by Scott Lynch
“Help you circumvent my own work? Are you mad?”
“I had hoped,” said Jean, “that the identity of the vault owner might be one that wouldn’t raise any particular pangs of sympathy.”
“Who and where?”
“Requin. The Sinspire.”
“Twelve gods, you are mad!” Gallardine glanced around as though checking the room for spies before she continued. “That certainly does raise pangs of sympathy! Sympathy for myself!”
“My pockets are deep, Guildmistress. Surely there must be a sum which would alleviate your qualms?”
“There is no sum in this world,” said the old woman, “large enough to convince me to give you what you ask for. Your accent, Master de Ferra…I believe I place it. You’re from Talisham, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“And Requin—you’ve studied him, have you?”
“Thoroughly, of course.”
“Nonsense. If you’d studied him thoroughly, you wouldn’t be here. Let me tell you a little something about Requin, you poor rich Talishani simpleton. Do you know that woman of his, Selendri? The one with the brass hand?”
“I’ve heard that he keeps no other close to him.”
“And that’s all you know?”
“Ah, more or less.”
“Until several years ago,” said Gallardine, “it was Requin’s custom to host a grand masque at the Sinspire each Day of Changes. A mad revel, in thousand-solari costumes, of which his were always the grandest. Well, one year he and that beautiful young woman of his decided to switch costumes and masks. On a whim.
“An assassin,” she continued, “had dusted the inside of Requin’s costume with something devilish. The blackest sort of alchemy, a kind of aqua regia for human flesh. It was just a powder…it needed sweat and warmth to bring it to life. And so that woman wore it for nearly half an hour, until she’d just begun to sweat and enjoy herself. And that’s when she started to scream.
“I wasn’t there. But there were artificers of my acquaintance in the crowd, and they say she screamed and screamed until her voice broke. Until there was nothing coming from her throat but a hiss, and still she kept trying to scream. Only one side of the costume was doused with the stuff…a perverse gesture. Her skin bubbled and ran like hot tar. Her flesh steamed, Master de Ferra. No one had the courage to touch her, except Requin. He cut her costume off, demanded water, worked over her feverishly. He wiped her burning skin clean with his jacket, with scraps of cloth, with his bare hands. He was so badly burned himself that he wears gloves to this day, to hide his own scars.”
“Astonishing,” said Jean.
“He saved her life,” said Gallardine, “what was left of it to save. Surely you’ve seen her face. One eye evaporated, like a grape in a bonfire. Her toes required amputation. Her fingers were burnt twigs, her hand a blistered waste. It had to go as well. They had to cut off a breast, Master de Ferra. I assure you, you can have no conception of quite what that means—it would mean much to me now, and it has been many long years since I was last thought comely.
“When she was abed, Requin passed the word to all of his gangs, all of his thieves, all of his contacts, all of his friends among the rich and the powerful. He offered a thousand solari, no questions asked, for anyone who could give him the identity of the would-be poisoner. But there was quite a bit of fear concerning this particular assassin, and Requin was not nearly as respected then as he is now. He received no answer. The next night, he offered five thousand solari, no questions asked, and still received no answer. The third night, he repeated his offer, for ten thousand solari, fruitlessly. On the fourth night, he offered twenty thousand…and not one person came forward.
“And so the murders started the very next night. At random. Among the thieves, among the alchemists, among the servants of the Priori. Anyone who might have access to useful information. One a night, silent work, absolutely professional. Each victim had his or her skin peeled off with a knife, on their left side. As a reminder.
“And so his gangs, and his gamblers, and his associates begged him to stop. ‘Find me an assassin,’ he told them, ‘and I will.’ And they pleaded, and they made their inquiries, and came back with nothing. So he began to kill two people per night. He began to kill wives, husbands, children, friends. One of his gangs rebelled, and they were found dead the next morning. All of them. He tightened his grip on his gangs and purged them of the weak-hearted. He killed and killed and killed, until the entire city was in a frenzy to turn over every rock, to kick in every door for him. Until nothing could be worse than to keep disappointing him. At last, a man was brought before him who satisfied his questions.
