The Lies of Locke Lamora

1

AT HALF PAST the tenth hour of the evening on Duke’s Day, as low dark clouds fell in above Camorr, blotting out the stars and the moons, Doña Sofia Salvara was being hoisted up into the sky to have a late tea with Doña Angiavesta Vorchenza, dowager countess of Amberglass, at the top of the great lady’s Elderglass tower.

The passenger cage rattled and swayed, and Sofia clung to the black iron bars for support. The sweaty Hangman’s Wing fluttered at her hooded coat as she stared south. All of the city lay spread beneath her, black and gray from horizon to horizon, suffused with the glow of fire and alchemy. This was a point of quiet pride for her every time she had the chance to take in this view from one of the Five Towers. The Eldren had built glass wonders for men to claim; engineers had crafted buildings of stone and wood in the Eldren ruins to make the cities their own; Bondsmagi pretended to the powers the Eldren must have once held. But it was alchemy that drove back the darkness every evening; alchemy that lit the commonest home and the tallest tower alike, cleaner and safer than natural fire. It was her art that tamed the night.

At last, her long ascent ended; the cage rattled to a halt beside an embarkation platform four-fifths of the way up Amberglass’ full height. The wind sighed mournfully in the strange fluted arches at the peak of the tower. Two footmen in cream-white waistcoats and immaculate white gloves and breeches helped her out of the cage, as they might have assisted her from a carriage down on the ground. Once she was safely on the platform, the two men bowed from the waist.

“M’lady Salvara,” said the one on the left, “my mistress bids you welcome to Amberglass.”

“Most kind,” said Doña Sofia.

“If it would please you to wait on the terrace, she will join you momentarily.”

The same footman led the way past a half dozen servants in similar livery, who stood panting beside the elaborate arrangement of gears, levers, and chains they worked to haul the cargo cage up and down. They, too, bowed as she passed; she favored them with a smile and an acknowledging wave. It never hurt to be pleasant to the servants in charge of that particular operation.

Doña Vorchenza’s terrace was a wide crescent of transparent Elderglass jutting out from the north face of her tower, surrounded by brass safety rails. Doña Sofia looked straight down, as she had always been warned not to do, and as she always did. It seemed that she and the footman walked on thin air forty stories above the stone courtyards and storage buildings at the base of the tower; alchemical lamps were specks of light, and carriages were black squares smaller than one of her nails.

On her left, visible through a series of tall arched windows whose sills were on a level with her waist, were dimly lit apartments and parlors within the tower itself. Doña Vorchenza had very few living relatives, and no children; she was effectively the last of a once-powerful clan, and there was little doubt (among the grasping, ambitious nobles of the Alcegrante slopes, at least) that Amberglass would pass to some new family upon her death. Most of her tower was dark and quiet, most of its opulence packed away in closets and chests.

The old lady still knew how to host a late-night tea, however. At the far northwestern corner of her transparent terrace, with a commanding view of the lightless countryside to the north of the city, a silk awning fluttered in the Hangman’s Wind. Tall alchemical lanterns in cages of gold-gilded brass hung from the four corners of the awning, shedding warm light on the little table and the two high-backed chairs arranged therein.

The footman placed a thin black cushion upon the right-hand chair and pulled it out for her; with a swish of skirts she settled into it and nodded her thanks. The man bowed and strolled away, taking up a watch at a point that was politely out of earshot but within easy beckoning distance.

Sofia did not have long to wait for her hostess; a few minutes after her arrival, old Doña Vorchenza appeared out of a wooden door on the tower’s north wall.

Age has a way of exaggerating the physical traits of those who live to feel its strains; the round tend to grow rounder, and the slim tend to waste away. Time had narrowed Angiavesta Vorchenza. She was not so much withered as collapsed, a spindly living caricature like a wooden idol animated by the sorcery of sheer willpower. Seventy was a fading memory for her, yet she still moved about without an escort on her arm or a cane in her hands. She dressed eccentrically in a black velvet frock coat with fur collars and cuffs. Eschewing the cascading petticoats the ladies of her era had favored, she actually wore black pantaloons and silver slippers. Her white hair was pulled back and fixed with lacquered pins; her dark eyes were bright behind her half-moon optics.

“ Sofia,” she said as she stepped daintily beneath the awning, “what a pleasure it is to have you up here again. It’s been months, my dear girl, months. No, do sit; pulling out my own chair holds no terrors for me. Ah. Tell me, how is Lorenzo? And surely we must speak of your garden.”

“Lorenzo and I are well, considered solely in ourselves. And the garden thrives, Doña Vorchenza. Thank you for asking.”

“Considered solely in yourselves? Then there is something else? Something, dare I pry, external?”

A night tea, in Camorr, was a womanly tradition when one wished to seek the advice of another, or simply make use of a sympathetic ear while expressing regrets or complaints-most frequently concerning men.

“You may pry, Doña Vorchenza, by all means. And yes, yes, ‘external’ is a very proper term for it.”

“But it’s not Lorenzo?”

“Oh, no. Lorenzo is satisfactory in every possible respect.” Sofia sighed and glanced down at the illusion of empty air beneath her feet and her chair. “It’s…both of us that may be in need of advice.”

“Advice,” chuckled Doña Vorchenza. “The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one’s mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you’re a nag. Give it at seventy and you’re a sage.”

“Doña Vorchenza,” said Sofia, “you have been of great help to me before. I couldn’t think…well, there was no one else I was comfortable speaking to about this matter, for the time being.”

“Indeed? Well, dear girl, I’m eager to be of whatever help I can. But here’s our tea-come, let us indulge ourselves for a few moments.”

One of Doña Vorchenza’s jacketed attendants wheeled a silver-domed cart toward them and slid it into place beside the little table. When he whisked the dome away, Sofia saw that the cart held a gleaming silver tea service and a subtlety-a perfect culinary replica of Amberglass Tower, barely nine inches high, complete with minuscule specks of alchemical light dotting its turrets. The little glass globes were not much larger than raisins.

“You see how little real work I give to my poor chef,” said Doña Vorchenza, cackling. “He suffers in the service of such a plain and simple palate; he takes his revenge with these surprises. I cannot order a soft-boiled egg, but that he finds a dancing chicken to lay it directly on my plate. Tell me, Gilles, is that edifice truly edible?”

“So I am assured, my lady Vorchenza, save for the tiny lights. The tower itself is spice cake; the turrets and terraces are jellied fruit. The buildings and carriages at the base of the tower are mostly chocolate; the heart of the tower is an apple brandy cream, and the windows-”

“Thank you, Gilles, that will do for an architectural synopsis. But spit out the lights when we’re finished, you say?”

“It would be more decorous, m’lady,” said the servant, a round, delicate-featured man with shoulder-length black ringlets, “to let me remove them for you prior to consumption…”

“Decorous? Gilles, you would deny us the fun of spitting them over the side of the terrace like little girls. I’ll thank you not to touch them. The tea?”

“Your will, Doña Vorchenza,” he said smoothly. “Tea of Light.” He lifted a silver teapot and poured a steaming line of pale brownish liquid into a tea glass; Doña Vorchenza’s etched glasses were shaped like large tulip buds with silver bases. As the tea settled into the container, it began to glow faintly, shedding an inviting orange radiance.

“Oh, very pretty,” said Doña Sofia. “I’ve heard of it… Verrari, is it?”

“Lashani.” Doña Vorchenza took the glass from Gilles and cradled it in both hands. “Quite the latest thing. Their tea masters are mad with the competitive spirit. This time next year we’ll have something even stranger to one-up one another with. But forgive me, my dear-I do hope you’re not averse to drinking the products of your art as well as working with them in your garden?”

“Not at all,” Sofia replied as the servant set her own glass before her and bowed. She took the cup into her hands and took a deep breath; the tea smelled of mingled vanilla and orange blossoms. When she sipped, the flavors ran warmly on her tongue and the scented steam rose into her nostrils. Gilles vanished back into the tower itself while the ladies commenced drinking. For a few moments they enjoyed their tea in appreciative silence, and for a few moments Sofia was almost content.

“Now we shall see,” said Doña Vorchenza as she set her half-empty glass down before her, “if it continues to glow when it comes out the other side.”

Doña Salvara giggled despite herself, and the lines on her hostess’ lean face drew upward as she smiled. “Now, what did you want to ask me about, my dear?”

“Doña Vorchenza,” Sofia began, then hesitated. “It is…it is commonly thought that you have some, ah, means to communicate with the…the duke’s secret constabulary.”

“The duke has a secret constabulary?” Doña Vorchenza placed a hand against her breast in an expression of polite disbelief.

“The Midnighters, Doña Vorchenza, the Midnighters, and their leader-”

“The duke’s Spider. Yes, yes. Forgive me, dear girl, I do know of what you speak. But this idea you have…‘Commonly thought,’ you say? Many things are commonly thought, but perhaps not commonly thought all the way through.”

“It is very curious,” said Sofia Salvara, “that when the doñas come to you with problems, on more than one occasion, their problems have…reached the ear of the Spider. Or seemed to, since the duke’s men became involved in assisting with those problems.”

“Oh, my dear Sofia. When gossip comes to me I pass it on in packets and parcels. I drop a word or two in the right ear, and the gossip acquires a life of its own. Sooner or later it must reach the notice of someone who will take action.”

“Doña Vorchenza,” said Sofia, “I hope I can say without intending or giving offense that you are dissembling.”

“I hope I can say without disappointing you, dear girl, that you have a very slender basis for making that suggestion.”

“Doña Vorchenza.” Sofia clutched at her edge of the table so hard that several of her finger joints popped. “Lorenzo and I are being robbed.”

“Robbed? Whatever do you mean?”

“And we have Midnighters involved. They’ve…made the most extraordinary claims, and made requests of us. But…Doña Vorchenza, there must be some way to confirm that they are what they say they are.”

“You say Midnighters are robbing you?”

“No,” said Sofia, biting her upper lip. “No, it’s not the Midnighters themselves. They are…supposedly watching the situation and waiting for a chance to act. But something…something is just wrong. Or they are not telling us everything they perhaps should.”

“My dear Sofia,” said Doña Vorchenza. “My poor troubled girl, you must tell me exactly what has happened, and leave out not one detail.”

“It is…difficult, Doña Vorchenza. The situation is rather…embarrassing. And complicated.”

“We are all alone up here on my terrace, my dear. You have done all the hard work already, in coming over to see me. Now you must tell me everything. Then I’ll see to it that this particular bit of gossip speeds on its way to the right ear, I promise you.”

Sofia took another small sip of tea, cleared her throat, and hunched down in her seat to look Doña Vorchenza directly in the eyes.

“Surely,” she began, “you’ve heard of Austershalin brandy, Doña Vorchenza?”

“More than heard of, my dear. I may even have a few bottles hidden away in my wine cabinets.”

“And you know how it is made? The secrets surrounding it?”

“Oh, I believe I understand the essence of the Austershalin mystique. The fussy black-coated vintners of Emberlain are, shall we say, well served by the stories surrounding their wares.”

“Then you can understand, Doña Vorchenza, how Lorenzo and I reacted as we did when the following opportunity supposedly fell into our laps by an act of the gods…”

2

THE CAGE containing Doña Salvara creaked and rattled toward the ground, growing ever smaller and fading into the background gray of the courtyard. Doña Vorchenza stood by the brass rails of the embarkation platform, staring into the night for many minutes, while her team of attendants pulled at the machinery of the capstan. Gilles wheeled the silver cart with the near-empty pot of tea and the half-eaten Amberglass cake past her, and she turned to him.

“No,” she said. “Send the cake up to the solarium. That’s where we’ll be.”

“Who, m’lady?”

“Reynart.” She was already striding back toward the door to her terrace-side apartments; her slippered feet made an echoing slap-slap-slap against the walkway. “Find Reynart. I don’t care what he’s doing. Find him and send him up to me, the moment you’ve seen to the cake.”

