The Gentleman Bastard Series 3-Book Bundle: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, The Republic of Thieves (58 page)

Three initiates plunged to their deaths attempting to perform this ritual before Jean
had passed his first month at the temple. This number struck him as surprisingly low,
given how many of the devotional duties of Aza Guilla’s new servants (not to mention
the architecture of their home) were clearly designed to encourage premature meetings
with the Death Goddess.

“We are concerned here with death considered in two aspects: Death the Transition
and Death Everlasting,” said one of their lecturers, an elderly priestess with three
braided silver collars at the neck of her black robe. “Death Everlasting is the realm
of the Lady Most Kind; it is a mystery not intended for penetration or comprehension
from our side of the Lady’s shroud. Death the Transition, therefore, is the sole means
by which we may achieve a greater understanding of her dark majesty.

“Your time here in Revelation House will bring you close to Death the Transition on
many occasions, and it is a certainty that some of you will pass beyond before you
finish your initiation. This may be achieved through inattentiveness, lassitude, ill
fortune, or the inscrutable will of the Lady Most Kind herself. As initiates of the
Lady, you will be exposed to Death the Transition and its consequences for the rest
of your lives. You must grow accustomed to it. It is natural for living flesh to recoil
from the presence of death, and from thoughts of death. Your discipline must overcome
what is natural.”

AS WITH most Therin temples, initiates of the First Inner Mystery were mostly expected
to train their scribing, sums, and rhetoric to the point that they could enter higher
levels of study without distracting more advanced initiates. Jean, with his advantages
in age and training, was
inducted into the Second Inner Mystery a bare month and a half after arrival.

“Henceforth,” said the priest conducting the ceremony, “you will conceal your faces.
You will have no features of boy or girl, man or woman. The priesthood of the Lady
Most Kind has only one face, and that face is inscrutable. We must not be seen as
individuals, as fellow men and women. The office of the Death Goddess’ servants must
disquiet
if those we minister to are to compose their thoughts to her properly.”

The Sorrowful Visage was the silver mask of the order of Aza Guilla; for initiates,
it bore a crude resemblance to a human face, with a rough indentation for the nose
and holes for the eyes and mouth. For full priests, it was a slightly ovoid hemisphere
of fine silver mesh. Jean donned his Sorrowful Visage, eager to get to work cataloguing
more secrets of the order, only to discover that his duties were little changed from
his month as an initiate of the First Inner Mystery. He still carried messages and
scribed scrolls, swept floors and scoured the kitchens, still scurried up and down
the precarious rock ladders beneath the Bells of the Twelve, with the unfriendly sea
crashing far below and the wind tugging at his robes.

Only now he had the honor of doing all these things in his silver mask, with his peripheral
vision partly blocked. Two more initiates of the Second Inner Mystery fell to a firsthand
acquaintance with Death the Transition shortly after Jean’s elevation.

About a month after that, Jean was poisoned for the first time.

“CLOSER AND closer,” said the priestess, whose voice seemed muffled and distant. “Closer
and closer to Death the Transition, to the very edge of the mystery—feel your limbs
growing cold. Feel your thoughts slowing. Feel the beating of your heart growing sluggish.
The warm humors are banking down; the fire of life is fading.”

She had given them some sort of green wine, a poison that Jean could not identify;
each of the dozen initiates of the Second Inner Mystery in his morning class lay prostrated
and twitching feebly, their silver masks staring fixedly upward, as they could no
longer move their necks.

Their instructor hadn’t quite managed to explain what the wine would do before she
ordered them to drink it; Jean suspected that the willingness of the initiates around
him to dance gaily on the edge of Death the Transition was still more theory than
actuality.

Of course, look who knows so much better
, he thought to himself as he marveled at how tingly and distant his legs had become.
Crooked Warden … this priesthood is crazy. Give me strength to live, and I’ll return
to the Gentlemen Bastards … where life makes sense.

Yes, where he lived in a secret Elderglass cellar beneath a rotting temple, pretending
to be a priest of Perelandro while taking weapons lessons from the duke’s personal
swordmaster. Perhaps a bit drunk on whatever drug was having its way with him, Jean
giggled.

