The Lies of Locke Lamora (23 page)

Again, Locke nodded. Nazca returned to her father’s side, sipping from a tarred leather ale-jack; she stared at Locke over the rim of this drinking vessel, which she had to clutch in both hands.

Capa Barsavi snapped his fingers; one of the toadies in the background vanished through a curtain. “Then I’m not going to bore you with any more threats, Locke. This night, you’re a man. You will do a man’s work and suffer a man’s fate if you cross your brothers and sisters. You will be one of us, one of the Right People; you’ll receive the words and the signs, and you’ll use them discreetly. As Chains, your
garrista
, is sworn to me, so you are sworn to me, through him. I am your
garrista
above all
garristas
. I am the only duke of Camorr you will ever acknowledge. Bend your knee.”

Locke knelt before Barsavi; the Capa held out his left hand, palm down. He wore an ornate ring of black pearl in a white iron setting; nestled inside the pearl by some arcane process was a speck of red that had to be blood.

“Kiss the ring of the Capa of Camorr.”

Locke did so; the pearl was cool beneath his dry lips.

“Speak the name of the man to whom you have sworn your oath.”

“Capa Barsavi,” Locke whispered. At that moment, the capa’s underling returned to the alcove and handed his master a small crystal tumbler filled with dull brown liquid.

“Now,” said Barsavi, “as has every one of my
pezon
, you will drink my toast.” From one of the pockets of his waistcoat the capa drew a shark’s tooth, one slightly larger than the death-mark Locke wore around his neck. Barsavi dropped the tooth into the tumbler and swirled it around a few times. He then handed the tumbler to Locke. “It’s dark-sugar rum from the Sea of Brass. Drink the entire thing, including the tooth. But don’t swallow the tooth, whatever you do. Keep it in your mouth. Draw it out after all the liquor is gone. And try not to cut yourself.”

Locke’s nose smarted from the stinging aroma of hard liquor that wafted from the tumbler, and his stomach lurched, but he ground his jaws together and stared down at the slightly distorted shape of the tooth within the rum. Silently praying to his new Benefactor to save him from embarrassment, he dashed the contents of the glass into his mouth, tooth and all.

Swallowing was not as easy as he’d hoped—he held the tooth against the roof of his mouth with his tongue, gingerly, feeling its sharp points scrape against the back of his upper front teeth. The liquor burned; he began to swallow in small gulps that soon turned into wheezing coughs. After a few interminable seconds, he shuddered and sucked down the last of the rum, relieved that he had held the tooth carefully in place—

It twisted in his mouth.
Twisted
, physically, as though wrenched by an unseen hand, and scored a burning slash across the inside of his left cheek. Locke cried out, coughed, and spat up the tooth—it lay there in his open palm, flecked with spit and blood.

“Ahhhhh,” said Capa Barsavi as he plucked the tooth up and slipped it back into his waistcoat, blood and all. “So you see—you are bound by an oath of blood to my service. My tooth has tasted of your life, and your life is mine. So let us not be strangers, Locke Lamora. Let us be capa and
pezon
, as the Crooked Warden intended.”

At a gesture from Barsavi Locke stumbled to his feet, already inwardly cursing the now-familiar sensation of liquor rapidly going to his head. His stomach was empty from the day’s hangover; the room was already swaying a bit around him. When he set eyes on Nazca once again, he saw that she was smiling at him above her ale-jack, with the air of smarmy tolerance the older children in Shades’ Hill had once shown to him and his compatriots in Streets.

Before he knew what he was doing, Locke bent his knee to her as well.

“If you’re the next Capa Barsavi,” he said rapidly, “I should swear to serve you, too. I do. Madam. Madam Nazca. I mean…Madam Barsavi.”

The girl took a step back. “I already
have
servants, boy. I have
assassins
. My father has a hundred gangs and two thousand knives!”

“Nazca Belonna Jenavais Angeliza de Barsavi!” her father thundered. “Now it seems you only grasp the value of
strong
men as servants. In time, you will come to see the value of
gracious
ones as well. You shame me.”

Nonplussed, the girl glanced back and forth between Locke and her father several times. Her cheeks slowly turned red. After a few more moments of pouting consideration, she stiffly held out her ale-jack to Locke.

“You may have some of my beer.”