“Requin,” said Gallardine with a long dry sigh, “set that man inside a wooden frame, chained there, on his left side. The frame was filled with alchemical cement, which was allowed to harden. The frame was tipped up—so you see, the man was half sealed into a stone wall, all along his left side, from his feet to the top of his head. He was tipped up and left standing in Requin’s vault to die. Requin would go in himself and force water down the man’s throat each day. His trapped limbs rotted, festered, made him sick. He died slowly, starving and gangrenous, sealed into the most perfectly hideous physical torture I have ever heard of in all my long years.
“So you will forgive me,” she said, taking Jean gently by the arm and leading him toward the left-hand window, “if Requin is one client with whom I intend to maintain absolute faith until the Lady Most Kind sweeps my soul out of this old sack of bones.”
“But surely, there’s no need for him to know?”
“And just as surely, Master de Ferra, there is the fact that I would never chance it. Never.”
“But surely, a small consideration—”
“Have you heard,” interrupted Gallardine, “of what happens to those caught cheating at his tower, Master de Ferra? He collects their hands, and then he drops them onto a stone courtyard and bills their families or business partners to have the bodies cleaned up. And what about the last man who started a fight inside the Sinspire, and drew blood? Requin had him tied to a table. His kneecaps were cut out by a dog-leech, and red ants were poured into the wounds. The kneecaps were lashed back down with twine. That man begged to have his throat slit. His request was not granted.
“Requin is a power unto himself. The archon can’t touch him for fear of aggravating the Priori, and the Priori find him far too useful to turn on him. Since Selendri nearly died, he’s become an artist of cruelty the likes of which this city has never seen. There is no mortal reward that I would consider worth provoking that man.”
“I take all that very seriously, madam. So can we not carefully minimize your involvement? Settle for a basic schematic of the vault mechanisms, the most general overview? The sort of thing that could never be specifically tied to you?”
“You haven’t really been listening.” She shook her head and gestured toward the left-hand window of her house. “Let me ask you something else, Master de Ferra. Can you see the view of Tal Verrar out this window?”
Jean stepped forward to gaze out through the pane of glass. The view was southward, over the western tip of the Artificers’ Crescent, across the anchorage and the glimmering silver-white water to the Sword Marina. There the archon’s navy rode at anchor, protected by high walls and catapults.
“It’s a…very lovely view,” he said.
“Isn’t it? Now, you must consider this my final statement on the matter. Do you know anything of counterweights?”
“I can’t say that I—”
At that moment, the guildmistress yanked on one of the leather cords that hung down from her ceiling.
The first notion Jean had that the floor had opened up beneath his feet was when the view of Tal Verrar suddenly seemed to move up toward the ceiling; his senses conferred hastily on just what this meant, and were stumped for a split second until his stomach weighed in with nauseous confirmation that the view wasn’t doing the moving.
He plunged throug
h the floor and struck a hard square platform suspended just beneath Gallardine’s house by iron chains at the corners. His first thought was that it must be some sort of lift—and then it began to plummet toward the street forty-odd feet below.
The chains rattled and the sudden breeze washed over him; he fell prone and clung to the platform with white-knuckled alarm. Roofs and carts and cobblestones rushed up toward him and he braced himself for the sharp pain of impact—but it didn’t come. The platform was slowing down with impossible smoothness: sure death slowed to possible injury and then to mere embarrassment. The descent ended a bare few feet above the street, when the chains on Jean’s left stayed taut while the others went slack. The platform tilted with a lurch and dumped him in a heap on the cobbles.
He sat up and sucked in a grateful breath; the street was spinning slightly around him. He looked up and saw that the chain platform was rapidly ascending back to its former position. A split second before it drew home into the underside of Gallardine’s floor, something small and shiny tumbled out of the trap door above it. Jean managed to flinch away and cover his face just before glass shards and liquor from the exploding bottle of brandy mix sprayed over him.