Inside the suite of apartments, through a locked door, up a curving stairway…Doña Vorchenza cursed under her breath. Her knees, her feet, her ankles. “Damn venerability,” she muttered. “I piss on the gods for the gift of rheumatism.” Her breathing was ragged. She undid the buttons on the front of her fur-trimmed coat as she continued to mount the steps.

At the top-the very peak of the inner tower-there was a heavy oaken door reinforced with iron joints and bands. She pulled forth a key that hung around her right wrist on a silk cord. This she inserted into the silver lockbox above the crystal knob while carefully pressing a certain decorative brass plate in a wall sconce. A series of clicks echoed within the walls and the door fell open, inward.

Forgetting the brass plate would be a poor idea; she’d specified a rather excessive pull for the concealed crossbow trap, when she’d had it installed three decades earlier.

This was the solarium, then, another eight stories up from the level of the terrace. The room took up the full diameter of the tower at its apex, fifty feet from edge to edge. The floor was thickly carpeted. A long curving brass-railed gallery, with stairs at either end, spread across the northern half of the space. This gallery held a row of tall witchwood shelves divided into thousands upon thousands of cubbyholes and compartments. The transparent hemispherical ceiling dome revealed the low clouds like a bubbling lake of smoke. Doña Vorchenza tapped alchemical globes to bring them to life as she mounted the stairs to her file gallery.

There she worked, engrossed, heedless of the passage of time as her narrow fingers flicked from compartment to compartment. She pulled out some piles of parchment and set them aside, half considered others and pushed them back in, muttering remembrances and conjecture under her breath. She snapped out of her fugue only when the solarium door clicked open once more.

The man who entered was tall and broad-shouldered; he had an angular Vadran face and ice-blond hair pulled back in a ribbon-bound tail. He wore a ribbed leather doublet over slashed black sleeves, with black breeches and tall black boots. The little silver pins at his collar gave him the rank of captain in the Nightglass Company; the blackjackets, the Duke’s Own. A rapier with straight quillons hung at his right hip.

“Stephen,” said Doña Vorchenza without preamble, “have any of your boys or girls paid a recent visit to Don and Doña Salvara, on the Isla Durona?”

“The Salvaras? No, certainly not, m’lady.”

“You’re sure? Absolutely sure?” Parchments in hand, eyebrows arched, she stalked down the steps, barely keeping her balance. “I need certain truth from you right now as badly as I ever have.”

“I know the Salvaras, m’lady. I met them both at last year’s Day of Changes feast; I rode up to the Sky Garden in the same cage with them.”

“And you haven’t sent any of the Midnighters to pay them a visit?”

“Twelve gods, no. Not one.”

“Then someone is abusing our good name, Stephen. And I think we may finally have the Thorn of Camorr.”

Reynart stared at her, then grinned. “You’re joking. You’re not? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. What’s the situation?”

“First things first; I know you think fastest when we nurse that damned sweet tooth of yours. Peek inside the dumbwaiter; I’m going to have a seat.”

“Oh my,” said Reynart, peering into the chain-hoist shaft that held the dumbwaiter. “It looks as though someone’s already made a merry work of this poor spice cake. I’ll put it out of its misery. There’s wine and glasses, too-looks like one of your sweet whites.”

“Gods bless Gilles; I’d forgotten to ask him for that, I was in such haste to get to my files. Be a dear dutiful subordinate and pour us a glass.”

“Dear dutiful subordinate, indeed. For the cake, I’d polish your slippers as well.”

“I’ll hold that promise in reserve for the next time you vex me, Stephen. Oh, fill the glass, I’m not thirteen years old. Now, take your seat and listen to this. If everything signifies, as I believe it shall, the bastard has just been delivered to us right in the middle of one of his schemes.”

“How so?”

“I’ll answer a question with a question, Stephen.” She took a deep draught of her white wine and settled back into her chair. “Tell me, how much do you know of the body of lore surrounding Austershalin brandy?”

3

“POSING AS one of us,” Reynart mused after she’d finished her tale. “The sheer fucking cheek. But are you sure it’s the Thorn?”

“If it isn’t, then we could only presume that we now have another equally skilled and audacious thief picking the pockets of my peers. And I think that’s presuming a bit much. Even for a city crammed as full of ghosts as this one.”

“Mightn’t it be the Gray King? He’s the right sort of slippery, by all reports.”

“Mmmm. No, the Gray King’s been murdering Barsavi’s men. The Thorn’s mode of operation is plain trickery; not a drop of real blood shed yet, as near as I can tell. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

Reynart set aside his empty cake plate and took a sip from his glass of wine. “So if we can trust Doña Salvara’s story, we’re looking at a gang of at least four men. The Thorn himself-let’s call him Lukas Fehrwight, for the sake of argument. His servant Graumann. And the two men who broke into the Salvara estate.”

“That’s a beginning, Stephen. But I’d say the gang is more probably five or six.”

“How do you figure?”

“I believe the false Midnighter was telling the truth when he told Don Salvara that the attack near the Temple of Fortunate Waters was staged; it would have to be, for a scheme this complex. So we have two more accomplices-the masked attackers.”

“Assuming they weren’t just hired for the task.”

“I doubt it. Consider the total paucity of information we’ve had previous to this: not one report, one boast, one slender whisper from anyone, anywhere. Not a speck of information pointing to anyone who even claimed to work with the Thorn of Camorr. Yet on any given day, thieves will boast loudly for hours about who among them can piss the farthest. This silence is unnatural.”

“Well,” said Reynart, “if you just slit a hireling’s throat when he’s done his job, you don’t have to pay him, either.”

“But we’re still dealing with the Thorn, and I hold that such an act would be outside his pattern of operations.”

“So his gang runs a closed shop… That would make sense. But it still might not be six. The two in the alley could also be the two who entered the estate dressed as Midnighters.”

“Oh, my dear Stephen. An interesting conjecture. Let us say four minimum, six maximum as our first guess, or we’ll be here all night drawing diagrams for one another. I suspect anything larger would be difficult to hide as well as they have.”

“So be it, then.” Reynart thought for a moment. “I can give you fifteen or sixteen swords right this very hour; some of my lads are mumming it up tonight down in the Snare and the Cauldron, since we got those reports of Nazca Barsavi’s funeral. I can’t pull them on short notice. But give me until the dark of the morning and I can have everyone else kitted up and ready for a scrap. We’ve got the Nightglass to back us; no need to even bring the yellowjackets in on it. We know they’re probably compromised anyway.”

“That would be well, Stephen, if I wanted them snatched up right now. But I don’t. I think we have a few days, at least, to draw the web tight around this man. Sofia said they’d discussed an initial outlay of about twenty-five thousand crowns; I suspect the Thorn will wait around to collect the other seven or eight he’s due.”

“At least let me hold a squad ready, then. I’ll keep them at the Palace of Patience; tuck them in amongst the yellowjackets. They can be ready to dash off with five minutes’ notice.”

“Very prudent; do so. Now, as for how we move on the Thorn himself-send someone down to Meraggio’s tomorrow, the subtlest you have. See if Fehrwight holds an account there, and when it was begun.”

“Calviro. I’ll send Maraliza Calviro.”

“An excellent choice. As far as I’m concerned, anyone else this Fehrwight has introduced the Salvaras to is suspect. Have her check up on the lawscribe she said her husband met just after the staged attack behind the temple.”

“Eccari, wasn’t it? Evante Eccari?”

“Yes. And then I want you to check out the Temple of Fortunate Waters.”

“Me? M’lady, you of all people know I don’t keep the faith; I just inherited the looks.”

“But you can fake the faith, and it’s the looks I need. They’ll keep you from being too suspicious. Case the place; look for anyone out of sorts. Look for gangs or goings-on. It’s remotely possible someone at the temple was in on the staged attack. Even if that’s not so, we need to eliminate it as a possibility.”

“It’s as good as done, then. And what about their inn?”

“The Tumblehome, yes. Send one person and one person only. I have a pair of old informants on the staff; one of them thinks he’s reporting to the yellowjackets, and one thinks she’s working for the capa. I’ll pass the names along. For now, I just want to find out if they’re still there, at the Bowsprit Suite. If they are, you can place a few of your men there dressed as staff. Observation only, for the time being.”

“Very well.” Reynart rose from his chair and brushed crumbs from his breeches. “And the noose? Assuming you get your wish, where and when would you like to draw it tight?”

“Going after the Thorn has always been like trying to grab fish with bare hands,” she replied. “I’ll want him sewn up somewhere, someplace where escape will be impossible, cut off from his friends, and entirely surrounded by ours.”

“By ours? How…? Oh. Oh. Raven’s Reach!”

“Yes. Very good, Stephen. The Day of Changes, just a week and a half from now. The duke’s midsummer feast. Five hundred feet in the air, surrounded by the peers of Camorr and a hundred guards. I’ll instruct Doña Sofia to invite this Lukas Fehrwight to dine with the duke, as a guest of the Salvaras.”

“Assuming he doesn’t suspect a trap…”

“I think it’s just the sort of gesture he’d appreciate. I think our mysterious friend’s audacity is going to be what finally arranges our direct introduction. I shall have Sofia feign financial distress; she can tell Fehrwight that the last few thousand crowns won’t be forthcoming until after the festival. A double-baited hook, his greed hand in hand with his vanity. I daresay he’ll relish the temptation.”

“Shall I pull everyone in for it?”

“Of course.” Doña Vorchenza sipped her wine and smiled slowly. “I want a Midnighter to take his coat; I want Midnighters serving him before the meal. If he uses a chamber pot, I want a Midnighter to close it for him afterward. We’ll take him atop Raven’s Reach; then we’ll watch the ground to see who runs, and where they run to.”

“Anything else?”

“No. Get to it, Stephen. Come back and let me have your report in a few hours. I’ll still be up… I’m expecting messages from the Floating Grave once Barsavi’s funeral procession gets back. In the meantime, I’ll send old Nicovante a note about what we suspect.”

“Your servant, m’lady.” Reynart bowed briefly and then departed the solarium, his strides long and rapid.

Before the heavy door had even slammed shut, Doña Vorchenza was up and moving toward a small scrivener’s desk tucked into an alcove to the left of the door. There she withdrew a half-sheet of parchment, scribbled a few hasty lines, folded it, and closed the fold with a small dollop of blue wax from a paper tube. The stuff was alchemical, hardening after a few moments of exposure to air. She preferred to allow no sources of open flame into this room, with its many decades of carefully collected and indexed records.

Within the desk was a signet ring that Doña Vorchenza never wore outside her solarium; on that ring was a sigil that appeared nowhere on the crest of the Vorchenza family. She pressed the ring into the stiffening blue wax and then withdrew it with a slight popping noise.

When she passed it down the dumbwaiter, one of her night attendants would immediately run to the northeastern cage platform of her tower and have himself cranked over to Raven’s Reach via cable car. There, he would place the message directly into the old duke’s hands, even if Nicovante had retired to his bedchamber.

Such was the custom with every note that was sealed in blue with nothing but the stylized sigil of a spider for its credentials.

1

IN THE DARKNESS beneath the Echo Hole, Jean Tannen was moving even before the cask came crashing down into the black water, lit faintly from above by the red glow of Barsavi’s torches.

Beneath the ancient stone cube, there was a network of hanging rafters, built from black witchwood and lashed with Elderglass cords. The rafters were slimy with age and unmentionable growths, but they had surely held as long as the stones above had, and they retained their strength.

The waterfall that cascaded in from the roof terminated here in one of the swirling channels beneath the rafters. There was a veritable maze of the things; some were as smooth as glass, while others were as turbulent as whitewater rapids. A few wheels and even stranger devices turned slowly in the corners of the under-rafters. Jean had briefly appraised them by the light of a tiny alchemical ball when he’d settled himself in for a long wait. Bug, understandably unwilling to move too far from Jean’s company, had crouched on a rafter of his own about twenty feet to Jean’s left.

There were little shafts in the stone floor of the Echo Hole, square cuts about two inches wide, irregularly spaced and serving some unguessable function. Jean had positioned himself between one of these, knowing that it would be impossible to hear any of the activities above with the noise of the waterfall right in his ear.

