Authors: Scott Lynch
“There’s nothing to forgive.” Locke spoke as though the sound of his own voice pained
him. “It was a trap. It had your name on it, that thing the mage left for us. They
guessed you’d be coming back.”
“A … a severed hand? A human hand, with my name stitched into it?”
“Yes.”
“A Hanged Man’s Grasp,” said Jean, staring at the fragments of flesh, and at the bodies
of the Sanzas. “I … read about them, when I was younger. Seems they work.”
“Neatly removing you from the situation,” said Locke, coldly. “So one assassin hiding
up above could come down, kill Bug, and finish you.”
“Just one?”
“Just one.” Locke sighed. “Jean. In the temple rooms up above. Our lamp oil … please
fetch it down.”
“Lamp oil?”
“All of it,” said Locke. “Hurry.”
Jean paused in the kitchen, knelt, and slid Bug’s eyes closed with his left hand.
He buried his face in his hands and shook, making no noise. Then he stumbled back
to his feet, wiping away tears, and ran off to carry out Locke’s request.
Locke walked slowly back into the kitchen, dragging the body of Calo Sanza with him.
He placed the corpse beside the table, folded its arms across its chest, knelt, and
kissed its forehead.
The man in the corner moaned and moved his head. Locke kicked him once in the face,
then returned to the Wardrobe for Galdo’s body. In short order, he had the Sanzas
laid out neatly in the middle of the ransacked kitchen, with Bug beside them. Unable
to bear the glassy stare of his dead friends’ eyes, Locke covered them with silk tablecloths
from a smashed cabinet.
“I promise you a death-offering, brothers,” Locke whispered when he’d finished. “I
promise you an offering that will make the gods themselves take notice. An offering
that will make the shades of all the dukes and capas of Camorr feel like paupers.
An offering in blood and gold and fire. This I swear by Aza Guilla who gathers us,
and by Perelandro who sheltered us, and by the Crooked Warden who places his finger
on the scale when our souls are weighed. This I swear to Chains, who kept us safe.
I beg your forgiveness that I failed to do the same.”
Locke forced himself to stand up and return to work.
A few old garments had been thrown into the Wardrobe corners; Locke gathered them
up, along with a few components from the spilled Masque Box: a handful of false moustaches,
a bit of false beard, and some stage adhesive. These he threw into the entrance corridor
to the burrow; then he peeked into the vault. As he’d suspected, it was utterly empty.
Not a single
coin remained in any well or on any shelf. No doubt the sacks loaded onto the wagon
earlier had vanished as well.
From the sleeping quarters at the back of the burrow, he gathered sheets and blankets,
then parchment, books, and scrolls. He threw these into a heap atop the dining room
table. At last, he stood over the Gray King’s assassin, his hands and clothes covered
in blood, and waited for Jean to return.
“WAKE UP,” said Locke. “I know you can hear me.”
The Gray King’s assassin blinked, spat blood, and tried to push himself even farther
back into the corner with his feet.
Locke stared down at him. It was a curious reversal of the natural way of things.
The assassin was well muscled, a head taller than Locke, and Locke was particularly
unimposing after the events of this night. But everything frightening about him was
concentrated in his eyes, and they bore down on the assassin with a bright, hard hatred.
Jean stood a few paces behind him, a bag over his shoulder, his hatchets tucked into
his belt.
“Do you want to live?” asked Locke.
The assassin said nothing.
“It was a simple question, and I won’t repeat it again.
Do you want to live?
”
“I … yes,” the man said softly.
“Then it pleases me to deny you your preference.” Locke knelt beside him, reached
beneath his own undertunic, and drew forth a little leather pouch that hung by a cord
around his neck.
“Once,” said Locke, “when I was old enough to understand what I’d done, I was ashamed
to be a murderer. Even after I’d paid the debt, I still wore this. All these years,
to remind me.”
He pulled the pouch forward, snapping the cord. He opened it and removed a single
small white shark’s tooth. He grabbed the assassin’s right hand, placed the pouch
and the tooth on his palm, and then squeezed the man’s broken fingers together around
them. The assassin writhed and screamed. Locke punched him.
