The Lies of Locke Lamora (43 page)

“Up the Angevine, seven or eight miles. Little place called Villa Senziano. It’s tenant farmers, mostly beholden to the duke or some of the minor swells from the Alcegrante. I’ll dress as a priest of Dama Elliza, and you’ll be my initiate, being sent off to work the earth as part of your service to the goddess. It’s what they do.”

“But I don’t know anything about the Order of Dama Elliza.”

“You won’t need to. The man you’ll be staying with understands that you’re one of my little bastards. The story’s just for everyone else.”

“What,” said Calo, “are we going to do in the meantime?”

“You’ll mind the temple. I’ll only be gone two days; the Eyeless Priest can be sick and locked away in his chambers. Don’t sit the steps while I’m away; people always get sympathetic if I’m out of sight for a bit, especially if I cough and hack when I return. You two and Jean can amuse yourselves as you see fit, so long as you don’t make a bloody mess of the place.”

“But by the time I get back,” said Locke, “I’ll be the worst card player in the temple.”

“Yes. Best wishes for a safe journey, Locke,” said Calo.

“Savor the country air,” said Galdo. “Stay as long as you like.”

THE FIVE Towers loomed over Camorr like the upstretched hand of a god; five irregular, soaring, Elderglass cylinders, dotted with turrets and spires and walkways and much curious evidence that the creatures that had designed them did not quite share the aesthetic sense of the humans who’d appropriated them.

Easternmost was Dawncatcher, four hundred feet high, its natural color a shimmery silver-red, like the reflection of a sunset sky in a still body of water. Behind it was Blackspear, slightly taller, made of an obsidian glass that shone with broken rainbows like a pool of oil. At the far side, as one might reckon by looking across the Five with Dawncatcher in the middle of one’s vision, was Westwatch, which shone with the soft violet of a tourmaline, shot through with veins of snow-white pearl. Beside it was stately Amberglass, with its elaborate flutings from which the wind would pull eerie melodies. In the middle, tallest and grandest of all, was Raven’s Reach, the palace of Duke Nicovante, which gleamed like molten silver and was crowned with the famous Sky Garden, whose lowest-hanging vine trailed in the air some six hundred feet above the ground.

A network of glassine cables (miles and miles of spun Elderglass cords had been found in the tunnels beneath Camorr, centuries before) threaded the roofs and turret tops of the Five Towers. Hanging baskets passed back and forth on these cables, drawn along by servants at huge clacking capstans. These baskets carried both passengers and cargo. Although many of the residents of lower Camorr proclaimed them mad, the nobles of the Five Families regarded the lurching, bobbing passage across the yawning empty spaces as a test of honor and courage.

Here and there, large cargo cages were being drawn up or lowered from jutting platforms on several of the towers. They reminded Locke, who stared up at all this with eyes that were not yet sated with such wonders, of the spider cages at the Palace of Patience.

He and Chains sat in a two-wheeled cart with a little walled space behind the seat, where Chains had stashed several parcels of goods under an old canvas tarp. Chains wore the loose brown robes with green and silver trim that marked a priest of Dama Elliza, Mother of Rains and Reaping. Locke wore a plain tunic and breeches, without shoes.

Chains had their two horses (un-Gentled, for Chains misliked using the white-eyed creatures outside city walls) trotting at a gentle pace up the winding cobbles of the Street of Seven Wheels, the heart of the Millfalls district. In truth, there were more than seven wheels spinning in the white froth of the Angevine; there were more in sight than Locke could count.

The Five Towers had been built on a plateau some sixty-odd feet above the lower city; the Alcegrante islands sloped up toward the base of this plateau. The Angevine came into Camorr at that height, just to the east of the Five, and fell down a crashing six-story waterfall nearly two hundred yards across. Wheels turned at the top of these falls, within a long glass-and-stone bridge topped with wooden mill-houses.

Wheels turned beneath the falls as well, jutting out into the river on both sides, making use of the rushing white flow to work everything from grinding stones to the bellows that blew air across the fires beneath brewers’ vats. It was a district choked with business-folk and laborers alike, with escorted nobles in gilded carriages rolling here and there to inspect their holdings or place orders.

