by Scott Lynch
The timbers of the cabin bulkheads creaked, as though the ship were being tossed about, though all of Jean’s senses told him the Sky-Reacher was plodding along as slowly and smoothly as ever. Then the rattling began, faintly at first, but soon the yellow alchemical lanterns were shaking and the shadows in the room wobbled.
Locke moaned. Patience and Coldmarrow leaned forward, keeping Locke’s arms pinned, while their joined hands intricately wove and unwove the silver thread. The sight would have been mesmerizing in calm circumstances, but Jean was far from calm. His stomach roiled as though he had eaten rotten oysters and they were clamoring for release.
“Dammit,” Jean whispered, and bit on his knuckles just as he’d promised. The pain helped drive back the rising tide of nausea, but the atmosphere of the room was growing stranger. The lanterns rattled now like kettles on a high boil, and the white flames of the candles flared and danced to an unfelt breeze.
Locke moaned again, louder than before, and the thousand silvery points of light embedded in his upper body made eerie art as he strained at his ropes.
There was a sizzling sound, then a whip-like crack. The alchemical lanterns shattered, spraying glass across the cabin along with puffs of sulfurous-smelling vapor. Jean flinched, and the Bondsmagi reeled as lantern fragments rattled onto the floor around them.
“I’ve been poisoned a lot,” muttered Locke, for no apparent reason.
“Help,” hissed Coldmarrow in a strained voice.
“How? What do you need?” Jean was caught in another shuddering wave of nausea, and he clung to a bulkhead.
“Not … you.”
The cabin door burst open. One of the attendants who had carried Locke on the cot stomped down the stairs, discarding his wet cloak as he came. He put his hands against Coldmarrow’s back and settled his feet as though bracing the old man against a physical force. Shadows reeled wildly around the cabin as the candle flames whirled, and Jean’s nausea grew; he went down to his knees.
There was an uncanny vibration in the air, in the deck, in the bulkheads, in Jean’s bones. It felt as though he were leaning against a massive clockwork machine with all of its gears turning. Behind his eyes, the vibration grew past annoyance to pain. Jean imagined a maddened insect trapped inside his skull, biting and scrabbling and beating its wings against whatever it found in there. That was too much; bludgeoned by awful sensations, he tilted his head forward and threw up on the deck.
A thin dark line appeared beside the vomit as he finished—blood from his nose. He coughed out a string of profanities along with the acidic taste of his last meal, and though he couldn’t find the strength to heave himself to his feet, he did manage to tilt his head back far enough to see what happened next.
“This is your death, effigy. You are him,” cried Patience, her voice cracking, “and not him!”
There was a sound like marrow bones cracking, and the three candle flames surged into conflagrations large enough to swallow Jean’s hands. Then the flames turned black—black as the depths of night, an unnatural hue that caused actual pain to behold. Jean flinched away from the sight, his eyes gushing hot tears. The light of the black fires was pallid gray, and it washed the cabin with the tint of stagnant graveyard water.
Another shudder passed through the timbers of the ship, and the young Bondsmage at Coldmarrow’s back suddenly reeled away from the table, blood pouring from his nose. As he toppled, the woman who’d been on the quarterdeck came through the door, hands up to shield her eyes from the unearthly glare. She stumbled against a bulkhead but kept her feet, and began to chant rapidly in a harsh unknown language.
Who the hell is steering the ship? thought Jean, as the sickly gray light pulsed with a speed to match his own heartbeat and the very air seemed to thicken with a fever heat.
“Take this death. You are him,” gasped Coldmarrow, “and not him! This death is yours!”
There was a sound like nails on slate, and then Locke’s moans turned to screams—the loudest, longest screams Jean had ever heard.
4
PAIN WAS nothing new to Locke, but pain was an inadequate term for what happened when the two Bondsmagi pressed him down and squeezed him between their sorceries.
