The Book of Swords

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “This is messed up,” Ivan said, craning around the horses to see what was going on. “Stop talking and knock him out.”

  I hesitated. It was messed up. Marco sighed gustily. “All right, we get it, Richard: the one noble in town you actually know, you’ve worked for him, you don’t want to lose a patron. Just our luck. As usual. You should’ve come masked.”

  “Just so,” said Lord Thomas, in that soft and friendly way of his. “It is unfortunate that we had to meet again like this, Master St. Vier. The Watch—and my father—will demand a full description of the criminals.” He pointed his chin at Marco. “You gentlemen, of course, I do not know.”

  Both his hands were shaking badly now. I was surprised he was still standing, because usually the knees go first. “My father is hard to lie to, but I will try.”

  “How kind,” Marco sneered. “What for?”

  Berowne turned to me. “If I might ask, in return, that you would consent to visit me again? Soon?”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. “I would like that.”

  “See, Richard,” Marco crowed. “And you even got a job out of it! Now let’s bash him on the head and get this over with.”

  Berowne paled, and Marco said with savage cheer, “Fathers like it when we bash you on the head.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Thomas said desperately. “I have a very soft head—my father says so—“

  “Shut up,” snapped Marco, but I said:

  “Wait.”

  “Richard, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Knocking him out,” I said.

  I knew Thomas closed his eyes when he kissed, and kept them closed. So I sheathed my sword and put my arms around him, and my damp cloak, as well, hiding Ivan and Marco from his sight and he from theirs. It was sort of lovely, the way his whole body was shaking against me. I kissed him, and after a while he started kissing back, a thing he does very well.

  Behind us, Marco and Ivan were looting the carriage. I murmured with pleasure, so Thomas wouldn’t hear them, wouldn’t think about it. He pressed in closer to me. His hands had stopped shaking, were moving against my back. I wasn’t sure how long either of us was going to be able to remain standing. I wanted to shove him up against the side of the carriage, which would be foolish, or against one of those god-awful trees, which would be difficult. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to—so it was a relief when I heard Marco say, “Let’s go.”

  “What about his rings?” Ivan whined.

  I unpeeled myself from Thomas Berowne. “Leave the goddamned rings,” I said harshly, not quite master of my breath. “Get in the coach, Thomas, and keep your head down.” Luggage was scattered across the road; shirts and stockings and waistcoats and broken-open boxes and books. “Leave it! Leave it and get in. No, don’t, Marco—”

  But this time, they didn’t heed me. Marco elbowed him in the kidneys, then bound his hands with a neckcloth, stuffed a stocking in his mouth, and left Lord Thomas Berowne in his coach for the next traveler to find.

  —

  As arranged, we met up at the Four Horse Quarters, a tavern on a side road to Azay, about a mile outside of town. Marco and Ivan were in the back room, organizing their takings, which ranged from plentiful coins to jeweled neck pins. They were delighted to see me.

  “So,” Ivan said, practically bouncing on his toes; “we’re gonna do that again, right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? But it was perfect! You’re even more than a Gentleman Robber—you’re the Robber Lover! There’ll be songs out there in a week. Less!”

  “Not just songs”—Marco leered—“they’ll be lining up on the high road to get ‘knocked out’ by you!”

  “Just watch you don’t knock ’em up!” said Ivan, which was his idea of humor.

  “No,” I said again, taking the flagon from in front of him and drinking it straight down. “I spent hours in the grass getting bored and wet. I’m going to have to oil my sword again, and I didn’t really use it. I had to walk all the way back here. And I missed a whole day’s practice.”

  Marco sat back a little, his hands on the table. “And the money?”

  “I’ll take it.”

  —

  Jess and I lived well for a few weeks. We got her linen back, and I bought her a dress, nearly new, white with bright flowers scattered all over it. She put it on to go uptown to do the Missing Pocket trick, her braids tidy, her skirts neat, looking for all the world like the pampered daughter of a country gentleman.

