The Gentleman Bastard Series (59 page)

“I can do precious little harm to Capa Raza with my face planted in the dust of this hovel,” said Locke, his temper flaring once again.

“Then rest, sir;
rest
,” snapped Ibelius, his own color rising. “Have the grace not to lash your tongue at me for failing to carry the power of the gods about in my fingertips! Rest, and regain your strength. Tomorrow, when it is safe to move about, I shall bring you more food; a restored appetite will be a welcome sign. With food and rest, you may achieve an acceptable level of vigor in but a day or two. You cannot expect to skip lightly away from what you’ve endured. Have patience.”

Locke sighed. “Very well. I just … I ache to be about the business of keeping Capa Raza’s reign short.”

“And I yearn to have you about it as well, Master Lamora.” Ibelius removed his optics and polished them against his tunic. “If I thought you could slay him now, with little more strength in you than a half-drowned
kitten, why, I’d put you in a basket and carry you to him myself. But that is not the case, and no poultice in my books of physik could make it so.”

“Listen to Master Ibelius, Locke, and quit sulking.” Jean gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Look on this as a chance to exercise your mind. I’ll gather what further information I can, and I’ll be your strong arm. You give me a plan to trip that fucker up and send him to hell. For Calo, Galdo, and Bug.”

6

BY THE next night, Locke had recovered enough of his strength to pace about the room under his own power. His muscles felt like jelly, and his limbs moved as though they were being controlled from a very great distance—the messages transmitted by heliograph, perhaps, before being translated into movements of joint and sinew. But he no longer fell on his face when he stood up, and he’d eaten an entire pound of roast sausages, along with half a loaf of bread slathered in honey, since Ibelius had brought the food in the late afternoon.

“Master Ibelius,” said Locke as the physiker counted off Locke’s pulse for what Locke suspected must be the thirteen thousandth time. “We are of a like size, you and I. Do you by chance have any coats in good care? With suitably matching breeches, vests, and gentleman’s trifles?”

“Ah,” said Ibelius, “I did have such things, after a fashion, but I fear … I fear Jean did not tell you …”

“Ibelius is living with us here for the time being,” said Jean. “Around the corner, in one of the villa’s other rooms.”

“My chambers, from which I conducted my business, well …” Ibelius scowled, and it seemed to Locke that a very fine fog actually formed behind his optics. “They were burned, the morning after Raza’s ascension. Those of us with blood ties to Barsavi’s slain men … we have not been encouraged to remain in Camorr! There have already been several murders. I can still come and go, if I’m careful, but … I have lost most of my finer things, such as they were. And my patients. And my books! Yet another reason for me to earnestly desire that some harm should befall Raza.”

“Damnation,” said Locke. “Master Ibelius, might I beg just a few minutes alone with Jean? What we have to discuss is … well, it is of the utmost privacy, and for very good reason. You have my apologies.”

“Hardly necessary, sir, hardly necessary.” Ibelius rose from his seat and
brushed plaster dust from his waistjacket. “I shall conceal myself outside, until required. The night air will be invigorating for the actions of the capillaries; it will quite restore the full flush of my balanced humors.”

When he had gone, Locke ran his fingers through his greasy hair and groaned. “Gods, I could do with a bath, but right now I’d take standing in the rain for half an hour. Jean, we need resources to take on Raza. The fucker took forty-five thousand crowns from us; here we sit with ten. I need to kick the Don Salvara game back into life, but I’m deathly afraid it’s in tatters, what with me being out of it for these past few days.”

“I doubt it,” said Jean. “I spent some coin the day before you woke up for a bit of stationery and some ink. I sent a note to the Salvaras by courier, from Graumann, stating that you’d be handling some very delicate business for a few days and might not be around.”

“You did?” Locke stared at him like a man who’d gone to the gallows only to have a pardon and a sack of gold coins handed to him at the last minute. “You
did
? Gods bless your heart, Jean. I could kiss you, but you’re as covered in muck as I am.”

Locke circled around the room furiously, or as close to furiously as he could manage, still jerking and stumbling as he was. Hiding in this damned hovel, suddenly torn away from the advantages he’d taken for granted for many years—no cellar, no vault full of coins, no Wardrobe, no Masque Box … no gang. Raza had taken everything.

