Authors: Scott Lynch
“Lower your piece, for the love of the gods,” said Locke’s opponent. “We’ve been instructed
not to kill you, if we don’t have to.”
“And I’m sure you’d be honest if it were otherwise, of course,” said Locke. His smile
grew. “I make it a point never to trust men with weapons at my windpipe. Sorry.”
“Your hand will start to shake long before mine does.”
“I’ll rest the tip of my quarrel against your nose when I get tired. Who sent you
after us? What are they paying you? We’re not without funds; a happy arrangement could
be reached.”
“Actually,” said Jean, “I know who sent them.”
“Really?” Locke flicked a glance at Jean before locking eyes with his adversary once
again.
“And an arrangement has been reached, but I wouldn’t call it happy.”
“Ah … Jean, I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“No.” Jean raised one hand, palm out, to the man opposite him. He then slowly, carefully
shifted his aim to his left—until his crossbow was pointing at Locke’s head. The man
he’d previously been threatening blinked in surprise. “You’ve lost me, Locke.”
“Jean,” said Locke, the grin vanishing from his face, “this isn’t funny.”
“I agree. Hand your piece over to me.”
“Jean—”
“Hand it over now. Smartly. You there, are you some kind of moron? Get that thing
out of my face and point it at him.”
Jean’s former opponent licked his lips nervously, but didn’t move. Jean ground his
teeth together. “Look, you sponge-witted dock ape, I’m doing your job for you. Point
your crossbow at my gods-damned partner so we can get off this pier!”
“Jean, I would describe this turn of events as less than helpful,” said Locke, and
he would have said more, except that Jean’s opponent chose that moment to take Jean’s
advice.
It seemed to Locke that sweat was now veritably cascading down his face, as though
his own treacherous moisture were abandoning the premises before anything worse happened.
“There. Three on one.” Jean spat on the pier and waved toward the two assailants with
his free hand. “You gave me no choice but to cut a deal with the employer of these
gentlemen before we set out—gods damn it, you
forced me. I’m sorry. I thought they’d make contact before they drew down on us. Now
give your weapon over.”
“Jean, what the hell do you think you’re—”
“Don’t. Don’t say another fucking thing. Don’t try to finesse me; I know you too well
to let you have your say. Silence, Locke. Finger off the trigger and hand it over.”
Locke stared at the steel-tipped point of Jean’s quarrel, his mouth open in disbelief.
The world around him seemed to fade to that tiny, gleaming point, alive with the orange
reflection of the inferno blazing in the anchorage behind him. Jean would have given
him a hand signal if he were lying.… Where the hell was the hand signal?
“I don’t believe this,” he whispered. “This is impossible.”
“This is the last time I’m going to say this, Locke.” Jean ground his teeth together
and held his aim steady, directly between Locke’s eyes. “Take your finger off the
trigger and hand over your gods-damned weapon. Right now.”
“If you must play, decide upon three things at the start: the rules of the game, the
stakes, and the quitting time.”
Chinese Proverb
THE GAME WAS CAROUSEL HAZARD, the stakes were roughly half of all the wealth they
commanded in the entire world, and the plain truth was that Locke Lamora and Jean
Tannen were getting beaten like a pair of dusty carpets.
“Last offering for the fifth hand,” said the velvet-coated attendant from his podium
on the other side of the circular table. “Do the gentlemen choose to receive new cards?”
“No, no—the gentlemen choose to confer,” said Locke, leaning to his left to place
his mouth close to Jean’s ear. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “What’s your hand
look like?”
“A parched desert,” Jean murmured, casually moving his right hand up to cover his
mouth. “How’s yours?”
“A wasteland of bitter frustration.”
“Shit.”
“Have we been neglecting our prayers this week? Did one of us fart in a temple or
something?”
“I thought the expectation of losing was all part of the plan.”
“It is. I just expected we’d be able to put up a better fight than
this
.”