Locke responded as though this were the deepest honor ever conferred upon him, realizing (though hardly in so many words) all the while that the liquor was somehow running a sort of rump parliament in his brain that had overruled his usual cautious social interactions—especially with girls. Her beer was bitter dark stuff, slightly salted—she drank like a Verrari. Locke took two sips to be polite, then handed it back to her, bowing in a rather noodle-necked fashion as he did so. She was too flustered to say anything in return, so she merely nodded.

“Ha! Excellent!” Capa Barsavi chomped on his slender cigar in mirth. “Your first
pezon
! Of course, both of your brothers are going to want some just as soon as they hear about this.”

THE TRIP home was a muggy, misty blur to Locke; he clung to the neck of his Gentled goat while Chains led them back north toward the Temple District, frequently cackling to himself.

“Oh, my boy,” he muttered. “My dear, dear charming sot of a boy. It was all bullshit, you realize.”

“What?”

“The shark’s tooth. Capa Barsavi had a Bondsmage enchant that thing for him in Karthain years ago.
Nobody
can swallow it without cutting themselves. He’s been carrying it around ever since; all those years he spent studying Throne Therin theater have given him a substantial fetish for the dramatic.”

“So it wasn’t…like, fate, or the gods, or anything like that?”

“It was just a shark’s tooth with a tiny bit of sorcery. A good trick, I have to admit.” Chains rubbed his own cheek in sympathy and remembrance. “No, Locke, you don’t belong to Barsavi. He’s good enough for what he is—a powerful ally to have on your side, and a man that you must appear to obey at all times. But he certainly doesn’t own you. In the end, neither do I.”

“So I don’t have to…”

“Obey the Secret Peace? Be a good little
pezon
? Only for pretend, Locke. Only to keep the wolves from the door. Unless your eyes and ears have been stitched shut with rawhide these past two days, by now you must have realized that I intend you and Calo and Galdo and Sabetha to be nothing less,” Chains confided through a feral grin, “than a fucking ballista bolt
right through
the heart of Vencarlo’s precious Secret Peace.”

Complication

“I can add colours to the chameleon,

Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,

And set the murderous Machiavel to school.”

King Henry VI, Part III

At the Court of Capa Barsavi

“NINETEEN THOUSAND,” SAID Bug, “nine hundred and twenty. That’s all of it. Can I please
kill
myself now?”

“What? I’d have thought you’d be enthusiastic about helping us tally the loot, Bug.” Jean sat cross-legged in the middle of the dining area in the glass cellar beneath the House of Perelandro; the table and chairs had been moved away to make room for a vast quantity of gold coins, stacked into little glittering mounds that circled Jean and Bug, nearly walling them in completely.

“You didn’t tell me you’d be hauling it home in tyrins.”

“Well, white iron is dear. Nobody’s going to hand out five thousand crowns in it, and nobody’s going to be dumb enough to carry it around like that. Meraggio’s makes all of its big payouts in tyrins.”

There was a rattling noise from the entrance passage to the cellar; then Locke appeared around the corner, dressed as Lukas Fehrwight. He whipped his false optics off, loosened his cravats, and shrugged out of his wool coat, letting it fall unceremoniously to the floor. His face was flushed, and he was waving a piece of folded parchment affixed with a blue wax seal.

“Seventy-five hundred more, my boys! I told him we’d found four likely galleons, but that we were already having cash flow problems—bribes to be paid, crews to be called back and sobered up, officers to be placated, other cargo-shippers to be chased off…And he just handed it right over, smiling all the while. Gods. I should’ve thought this scam up five years ago. We don’t even have to bother setting up fake ships and paperwork and so forth, because Salvara
knows
the Fehrwight part of the game is a lie. There’s nothing for us to do except relax and count the money.”

“If it’s so relaxing, why don’t
you
count it, then?” Bug jumped to his feet and leaned backward until his back and his neck made a series of little popping noises.

“I’d be happy to, Bug.” Locke took a bottle of red wine out of a wooden cupboard and poured himself half a glass, then watered it from a brass pitcher of lukewarm rainwater until it was a soft pink. “And tomorrow you can play Lukas Fehrwight. I’m sure Don Salvara would never notice any difference. Is it all here?”

