by Scott Lynch
“And I, for my part, have found you the most charming of hostesses, my lady Vorchenza.” He bowed from the waist, right foot forward in perfect courtly fashion. “But business is pressing everywhere; I must be about mine, and leave you to yours.”
“So be it, dear boy.” She began to rise, and he gestured for her to stay seated.
“No, no; don’t trouble yourself on our account. We can find our way back down your lovely tower on our own; pray return to whatever you were doing before I interrupted.”
“It was hardly an interruption,” said Doña Vorchenza. “I shall see you, then, on the Day of Changes? You will accept the invitation?”
“Yes,” said Capa Raza. He turned and favored her with a smile before he stepped out through the solarium door. “I gladly accept your invitation. And I shall see you on the Day of Changes, at Raven’s Reach.”
INTERLUDE
The Daughters of Camorr
The first true revolution in Camorr’s criminal affairs came long before Capa Barsavi. It predated his rise by nearly fifty years, in fact, and it came about entirely as the result of a certain lack of self-control on the part of a pimp called Rude Trevor Vargas.
Rude Trevor had a great many other nicknames, most of them used privately in his little stable of whores. To say that he was an intemperate, murderous lunatic would wound the feelings of most intemperate, murderous lunatics. As was often the case, he was a greater danger to his own whores than the marks they plied for coppers and silvers. The only protection he really offered them was protection from his own fists, which could be had by giving him all but a tiny fraction of the money they worked for.
One night, a particularly put-upon whore found herself unwilling to participate in his preferred evening diversion, which was to take his pleasure from her mouth while pulling on her hair until she screamed in pain. Her bodice dagger was out before she realized it; she planted it just to the left of Trevor’s manhood, in the joint of his thigh, and slashed to his right. There was an awful lot of blood, not to mention screaming, but Trevor’s attempts to first fight back and then to flee were greatly hampered by the speed with which his life was gushing out between his legs. His (former) whore pulled him to the ground and sat on his back to keep him from crawling out of the room. His strength ebbed, and he died in very short order, mourned by exactly no one.
The next night, Trevor’s capa sent another man around to take over Trevor’s duties. The women in Trevor’s old stable welcomed him with smiling faces, and offered him a chance to try out their services for free. Because he had a small pile of broken bricks where most people kept their brains, he accepted. When he was neatly undressed and separated from his weapons, he was stabbed to death from several directions at once. That really caught the attention of Trevor’s old capa. The next night, he sent five or six men to straighten the situation out.
But a curious thing had happened. Another two or three packs of whores had gotten rid of their pimps; a growing nucleus of women claimed a warehouse in the northern Snare as their headquarters. The capa’s men found not six or seven frightened whores, as they’d been told, but nearly two dozen angry women, who’d seen fit to arm themselves using all the coin they could muster.
Crossbows are quite an equalizer, especially at close range, with the advantage of surprise. Those five or six men were never seen again.
So the war began in earnest. Those capas who had lost pimps and whores attempted to correct the situation, while with every passing day the number of women joining the rebellion grew. They hired several other gangs to serve as their own protection; they established houses of pleasure to their own standards, and began to work out of them. The service they offered, in comfortable and well-appointed chambers, was greatly superior to that which could be had from the gangs of whores still run by men, and prospective customers began to weigh in with their coin on the side of the ladies.
There was a great deal of blood. Dozens of whores were brutally murdered, and several of their bordellos were burnt to the ground. But for every lady of the night that fell, some capa’s man would get the same. The ladies gave like for like as viciously as any capa in Camorr’s history. Less than a year after Rude Trevor’s death, the last few pimps clinging brutally to their livelihood were convinced (convinced to death, in most cases) to give up their fight. An uneasy truce fell into place between the capas and the city’s whores.
Eventually, this truce grew into a stable and mutually beneficial arrangement.
