by Scott Lynch
“Most illuminating.” Again, a casual flick; again, Locke jumped back. “You’re not actually very good at this, are you?”
“It would be to my advantage if you thought so, wouldn’t it?”
At this the Gray King actually laughed. “Oh, no. No, no, no.” With one decisive gesture, he flung his cloak and mantle to the ground. A wild grin had etched deep furrows of anticipation into his lean face. “No more bluffs. No more games.”
And then he fell on Locke, his footwork a blur, his brutality unmatched by anything in Locke’s memory. Behind his blade, there were twenty years of experience and twenty years of blackest hatred. Some tiny, detached part of Locke’s mind cooly registered his own inadequacy as he desperately flailed parry after parry, chasing phantom thrusts with his eyes and hands even while the Gray King’s steel was punching through cloth and flesh.
Once, twice, three times—in between breaths, the Gray King’s blade sang out and bit Locke’s left wrist, forearm, and biceps.
Cold surprise hit Locke harder than the pain of the thrusts; then the warm blood began to flow across his sweat-slick skin, tickling devilishly, and a wave of nausea rose up from the pit of his stomach. The dagger dropped from his left hand, red with the wrong man’s blood.
“At last we come to something you cannot pretend your way out of, Master Lamora.” The Gray King flicked Locke’s blood from the tip of his rapier and watched it splash against the wooden deck in an arc. “Good-bye.”
Then he was moving again, and in the wine-colored light of the alchemical globes the full length of his blade was bright scarlet.
“Aza Guilla,” Locke whispered, “give me justice for the death of my friends. Give me blood for the death of my brothers!”
His voice rising to a shout, he thrust, missed, and thrust again, willing all of his desperate hatred and fear into each cut, driving the blade faster than he ever had in his life, and still the Gray King caught and turned his every thrust; still the Gray King displaced himself from the path of Locke’s cuts as though fighting a child.
“It seems that the final difference between us, Master Lamora,” said the Gray King between passages, “is that I knew what I was doing when I stayed here to meet you one last time.”
“No,” gasped Locke, “the difference between us is that I am going to have my revenge.”
Cold pain exploded in Locke’s left shoulder, and he stared down in horror at the Gray King’s blade, sunk three inches into his flesh just above his heart. The Gray King twisted savagely, scraping bone as he withdrew his rapier, and the sensation sent Locke tumbling to his knees, his useless left arm thrown out instinctively to break his fall.
But instinct, too, betrayed him here; his hand struck the hard deck palm-up, folded awkwardly under the full weight of his arm, and with a terrible sharp snap his left wrist broke. He was too shocked to scream. A split second later the Gray King slammed a vicious kick into the side of Locke’s head, and Locke’s world became a kaleidoscope of agony, tumbling end over end as stinging tears filled his eyes. Reynart’s rapier clattered across the deck.
Locke was conscious of the wood pressing up against his back. He was conscious of the blood that misted his vision. He was conscious of the bright, hot rings of pain that radiated from his shattered wrist, and of the slick wet agony of the hole in his shoulder joint. But most of all he was conscious of his own shame, his own terror of failure, and the great weight of three dead friends, lying unavenged, lying unquiet because Locke Lamora had lost.
He sucked in a great gasping breath, kindling new flickers of pain all across his chest and back, but now it was all one pain, all one red sensation that drove him up from the ground. Bellowing without an ounce of reason in his voice, he pulled his legs in and whipped himself up, attempting to tackle the Gray King around the stomach.
The killing thrust that had been falling toward Locke’s heart struck his left arm instead; impelled with every ounce of the Gray King’s ferocity, it punched fully through the meat of Locke’s slender forearm and out the other side. Wild with pain, Locke threw this arm forward and up as the Gray King struggled to withdraw; the edges of his rapier worked a terrible business on Locke’s flesh, but stayed caught, sawing back and forth at the muscle as the two men struggled.
