So we have two more accomplices—the masked attackers.”
“Assuming they weren’t just hired for the task.”
“I doubt it. Consider the total paucity of information we’ve had previous to this:
not one report, one boast, one slender
whisper
from anyone, anywhere. Not a speck of information pointing to anyone who even claimed
to
work
with the Thorn of Camorr. Yet on any given day, thieves will boast loudly for hours
about who among them can piss the farthest. This silence is unnatural.”
“Well,” said Reynart, “if you just slit a hireling’s throat when he’s done his job,
you don’t have to pay him, either.”
“But we’re still dealing with the Thorn, and I hold that such an act would be outside
his pattern of operations.”
“So his gang runs a closed shop.… That would make sense. But it still might not be
six. The two in the alley could
also
be the two who entered the estate dressed as Midnighters.”
“Oh, my dear Stephen. An interesting conjecture. Let us say four minimum, six maximum
as our first guess, or we’ll be here all night drawing diagrams for one another. I
suspect anything larger would be difficult to hide as well as they have.”
“So be it, then.” Reynart thought for a moment. “I can give you fifteen or sixteen
swords right this very hour; some of my lads are mumming it up tonight down in the
Snare and the Cauldron, since we got those reports of Nazca Barsavi’s funeral. I can’t
pull them on short notice. But give me until the dark of the morning and I can have
everyone else kitted up and ready for a scrap. We’ve got the Nightglass to back us;
no need to even bring the yellowjackets in on it. We know they’re probably compromised
anyway.”
“That would be well, Stephen, if I wanted them snatched up right now. But I don’t.
I think we have a few days, at least, to draw the web tight around this man. Sofia
said they’d discussed an initial outlay of about twenty-five thousand crowns; I suspect
the Thorn will wait around to collect the other seven or eight he’s due.”
“At least let me hold a squad ready, then. I’ll keep them at the Palace of Patience;
tuck them in amongst the yellowjackets. They can be ready to dash off with five minutes’
notice.”
“Very prudent; do so. Now, as for how we move on the Thorn himself—send someone down
to Meraggio’s tomorrow, the subtlest you have. See if Fehrwight holds an account there,
and when it was begun.”
“Calviro. I’ll send Maraliza Calviro.”
“An excellent choice. As far as I’m concerned, anyone else this Fehrwight has introduced
the Salvaras to is suspect. Have her check up on the lawscribe she said her husband
met just after the staged attack behind the temple.”
“Eccari, wasn’t it? Evante Eccari?”
“Yes. And then I want you to check out the Temple of Fortunate Waters.”
“Me? M’lady, you of all people know I don’t keep the faith; I just inherited the looks.”
“But you can fake the faith, and it’s the looks I need. They’ll keep you from being
too suspicious. Case the place; look for anyone out of sorts. Look for gangs or goings-on.
It’s remotely possible someone at the temple was in on the staged attack. Even if
that’s not so, we need to eliminate it as a possibility.”
“It’s as good as done, then. And what about their inn?”
“The Tumblehome, yes. Send one person and one person only. I have a pair of old informants
on the staff; one of them thinks he’s reporting to the yellowjackets, and one thinks
she’s working for the capa. I’ll pass the names along. For now, I just want to find
out if they’re still there, at the Bowsprit Suite. If they are, you can place a few
of your men there dressed as staff. Observation only, for the time being.”
“Very well.” Reynart rose from his chair and brushed crumbs from his breeches. “And
the noose? Assuming you get your wish, where and when would you like to draw it tight?”
“Going after the Thorn has always been like trying to grab fish with bare hands,”
she replied. “I’ll want him sewn up somewhere, someplace where escape will be impossible,
cut off from
his
friends, and entirely surrounded by ours.”
“By ours? How …? Oh.
Oh
. Raven’s Reach!”
“Yes. Very good, Stephen. The Day of Changes, just a week and a half from now. The
duke’s midsummer feast. Five hundred feet in the air, surrounded by the peers of Camorr
and a hundred guards. I’ll instruct Doña Sofia to invite this Lukas Fehrwight to dine
with the duke, as a guest of the Salvaras.”
“Assuming he doesn’t suspect a trap …”
“I think it’s
just
the sort of gesture he’d appreciate. I think our mysterious friend’s audacity is
going to be what finally arranges our direct introduction. I shall have Sofia feign
financial distress; she can tell Fehrwight that the last few thousand crowns won’t
be forthcoming until after the festival. A double-baited hook, his greed hand in hand
with his vanity. I daresay he’ll relish the temptation.”
“Shall I pull everyone in for it?”
“Of course.” Doña Vorchenza sipped her wine and smiled slowly. “I want a Midnighter
to take his coat; I want Midnighters serving him before the meal. If he uses a chamber
pot, I want a Midnighter to close it for him afterward. We’ll take him atop Raven’s
Reach; then we’ll watch the ground to see who runs, and where they run to.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Get to it, Stephen. Come back and let me have your report in a few hours. I’ll
still be up.… I’m expecting messages from the Floating Grave once Barsavi’s funeral
procession gets back. In the meantime, I’ll send old Nicovante a note about what we
suspect.”
“Your servant, m’lady.” Reynart bowed briefly and then departed the solarium, his
strides long and rapid.
Before the heavy door had even slammed shut, Doña Vorchenza was up and moving toward
a small scrivener’s desk tucked into an alcove to the left of the door. There she
withdrew a half-sheet of parchment, scribbled a few hasty lines, folded it, and closed
the fold with a small dollop of blue wax from a paper tube. The stuff was alchemical,
hardening after a few moments of exposure to air. She preferred to allow no sources
of open flame into this room, with its many decades of carefully collected and indexed
records.
Within the desk was a signet ring that Doña Vorchenza never wore outside her solarium;
on that ring was a sigil that appeared nowhere on the crest of the Vorchenza family.
She pressed the ring into the stiffening blue wax and then withdrew it with a slight
popping noise.
When she passed it down the dumbwaiter, one of her night attendants would immediately
run to the northeastern cage platform of her tower and have himself cranked over to
Raven’s Reach via cable car. There, he would place the message directly into the old
duke’s hands, even if Nicovante had retired to his bedchamber.