Authors: Scott Lynch
Tal Verrar had no hangings, no beheadings, and none of the fights between convicted
criminals and wild animals that were popular virtually everywhere else. In Tal Verrar
those convicted of capital crimes simply vanished, along with most of the city’s garbage,
into the Midden Deep. This was an open square pit, forty feet on a side, located to
the north of the Midden of Souls. Its Elderglass walls plunged into absolute darkness,
giving no hint as to how far down they truly went. Popular lore held that it was bottomless,
and criminals prodded off the execution planks usually went screaming and pleading.
The worst rumor about the place, of course, was that those thrown down into the Deep
did
not
die … but somehow continued falling. Forever.
“Hard larboard!” cried the girl at the bow of the scull. The rowers on Jean’s left
yanked their oars out of the water and the ones on the right pulled hard, sliding
the craft just out of the way of a cargo galley crammed with fairly alarmed cattle.
A man at the side rail of the galley shook his fist down at the scull as it passed,
perhaps ten feet beneath the level of his boots.
“Get the shit out of your eyes, you undergrown cunt!”
“Go back to pleasuring your cattle, you soft-dicked cur!”
“You bitch! You cheeky bitch! Heave- to and I’ll show you who’s soft-dicked! Begging
your pardon, gracious sir.”
Seated in his thronelike chair, dressed in a velvet frock coat with enough gold fripperies
to sparkle even in the weak light of an overcast day, Jean looked very much a man
of consequence. It was important for the man on the galley to ensure that his verbal
salvoes were accurately received; while they were an accepted part of life on the
harbor in Tal Verrar, the moneyed class were always treated as though they were somehow
levitating above the water, entirely independent of the vessels and laborers carrying
them. Jean waved nonchalantly.
“I don’t need to get any closer to know it’s soft, lard-cock!” The girl made a rude
gesture with both hands. “I can see how disappointed your fucking cows are from here!”
With that, the scull was out of range of any audible reply; the galley fell away to
the stern, and the southwestern edge of the Artificers’ Crescent grew before them.
“For that,” said Jean, “an extra silver volani for everyone here.”
As the increasingly cheerful girl and her enthusiastic team pulled him steadily toward
the docks of the Artificers’ Crescent, Jean’s eyes were drawn by a tumult on the water
a few hundred yards to his left. A cargo lighter flagged with some sort of Verrari
guild banner Jean didn’t recognize was surrounded by at least a dozen smaller craft.
Men and women from the boats were trying to clamber aboard the cargo lighter while
the outnumbered crew of the larger vessel attempted to fend them off with oars and
a water pump. A boat full of constables seemed to be approaching, but was still several
minutes off.
“Now, what the hell’s that?” Jean yelled to the girl.
“What? Where? Oh, that. That’s the Quill Pen Rebellion, up to business as usual.”
“Quill Pen Rebellion?”
“The Guild of Scribes. That cargo boat’s flying a Guild of Letter-Pressers’ flag.
It must be carrying a printing press from the Artificers’ Crescent. You ever seen
a press?”
“Heard of them. For the first time just a few months ago, in fact.”
“The scribes don’t like ’em. Think they’ll put their trade out of business. So they’ve
been running ambushes when the Letter-Pressers try to get one across the bay. There
must be six or seven of those new presses on the bottom of the water by now. Plus
a few bodies. It’s a big fat weeping mess, you ask me.”
“I’m inclined to agree.”
“Well, hopefully they won’t come up with anything that can replace a good team of
honest rowers. Here’s your dock, sir, quite a bit ahead of schedule if I’m correct.
You want us to wait around?”
“By all means,” said Jean. “Amusing help is so hard to find. I expect I won’t be but
an hour.”
“At your service, then, Master de Ferra.”
THE CRESCENT was not exclusive to the Great Guild of Artificers, though it was where
the majority of them chose to settle, and where their private halls and clubs loomed
on virtually every street corner, and where they were most tolerated in their habit
of leaving incomprehensible and occasionally hazardous devices out in plain sight.
