The Gentleman Bastard Series (55 page)

He yanked Barsavi’s head up and backward by his beards. A stiletto fell into his other hand from within his sleeve, and he rammed it into the underside of Vencarlo Barsavi’s exposed chins, all the way to the hilt. Barsavi kicked weakly, just once.

Capa Raza stood up, withdrawing the blade. The Berangias sisters grabbed their former master by his lapels and slid him into the dark water of the bay, which received his body as readily as it had taken his victims and his enemies, over all the long years of his rule.

“One capa rules Camorr,” said Raza, “and now it is me. Now it is me!” He raised the bloody stiletto over his head and gazed around the room, as though inviting disagreement. When none came forth, he continued.

“It is not my intention merely to remove Barsavi, but to replace him. My reasons are my own. So now there is business between myself and all the rest of you, all the Right People.” He gazed slowly around the room, his arms folded before him, his chin thrust out like a conquering general in an old bronze sculpture.

“You must hear my words, and then come to a decision.”

4

“NOTHING THAT you have achieved shall be taken from you,” he continued. “Nothing that you have worked or suffered for will be revoked. I admire the arrangements Barsavi built, as much as I hated the man who built them. So this is my word.

“All remains as it was. All
garristas
and their gangs will control the same territories; they will pay the same tribute, on the same day, once a week. The Secret Peace remains. As it was death to breach under Barsavi’s rule, so shall it be death under mine.

“I claim all of Barsavi’s offices and powers. I claim all of his dues. In justice, I must therefore claim his debts and his responsibilities. If any man can show that he was owed by Barsavi, he will now be owed the same by Capa Raza. First among them is Eymon Danzier.… Step forward, Eymon.”

There was a murmur and a ripple in the crowd to Capa Raza’s right; after a few moments, the skinny man Locke remembered very well from the Echo Hole was pushed forward, obviously terrified. His bony knees all but knocked together.

“Eymon, be at ease.” Raza held out his left hand, palm down, fingers splayed, as Barsavi had once done for every single person watching. “Kneel to me and name me your capa.”

Shaking, Eymon dropped to one knee, took Raza’s hand, and kissed the ring. His lips came away wet with Barsavi’s blood. “Capa Raza,” he said, in an almost pleading tone.

“You did a very brave thing at the Echo Hole, Eymon. A thing few men would have done in your place. Barsavi was right to promise you much for it, and I will make good on that promise. You will have a thousand crowns, and a suite of rooms, and such comforts that men with many long years of life ahead of them will pray to the gods to put them in your place.”

“I … I …” Tears were actually pouring out of the man’s eyes. “I wasn’t sure what you would … thank you, Capa Raza. Thank you.”

“I wish you much pleasure, for the service you have given me.”

“Then … it wasn’t … it wasn’t you, at the Echo Hole, if I may ask, Capa Raza.”

“Oh, no, Eymon.” Raza laughed, a deep and pleasant sound. “No, that was but an illusion.”

In the far corner of the Floating Grave’s ballroom, that particular illusion fumed silently to himself, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Tonight you have seen me with blood on my hands,” Raza shouted, “and you have seen them open in what I hope will be seen as true generosity. I am not a difficult man to get along with; I want us to prosper together. Serve me as you served Barsavi, and I know it will be so. I ask you,
garristas
, who will bend the knee and kiss my ring as your capa?”

“The Rum Hounds,” shouted a short, slender woman at the front of the crowd on the ballroom floor.

“The Falselight Cutters,” cried another man. “The Falselight Cutters say aye!”

That doesn’t make any gods-damned sense
, thought Locke. The Gray King murdered their old
garristas
. Are they playing some sort of game with him?

“The Wise Mongrels!”

“The Catchfire Barons.”

“The Black Eyes.”

“The Full Crowns,” came another voice, and an echoing chorus of affirmations. “The Full Crowns stand with Capa Raza!”

Suddenly Locke wanted to laugh out loud. He put a fist to his mouth and turned the noise into a stifled cough. It was suddenly obvious. The Gray King hadn’t just been knocking off Barsavi’s most loyal
garristas
. He must have been cutting deals with their subordinates, beforehand.

Gods, there had been more Gray King’s men in the room
out
of costume than in … waiting for the evening’s real show to commence.

