The Gentleman Bastard Series (87 page)

“No. You open it.”

“I can’t! You told me yourself you’ve got the special key!”

“The Locke Lamora I used to know would
spit
on you,” said Jean. “Priest of the Crooked Warden.
Garrista
of the Gentlemen Bastards. Student of Father Chains. Brother to Calo, Galdo, and Bug! Tell me, what would
Sabetha
think of you?”

“You … you bastard! Open this door!”

“Look at yourself, Locke. You’re a fucking disgrace. Open it yourself.”

“You. Have. The. Godsdamnedmotherfuckingkey.”

“You know how to charm a lock, right? I left you some picks on the table. You want your wine back, you work the bloody door yourself.”

“You son of a
bitch
!”

“My mother was a saint,” said Jean. “The sweetest jewel Camorr ever produced. The city didn’t deserve her. I can wait out here all night, you know. It’ll be easy. I’ve got all your wine and all
your
money.”

“Gaaaaaaaaaaah!”

Locke snatched the little leather wallet off the table; he wiggled the fingers of his good right hand and regarded his left hand more dubiously; the broken wrist was mending, but it ached constantly.

He bent over the lock mechanism by the door, scowled, and went to work. He was surprised at how quickly the muscles of his back began to protest his uncomfortable posture. He stopped long enough to pull the room’s chair over so he could sit on it while he worked.

As his picks rattled around inside the lock and he bit his tongue in concentration, he heard the heavy creak of movement outside the door and a series of loud thumps.

“Jean?”

“Still here, Locke,” came Jean’s voice, now cheerful. “Gods, you’re taking your sweet time. Oh, I’m sorry—have you even started yet?”

“When I get this door open, you’re dead, Jean!”

“When you get that door open? I look forward to many long years of life, then.”

Locke redoubled his concentration, falling back into the rhythm he’d learned over so many painstaking hours as a boy—moving the picks slightly, feeling for sensations. That damn creaking and thumping had started up on the other side of the door again! What was Jean playing at now? Locke closed his eyes and tried to block the sound out of his mind … tried to let his world narrow down to the message of the picks against his fingers.

The mechanism clicked open. Locke stumbled up from his chair, jubilant and furious, and yanked the door open.

Jean had vanished, and the narrow corridor outside the room was
packed wall to wall with wooden crates and barrels—an impassable barrier about three feet from Locke’s face.

“Jean, what the
hell
is this?”

“I’m sorry, Locke.” Jean was obviously standing directly behind his makeshift wall. “I borrowed a few things from the keeper’s larder, and got a few of the boys you cheated at cards last week to help me carry it all up here.”

Locke gave the wall a good shove, but it didn’t budge; Jean was probably putting his full weight against it. There was a faint chorus of laughter from somewhere on the other side, probably down in the common room. Locke ground his teeth together and beat the flat of his good hand against a barrel.

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Jean? You’re making a gods-damned scene!”

“Not really. Last week I told the keeper you were a Camorri don traveling incognito, trying to recover from a bout of madness. Just now I set an awful lot of silver on his bar. You do remember silver, don’t you? How we used to steal it from people, back when you were pleasant company?”

“This has ceased to amuse me, Jean! Give me back my gods-damned wine!”

“Gods-damned, it is. And I’m afraid that if you want it, you’re going to have to climb out your window.”

Locke took a step back and stared at the makeshift wall, dumbfounded.

“Jean, you can’t be serious.”

“I’ve never been more serious.”

“Go to hell. Go to hell! I can’t climb out a bloody window. My wrist—”

“You fought the Gray King with one arm nearly cut off. You climbed out a window five hundred feet up in Raven’s Reach. And here you are, three stories off the ground, helpless as a kitten in a grease barrel. Crybaby. Pissant.”

“You are deliberately trying to provoke me!”

“No shit,” said Jean. “Sharp as a cudgel, you are.”

Locke stomped back into the room, fuming. He stared at the shuttered window, bit his tongue, and stormed back to Jean’s wall.

“Please let me out,” he said, as evenly as he could manage. “Your point is driven home.”

“I’d drive it home with a blackened steel pike if I had one,” said Jean. “Why are you talking to me when you should be climbing out the window?”

“Gods
damn
you!”

