The Gentleman Bastard Series (22 page)

“Then Capa Barsavi walked in from Tal Verrar. Used to be a scholar at the Therin Collegium, if you can believe it. Taught
rhetoric
. He got a few gangs under his thumb and he started
cutting
. Not like a back-alley slasher, but more like a physiker cutting out a chancre. When Barsavi took out another capa, he took their gangs, too. But he didn’t lean on them if he didn’t have to. He gave them full territories and let them choose their own
garristas
, and he cut them in on his take.

“So—five years ago, there were thirty. Four years ago, there were ten. Three years ago, there was one. Capa Barsavi and his hundred gangs. The whole city—all the Right People, present company included—in his pocket. No more open war across the bloody canals. No more platoons of thieves getting strung up all at once at the Palace of Patience. Nowadays they have to do them two or three at a time.”

“Because of the Secret Peace? The one I broke?”

“The one you broke, yes. Good guess, presuming I’d know about that. Yes, my boy, it’s the key to Barsavi’s peculiar success. What it comes down to is, he has a standing agreement with the duke, handled through one of the duke’s agents. The gangs of Camorr don’t touch the nobles; we don’t lay a finger on ships or drays or crates that have a legitimate coat of arms on them. In exchange, Barsavi is the actual ruler of a few of the city’s more charming points. Catchfire, the Narrows, the Dregs, the Wooden Waste, the Snare, and parts of the docks. Plus the city watch is much more … relaxed than they ought to be.”

“So we can rob anyone who isn’t a noble?”

“Or a yellowjacket, yes. We can have the merchants and the money-changers and the incoming and the outgoing. There’s more money passing through Camorr than any other city on this coast, boy. Hundreds of ships a week; thousands of sailors and officers. We don’t have any problem laying off the nobility.”

“Doesn’t that make the merchants and the money-changers and the other people angry?”

“It might if they knew about it. That’s why there’s that word ‘Secret’ in front of ‘Peace.’ And that’s why Camorr’s such a lovely, fine, safe place to live. You really only need to worry about losing your money if you don’t have much of it in the first place.”

“Oh,” said Locke, fingering his little shark’s-tooth necklace. “Okay. But now I wonder … You said my old master bought and paid for, um, killing me. Will you get in trouble with Barsavi for not … killing me?”

Chains laughed. “Why would I be taking you to see him if that’d get me
in trouble, boy? No, the death-mark’s mine to use, or not, as I see fit. I bought it. Don’t you see? He doesn’t care if we actually use ’em, only that we acknowledge that the
power
of granting life or death is his. Sort of like a tax only he can collect. You see?”

Locke nodded, then allowed himself to be trundled along silently for a few minutes, absorbing all of this. His aching head made the scale of what was going on a bit difficult to grasp.

“Let me tell you a story,” said Father Chains after a while. “A story that will let you know just what sort of man you’re going to meet and swear fealty to this evening. Once upon a time, when Capa Barsavi’s hold on the city was very new and very delicate, it was an open secret that a pack of his
garristas
was plotting to get rid of him just as soon as the chance presented itself. And they were very alert for his countermoves, see; they’d helped him take over the city, and they knew how he worked.

“So they made sure he couldn’t get all of them at once; if he tried to cut some throats the gangs would scatter and warn each other and it’d be a bloody mess, another long war. He made no open moves. And the rumors of their disloyalty got worse.

“Capa Barsavi would receive visitors in his hall—it’s still out there in the Wooden Waste; it used to be a big Verrari hulk, one of those fat wide galleons they used for hauling troops. It’s just anchored there now, a sort of makeshift palace. He calls it the Floating Grave. Well, at the Floating Grave, he made a big show of putting down this one large carpet from Ashmere; a really lovely thing, the sort of cloth the duke would hang on a wall for safekeeping. And he made sure that
everyone
around him knew how much he liked that carpet.

“It got so that his court could tell what he was going to do to a visitor by watching that carpet; if there was going to be blood, that carpet would be rolled up and packed away safe.
Without exception
. Months went by. Carpet up, carpet down. Sometimes men who got called to see him would try to run the moment they saw bare floor beneath his feet, which of course was as good as admitting wrongdoing out loud.

