by Scott Lynch
How?
“Irrelevant. You are the sole survivor of your faction. All questions between us have been settled. We’re leaving Karthain, entering the time of quiet as planned. You are my final item of business before I go.”
Come to kill me last? Come to bring an end to three years of cowardice?
“Part of me wishes you were dead,” she says. “Wishes you’d died cleanly, as you would have had you been healthy and abroad in Karthain tonight. I can’t imagine wanting to live on in your … condition. And I will end your suffering, if it’s what you desire. But I felt that I had to ask. I owe you at least this much.”
She points to the other figure in the room, a burly man, balding, with a black mustache that droops to the collar of his brown tunic. There are no rings visible on either of his wrists.
“This is Eganis, your caretaker.” She offers images and impressions, revealing to the Falconer how it has been for three years.
Eganis moving him, rolling him from side to side, turning him to avoid weeping bedsores.
Eganis feeding him, gruel and pap and milk.
Eganis emptying his chamber pot.
Eganis walking him, leading the doddering Falconer by a length of leather around his neck.
A mage of Karthain … leashed …
It was necessary to preserve your health.
Like a dog …
It was necessary!
LIKE A GODS-DAMNED DOG!
You’re the one who always sought to know the spirits of animals more intimately.
He sends no words, but an unrelieved outpouring of hatred so hot and acidic he sees her stagger before she can manage to gird her mind against it.
“You’ll understand when you calm down,” she says. “I’ll leave this house and funds for Eganis to draw on. Without hands or voice, you’re now effectively one of the ungifted, and you will never see any of us again. If you can find some reason to live, you are invited to do so. If you find the thought unpalatable, then I will … I will end the matter quickly and painlessly.”
I will accept nothing more from you for so long as I live. Not this house. Not Eganis. Not charity. Certainly not death.
“On your own head be it,” she mutters. “Eganis will stay. You’re a mute invalid with three rings tattooed on your wrist, and Karthain could soon be a very … interesting place for you.”
There’s no hell for you deep enough to suit my tastes, Mother.
Your ambitions and your researches were a threat to every living being on this world. Consider that, when you cry your tears.
Your TIMIDITY! In the face of the secrets waiting to be unlocked everywhere the Eldren set foot, you want us to stay ignorant and helpless … well, to hell with you. All the real power of the human race is squandered on people like you … the willfully small. You and all your fellow punch lines to Karthain’s worst joke. Five rings! Five prisoner’s shackles!
You would have been free to stick your hand into fire, if only the rest of us wouldn’t have to burn with you. Good-bye, Falconer.
She departs, and the spell of thought-shaping crumbles in her absence. He is alone and voiceless with Eganis. The man looks at the Falconer, then slightly away, as though uncomfortable at seeing him with his eyes open.
“If you ever find the burden of your new life … too overwhelming,” the man mutters, “I am instructed … to offer you mercy. I have powders that can be taken in wine.”
The Falconer glares at the man until he shrugs and leaves the room.
6
NOW THE Falconer notices the autumn cold. He feels it like an ache in his too-thin body. Disgusted, he rolls to his left and attempts to stand on his own two feet.
Success, but only just. Gods, he moves like a man of ninety! His hips ache and his legs seem too stick-thin to bear him, but they do, awkwardly. The Falconer chortles disgustedly at the creaky hop that passes for his walk.
There is nothing useful in this prisoner’s chamber. A bed, a chair, a lamp, a chamber pot. The next room is larger, furnished with a library of several dozen volumes and a small basin. The Falconer hops wistfully to the basin, knowing what he’ll see there. Dreamsteel is ubiquitous in mage households, a decoration and an amusement. The pool is inert to him, dead as water, and the frustration makes him shudder so hard he nearly falls over.
Lips trembling, he prods the silver pool with the remnants of his right hand. He needs fingers, flexible fingers! Then this steel could take any shape required at the press of a thought. When he was five, he could move the metal with a wave of his hands and a single word. Fresh heat rises in his cheeks, and for an instant he hates what he has become so fiercely he actually considers the powders offered by the caretaker.
The surface of the dreamsteel ripples in a place where he isn’t touching it.