They turned east at the tip of the Millfalls and crossed a wide low bridge into the Cenza Gate district, the means by which most northbound land traffic left the city. Here was a great mess, barely controlled by a small army of yellowjackets. Caravans of wagons were rolling into the city, their drivers at the mercy of the duke’s tax and customs agents, men and women marked by their tall black brimless caps and commonly referred to (when out of earshot) as “vexationers.”

Petty merchants were pitching everything from warm beer to cooked carrots; beggars were pleading countless improbable reasons for impoverishment and claiming lingering wounds from wars that had obviously ended long before they were born. Yellowjackets were driving the most persistent or malodorous off with their black lacquered sticks. It was not yet the tenth hour of the morning.

“You should see this place around noon,” said Chains, “especially during harvest time. And when it rains. Gods.”

Chains’ clerical vestments (and a silver solon passed over in a handshake) got them out of the city with little more than a “Good day, Your Holiness.” The Cenza Gate was fifteen yards wide, with huge ironwood doors almost as tall. The guardhouses on the wall were occupied, barracks-like, not just by the city watch but by the blackjackets, Camorr’s regular soldiers. They could be seen pacing here and there atop the wall, which was a good twenty feet thick.

North of Camorr proper was neighborhood after neighborhood of lightly built stone and wooden buildings, arranged in courts and squares more airy than those found on the islands of the city itself. Along the riverbank there were the beginnings of a marsh; to the north and the east were terraced hills, crisscrossed by the white lines of boundary stones set out to mark the property of the families that farmed them. The air took on divergent qualities depending on which way the chance breezes blew. It would smell of sea salt and wood smoke one minute, of manure and olive groves the next.

“Here beyond the walls,” said Chains, “is what many folks living outside the great cities would think of as cities; these little scatterings of wood and stone that probably don’t look like much to someone like you. Just as you haven’t really seen the country, most of them haven’t truly seen the city. So keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, and be mindful of differences until you’ve had a few days to acclimate yourself.”

“What’s the point of this trip, Chains, really?”

“You might one day have to pretend to be a person of very lowly station, Locke. If you learn something about being a farmer, you’ll probably learn something about being a teamster, a barge poleman, a village smith, a horse physiker, and maybe even a country bandit.”

The road north from Camorr was an old Therin Throne road: a raised stone expanse with shallow ditches at the sides. It was covered with a gravel of pebbles and iron filings, waste from the forges of the Coalsmoke district. Here and there the rains had fused or rusted the gravel into a reddish cement; the wheels clattered as they slid over these hard patches.

“A lot of blackjackets,” Chains said slowly, “come from the farms and villages north of Camorr. It’s what the dukes of Camorr do, when they need more men, and they can afford to wait a bit, without raising a general levy of the lowborn. It’s good wages, and there’s the promise of land for those that stay in service a full twenty-five years. Assuming they don’t get killed, of course. They come from the north, and mostly they go back to the north.”

“Is that why the blackjackets and the yellowjackets don’t like each other?”

“Heh.” Chains’ eyes twinkled. “Good guess. There’s some truth to it. Most of the yellowjackets are city boys that want to stay city boys. But on top of that, soldiers can be some of the cattiest, most clannish damn folk you’ll ever find outside of a highborn lady’s wardrobe. They’ll fight over anything; they’ll brawl over the colors of their hats and the shapes of their shoes. I know, believe me.”

“You pretended to be one once?”

“Thirteen gods, no. I
was
one.”

“A blackjacket?”

“Yes.” Chains sighed and settled back against the hard wooden seat of the horse cart. “Thirty years past, now. More than thirty. I was a pikeman for the old Duke Nicovante. Most of us from the village my age went; it was a bad time for wars. Duke needed fodder; we needed food and coin.”

“Which village?”

Chains favored him with a crooked smile. “Villa Senziano.”

“Oh.”

“Gods, it was a whole pile of us that went.” The horses and the cart rattled down the road for a few long moments before Chains continued. “There were three of us that came back. Or at least got out of it.”

“Only three?”

“That I know of.” Chains scratched at his beard. “One of them is the man I’m going to be leaving you with. Vandros. A good fellow; not book-smart but very wise in the everyday sense. He did his twenty-five years, and the duke gave him a spot of land as a tenancy.”

