The Lies of Locke Lamora (48 page)

“Your will, Doña Vorchenza,” he said smoothly. “Tea of Light.” He lifted a silver teapot and poured a steaming line of pale brownish liquid into a tea glass; Doña Vorchenza’s etched glasses were shaped like large tulip buds with silver bases. As the tea settled into the container, it began to glow faintly, shedding an inviting orange radiance.

“Oh, very pretty,” said Doña Sofia. “I’ve heard of it…. Verrari, is it?”

“Lashani.” Doña Vorchenza took the glass from Gilles and cradled it in both hands. “Quite the latest thing. Their tea masters are mad with the competitive spirit. This time next year we’ll have something even stranger to one-up one another with. But forgive me, my dear—I do hope you’re not averse to drinking the products of your art as well as working with them in your garden?”

“Not at all,” Sofia replied as the servant set her own glass before her and bowed. She took the cup into her hands and took a deep breath; the tea smelled of mingled vanilla and orange blossoms. When she sipped, the flavors ran warmly on her tongue and the scented steam rose into her nostrils. Gilles vanished back into the tower itself while the ladies commenced drinking. For a few moments they enjoyed their tea in appreciative silence, and for a few moments Sofia was almost content.

“Now we shall see,” said Doña Vorchenza as she set her half-empty glass down before her, “if it continues to glow when it comes out the other side.”

Doña Salvara giggled despite herself, and the lines on her hostess’ lean face drew upward as she smiled. “Now, what did you want to ask me about, my dear?”

“Doña Vorchenza,” Sofia began, then hesitated. “It is…it is commonly thought that you have some, ah, means to communicate with the…the duke’s secret constabulary.”

“The duke has a secret constabulary?” Doña Vorchenza placed a hand against her breast in an expression of polite disbelief.

“The Midnighters, Doña Vorchenza, the Midnighters, and their leader—”

“The duke’s Spider. Yes, yes. Forgive me, dear girl, I do know of what you speak. But this idea you have…‘Commonly thought,’ you say? Many things are
commonly
thought, but perhaps not commonly thought
all the way through
.”

“It is very curious,” said Sofia Salvara, “that when the doñas come to you with problems, on more than one occasion, their problems have…reached the ear of the Spider. Or seemed to, since the duke’s men became involved in assisting with those problems.”

“Oh, my dear Sofia. When gossip comes to me I pass it on in packets and parcels. I drop a word or two in the right ear, and the gossip acquires a life of its own. Sooner or later it must reach the notice of someone who will take action.”

“Doña Vorchenza,” said Sofia, “I hope I can say without intending or giving offense that you are dissembling.”

“I hope I can say without disappointing you, dear girl, that you have a very slender basis for making that suggestion.”

“Doña Vorchenza.” Sofia clutched at her edge of the table so hard that several of her finger joints popped. “Lorenzo and I are being robbed.”

“Robbed? Whatever do you mean?”

“And we have Midnighters involved. They’ve…made the most extraordinary claims, and made requests of us. But…Doña Vorchenza, there must be some way to confirm that they are what they say they are.”

“You say
Midnighters
are robbing you?”

“No,” said Sofia, biting her upper lip. “No, it’s not the Midnighters themselves. They are…supposedly watching the situation and waiting for a chance to act. But something…something is just wrong. Or they are not telling us everything they perhaps should.”

“My dear Sofia,” said Doña Vorchenza. “My poor troubled girl, you must tell me exactly what has happened, and leave out not one detail.”

“It is…difficult, Doña Vorchenza. The situation is rather…embarrassing. And complicated.”

“We are all alone up here on my terrace, my dear. You have done all the hard work already, in coming over to see me. Now you must tell me
everything
. Then I’ll see to it that this particular bit of gossip speeds on its way to the right ear, I promise you.”

Sofia took another small sip of tea, cleared her throat, and hunched down in her seat to look Doña Vorchenza directly in the eyes.

“Surely,” she began, “you’ve heard of Austershalin brandy, Doña Vorchenza?”

“More than heard of, my dear. I may even have a few bottles hidden away in my wine cabinets.”

“And you know how it is made? The secrets surrounding it?”

“Oh, I believe I understand the essence of the Austershalin mystique. The fussy black-coated vintners of Emberlain are, shall we say, well served by the stories surrounding their wares.”