The whores of the city split amiably into two groups, defined by territory. The Docksies took the west side of Camorr, while the Guilded Lilies ruled in the east; and both organizations mingled comfortably in the Snare, where business was most plentiful. They continued to prosper; they hired loyal muscle of their own and ceased renting cutthroats from other gangs. While their lives could not be deemed pleasant, in light of their trade, at least they were now firmly in control of their own affairs, and free to enforce certain rules of decorum on their customers.
They built and preserved a monopoly, and in exchange for promising not to become involved in any other forms of crime, they secured the right to mercilessly crush any attempt to pimp women outside the purview of their two gangs. Naturally, some men didn’t pay close attention to the rules the women set; they attempted to slap their whores around, or renege on their payments for services, or ignore the standards the ladies set concerning cleanliness and drunkenness.
Hard lessons were handed out. As many men learned to their sorrow, it’s impossible to be intimidating when one angry woman has your cock between her teeth and another is holding a stiletto to your kidneys.
When Vencarlo Barsavi slew his opponents and rose to prominence as the sole Capa of Camorr, even he dared not disturb the equilibrium that had grown between the traditional gangs and the two guilds of whores. He met with representatives from the Docksies and the Lilies; he agreed to let them preserve their quasi-autonomous status, and they agreed to regular payments for his assistance—payments, as a percentage of profits, significantly lower than any other dues paid to the capa by the Right People of Camorr.
Barsavi realized something that too many men in the city were slow to grasp; an idea that he reinforced years later when he took the Berangias sisters to be his primary enforcers. He was wise enough to understand that the women of Camorr could be underestimated only at great peril to one’s health.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SPIDERBITE
1
“CAN YOU ASSURE me,” said Ibelius, “that you will take better care for yourself than you did previously, or that your friend Jean has taken for himself, this past week?”
“Master Ibelius,” said Locke, “you are our physiker, not our mother. And as I have already told you a dozen times this afternoon, I am entirely prepared—body and mind—for this affair at Raven’s Reach. I am the soul of caution.”
“La, sir, if that is the case, I should hope never to meet the soul of recklessness.”
“Ibelius,” groaned Jean, “let him alone; you are henpecking him without having the decency to marry him first.”
Jean sat upon the sleeping pallet, haggard and rather scruffy; the darkness of the hairs thickening on his face only emphasized his own unnatural pallor. His injuries had been a close thing. A great wad of cloth was tied around his naked chest, and similar bandages wrapped his leg beneath his breeches and his upper right arm.
“These physikers are handy things,” said Locke, adjusting his (formerly Meraggio’s) coat cuffs, “but I think next time we should pay a bit extra for the silent version, Jean.”
“And then you may dress your own wounds, sir, and apply your own poultices—though I daresay it would be quicker and easier for the pair of you to simply dig your own graves and take your ease in them until your inevitable transition to a more quiet state of affairs!”
“Master Ibelius,” said Locke, grasping the old man by the arms, “Jean and I are more grateful than we can say for your aid; I suspect
that we would both be dead without your intervention. I mean to repay you for the time you’ve endured with us here in this hovel; I expect to come into a few thousand crowns in very short order. Some of it is yours; you shall have a new life far from here with very full pockets. And the rest will be used to put Capa Raza under the earth; take heart. Look what Jean has already done to his sisters.”
“A feat I’m in no condition to perform again,” said Jean. “Take care of yourself, Locke; I won’t be able to come running to the rescue if something goes awry tonight.”
“Though I have no doubt you would try,” muttered Ibelius.
“Don’t worry, Jean. It’ll be nothing but a routine evening with the duke and his entire fucking court, assembled in a glass tower six hundred feet in the air. What could possibly go wrong?”
“That sarcasm sounds halfhearted,” said Jean. “You’re really looking forward to this, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am, Jean. Chains would be beside himself with glee if he were alive; I’m going to play Lukas Fehrwight in front of the gods-damned duke, not to mention all the other peers of our acquaintance. The de Marres, the Feluccias, old Javarriz … Glory to the Crooked Warden, it’s going to be fantastic fucking fun. Assuming I’m on top of my game. And then … money in our pockets. And then revenge.”