  She came home late, red-faced and drunk, her hair in a half-knot, the rest straggling down her front. I hadn’t realized how dark it had gotten: I’d been practicing, which is important whether you have work or not, and I don’t really need to see if there’s no one else there.

  “Look!” she said. “Look what he gave me!”

  She parted her hair to display a gold necklace, curlicued and jeweled. “Dipped,” she said. “And fake. But it’ll be real next time.” Her kiss tasted of brandy. That was her favorite, when she could get it. “I’m coming up in the world!”

  I didn’t ask her what happened. Sometimes, things just did. I had to hear it from Nimble Willy, that Jess had nearly been nabbed up on Tilton Street. But the man with the necklace had stepped forward and vouched for her to the Watch, then he offered her a drink.

  She sold the necklace, and bought more dresses. When she came back from her expeditions in town, she didn’t boast of her sharp cons, the way she used to. Sometimes, she didn’t want to talk at all.

  That gave me more time to practice. It was a hot summer, and our rooms were stifling. Jess thought I should go drill out in the courtyard, but that was too public: the moves I practiced were mine. A winning fight is where they don’t have any idea what you’re likely to do next.

  Jess said my endless practice was no fun, and she started spending more time out at Riverside taverns. That might not have been such a great idea. I could see for myself that her hands were shaky sometimes. Picking gentlemen’s pockets would be out of the question. And yet she came home with all kinds of gauds and bangles. “Coming up in the world,” she’d tell anyone who asked her. “Marks can be so stupid if you know how to manage them.” And no one contradicted her. Maybe because she shared some of her trinkets out with her friends at the Maiden’s Fancy, the ones she didn’t keep, the ones she didn’t sell.

  You’d think she had enough stuff to play with, but she started messing with my things, as well: prancing around the room in nothing but my sword belt, playing childish games with my dragon candlesticks, going through all my shirts looking for holes, over and over…When she tried to mess with my good knives, I’d had it. Those edges are perfect, and needed to remain that way. “They’re not toys,” I told her; “and they’re not yours. Leave them be.”

  So she picked up the glass dagger, and wound her bright, heavy hair up off her neck with one hand, pinning it in place with the blade. It looked good, and I told her so. She just tossed her head—“Glad you like it”—and went out.

  From then on, I kept both knives on me, the weight balancing my hips.

  It was a warm evening, and I was practicing. Jessamyn and I had woken early that morning and taken our pleasure together slowly and lazily for once, until the sun blazed through the cracks in the shutters, and we unstuck ourselves from the sweaty unit we had become. I lay in bed, drying myself with a corner of the sheet, watching Jessamyn sponge herself off with the water in the basin. She was like an ivory statue herself, pale body with its smooth and perfect curves, hair pale in the shadows, falling like a river carved by a careful hand.

  She didn’t ask me for help braiding her hair. Quickly and efficiently, she did it in one long, thick plait, and then she gave it a twist and secured it with the glass dagger. She dressed in a white linen smock, and a blue linen kirtle and bodice, then started draping herself with some of the trinkets she’d been collecting. I thought they looked garish, but I didn’t say anything; she didn’t l
ike it when I had opinions. She said she knew her business best.

  “I’m off,” she said.

  I said, “D’you have to go?”

  “Oh, yes,” she answered brightly. “He’s taking me to luncheon at the King’s Head.”

  I’d never heard of the place. I fell back asleep for a bit. Then I got up, and washed in the courtyard, dressed and went out to find something to eat. There were no messages of employment for me at the Maiden’s Fancy. Rosalie hadn’t heard of any stray jobs, either. So I went home to practice.

  I was working on a new move that a blade in my last duel had nearly taken me down with. First I had to see my opponent clearly, and then I had to become him, executing the sequence so slowly that a child could have pierced through it, before speeding up, faster and faster.

  The light was fading when Jess came waltzing in with a bright, fringed shawl. She tried to tickle me with the fringe. I shook her off, the way you do a fly: She knew better than to disturb me when I was working, I’d told her a dozen times.

  “Rich-a-ard,” she sang, “how do you like my new duds?”

