Authors: Scott Lynch
Locke sighed. He paused for a moment in the doorway and stared back
at Capa Raza and the Falconer. The Bondsmage seemed to stare right back at him, and
for the tiniest instant Locke’s heart raced, but the sorcerer said nothing and did
nothing. He merely continued to stand watch over the ritual as Capa Raza’s new subjects
kissed his ring. Vestris yawned, snapping her beak briefly open, as though the affairs
of the unwinged bored her terribly. Locke hurried out.
All the guards who watched the revelers as they left the galleon and filed up the
walkway toward the quay were Raza’s men; they hadn’t bothered to move the bodies that
lay on the ground at their feet. Some merely stared coldly; others nodded companionably.
Locke recognized more than a few of them.
“Three nights, ladies and gents, three nights,” said one. “Tell your friends. You’re
Capa Raza’s now. No need to be alarmed; just do as you’ve always done.”
So now we have some answers
, thought Locke.
Forgive me again, Nazca. I couldn’t have done anything even if I’d had the courage
to try.
He clutched his aching stomach as he shambled along, head down. No guard spared a
second glance for the skinny, bearded, dirty old beggar; there were a thousand in
Camorr just like him, a thousand interchangeable losers, hopeless and penniless at
the very bottom of the many levels of misery the underworld had to offer.
Now to hide. And to plan.
“Please yourself with what you’ve stolen tonight, you son of a bitch,” Locke whispered
to himself when he’d made his way past the last of Raza’s guards. “Please yourself
very well. I want to see the loss in your eyes when I put the fucking dagger in your
heart.”
BUT ONE can only get so far on thoughts of vengeance alone. The sharp pains in his
stomach started up again about halfway through his slow, lonely walk to the Ashfall
district.
His stomach ached and churned and growled. The night seemed to turn darker around
him, and the narrow, fog-softened city horizons tilted strangely, as though he were
drunk. Locke staggered and clutched at his chest, sweating and mumbling.
“Damned Gazer,” said a voice from the darkness. “Probably chasing dragons and rainbows
and the lost treasure of Camorr.” Laughter followed this, and Locke stumbled on, anxious
to avoid becoming a target for
mischief. He’d never felt such weariness. It was as though his vigor had burned down
to a pile of embers within him, fading and cooling and graying with every passing
second.
Ashfall, never hospitable, was a hellish conglomeration of shadow-shapes to Locke’s
decreasing concentration. He was breathing heavily, and sweating rivers. It felt as
though someone were steadily packing more and more dry cotton in behind his eyeballs.
His feet grew heavier and heavier; he urged them forward, one scraping step after
another, on into the darkness and the jagged looming shadows of collapsed buildings.
Unseen things skittered in the night; unseen watchers murmured at his passing.
“What the … gods, I … must … Jean,” he mumbled as he tripped against a man-sized chunk
of fallen masonry and sprawled in the dusty shadows behind it. The place smelled of
limestone and cookfires and urine. He lacked the strength to push himself back up.
“Jean,” he gasped, one last time; then he fell forward onto his face, unconscious
even before his head struck the ground.
THE LIGHTS became visible in the third hour of the morning, perhaps a mile out to
sea due south of the Dregs, where a nucleus of greater darkness slid low against the
water, tacking slowly and gracelessly. The ship’s ghostly white sails flapped in the
breezes as it made its way toward the Old Harbor; the bored watch in the three-story
tower at the tip of the South Needle were the first to spot it.
“Right sloppy sailor, that one,” said the younger watchman, looking-glass in hand.
“Probably Verrari,” muttered the senior, who was methodically torturing a piece of
ivory with a slender carving knife. He wanted it to come out like a sculpted terrace
he’d seen at the Temple of Iono, alive with lovely relief and fantastical representations
of drowned men taken by the Lord of the Grasping Waters. What he seemed to be producing
more closely resembled a lump of white dogshit, life-size. “Sooner trust a sailing
ship to a blind drunkard with no hands than a Verrari.”
Nothing else the vessel did warranted much attention until the lights suddenly appeared,
and their deep yellow glow could be seen rippling on the dark surface of the water.