A half dozen men and women stepped forward and knelt before Raza at the edge of the pool, wherein the shark hadn’t shown so much as a fin since forcibly relieving Barsavi of his arm.

The damned Bondsmage certainly has a way with animals
, Locke thought, with mixed anger and jealousy. He found himself feeling very small indeed before each display of the Falconer’s arts.

One by one the
garristas
knelt and made their obeisance to the Capa,
kissing his ring and saying “Capa Raza” with real enthusiasm. Five more stepped forward to kneel directly afterward, apparently giving in to the direction they felt events to be slipping. Locke calculated rapidly. With just the pledges he’d already received, Raza could now call three or four hundred Right People his own. His overt powers of enforcement had increased substantially.

“Then we are introduced,” said Raza to the entire crowd. “We are met, and you know my intentions. You are free to return to your business.”

The Falconer made a few gestures with his free hand. The clockwork mechanisms within the doors to the hall clattered in reverse, and the doors clicked open.

“I give the undecided three nights,” Capa Raza shouted. “Three nights to come to me here and bend the knee, and swear to me as they did to Barsavi. I devoutly wish to be lenient—but I warn you, now is not the time to anger me. You have seen my work; you know I have resources Barsavi lacked. You know I can be merciless when I am moved to displeasure. If you are not content serving beneath me, if you think it might be wiser or more exciting to oppose me, I will make one suggestion: pack what fortune you have and leave the city by the landward gates. If you wish to part ways, no harm will come to you from my people. For three nights, I give you my leave and my parole.

“After that,” he said, lowering his voice, “I will make what examples I must. Go now, and speak to your
pezon
. Speak to your friends, and to other
garristas
. Tell them what I have said; tell them I wait to receive their pledges.”

Some of the crowd began to disperse out the doors; others, wiser perhaps, began to line up before Capa Raza. The former Gray King took each pledge at the bloody heart of a circle of corpses.

Locke waited for several minutes until the press had lessened, until the solid torrent of hot, smelly humanity had decreased to a few thick streams, and then he moved toward the entrance. His feet felt as heavy as his head; fatigue seemed to be catching up with him.

There were corpses here and there on the floor—Barsavi’s guards, the loyal ones. Locke could see them now as the crowds continued to thin. Just beside the tall doors to the hall lay Bernell, who’d grown old in Capa Barsavi’s service. His throat was slashed; he lay in a pool of his own blood, and his fighting knives remained in their sheaths. He’d not had time to pull them.

Locke sighed. He paused for a moment in the doorway and stared back
at Capa Raza and the Falconer. The Bondsmage seemed to stare right back at him, and for the tiniest instant Locke’s heart raced, but the sorcerer said nothing and did nothing. He merely continued to stand watch over the ritual as Capa Raza’s new subjects kissed his ring. Vestris yawned, snapping her beak briefly open, as though the affairs of the unwinged bored her terribly. Locke hurried out.

All the guards who watched the revelers as they left the galleon and filed up the walkway toward the quay were Raza’s men; they hadn’t bothered to move the bodies that lay on the ground at their feet. Some merely stared coldly; others nodded companionably. Locke recognized more than a few of them.

“Three nights, ladies and gents, three nights,” said one. “Tell your friends. You’re Capa Raza’s now. No need to be alarmed; just do as you’ve always done.”

So now we have some answers
, thought Locke.
Forgive me again, Nazca. I couldn’t have done anything even if I’d had the courage to try.

He clutched his aching stomach as he shambled along, head down. No guard spared a second glance for the skinny, bearded, dirty old beggar; there were a thousand in Camorr just like him, a thousand interchangeable losers, hopeless and penniless at the very bottom of the many levels of misery the underworld had to offer.

Now to hide. And to plan.

“Please yourself with what you’ve stolen tonight, you son of a bitch,” Locke whispered to himself when he’d made his way past the last of Raza’s guards. “Please yourself very well. I want to see the loss in your eyes when I put the fucking dagger in your heart.”

5

BUT ONE can only get so far on thoughts of vengeance alone. The sharp pains in his stomach started up again about halfway through his slow, lonely walk to the Ashfall district.

His stomach ached and churned and growled. The night seemed to turn darker around him, and the narrow, fog-softened city horizons tilted strangely, as though he were drunk. Locke staggered and clutched at his chest, sweating and mumbling.

