Authors: Scott Lynch
“Now wait,” said the girl. “Run your little games, and chase your little fortunes.…”
“And wait,” whispered the chorus. “Wait for our answer.”
“Wait for our time.”
“You are always in our reach,” said the little girl, “and you are always in our sight.”
“Always,” whispered the circle, slowly dispersing back to their stalls, back to the
positions they’d held just a few minutes earlier.
“You will meet misfortune,” said the little girl as she slipped away. “For the Falconer
of Karthain.”
Locke and Jean said nothing as the merchants around them resumed their places in the
Night Market, as the lanterns and barrel fires gradually rose once more to flush the
area with warm light. Then the affair was ended; the merchants resumed their former
attitudes of keen interest or watchful boredom, and the babble of conversation rose
up around them again. Locke and Jean slipped their weapons out of sight before anyone
seemed to notice them.
“Gods,” said Jean, shuddering visibly.
“I suddenly feel,” Locke said quietly, “that I didn’t drink nearly enough from that
bloody carousel.” There was mist at the edges of his vision; he put a hand to his
cheeks and was surprised to find himself crying. “Bastards,” he muttered. “Infants.
Wretched cowardly show-offs.”
“Yes,” said Jean.
Locke and Jean began to walk forward once again, glancing warily around. The little
girl who had done most of the speaking for the Bondsmagi was now sitting beside an
elderly man, sorting through little baskets of dried figs under his supervision. She
smiled shyly as they passed.
“I hate them,” whispered Locke. “I hate
this
. Do you think they’ve really got something planned for us, or was that just a put-on?”
“I suppose it works either way,” said Jean with a sigh. “Gods.
Strat péti
. Do we flinch, or do we keep betting? Worst case, we’ve got a few thousand solari
on record at the ‘Spire. We could cash out, take a ship, be gone before noon tomorrow.”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere else.”
“There’s no running from these assholes, not if they’re serious.”
“Yes, but—”
“Fuck Karthain.” Locke clenched his fists. “You know, I think I understand? I think
I understand how the Gray King could feel the way he did. I’ve never even been there,
but if I could
smash
Karthain, burn the fucking place, make the sea swallow it … I’d do it. Gods help
me, I’d do it.”
Jean suddenly came to a complete stop.
“There’s … another problem, Locke. Gods forgive me.”
“What?”
“Even if you stay … I shouldn’t. I’m the one who should be gone, as far from you as
possible.”
“What the
fuck
nonsense is this?”
“They know my name!” Jean grabbed Locke by his shoulders, and Locke winced; that stone-hard
grip didn’t agree with the old wound beneath his left clavicle. Jean immediately realized
his mistake and loosened his fingers, but his voice remained urgent. “My real name,
and they can use it. They can make me a puppet, like these poor people. I’m a threat
to you every moment I’m around you.”
“I don’t bloody well care that they know your name! Are you mad?”
“No, but you’re still drunk, and you’re not thinking straight.”
“I certainly am! Do you
want
to leave?”
“No! Gods, no, of course not! But I’m—”
“Shutting up right this second if you know what’s good for you.”
“You need to understand that you’re in danger!”
“Of course I’m in danger. I’m
mortal
. Jean, gods love you, I will
not
fucking send you away, and I will not let you send yourself away! We lost Calo, Galdo,
and Bug. If I send you away, I lose the last friend I have in the world. Who wins
then, Jean? Who’s protected
then
?”
Jean’s shoulders slumped, and Locke suddenly felt the beginning of the transition
from fading inebriation to pounding headache. He groaned.
“Jean, I will never stop feeling awful for what I put you through in Vel Virazzo.
And I will never forget how long you stayed with me when you should have tied weights
around my ankles and thrown me in the bay. Gods help me, I will
never
be better off without you. I don’t care how many Bondsmagi know your damned name.”
“I wish I could be sure you knew best about this.”
“This is our life,” said Locke. “This is our game, that we’ve put
two years
into. That’s our fortune, waiting for us to steal it at the Sinspire. That’s all
our hopes for the future. So fuck Karthain. They want to kill us, we can’t stop them.
So what else can we do? I won’t jump at shadows on account of those bastards.
On with it
! Both of us together.”