“When are you expected at the Salvara manor?”
“Third hour of the afternoon, which means I’ve no more time to dawdle. Jean, Ibelius … how do I look?”
“I would hardly recognize the man we laid on that sickbed not so many days ago,” said Ibelius. “I’ll confess, you’ve a surprising degree of professional skill; I’d never conceived of such a thing as this false-facing of yours.”
“That’s to our advantage, Master Ibelius,” said Jean. “Very few have. You look ready for the evening, Master Fehrwight. Now, you’re going to take the long way round to the Isla Durona, right?”
“Gods, yes. I’m only mad to a certain measure. I’ll go north through the graveyards and up through the Quiet; I expect I won’t see a soul once I’m out of Ashfall.”
As he spoke, he draped himself with the oilcloak Jean had brought back from his encounter with the Berangias sisters, despite the sweltering heat. It would conceal his fine garments from sight until he reached the Hill of Whispers. A man dressed in evening best might attract too much attention from some of the lurkers in the dark places of Ashfall.
“I’m for Raven’s Reach, then,” said Locke. “Until much later, Jean; rest up. Master Ibelius, favor Jean with your motherly attention; I hope to return with very good news.”
“I shall be grateful if you return at all,” said Ibelius.
2
MIDSUMMER-MARK; the Day of Changes, the seventeenth of Parthis in the Seventy-eighth Year of Aza Guilla, as the Therin Calendar would have it. On the Day of Changes, the city of Camorr went mad.
A Shifting Revel commanded the wide circular pond of the market, but this one was smaller and more ragged than the formal monthly Revels. The centerpiece of this one was a floating handball court made from a number of flat-topped barges lashed together. Teams of commoners had selected colors from out of a barrel; now randomly matched, they were mauling one another drunkenly as a crowd composed entirely of commoners cheered. When a team scored, a small boat with a beer keg lashed amidships would pull alongside the playing court and ladle out a drink for every man on that team. Naturally, the matches got wilder and dirtier as they progressed; quite a few players were flung into the water, there to be fished out by a crew of diligent yellowjackets who wouldn’t otherwise dream of interfering.
Commoners ruled the streets of lower Camorr on the Day of Changes. They held wandering picnics, hauling ale barrels and wine bags around with them. Streams of celebrants would cross paths, jostle, join, and split; a gods’-eye view of the affair would have shown disorderly men and women circulating through the city streets like blood through the vessels of an inebriated man.
In the Snare, business was bountiful. The celebration sucked in sailors and visitors from foreign shores like a tidal pool drawing downward; a few hours of Camorri hospitality and the guest revelers were unlikely to be able to tell their asses from their eardrums. There would be few ships setting out from port the next day; few would have the able manpower necessary to raise so much as a flag pennant, let alone a sail.
In the Cauldron and the Narrows and the Dregs, Capa Raza’s people celebrated their new ruler’s largesse. By his order, dozens upon dozens of casks of cheap red wine had been rolled out in dog-carts. Those gangs that were too poor or too lazy to journey to the crossroads of wickedness that was the Snare drank themselves silly on their own doorsteps. Raza’s garristas passed through the neighborhoods he claimed as his own with baskets of bread, passing them out to anyone who asked for them. It turned out that each loaf had either a copper piece or a silver piece baked into it, and when these hidden gifts were revealed (by means of a few unlucky broken teeth), not a single loaf of bread was safe from depredation south of the Temple District.
Raza’s Floating Grave was open for visitors; several of his garristas and their gangs amused themselves with a game of cards that grew to epic size; at its height, forty-five men and women were bickering and shuffling and drinking and screaming at one another on the floor above the dark waters of the Waste—the waters that had eaten Capa Barsavi and his entire family.
Raza was nowhere to be seen; Raza had business in the north that evening, and he told none outside his close circle of original servants that he would be at the duke’s court, looking down on them from the tower of Raven’s Reach.
