by Scott Lynch
“Very well, then. Valista will see you back out the way you came. Apologies once again for the blindfolds, but…some precautions are for your benefit as well as mine.”
The actual location of Pale Therese’s parlor was a secret, tucked away somewhere amongst the hundreds of respectable businesses, coffeehouses, taverns, and homes in the wooden warrens of the Emerald Galleries, where sunlight and moonlight alike filtered down a soothing sea green through the mushrooming, intersecting Elderglass domes that roofed the district. Therese’s guards led prospective clients to her, blindfolded, along a lengthy series of passageways. The armed young woman stood away from the door, a pair of blindfolds in hand.
“We understand completely,” said Locke. “And never fear. We’re becoming quite accustomed to being led around by our noses in the dark.”
2
LOCKE AND Jean skulked about the Savrola for two nights after that, keeping their eyes on every rooftop and every alley, but neither Bondsmagi nor agents of the archon came forward and conveniently announced themselves. They were being followed and observed by several teams of men and women; that much was clear. Locke’s guess was that these were Requin’s people, given instructions to let just enough of their activities slip to keep him and Jean on their toes.
On the third night, they decided they might as well return to the Sinspire and put on their brave faces. Decked out in several hundred solari worth of finery apiece, they walked up the red velvet carpet and placed silver volani in the hands of the door-guards while a sizable crowd of well-dressed nobodies stood nearby hoping for a glimmer of social mercy.
Locke’s practiced eye picked out the ringers among them; men and women with worse teeth, leaner faces, and warier eyes than the rest of the crowd, dressed in evening clothes that didn’t look precisely tailored, or wearing the wrong accessories, or the wrong colors. Requin’s Right People, out for a night at his Sinspire as a reward for some job well done. They’d be let in in good time, but not allowed past the second floor. Their presence was just one more component of the tower’s mystique; a chance for the great and good to mingle with the dirty and dangerous.
“Masters Kosta and de Ferra,” said one of the doormen, “welcome back.”
When the wide doors swung open toward Locke and Jean, a wave of noise and heat and smells washed out over them into the night—the familiar exhalation of decadence.
The first floor was merely crowded, but the second floor was a wall-to-wall sea of flesh and fine clothes. The crowd began on the stairs, and Locke and Jean had to use elbows and threats to make their way up into the mess.
“What in Perelandro’s name is going on?” Locke asked of a man pressed against him. The man turned, grinning excitedly.
“It’s a cage spectacle!”
In the center of the second floor was a brass cage that could be lowered from the ceiling, locking into apertures in the floor to create a sturdy cube about twenty feet on a side. Tonight the cage was also covered with a very fine mesh—no, Locke corrected himself, two layers of mesh, one inside the cage and one outside. A lucky minority of the Sinspire patrons in the room were watching from elevated tables along the outer walls; it was standing-room only for at least a hundred others.
Locke and Jean made their way through the crowd counterclockwise, attempting to get close enough to see what the spectacle was. The excited murmur of conversation surrounded them, more frantic than Locke had ever heard it within these walls. But as he and Jean approached the cage, he suddenly realized that not all of the noise was coming from the crowd.
Something the size of a sparrow beat its wings against the mesh and buzzed angrily, a low thrumming sound that sent a shiver of pure animal dread up Locke’s spine. “That’s a fucking stiletto wasp,” he whispered to Jean, who nodded vigorously in agreement.
Locke had never been unfortunate enough to encounter one of the insects personally. They were the bane of several large tropical islands a few thousand miles to the east, far past Jerem and Jeresh and the lands detailed on most Therin maps. Years before, Jean had found a gruesome account of the creatures in one of his natural philosophy books and read it aloud to the other Gentlemen Bastards, ruining their sleep for several nights.
They were called stiletto wasps on account of descriptions the rare survivors gave of being stung by them. They were as heavy as songbirds, bright red in color, and their stinging abdomens were longer than a grown man’s middle finger. Possession of a stiletto wasp queen in any Therin city-state was punishable by death, lest the things should ever gain a foothold on Therin soil. Their hives were said to be the size of houses.