  “Later.” Sweat was pouring down my chest. But I had to get the new move solid in my body so I knew it was there to count on next time, so fast my next opponent would never even see it coming.

  “Oh, come on,” she teased. She darted in to flick me with that shawl, like a kid taking a dare, and darted back out.

  “Stop it, Jess.” It’s not wise to come at a swordsman unannounced.

  “No, you stop it!” She started marching around the edges of my vision, in a distracting little semicircle. “You can practice later. Don’t you want to have some fun?”

  “I don’t like ‘fun.’ ”

  “You don’t, do you? Not anymore.” She worked her bodice loose, bared a shoulder to me like some girl on the street. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but I ignored her. “Like what you see?”

  “Will you please—”

  “I’m not just here to decorate the room, you know.”

  “I know.” I tried to keep my sharpness and attack for my drill, but it came out in my voice: “I know, I know, now will you please shut up?”

  “I will not shut up!” she shrieked, a sudden explosion, and she grabbed my free arm, a move I was not expecting. “You look at me! And you listen to me!”

  Sweat was dripping into my eyes so I could hardly see. “You don’t care about me, you country son of a bitch! All you care about is your sword. You’d be dead if it weren’t for me!” I don’t know how I even understood the words, they were so loud and high. “You think you’re too good to go out and earn your living like the rest of us, well, let me tell you, I do what I can to survive, do you even notice? You think you’re some nobleman? You think you’re too fine to do anything but practice until your next big duel?” The noise was intolerable. “When did you get so fancy, huh? When did you get too good for the rest of us?” I didn’t know how to make her stop. “Look at you, waiting here at home for me to come back with whatever I can get for whatever I have to do and it’s hard but you think I’ve lost my style I’ve got plenty of style, more than you’ll ever have, you can’t even get a job I haven’t lost my nerve I have plenty of nerve left when it comes to whoresons like you Riverside doesn’t want you I don’t want you.”

  She pulled the glass dagger from her hair. Silver tumbled all around her, so there must have been moonlight. She was coming at me with the knife still saying those things. I had to make her stop.

  The moon was so bright it cast shadows all around.

  —

  Kathy Blount came by in the morning, with the sun barely up. She knocked on the door again and again, and when she opened it she stared at what she saw and stuck both fists in her mouth.

  “She was screaming,” I tried to tell her, and Kathy turned and ran.

  After that, people steered clear of me for a while. It was a respectful distance, and I didn’t mind. I never like it when people crowd me. Then a new swordsman came to town, flashy and boastful, annoying as hell. I challenged him on the street, killed him clean and fair with one blow, straight to the heart, and after that I was Riverside’s own true blade again. Ginnie Vandall was annoyed because she’d just taken up with Hugo Seville, and it would be dangerous to dump him now, not to mention foolish. Hugo did weddings; Hugo did demonstration bouts; Hugo would fight a golden retriever if it made him popular with the nobles, or the merchants paid him enough.

  I didn’t go back to the Maiden’s Fancy, even at summer’s end. The stew at Rosalie’s was better, and my credit seemingly inexhaustible.

  So it was there that Marco and Ivan found me, back from their summer jaunt up north, and greeted me like a long-lost friend. Did I want to go back on the highway? they asked. Did I want to make some real money, this time? The summer had been tough on me, they’d heard, and hardly any of the nobles back in town yet, so jobs must be scarce, and the nights were getting cold. They’d missed me, up in Hartsholt, truly they had, though my style would be wasted up there, and now they were back in the city, how about it?

  I told them No. It didn’t matter what they offered, or how hard up I was.

  I wasn’t doing that again.

  It leads to things I’d rather not think about.

  And it wasn’t any fun.

  ⬩  ⬩  ⬩

  Fantasy novelist Scott Lynch is best known for his Gentleman Bastard series, about a thief and con man in a dangerous fantasy world, which consists of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which was a finalist for both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Society Award, Red Seas Under Red Skies, and The Republic of Thieves. His most recent book is another Gentleman Bastard story, The Thorn of Emberlain. He maintains a website at scottlynch.us. He lives with his wife, writer Elizabeth Bear, in Massachusetts.