Packed up with the coins from the vault had been a packet of papers and keys, wrapped in oilcloth. Those papers were documents of accounts at Meraggio’s countinghouse for Lukas Fehrwight, Evante Eccari, and all the other false identities the Gentlemen Bastards had planted over the years. There were hundreds of crowns in those accounts, but without the documents, they were beyond mortal reach. In that packet, as well, were the keys to the Bowsprit Suite at the Tumblehome Inn, where extra clothing suitable to Lukas Fehrwight was neatly set out in a cedar-lined closet … locked away behind a clockwork box that no lock-charmer with ten times the skill Locke had ever possessed could tease open.

“Damn,” said Locke. “We can’t get to
anything
. We need money, and we can get that from the Salvaras, but I can’t go to them like this. I need gentleman’s clothes, rose oil, trifles. Fehrwight has to look like Fehrwight, and I can’t conjure him for ten crowns.”

Indeed, the clothes and accessories he’d worn when dressed as the Vadran merchant had easily come to forty full crowns—not the sort of sum he could simply tease out of pockets on the street. Also, the few tailors
that catered to appropriately rarefied tastes had shops like fortresses, in the better parts of the city, where the yellowjackets prowled not in squads but in battalions.

“Son of a bitch,” said Locke, “but I am
displeased
. It all comes down to clothes. Clothes, clothes, clothes. What a ridiculous thing to be restrained by.”

“You can have the ten crowns, for what it’s worth. We can eat off the silver for a long time.”

“Well,” said Locke, “that’s something.” He heaved himself back down on the sleeping pallet and sat with his chin resting on both of his hands. His eyebrows and his mouth were turned down, in the same expression of aggrieved concentration Jean remembered from their years as boys. After a few minutes, Locke sighed and looked up at Jean.

“If I’m fit to move, I suppose I’ll take seven or eight crowns and go out on the town tomorrow, then.”

“Out on the town? You have a plan?”

“No,” said Locke. “Not even a speck of one. Not the damnedest idea.” He grinned weakly. “But don’t all of my better schemes start like this? I’ll find an opening, somehow … and then I suppose I’ll be rash.”

INTERLUDE

The White Iron Conjurers

It is said in Camorr that the difference between honest and dishonest commerce is that when an honest man or woman of business ruins someone, they don’t have the courtesy to cut their throat to finish the affair.

This is, in some respects, a disservice to the traders, speculators, and money-lenders of Coin-Kisser’s Row, whose exertions over the centuries have helped to draw the Therin city-states (all of them, not merely Camorr) up out of the ashes of the collapse of the Therin Throne and into something resembling energetic prosperity … for certain fortunate segments of the Therin population.

The scale of operations on Coin-Kisser’s Row would set the minds of most small shopkeepers spinning. A merchant might move two stones on a counting-board in Camorr; sealed documents are then dispatched to Lashain, where four galleons crewed by three hundred souls take sail for the far northern port of Emberlain, their holds laden with goods that beggar description. Hundreds of merchant caravans are embarking and arriving across the continent on any given morning, on any given day, all of them underwritten and itemized by well-dressed men and women who weave webs of commerce across thousands of miles while sipping tea in the back rooms of countinghouses.

But there are also bandits, warned to be in places at certain times, to
ensure that a caravan flying a certain merchant’s colors will vanish between destinations. There are whispered conversations, recorded in no formal minutes, and money that changes hands with no formal entry in any ledger. There are assassins, and black alchemy, and quiet arrangements made with gangs. There is usury and fraud and insider speculation; there are hundreds of financial practices so clever and so arcane that they do not yet have common names—manipulations of coin and paper that would have Bondsmagi bowing at the waist in recognition of their devious subtlety.

Trade is all of these things, and in Camorr, when one speaks of business practices fair or foul, when one speaks of commerce on the grandest scale, one name leaps to mind above and before all others—
the Meraggio
.

Giancana Meraggio is the seventh in his line; his family has owned and operated its countinghouse for nearly two and a half centuries. But in a sense the first name isn’t important; it is always simply
the
Meraggio at Meraggio’s. “The Meraggio” has become an office.