Most of the Night Market merchants had taken note of the intensity of Locke and Jean’s
private conversation, and had avoided making further pitches. But one of the last
merchants on the northern fringe of the Night Market was either less sensitive or
more desperate for a sale, and called out to them.
“Carved amusements, gentlemen? Something for a woman or a child in your lives? Something
artful from the City of Artifice?” The man had dozens of exotic little toys on an
upturned crate. His long, ragged brown
coat was lined on the inside with quilted patches in a multitude of garish colors—orange,
purple, cloth-of-silver, mustard yellow. He dangled the painted wood figure of a spear-carrying
soldier by four cords from his left hand, and with little gestures of his fingers
he made the figure thrust at an imaginary enemy. “A marionette? A little puppet, for
memory of Tal Verrar?”
Jean stared at him for a few seconds before responding. “For memory of Tal Verrar,”
he said quietly, “I would want anything, beg pardon, before I would want a puppet.”
Locke and Jean said nothing else to each other. With an ache around his heart to match
the one growing in his head, Locke followed the bigger man out of the Great Gallery
and into the Savrola, eager to be back behind high walls and locked doors, for what
little it might prove to be worth.
Locke Lamora had arrived in Vel Virazzo nearly two years earlier, wanting to die,
and Jean Tannen had been inclined to let him have his wish.
Vel Virazzo is a deepwater port about a hundred miles southeast of Tal Verrar, carved
out of the high rocky cliffs that dominate the mainland coast on the Sea of Brass.
A city of eight or nine thousand souls, it has long been a sullen tributary of the
Verrari, ruled by a governor appointed directly by the archon.
A line of narrow Elderglass spires rises two hundred feet out of the water just offshore,
one more Eldren artifact of inscrutable function on a coast thick with abandoned wonders.
The glass pylons have fifteen-foot platforms atop them and are now used as lighthouses,
manned by petty convicts. Boats will leave them to climb up the knotted rope ladders
that hang down the pylons. That accomplished, they winch up their provisions and settle
in for a few weeks of exile, tending red alchemical lamps the size of small huts.
Not all of them come back down right in the head, or live to come back down at all.
Two years before that fateful game of Carousel Hazard, a heavy galleon swept in toward
Vel Virazzo under the red glow of those offshore lights. The hands atop the galleon’s
yardarms waved, half in pity and half in jest, at the lonely figures atop the pylons.
The sun had been swallowed by thick clouds on the western horizon, and a soft, dying
light rippled across the water beneath the first stars of evening.
A warm wet breeze was blowing from shore to sea, and little threads of mist seemed
to be leaking out of the gray rocks to either side of the old port town. The galleon’s
yellowed canvas topsails were close-reefed as she prepared to lay to about half a
mile offshore. A little harbormaster’s skiff scudded out to meet the galleon, green
and white lanterns bobbing in its bow to the rhythm of the eight heaving oarsmen.
“What vessel?” The harbormaster stood up beside her bow lanterns and shouted through
a speaking trumpet from thirty yards away.
“
Golden Gain
; Tal Verrar,” came the return shout from the galleon’s waist.
“Do you wish to put in?”
“No! Passengers only, coming off by boat.”
The lower stern cabin of the
Golden Gain
smelled strongly of sweat and illness. Jean Tannen was newly returned from the upper
deck, and had lost some of his tolerance for the odor, which lent further edge to
his bad mood. He flung a patched blue tunic at Locke and folded his arms.
“For fuck’s sake,” he said, “we’re here. We’re getting off this bloody ship and back
onto good solid stone. Put the bloody tunic on; they’re lowering a boat.”
Locke shook the tunic out with his right hand and frowned. He was sitting on the edge
of a bunk, dressed only in his breeches, and was thinner and dirtier than Jean had
ever seen him. His ribs stood out beneath his pale skin like the hull timbers of an
unfinished ship. His hair was dark with grease, long and unkempt on every side, and
a fine thistle of beard fringed his face.
His upper left arm was crisscrossed with the glistening red lines of barely sealed
wounds; there was a scabbed puncture on his left forearm, and beneath that a dirty
cloth brace was wound around his wrist. His left hand was a mess of fading bruises.