The sound seemed to echo and reverberate in the low-ceilinged study hall; the priestess
turned slowly. The Sorrowful Visage concealed her true expression, but in his drug-hazed
mind Jean was certain he could feel her burning stare.

“An insight, Tavrin?”

He couldn’t help himself; he giggled again. The poison seemed to be making merry with
the tight-lipped inhibition he’d feigned since arriving at the temple. “I saw my parents
burn to death,” he said. “I saw my cats burn to death. Do you know the noise a cat
makes, when it burns?” Another damn giggle; he almost choked on his own spit in surprise.
“I watched and could do nothing. Do you know where to stab a man, to bring death now,
or death in a minute, or death in an hour? I do.” He would have been rolling with
laughter, if he could move his limbs; as it was, he shuddered and twitched his fingers.
“Lingering death? Two or three days of pain? I can give that, too. Ha! Death the Transition?
We’re old friends!”

The priestess’ mask fixed directly on him; she stared for several drug-lengthened
moments while Jean thought,
Oh, gods damn this stuff, I’ve really done it now
.

“Tavrin,” said the priestess, “when the effects of the emerald wine have passed, remain
here. The High Proctor will speak to you then.”

Jean lay in mingled bemusement and dread for the rest of the morning. The giggles
still came, interspersed with bouts of drunken self-loathing.
So much for a full season of work. Some false-facer I turned out to be
.

That night, much to his surprise, he was confirmed as having passed into the Third
Inner Mystery of Aza Guilla.

“I knew we could expect exceptional things from you, Callas,” said the High Proctor,
a bent old man whose voice wheezed behind his Sorrowful Visage. “First the extraordinary
diligence you showed in your mundane studies, and your rapid mastery of the exterior
rituals. Now, a vision … a
vision during your very first Anguishment. You are marked, marked! An orphan who witnessed
the death of his mother and father … You were fated to serve the Lady Most Kind.”

“What, ah, are the additional duties of an initiate of the Third Inner Mystery?”

“Why, Anguishment,” said the High Proctor. “A month of Anguishment; a month of exploration
into Death the Transition. You shall take the emerald wine once again, and then you
shall experience other means of closeness to the precipitous moment of the Lady’s
embrace. You shall hang from silk until nearly dead; you shall be exsanguinated. You
shall take up serpents, and you shall swim in the night ocean, wherein dwell many
servants of the Lady. I envy you, little brother. I envy you, newly born to our mysteries.”

Jean fled Revelation House that very night.

He packed his meager bag of belongings and raided the kitchens for food. Before entering
Revelation House, he’d buried a small bag of coins beneath a certain landmark about
a mile inland from the cliffs, near the village of Sorrow’s Ease, which supplied the
cliffside temple’s material wants. That money should suffice to get him back to Camorr.

He scrawled a note and left it on his sleeping pallet, in the fresh new solitary chamber
accorded to him for his advanced rank:

He climbed the stone stairs for the last time, as the waves crashed in the darkness
below; the soft red glow of alchemical storm-lamps guided him to the top of Revelation
House, and thence to the top of the cliffs, where he vanished unseen into the night.

“DAMN,” SAID Galdo, when Jean had finished his tale. “I’m glad I got sent to the Order
of Sendovani.”

The night of Jean’s return, after Father Chains had grilled Jean in depth on his experiences
at Revelation House, he’d let the four boys head
up to the roof with clay mugs of warm Camorri ale. They sat out beneath the stars
and the scattered silver clouds, sipping their ale with much-exaggerated casualness.
They savored the illusion that they were men, gathered of their own accord, with the
hours of the night theirs to spend entirely at their own whim.

“No shit,” said Calo. “In the Order of Gandolo, we got pastries and ale every second
week, and a copper piece every Idler’s Day, to spend as we wished. You know, for the
Lord of Coin and Commerce.”

“I’m particularly fond of our priesthood of the Benefactor,” said Locke, “since our
main duties seem to be sitting around and pretending that the Benefactor doesn’t exist.
When we’re not stealing things, that is.”