“Tenancy?”

“Most common folk outside the city don’t own their own land any more than city renters own their buildings. An old soldier with a tenancy gets a nice spot of land to farm until he dies; it’s a sort of allowance from the duke.” Chains chuckled. “Given in exchange for one’s youth and health.”

“You didn’t do the twenty-five, I’m guessing.”

“No.” Chains fiddled with his beard a bit more, an old nervous gesture. “Damn, I wish I could have a smoke. It’s a very frowned-on thing in the order of the Dama, mind you. No, I took sick after a battle. Something more than just the usual shits and sore feet. A wasting fever. I couldn’t march and I was like to die, so they left me behind…myself and many others. In the care of some itinerant priests of Perelandro.”

“But you didn’t die.”

“Clever lad,” said Chains, “to deduce that from such slender evidence after living with me for just three years.”

“And what happened?”

“A great many things,” said Chains. “And you know how it ends. I wound up in this cart, riding north and entertaining you.”

“Well, what happened to the third man from your village?”

“Him? Well,” said Chains, “he always had his head on right. He made banneret sergeant not long after I got laid up with the fever. At the Battle of Nessek, he helped young Nicovante hold the line together when old Nicovante took an arrow right between his eyes. He lived, got elevated, and served Nicovante in the next few wars that came their way.”

“And where is he?”

“At this very moment? How should I know? But,” said Chains, “later this afternoon, he’ll be giving Jean Tannen his usual afternoon weapons lesson at the House of Glass Roses.”

“Oh,”
said Locke.

“Funny old world,” said Chains. “Three farmers became three soldiers; three soldiers became one farmer, one baron, and one thieving priest.”

“And now I’m to become a farmer, for a while.”

“Yes. Useful training indeed. But not just that.”

“What else?”

“Another test, my boy. Just another test.”

“Which is?”

“All these years, you’ve had me looking over you. You’ve had Calo and Galdo, and Jean, and Sabetha from time to time. You’ve gotten used to the temple as a home. But time’s a river, Locke, and we’ve always drifted farther down it than we think.” He smiled down at Locke with real affection. “I can’t stand watch on you forever, boy. Now we need to see what you can do when you’re off in a strange new place, all on your own.”

The Funeral Cask

IT BEGAN LIKE this—with the slow, steady beat of mourning drums and the slow cadence of marchers moving north from the Floating Grave, red torches smoldering in their hands, a double line of bloodred light stretched out beneath the low dark clouds.

At its heart was Vencarlo Barsavi, Capa of Camorr, with a son at either hand. Before him was a covered casket draped in black silk and cloth of gold, carried at either side by six pallbearers—one for each of the twelve Therin gods—dressed in black cloaks and black masks. At Barsavi’s back was a huge wooden cask on a cart pulled by another six men, with a black-shrouded priestess of the Nameless Thirteenth close behind.

The drums echoed against stone walls; against stone streets and bridges and canals; the torches cast reflections of fire in every window and shred of Elderglass they passed. Folk looked on in apprehension, if they looked on at all; some bolted their doors and drew shutters over their windows as the funeral procession passed. This is how things are done in Camorr, for the rich and the powerful; the slow mournful march to the Hill of Whispers, the interment, the ceremony, and then the wild, tearful celebration afterward. A toast on behalf of the departed; a bittersweet revel for those not yet taken for judgment by Aza Guilla, Lady of the Long Silence. The funeral cask is what fuels this tradition.

The lines of marchers left the Wooden Waste just after the tenth hour of the evening and marched into the Cauldron, where no urchin or drunkard dared to get in their way, where gangs of cutthroats and Gaze addicts stood in silent attention as their master and his court walked past.

Through Coalsmoke they marched, and then north into the Quiet, as silvery mist rose warm and clinging from the canals around them. Not a single yellowjacket crossed their path; not one constable even caught sight of the procession—arrangements had been made to keep them busy elsewhere that night. The east belonged to Barsavi and his long lines of torches, and the farther north he went the more honest families bolted their doors and doused their lights and prayed that the business of the marchers lay far away from them.