Back to the room; Locke paced furiously. He swung his arms about tentatively; the cuts on his left arm ached, and the deep wound on his shoulder still twinged cruelly. His battered left wrist felt as though it
might
almost serve. Pain or no pain … he curled his left-hand fingers into a fist, stared down at them, and then looked up at the window with narrowed eyes.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I’ll show you a thing or three, you son of a bloody silk merchant.”

Locke tore his bedding apart, knotting sheet-ends to blankets, inviting twinges from his injuries. The pain only seemed to drive him on faster. He tightened his last knot, threw open the shutters, and tossed his makeshift rope out the window. He tied the end in his hands to his bed frame. It wasn’t a terribly sturdy piece of furniture, but then, he didn’t weigh all that much.

Out the window he went.

Vel Virazzo was an old, low city; Locke’s impressions as he swung there, three stories above the faintly misted street, came in flashes. Flat-topped, sagging buildings of stone and plaster … reefed sails on black masts in the harbor … white moonlight gleaming on dark water … red lights burning atop glass pylons, in a line receding out toward the horizon. Locke shut his eyes, clung to his sheets, and bit his tongue to avoid throwing up.

It seemed easiest to simply let himself slide downward; he did so in fits and starts, letting his palms grow warm against the sheets and blankets before stopping. Down ten feet … twenty … he balanced precariously on the top sill of the inn’s common-room window and gasped in a few deep breaths before continuing. Warm as the night was, he was getting chilly from the soaking he’d received.

The last end of the last sheet ended about six feet off the ground; Locke slid down as far as he could, then let himself drop. His heels slapped against the cobblestones, and he found that Jean Tannen was already waiting for him, with a cheap gray cloak in his hands. Before Locke could move, Jean flung the cloak around his shoulders.

“You son of a bitch,” cried Locke, pulling the cloak around himself with both hands. “You snake-souled, dirty-minded
son of a bitch
! I hope a shark tries to suck your cock!”

“Why, Master Lamora, look at you,” said Jean. “Charming a lock, climbing out a window. Almost as though you used to be a thief.”

“I was pulling off hanging offenses when you were still teeth-on-tits in your mother’s arms!”

“And I’ve been pulling off hanging offenses while you’ve been sulking in your room, drinking away your skills.”

“I’m the best thief in Vel Virazzo,” growled Locke, “drunk or sober, awake or asleep, and you damn well know it.”

“I might have believed that once,” said Jean. “But that was a man I knew in Camorr, and he hasn’t been with me for some time.”

“Gods
damn
your ugly face,” yelled Locke as he stepped up to Jean and punched him in the stomach. More surprised than hurt, Jean gave him a solid shove. Locke flew backward, cloak whirling as he tried to keep his balance—until he collided with a man who’d been coming down the street.

“Mind your fucking step!” The stranger, a middle-aged man in a long orange coat and the prim clothes of a clerk or a lawscribe, wrestled for a few seconds with Locke, who clutched at him for support.

“A thousand pardons,” said Locke, “A thousand pardons, sir. My friend and I were merely having a discussion; the fault is all mine.”

“I daresay it is,” said the stranger, at last succeeding in prying Locke from his coat lapels and thrusting him away. “You have breath like a wine cask! Bloody Camorri.”

Locke watched until the man was a good twenty or thirty yards down the street, then whirled back toward Jean, dangling a little black leather purse in the air before him. It jingled with a healthy supply of heavy coins.

“Ha! What do you say to that, hmmm?”

“I say it was bloody child’s play. Doesn’t mean a gods-damned thing.”

“Child’s play? Die screaming, Jean, that was—”

“You’re mangy,” said Jean. “You’re dirtier than a Shades’ Hill orphan. You’ve lost weight, though where from is a great mystery. You haven’t been exercising your wounds or letting anyone tend to them for you. You’ve been hiding in a room, letting your condition slip away, and you’ve been drunk for two straight weeks. You’re not what you were, and it’s your own damn fault.”

“So.” Locke scowled at Jean, slipped the purse into a tunic pocket, and straightened the cloak on his shoulders. “You require a demonstration. Fine. Get back inside and take down your silly wall, and wait for me in the room. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“I—”

But Locke had already thrown up the hood of his cloak, turned, and begun to stride down the street, into the warm Vel Virazzo night.