“Five thousand crowns delivered as twenty thousand tyrins,” said Jean, “less eighty for clerking fees and guards and a rented dray to haul it from Meraggio’s.”

The Gentlemen Bastards used a simple substitution scheme for hauling large quantities of valuables to their hideout at the House of Perelandro. At a series of quick stops, strongboxes of coins would vanish from one wagon and barrels marked as common food or drink would roll off on another. Even a decrepit little temple needed a steady infusion of basic supplies.

“Well,” said Locke, “let me get rid of poor Master Fehrwight’s clothes and I’ll give you a hand dumping it all in the vault.”

There were actually three vaults tucked away at the rear of the cellar, behind the sleeping quarters. Two of them were wide Elderglass-coated shafts that went down about ten feet; their original purpose was unknown. With simple wooden doors mounted on hinges set atop them, they resembled nothing so much as miniature grain-storage towers sunk into the earth and filled to a substantial depth with coins of every sort.

Silver and gold in large quantities went into the vaults; narrow wooden shelves around the periphery of the vault room held small bags or piles of more readily useful currency. There were cheap purses of copper barons, fine leather wallets with tight rolls of silver solons, and small bowls of clipped half-copper bits, all of them set out for the rapid taking for any scam or need one of the gang might face. There were even little stacks of foreign coinage; marks from the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows, solari from Tal Verrar, and so forth.

Even back in the days of Father Chains there had been no locks on these vaults or on the room that held them. This was not merely because the Gentlemen Bastards trusted one another (and they did), nor because the existence of their luxurious cellar was a closely guarded secret (and it certainly was). The primary reason was one of practicality—not one of them, Calo or Galdo or Locke or Jean or Bug, had anything they could conceivably do with their steadily growing pile of precious metal.

Outside of Capa Barsavi, they had to be the wealthiest thieves in Camorr; the little parchment ledger set aside on one of the shelves would list more than forty-three
thousand
full crowns when Don Salvara’s second note was turned into cold coin. They were as wealthy as the man they were currently robbing, and far wealthier than many of his peers.

Yet so far as anyone knew, the Gentlemen Bastards were an unassuming gang of ordinary sneak thieves; competent and discreet enough, steady earners, but hardly shooting stars. They could live comfortably for ten crowns apiece each year, and to spend much more than that would invite the most unwelcome scrutiny imaginable, from every authority in Camorr, legal or otherwise.

In four years, they’d brought off three huge scores and were currently working on their fourth; for four years, the vast majority of the money had simply been counted and thrown down into the darkness of the vaults.

The truth was, Chains had trained them superbly for the task of relieving Camorr’s nobility of the burden of some of its accumulated wealth, but had perhaps neglected to discuss the possible uses of the sums involved. Other than financing further theft, the Gentlemen Bastards really had no idea what they were eventually going to do with it all.

Their tithe to Capa Barsavi averaged about a crown a week.

“REJOICE!” CRIED Calo as he appeared in the kitchen, just as Locke and Jean were moving the dining table back to its customary position. “The Sanza brothers are returned!”

“I do wonder,” said Jean, “if that particular combination of words has ever been uttered by anyone, before now.”

“Only in the chambers of unattached young ladies across the city,” said Galdo as he set a small burlap sack down on the table. Locke shook it open and perused the contents—a few lockets set with semiprecious stones, a set of moderately well-crafted silver forks and knives, and an assortment of rings ranging from cheap engraved copper to one made of threaded gold and platinum, set with flecks of obsidian and diamond.

“Oh, very nice,” said Locke. “Very likely. Jean, would you pick out a few more bits from the Bullshit Box, and get me…twenty solons, right?”

“Twenty’s good and proper.”

While Locke gestured for Calo and Galdo to help him set chairs back in place around the dining table, Jean walked back to the vault room, where there was a tall, narrow wooden chest tucked against the left-hand wall. He threw back the lid on its creaky hinges and began rummaging inside, a thoughtful expression on his face.

The Bullshit Box was filled to a depth of about two feet with a glittering pile of jewelry, knickknacks, household items, and decorative gewgaws. There were crystal statues, mirrors in carved ivory frames, necklaces and rings, candleholders in five kinds of precious metal. There were even a few bottles of drugs and alchemical draughts, wrapped in felt to cushion them and marked with little paper labels.