His understanding of the situation above was imperfect-but as the long minutes rolled by, and the red light grew, and Capa Barsavi and Locke began speaking to one another, Jean’s uneasiness deepened into dread. There was shouting, cursing, the trample of booted feet on stone-cheers. Locke was taken. Where was the gods-damned Bondsmage?

Jean scuttled along his rafter, looking for the best way to cross to the waterfall. It would be a good five or six feet up from the rafters to the lip of the stone gash through which the waterfall poured, but if he stayed out of the falling water he could make it. Besides, it was the quickest way up-the only way up from within here. In the thin red light pouring down through the little holes in the floor, Jean signaled for Bug to stay put.

There was another outburst of cheering above, and then the capa’s voice, loud and clear through one of the peepholes: “Take this bastard and send him out to sea.”

Send him out to sea? Jean’s heart pounded. Had they already cut Locke’s throat? His eyes stung at the thought that the next thing he’d see was a limp body falling in the white stream of gushing water, a limp body dressed all in gray.

Then came the cask, a heavy dark object that plunged into the black canal at the base of the waterfall with a loud splash and a geyser of water. Jean blinked twice before he realized what he’d just seen. “Oh, gods,” he muttered. “Like for like! Barsavi had to be fucking poetic!”

Overhead there was more cheering, more stomping of feet. Barsavi was yelling something; his men were yelling in response. Then the faint lines of red light began to flicker; shadows passed before them, and they began to recede in the direction of the street door. Barsavi was moving, so Jean decided to take a risk.

There was another splash, audible even over the hiss and rumble of the waterfall. What the hell was that? Jean reached beneath his vest, drew out his light-globe, and shook it. A faint white star blossomed in the darkness. Clinging tightly to the wet rafter with his other hand, Jean tossed the globe down toward the channel in which the cask would have fallen, about forty feet to his right. It hit the water and settled, giving Jean enough light to discern the situation.

The little channel was about eight feet wide, stone-bordered, and the cask was bobbing heavily in it, three-quarters submerged.

Bug was thrashing about in that canal, visible only from the arms up. Jean’s light-globe had struck the water about three feet to the right of his head; Bug had jumped down into the water on his own.

Damn, but the boy seemed to be constitutionally incapable of remaining in high places for any length of time.

Jean looked around frantically; it would take him a few moments to work his way over to a point where he could splash down into the right channel without cracking his legs against one of the stone dividers.

“Bug,” Jean cried, judging that the ruckus above would cover his own voice. “Your light! Slip it out, now! Locke’s in that cask!”

Bug fumbled within his tunic, drew out a globe, and shook it. By the sudden flare of added white light Jean could clearly see the outline of the bobbing black cask. He judged the distance between himself and it, came to a decision, and reached for one of his hatchets with his free hand.

“Bug,” he yelled, “don’t try to get through the sides. Attack the flat top of the cask!”

“How?”

“Stay right where you are.” Jean leaned to his right, clinging to the rafter with his left arm. He raised the hatchet in his right hand, whispered a single “please” to whatever gods were listening, and let fly. The hatchet struck, quivering, in the dark wood of the cask; Bug flinched back, then splashed through the water to pry at the weapon.

Jean began sliding his bulk along the rafter, but more dark motion in the corner of his eye brought him up short. He peered down into the shadows on his left. Something was moving across the surface of one of the other waterways in the damned maze. Several somethings-black scuttling shapes the size of dogs. Their bristling legs spread wide when they slipped just beneath the surface of the dark water, then drew in to propel them up and over stone just as easily…

“Fuck me,” he muttered. “Fuck me, that’s not possible.”

Salt devils, despite their horrific size and aspect, were timid creatures. The huge spiders crouched in crevices on the rocky coasts to the southwest of Camorr, preying on fish and gulls, occasionally falling prey to sharks or devilfish if they ventured too far from shore. Sailors flung stones and arrows at them with superstitious dread.

Only a fool would approach one, with their fangs the length of a grown man’s fingers and their venom, which might not always bring death but could make a man fervently pray for it. Yet salt devils were quite content to flee from humans; they were ambush hunters, solitary, incapable of tolerating one another at close quarters. Jean had scared himself witless in his early years reading the observations of scholars and naturalists concerning the creatures.

Yet here was an entire pack of the damn things, leg to leg like hounds, scrabbling across stone and water alike toward Bug and the cask.

“Bug,” Jean screamed. “Bug!”

2

BUG HAD heard even less of the goings-on upstairs than Jean, yet when the cask had splashed down into darkness, he’d realized immediately that it hadn’t been dropped down idly. Having placed himself directly over the canal that flowed from the waterfall, he’d simply let himself drop the fifteen feet down into the rushing water.

He’d tucked his legs and hit like a catapult stone, ass-first. Although his head had plunged under with the momentum of his drop, he quickly found that he could plant his feet; the canal was only about four feet deep.

Now, with Jean’s hatchet gripped in one hand, he chopped frantically at the flat barrel-top before him. He’d set his own light-glass on the stone walkway beside the canal, as there was enough working light coming from Jean’s beneath the surface of the water.

“Bug,” the big man yelled, his voice suddenly loud with real alarm. “Bug!”

The boy turned to his right and caught a glimpse of what was moving out of the far shadows toward him. A shudder of pure revulsion passed up and down his spine, and he looked around frantically to make sure the threat was approaching from only one direction.

“Bug, get out of the water! Get up on the stones!”

“What about Locke?”

“He doesn’t want to come out of that cask right this fucking second,” Jean hollered. “Trust me!”

As Bug scrambled up out of the rippling, alchemically lit water, the cask began once again bobbing toward the south end of the building, where the canal exited to gods knew where. Too desperate to think clearly about his own safety, Jean scrambled out along the crossbeam, feet sliding in the muck of the ages, and ran in the direction of the waterfall with his arms windmilling crazily for balance. A few seconds later he arrested his forward momentum by wrapping his arms around a vertical beam; his feet slipped briefly out from beneath him, but he clung tightly to his perch. His mad dash had brought him to a point beside the waterfall; now he flung himself forward into the air, carefully drawing his legs into his chest. He hit the water with a splash as great as that caused by the cask and bumped the canal bottom.

He came up sputtering, second hatchet already in hand. Bug was crouched on the stone lip beside the canal, waving his alchemical globe at the spiders. Jean saw that the salt devils were about fifteen feet away from the boy, across the water and moving more warily, but still approaching. Their carapaces were mottled black and gray; their multiple eyes the color of deepest night, starred with eerie reflections of Bug’s light. Their hairy pedipalps waved in the air before their faces, and their hard black fangs twitched.

Four of the damn things. Jean heaved his bulk up out of the canal on Bug’s side, spitting water. He fancied that he saw some of those inhuman black eyes turn to regard him.

“Jean,” Bug moaned. “Jean, those things look pissed off.”

“It’s not natural,” said Jean as he ran to Bug’s side; the boy tossed him his other hatchet and he caught it in the air. The spiders had closed to ten feet, just across the water; he and Bug seemed hemmed in by thirty-two unblinking black eyes, thirty-two twitching legs with jagged dark hairs. “Not natural at all; salt devils don’t act like this.”

“Oh, good.” Bug held the alchemical globe out at arm’s length as though he could conceal himself entirely behind it. “You discuss it with them.”

“I’m sure we can communicate. I speak fluent hatchet.”

No sooner were these words out of Jean’s mouth than the spiders moved in eerie unison, forward into the water with four splashes. The cask had now drifted a few feet to Jean and Bug’s right; one black shape actually passed beneath it. Multiple black legs speared upward out of the water, flailing for purchase; Bug cried out in mingled disgust and horror. Jean lunged forward, striking out with each hatchet in rapid downward strokes. Two spider limbs opened with stomach-turning cracking noises, spurting dark blue blood. Jean leapt backward.

The two uninjured spiders pulled themselves up out of the water a few seconds ahead of their wounded brethren and rushed Jean, their barbed feet rasping against the wet stone blocks beneath them. Realizing he would be dangerously overbalanced if he attempted to swing on both at once, Jean opted for a more disgusting plan of action.

The Wicked Sister in his right hand arced downward viciously, splitting the rightmost salt devil’s head between its symmetrical rows of black eyes. Its legs spasmed in its death reflex, and Bug actually dropped his alchemical globe, so quickly did he leap backward. Jean used the momentum of his right-hand swing to raise his left leg up off the ground; the left-hand spider reared up with its fangs spread just as he brought his boot heel down on what he supposed was its face. Its eyes cracked like jellied fruit, and Jean shoved downward with all his might, feeling as though he was stomping on a sack of wet leathers.

Warm blood soaked his boot as he pulled it free, and now the wounded spiders were scuttling up right behind their fallen counterparts, hissing and clicking in anger.

One shoved its way in front of the other and lunged at Jean, legs wide, head up to bare its curving fangs. Jean brought both the Sisters down in a hammer blow, blade sides reversed, smashing the spider’s head down into the wet stones and stopping it in its tracks. Ichor spurted; Jean felt it spattering his neck and forehead, and did his best to ignore it.

One damn monster left. Incensed at the delay they’d caused him, Jean bellowed and leapt into the air. Arms spread, he landed with both of his feet in the middle of the last creature’s carapace. It exploded wetly beneath him, folding the flailing legs up at an unnatural angle. They beat their last few pulses of life against his legs as he ground in his heels, growling.

“Gah!” cried Bug, who’d gotten a good soaking from something blue and previously circulating through a salt devil; Jean didn’t waste a second in tossing the boy one of his gore-soaked Sisters before jumping down into the water once again. The cask had floated about ten feet farther south; Jean splashed frantically toward it and secured it with his left hand. Then he began to piston his right arm up and down, hacking at the wood of the barrel’s cover with his hatchet.

“Bug,” he cried, “kindly make sure there aren’t any more of those damn things creeping up on us!”

There was a splash behind Jean as Bug hopped back into the waterway. A few seconds later the boy came up beside the cask and steadied it with his own thin arms. “None that I can see, Jean. Hurry.”

“I am”-crack, crack, crack-“fucking hurrying.” His hatchet blade bit through the wood at last; horse urine poured out into the water and Bug gagged. Working furiously, Jean widened the hole, then managed to pry off the end of the cask entirely. A wave of the foul yellow-slick stuff swept out across his chest. Tossing his hatchet away without a further thought, he reached inside and tugged out the motionless body of Locke Lamora.

Jean checked him frantically for cuts, slashes, or raised purple welts; his neck seemed to be quite intact.

Jean heaved Locke rather ungently up onto the stone walkway beside the dead spiders, some parts of which were still twitching, then pushed himself up out of the water to crouch beside Locke. He wrenched off Locke’s mantle and cloak; Bug appeared at his side just in time to yank them away and toss them in the water. Jean tore open Locke’s gray vest and began thumping on his chest.

“Bug,” he gasped. “Bug! Get up here and push his legs in for me. His warm humors are all snuffed out. Let’s get a rhythm going and maybe we can rekindle them. Gods, if he lives I swear I’ll get ten books on physik and memorize every single one.”

Bug clambered out of the water and began pumping Locke’s legs, moving them in and out one at a time, while Jean alternately pressed on Locke’s stomach, pounded on his chest, and slapped him on the cheeks. “Come on, gods damn it,” Jean muttered. “Be stubborn, you skinny little-”

Locke’s back arched convulsively, and harsh wet coughing noises exploded out of his throat; his hands scrabbled weakly at the stone, and he rolled over onto his left side. Jean sat back and sighed with relief, oblivious to the puddle of spider blood he’d settled into.

Locke vomited into the water, retched and shuddered, then vomited again. Bug knelt beside him, steadying him by the shoulders. For several minutes, Locke lay there shaking, breathing heavily and coughing.

“Oh, gods,” he said at last in a small hoarse voice. “Oh, gods. My eyes. I can barely see. Is that water?”

“Yes, running water.” Jean reached over and took one of Locke’s arms.

“Then get me in there. Thirteen gods, get this foulness off me.”

Locke rolled into the canal with a splash before Jean or Bug could even move to assist him; he dunked his head beneath the dark stream several times, then began tearing off his remaining clothes, until he was wearing nothing but a white undertunic and his gray breeches.