“Yellow lights, sergeant,” said the younger watchman. “Yellow lights.”
“What?” The older man set down his piece of ivory, plucked the spyglass
from the younger man’s hands, and gave the incoming ship a good long stare. “Shit.
Yellow it is.”
“A plague ship,” whispered the other watchman. “I’ve never seen one.”
“Either it’s a plague ship, or some bum-fancier from Jerem who don’t know proper colors
for harbor lights.” He slid the spyglass casing shut and stepped over to a brass cylinder,
mounted sideways on the rim of the watch station’s western wall, pointed toward the
softly lit towers on the shore of the Arsenal District. “Ring the bell, boy. Ring
the damn bell.”
The younger watchman reached over the other side of the little tower’s parapet to
grasp a rope that dangled there. He began ringing the station’s heavy brass bell,
a steady repetition of two pulls: ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding.
Flickering blue light flashed out from one of the Arsenal towers. The watch-sergeant
worked the knob on the brass cylinder, turning the shutters that concealed the light
of the unusually powerful alchemical globe within the cylinder. There was a list of
simple messages he could flash to the Arsenal stations; they would flash it in turn
to other ready sets of eyes. With luck, it might reach the Palace of Patience, or
even Raven’s Reach, within two minutes.
Some time did pass; the plague ship grew larger and more distinct.
“Come on, half-wits,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Rouse yourselves. Quit pulling
that damn bell, boy. I think we’ve been heard.”
Echoing across the mist-shrouded city came the high whistles of the Quarantine Guard.
This noise was joined in short order by the rattle of drums: a night-muster of yellowjackets.
Bright white lights flared to life in the towers of the Arsenal, and the watch-sergeant
could see the tiny black shapes of men running along the waterfront.
“Oh, now we’ll see something,” he muttered. More lights appeared to the northeast;
little towers dotted the South Needle and the Dregs, overlooking the Old Harbor, where
Camorr set its plague anchorage by law and custom. Each little tower held a stone-throwing
engine that could reach out across the water with fifty-pound loads of rock or fire-oil.
The plague anchorage was one hundred and fifty yards south of the Dregs, directly
over sixty fathoms of water, well within the throwing arcs of a dozen engines that
could sink or burn anything afloat in minutes.
A galley was sliding out of the Arsenal gate, between the brightly lit towers—one
of the swift little patrol vessels called “gulls,” for the winglike sweep of their
oars. A gull carried twenty oars on a side, rowed by eighty paid men; on its deck
it carried forty swordsmen, forty archers, and a pair
of the heavy bolt-throwers called
scorpia
. It had no provisions for cargo and only one mast with a simple, furled sail. It
was meant to do just one thing—close with any ship that threatened the city of Camorr
and kill every man aboard, if its warnings were not heeded.
Smaller boats were putting out from the northern edge of the South Needle; harbor
pilots and crews of yellowjackets, with red and white lanterns blazing at their prows.
On the opposite side of the long breakwater, the gull was just getting up to speed;
the rows of graceful oars dipped and cut white froth in the black sea. A trail of
rippling wake grew behind the galley; a drumbeat could be heard echoing across the
water, along with the shouts of orders.
“Close, close,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Going to be close. That poor bastard
don’t sail well; might have to get a stone across the bows before she slows up.”
A few small dark shapes could be seen moving against the pale billow of the plague
ship’s sails; too few, it seemed, to work them properly. Yet as the vessel slid into
Old Harbor, it began to show signs of slowing down. Its topsails were drawn up, albeit
in a laggardly and lubberly fashion. The remaining sails were braced so as to spill
the ship’s wind. They slackened, and with the creak of rope pulleys and the muted
shouts of orders, they too began to draw up toward the yards.
“Oh, she’s got fine lines,” mused the watch-sergeant. “Fine lines.”
“That’s not a galleon,” said the younger watchman.
“Looks like one of those flush-deckers they were supposed to be building up in Emberlain;
frigate-fashion, I think they call it.”
The plague ship wasn’t black from the darkness alone; it was lacquered black, and
ornamented from bow to stern with witchwood filigree. There were no weapons to be
seen.