“Then you can understand, Doña Vorchenza, how Lorenzo and I reacted as we did when the following opportunity supposedly fell into our laps by an act of the gods….”

THE CAGE containing Doña Salvara creaked and rattled toward the ground, growing ever smaller and fading into the background gray of the courtyard. Doña Vorchenza stood by the brass rails of the embarkation platform, staring into the night for many minutes, while her team of attendants pulled at the machinery of the capstan. Gilles wheeled the silver cart with the near-empty pot of tea and the half-eaten Amberglass cake past her, and she turned to him.

“No,” she said. “Send the cake up to the solarium. That’s where we’ll be.”

“Who, m’lady?”

“Reynart.” She was already striding back toward the door to her terrace-side apartments; her slippered feet made an echoing slap-slap-slap against the walkway. “Find Reynart. I don’t care what he’s doing. Find him and send him up to me, the moment you’ve seen to the cake.”

Inside the suite of apartments, through a locked door, up a curving stairway…Doña Vorchenza cursed under her breath. Her knees, her feet, her
ankles
. “Damn venerability,” she muttered. “I piss on the gods for the gift of rheumatism.” Her breathing was ragged. She undid the buttons on the front of her fur-trimmed coat as she continued to mount the steps.

At the top—the very peak of the inner tower—there was a heavy oaken door reinforced with iron joints and bands. She pulled forth a key that hung around her right wrist on a silk cord. This she inserted into the silver lockbox above the crystal knob while carefully pressing a certain decorative brass plate in a wall sconce. A series of clicks echoed within the walls and the door fell open, inward.

Forgetting the brass plate would be a poor idea; she’d specified a rather excessive pull for the concealed crossbow trap, when she’d had it installed three decades earlier.

This was the solarium, then, another eight stories up from the level of the terrace. The room took up the full diameter of the tower at its apex, fifty feet from edge to edge. The floor was thickly carpeted. A long curving brass-railed gallery, with stairs at either end, spread across the northern half of the space. This gallery held a row of tall witchwood shelves divided into thousands upon thousands of cubbyholes and compartments. The transparent hemispherical ceiling dome revealed the low clouds like a bubbling lake of smoke. Doña Vorchenza tapped alchemical globes to bring them to life as she mounted the stairs to her file gallery.

There she worked, engrossed, heedless of the passage of time as her narrow fingers flicked from compartment to compartment. She pulled out some piles of parchment and set them aside, half considered others and pushed them back in, muttering remembrances and conjecture under her breath. She snapped out of her fugue only when the solarium door clicked open once more.

The man who entered was tall and broad-shouldered; he had an angular Vadran face and ice-blond hair pulled back in a ribbon-bound tail. He wore a ribbed leather doublet over slashed black sleeves, with black breeches and tall black boots. The little silver pins at his collar gave him the rank of captain in the Nightglass Company; the blackjackets, the Duke’s Own. A rapier with straight quillons hung at his right hip.

“Stephen,” said Doña Vorchenza without preamble, “have any of your boys or girls paid a recent visit to Don and Doña Salvara, on the Isla Durona?”

“The Salvaras? No, certainly not, m’lady.”

“You’re sure?
Absolutely
sure?” Parchments in hand, eyebrows arched, she stalked down the steps, barely keeping her balance. “I need certain truth from you right now as badly as I ever have.”

“I know the Salvaras, m’lady. I met them both at last year’s Day of Changes feast; I rode up to the Sky Garden in the same cage with them.”

“And you haven’t sent
any
of the Midnighters to pay them a visit?”

“Twelve gods, no. Not one.”

“Then someone is abusing our good name, Stephen. And I think we may finally have the Thorn of Camorr.”

Reynart stared at her, then grinned. “You’re joking. You’re not? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. What’s the situation?”

“First things first; I know you think fastest when we nurse that damned sweet tooth of yours. Peek inside the dumbwaiter; I’m going to have a seat.”

“Oh my,” said Reynart, peering into the chain-hoist shaft that held the dumbwaiter. “It looks as though someone’s already made a merry work of this poor spice cake. I’ll put it out of its misery. There’s wine and glasses, too—looks like one of your sweet whites.”

“Gods bless Gilles; I’d forgotten to ask him for that, I was in such haste to get to my files. Be a dear dutiful subordinate and pour us a glass.”