“Anyhow. Back to his problem
garristas
. Not one of them was stupid enough to enter the Floating Grave without a gang at their back, or to be caught alone with Barsavi. His rule was still too uncertain at this point for him to just throw a tantrum about it. So he waited … and then one night he invited nine of his troublesome
garristas
to dinner. Not all the troublemakers, of course, but the cleverest, and the toughest, and the ones with the biggest gangs. And their spies brought back word that that lovely
embroidered carpet, the capa’s prize possession, was rolled out on the floor for everyone to see, with a banquet table on top of it and more food than the gods themselves had ever seen.

“So those stupid bastards, they figured Barsavi was serious, that he really wanted to talk. They thought he was scared, and they expected negotiations in good faith; so they didn’t bring their gangs or make alternate plans. They thought they’d won.

“You can imagine,” said Chains, “just how surprised they were when they sat down at their chairs on that beautiful carpet, and fifty of Barsavi’s men piled into the room with crossbows, and shot those poor idiots so full of bolts that a porcupine in heat would have taken any one of them home and fucked him. If there was a drop of blood that wasn’t on the carpet, it was on the
ceiling
. You get my meaning?”

“So the carpet was ruined?”

“And then some. Barsavi knew how to
create
expectations, Locke, and how to use those expectations to mislead those who would harm him. They figured his strange obsession was a guarantee of their lives. Turns out there are just some enemies numerous enough and powerful enough to be worth losing a damn carpet over.”

Chains pointed ahead of them and to the south.

“That’s the man waiting to talk to you about half a mile that way. I would strongly recommend cultivating a civil tongue.”

3

THE LAST Mistake was a place where the underworld of Camorr bubbled to the surface; a flat-out crook’s tavern, where Right People of every sort could drink and speak freely of their business, where respectable citizens stood out like serpents in a nursery and were quickly escorted out the door by mean-looking, thick-armed men with very small imaginations.

Here entire gangs would come to drink and arrange jobs and just show themselves off. In their cups, men would argue loudly about the best way to strangle someone from behind, and the best sorts of poisons to use in wine or food. They would openly proclaim the folly of the duke’s court, or his taxation schemes, or his diplomatic arrangements with the other cities of the Iron Sea. They would refight entire battles with dice and fragments of chicken bones as their armies, loudly announcing how
they
would have turned left when Duke Nicovante had gone right, how
they
would have
stood fast when the five thousand blackened iron spears of the Mad Count’s Rebellion had come surging down Godsgate Hill toward them.

But not one of them, no matter how far doused in liquor or Gaze or the strange narcotic powders of Jerem—no matter what feats of generalship or statecraft he credited himself with the foresight to bring off—would dare suggest to Capa Vencarlo Barsavi that he should ever change so much as a single button on his waistcoat.

4

THE BROKEN Tower is a landmark of Camorr, jutting ninety feet skyward at the very northern tip of the Snare—that low and crowded district where sailors from a hundred ports of call are passed from bar to alehouse to gaming den and back again on a nightly basis. They are shaken through a sieve of tavern-keepers, whores, muggers, dicers, cobble-cogs, and other low tricksters until their pockets are as empty as their heads are heavy, and they can be dumped on ship to nurse their new hangovers and diseases. They come in like the tide and go out like the tide, leaving nothing but a residue of copper and silver (and occasionally blood) to mark their passing.

Although human arts are inadequate to the task of cracking Elderglass, the Broken Tower was found in its current state when humans first settled Camorr, stealing in among the ruins of an older civilization. Great gashes mar the alien glass and stone of the tower’s upper stories; these discontinuities have been somewhat covered over with wood and paint and other human materials. The sturdiness of the whole affair is hardly in question, but the repairs are not beautiful, and the rooms for let on the upper six floors are some of the least desirable in the city, as they are accessible only by rank upon rank of narrow, twisting exterior stairs—a spindly wooden frame that sways nauseatingly in high winds. Most of the residents are young bravos from various gangs, to whom the insane accommodations are a strange badge of honor.