“Better?” asked Jean.

“I suppose I must be.” Locke retched again. “My eyes sting, my nose and throat burn, my chest hurts, I’ve got a pounding black headache the size of Therim Pel, I got slapped around by the entire Barsavi family, I’m covered in horse piss, and it looks like the Gray King just did something pretty clever at our expense.” He set his head against the edge of the stone pathway and coughed a few more times. When he raised his head again, he noticed the spider carcasses for the first time and jerked backward. “Ugh. Gods. Looks like there’s things I’ve missed, too.”

“Salt devils,” said Jean. “A whole pack of them, working together. They came on looking for a fight. Suicidal, like.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Locke.

“One thing could explain it,” Jean replied.

“A conspiracy of the gods,” Locke muttered. “Oh. Sorcery.”

“Yes, that bloody Bondsmage. If he can tame a scorpion hawk, he could-”

“But what if it’s just this place?” interrupted Bug. “You’ve heard the stories.”

“No need to fret about stories,” said Locke, “when there’s a live mage known to have it in for us. Jean’s right. I didn’t get stuffed in that barrel as a criticism of my playacting, and those biting bitches weren’t here for a rest holiday. You were both meant to be dead as well, or if not dead-”

“Scared off,” said Jean. “Distracted. The better for you to drown.”

“Seems plausible.” Locke rubbed at his stinging eyes once again. “Amazing how every time I think my tolerance for this affair has reached a final low, I find something new to hate. Calo and Galdo…we need to get to them.”

“They could be in a world of shit,” agreed Jean.

“They already are, but we’ll face it better once we’re back together.”

Locke attempted to heave himself up out of the water and failed. Jean reached down and pulled him up by the collar of his tunic. Locke nodded his thanks and slowly stood up, shaking. “I’m afraid my strength seems to have fled. I’m sorry, Jean.”

“Don’t be. You’ve taken a hell of a lot of abuse tonight. I’m just pleased we broke you out of that thing before it was too late.”

“I’m indebted to the pair of you, believe me. That was…It would have been…” Locke shuddered and coughed again. “It was pretty gods-damned awful.”

“I can only suppose,” said Jean. “Shall we go?”

“With all haste. Back out the way you two came in, quietly. Barsavi’s crowd may still be in the area. And keep your eyes open for, ah, birds.”

“Too right. We came in through a sort of crawlway, western canal-side.” Jean slapped his forehead and looked around. “Damn me, I’ve mislaid the Sisters.”

“Never fear,” said Bug, holding them up. “I figured you’d want them back, so I kept a watch on them.”

“Much obliged, Bug,” said Jean. “I’m of a mind to use them on some people before this night is done.”

3

RUSTWATER WAS as dead as ever when they snuck out the crawlway and scrabbled up onto the canal bank just to the west of the Echo Hole. Barsavi’s procession had vanished. And although the three Gentlemen Bastards crouched low and scanned the occulted sky for any hint of a swooping hawk, they caught not a glimpse.

“Let’s make for Coalsmoke,” said Locke. “Past Beggar’s Barrow. We can steal a boat and slip home through the culvert.” The drainage culvert on the south side of the Temple District, just beneath the House of Perelandro, had a concealed slide mechanism within the cage that covered it from the outside. The Gentlemen Bastards could open it at will to come and go quietly.

“Good idea,” said Jean. “I’m not comfortable being about on the streets and bridges.”

They crept south, grateful for the low, warm mists that swirled around them. Jean had his hatchets out and was moving his head from side to side, watchful as a cat on a swaying clothesline. He led them over a bridge, with Locke constantly stumbling and falling behind, then down the southeastern shore of the Quiet. Here the lightless black heap of Beggar’s Barrow loomed in the mists to their left, and the wet stink of pauper’s graves filled the air.

“Not a watchman,” whispered Locke. “Not a Shades’ Hill boy or girl. Not a soul. Even for this neighborhood, that’s damn peculiar.”

“Has anything about tonight been right yet?” Jean set as rapid a pace as he could, and they soon crossed another bridge, south into Coalsmoke. Locke labored to keep up, clutching his aching stomach and ribs. Bug brought up their rear, constantly peering over his shoulder.

On the northeastern edge of Coalsmoke there was a line of weathered docks, sagging stairs, and crumbling stone quays. All the larger, nicer boats and barges were locked and chained, but a few small cockleshells bobbed here and there, secured by nothing more than rope. In a city full of such little boats, no sane thief would bother stealing one-most of the time.

They clambered into the first one that chanced to have an oar; Locke collapsed at the stern, while Bug took up the oar and Jean cast off the rope.

“Thank you, Bug.” Jean squeezed himself down into the wet bottom of the little wooden craft; all three of them made for a tight fit. “I’ll trade off with you in just a bit.”

“What, no crack about my moral education?”

“Your moral education’s over.” Jean stared up into the sky as the dockside receded and Bug took them out into the canal’s heart. “Now you’re going to learn a thing or two about war.”

4

UNSEEN AND undisturbed, Jean quietly paddled them up against the north bank of the canal just south of their temple. The House of Perelandro was nothing more than a dark impression of mass, lightless in the silver fog above their heads.

“Smartly, smartly,” the big man muttered to himself as he brought them abreast with the drainage culvert; it was about a yard up from the water, with an opening five feet in diameter. It led more or less directly to a concealed passage just behind the ladder that led down from the temple itself. Bug slipped a hand past the iron bars at the end of the culvert and tripped the hidden locking mechanism. He then prepared to climb in.

“I’ll go first,” he said, just before Jean grabbed him by the collar.

“I think not. The Wicked Sisters will go first. You sit down and keep the boat steady.”

Bug did so, pouting, and Locke smiled. Jean pulled himself up into the culvert and began crawling into the darkness.

“You can have the honor of going second, Bug,” said Locke. “I might need a hand pulling me up.”

When all three of them were wedged safely into the pipe, Locke turned and nudged the little boat back out into midcanal with his feet. The current would carry it to the Via Camorrazza, lost in the mists, until someone ran into it with a larger boat or claimed it as a windfall. Locke then slid the pipe cover closed and locked it once again. The Gentlemen Bastards actually oiled the hinges on the grate to keep their comings and goings quiet.

They crawled forward into blackness, surrounded by the gentle echoes of their own breathing and the soft noise of scuffing cloth. There was a quiet click as Jean operated the hidden entrance into the burrow; then a line of pale silver light spilled in.

Jean stepped out onto the wooden floor of the dim passage; just to his right, the rungs ran up into the hidden entrance beneath what had once been Father Chains’ sleeping pallet. Despite Jean’s best effort to move quietly, the floor creaked slightly as he moved forward. Locke slipped out into the passage behind him, his heart pounding.

The illumination was too dim. The walls had been golden for as long as he’d known the place.

Jean crept forward, hatchets bobbing in his fists. At the far end of the passage, he whirled around the corner, crouched low-and then stood straight up, growling, “Shit!”

The kitchen had been thoroughly trashed.

The spice cabinets were overturned; broken glass and shattered crockery littered the floor. The storage cupboards hung open, empty; the water barrel had been dumped on the tiles. The gilded chairs were torn apart, thrown into a heap in one corner. The beautiful chandelier that had swung above their heads for as long as any of them had lived within the glass burrow was a total ruin. It dangled now by a few wires, its planets and constellations smashed, its armillary paths bent beyond all possible repair. The sun that had burned at the heart of it all was cracked like an egg; the alchemical oils that had lit it from within had seeped onto the table.

Locke and Jean stood at the edge of the entrance passage, staring in shock. Bug rounded the corner, hot for action against unseen foes, and came up short between them. “I…gods. Gods.”

“Calo?” Locke abandoned all thoughts of sneaking about. “Galdo! Calo! Are you here?”

Jean swept aside the heavy curtain to the door that led to the Wardrobe. He didn’t say anything or make any noise, but the Wicked Sisters fell out of his hands and clattered against the floor tiles.

The Wardrobe, too, had been ransacked. All the rows of fine clothing and costume garments, all the hats and cravats and breeches and hose, all the waistcoats and vests and thousands of crowns worth of accessories-all of it was gone. The mirrors were smashed; the Masque Box was overturned, its contents strewn and broken across the floor.

Calo and Galdo lay beside it, on their backs, staring upward in the semidarkness. Their throats were slashed from ear to ear, a pair of smooth gashes-identical twin wounds.

5

JEAN FELL forward onto his knees.

Bug tried to squeeze past Locke, and Locke shoved him back into the kitchen with all the feeble strength he could muster, saying, “No, Bug, don’t…” But it was already too late. The boy sat down hard against the edge of the witchwood table and broke into sobs.

Gods, Locke thought as he stumbled past Jean into the Wardrobe. Gods, I have been a fool. We should have packed up and run.

“Locke…,” Jean whispered, and then he sprawled forward onto the ground, shaking and shuddering as though he were having some sort of fit.

“Jean! Gods, what now?” Locke crouched beside the bigger man and placed a hand beneath his round, heavy chin. Jean’s pulse was pounding wildly. He looked up at Locke with wide eyes, his mouth opening and closing, failing to spit out words. Locke’s mind raced.

Poison? A trap of some sort? An alchemical trick left behind in the room? Why wasn’t he affected? Did he feel so miserable already that the symptoms hadn’t caught his attention yet? He glanced frantically around the room, and his eyes seized on a dark object that lay between the sprawled Sanza twins.

A hand-a severed human hand, gray and dried and leathery. It lay with its palm toward the ceiling and its fingers curled tightly inward. A black thread had been used to sew a name into the dead skin of the palm; the script was crude but nonetheless clear, for it was outlined with the faintest hint of pale blue fire:

JEAN TANNEN

The things I could do to you if I were to stitch your true name. The words of the Falconer returned unbidden to Locke’s memory; Jean groaned again, his back arched in pain, and Locke reached down toward the severed hand. A dozen plans whirled in his head-chop it to bits with a hatchet, scald it on the alchemical hearthslab, throw it in the river…He had little knowledge of practical sorcery, but surely something was better than nothing.

New footsteps crunched on the broken glass in the kitchen.

“Don’t move, boy. I don’t think your fat friend can help you at the moment. That’s it, just sit right there.”

Locke slid one of Jean’s hatchets off the ground, placed it in his left hand, and stepped to the Wardrobe door.

A man was standing at the lip of the entrance hall-a complete stranger to Locke’s eyes. He wore a long brownish red oilcloak with the hood thrown back, revealing long stringy black hair and drooping black moustaches. He held a crossbow in his right hand, almost casually, pointed at Bug. His eyes widened when Locke appeared in the Wardrobe doorway.

“This ain’t right,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“You’re the Gray King’s man,” said Locke. His left hand was up against the back of the wall beside the door, as though he were holding himself up, concealing the hatchet.

“A Gray King’s man. He’s got a few.”

“I will give you any price you name,” said Locke. “Tell me where he is, what he’s doing, and how I can avoid the Bondsmage.”

“You can’t. I’ll give you that one for free. And any price I name? You got no such pull.”

“I have forty-five thousand full crowns.”

“You did,” said the crossbowman, amiably enough. “You don’t anymore.”

“One bolt,” said Locke. “Two of us.” Jean groaned from the floor behind him. “The situation bears thinking on.”

“You don’t look so well, and the boy don’t look like much. I said don’t move, boy.”

“One bolt won’t be enough,” said Bug, his eyes cold with an anger Locke had never before seen in him. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”

“One bolt,” repeated Locke. “It was for Bug, wasn’t it? If I weren’t here, you’d have shot him first thing. Then done for Jean. A commendable arrangement. But now there’s two of us, and you’re still armed for one.”

“Easy, gents,” said the Gray King’s man. “I don’t see either of you eager for a hole in the face.”

“You don’t know what you’re up against. What we’ve done.” Bug flicked his wrist, slightly, and something fell into it from his sleeve. Locke only barely caught the motion-what was that thing? An Orphan’s Twist? Oh, gods…that wouldn’t do any good against a crossbow quarrel…

“Bug…,” he muttered.