6

JEAN CLEARED the barrier from the third-floor hallway, left a few more coins (from Locke’s purse) with the bemused innkeeper, and bustled about
the room, allowing some of the smell of drunken enclosure to evaporate out the open window. Upon reflection, he went down to the bar and came back with a glass decanter of water.

Jean was pacing, worriedly, when Locke burst back in about four hours later, just past the third hour of the morning. He set a huge wicker basket down on the table, threw off his cloak, grabbed the bucket Jean had used to douse him, and noisily threw up in it.

“My apologies,” he muttered when he finished. He was flushed and breathing heavily, as wet as he’d been when he’d left, but now with warm sweat. “The wine has not entirely left my head … and my wind has all but deserted me.”

Jean passed him the decanter, and Locke slurped from it as shamelessly as a horse at a trough. Jean helped him into the chair. Locke said nothing for a few seconds, then suddenly seemed to notice Jean’s hand on his shoulder, and he recoiled. “Here we are, then,” he gasped. “See what happens when you provoke me? I think we’re going to have to flee the city.”

“What the—what have you done?”

Locke tore the lid from his basket; it was the sort commonly used by merchants to haul small loads of goods to and from a street market. A prodigious assortment of odds and ends lay inside, and Locke began to list them off as he pulled them out and showed them to Jean.

“What’s this? Why, it’s a pile of purses … one-two-three
-four
of them, all plucked from sober gentlemen in open streets. Here’s a knife, two bottles of wine, a pewter ale mug—dented a bit, but still good metal. A brooch, three gold pins, two earrings—
earrings
, Master Tannen, plucked from
ears
, and I’d like to see you try that. Here’s a little bolt of nice silk, a box of sweetmeats, two loaves of bread—the crusty kind with all the spices baked in that you like so much. And now, specially for the edification of a certain pessimistic, peace-breaking son of a bitch who shall remain nameless …”

Locke held up a glittering necklace, a braided band of gold and silver supporting a heavy gold pendant, studded with sapphires in the stylized pattern of a floral blossom. The little phalanx of stones flashed like blue fire even by the light of the room’s single soft lantern.

“That’s a sweet piece,” said Jean, briefly forgetting to be aggravated. “You didn’t snatch that off a street.”

“No,” said Locke, before taking another deep draught of the warm water in the decanter. “I got it from the neck of the governor’s mistress.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“In the governor’s manor.”

“Of all the—”

“In the governor’s bed.”

“Damned lunatic!”

“With the governor sleeping next to her.”

The night quiet was broken by the high, distant trill of a whistle, the traditional swarming noise of city watches everywhere. Several other whistles joined in a few moments later.

“It is possible,” said Locke with a sheepish grin, “that I have been slightly too bold.”

Jean sat down on the bed and ran both of his hands through his hair. “Locke, I’ve spent the past few weeks making a name for Tavrin Callas as the biggest, brightest thing to come along in this city’s sad little pack of Right People for ages! When the watch starts asking questions, someone’s going to point me out … and someone’s going to mention all the time I spend here, and the time I spend with you … and if we try to fence a piece of metal like that in a place this small …”

“As I said, I think we’re going to have to flee the city.”

“Flee the city?” Jean jumped up and pointed an accusatory finger at Locke. “You’ve screwed up weeks of work! I’ve been training the Coves—signals, tricks, teasing, fighting, the whole bit! I was going to … I was going to start teaching them how to cook!”

“Oooh, this is serious. I take it the marriage proposal wasn’t far behind?”

“Dammit, this
is
serious! I’ve been
building
something! I’ve been out working while you’ve been sobbing and sulking and pissing your time away in here.”

“You’re the one who lit a fire under me because he wanted to see me dance. Now I’ve danced, and I believe I’ve made my point. Will you be apologizing?”

“Apologizing? You’re the one who’s been an insufferable little shit! Letting you live is apology enough! All my work …”

“Capa of Vel Virazzo? Is that how you saw yourself, Jean? Another Barsavi?”

“Another
anything
,” said Jean. “There’s worse things to be—Capa Lamora, for example, Lord of One Smelly Room. I won’t be a bloody knockabout, Locke. I am an honest working thief and I’ll do what I have to, to keep a roof over our heads!”