Jean made his way up the steep steps of the Avenue of the Brass
Cockatrice, past candle merchants and blade sharpeners and veniparsifers (mystics
who claimed to be able to read the full sweep of someone’s destiny from the pattern
of blood vessels visible on their hands and forearms). At the top of the avenue he
dodged away from a slim young woman in a four-cornered hat and sun veil walking a
valcona
on a reinforced leather leash.
Valcona
were flightless attack birds, larger than hunting hounds. With their vestigial wings
folded back along their stout bodies, they hopped about on claws that could tear out
fist-sized chunks of human flesh. They bonded like affectionate babies to one person
and were perfectly happy to kill anyone else in the entire world, at any time.
“Good killer bird,” muttered Jean. “Pretty threat to life and limb. What a lovely
little girl or boy or thing you are.”
The creature chirruped a little warning at him and scampered after its mistress.
Huffing and sweating, Jean made his way up another set of switchback stairs and made
an irritated mental note that a few hours of training would do his spreading gut some
good. Jerome de Ferra was a man who viewed exercise solely as a means of getting from
bed to the gambling tables and back again. Forty feet, sixty feet, eighty feet … up
from the waterfront, up the second and third tiers of the island, up to the fourth
and topmost, where the eccentric influence of the Artificers was at its strongest.
The shops and houses on the fourth tier of the Crescent were provided with water by
an extremely elaborate network of aqueducts. Some of them were the stones and pillars
of the Therin Throne era, while some were merely leather chutes supported by wooden
struts. Waterwheels, windmills, gears, counterweights, and pendulums swung everywhere
Jean looked. Rearranging the water supply was a game the Artificers played amongst
themselves; the only rule was that nobody’s supply was to be cut off at the point
of final delivery. Every few days, a new offshoot of some duct or a new pumping apparatus
would appear, stealing water from an older duct or pumping apparatus. A few days later
another artificer would divert water through another new channel and the battle would
continue. Tropical storms would invariably litter the streets of the Crescent with
cogs and mechanisms and ductwork, and the artificers would invariably rebuild their
water channels twice as strangely as before.
Glassbender Street ran the full length of the topmost tier. Jean turned to his left
and hurried along the cobbles. The strange smells of glassmaking wafted out at him
from shop fronts; through open doors he could see artisans spinning glowing orange
shapes at the ends of long poles. A small
crowd of alchemists’ assistants brushed past him, hogging the street. They wore the
trademark red skullcaps of their profession and displayed the chemical burns along
their hands and faces that were their badges of pride.
He passed the Avenue of the Cog-Scrapers, where a small crowd of laborers were seated
before their shops, cleaning and polishing pieces of metal. Some were under the direct
scrutiny of impatient artificers, who grumbled unhelpful directions and stamped their
feet nervously. This intersection was the southwestern end of the fourth tier; there
was nowhere else to go except down—or out along the forty-foot walk to the home of
Azura Gallardine.
At the cul-de-sac end to Glassbender Street was an arc of shop fronts with one gap
like a tooth knocked out of a smile. Jutting beyond this gap was an Elderglass pylon,
anchored to the stone of the fourth tier for some unfathomable Eldren reason. The
pylon was about a foot and a half wide, flat-topped, and forty feet long. It speared
out into the empty air, fifteen yards above the rooftops of a winding street down
on the third tier.
The house of Azura Gallardine was perched at the far end of that pylon like a three-story
bird’s nest on the tip of a branch. The second mistress of the Great Guild of Artificers
had discovered an ideal means of assuring her privacy—only those with very serious
business, or very sincere need of her skills, would be mad enough to scamper out along
the pylon that led to her front door.
Jean swallowed, rubbed his hands together, and said a brief prayer to the Crooked
Warden before stepping out onto the Elderglass. “It can’t be that hard,” he muttered.
“I’ve been through worse. It’s just a short little walk. No need to look down. I’m
as steady as a laden galleon.”
With his hands held out at his sides for balance, he began to make his way carefully
across the pylon. It was curious, how the breeze seemed to pick up as he crossed,
and how the sky seemed suddenly wider above him.… He fixed his eyes firmly on the
door before him, and (unbeknownst to himself) ceased to breathe until his hands were
planted firmly on that door. He gasped in a deep breath and wiped his brow, which
had sprung an embarrassing quantity of sweat.