The room around him became a whirl of confusion—white light, rippling air. His eyes blurred with tears until even the faces of Patience and Coldmarrow bled at the edges like melting wax. Something shattered, and hot needles stung his scalp and forehead. He saw a strange swirl of yellow vapors, then gasped and moaned as the silver needles in his upper body suddenly came alive with heat, driving away all concern for his surroundings. It felt like a thousand coal-red flecks of ash were being driven into his pores.
Stabbed, he thought, clenching his teeth and swallowing a scream. This is nothing. I’ve been stabbed before. Stabbed in the shoulder. In the wrist. In the arm. Cut, smashed, clubbed, kicked … drowned … nearly drowned. Poisoned.
He cast his memory back across the long catalog of injuries, realizing with some deeper and still vaguely sensible part of his mind that counting inflictions of pain to take his mind off the infliction of pain was both very stupid and very funny.
“I’ve been poisoned a lot,” he said to himself, shuddering in a paroxysm born of the struggle between laughter and the hot-needle pain.
There was noise after that, the voices of the Bondsmagi, and Jean—then creaking, moaning, slamming, banging. It all went hazy while Locke fought for self-control. Then, after an unguessable interval, a voice penetrated his misery at last, and was more than a voice. It was a thought, shaped by Patience, whose touch he now instinctively recognized in the word-shapes that thrust themselves to the center of his awareness:
“You are him … and not him!”
Beneath the hornet-stings of the dreamsteel needles, something moved inside Locke, some pressure in his guts. The quality of the light and the air around him changed; the white glow of the candles turned black. Like a snake, the force inside him uncoiled and slid upward, under his ribs, behind his lungs, against his pulsating heart.
“F-fuck,” he tried to say, so profoundly disquieted that no air moved past his lips. Then the thing inside him surged, frothed, ate—like tar heated instantly to a boil, scalding the surface of every organ and cavity between his nose and his groin. All of those never-thought-of crevices of the body, suddenly alive in his mind, and suddenly limned in pure volcanic agony.
Stop oh please oh please stop just let the pain end, he thought, so far gone that his previous resolution was forgotten beneath sheer animal pleading. Stop the pain stop the pain—
“You are him … and not him!” The thought-voice was a weak echo above the cresting tide of internal fire. Coldmarrow? Patience? Locke could no longer tell. His arms and legs were numb, dissolving into meaningless sensory fog beyond the hot core of his agony. The Bondsmagi and everything beyond them faded into haze. The table seemed to fall away beneath him; blackness rose like the coming of sleep. His eyelids fluttered shut, and at last the blessed numbness spread to his stomach and chest and arms, smothering the hell that had erupted there.
Let that be it. I don’t want to die, but gods, just let that be the last of the pain.
The outside world had gone silent, but there was still some noise in the darkness—his own noise. The faint throb of a heartbeat. The dry shudder of breath. Surely, if he were dead, all that business would have ended. There was a pressure on his chest. A sensation of weight—someone was pushing down on his heart, and the touch felt cold. Surprised at the amount of will it required, Locke forced his eyes partly open.
The hand above his heart was Bug’s, and the eyes staring down from the dead boy’s face were solid black.
“There is no last of the pain,” said Bug. “It always hurts. Always.”
Locke opened his mouth to scream, but no sound moved past his lips—just a barely perceptible dry hissing. He strained to move, but his limbs were lead. Even his neck refused to obey his commands.
This can’t
be real, Locke tried to say, and the unspoken words echoed in his head.
“What’s real?” Bug’s skin was pale and strangely loose, as though the flesh behind it had collapsed inward. The curls had come out of his hair, and it hung limp and lifeless above his dead black eyes. A crossbow quarrel, crusted with dry blood, was still buried in his throat. The cabin was dark and empty; Bug seemed to be crouching above him, but the only weight Locke could feel was the cold pressure of the hand above his heart.
You’re not really here!
“We’re both here.” Bug fiddled with the quarrel as though it were an annoying neck-cloth. “You know why I’m still around? When you die, your sins are engraved on your eyes. Look closely.”
Unable to help himself, Locke stared up into the awful dark spheres, and saw that their blackness was not quite unbroken. It had a rough and layered quality, as though made up of a countless number of tiny black lines of script, all running together into a solid mass.