The Last Mistake fills the first floor at the wide base of the Broken Tower, and after the fall of Falselight, it rarely has less than a hundred patrons in it at any given time. Locke clung tightly to the back of Father Chains’ half-cloak as the older man elbowed his way past the crowd at the door. The outward exhalation of the bar’s air was full of smells Locke knew quite well: a hundred kinds of liquors and the breath of the men and
women drinking them, sweat both stale and fresh, piss and vomit, spiced pomanders and wet wool, the sharp bite of ginger and the acrid fog of tobacco.

“Can we trust that boy to watch our goat?” Locke cried above the din.

“Of course, of course.” Chains made some elaborate hand sign in greeting to a group of men arm-wrestling just inside the bar’s main room; those not locked in bitter struggles grinned and waved back. “First, it’s his job. Second, I paid well. Third, only a crazy person would want to steal a Gentled goat.”

The Last Mistake was a sort of monument to the failure of human artifice at critical moments. Its walls were covered in a bewildering variety of souvenirs, each one telling a visual tale that ended with the phrase “not quite good enough.” Above the bar was a full suit of armor, a square hole punched through at the left breast by a crossbow quarrel. Broken swords and split helmets covered the walls, along with fragments of oars, masts, spars, and tatters of sails. One of the bar’s proudest claims was that it had secured a memento of every ship that had foundered within sight of Camorr in the past seventy years.

Into this mess Father Chains dragged Locke Lamora, like a launch being towed at the stern of a huge galleon. On the south wall of the bar was an elevated alcove, given privacy by rows of partially drawn curtains. Men and women stood at attention here, their hard eyes constantly sweeping across the crowd, their hands never far from the weapons they carried openly and ostentatiously—daggers, darts, brass and wooden clubs, short swords, hatchets, and even crossbows, ranging from slender alley-pieces to big horse-murderers that looked (to Locke’s wide eyes) as though they could knock holes in stone.

One of these guards stopped Father Chains, and the two exchanged a few whispered words; another guard was dispatched into the curtained alcove while the first eyed Chains warily. A few moments later the second guard reappeared and beckoned; thus it was that Locke was led for the first time into the presence of Vencarlo Barsavi, Capa of Camorr, who sat in a plain chair beside a plain table. Several minions stood against the wall behind him, close enough to respond to a summons but far enough to be out of earshot for quiet conversation.

Barsavi was a big man, as wide as Chains but obviously a bit younger. His oiled black hair was pulled tight behind his neck, and his beards curved off his chin like three braided whipcords of hair, one atop the other, neatly layered. These beards flew about when Barsavi turned his
round head, and they looked quite thick enough to sting if they struck bare skin.

Barsavi was dressed in a coat, vest, breeches, and boots of some odd dark leather that seemed unusually thick and stiff even to Locke’s untrained eyes; after a moment, the boy realized it must be shark hide. The strangely uneven white buttons that dotted his vest and his cuffs and held his layered red silk cravats in place … they were human teeth.

Sitting on Barsavi’s lap, staring intently at Locke, was a girl about his own age, with short tangled dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She, too, wore a curious outfit. Her dress was white embroidered silk, fit for any noble’s daughter, while the little boots that dangled beneath her hem were black leather, shod with iron, bearing sharpened steel kicking-spikes at the heels and the toes.

“So this is the boy,” said Barsavi in a deep, slightly nasal voice with the pleasant hint of a Verrari accent. “The industrious little boy who so confounded our dear Thiefmaker.”

“The very one, Your Honor, now happily confounding myself and my other wards.” Chains reached behind himself and pushed Locke out from behind his legs. “May I present Locke Lamora, late of Shades’ Hill, now an initiate of Perelandro?”

“Or
some
god, anyway, eh?” Barsavi chuckled and held out a small wooden box that had been resting on the table near his arm. “It’s always nice to see you when your sight miraculously returns, Chains. Have a smoke. They’re Jeremite blackroot, extra fine, just rolled this week.”

“I can’t say no to that, Ven.” Chains accepted a tightly rolled sheaf of tobacco in red paper; while the two men bent over a flickering taper to light up (Chains dropped his little bag of coins on the table at the same time), the girl seemed to come to some sort of decision about Locke.