The Gray King’s dagger loomed before Locke’s eyes; some animal instinct drove Locke to lash out with the only weapon available. His teeth sank into the first three fingers of the Gray King’s hand where they wrapped around the hilt; he tasted blood and felt bone beneath the tips of his teeth. The Gray King cried out and the dagger fell sideways, rebounding off Locke’s left shoulder before clattering to the deck. The Gray King jerked his hand free, and Locke spat the man’s skin and blood back at him.
“Give it up!” the Gray King screamed, punching Locke atop his skull, then across his nose. With his good right arm, Locke clutched for the Gray King’s sheathed dagger. The Gray King slapped his hand away, laughing.
“You can’t win. You can’t win, Lamora!” With every exhortation, the Gray King rained blows on Locke, who clutched at him desperately, as a drowning man might hug a floating timber. The Gray King laughed savagely as he pummeled Lamora’s skull, his ears, his forehead, and his shoulders, deliberately driving his fist down into the seeping wound. “You … cannot … beat me!”
“I don’t have to beat you,” Locke whispered, grinning madly up at the Gray King, his face streaked with blood and tears, his nose broken and his lips cracked, his vision swimming and edged with blackness. “I don’t have to beat you, motherfucker. I just have to keep you here … until Jean shows up.”
At that, the Gray King became truly desperate, and his blows fell like rain, but Locke was heedless of them, laughing the wet braying laugh of utter madness. “I just have to keep you here … until Jean … shows up!”
Hissing fury, the Gray King shook Locke’s grip off enough to make a grab for his sheathed dagger. As he tore his left hand from Locke’s right, Lamora let a gold tyrin coin fall from his sleeve into his palm; a desperate flick of his wrist sent the coin caroming off the wall behind the Gray King, echoing loudly.
“There he is, motherfucker!” Locke yelled, spraying blood across the front of the Gray King’s shirt. “Jean! Help me!”
And the Gray King whirled, dragging Locke halfway around with him; whirled in fear of Jean Tannen before he realized that Locke must be lying; whirled for just the half second that Locke would have begged from any god that would hear his prayer. Whirled for the half second that was worth Locke’s entire life.
He whirled just long enough for Locke Lamora to snake his right arm around the Gray King’s waist, and slide out the dagger sheathed there, and bury it with a final scream of pain and triumph in the Gray King’s back, just to the right of his spine.
The Gray King’s back arched, and his mouth hung open, gasping in the icy thrall of shock; with both of his arms he pushed at Locke’s head, as though by prying the smaller man off him he could undo his wound, but Locke held fast, and in an impossibly calm voice he whispered, “Calo Sanza. My brother and my friend.”
Backward, the Gray King toppled, and Locke slid the knife out of his back just before he struck the deck. Locke fell on top of him. He raised the dagger once again and brought it down in the middle of the Gray King’s chest, just beneath his rib cage. Blood spurted and the Gray King flailed, moaning. Locke’s voice rose as he worked the knife farther in: “Galdo Sanza, my brother and my friend!”
With one last convulsive effort, the Gray King spat warm coppery blood into Locke’s face and grabbed at the dagger that transfixed his chest; Locke countered by bearing down with his useless left side, batting the Gray King’s hands away. Sobbing, Locke wrenched the dagger out of the Gray King’s chest, raised it with a wildly shaking right arm, and brought it down in the middle of the Gray King’s neck. He sawed at the windpipe until the neck was half-severed and great rivers of blood were flowing on the deck. The Gray King shuddered one last time and died, his wi
de white eyes still fixed on Locke’s.
“Bug,” Locke whispered. “His real name was Bertilion Gadek. My apprentice. My brother. And my friend.”
His strength failed, and he slid down atop the Gray King’s corpse.
“My friend.”
But the man beneath him said nothing, and Locke was acutely aware of the stillness of the chest beneath his ears; of the heart that should have been beating against his cheek, and he began to cry—long wild sobs that racked his entire body, drawing new threads of agony from his tortured nerves and muscles. Mad with grief and triumph and the red haze of pain and a hundred other feelings he couldn’t name, he lay atop the corpse of his greatest enemy and bawled like a baby, adding saltwater to the warm blood that covered the body of the Gray King.