He wiped a good few solari worth of White Plum Austershalin out of his hair as he stumbled to his feet, wide-eyed and cursing.
“A fine afternoon to you, sir. But wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess. Proposal not accepted by the guildmistress?”
Jean, befuddled, found a smiling beer seller not five feet to his right, leaning against the wall of a closed and unmarked two-story building. The man was a tanned scarecrow with a broad-brimmed leather hat that drooped with age until it nearly touched his bony shoulders. He drummed the fingers of one hand on a large wheeled cask, to which several wooden mugs were attached by long chains.
“Um, something like that,” said Jean. A hatchet slipped out of his coat and clattered against the cobblestones. Red-faced, he bent, retrieved it, and made it vanish again.
“You might call this self-serving, and I’d certainly be the first to agree with you, sir. But you look to me like a man in need of a drink. A drink that won’t bust open against the cobbles and damn near break your skull, that is.”
“Do I? What have you got?”
“Burgle, sir. Presuming you’ve heard of it, it’s a Verrari specialty, and if you’ve had it in Talisham you haven’t had it at all. Nothing at all against Talishani, of course. Why, I’ve got family in Talisham, you know.”
Burgle was a thick dark beer usually flavored with a few drops of almond oil. It had a kick comparable to many wines. Jean nodded. “A full mug, if you please.”
The beer seller opened the tap on his cask and filled one of the chained mugs with liquid that looked almost black. He passed this to Jean with one hand and tipped his cap with the other.
“She does it a few times a week, you know.”
Jean quaffed the warm beer and let the yeasty, nutty flavor flow down the back of his throat. “A few times a week?”
“She’s a mite impatient with some of her visitors. Doesn’t wait to terminate conversation with all the usual niceties. But then you knew that already.”
“Mmm-hmmm. This is pretty tolerable stuff.”
“Thank you kindly, sir. One centira the full mug…thank you, thank you kindly. I do a brisk business with folks falling out of Madam Gallardine’s floor. I usually try to stake this spot out just in case it rains a customer or two. I’m very sorry you didn’t find satisfaction in your meeting with her.”
“Satisfaction? Well, she might have gotten rid of me before I expected, but I think I did what I set out to do.” Jean poured the last of the beer down his throat, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and passed the mug back. “I’m really just planting a seed for the future, is all.”
CHAPTER FOUR
BLIND ALLIANCES
1
“MASTER KOSTA, please be reasonable. Why would I be holding anything back from you? If I had a treatment to suggest, it would mean a fair bit more gold in my pocket, now wouldn’t it?”
Pale Therese, the consulting poisoner, kept a rather comfortable parlor in which to discuss confidential business with her clients. Locke and Jean were seated cross-legged on soft, wide cushions, holding (but not sipping from) little porcelain cups of thick Jereshti coffee. Pale Therese—a serious, ice-eyed Vadran of about thirty—had hair the color of new sail canvas that bobbed against the collar of her black velvet coat as she paced the room across from her guests. Her bodyguard, a well-dressed Verrari woman with a basket-hilted rapier and a lacquered wooden club hanging from her belt, lounged against the wall beside the room’s single locked door, silent and watchful.
“Of course,” said Locke. “I beg your pardon, madam, if I’m a bit out of sorts. I hope you can appreciate our situation…possibly poisoned, with no means to tell in the first place, let alone begin securing an antidote.”
“Yes, Master Kosta. It’s certainly an anxious position you’re in.”
“This is the second time I’ve been poisoned for coercive purposes. I was lucky enough to escape the first.”
“Pity it’s such an effective means of keeping someone on a chain, isn’t it?”
“You needn’t sound so satisfied, madam.”