“I can’t see the way out of this place,” said Bug softly. “Can’t find the way to what’s next.”
You were twelve fucking years old. How many sins could you have—
“Sins of omission. Sins of my teachers and my friends.” The chilling weight above Locke’s heart pressed down harder.
That’s bullshit, I know better, I’m a divine of the Crooked Warden!
“How’s that working out for you?” Bug wiped at the trails of blood running down his neck, and the blood came away on his pale fingertips as a brown powder. “Doesn’t seem to have done either of us much good.”
I’m a priest, I’d know how this works, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be! I’m a priest of the Unnamed Thirteenth!
“Well … I could tell you how far you’ll get trusting people when you don’t even know their real name.” Again the pressure on Locke’s chest grew.
I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming. It’s just a dream.
“You’re dreaming. You’re dying. Maybe they’re the same thing.” The corners of Bug’s mouth twitched up briefly in a weak attempt at a smile. The sort of smile, thought Locke, that you give someone when you can see they’re in deep shit.
“Well, you’ve made all your decisions. Nothing left for you to do but see which one of us is right.”
Wait, wait, don’t—
The pain in Locke’s chest flared again, spreading sharply outward from his heart, and this time it was cold, deathly cold, an unbearable icy pressure that squeezed him like a vise. Darkness swept in behind it, and Locke’s awareness broke against it like a ship heaved onto rocks.
INTERLUDE
ORPHAN’S MOON
1
THEY LET HIM out of the darkness at last, and cool air touched his skin after an hour of stuffy helplessness.
It had been a rough trip to the site of the ritual, wherever it was. The men carrying him hadn’t had much difficulty with his relatively slight weight, but it seemed they’d gone down many stairs and through narrow, curving passages. Around and around in the dark he’d been hauled, listening to the grunts and whispers of the adults, and to the sound of his own breathing inside the scratchy wool sack that covered his head.
At last that hood was drawn away. Locke blinked in the dimness of a high barrel-vaulted room, faintly lit by pale globes tucked away in sconces. The walls and pillars were stone, and here and there Locke could see decorative paintings flaking with age. Water trickled somewhere nearby, but that was hardly unusual for a structure in lower Camorr. What was significant was that this was a human place, all blocks and mortar, without a shred of visible Elderglass.
Locke was on his back in the middle of the vaulted room, on a low slab. His hands and feet weren’t tied, but his freedom of movement was sharply curtailed when a man knelt and put a knife to his throat. Locke could feel the edge of the blade against his skin, and knew instantly that it was the not-fooling-around sort of edge.
“You are bound and compelled to silence in all ways, at all times, from now until the weighing of your soul, concerning what we do here this night,” said the man.
“I am bound and compelled,” said Locke.
“Who binds and compels you?”
“I bind and compel myself,” said Locke.
“To break this binding is to be condemned to die.”
“I would gladly be condemned for my failure.”
“Who would condemn you?”
“I would condemn myself.” Locke reached up with his right hand and placed it over the man’s knuckles. The stranger withdrew his hand, leaving Locke holding the knife at his own throat.
“Rise, little brother,” said the man.
Locke obeyed, and passed the knife back to the man, a long-haired, muscular garrista Locke knew by sight but not by name. The world Capa Barsavi ruled was a big place.
“Why have you come here tonight?”
“To be a thief among thieves,” said Locke.
“Then learn our sign.” The man held up his left hand, fingers slightly spread, and Locke mirrored the gesture, pressing his palm firmly against the garrista’s. “Left hand to left hand, skin to skin, will tell your brothers and sisters that you do not come holding weapons, that you do not shun their touch, that you do not place yourself above them. Go and wait.”
Locke bowed and moved into the shadow of a pillar. There was enough space, he calculated, for a few hundred people to fit down here. At the moment, there were just a few men and women visible. He’d been brought in early, it seemed, as one of the very first of the postulants to take the oath of secrecy. He watched, feeling the churn of excitement in his stomach, as more boys and girls were carried into the room, stripped of their hoods, and given the treatment he’d received. Calo … Galdo … Jean … one by one they joined him and watched the ongoing procession. Locke’s companions were uncharacteristically silent and serious. In fact, he’d have gone so far as to say that both Sanzas were actually nervous. He didn’t blame them.