A young man ducked and wove inside the cage, dressed in nothing more protective than a silk tunic, cotton breeches, and short boots. Thick leather gauntlets were his weapons as well as his only armor; they were wedded to bracers buckled around his forearms, and he kept his hands up before his face like a boxer. With gloves like that a man could certainly contemplate swatting or crushing a stiletto wasp—but he would have to be very quick and very sure of himself.
On a table at the opposite side of the cage sat a heavy wooden cabinet fronted with dozens of mesh-covered cells, a few of which were already open. The rest, judging by the noise, were crammed full of highly agitated stiletto wasps just waiting to be released.
“Master Kosta! Master de Ferra!”
The shout carried across the noisy crowd but even so was hard to pinpoint. Locke had to look around several times before he could spot the source—Maracosa Durenna, waving to him and Jean from her place at one of the tables against a far wall.
Her black hair was pulled back into a sort of fantail around a gleaming silver ornament, and she was smoking from a curved silver pipe almost as long as her arm. Bands of white iron and jade slid against one another on her left wrist as she beckoned Locke and Jean across the room. They raised eyebrows at each other but pushed their way through the crowd toward her, and were soon standing beside her table.
“Where have you been these past few nights? Izmila has been indisposed, but I’ve been cruising the waters with other games in mind.”
“Our apologies, Madam Durenna,” said Jean. “Matters of business have kept us elsewhere. We occasionally consult on a freelance basis for very…demanding clients.”
“There was a brief trip over water,” added Locke.
“Negotiations concerning futures in pear cider,” said Jean.
“We came highly recommended by former associates,” said Locke.
“Pear cider futures? What a romantic and dangerous sort of trade you two must ply. And are you as accomplished at stake-placing in futures as you are at Carousel Hazard?”
“It stands to reason,” said Jean, “or else we wouldn’t have the funds to play Carousel Hazard.”
“Well then, how about a demonstration? The cage duel. Which participant do you believe to have a happier prospect for the future?”
In the cage, the free stiletto wasp darted toward the young man, who swatted it out of the air and crushed it beneath one of his boots with an audible juicy crack. Most of the crowd cheered.
“Apparently, it’s too late for our opinion to matter one way or the other,” said Locke. “Or is there more to the show?”
“The show’s only just started, Master Kosta. That hive has one hundred and twenty cells. There’s a clockwork device opening the doors, mostly at random. He might get one at a time; he might get six. Eye-catching, isn’t it? He can’t leave the cage until he’s got one hundred and twenty wasps dead at his feet, or…”
She punctuated the sentence with a deep intake of smoke from her pipe and a raising of both her eyebrows.
“I believe he’s killed eight so far,” she finished.
“Ah,” said Locke. “Well…if I had to choose, I’d be inclined to favor the boy. Call me an optimist.”
“I do.” She let two long streams of smoke fall out of her nose like faint gray waterfalls, and she smiled. “I would take the wasps. Shall we call it a wager? Two hundred solari fr
om me, one hundred apiece from each of you?”
“I’m as fond of a small wager as the next man, but let’s ask the next man—Jerome?”
“If it’s your pleasure, madam, our coin purses are yours to command.”
“What a font of gracious untruths you two are.” She beckoned one of Requin’s attendants, and the three of them pledged their credit with the house for markers. They received four short wooden sticks engraved with ten rings apiece. The attendant recorded their names on a tablet and moved on; the tempo of the betting around the room was still rising.
In the cage, two more murderously annoyed insects wriggled out of their enclosures and took wing toward the young man.
“Did I mention,” said Durenna as she set her pair of markers down atop her little table, “that the death of nearby wasps seems to excite the others to a higher state of frenzy? That boy’s opponents will get angrier and angrier as the fight goes on.”