  Here he takes us along on an insanely dangerous quest with a down-on-his-luck thief who has nothing left to lose, and who finds that by finding everything, he gains nothing—except for a rousing story to tell on a cold winter’s night.

  ⬩  ⬩  ⬩

  Sail north from the Crescent Cities, three days and nights over the rolling black sea, and you will surely find the tip of the Ormscap, the fire-bleeding mountains that circle the roof of the world like a scar. There in the shallows, where the steam rises in a thousand curtains, you’ll see a crumbling dock, and from that dock you can still walk into the scraps and tatters of a blown-apart town that was never laid straight from the start. It went up on those rocks layer after layer, like ten eyeless drunks scraping butter onto the same piece of bread.

  The southernmost Ormscap is still called the Dragon’s Anvil. The town below the mountain was once called Helfalkyn.

  Not so long ago it was an enchantment and a refuge and a prison, home to the most desperate thieves in all the breathing world. Not so long ago, they all cried out in their sleep for the mountain’s treasure. One part in three of every gleaming thing that has ever been drawn or dredged or delved from the earth, that’s what the scholars claimed.

  That’s what the dragon carried there and brooded over, the last dragon that will ever speak to any of us.

  Now the town’s empty. The wind howls through broken windows in roofless walls. If you licked the stones of the mountain for a thousand days, you wouldn’t taste enough precious metal to gild one letter in a monk’s manuscript.

  Helfalkyn is dead, and the dragon is dead, and the treasure might as well have never existed.

  I ought to know. I’m the man who lost a bet, climbed the Anvil, and helped break the whole damn thing.

  I tell this story once a year, on Galen’s Eve, and no other. Some of you have heard it before. I take it kindly that you’ve come to hear it again. Like any storyteller, I’d lie about the color of my eyes to my own mother for half a cup of ale-dregs, but you’ll affirm to all the new faces that to this one tale I add no flourishes. I deepen no shadows and gentle no sorrows. I tell it as it was, one night each year, and on that night I take
no coin for it.

  Heed me now. Gather in as you will. Jostle your neighbors. Spill your drinks. Laugh early at the bad jokes and stare at me like clubbed sheep for all the good ones, and I shall care not, for I am armored by long experience. But this bowl of mine, if we are to part as friends, must catch no copper or silver, I swear it. Tonight pay me in food, or drink, or simple attention.

  With that, let me commence to tell:

  FIRST, HOW I FELL IN WITH THE CHARMING LUNATICS WHO ENDED MY ADVENTURING CAREER

  It was the Year of the Bent-Wing Raven, and everything went sour for me right around the back side of autumn.

  One week I was in funds, the next I was conspicuously otherwise. I’m still not sure what happened. Bad luck, worse judgment, enemy action, sorcery? Hardly matters. When you’re on the ground getting kicked in the face, one pair of boots looks very much like another.

  I have long been candid about the nature of my previous employment. Those of you who find this frank exchange of purely historical details in any way disturbing are of course welcome to say a word or two to Galen on my behalf, and I shall thank you, as I doubt an old thief can really collect such a thing as too many prayers. In those days I would have laughed. Young thieves think luck and knee joints are meant to last forever.

  I started the summer by lifting four ivory soul lanterns from the Temple of the Cloud Gardens in Port Raugen. Spent a few weeks carving decent wooden replicas and painting them with a white cream wash, first. I made the switch at night, walked out unnoticed, presented the genuine articles to my client, and set sail on the morning tide as a very rich man. I washed up in Hadrinsbirk a few weeks later with a pounding headache and a haunting memory of money. No matter. I made the acquaintance of an uncreatively guarded warehouse and appropriated a crate of the finest Sulagar steel padlocks. I sold the locks and their keys to a corner-cutting merchants’ guild, then sold wax impressions of the keys to their bitter rivals for twice that sum. So much for Hadrinsbirk. I cast off for the Crescent Cities.