“Tell him, Locke. Tell him he doesn’t know who he’s fucking with. Tell him he doesn’t know what he’s going to get! We can take him.”

“First one of you moves an inch, I let fly.” The crossbowman backed off a stride, braced his weapon with his left arm, and swung his aim back and forth between Locke and Bug.

“Bug, don’t…”

“We can take him, Locke. You and I. He can’t stop both of us. Hell, I bet he can’t stop either of us.”

“Bug, listen…”

“Listen to your friend, boy.” The intruder was sweating nervously behind his weapon.

“I’m a Gentleman Bastard,” said Bug, slowly and angrily. “Nobody messes with us. Nobody gets the best of us. You’re going to pay!”

Bug sprang upward from the floor, raising the hand that held the Orphan’s Twist, a look of absolute burning determination on his face. The crossbow snapped, and the whip-crack of its unleashed cord echoed sharply from the enclosed glass walls of the kitchen.

The bolt that was meant to catch Bug between the eyes took him in the neck instead.

He jerked back as though stung by an insect; his knees buckled only halfway into his leap, and he spun backward, his useless little Orphan’s Twist arcing out of his hands as he fell.

The Gray King’s man threw down his crossbow and reached for a blade at his belt, but Locke was preceded out the doorway by the hatchet he’d concealed, flung with all of his rage. Jean could have split the man’s head with the blade; Locke barely managed to crack him hard with the ball side of the weapon. But it was enough. The ball caught him just beneath his right eye and he flinched backward, crying out in pain.

Locke scooped up the crossbow and fell upon the intruder, howling. He swung the butt-stock of the weapon into the man’s face, and the man’s nose broke with a spray of blood. He fell backward, his head cracking against the Elderglass of the passage wall. As he slid down, he raised his hands before him in an attempt to ward off Locke’s next blow. Locke smashed his fingers with the crossbow; the screams of the two men mingled and echoed in the enclosed space.

Locke ended the affair by slamming one curved end of the bow into the man’s temple. The assassin’s head spun, blood spattered against the glass, and he sagged into the passage corner, motionless.

Locke threw down the crossbow, turned on his heel, and ran to Bug.

The bolt had pierced the boy’s neck to the right of his windpipe, toward the outer edge of his neck, where it was buried up to its rounded feathers in a spreading pool of dark blood. Locke knelt and cradled Bug’s head in his hands, feeling the tip of the crossbow quarrel on the back of Bug’s neck. Slick warmth poured out over Locke’s hands; he could feel it coursing out with every ragged breath the boy took. Bug’s eyes were wide, and they fixed on him.

“Forgive me,” Locke mumbled through his tears. “Gods damn me, Bug, this is my fault. We could have run. We should have. My pride…you and Calo and Galdo. That bolt should have been me.”

“Your pride,” the boy whispered. “Justified. Gentleman…Bastard.”

Locke pressed his fingers against Bug’s wound, imagining he could somehow dam the flow of blood, but the boy cried out, and Locke withdrew his shaking fingers.

“Justified,” Bug spat. Blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. “Am I…not a second. Not…apprentice. Real Gentleman Bastard.”

“You were never a second, Bug. You were never an apprentice.” Locke sobbed, tried to brush the boy’s hair back, and was aghast at the bloody handprint he left on Bug’s pale forehead. “You brave little idiot. You brave, stupid little bastard. This is my fault, Bug, please…please say this is all my fault.”

“No,” whispered Bug. “Oh gods…hurts…hurts so much…”

The boy said nothing more. His breathing came to one last ragged halt while Locke held him.

Locke stared upward. It seemed to him that the alien glass ceiling that had shed warm light on his life for so many long years now took a knowing pleasure in showing him nothing but dark red: the reflection of the floor on which he sat with the motionless body of Bug, still bleeding in his arms.

He might have stayed there, locked in a reverie of grief for the gods only knew how long-but Jean groaned loudly in the next room.

Locke remembered himself, shuddered, and set Bug’s head down as gently as he could. He stumbled to his feet and lifted Jean’s hatchet up off the ground once more. His motions were slow and unsteady as he walked back into the Wardrobe, raised the hatchet above his head, and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the sorcerous hand that lay between the bodies of Calo and Galdo.

The faint blue fire dimmed as the hatchet blade bit down into the desiccated flesh; Jean gasped loudly behind him, which Locke took as an encouraging sign. Methodically, maliciously, he hacked the hand into smaller pieces. He chopped at leathery skin and brittle bones until the black threads that had spelled Jean’s name were separated and the blue glow faded entirely.

He stood staring down at the Sanzas until he heard Jean moving behind him.

“Oh, Bug. Oh, gods damn it.” The big man stumbled to his feet and groaned. “Forgive me, Locke. I just couldn’t…I couldn’t move!”

“There’s nothing to forgive.” Locke spoke as though the sound of his own voice pained him. “It was a trap. It had your name on it, that thing the mage left for us. They guessed you’d be coming back.”

“A…a severed hand? A human hand, with my name stitched into it?”

“Yes.”

“A Hanged Man’s Grasp,” said Jean, staring at the fragments of flesh, and at the bodies of the Sanzas. “I…read about them, when I was younger. Seems they work.”

“Neatly removing you from the situation,” said Locke, coldly. “So one assassin hiding up above could come down, kill Bug, and finish you.”

“Just one?”

“Just one.” Locke sighed. “Jean. In the temple rooms up above. Our lamp oil…please fetch it down.”

“Lamp oil?”

“All of it,” said Locke. “Hurry.”

Jean paused in the kitchen, knelt, and slid Bug’s eyes closed with his left hand. He buried his face in his hands and shook, making no noise. Then he stumbled back to his feet, wiping away tears, and ran off to carry out Locke’s request.

Locke walked slowly back into the kitchen, dragging the body of Calo Sanza with him. He placed the corpse beside the table, folded its arms across its chest, knelt, and kissed its forehead.

The man in the corner moaned and moved his head. Locke kicked him once in the face, then returned to the Wardrobe for Galdo’s body. In short order, he had the Sanzas laid out neatly in the middle of the ransacked kitchen, with Bug beside them. Unable to bear the glassy stare of his dead friends’ eyes, Locke covered them with silk tablecloths from a smashed cabinet.

“I promise you a death-offering, brothers,” Locke whispered when he’d finished. “I promise you an offering that will make the gods themselves take notice. An offering that will make the shades of all the dukes and capas of Camorr feel like paupers. An offering in blood and gold and fire. This I swear by Aza Guilla who gathers us, and by Perelandro who sheltered us, and by the Crooked Warden who places his finger on the scale when our souls are weighed. This I swear to Chains, who kept us safe. I beg your forgiveness that I failed to do the same.”

Locke forced himself to stand up and return to work.

A few old garments had been thrown into the Wardrobe corners; Locke gathered them up, along with a few components from the spilled Masque Box: a handful of false moustaches, a bit of false beard, and some stage adhesive. These he threw into the entrance corridor to the burrow; then he peeked into the vault. As he’d suspected, it was utterly empty. Not a single coin remained in any well or on any shelf. No doubt the sacks loaded onto the wagon earlier had vanished as well.

From the sleeping quarters at the back of the burrow, he gathered sheets and blankets, then parchment, books, and scrolls. He threw these into a heap atop the dining room table. At last, he stood over the Gray King’s assassin, his hands and clothes covered in blood, and waited for Jean to return.

6

“WAKE UP,” said Locke. “I know you can hear me.”

The Gray King’s assassin blinked, spat blood, and tried to push himself even farther back into the corner with his feet.

Locke stared down at him. It was a curious reversal of the natural way of things. The assassin was well muscled, a head taller than Locke, and Locke was particularly unimposing after the events of this night. But everything frightening about him was concentrated in his eyes, and they bore down on the assassin with a bright, hard hatred.

Jean stood a few paces behind him, a bag over his shoulder, his hatchets tucked into his belt.

“Do you want to live?” asked Locke.

The assassin said nothing.

“It was a simple question, and I won’t repeat it again. Do you want to live?”

“I…yes,” the man said softly.

“Then it pleases me to deny you your preference.” Locke knelt beside him, reached beneath his own undertunic, and drew forth a little leather pouch that hung by a cord around his neck.

“Once,” said Locke, “when I was old enough to understand what I’d done, I was ashamed to be a murderer. Even after I’d paid the debt, I still wore this. All these years, to remind me.”

He pulled the pouch forward, snapping the cord. He opened it and removed a single small white shark’s tooth. He grabbed the assassin’s right hand, placed the pouch and the tooth on his palm, and then squeezed the man’s broken fingers together around them. The assassin writhed and screamed. Locke punched him.

“But now,” he said, “now, I’ll be a murderer once again. I will set myself to slay until every last Gray King’s man is gone. You hear me, cock-sucker? I will have the Bondsmage and I will have the Gray King, and if all the powers of Camorr and Karthain and Hell itself oppose me, it will be nothing-nothing but a longer trail of corpses between me and your master.”

“You’re mad,” the assassin whispered. “You’ll never beat the Gray King.”

“I’ll do more than that. Whatever he’s planning, I will unmake it. Whatever he desires, I will destroy it. Every reason you came down here to murder my friends will evaporate. Every Gray King’s man will die for nothing, starting with you.”

Jean Tannen stepped forward and grabbed the assassin with one hand, hauling him to his knees. Jean dragged him into the kitchen, oblivious to the man’s pleas for mercy. The assassin was flung against the table, beside the three covered bodies and the pile of cloth and paper, and he became aware of the cloying smell of lamp oil.

Without a word, Jean brought the ball of one of his hatchets down on the assassin’s right knee; the man howled. Another swift crack shattered his left kneecap, and the assassin rolled over to shield himself from further blows-but none fell.

“When you see the Crooked Warden,” said Locke, twisting something in his hands, “tell him that Locke Lamora learns slowly, but he learns well. And when you see my friends, you tell them that there are more of you on the way.”

He opened his hands and let an object fall to the ground. It was a piece of knotted cord, charcoal gray, with white filaments jutting out from one end. Alchemical twist-match. When the white threads were exposed to air for several moments, they would spark, igniting the heavier, longer-burning gray cord they were wrapped in. It splashed into the edge of a pool of lamp oil.

Locke and Jean went up through the concealed hatch into the old stone temple, letting the ladder cover fall shut with a bang behind them.

In the glass burrow beneath their feet, the flames began to rise.

First the flames, and then the screams.

1

THEY HAD TO steal another little boat, Locke having so profligately disposed of their first. On any other night, he would have had a good laugh.

And so would Bug, and Calo, and Galdo, he told himself.

Locke and Jean drifted south between the Narrows and the Mara Camorrazza, hunched over in old cloaks from the floor of the Wardrobe, locked away from the rest of the city in the mist. The soft flickering lights and murmuring voices in the distance seemed to Locke as artifacts of an alien life he’d left long ago, not elements of the city he’d lived in for as long as he could remember.

“I am such a fool,” he muttered. He lay along a gunwale, aching, feeling the dry heaves rise up again from the battered pit of his stomach.

“If you say that one more time,” said Jean, “I will throw you into the water and row the boat over your head.”

“I should have let us run.”

“Perhaps,” said Jean. “But perhaps not everything miserable that happens to us stems directly from one of your choices, brother. Perhaps bad tidings come regardless of what we do. Perhaps if we’d run, that Bondsmage would have hunted us down upon the road, and scattered our bones somewhere between here and Talisham.”

“And yet…”

“We live,” said Jean forcefully. “We live and we may avenge them. You had the right idea when you did for that Gray King’s man back in the burrow. The questions now are why, and what next? Quit acting like you’ve been breathing Wraithstone smoke. I need your wits, Locke. I need the Thorn of Camorr.”

“Let me know when you find him. He’s a fucking fairy tale.”

“No, he’s sitting here in this boat with me. If you’re not him now, you must become him. The Thorn is the man who can beat the Gray King. I can’t do it alone; I know that much. Why would the Gray King do this to us? What does it bring him? Think, damn it!”