The Falconer leaps back, heart hammering, piteously loud in his weak chest. Gods! If his eyes are tricking him … if he didn’t actually see that, he tells himself he’ll demand the powders. His teeth are rattling from excitement as he bends back over the basin. He touches the severed stumps of his fingers to the liquid and stares at it, mustering all of his willpower from its long slumber, all of his fury, all of his inhumanly honed focus and desire. Beads of sweat pour down his forehead.
He shudders with a yearning so profound his breath comes in gasps.
Hair-thin strands of dreamsteel creep onto the stump of his right index finger. Then thick drops, then a tangible curving line. He feels power like a vibration along the silver edge. His grip on the energy of sorcery. His focus. Hot tears drench his cheeks, and his chest heaves like a bellows.
In a minute, he has crafted a single silvery finger, and the process gains speed. With one finger to direct the currents of magic, it is easy to craft a second, even easier to craft a third. Before he can believe it, the Falconer is staring in awestruck joy at a half-metal hand, held together by the trivial flexions of his will—four silver fingers and a silver thumb.
His wail of relief and joy is so loud and undignified that Eganis comes running from below. The man’s eyes widen.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
There’s no need for the old device, the playing of a silver thread back and forth. The Falconer’s hand will now do the job itself. He flexes his mirror-skinned fingers, makes a brush-off gesture toward Eganis, and the caretaker falls gasping to his knees.
The Falconer has power, but it is weak and vague. He needs a voice. Some magic only makes him more desperately thirsty to have it all back. Thirsty! The very idea … and yet, why not? What can caution possibly do for him now? He takes the dreamsteel basin in his new hand and tilts it into his mouth; the metal is cool and strangely salty. It pools beneath the stump of his tongue, slides in tendrils down his gullet, and there he holds it, shapes it, not as a tongue but as a thin resonant surface, vibrating half with sound and half with magic.
Eerie noises like hissing laughter fill the room as he fights to master the dreamsteel, to align it perfectly, to gild his throat.
“EGANIS,” he booms at last. The voice is cold, the words like metal grates sliding shut. “So, you would have offered me mercy, Eganis? YOU … offer ME mercy?”
“Please,” the caretaker coughs, “I meant you no harm! I’ve taken care of you!”
“I refused you as a gift.” The Falconer seizes the basin and hurls it at Eganis, spilling the remaining dreamsteel over him. “My mother should have sent you away.”
He moves his silver hand and speaks in his silver voice. The dreamsteel comes alive and crawls over Eganis, rolling toward his neck.
“No! Please, I can serve you!”
“You will serve me. As proof of concept.”
The Falconer makes a fist, and the loose dreamsteel flows into Eganis’ ears. Parallel red lines pour out beneath the silver ones, and then become rivers. Eganis screams. He clutches the top of his head, and there is a sound like wheat husks cracking. The skull shatters. A wave of silver fountains out behind hot blood a
nd wet brains.
The results hit the floor in many different parts of the room. The Falconer calls the loose dreamsteel back to him, forming a necklace with it. He’ll need to secure more, somehow, to craft another functional hand. Still, what he has should be more than enough to give him back his wild sky.
7
THERE IS a narrow window beside the bookshelf. A gesture from the Falconer and the glass becomes sand, sliding out of the frame, blowing away into the blackly overcast night. Another gesture and the frame hinges rust; the Falconer pulls it out of the wall and lets it clatter to the floor.
He sees that he is somewhere in the Ponta Corbessa, just a block or two north of the docks. He sends his awareness forth, softly and subtly, well aware that none of the magi still abroad in the city will show him an instant’s mercy if he is located. It takes only moments to find what he wants, one of the fan-tailed carrion crows of the North Amathel, sly sociable birds with sharp eyes, sharp beaks, and sharp talons.
The Falconer takes the first crow gently and launches it into the night, using a slim thread of awareness, suppressing his delight at the sensation of soaring. A moment or two reaffirms his affinity for the work, and he extends his control to the half-dozen other crows roosting nearby.
The Falconer’s purloined murder circles over the Ponta Corbessa, hunting both for other crows and a glimpse of a certain cloaked woman. She must still be somewhere in Karthain, and he’ll know her at any distance, so long as she isn’t hidden away under a deep spell.
Seven crows becomes thirty. The Falconer directs them with the precision of a dancing master, sending more and more of his awareness out into the feathered cloud, seeing not through individual pairs of eyes but as a thrilling gestalt, a whirling composite of dark streets, rooftops, rattling carriages, and hurrying people.