A discolored bandage partially covered an ugly-looking injury on his left shoulder,
a scant few inches above his heart. Their three weeks at sea had done much to reduce
the swelling of Locke’s cheeks, lips, and broken nose, but he still looked as though
he’d tried to kiss a kicking mule. Repeatedly.
“Can I get a hand, then?”
“No, you can do it for yourself. You should’ve been exercising this past week, getting
ready. I can’t always be here to hover about like your fairy fucking nursemaid.”
“Well, let me shove a gods-damn rapier through your shoulder and wiggle it for you,
and then let’s see how keen you are to exercise.”
“I
took
my cuts, you sobbing piss-wallow, and I did exercise ’em.” Jean
lifted his own tunic; above the substantially reduced curve of his once-prodigious
belly was the fresh, livid scar of a long slash across his ribs. “I don’t care how
much it hurts; you have to move around, or they heal tight like a caulk-seal and then
you’re really in the shit.”
“So you keep telling me.” Locke threw the shirt down on the deck beside his bare feet.
“But unless that tunic animates itself, or you do the honors, it seems I go to the
boat like this.”
“Sun’s going down. Summer or not, it’s going to be cool out there. But if you want
to be an idiot, I guess you do go like that.”
“You’re a son of a bitch, Jean.”
“If you were healthy, I’d rebreak your nose for that, you self-pitying little—”
“Gentlemen?” A crew-woman’s muffled voice came through the door, followed by a loud
knock. “Captain’s compliments, and the boat is ready.”
“Thank you,” yelled Jean. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Why did I bother
saving your life, again? I could’ve brought the Gray King’s corpse. Would’ve been
better fucking company.”
“Please,” said Locke forcefully, gesturing with his good arm. “We can meet in the
middle. I’ll pull with my good arm and you handle the bad side. Get me off this ship
and I’ll get to exercising.”
“Can’t come soon enough,” said Jean, and after another moment’s hesitation he bent
down for the tunic.
JEAN’S TOLERANCE rose for a few days with their release from the wet, smelly, heaving
world of the galleon; even for paying customers, long-distance sea transit still had
more in common with a prison sentence than a vacation.
With their handful of silver volani (converted from Camorri solons at an extortionate
rate by the first mate of the
Golden Gain
, who’d argued that it was still preferable to the numismatic mugging they’d get from
the town’s moneychangers), he and Locke secured a third-floor room at the Silver Lantern,
a sagging old inn on the waterfront.
Jean immediately set about securing a source of income. If Camorr’s underworld had
been a deep lake, Vel Virazzo’s was a stagnant pond. He had little trouble sussing
out the major dockside gangs and the relationships between them. There was little
organization in Vel Virazzo, and no boss-of-bosses to screw things up. A few nights
of drinking in all the right dives, and he knew exactly who to approach.
They called themselves the Brass Coves, and they skulked about in an abandoned tannery
down on the city’s eastern docks, where the sea lapped against the pilings of rotting
piers that had seen no legitimate use in twenty years. By night, they were an active
crew of sneak-thieves, muggers, and coat-charmers. By day, they slept, diced, and
drank away most of their profits. Jean kicked in their door (though it hung loosely
in its frame, and wasn’t locked) at the second hour of the afternoon on a bright,
sunny day.
There were an even dozen of them in the old tannery, young men between the ages of
fifteen and twenty-odd. Standard membership for a local-trouble sort of gang. Those
who weren’t awake were slapped back to consciousness by their associates as Jean strolled
into the center of the tannery floor.
“Good afternoon!” He gave a slight bow, from the neck, then spread his arms wide.
“Who’s the biggest, meanest motherfucker here? Who’s the best bruiser in the Brass
Coves?”
After a few seconds of silence and surprised stares, a relatively stocky young man
with a crooked nose and a shaved head leapt down onto the dusty floor from an open
staircase. The boy walked up to Jean and smirked.
“You’re lookin’ at him.”
Jean nodded, smiled, then whipped both of his arms around so that his cupped hands
cracked against both of the boy’s ears. He staggered, and Jean took a firm hold of
his head, lacing his fingers tightly behind the rear arch of his skull. He pulled
the tough’s head sharply downward and fed him a knee—once, twice, three times. As
the boy’s face met Jean’s kneecap for the last time, Jean let go, and the tough sprawled
backward on the tannery floor, senseless as a side of cold, salted meat.