“Dear dutiful subordinate, indeed. For the cake, I’d polish your slippers as well.”

“I’ll hold that promise in reserve for the next time you vex me, Stephen. Oh, fill the glass, I’m not thirteen years old. Now, take your seat and listen to this. If everything signifies, as I believe it shall, the bastard has just been delivered to us right in the middle of one of his schemes.”

“How so?”

“I’ll answer a question with a question, Stephen.” She took a deep draught of her white wine and settled back into her chair. “Tell me, how much do you know of the body of lore surrounding Austershalin brandy?”

“POSING AS one of us,” Reynart mused after she’d finished her tale. “The sheer fucking cheek. But are you sure it’s the Thorn?”

“If it isn’t, then we could only presume that we now have
another
equally skilled and audacious thief picking the pockets of my peers. And I think that’s presuming a bit much. Even for a city crammed as full of ghosts as this one.”

“Mightn’t it be the Gray King? He’s the right sort of slippery, by all reports.”

“Mmmm. No, the Gray King’s been murdering Barsavi’s men. The Thorn’s mode of operation is plain trickery; not a drop of real blood shed yet, as near as I can tell. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

Reynart set aside his empty cake plate and took a sip from his glass of wine. “So if we can trust Doña Salvara’s story, we’re looking at a gang of at least four men. The Thorn himself—let’s call him Lukas Fehrwight, for the sake of argument. His servant Graumann. And the two men who broke into the Salvara estate.”

“That’s a beginning, Stephen. But I’d say the gang is more probably five or six.”

“How do you figure?”

“I believe the false Midnighter was telling the truth when he told Don Salvara that the attack near the Temple of Fortunate Waters was staged; it would have to be, for a scheme this complex. So we have two more accomplices—the masked attackers.”

“Assuming they weren’t just hired for the task.”

“I doubt it. Consider the total paucity of information we’ve had previous to this: not one report, one boast, one slender
whisper
from anyone, anywhere. Not a speck of information pointing to anyone who even claimed to
work
with the Thorn of Camorr. Yet on any given day, thieves will boast loudly for hours about who among them can piss the farthest. This silence is unnatural.”

“Well,” said Reynart, “if you just slit a hireling’s throat when he’s done his job, you don’t have to pay him, either.”

“But we’re still dealing with the Thorn, and I hold that such an act would be outside his pattern of operations.”

“So his gang runs a closed shop…. That would make sense. But it still might not be six. The two in the alley could
also
be the two who entered the estate dressed as Midnighters.”

“Oh, my dear Stephen. An interesting conjecture. Let us say four minimum, six maximum as our first guess, or we’ll be here all night drawing diagrams for one another. I suspect anything larger would be difficult to hide as well as they have.”

“So be it, then.” Reynart thought for a moment. “I can give you fifteen or sixteen swords right this very hour; some of my lads are mumming it up tonight down in the Snare and the Cauldron, since we got those reports of Nazca Barsavi’s funeral. I can’t pull them on short notice. But give me until the dark of the morning and I can have everyone else kitted up and ready for a scrap. We’ve got the Nightglass to back us; no need to even bring the yellowjackets in on it. We know they’re probably compromised anyway.”

“That would be well, Stephen, if I wanted them snatched up right now. But I don’t. I think we have a few days, at least, to draw the web tight around this man. Sofia said they’d discussed an initial outlay of about twenty-five thousand crowns; I suspect the Thorn will wait around to collect the other seven or eight he’s due.”

“At least let me hold a squad ready, then. I’ll keep them at the Palace of Patience; tuck them in amongst the yellowjackets. They can be ready to dash off with five minutes’ notice.”

“Very prudent; do so. Now, as for how we move on the Thorn himself—send someone down to Meraggio’s tomorrow, the subtlest you have. See if Fehrwight holds an account there, and when it was begun.”

“Calviro. I’ll send Maraliza Calviro.”

“An excellent choice. As far as I’m concerned, anyone else this Fehrwight has introduced the Salvaras to is suspect. Have her check up on the lawscribe she said her husband met just after the staged attack behind the temple.”

“Eccari, wasn’t it? Evante Eccari?”

“Yes. And then I want you to check out the Temple of Fortunate Waters.”

“Me? M’lady, you of all people know I don’t keep the faith; I just inherited the looks.”