The pair currently free in the enclosure seemed angry enough; the boy was dancing a lively jig to keep them away from his back and flanks. “Fascinating,” said Jean, working a series of specific hand gestures into his mannerisms as he craned his neck to watch the duel. There were a few creative uses of fairly limited signals in Jean’s message, but Locke eventually sorted the gist of it out:
Do we really have to stay to watch this with her?
He was about to answer when a familiar hard weight fell on his left shoulder.
“Master Kosta,” said Selendri before Locke had even finished turning. “One of the Priori wishes to speak to you on the sixth floor. A small matter. Something concerning…card tricks. He said you’d understand.”
“Madam,” said Locke, “I, ah, would be only too happy to attend. Can you let him know that I’ll be with him shortly?”
“Better,” she said with a half-smile that didn’t move the devastated side of her face at all. “I can escort you myself, to greatly speed your passage.”
Locke smiled as though that were exactly what he would have wished, and he turned back to Madam Durenna with his hands spread out before him.
“You do move in interesting circles, Master Kosta. Best hurry; Jerome can tend your wager, and share a drink with me.”
“A most unlooked-for pleasure,” said Jean, already beckoning an attendant to order that drink.
Selendri didn’t waste another moment; she turned and stepped into the crowd, setting course for the stairs on the far side of the circular room. She moved quickly, with her brass hand cradled in her flesh hand before her like an offering, and the throng parted almost miraculously. Locke hurried along in her wake, keeping just ahead of the crowd as it closed up again behind him like some colony of scuttling creatures briefly disturbed in its chores. Glasses clinked, ragged layers of smoke twirled in the air, and wasps buzzed.
Up the stairs to the third floor; again the well-dressed masses melted away before Requin’s majordomo. On the south side of the third floor was a service area filled with attendants bustling about shelves of liquor bottles. At the rear of the service room was a narrow wooden door with a brass wall-plate beside it. Selendri slid her artificial hand into this plate, and the door cracked open on a dark space barely larger than a coffin. She stepped in first, put her back against the wall of the enclosure, and beckoned him in.
“The climbing closet,” she said. “Much easier than the stairs and the crowds.”
It was a tight fit; Jean would have been unable to share the compartment with her. Locke was crammed in against her left side, and he could feel the heavy weight of her brass hand against his upper back. She reached past him with her other hand and drew the compartment closed. They were locked in warm darkness, and Locke became intensely aware of their smells—his fresh sweat and her feminine musk, and something in her hair, like the smoke from a burning pine log. Woodsy, tingly, not at all unpleasant.
“Well,” he said softly, “this is where I’d have an accident, right? If I had an accident coming?”
“It wouldn’t be an accident, Master Kosta.” She spoke softly as well, as though it was some rule of the enclosure. “But no, you’re not to have it on the way up.”
She moved, and he heard the clicking of some mechanism from the wall on her right. A moment later, the walls of the compartment shuddered, and a faint creaking noise grew above them.
“You dislike me,” Locke said on a whim. There was a brief silence.
“I’ve known many traitors,” she said at last, “but perhaps none so glib.”
“Only those who initiate treachery are traitors,” said Locke, injecting a hurt tone into his voice. “What I desire is redress for a grievance.”
“You would have your rationalizations,” she whispered.
“I’ve offended you somehow.”
“Call it whatever you like.”
Locke concentrated furiously on the tone of his next few words. In darkness, facing away from her, his voice would be detached from all the cues of his face and his mannerisms. It would never have a more effective theater of use. Like an alchemist, he mingled long-practiced deceptions into the desired emotional compound—regret, abashedness, longing.
“If I have offended you, madam—I would unsay what I said, or undo what I did.” The briefest hesitation, just the thing for conveying sincerity. The trustiest tool in his verbal kit. “I would do it the moment you told me how, if you only gave me the chance.”