“But now,” he said, “now, I’ll be a murderer once again. I will set myself to slay
until every last Gray King’s man is gone. You hear me, cocksucker? I will have the
Bondsmage and I will have the Gray King, and if all
the powers of Camorr and Karthain and Hell itself oppose me, it will be
nothing
—nothing but a longer trail of corpses between me and your master.”
“You’re mad,” the assassin whispered. “You’ll never beat the Gray King.”
“I’ll do more than that. Whatever he’s planning, I will
unmake
it. Whatever he desires, I will
destroy
it. Every reason you came down here to murder my friends will evaporate. Every Gray
King’s man will die for nothing, starting with you.”
Jean Tannen stepped forward and grabbed the assassin with one hand, hauling him to
his knees. Jean dragged him into the kitchen, oblivious to the man’s pleas for mercy.
The assassin was flung against the table, beside the three covered bodies and the
pile of cloth and paper, and he became aware of the cloying smell of lamp oil.
Without a word, Jean brought the ball of one of his hatchets down on the assassin’s
right knee; the man howled. Another swift crack shattered his left kneecap, and the
assassin rolled over to shield himself from further blows—but none fell.
“When you see the Crooked Warden,” said Locke, twisting something in his hands, “tell
him that Locke Lamora learns slowly, but he learns well. And when you see my friends,
you tell them that there are
more of you on the way
.”
He opened his hands and let an object fall to the ground. It was a piece of knotted
cord, charcoal gray, with white filaments jutting out from one end. Alchemical twist-match.
When the white threads were exposed to air for several moments, they would spark,
igniting the heavier, longer-burning gray cord they were wrapped in. It splashed into
the edge of a pool of lamp oil.
Locke and Jean went up through the concealed hatch into the old stone temple, letting
the ladder cover fall shut with a bang behind them.
In the glass burrow beneath their feet, the flames began to rise.
First the flames, and then the screams.
Handball is a Therin pastime, as cherished by the people of the southern city-states
as it is scorned by the Vadrans in their kingdom to the north (although Vadrans in
the south seem to love it well enough). Scholars belittle the idea that the game had
its origin in the era of the Therin Throne, when the mad emperor Sartirana would amuse
himself by bowling with the severed heads of executed prisoners. They do not, however,
deny it out of hand, for it is rarely wise to underestimate the Therin Throne’s excesses
without the very firmest sort of proof.
Handball is a rough sport for the rough classes, played between two teams on any reasonably
flat surface that can be found. The ball itself is a rubbery mass of tree latex and
leather about six inches wide. The field is somewhere between twenty and thirty yards
long, with straight lines marked (usually with chalk) at either end. Each team tries
to move the ball across the other side’s goal line. The ball must be held in both
hands of a player as he runs, steps, or dives across the end of the field.
The ball may be passed freely from player to player, but it must not be touched with
any part of the body below the waist, and it must not be allowed to touch the ground,
or possession will revert to the other team. A neutral adjudicator, referred to as
the “Justice,” attempts to enforce the rules at any given match, with varying degrees
of success.
Matches are sometimes played between teams representing entire neighborhoods or islands
in Camorr; and the drinking, wagering, and brawling surrounding these affairs always
starts several days beforehand and ends when the match is but a memory. Indeed, the
match is frequently an island of relative calm and goodwill in a sea of chaos.
It is said that once, in the reign of the first Duke Andrakana, a match was arranged
between the Cauldron and Catchfire. One young fisherman, Markos, was reckoned the
finest handballer in the Cauldron, while his closest friend Gervain was thought of
as the best and fairest handball Justice in the entire city. Naturally, the adjudication
of the match was given over to Gervain.
The match was held in one of the dusty, abandoned public squares of the Ashfall district
with a thousand screaming, barely sober spectators from each side crowding the wrecked
houses and alleys that surrounded the square. It was a bitter contest, close-fought
all the way. At the very end, the Cauldron was behind by one point, with the final
sands trickling out of the hourglass that kept the game’s time.