The attendant coughed demurely into his left hand, the card-table equivalent of slapping
Locke and Jean across the backs of their heads. Locke leaned away from Jean, tapped
his cards lightly against the lacquered surface of the table, and grinned the best
knew-what-he-was-doing sort of grin he could conjure from his facial arsenal. He sighed
inwardly, glancing
at the sizable pile of wooden markers that was about to make the short journey from
the center of the table to his opponents’ stacks.
“We are of course prepared,” he said, “to meet our fate with heroic stoicism, worthy
of mention by historians and poets.”
The dealer nodded. “Ladies and gentlemen both decline last offering. House calls for
final hands.”
There was a flurry of shuffling and discarding as the four players formed their final
hands and set them, facedown, on the table before them.
“Very well,” said the attendant. “Turn and reveal.”
The sixty or seventy of Tal Verrar’s wealthiest idlers who had crowded the room behind
them to watch every turn of Locke and Jean’s unfolding humiliation now leaned forward
as one, eager to see how embarrassed they would be this time.
TAL VERRAR, the Rose of the Gods, at the westernmost edge of what the Therin people
call the civilized world.
If you could stand in thin air a thousand yards above Tal Verrar’s tallest towers,
or float in lazy circles there like the nations of gulls that infest the city’s crevices
and rooftops, you could see how its vast dark islands have given this place its ancient
nickname. They seem to whirl outward from the city’s heart, a series of crescents
steadily increasing in size, like the stylized petals of a rose in an artist’s mosaic.
They are not natural, in the sense that the mainland looming a few miles to the northeast
is natural. The mainland cracks before wind and weather, showing its age. The islands
of Tal Verrar are unweathered, possibly unweatherable—they are the black glass of
the Eldren, unimaginable quantities of it, endlessly tiered and shot through with
passages, glazed with layers of stone and dirt from which a city of men and women
springs.
This Rose of the Gods is surrounded by an artificial reef, a broken circle three miles
in diameter, shadows under shadowed waves. Against this hidden wall the restless Sea
of Brass is gentled for the passage of vessels flying the banners of a hundred kingdoms
and dominions. Their masts and yards rise in a forest, white with furled sails, far
beneath your feet.
If you could turn your eye to the city’s western island, you would see that its interior
surfaces are sheer black walls, plunging hundreds of feet to the softly lapping harbor
waves, where a network of wooden docks clings to the base of the cliffs. The seaward
side of the island, however, is tiered
along its entire length. Six wide, flat ledges sit one atop the other with smooth
fifty-foot escarpments backing all but the highest.
The southernmost district of this island is called the Golden Steps—its six levels
are thick with alehouses, dicing dens, private clubs, brothels, and fighting pits.
The Golden Steps are heralded as the gambling capital of the Therin city-states, a
place where men and women may lose money on anything from the mildest vices to the
wickedest felonies. The authorities of Tal Verrar, in a magnanimous gesture of hospitality,
have decreed that no foreigner upon the Golden Steps may be impressed into slavery.
As a result, there are few places west of Camorr where it is safer for strangers to
drink their brains out and fall asleep in the gutters and gardens.
There is rigid stratification on the Golden Steps; with each successively higher tier,
the quality of the establishments rises, as do the size, number, and vehemence of
the guards at the doors. Crowning the Golden Steps are a dozen baroque mansions of
old stone and witchwood, embedded in the wet green luxury of manicured gardens and
miniature forests.
These are the “chance houses of quality”—exclusive clubs where men and women of funds
may gamble in the style to which their letters of credit entitle them. These houses
have been informal centers of power for centuries, where nobles, bureaucrats, merchants,
ships’ captains, legates, and spies gather to wager fortunes, both personal and political.
Every possible amenity is contained within these houses. Notable visitors board carriage-boxes
at exclusive docks at the base of the inner harbor cliffs, and are hauled up by gleaming
brass water engines, thereby avoiding the narrow, twisting, crowd-choked ramps leading
up the five lower Steps on their seaward face. There is even a public dueling green—a
broad expanse of well-kept grass lying dead-center on the top tier, so that cooler
heads need not be given any chance to prevail when someone has their blood up.
The houses of quality are sacrosanct. Custom older and firmer than law forbids soldiers
or constables to set foot within them, save for response to the most heinous crimes.