“Too much to guess at,” said Locke. His voice regained a bit of its vigor as he pondered. “But…narrow the question. Consider the means. We saw one of his men beneath the temple; I saw another man when I was taken for the first time. So we know he had at least two working for him, in addition to the Bondsmage.”

“Right. Does he strike you as a sloppy operator?”

“No.” Locke rubbed his hands together. “No, everything he did seemed to me to be as intricate as Verrari clockwork.”

“Yet he sent only one man down into the burrow.”

“Yes-the Sanzas were already dead, I was thought to be dead, you walked into another trap set by the Bondsmage, and it would have been a crossbow quarrel for Bug. Deftly done. Quick and cruel.”

“But why not send two men? Why not three? To bury us so viciously, why not be absolutely sure of the issue?” Jean gave the water a few gentle strokes to hold their position against the current. “I cannot believe he suddenly became lazy, at the very culmination of his scheme.”

“Perhaps,” said Locke, “perhaps…he needed what other men he had elsewhere, very badly. Perhaps one was all he could spare.” Locke gasped and slammed his right fist into the open palm of his left hand. “Perhaps we weren’t the culmination of his scheme after all.”

“What, then?”

“Not what, who.” Locke sat up and groaned, his head swimming. “Who has he been attacking all these months? Jean, Barsavi believes the Gray King to be dead. So now what will he do tonight?”

“He…he’ll throw a revel. Just like he used to do on the Day of Changes. He’ll celebrate.”

“At the Floating Grave,” said Locke. “He’ll throw the doors open, haul in casks-gods, real ones this time. He’ll summon his whole court. All the Right People, drunk three deep along the causeway and the wharfs of the Wooden Waste. Just like the good old days.”

“So the Gray King faked his own death to lure Barsavi into throwing a revel?”

“It’s not the revel,” said Locke. “It’s…it’s the people. All the Right People. That’s it; gods, that’s it! Barsavi will appear before his people tonight for the first time in months. Do you understand? All the gangs, all the garristas will witness anything that happens there.”

“Which does what for the Gray King?”

“The fucker has a flair for the dramatic. I’d say Barsavi’s in a heap of shit. Row, Jean. Get me down to the Cauldron right now. I can cross to the Waste myself. I need to be at the Floating Grave, with haste.”

“Have you lost your mind? If the Gray King and his men are still prowling, they’ll kill you for sure. And if Barsavi sees you, you’re supposed to be nearly dead of a stomach flux! You are nearly dead of more than that!”

“They won’t see Locke Lamora,” said Locke, fumbling with some of the items he’d managed to salvage from the Masque Box. He held a false beard up to his chin and grinned. “My hair’s going to be gray for a few days, since the removal salve is burning up as we speak. I’ll throw on some soot and put up the hood, and I’ll be just another skinny nobody with bruises all over his face, come looking for some free wine from the Capa.”

“You should rest; you’ve had your life damn near pounded out of you. You’re a complete mess.”

“I ache in places I didn’t previously realize I owned,” said Locke, gingerly applying adhesive paste to his chin with his fingers. “But it can’t be helped. This is all the disguise gear we have left; we’ve got no money, no wardrobe, no more temple, no more friends. And you only have a few hours, at best, to go to ground and find us a place to stay before the Gray King’s men realize one of their number is missing.”

“But still-”

“I’m half your size, Jean. You can’t pamper me now. I can go unseen; you’ll be obvious as the rising sun. My suggestion is that you find a hovel in Ashfall, clear out the rats, and leave some of our signs in the area. Just scrawl soot on the walls. I’ll find you when I’m done.”

“But-”

“Jean, you wanted the Thorn of Camorr. Well, you’ve got him.” Locke jammed the false beard onto his chin and pressed until the adhesive ceased tingling, letting him know that it was dry. “Take me to the Cauldron and let me off. For Calo, Galdo, and Bug, if not for me! Something’s about to happen at the Floating Grave, and I need to see what it is. Everything that bastard has done to us comes down to the next few hours-if it isn’t happening already.”

2

IT COULD be said, with several levels of truthful meaning, that Vencarlo Barsavi outdid himself with the celebration for his victory over the murderer of his daughter.

The Floating Grave was thrown open. The guards remained at their posts, but discipline slackened agreeably. Huge alchemical lanterns were hauled up under the silk awnings on the topmost decks of the harbor-locked galleon; they lit up the Wooden Waste beneath the dark sky and shone like beacons through the fog.

Runners were sent out to the Last Mistake for food and wine. The tavern was rapidly emptied of all its edibles, most of its casks, and every single one of its patrons. They streamed toward the Wooden Waste, drunk or sober, united in curious expectation.

The guards on the quay eyed the guests pouring in but did little else. Men and women without obvious weapons concealed beneath their clothes were passed through without so much as a cursory search. Flush with victory, the capa had decided to be magnanimous in more ways than one. This was to Locke’s benefit; hooded and bearded and thoroughly begrimed, he slipped in with a huge crowd of Cauldron cutthroats making their rowdy way across the walkway to Barsavi’s galleon, lit like a pleasure galley from some romantic tale of the pashas of the Bronze Sea.

The Floating Grave was packed with men and women. Capa Barsavi sat on his raised chair, surrounded by all of his inner circle: his red-faced, shouting sons; his most powerful surviving garristas; his quiet, watchful Berangias twins. Locke had to push and shove and utter curses to make his way into the heart of the fortress. He nudged himself into a corner near the main doors to the ballroom and watched the affair from this position, aching and uncomfortable but grateful just to be able to claim a vantage point.

The balconies were spilling over with toughs from all the gangs in Camorr-the rowdiness was growing by the minute. The heat was incredible, and the smell; Locke felt pressed against the wall by the weight of odors. Wet wool and sweated-through cotton, wine and wine breath, hair oils and leather.

It was just past the first hour of the morning when Barsavi suddenly rose from his chair and held up a single hand.

Attentiveness spread outward like a wave. Right People nudged one another into silence and pointed to the capa. It took less than a minute for the echoing chaos of the celebration to peter down to a soft murmur. Barsavi nodded appreciatively.

“I trust we’re enjoying ourselves?”

There was a general outburst of cheers, applause, and foot-stomping. Locke privately wondered how wise that really was in a ship of any sort. He was careful to applaud along with the crowd.

“Feels marvelous to be out from under a cloud, doesn’t it?”

Another cheer; Locke scratched at his temporary beard, now damp with sweat. There was a sudden sharp pain in his stomach, right where one of the younger Barsavis had given him particular consideration with a fist. The heat and the smell were triggering strange tickly feelings of nausea in the back of his throat, and he’d had enough of that particular sensation to last the rest of his life. Sourly, he coughed into his hands and prayed for just a few more hours of strength.

One of the Berangias sisters stepped over beside the capa, her shark’s-teeth bangles shining in the light of the hall’s chandeliers, and whispered into his ear. He listened for a few seconds, and then he smiled.

“Cheryn,” he shouted, “proposes that I allow her and her sister to entertain us. Shall I?”

The answering cheer was twice as forceful (and twice as genuine, to Locke’s ears) as anything yet heard. The wooden walls reverberated with it, and Locke flinched.

“Let’s have a teeth show, then!”

All was chaos for the next few minutes. Dozens of Barsavi’s people pushed revelers back, clearing an area at the center of the floor about ten yards on a side. Revelers were pressed up the stairs until the balconies creaked beneath their weight; observation holes were cranked open so those on the top deck could peer down at the proceedings. Locke was pushed back into his corner more firmly than ever.

Men with hooked poles drew up the wooden panels of the floor, revealing the dark water of Camorr Bay. A thrill of anticipation and alarm passed through the crowd at the thought of what might be swimming down there. The unquiet spirits of eight Full Crowns, for one thing, thought Locke.

As the final panels in the center of the opening square were removed, almost everyone present could see the little support platforms on which they’d rested, not one wider than a man’s hand-spread. They were spaced about five feet apart. Barsavi’s arena for his own private teeth shows-a challenge for any contrarequialla, even a pair as experienced as the Berangias sisters.

Cheryn and Raiza, old hands at teasing a crowd, were stripping out of their leather doublets, bracers, and collars. They took their graceful time while the capa’s subjects hooted approval, hoisted cups and glasses, and in some cases even shouted unlikely propositions.

Anjais hurried forward with a little packet of alchemical powders in his hands. He dumped this into the water, then took a prudent step back. This was the “summons”-a potent mix of substances that would rouse the shark’s ire and maintain it for the duration of the contest. Blood in the water could attract and enrage a shark, but the summons would make it utterly drunk with the urge to attack-to leap, thrash, and roll at the women jumping back and forth across their little platforms.

The Berangias sisters stepped forward to nearly the edge of the artificial pool, holding their traditional weapons: the pick-head axes and the short javelins. Anjais and Pachero stood behind them and just to their left; the Capa remained standing by his chair, clapping his hands and grinning broadly.

A black fin broke the surface of the pool; a tail thrashed. There was a brief splash of water, and the electric atmosphere of the crowd intensified. Locke could feel it washing over him-lust and fear entwined, a powerful, animalistic sensation. The crowd had backed off about two yards from any edge of the pool, but still some in the front ranks were shaking nervously, and a few were trying to push their way farther back through the crowd, to the delight and derision of those around them.

In truth, the shark couldn’t have been longer than five or six feet; some of those used at the Shifting Revel reached twice that length. Still, a fish like that could easily maim on the leap, and if it dragged a person down into the water with it, well, raw size would mean little in such an uneven contest.

The Berangias sisters threw up their arms, then turned as one to the capa. The sister on the right-Raiza? Cheryn? Locke had never learned the trick of telling them apart… And at the thought his heart ached for the Sanzas. Playing deftly to the crowd, Barsavi put up his hands and looked around at his court. When they cheered him on, he stepped down between the ladies and received a kiss on the cheek from each of them.

The water stirred just before the three of them; a sleek black shadow swept past the edge of the pool, then dove down into the lightless depths. Locke could feel five hundred hearts skip a beat, and the breath in five hundred throats catch. His own concentration seemed to peak, and he caught every detail of that moment as though it were frozen before him, from the eager smile on Barsavi’s round red face to the rippling reflection of chandelier light on the water.

“Camorr!” cried the Berangias sister to the capa’s right. Again, the noise of the crowd died, this time as though one gigantic windpipe had been slit. Five hundred pairs of eyes were fixed on the capa and his bodyguards.

“We dedicate this death,” she continued, “to Capa Vencarlo Barsavi, our lord and patron!”

“Well does he deserve it,” said the other.

The shark exploded out of the pool immediately before them-a sleek dark devilish thing, with black lidless eyes and white teeth gaping. A ten-foot fountain of water rose up with it, and it half somersaulted in midair, falling forward, falling…

Directly atop Capa Barsavi.

Barsavi put up his arms to shield himself; the shark came down with its mouth wide open around one of them. The fish’s muscle-heavy body slammed hard against the wood floor, yanking Barsavi down with it. Those implacable jaws squeezed tight, and the capa screamed as blood gushed from just beneath his right shoulder, running out across the floor and down the shark’s blunt snout.

His sons dashed forward to his aid. The Berangias sister to the right looked down at the shark, shifted her weight fluidly to a fighting stance, raised her gleaming axe, and whirled with all the strength of her upper body behind the blow.

Her blade smashed Pachero Barsavi’s head just above his left ear; the tall man’s optics flew off and he staggered forward, his skull caved in, dead before his knees hit the deck.

The crowd screamed and surged, and Locke prayed to the Benefactor to preserve him long enough to make sense of whatever happened next.

Anjais gaped at his struggling father and his falling brother. Before he could utter a single word the other Berangias stepped up behind him, reached around to press her javelin shaft up beneath his chin, and buried the spike of her axe in the back of his head. He spat blood and toppled forward, unmoving.

The shark writhed and tore at the capa’s right arm, while he screamed and beat at its snout until his left hand was scraped bloody by the creature’s abrasive skin. With a final sickening wrench, the shark tore his right arm completely off and slid backward into the water, leaving a broad red streak on the wooden deck behind it. Barsavi rolled away, spraying blood from the stump of his arm, staring at the bodies of his sons in uncomprehending terror. He tried to stumble up.