“Crazy northerners. Even their ships have to be black. But she does look damn fine;
fast, I’ll bet. What a heap of shit to fall into; now she’ll be stuck at quarantine
for weeks. Poor bastards’ll be lucky to live.”
The gull rounded the point of the South Needle, oars biting hard into the water. By
the galley’s running lamps, the two watchmen could see that the
scorpia
were loaded and fully manned; that the archers stood on their raised platforms with
longbows in hand, fidgeting nervously.
A few minutes later the gull pulled abreast with the black ship, which had drifted
in to a point about four hundred yards offshore. An officer strode out onto the gull’s
long bow spar, and put a speaking trumpet to his mouth.
“What vessel?”
“
Satisfaction
; Emberlain,” came a return shout.
“Last port of call?”
“Jerem!”
“Ain’t that pretty,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Poor bastards might have anything.”
“What is your cargo?” asked the officer on the gull.
“Ship’s provisions only; we were to take cargo in Ashmere.”
“Complement?”
“Sixty-eight; twenty now dead.”
“You fly the plague lights in real need, then?”
“Yes, for the love of the gods. We don’t know what it is.… The men are burning with
fever. The captain is dead and the physiker died yesterday! We beg assistance.”
“You may have a plague anchorage,” shouted the Camorri officer. “You must not approach
our shore closer than one hundred and fifty yards, or you will be sunk. Any boats
put out will be sunk or burned. Any man who attempts to swim to shore will be shot
down—assuming he makes it past the sharks.”
“Please, send us a physiker. Send us alchemists, for the love of the gods!”
“You may not throw corpses overboard,” continued the officer. “You must keep them
on board. Any packages or objects somehow conveyed to shore from your vessel will
be burnt without examination. Any attempt to make such conveyance will be grounds
for burning or sinking. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but please, is there nothing else you can do?”
“You may have priests on shore, and you may have freshwater and charitable provisions
sent forth by rope from the dockside—these ropes to be sent out by boat from shore,
and to be cut after use if necessary.”
“And nothing else?”
“You may not approach our shore, on pain of attack, but you may turn and leave at
will. May Aza Guilla and Iono aid you in your time of need; I pray mercy for you,
and wish you a swift deliverance in the name of Duke Nicovante of Camorr.”
A few minutes later the sleek black ship settled into its plague anchorage with furled
sails, yellow lights gleaming above the black water of the Old Harbor, and there it
rocked, gently, as the city slept in silver mists.
Jean Tannen entered the service of the Death Goddess about half a year after Locke
returned from his sojourn in the priesthood of Nara, with the usual instructions to
learn what he could and then return home in five or six months. He used the assumed
name Tavrin Callas, and he traveled south from Camorr for more than a week to reach
the great temple of Aza Guilla known as Revelation House.
Unlike the other eleven (or twelve) orders of Therin clergy, the servants of Aza Guilla
began their initiation in only one place. The coastal highlands that rose south of
Talisham ended at vast, straight white cliffs that fell three or four hundred feet
to the crashing waves of the Iron Sea. Revelation House was carved from one of these
cliffs, facing out to sea, on a scale that recalled the work of the Eldren but was
accomplished—gradually and painstakingly, in an ongoing process—solely with human
arts.
Picture a number of deep rectangular galleries, dug straight back into the cliff,
connected solely by exterior means. To get anywhere in Revelation House, one had to
venture outside, onto the walkways, stairs, and carved stone ladders, regardless of
the weather or the time of day. Safety rails were unknown to Revelation House; initiates
and teachers alike scuttled along in light or darkness, in rain or bright clear skies,
with no barrier between
themselves and a plunge to the sea save their own confidence and good fortune.
Twelve tall excised columns to the west of Revelation House held brass bells at the
top; these open-faced rock tubes, about six feet deep and seventy feet high, had slender
hand- and footholds carved into their rear walls. At dawn and dusk, initiates were
expected to climb them and ensure that each bell was rung twelve times, once for each
god in the pantheon. The carillon was always somewhat ragged; when Jean thought he
could get away with it, he rang his own bell thirteen times.