She shuffled ever so slightly against him; the brass hand pressed harder for a heartbeat. Locke closed his eyes and willed his ears, his skin, and his pure animal instincts to pluck whatever slightest clue they could out of the darkness. Would she scorn pity, or did she crave it? He could feel the shuddering beat of his own heart, hear the faint pulse in his own temples.
“There is nothing to unsay or undo,” she replied, faintly.
“I almost wish that there were. So that I could put you at ease.”
“You cannot.” She sighed. “You could not.”
“And you won’t even let me try?”
“You talk the way you perform card tricks, Master Kosta. Far too smoothly. I fear you may be even better at hiding things with words than you are with your hands. If you must know, it’s your possible usefulness against your employer—and that alone—that preserves my consent for letting you live.”
“I don’t want to be your enemy, Selendri. I don’t even want to be trouble.”
“Words are cheap. Cheap and meaningless.”
“I can’t…” Judicious pause again. Locke was as careful as a master sculptor placing crow’s-feet around the edges of a stone statue’s eye. “Look, maybe I am glib. I can’t speak otherwise, Selendri.” Repeated use of her proper name, a compulsion, almost a spell. More intimate and effective than titles. “I am who I am.”
“And you wonder that I distrust you for it?”
“I wonder more if there’s anything that you don’t distrust.”
“Distrust everyone,” she said, “and you can never be betrayed. Opposed, but never betrayed.”
“Hmmm.” Locke bit his tongue and thought rapidly. “But you don’t distrust him, do you, Selendri?”
“That’s no gods-damned business of yours, Master Kosta.”
There was a loud rattle from the ceiling of the climbing closet. The room gave a last heavy shudder, and then fell still.
“Forgive me, again,” said Locke. “Not the sixth floor, of course. The ninth?”
“The ninth.”
In a second she would push past him and open the door. They had one last moment alone in the intimate darkness. He weighed his options, hefted his last conversational dart. Something risky, but potentially disquieting.
“I used to think much less of him, you know. Before I found out that he was wise enough to really love you.” Another pause, and he lowered his voice to the barest edge of audibility. “I think you must be the bravest woman I’ve ever met.”
He counted his own heartbeats in the darkness until she responded.
“What a pretty presumption,” she whispered, and there was acid beneath her words. There was a click, and a line of yellow light split the blackness, stinging his eyes. She gave him a firm push with her artificial hand, against the door that opened out into the lamplit heart of Requin’s office.
Well, let her roll his words over in her thoughts for a while. Let her give him the signals that would tell him how to proceed. He had no specific goal in mind; it would be enough to keep her uncertain, simply less inclined to stick a knife in his back. And if some small part of him felt sour at twisting her emotions (gods damn it, that part of him had rarely spoken up before!), well—he reminded himself that he could do as he pleased and feel as he pleased while he was Leocanto Kosta. Leocanto Kosta wasn’t real.
He stepped out of the climbing closet, unsure if he was any more convinced by himself than Selendri was.
3
“MASTER KOSTA! My mysterious new associate. What a busy man you’ve been.”
Requin’s office was as cluttered as it had been on Locke’s last visit. Locke was gratified to see his decks of cards stacked haphazardly at various points on and near Requin’s desk. The climbing closet opened out of a wall niche between two paintings, a niche Locke certainly hadn’t noticed on his previous visit.
Requin was standing gazing out through the mesh screen that covered the door to his balcony, wearing a heavy maroon frock coat with black lapels. He scratched at his chin with one gloved hand and glanced sideways at Locke.
“Actually,” said Locke, “Jerome and I have had a quiet few days. As I believe I promised you.”
“I don’t mean just these past few days. I’ve been making those inquiries into your past two years in Tal Verrar.”
“As I’d hoped. Enlightening?”
“Most educational. Let’s be direct. Your associate tried to shake down Azura Gallardine for information concerning my vault. Something more than a year ago. You know who she is?”
Selendri was pacing the room to Locke’s left, slowly, watching him over her right shoulder.
“Of course. One of the high muck-a-shits of the Artificers’ Guild. I told Jerome where to find her.”