“Too right,” said Galdo. “Death-priesting is for morons.”

“But still,” asked Calo, “didn’t you wonder if they might not be right?” He sipped
his ale before continuing. “That you might really be fated to serve the Lady Most
Kind?”

“I had a long time to think about it, on the way back to Camorr,” said Jean. “And
I think they
were
right. Just maybe not the way they thought.”

“How do you mean?” The Sanzas spoke in unison, as they often did when true curiosity
seized the pair of them at once.

In reply, Jean reached behind his back, and from out of his tunic he drew a single
hatchet, a gift from Don Maranzalla. It was plain and unadorned, but well maintained
and ideally balanced for someone who’d not yet come into his full growth. Jean set
it on the stones of the temple roof and smiled.

“Oh,” said Calo and Galdo.

WHEN LOCKE AWOKE, he was lying on his back and looking up at a fading, grime-covered
mural painted on a plaster ceiling. The mural depicted carefree men and women in the
robes of the Therin Throne era, gathered around a cask of wine, with cups in their
hands and smiles on their rosy faces. Locke groaned and closed his eyes again.

“And here he is,” said an unfamiliar voice, “just as I said. It was the poultice that
answered for him; most uncommonly good physik for the enervation of the bodily channels.”

“Who the hell might you be?” Locke found himself in a profoundly undiplomatic temper.
“And where am I?”

“You’re safe, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say comfortable.” Jean Tannen rested
a hand on Locke’s left shoulder and smiled down at him. Usually rather fastidious,
he was now several days unshaven, and his face was streaked with dirt. “And some former
patients of the renowned Master Ibelius might also take issue with my pronouncement
of safety.”

Jean made a quick pair of hand gestures to Locke:
We’re safe; speak freely
.

“Tut, Jean, your little cuts are fine repayment for the work of the past few days.”
The unfamiliar voice, it seemed, came from a wrinkled, birdlike man with skin like
a weathered brown tabletop. His nervous dark eyes
peeped out from behind thick optics, thicker than any Locke had ever seen. He wore
a disreputable cotton tunic, spattered with what might have been dried sauces or dried
blood, under a mustard-yellow waistjacket in a style twenty years out of date. His
spring-coils of curly gray hair seemed to sprout straight out from the back of his
head, where they were pulled into a queue. “I have navigated your friend back to the
shores of consciousness.”

“Oh, for Perelandro’s sake, Ibelius, he didn’t have a crossbow quarrel in his brain.
He just needed to rest.”

“His warm humors were at a singularly low ebb; the channels of his frame were entirely
evacuated of vim. He was pale, unresponsive, bruised, desiccated, and malnourished.”

“Ibelius?” Locke attempted to sit up and was partially successful; Jean caught him
by the back of his shoulders and helped him the rest of the way. The room spun. “Ibelius
the dog-leech from the Redwater district?”

Dog-leeches were the medical counterparts of the black alchemists; without credentials
or a place in the formal guilds of physikers, they treated the injuries and maladies
of the Right People of Camorr. A genuine physiker might look askance at treating a
patient for an axe wound at half past the second hour of the morning, and summon the
city watch. A dog-leech would ask no questions, provided his fee was paid in advance.

The trouble with dog-leeches, of course, was that one took one’s chances with their
abilities and credentials. Some really were trained healers, fallen on hard times
or banished from the profession for crimes such as grave-robbing. Others were merely
improvisers, applying years’ worth of practical knowledge acquired tending to the
results of bar fights and muggings. A few were entirely mad, or homicidal, or—charmingly—both.

“My colleagues are dog-leeches,” sniffed Ibelius. “I am a physiker, Collegium-trained.
Your own recovery is a testament to that.”

Locke glanced around the room. He was lying (wearing nothing but a breechclout) on
a pallet in a corner of what must have been an abandoned Ashfall villa. A canvas curtain
hung over the room’s only door; two orange-white alchemical lanterns filled the space
with light. Locke’s throat was dry, his body still ached, and he smelled rather unpleasant—not
all of it was the natural odor of an unwashed man. A strange translucent residue flaked
off his stomach and sternum. He poked at it with his fingers.