Azura Gallardine’s house was solidly crafted from white stone blocks. It had a high
peaked roof crowned with a squeaking windmill and a large leather rain-collection
bladder in a wooden frame. The door was decorated with relief carvings of gears and
other clockwork mechanisms, and beside it a brass plate was set into the stone. Jean
pressed the plate, and heard a gong echoing within the house. Smoke from cookfires
below curled up past him while he stood there waiting for some response.
He was about to press the plate again when the door creaked open. A short, scowling
woman appeared in the gap between the door and its frame, staring up at him. She had
to be on the downside of sixty, Jean thought—her reddish skin was lined like the joints
of an aged leather garment. She was heavyset, with a vaguely froglike bulge of flesh
at her throat and jowly features drooping like sculptor’s putty from her high cheekbones.
Her white hair was tightly braided with alternating rings of brass and black iron,
and most of the visible flesh on her hands, forearms, and neck was covered in elaborate,
slightly faded tattoos.
Jean set his right foot before his left and bowed at a forty-five-degree angle, with
his left hand flung out and his right tucked beneath his stomach. He was about to
start conjuring verbal flowers when Guildmistress Gallardine seized him by his collar
and dragged him into her house.
“Ow! Madam, please! Allow me to introduce myself!”
“You’re too fat and well dressed to be an apprentice after patronage,” she replied,
“so you must be here to beg a favor, and when your kind says hello, it tends to take
a while. No, shut up.”
Her house smelled like oil, sweat, stone dust, and heated metal. The interior was
one tall hollow, the strangest cluttered conglomeration Jean had ever seen. There
were man-sized arched windows on the right-hand and left-hand walls, but every other
inch of wall space was taken up with a sort of scaffolding that supported a hundred
wooden shelves crammed with tools, materials, and junk. At the top of the scaffolding,
set atop a makeshift floor of planks, Jean could see a sleeping pallet and a desk
beneath a pair of hanging alchemical lamps. Ladders and leather cords hung down in
several places; books and scrolls and half-empty corked bottles covered most of the
floor.
“If I’ve come at a bad time …”
“It’s usually a bad time, Young Master Interloper. A client with an interesting request
is about the only thing that ever changes that. So what’s it to be?”
“Guildmistress Gallardine, everyone I’ve asked has sworn that the most subtle, most
accomplished, most imitated artificer in all of Tal Verrar is none other than y—”
“Quit bathing me with your flattery, boy,” said the old woman, waving her hands. “Look
around you. Gears and levers, weights and chains. You don’t need to lick them with
pretty words to make them work—nor me.”
“As you wish,” said Jean, straightening up and reaching within his coat. “I couldn’t
live with myself if I didn’t extend one small courtesy, however.”
From within his coat he brought forth a small package wrapped in
cloth-of-silver. The neat corners of the wrapping were drawn together beneath a red
wax seal, stamped into a curled disc of shaved gold.
Jean’s informants had all mentioned Gallardine’s single human failing: a taste for
presents as strong as her distaste for flattery and interruptions. She knitted her
eyebrows, but did manage a ghost of an anticipatory smile as she took the package
in her tattooed hands.
“Well,” she said, “well, we must all certainly be able to live with ourselves.…”
She popped the disc seal and pried the cloth-of silver apart with the eagerness of
a little girl. The package contained a brass-stoppered rectangular bottle filled with
milky white liquid. She sucked in her breath when she read the label.
“White Plum Austershalin,” she whispered. “Twelve gods. Who
have
you been speaking to?”
Brandy mixes were a Tal Verrar peculiarity; fine brandies from elsewhere (in this
case, the peerless Austershalin of Emberlain) were mixed with local liquor from rare
alchemical fruits (and there were none rarer than the heavenly white plum), then bottled
and aged to produce cordials that could blast the tongue into numbness with the richness
of their flavor. The bottle held perhaps two glasses of White Plum Austershalin, and
it was worth forty-five solari.
“A few knowledgeable souls,” said Jean, “who said you might appreciate a modest draught.”
“This is hardly modest, Master …”