“Oh, come now, Master Kosta. You mustn’t think me unsympathetic.” Pale Therese held up her left hand, showing off a collection of rings and alchemical scars, and Locke was surprised to see that the fourth finger of that hand was missing. “A careless accident, when I was an apprentice, working with something unforgiving. I had ten heartbeats to choose—my finger or my life. Fortunately there was a heavy knife very close at hand. I know what it means to taste the fruits of my art, gentlemen. I know what it is to feel sickly and anxious and desperate, waiting to see what happens next.”
“Of course,” said Jean. “Forgive my partner. It’s just…well, the artistry of our apparent poisoning surely left us hoping for some equally miraculous solution.”
“As a rule of thumb, it’s always easier to poison than it is to cure.” Therese idly rubbed the stump of her missing finger, a gesture that looked like an old familiar tic. “Antidotes are delicate things; in many cases, they’re poisons in their own right. There is no panacea, no cure-all, no cleansing that can blunt every venom known to my trade. And since the substance you describe does indeed seem to be proprietary, I’d sooner just cut your throats than attempt random antidote treatments. They could prolong your misery, or even enhance the effect of the substance already within you.”
Jean cupped his chin in one hand and gazed around the parlor. Therese had decorated one wall with a shrine to fat, sly Gandolo, Lord of Coin and Commerce, heavenly father of business transactions. On the opposite wall was a shrine to veiled Aza Guilla, Lady of the Long Silence, Goddess of Death. “But you said there are known substances that linger on like the one we’re supposed to be afflicted with. Might they not narrow the field of worthwhile treatments?”
“There are such substances, yes. Twilight rose essence sleeps in the body for several months and deadens the nerves if the subject doesn’t take a regular antidote. Witherwhite steals the nourishment from all food and drink; the victims can gorge themselves all they like and still waste away to nothing. Anuella dust makes the victim bleed out through their skin weeks after they breathe it…. But don’t you see the problem? Three lingering poisons, three very different means of causing harm. An antidote for, say, a poison of the blood might well kill you if your poison works by some other means.”
“Damn,” said Locke. “All right, then. I feel silly bringing this up, but Jerome, you said there was one more possibility….”
“Bezoars,” said Jean. “I read a great deal about them as a child.”
“Bezoars are, sadly, a myth.” Therese folded her hands in front of her and sighed. “Just a fairy story, like the Ten Honest Turncoats, the Heart-Eating Sword, the Clarion Horn of Therim Pel, and all that wonderful nonsense. I’m sure I read the same books, M
aster de Ferra. I’m sorry. In order to extract magic stones from the stomachs of dragons, we’d have to have living dragons somewhere, wouldn’t we?”
“They do seem to be in short supply.”
“If it’s miraculous and expensive you’re looking for,” said Therese, “there is one more course of action I could suggest.”
“Anything…,” said Locke.
“The Bondsmagi of Karthain. I have credible reports that they do have means to halt poisonings that we alchemists cannot. For those who can afford their fees, of course.”
“…except that,” muttered Locke.
“Well,” said Therese with a certain resigned finality. “Though it aids neither my pocketbook nor my conscience to set you back on the street without a solution, I fear I can do little else, given how thin our information is. You are absolutely confident the poisoning happened but recently?”
“Last night, madam, was the very first opportunity our…tormentor ever had.”
“Then take what little comfort I can give. Stay useful to this individual and you probably have weeks or months of safety ahead. In that time, some lucky stroke may bring you more information on the substance in question. Watch and listen keenly for whatever clues you may. Return with more solid information for me, and I will instruct my people to take you in at any hour, night or day, to see what I might do.”
“That’s quite gracious of you, madam,” said Locke.
“Poor gentlemen! I offer you my best prayers for good fortune. I know you shall live for some time with a weight on your shoulders…and should you eventually find no solution forthcoming, I can always offer you my other services. Turnabout, as they say, is fair play.”
“You’re our kind of businesswoman,” said Jean, rising to his feet. He set down his little cup of coffee, and beside it placed a gold solari coin. “We appreciate your time and hospitality.”
“No trouble, Master de Ferra. Are you ready to go out, then?”
Locke stood up and adjusted his long coat. He and Jean nodded in unison.