He lay there shaking in the light of the red lamps, in a silent hall, alone with his triumph, unable to move and bleeding to death.
10
JEAN FOUND him there just a minute or two later; the big man turned Locke over and slid him off the Gray King’s corpse, eliciting a sincere howl of pain from his half-conscious friend.
“Oh, gods,” Jean cried. “Oh, gods, you fucking idiot, you miserable fucking bastard.” He pressed his hands against Locke’s chest and neck as though he could simply will the blood back into his body. “Why couldn’t you wait? Why couldn’t you wait for me?”
Locke stared drunkenly up at Jean, his mouth a little O of concern.
“Jean,” Locke whispered gravely, “you have … been running. You were in … no condition to fight. Gray King … so accommodating. Could not refuse.”
Jean snorted despite himself. “Gods damn you, Locke Lamora. I sent him a message. I thought it might keep him around a while.”
“Bless your heart. I did … get him, though. I got him and I burnt his ship.”
“So that’s what happened,” Jean said, very gently. “I saw. I was watching the fire from the other side of the Wooden Waste; I saw you walk into the Floating Grave like you owned the place, and I came running as fast as I could. But you didn’t even need me.”
“Oh no.” Locke swallowed, grimacing at the taste of his own blood. “I made excellent use … of your reputation.”
At this Jean said nothing, and the forlorn light of his eyes chilled Locke more than anything yet.
“So this is revenge,” Locke mumbled.
“It is,” whispered Jean.
After a few seconds, new tears welled up in Locke’s eyes and he closed them, shaking his head. “It’s a shit business.”
“It is.”
“You have to leave me here.”
At this, Jean rocked back on his knees as though he’d been slapped. “What?”
“Leave me, Jean. I’ll be dead … just a few minutes. They won’t get anything from me. You can still get away. Please … leave me.”
Jean’s face turned bright red—a red that showed even by the light of the alchemical globes—and his eyebrows arched, and every line in his face drew so taut that Locke found the energy to be alarmed. Jean’s jaw clenched; his teeth ground together, and the planes of his cheeks stood out like mountain ridges under his gilding of fat.
“That is a hell of a thing for you to say to me,” he finally hissed in the flattest, deadliest voice Locke had ever heard.
“I made a mistake, Jean!” Locke croaked in desperation. “I couldn’t really fight him. He did for me before I could cheat my way out of it. Just promise … promise me that if you ever find Sabetha, you’ll—”
“You can find her yourself, half-wit, after we both get the hell out of here!”
“Jean!” Locke clutched weakly at the lapels of Jean’s coat with his good hand. “I’m sorry, I fucked up. Please don’t stay here and get caught; the blackjackets will be coming, soon. I couldn’t bear to have you taken. Please just leave me. I can’t walk.”
“Idiot,” Jean whispered, brushing away hot tears with his good hand. “You won’t have to.”
Working awkwardly but rapidly, Jean took up the Gray King’s cloak and tied it around his own neck, creating a makeshift sling for his right arm. This he slid beneath Locke’s knees, and straining mightily, he was able to pick the smaller man up and cradle him in front of his chest. Locke moaned.
“Quit sobbing, you damn baby,” Jean hissed as he began to lope back along the dock. “You must have at least a half beer glass of blood left somewhere in there.” But Locke was now well and truly unconscious, whether from pain or blood loss Jean couldn’t tell, and his skin was so pale that it almost looked like glass. His eyes were open but unseeing, and his mouth hung open, trailing blood and spittle.
Panting and shuddering, ignoring the wrenching pains of his own wounds, Jean turned and began to run as fast as he could.
The body of the Gray King lay forgotten on the deck behind him, and the red light shone on in the empty hall.
INTERLUDE
A Minor Prophecy
Father Chains sat on the roof of the House of Perelandro, staring down at the astonishingly arrogant fourteen-year-old that had grown out of the little orphan he’d purchased so many years before from the Thiefmaker of Shades’ Hill.
“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh, please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
EPILOGUE
FALSELIGHT
1
THE EIGHTEENTH OF Parthis in the Seventy-eighth Year of Aza Guilla; wet Camorri summer. The whole city had a hangover and the sky did, too.