In the Temple District, the Day of Changes was celebrated in a more restrained fashion. Each temple’s full complement of priests and initiates traded places with another in an ever-shifting cycle. The black-robes of Aza Guilla’s house conducted a stately ritual on the steps of Iono’s temple; the servants of the Father of Grasping Waters did likewise at theirs. Dama Elliza and Azri, Morgante and Nara, Gandolo and Sendovani; all the delegations of the divine burned candles and sang to the sky before a different altar, then moved on a few minutes later. A few extra benedictions were offered at the burnt-out House of Perelandro, where a single old man in the white robes of the Lord of the Overlooked, recently summoned from Ashmere, pondered the mess of a temple that had been thrust into his care. He had no idea how to begin composing his report to the chief divine of Perelandro on the destruction he’d found in an Elderglass cellar—the existence of which he’d not been informed of before his journey.
In the North Corner and Fountain Bend, well-to-do young couples made for Twosilver Green, where it was thought to be good luck to make love on the eve of the Midsummer-mark. It was said that any union consummated there before Falselight would bring the couple whatever they most desired in a child. This was a pleasant bonus, if true, but for the time being most of the men and women hidden away among the crushed-stone paths and rustling walls of greenery desired only one another.
On the waters of Old Harbor, the frigate Satisfaction floated at anchor, yellow flags flying atop its masts, yellow lanterns shining even by day. A dozen figures moved on its deck, surreptitiously going about the business of preparing the ship for night action. Crossbows were racked at the masts, and canvas tarps flung over them. Antiboarding nets were hauled out below the rails on the ship’s upper deck and set there for rapid rigging, out of sight. Buckets of sand were set out to smother flames; if the shore engines let fly, some of them would surely hurl alchemical fire, against which water would be worse than useless.
In the darkened holds beneath the ship’s upper deck, another three dozen men and women ate a large meal, to have their stomachs full when the time for action came. There wasn’t an invalid among them; not so much as an ague fever.
At the foot of Raven’s Reach, home and palace of Duke Nicovante of Camorr, a hundred carriages were parked in a spiraling fashion around the tower’s base. Four hundred liveried drivers and guards milled about, enjo
ying refreshments brought to them by scampering men and women in the duke’s colors. They would be there waiting all night for the descent of their lords and ladies. The Day of Changes was the only day of the year when nearly every peer of Camorr—every lesser noble from the Alcegrante islands and every last member of the Five Families in their glass towers—would be crammed together in one place, to drink and feast and scheme and intrigue and offer compliments and insults while the duke gazed down on them with his rheumy eyes. Each year the coming generation of Camorr’s rulers watched the old guard gray a bit more before their eyes; each year their bows and curtsies grew slightly more exaggerated. Each year the whispers behind their hands grew more poisonous. Nicovante had, perhaps, ruled too long.
There were six chain elevators serving Raven’s Reach; they rose and fell, rose and fell. With each new cage that creaked open at the top of the tower, a new flurry of people in colored coats and elaborate dresses was disgorged onto the embarkation terrace to mingle with the chattering flood of nobles and flatterers, power brokers and pretenders, merchants and idlers and drunkards and courtly predators. The sun beat down on this gathering with all of its power; the lords and ladies of Camorr seemed to be standing on a lake of molten silver, at the top of a pillar of white fire.
The air rippled with waves of heat as the iron cage holding Locke Lamora and the Salvaras swung, clattering, into the locking mechanisms at the edge of the duke’s terrace.
3
“HOLY MARROWS,” said Locke, “but I have never seen the like. I have never been this high in the air; by the Hands Beneath the Waters, I have never been this high in society! My lord and lady Salvara, pardon me if I cling to you both like a drowning man.”
“Sofia and I have been coming here since we were children,” said Lorenzo. “Every year, on this day. It’s only overwhelming the first ten or eleven times you see it, believe me.”