One of the Berangias sisters kicked him back to the deck.

There was a tumult behind the fallen Capa; several Red Hands rushed forward, weapons drawn, hollering incoherently. What happened next was a blurry, violent mystery to Locke’s untrained eyes, but the two half-clothed Berangias dealt with half a dozen armored men with a brutality the shark would have envied. Javelins flew, axes whirled, throats opened, and blood spurted. The last Red Hand was slumping to the deck, his face a jagged scarlet ruin, perhaps five seconds after the first had charged forward.

There was brawling on the balconies, now-Locke could see men pushing their way through the crowds, men in heavy gray oilcloaks, armed with crossbows and long knives. Some of Barsavi’s guards stood back and did nothing; some attempted to flee; others were taken from behind by their cloaked assailants and killed out of hand. Crossbow strings sang; bolts whirred through the air. There was a resounding bang to Locke’s left. The great doors to the ballroom had slammed shut, seemingly of their own accord, and the clockwork mechanisms within were whirring and clicking. People battered at them uselessly.

One of Barsavi’s men pushed his way out of a crowd of panicking, shoving Right People and raised a crossbow at the Berangias sisters, who stood over the wounded capa like lionesses guarding a kill. A dark streak fell on him from out of the shadowy corners of the ceiling; there was an inhuman screech, and the shot went far awry, hissing above the sisters’ heads to strike the far wall. The guard batted furiously at the brown shape that flapped back into the air on long curving wings-then he put a hand to his neck, staggered, and fell flat on his face.

“Remain where you are,” boomed a voice with an air of assured command. “Remain where you are and attend.”

The command had a greater effect than Locke would have expected. He even felt his own fear dimming down, his own urge to flee vanishing. The wailing and screaming of the crowd quieted; the pounding on the great doors ceased; an eerie calm rapidly fell on what had been the exultant court of Capa Barsavi, not two minutes earlier.

The hairs on the back of Locke’s neck stood up; the change in the crowd was not natural. He might have missed it, but that he’d been under its influence before. There was sorcery in the air. He shivered despite himself. Gods, I hope coming here was as wise an idea as it seemed.

The Gray King was suddenly there with them.

It was as though he’d stepped out of a door that opened from thin air, just beside the capa’s chair. He wore his cloak and mantle, and he stepped with a hunter’s easy assurance across the bodies of the Red Hands. At his side strode the Falconer, with a gauntleted fist held up to the air. Vestris settled upon it, pulled in her wings, and screeched triumphantly. There were gasps and murmurs in the crowd.

“No harm will come to you,” said the Gray King. “I’ve done what harm I came to do tonight.” He stepped up between the Berangias sisters and looked down at Capa Barsavi, who was writhing and moaning on the deck at his feet.

“Hello, Vencarlo. Gods, but you’ve looked better.”

Then the Gray King swept back his hood, and once again Locke saw those intense eyes, the hard lines of the face, the dark hair with streaks of gray, the lean rugged countenance. And he gasped, because he finally realized what had nagged him during his first meeting with the Gray King, that odd familiarity.

All the pieces of that particular puzzle were before him. The Gray King stood between the Berangias sisters, and it was now plain to Locke’s eye that they were siblings-very nearly triplets.

3

“CAMORR,” SHOUTED the Gray King, “the reign of the Barsavi family is at an end!”

His people had taken firm control of the crowd; there were perhaps two dozen of them, in addition to the Berangias sisters and the Falconer. The fingers of the mage’s left hand curled and twisted and flexed, and he muttered under his breath as he gazed around the room. Whatever spell he was weaving did its part to calm the crowd, but no doubt the three black rings visible on his exposed wrist arrested the attention of the revelers as well.

“In fact,” said the Gray King, “the Barsavi family is at an end. No more sons or daughters, Vencarlo. I wanted you to know, before you died, that I had wiped the disease of your loins from the face of the world.

“In the past,” he shouted, “you have known me as the Gray King. Well, now I am out of the shadows. That name is not to be spoken again. Henceforth, you may call me…Capa Raza.”

Raza, thought Locke. Throne Therin for “vengeance.” Not subtle.

Very little about the Gray King, he was learning to his sorrow, actually was.

Capa Raza, as he now styled himself, bent over Barsavi, who was weak with blood loss, whimpering in pain. Raza reached down and pried the capa’s signature ring from his remaining hand. He held this up for all the crowd to behold, then slid it onto the fourth finger of his own left hand.

“Vencarlo,” said Capa Raza, “I have waited so many years to see you like this. Now your children are dead, and your office is passed to me, along with your fortress and your treasure. Every legacy you thought to leave to someone of your name is in my hands. I have erased you from history itself. Does that suit your fancy, scholar? Like an errant chalk mark upon a slate. I have wiped you clean away.

“Do you remember the slow death of your wife? How she trusted your Berangias sisters to the very end? How they would bring her meals to her? She didn’t die of stomach tumors. It was black alchemy. I wanted to do something to whet my appetite, during the long years I spent building this death for you.” Capa Raza grinned with demonic mirth. “Lingered in pain, didn’t she? Well, it wasn’t an act of the gods, Vencarlo. Like everyone else you loved, she died because of you.”

“Why?” Barsavi’s voice was weak and small.

Capa Raza knelt beside him, cradled his head almost tenderly, and whispered in his ear for several long moments. Barsavi stared up at him when he was finished, jaw slack, eyes wide with disbelief, and Raza nodded slowly.

He yanked Barsavi’s head up and backward by his beards. A stiletto fell into his other hand from within his sleeve, and he rammed it into the underside of Vencarlo Barsavi’s exposed chins, all the way to the hilt. Barsavi kicked weakly, just once.

Capa Raza stood up, withdrawing the blade. The Berangias sisters grabbed their former master by his lapels and slid him into the dark water of the bay, which received his body as readily as it had taken his victims and his enemies, over all the long years of his rule.

“One capa rules Camorr,” said Raza, “and now it is me. Now it is me!” He raised the bloody stiletto over his head and gazed around the room, as though inviting disagreement. When none came forth, he continued.

“It is not my intention merely to remove Barsavi, but to replace him. My reasons are my own. So now there is business between myself and all the rest of you, all the Right People.” He gazed slowly around the room, his arms folded before him, his chin thrust out like a conquering general in an old bronze sculpture.

“You must hear my words, and then come to a decision.”

4

“NOTHING THAT you have achieved shall be taken from you,” he continued. “Nothing that you have worked or suffered for will be revoked. I admire the arrangements Barsavi built, as much as I hated the man who built them. So this is my word.

“All remains as it was. All garristas and their gangs will control the same territories; they will pay the same tribute, on the same day, once a week. The Secret Peace remains. As it was death to breach under Barsavi’s rule, so shall it be death under mine.

“I claim all of Barsavi’s offices and powers. I claim all of his dues. In justice, I must therefore claim his debts and his responsibilities. If any man can show that he was owed by Barsavi, he will now be owed the same by Capa Raza. First among them is Eymon Danzier… Step forward, Eymon.”

There was a murmur and a ripple in the crowd to Capa Raza’s right; after a few moments, the skinny man Locke remembered very well from the Echo Hole was pushed forward, obviously terrified. His bony knees all but knocked together.

“Eymon, be at ease.” Raza held out his left hand, palm down, fingers splayed, as Barsavi had once done for every single person watching. “Kneel to me and name me your capa.”

Shaking, Eymon dropped to one knee, took Raza’s hand, and kissed the ring. His lips came away wet with Barsavi’s blood. “Capa Raza,” he said, in an almost pleading tone.

“You did a very brave thing at the Echo Hole, Eymon. A thing few men would have done in your place. Barsavi was right to promise you much for it, and I will make good on that promise. You will have a thousand crowns, and a suite of rooms, and such comforts that men with many long years of life ahead of them will pray to the gods to put them in your place.”

“I…I…” Tears were actually pouring out of the man’s eyes. “I wasn’t sure what you would…thank you, Capa Raza. Thank you.”

“I wish you much pleasure, for the service you have given me.”

“Then…it wasn’t…it wasn’t you, at the Echo Hole, if I may ask, Capa Raza.”

“Oh, no, Eymon.” Raza laughed, a deep and pleasant sound. “No, that was but an illusion.”

In the far corner of the Floating Grave’s ballroom, that particular illusion fumed silently to himself, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Tonight you have seen me with blood on my hands,” Raza shouted, “and you have seen them open in what I hope will be seen as true generosity. I am not a difficult man to get along with; I want us to prosper together. Serve me as you served Barsavi, and I know it will be so. I ask you, garristas, who will bend the knee and kiss my ring as your capa?”

“The Rum Hounds,” shouted a short, slender woman at the front of the crowd on the ballroom floor.

“The Falselight Cutters,” cried another man. “The Falselight Cutters say aye!”

That doesn’t make any gods-damned sense, thought Locke. The Gray King murdered their old garristas. Are they playing some sort of game with him?

“The Wise Mongrels!”

“The Catchfire Barons.”

“The Black Eyes.”

“The Full Crowns,” came another voice, and an echoing chorus of affirmations. “The Full Crowns stand with Capa Raza!”

Suddenly Locke wanted to laugh out loud. He put a fist to his mouth and turned the noise into a stifled cough. It was suddenly obvious. The Gray King hadn’t just been knocking off Barsavi’s most loyal garristas. He must have been cutting deals with their subordinates, beforehand.

Gods, there had been more Gray King’s men in the room out of costume than in…waiting for the evening’s real show to commence.

A half dozen men and women stepped forward and knelt before Raza at the edge of the pool, wherein the shark hadn’t shown so much as a fin since forcibly relieving Barsavi of his arm.

The damned Bondsmage certainly has a way with animals, Locke thought, with mixed anger and jealousy. He found himself feeling very small indeed before each display of the Falconer’s arts.

One by one the garristas knelt and made their obeisance to the Capa, kissing his ring and saying “Capa Raza” with real enthusiasm. Five more stepped forward to kneel directly afterward, apparently giving in to the direction they felt events to be slipping. Locke calculated rapidly. With just the pledges he’d already received, Raza could now call three or four hundred Right People his own. His overt powers of enforcement had increased substantially.

“Then we are introduced,” said Raza to the entire crowd. “We are met, and you know my intentions. You are free to return to your business.”

The Falconer made a few gestures with his free hand. The clockwork mechanisms within the doors to the hall clattered in reverse, and the doors clicked open.

“I give the undecided three nights,” Capa Raza shouted. “Three nights to come to me here and bend the knee, and swear to me as they did to Barsavi. I devoutly wish to be lenient-but I warn you, now is not the time to anger me. You have seen my work; you know I have resources Barsavi lacked. You know I can be merciless when I am moved to displeasure. If you are not content serving beneath me, if you think it might be wiser or more exciting to oppose me, I will make one suggestion: pack what fortune you have and leave the city by the landward gates. If you wish to part ways, no harm will come to you from my people. For three nights, I give you my leave and my parole.

“After that,” he said, lowering his voice, “I will make what examples I must. Go now, and speak to your pezon. Speak to your friends, and to other garristas. Tell them what I have said; tell them I wait to receive their pledges.”

Some of the crowd began to disperse out the doors; others, wiser perhaps, began to line up before Capa Raza. The former Gray King took each pledge at the bloody heart of a circle of corpses.

Locke waited for several minutes until the press had lessened, until the solid torrent of hot, smelly humanity had decreased to a few thick streams, and then he moved toward the entrance. His feet felt as heavy as his head; fatigue seemed to be catching up with him.

There were corpses here and there on the floor-Barsavi’s guards, the loyal ones. Locke could see them now as the crowds continued to thin. Just beside the tall doors to the hall lay Bernell, who’d grown old in Capa Barsavi’s service. His throat was slashed; he lay in a pool of his own blood, and his fighting knives remained in their sheaths. He’d not had time to pull them.