“Damned Gazer,” said a voice from the darkness. “Probably chasing dragons and rainbows and the lost treasure of Camorr.” Laughter followed this, and Locke stumbled on, anxious to avoid becoming a target for
mischief. He’d never felt such weariness. It was as though his vigor had burned down to a pile of embers within him, fading and cooling and graying with every passing second.

Ashfall, never hospitable, was a hellish conglomeration of shadow-shapes to Locke’s decreasing concentration. He was breathing heavily, and sweating rivers. It felt as though someone were steadily packing more and more dry cotton in behind his eyeballs. His feet grew heavier and heavier; he urged them forward, one scraping step after another, on into the darkness and the jagged looming shadows of collapsed buildings. Unseen things skittered in the night; unseen watchers murmured at his passing.

“What the … gods, I … must … Jean,” he mumbled as he tripped against a man-sized chunk of fallen masonry and sprawled in the dusty shadows behind it. The place smelled of limestone and cookfires and urine. He lacked the strength to push himself back up.

“Jean,” he gasped, one last time; then he fell forward onto his face, unconscious even before his head struck the ground.

6

THE LIGHTS became visible in the third hour of the morning, perhaps a mile out to sea due south of the Dregs, where a nucleus of greater darkness slid low against the water, tacking slowly and gracelessly. The ship’s ghostly white sails flapped in the breezes as it made its way toward the Old Harbor; the bored watch in the three-story tower at the tip of the South Needle were the first to spot it.

“Right sloppy sailor, that one,” said the younger watchman, looking-glass in hand.

“Probably Verrari,” muttered the senior, who was methodically torturing a piece of ivory with a slender carving knife. He wanted it to come out like a sculpted terrace he’d seen at the Temple of Iono, alive with lovely relief and fantastical representations of drowned men taken by the Lord of the Grasping Waters. What he seemed to be producing more closely resembled a lump of white dogshit, life-size. “Sooner trust a sailing ship to a blind drunkard with no hands than a Verrari.”

Nothing else the vessel did warranted much attention until the lights suddenly appeared, and their deep yellow glow could be seen rippling on the dark surface of the water.

“Yellow lights, sergeant,” said the younger watchman. “Yellow lights.”

“What?” The older man set down his piece of ivory, plucked the spyglass
from the younger man’s hands, and gave the incoming ship a good long stare. “Shit. Yellow it is.”

“A plague ship,” whispered the other watchman. “I’ve never seen one.”

“Either it’s a plague ship, or some bum-fancier from Jerem who don’t know proper colors for harbor lights.” He slid the spyglass casing shut and stepped over to a brass cylinder, mounted sideways on the rim of the watch station’s western wall, pointed toward the softly lit towers on the shore of the Arsenal District. “Ring the bell, boy. Ring the damn bell.”

The younger watchman reached over the other side of the little tower’s parapet to grasp a rope that dangled there. He began ringing the station’s heavy brass bell, a steady repetition of two pulls: ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding.

Flickering blue light flashed out from one of the Arsenal towers. The watch-sergeant worked the knob on the brass cylinder, turning the shutters that concealed the light of the unusually powerful alchemical globe within the cylinder. There was a list of simple messages he could flash to the Arsenal stations; they would flash it in turn to other ready sets of eyes. With luck, it might reach the Palace of Patience, or even Raven’s Reach, within two minutes.

Some time did pass; the plague ship grew larger and more distinct.

“Come on, half-wits,” muttered the watch-sergeant. “Rouse yourselves. Quit pulling that damn bell, boy. I think we’ve been heard.”

Echoing across the mist-shrouded city came the high whistles of the Quarantine Guard. This noise was joined in short order by the rattle of drums: a night-muster of yellowjackets. Bright white lights flared to life in the towers of the Arsenal, and the watch-sergeant could see the tiny black shapes of men running along the waterfront.

“Oh, now we’ll see something,” he muttered. More lights appeared to the northeast; little towers dotted the South Needle and the Dregs, overlooking the Old Harbor, where Camorr set its plague anchorage by law and custom. Each little tower held a stone-throwing engine that could reach out across the water with fifty-pound loads of rock or fire-oil. The plague anchorage was one hundred and fifty yards south of the Dregs, directly over sixty fathoms of water, well within the throwing arcs of a dozen engines that could sink or burn anything afloat in minutes.