They are the envy of a continent: no foreign club, however luxurious or exclusive,
can quite recapture the particular atmosphere of a genuine Verrari chance house. And
they are, one and all, put to shame by the Sinspire.
Nearly one hundred and fifty feet tall, the Sinspire juts skyward at the southern
end of the topmost tier of the Steps, which is itself more than two hundred and fifty
feet above the harbor. The Sinspire is an Elderglass tower, glimmering with a pearly
black sheen. A wide balcony decked with alchemical lanterns circles each of its nine
levels. At night, the Sinspire is a
constellation of lights in scarlet and twilight-sky blue, the heraldic colors of Tal
Verrar.
The Sinspire is the most exclusive, most notorious, and most heavily guarded chance
house in the world, open from sunset to sunrise for those powerful, wealthy, or beautiful
enough to make it past the whims of the doorkeepers. Each ascending floor outdoes
the one beneath it for luxury, exclusivity, and the risk ceiling of the games allowed.
Access to each higher floor must be earned with good credit, amusing behavior, and
impeccable play. Some aspirants spend years of their lives and thousands of solari
trying to catch the attention of the Sinspire’s master, whose ruthless hold on his
unique position has made him the most powerful arbiter of social favor in the city’s
history.
The code of conduct at the Sinspire is unwritten, but as rigid as that of a religious
cult. Most simply, most incontrovertibly, it is death to be caught cheating here.
Were the archon of Tal Verrar himself to be detected with a card up his sleeve, he
would find no appeal this side of the gods themselves from the consequences. Every
few months, the tower’s attendants discover some would-be exception to the rule, and
yet another person dies quietly of an alchemical overdose in their carriage, or tragically
“slips” from the balcony nine stories above the hard, flat stones of the Sinspire’s
courtyard.
It has taken Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen two years and a completely new set of false
identities to carefully cheat their way up to the fifth floor.
They are, in fact, cheating at this very moment, trying hard to keep up with opponents
who have no need to do likewise.
“LADIES SHOW a run of Spires and a run of Sabers, crowned with the Sigil of the Sun,”
said the attendant. “Gentlemen show a run of Chalices and a mixed hand, crowned with
the five of Chalices. Fifth hand is to the ladies.”
Locke bit the inside of his cheek as a wave of applause rippled through the warm air
of the room. The ladies had taken four of the five hands so far, and the crowd had
barely deigned to notice Locke and Jean’s sole victory.
“Well, damn,” said Jean, in credible mock surprise.
Locke turned to the opponent on his right. Maracosa Durenna was a slender, dark-complexioned
woman in her late thirties, with thick hair the color of oil smoke and several visible
scars on her neck and forearms. In her right hand she held a thin black cigar wrapped
with gold thread, and
on her face she wore a tight smile of detached contentment. The game was clearly not
demanding her utmost exertion.
The attendant flicked Locke and Jean’s little pile of lost wooden counters toward
the ladies’ side of the table with a long-handled crop. He then used the same crop
to sweep all the cards back into his hands; it was strictly forbidden for players
to touch the cards after the attendant had called for the reveal.
“Well, Madam Durenna,” said Locke, “my congratulations on the increasingly robust
state of your finances. Your purse would seem to be the only thing growing faster
than my impending hangover.” Locke knuckle-walked one of his markers over the fingers
of his right hand. The little wooden disk was worth five solari, roughly eight months’
pay for a common laborer.
“My condolences on a particularly unfortunate run of cards, Master Kosta.” Madam Durenna
took a long drag from her cigar, then slowly exhaled a stream of smoke so that it
hung in the air between Locke and Jean, just far enough away to avoid direct insult.
Locke had come to recognize that she used the cigar smoke as her
strat péti
, her “little game”—an ostensibly civilized mannerism actually cultivated to distract
or annoy opponents at a gaming table, and goad them into mistakes. Jean had planned
to use his own cigars for the same purpose, but Durenna’s aim was better.
“No run of cards could be considered truly unfortunate in the presence of such a lovely
pair of opponents,” said Locke.