Locke sighed. He paused for a moment in the doorway and stared back at Capa Raza and the Falconer. The Bondsmage seemed to stare right back at him, and for the tiniest instant Locke’s heart raced, but the sorcerer said nothing and did nothing. He merely continued to stand watch over the ritual as Capa Raza’s new subjects kissed his ring. Vestris yawned, snapping her beak briefly open, as though the affairs of the unwinged bored her terribly. Locke hurried out.

All the guards who watched the revelers as they left the galleon and filed up the walkway toward the quay were Raza’s men; they hadn’t bothered to move the bodies that lay on the ground at their feet. Some merely stared coldly; others nodded companionably. Locke recognized more than a few of them.

“Three nights, ladies and gents, three nights,” said one. “Tell your friends. You’re Capa Raza’s now. No need to be alarmed; just do as you’ve always done.”

So now we have some answers, thought Locke. Forgive me again, Nazca. I couldn’t have done anything even if I’d had the courage to try.

He clutched his aching stomach as he shambled along, head down. No guard spared a second glance for the skinny, bearded, dirty old beggar; there were a thousand in Camorr just like him, a thousand interchangeable losers, hopeless and penniless at the very bottom of the many levels of misery the underworld had to offer.

Now to hide. And to plan.

“Please yourself with what you’ve stolen tonight, you son of a bitch,” Locke whispered to himself when he’d made his way past the last of Raza’s guards. “Please yourself very well. I want to see the loss in your eyes when I put the fucking dagger in your heart.”

5

BUT ONE can only get so far on thoughts of vengeance alone. The sharp pains in his stomach started up again about halfway through his slow, lonely walk to the Ashfall district.

His stomach ached and churned and growled. The night seemed to turn darker around him, and the narrow, fog-softened city horizons tilted strangely, as though he were drunk. Locke staggered and clutched at his chest, sweating and mumbling.

“Damned Gazer,” said a voice from the darkness. “Probably chasing dragons and rainbows and the lost treasure of Camorr.” Laughter followed this, and Locke stumbled on, anxious to avoid becoming a target for mischief. He’d never felt such weariness. It was as though his vigor had burned down to a pile of embers within him, fading and cooling and graying with every passing second.

Ashfall, never hospitable, was a hellish conglomeration of shadow-shapes to Locke’s decreasing concentration. He was breathing heavily, and sweating rivers. It felt as though someone were steadily packing more and more dry cotton in behind his eyeballs. His feet grew heavier and heavier; he urged them forward, one scraping step after another, on into the darkness and the jagged looming shadows of collapsed buildings. Unseen things skittered in the night; unseen watchers murmured at his passing.

“What the…gods, I…must…Jean,” he mumbled as he tripped against a man-sized chunk of fallen masonry and sprawled in the dusty shadows behind it. The place smelled of limestone and cookfires and urine. He lacked the strength to push himself back up.

“Jean,” he gasped, one last time; then he fell forward onto his face, unconscious even before his head struck the ground.

6

THE LIGHTS became visible in the third hour of the morning, perhaps a mile out to sea due south of the Dregs, where a nucleus of greater darkness slid low against the water, tacking slowly and gracelessly. The ship’s ghostly white sails flapped in the breezes as it made its way toward the Old Harbor; the bored watch in the three-story tower at the tip of the South Needle were the first to spot it.

“Right sloppy sailor, that one,” said the younger watchman, looking-glass in hand.

“Probably Verrari,” muttered the senior, who was methodically torturing a piece of ivory with a slender carving knife. He wanted it to come out like a sculpted terrace he’d seen at the Temple of Iono, alive with lovely relief and fantastical representations of drowned men taken by the Lord of the Grasping Waters. What he seemed to be producing more closely resembled a lump of white dogshit, life-size. “Sooner trust a sailing ship to a blind drunkard with no hands than a Verrari.”

Nothing else the vessel did warranted much attention until the lights suddenly appeared, and their deep yellow glow could be seen rippling on the dark surface of the water.

“Yellow lights, sergeant,” said the younger watchman. “Yellow lights.”

“What?” The older man set down his piece of ivory, plucked the spyglass from the younger man’s hands, and gave the incoming ship a good long stare. “Shit. Yellow it is.”

“A plague ship,” whispered the other watchman. “I’ve never seen one.”

“Either it’s a plague ship, or some bum-fancier from Jerem who don’t know proper colors for harbor lights.” He slid the spyglass casing shut and stepped over to a brass cylinder, mounted sideways on the rim of the watch station’s western wall, pointed toward the softly lit towers on the shore of the Arsenal District. “Ring the bell, boy. Ring the damn bell.”

The younger watchman reached over the other side of the little tower’s parapet to grasp a rope that dangled there. He began ringing the station’s heavy brass bell, a steady repetition of two pulls: ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding.

Flickering blue light flashed out from one of the Arsenal towers. The watch-sergeant worked the knob on the brass cylinder, turning the shutters that concealed the light of the unusually powerful alchemical globe within the cylinder. There was a list of simple messages he could flash to the Arsenal stations; they would flash it in turn to other ready sets of eyes. With luck, it might reach the Palace of Patience, or even Raven’s Reach, within two minutes.

Some time did pass; the plague ship grew larger and more distinct.

“Come on, half-wits,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Rouse yourselves. Quit pulling that damn bell, boy. I think we’ve been heard.”

Echoing across the mist-shrouded city came the high whistles of the Quarantine Guard. This noise was joined in short order by the rattle of drums: a night-muster of yellowjackets. Bright white lights flared to life in the towers of the Arsenal, and the watch-sergeant could see the tiny black shapes of men running along the waterfront.

“Oh, now we’ll see something,” he muttered. More lights appeared to the northeast; little towers dotted the South Needle and the Dregs, overlooking the Old Harbor, where Camorr set its plague anchorage by law and custom. Each little tower held a stone-throwing engine that could reach out across the water with fifty-pound loads of rock or fire-oil. The plague anchorage was one hundred and fifty yards south of the Dregs, directly over sixty fathoms of water, well within the throwing arcs of a dozen engines that could sink or burn anything afloat in minutes.

A galley was sliding out of the Arsenal gate, between the brightly lit towers-one of the swift little patrol vessels called “gulls,” for the winglike sweep of their oars. A gull carried twenty oars on a side, rowed by eighty paid men; on its deck it carried forty swordsmen, forty archers, and a pair of the heavy bolt-throwers called scorpia. It had no provisions for cargo and only one mast with a simple, furled sail. It was meant to do just one thing-close with any ship that threatened the city of Camorr and kill every man aboard, if its warnings were not heeded.

Smaller boats were putting out from the northern edge of the South Needle; harbor pilots and crews of yellowjackets, with red and white lanterns blazing at their prows.

On the opposite side of the long breakwater, the gull was just getting up to speed; the rows of graceful oars dipped and cut white froth in the black sea. A trail of rippling wake grew behind the galley; a drumbeat could be heard echoing across the water, along with the shouts of orders.

“Close, close,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Going to be close. That poor bastard don’t sail well; might have to get a stone across the bows before she slows up.”

A few small dark shapes could be seen moving against the pale billow of the plague ship’s sails; too few, it seemed, to work them properly. Yet as the vessel slid into Old Harbor, it began to show signs of slowing down. Its topsails were drawn up, albeit in a laggardly and lubberly fashion. The remaining sails were braced so as to spill the ship’s wind. They slackened, and with the creak of rope pulleys and the muted shouts of orders, they too began to draw up toward the yards.

“Oh, she’s got fine lines,” mused the watch-sergeant. “Fine lines.”

“That’s not a galleon,” said the younger watchman.

“Looks like one of those flush-deckers they were supposed to be building up in Emberlain; frigate-fashion, I think they call it.”

The plague ship wasn’t black from the darkness alone; it was lacquered black, and ornamented from bow to stern with witchwood filigree. There were no weapons to be seen.

“Crazy northerners. Even their ships have to be black. But she does look damn fine; fast, I’ll bet. What a heap of shit to fall into; now she’ll be stuck at quarantine for weeks. Poor bastards’ll be lucky to live.”

The gull rounded the point of the South Needle, oars biting hard into the water. By the galley’s running lamps, the two watchmen could see that the scorpia were loaded and fully manned; that the archers stood on their raised platforms with longbows in hand, fidgeting nervously.

A few minutes later the gull pulled abreast with the black ship, which had drifted in to a point about four hundred yards offshore. An officer strode out onto the gull’s long bow spar, and put a speaking trumpet to his mouth.

“What vessel?”

“Satisfaction; Emberlain,” came a return shout.

“Last port of call?”

“Jerem!”

“Ain’t that pretty,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Poor bastards might have anything.”

“What is your cargo?” asked the officer on the gull.

“Ship’s provisions only; we were to take cargo in Ashmere.”

“Complement?”

“Sixty-eight; twenty now dead.”

“You fly the plague lights in real need, then?”

“Yes, for the love of the gods. We don’t know what it is… The men are burning with fever. The captain is dead and the physiker died yesterday! We beg assistance.”

“You may have a plague anchorage,” shouted the Camorri officer. “You must not approach our shore closer than one hundred and fifty yards, or you will be sunk. Any boats put out will be sunk or burned. Any man who attempts to swim to shore will be shot down-assuming he makes it past the sharks.”

“Please, send us a physiker. Send us alchemists, for the love of the gods!”

“You may not throw corpses overboard,” continued the officer. “You must keep them on board. Any packages or objects somehow conveyed to shore from your vessel will be burnt without examination. Any attempt to make such conveyance will be grounds for burning or sinking. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but please, is there nothing else you can do?”

“You may have priests on shore, and you may have freshwater and charitable provisions sent forth by rope from the dockside-these ropes to be sent out by boat from shore, and to be cut after use if necessary.”

“And nothing else?”

“You may not approach our shore, on pain of attack, but you may turn and leave at will. May Aza Guilla and Iono aid you in your time of need; I pray mercy for you, and wish you a swift deliverance in the name of Duke Nicovante of Camorr.”

A few minutes later the sleek black ship settled into its plague anchorage with furled sails, yellow lights gleaming above the black water of the Old Harbor, and there it rocked, gently, as the city slept in silver mists.

1

Jean Tannen entered the service of the Death Goddess about half a year after Locke returned from his sojourn in the priesthood of Nara, with the usual instructions to learn what he could and then return home in five or six months. He used the assumed name Tavrin Callas, and he traveled south from Camorr for more than a week to reach the great temple of Aza Guilla known as Revelation House.

Unlike the other eleven (or twelve) orders of Therin clergy, the servants of Aza Guilla began their initiation in only one place. The coastal highlands that rose south of Talisham ended at vast, straight white cliffs that fell three or four hundred feet to the crashing waves of the Iron Sea. Revelation House was carved from one of these cliffs, facing out to sea, on a scale that recalled the work of the Eldren but was accomplished-gradually and painstakingly, in an ongoing process-solely with human arts.

Picture a number of deep rectangular galleries, dug straight back into the cliff, connected solely by exterior means. To get anywhere in Revelation House, one had to venture outside, onto the walkways, stairs, and carved stone ladders, regardless of the weather or the time of day. Safety rails were unknown to Revelation House; initiates and teachers alike scuttled along in light or darkness, in rain or bright clear skies, with no barrier between themselves and a plunge to the sea save their own confidence and good fortune.

Twelve tall excised columns to the west of Revelation House held brass bells at the top; these open-faced rock tubes, about six feet deep and seventy feet high, had slender hand- and footholds carved into their rear walls. At dawn and dusk, initiates were expected to climb them and ensure that each bell was rung twelve times, once for each god in the pantheon. The carillon was always somewhat ragged; when Jean thought he could get away with it, he rang his own bell thirteen times.

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.”

2

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.

3

“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:

GRATEFUL FOR OPPORTUNITIES, BUT COULD NOT WAIT. HAVE ELECTED TO SEEK THE STATE OF DEATH EVERLASTING; CANNOT BE CONTENT WITH THE LESSER MYSTERIES OF DEATH THE TRANSITION. THE LADY CALLS.

– TAVRIN CALLAS

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.

4

“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.