The Meraggio family made its original fortune from the sudden death of the popular Duke Stravoli of Camorr, who died of an ague while on a state visit to Tal Verrar. Nicola Meraggio, trader-captain of a relatively fast brig, outraced all other news of the duke’s death back to Camorr, where she expended every last half-copper at her command to purchase and control the city’s full stock of black mourning crepe. When this was resold at extortionate prices so the state funeral could take place in proper dignity, she sank some of the profits into a small coffeehouse on the canal-side avenue that would eventually be called (thanks largely to her family) Coin-Kisser’s Row.

As though it were an outward manifestation of the family’s ambitions, the building has never remained one size for very long. It expands suddenly at irregular intervals, consuming nearby structures, adding lodges and stories and galleries, spreading its walls like a baby bird slowly pushing its unhatched rivals from the nest.

The early Meraggios made their names as active traders and speculators; they were men and women who loudly proclaimed their ability to squeeze more profit from investors’ funds than any of their rivals could. The third Meraggio of note, Ostavo Meraggio, famously sent out a gaily decorated boat each morning to throw fifty gold tyrins into the deepest part of Camorr Bay; he did this every day without fail for a complete year. “I can do this and
still
have more fresh profit at the end of any given day than any one of my peers,” he boasted.

The later Meraggios shifted the family’s emphasis from investing coin to hoarding, counting, guarding, and loaning it. They were among the first to recognize the stable fortunes that could be had by becoming facilitators of commerce rather than direct participants. And so
the
Meraggio now sits at the heart of a centuries-old financial network that has effectively become the blood and sinews of the Therin city-states; his signature on a piece of parchment can carry as much weight as an army in the field or a squadron of warships on the seas.

Not without reason is it sometimes said that in Camorr there are two dukes—Nicovante, the Duke of Glass, and Meraggio, the Duke of White Iron.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ORCHIDS AND ASSASSINS

1

LOCKE LAMORA STOOD before the steps of Meraggio’s Countinghouse the next day, just as the huge Verrari water-clock inside the building’s foyer chimed out the tenth hour of the morning. A sun shower was falling; gentle hot rain blown in beneath a sky that was mostly blue-white and clear. Traffic on the Via Camorrazza was at a high ebb, with cargo barges and passenger boats dueling for water space with the sort of enthusiasm usually reserved for battlefield maneuvers.

One of Jean’s crowns had been broken up to furnish Locke (who still wore his gray hair and a false beard, trimmed down now to a modest goatee) with acceptably clean clothing in the fashion of a courier or scribe. While he certainly didn’t look like a man of funds, he was the very picture of a respectable employee.

Meraggio’s Countinghouse was a four-story hybrid of two hundred years’ worth of architectural fads; it had columns, arched windows, facades of stone and lacquered wood alike, and external sitting galleries both decorative and functional. All these galleries were covered with silk awnings in the colors of Camorr’s coins—brownish copper, yellowish gold, silver-gray, and milky white. There were a hundred Lukas Fehrwights in sight even outside the place; a hundred men of business in lavishly
tailored coats. Any one of their ensembles was worth five years of pay to a common artisan or laborer.

And if Locke set an unkind finger on so much as a coat sleeve, Meraggio’s house guards would boil out the doors like bees from a shaken hive. It would be a race between them and the several squads of city watchmen pacing this side of the canal—the winner would get the honor of knocking his brains out through his ears with their truncheons.

Seven white iron crowns, twenty silver solons, and a few coppers jingled in Locke’s coin purse. He was completely unarmed. He had only the vaguest idea of what he would do or say if his very tentative plan went awry.

“Crooked Warden,” he whispered, “I’m going into this countinghouse, and I’m going to come out with what I need. I’d like your aid. And if I don’t get it, well, to hell with you. I’ll come out with what I need anyway.”

Head high, chin out, he began to mount the steps.

2

“PRIVATE MESSAGE for Koreander Previn,” he told the guards on duty just inside the foyer as he ran a hand through his hair to sweep some of the water out of it. There were three of them, dressed in maroon velvet coats, black breeches, and black silk shirts; their gold-gilded buttons gleamed, but the grips on the long fighting knives and clubs sheathed at their belts were worn from practice.