Thirty crows becomes sixty. Sixty becomes ninety. They unwind in orderly spirals, north and west, search tirelessly.
It doesn’t take long to find her, at the western edge of the Ponta Corbessa. She is walking alone, toward some rendezvous, and the Falconer recognizes her beyond all possibility of doubt. Blood calls to blood.
His flights of crows, black against the black sky, converge and circle silently, three hundred feet up. In moments he has gathered one hundred and fifty, the most living creatures of any sort he has ever controlled at once. His mind is on fire with the thrill of power; now he has to be quick and certain, before Patience can bring her formidable skills into play, before any other magi can notice what’s going on.
One crow flutters and falls out of the night. The rest follow a heartbeat later.
Patience is on the pavement beside a warehouse, just passing under a swaying orange alchemical lamp. The first crow shoots past her hood from behind, brushing it, squawking and cawing all the way.
She whirls to see where it came from. The next dozen birds fly directly into her face.
Eyes, nose, cheeks, lips—there is no time to be merciful. The ball of sorcery-maddened crows pecks and claws at anything soft, anything vulnerable. Patience barely has time to scream before she is blind and on her back, flailing as more crows pour out of the sky like a black cloud given flesh.
She remembers her sorcery, and half manages a spell. A dozen birds flash into cinders, but a dozen more take their place, seeking neck and forehead, wrists and fingers. The Falconer presses Patience down to the pavement, the writhing flock a pure extension of his will, a crushing dark hand. Grinning madly, he channels a thought-sending to her, hurling his sigil against her shattered mental defenses, and then:
Is this weakness, Mother?
You never understood my talents.
The truth is, they never made me weak.
THE TRUTH IS THAT THEY GAVE ME WINGS.
The beaks and claws of the carrion birds are driven by human intelligence; in moments they have opened Patience’s wrists, pulped her hands, peeled the skin from her neck, torn out her eyes and tongue. She is helpless long before she dies.
The Falconer disperses his clouds of winged minions and sags against the window frame, gasping for breath. He has expended so much of himself.… He needs food. He must tear the house apart for anything useful. He needs clothing, money, boots.… He must be away as soon as he’s eaten, away from this nest of his enemies, away to recover himself.
“The time of quiet, Mother?” He hums the words softly to himself, savoring the eerie sensation of the dreamsteel vibrating in his throat. “Oh, I think the last fucking thing your friends are going to enjoy is a time of quiet.”
Hobbling uneasily, laughing to himself, he moves carefully down the stairs. First food, then clothes. Then to gather strength for the work ahead.
The long, bloody work ahead.
For Jason McCray,
one man who in his time
has played many parts.
AFTERWORD
I’m grateful to Simon Spanton for recommending Antony Sher’s autobiographical Year of the King, a book that didn’t so much directly influence The Republic of Thieves as whet my appetite to portray the players of the Moncraine Company from several angles I hadn’t previously considered. I hope that I may plead to enthusiasts of the theater, as I did to enthusiasts of all things nautical with Red Seas Under Red Skies, to remember that I have not sought to accurately re-create any particular tradition of troupe or performance from our own world, but to arrange selected elements of those traditions in a shape I found amusing.
I’m grateful again to Simon Spanton and Anne Groell for their long-suffering patience and support during a troublesome time; to my brilliant Sarah, who found something broken and helped put it back together; to Lou Anders, Jonathan Strahan, and Gareth-Michael Skarka, who coaxed work out of me when I badly needed to feel capable of it, and lastly to that person whose long correspondence kept me crawling forward in hope during the lowest, darkest point of my life: Thank you.
This concludes the third volume in the Gentleman Bastard sequence, which will continue with The Thorn of Emberlain.
SL
New Richmond, Wisconsin, 2008 –
Brookfield, Massachusetts, 2013
By Scott Lynch
THE LIES OF LOCKE LAMORA
RED SEAS UNDER RED SKIES
THE REPUBLIC OF THIEVES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Lynch is the author of The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves. He lives in Wisconsin and frequently visits Massachusetts, the home of his partner, SF/F writer Elizabeth Bear. He moonlights as a paid-on-call firefighter for the city he resides in.