The next hood yanked from a postulant’s head revealed Sabetha. Her lovely false-brown curls tumbled out in a cloud, and Locke bit the insides of his cheeks as the knife touched her throat. She took the oaths quickly and calmly, in a voice that had grown a shade huskier in the last season. She spared him a glance as she walked over to join the Gentlemen Bastards, and he hoped for a few seconds that she might choose to stand beside him. However, Calo and Galdo moved apart, offering her a place between them, and she accepted. Locke bit the insides of his cheeks again.
Together, the five of them watched more adults enter and more children about their own age pass under the oath-taking blade. There were some familiar faces in that stream.
First came Tesso Volanti from the Half-Crowns, with his night-black mane of oiled hair. He held Locke’s crew in high esteem despite (or probably because of) the fact that Jean Tannen had given him a thunderous ass-kicking a few summers previously. Then came Fat Saulus and Fatter Saulus from the Falselight Cutters … Whoreson Dominaldo … Amelie the Clutcher, who’d stolen enough to buy an apprenticeship with the Guilded Lilies … a couple boys and girls that must have come out of the Thiefmaker’s burrow around the time Locke had … and then, the very last initiate to have her hood yanked back, Nazca Belonna Jenavais Angeliza Barsavi, youngest child and only daughter of the absolute ruler of Camorr’s underworld.
After Nazca finished reciting her oaths, she removed a pair of optics from a leather pouch and slid them onto her nose. While nobody in their right mind would have laughed at her for doing so, Locke suspected that Nazca would have been unafraid to wear them in public even if she hadn’t been the Capa’s daughter.
Locke could see her older brothers, Pachero and Anjais, standing in the ranks of the older initiates, but her place was with the neophytes. Smiling, she walked over to Locke and gently pushed him out of his spot against the pillar.
“Hello, Lamora,” she whispered. “I need to stand next to an ugly little boy to make myself look better.”
She certainly did not, thought Locke
. An inch taller than him, Nazca was much like Sabetha these days, closer to woman than girl. For some reason, she also had a soft spot for the Gentlemen Bastards. Locke had begun to suspect that the “little favors” Father Chains had once done for Capa Barsavi were not as little as he’d let on, and that Nazca was privy to at least some of the story. Not that she ever spoke of it.
“Good to see you here in the cheap seats with us, Nazca,” said Sabetha as she gracefully nudged Jean out of his position behind Locke. Locke’s spine tingled.
“No such thing on a night like this,” said Nazca. “Just thieves among thieves.”
“Women among boys,” said Sabetha with an exaggerated sigh.
“Pearls among swine,” said Nazca, and the two of them giggled. Locke’s cheeks burned.
It was early winter in the seventy-seventh Year of Aza Guilla, the month of Marinel, the time of the empty sky. It was the night called the Orphan’s Moon, when Locke and all of his kind became, by ancient Therin custom, one year older.
It was the one night per year on which young thieves were fully initiated into the mysteries of the Crooked Warden, somewhere in the dark and crumbling depths of old Camorr.
It was, by Chains’ best guess, the night of Locke’s thirteenth birthday.
2
THE DAY’S activities had started with the procurement of an appropriate offering.
“Let’s toss the cake on that fellow right there,” said Jean. It was high afternoon, and he and Locke lay in wait in an alley just off the Avenue of Five Saints in the upper-class Fountain Bend district.
“He seems the type,” agreed Locke. He hefted the all-important package into his arms—a cube of flax-paper wrapped around a wooden frame, with a sturdy wooden base, the whole thing about two and a half feet on a side. “Where you coming from?”
“His right.”
“Let’s make his acquaintance.”
They went in opposite directions—Jean directly east onto the avenue, and Locke to the western end of the alley, so he could head north on the parallel Avenue of the Laurels and swing around the long way to intercept the chosen target.