Warm rain was falling in sheets, spattering and steaming in the glow of Falselight. The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.
“Watch-sergeant! Watch-sergeant Vidrik!”
The man yelling outside Vidrik’s station at the south end of the Narrows was another watchman; Vidrik stuck his lean, weathered face out through the window beside the shack’s door and was rewarded with a stream of runoff on his forehead. Thunder boomed overhead. “What is it, son?”
The watchman approached out of the rain; it was Constanzo, the new lad just shifted in from the North Corner. He was leading a Gentled donkey; behind the donkey was an open-topped cart, with two more yellowjacketed watchmen at its rear. They huddled in their oilcloaks and looked miserable, which meant they were sensible men.
“Found something, Sergeant,” said Constanzo. “Something pretty fucked.”
Teams of yellowjackets and blackjackets had been combing the south of Camorr since the previous night; rumors were swirling of some sort of assassination attempt at Raven’s Reach. Gods only knew what the Spider thought his boys should be doing turning over stones in the Dregs and the Ashfall districts, but Vidrik was used to never hearing the whys and the wherefores.
“Define ‘pretty fucked,’ ” he yelled as he slipped into his own oilcloak and threw up the hood. He stepped out into the rain and crossed to the donkey-cart, waving to the two men standing behind it. One of them owed him two barons from the previous week’s dicing.
“Have a look,” said Constanzo, sweeping back the wet blanket that covered the donkey-cart’s cargo. Beneath it was a man, youngish and very pale, balding, with a fuzz of stubble on his cheeks. He was fairly well dressed, in a gray coat with red cuffs. It happened to be spattered with blood.
The man was alive, but he lay in the cart with his fingerless hands pressed against his cheeks, and he stared up at Vidrik without a speck of sane comprehension in his eyes. “Mahhhhhh,” he moaned as the rain fell on his head, “mwaaaaaaaaah!”
His tongue had been cut out; a dark scar covered the stump at the bottom of his mouth, oozing blood.
“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
“Sweet fuckin
g Perelandro,” said Vidrik, “tell me I don’t see what I see on his wrists.”
“It’s a bondsmage, Sergeant,” said Constanzo. “It is—or it was.”
He threw the soaked blanket back over the man’s face and reached inside his oilcloak. “There’s more. Show it to you inside?”
Vidrik led Constanzo back into his shack; the two men swept their hoods back but didn’t bother taking their cloaks off. Constanzo pulled out a piece of folded parchment.
“We found this fellow tied to a floor over in Ashfall,” he said. “Pretty gods-damned weird. This parchment was on his chest.”
Vidrik took it and unfolded it to read:
PERSONAL ATTENTION OF THE DUKE’S SPIDER
FOR RETURN TO KARTHAIN
“Gods,” he said. “A real Karthani bondsmage. Looks like he won’t be recommending Camorr to his friends.”
“What do we do with him, Sergeant?”
Vidrik sighed, folded the letter, and passed it back to Constanzo.
“We pass the coin, lad,” he said. “We pass this fucking coin right up the chain of command and we forget we ever saw it. Haul him to the Palace of Patience and let someone else give it a ponder.”
2
FALSELIGHT GLIMMERED on the rain-rippled water of Camorr Bay as Doña Angiavesta Vorchenza, dowager countess of Amberglass, stood on the dock, huddled in a fur-lined oilcloak, while teams of men with wooden poles prowled through a barge full of rain-sodden shit beneath her. The smell was attention-grabbing.
“I’m sorry, my lady,” said the watch-sergeant at her left hand. “We’re positive there’s nothing on the other two barges, and we’ve been at this one for six hours. I sincerely doubt that anything will turn up. We will, of course, continue our efforts.”
Doña Vorchenza sighed deeply and turned to look at the carriage that stood on the dock behind her, drawn by four black stallions and framed with alchemical running lights in the Vorchenza colors. The door was open; Don and Doña Salvara sat inside peering out at her, along with Captain Reynart. She beckoned to them.