Markos, bellowing madly, took the ball in his hands and bashed his way through an
entire line of Catchfire defenders. With one eye blackened, his hands bruised purple,
blood streaming on his elbows and knees, he flung himself desperately for the goal
line as the very last second of the game fell away.
Markos lay upon the stones, his arms at full extension, with the ball touching but
not quite crossing the chalked line. Gervain pushed aside the crowding players, stared
down at Markos for a few seconds, and then said, “Not across the line. No point.”
The riot and the celebration that broke out afterward were indistinguishable from
one another. Some say the yellowjackets killed a dozen men while battling it back;
others say it was closer to a hundred. At least three of the city’s capas died in
a little war that broke out over reneged bets, and Markos vowed never to speak to
Gervain again. The two had fished together on the same boat since boyhood; now the
Cauldron as a whole warned Gervain’s entire family that their lives wouldn’t be worth
sausage casings if any one of them set foot in that district, ever again.
Twenty years passed, thirty, thirty-five. The first Duke Nicovante rose to eminence
in the city. Markos and Gervain saw nothing of one another during this time. Gervain
traveled to Jeresh for many years, where he rowed galleys and hunted devilfish for
pay. Eventually, homesick, he took passage for Camorr. At the dockside, he was astounded
to see a man stepping
off a little fishing boat—a man weathered and gray and bearded just like himself,
but certainly none other than his old friend Markos.
“Markos,” he cried. “Markos, from the Cauldron! Markos! The gods are kind! Surely
you remember me?”
Markos turned to regard the traveler who stood before him; he stared for a few seconds.
Then, without warning, he drew a long-bladed fisherman’s knife from his belt and buried
it, up to the hilt, in Gervain’s stomach. As Gervain stared downward in shock, Markos
gave him a shove sideways, and the former handball Justice fell into the water of
Camorr Bay, never to surface again.
“Not across the line, my
ass
,” Markos spat.
Verrari, Karthani, and Lashani nod knowingly when they hear this story. They assume
it to be apocryphal, but it confirms something they claim to know in their hearts—that
Camorri are all gods-damned crazy.
Camorri, on the other hand, regard it as a valuable reminder against procrastinating
in matters of revenge—or, if one cannot take satisfaction immediately, on the virtue
of having a long memory.
THEY HAD TO steal another little boat, Locke having so profligately disposed of their
first. On any other night, he would have had a good laugh.
And so would Bug, and Calo, and Galdo, he told himself.
Locke and Jean drifted south between the Narrows and the Mara Camorrazza, hunched
over in old cloaks from the floor of the Wardrobe, locked away from the rest of the
city in the mist. The soft flickering lights and murmuring voices in the distance
seemed to Locke as artifacts of an alien life he’d left long ago, not elements of
the city he’d lived in for as long as he could remember.
“I am such a fool,” he muttered. He lay along a gunwale, aching, feeling the dry heaves
rise up again from the battered pit of his stomach.
“If you say that one more time,” said Jean, “I will throw you into the water and row
the boat over your head.”
“I should have let us run.”
“Perhaps,” said Jean. “But perhaps not everything miserable that happens to us stems
directly from one of your choices, brother. Perhaps bad tidings come regardless of
what we do. Perhaps if we’d run, that Bondsmage would have hunted us down upon the
road, and scattered our bones somewhere between here and Talisham.”
“And yet …”
“We live,” said Jean forcefully. “We live and we may avenge them. You had the right
idea when you did for that Gray King’s man back in the burrow. The questions now are
why
, and
what next
? Quit acting like you’ve been breathing Wraithstone smoke. I need your wits, Locke.
I need the Thorn of Camorr.”
“Let me know when you find him. He’s a fucking fairy tale.”
“No, he’s sitting here in this boat with me. If you’re not him now, you must
become
him. The Thorn is the man who can beat the Gray King. I can’t do it alone; I know
that much. Why would the Gray King do this to us? What does it bring him? Think, damn
it!”
“Too much to guess at,” said Locke. His voice regained a bit of its vigor as he pondered.
“But … narrow the question. Consider the means. We saw one of his men beneath the
temple; I saw another man when I was taken for the first time. So we know he had at
least two working for him, in addition to the Bondsmage.”