The Republic of Thieves (16 page)

It wasn’t a question. Locke’s attitude would have been plain to someone with the empathy of a shithouse brick.

A day had passed since the affair of Sabetha’s “capture,” and while Locke had rapidly shrugged off the effects of his fall into the garden, he’d been snappish and sullen since returning to the Temple of Perelandro. He’d flat-out refused to help prepare dinner or eat it, and after a brief, awkward attempt at a meal Chains had finally dragged him up to the temple roof.

They sat there now, under the dying aura of Falselight, the hour when every visible inch of Elderglass in Camorr threw off enough supernatural radiance to bring on a second sunset. Every bridge and avenue and tower was limned in eerie light, and beneath the steel-blue sky the city was a dark tapestry knit with ten thousand glowing stitches.

The parapets of the temple’s untended rooftop garden shielded Locke and Chains from prying eyes. They sat a few paces apart amidst the shards of broken pottery, staring at one another. Chains was taking
unusually frequent drags on his sheaf of rolled tobacco, the red embers flaring with each indrawn breath.

“Look at me,” he muttered. “You’ve got me smoking the Anacasti Black. My holiday blend. Of course you’re still angry with me. You’re about seven years old and your view of the world is
this wide
.” Chains held up the thumb and the forefinger of his left hand, and the distance between them was not generous. This, at last, drew Locke out of his silence.

“What happened wasn’t fair!”

“Fair? You mean to claim with a straight face that you buy into that heresy, my boy?” Chains took a last long puff on his dying cigar and flicked the remnants into the darkness. “Everyone in Catchfire dropped dead except for you and your fellow wolf cubs. In Shades’ Hill, you avoided death for at
least
two grandiose mistakes that would have gotten a grown man’s balls peeled like grapes, and you still want to talk about—”

“No,” said Locke, his look of self-righteous annoyance instantly changing to one of startled embarrassment, as though he’d been accused of wetting his breeches. “No, no, I didn’t say
those
things were fair. I know
life’s
not fair. But I thought … I thought … you were.”

“Ah,” said Chains, “well, now. I’ve always thought of myself as fair to a fault. Look, what are you more upset about, the fact that I lied about what had to happen to Sabetha or the fact that the contest I rigged wasn’t, ah, as open to improvisation as you might have wished?”

“I don’t know. Both! All of it!”

“Locke, you may be too young for formal rhetoric, but you’ve got to at least try to pick your problems apart and explain them piece by piece. Now, here’s another important question. Are you comfortable at this temple?”

“Yes!”

“You eat well and sleep soundly. Your clothes are clean, you have many diversions, and you even get to bathe every week.”

“Yes. Yes, I like it a lot, it’s all worth having to bathe, even!”

“Hmmm,” said Chains. “You live long enough for your stones to drop, then tell me if bathing is really such a hardship when the young women around you have bosoms that are more than theoretical.”

“What? When my
what
?”

“Never mind. That subject will be sufficiently confusing in its own good time. So, you like it here. You’re comfortable, you’re protected. Have I behaved badly? Treated you as you were treated in Shades’ Hill?”

“Well, no … no, not like that at all.”

“Yet none of that buys me any consideration in the matter of last night? Not one speck of trust? One tiny instant of the benefit of the doubt?”

“I, uh, well, it’s not … uh, crap.” Locke made a desperate grab for eloquence and came up with empty hands as usual. “I don’t mean … it’s not that I don’t appreciate—”

“Easy, Locke, easy. Just because you’ve been uncouth doesn’t mean you might not have a point. But hear me now—this is a small home we live in. The temple might seem marvelous compared to living and sleeping in heaps of dozens, but believe me—walls squeeze the people who live inside them, sooner or later.”

“They don’t bother me,” said Locke quickly.

“It’s not so much the walls, though, Locke, it’s the
people
. This will be your home for many years to come, gods willing, and you and Sabetha and the Sanzas are going to be as close as family. You’ll strike sparks off one another. I can’t have you shoving your thumb up your ass and doing your best impression of a brick wall every time you get annoyed. Crooked Warden help us, we’ve got to be ready and willing to talk, or we’re all going to wake up with cut throats sooner or later.”

“I’m … I’m sorry.”

“Don’t hang your head like a kicked puppy. Just keep it in mind. If you’re going to live here, staying civil is as much a duty as sitting the steps or washing dishes. Now, while I bask in the glow of another moral sermon delivered with the precision of a master fencer, hold your applause and let’s get back to last night. You’re upset because the situation was contrived to give you only one real means of resolving it, short of curling up into a little ball and crying yourself into a stupor.”

“Yes! It wasn’t like it would have been, if they’d been real guards. If they weren’t, you know, watching for me.”

“You’re right. If those men had been real agents of the duke, some of them might have been incompetent, or open to bribery, and they might not have taken their duty to guard a little girl very seriously. Correct?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Of course, if they’d been real agents of the duke, they might also have taken her somewhere truly impregnable, like the Palace of Patience. And instead of six there might have been twelve, or twenty, or the entire Nightglass company, prowling the streets looking to have an urgent personal conversation with
you
.” Chains leaned forward and poked Locke’s forehead. “That’s how luck works, lad. You can bitch all you like about how things could have been more favorable for you, but rest assured things can
always be worse
. Always. Understood?”

“I think so,” said Locke, with the neutral tone of a student gingerly accepting a master’s assurances on something far beyond personal verification, like the number of angels that could play handball on the edge of a rose petal.

“Well, if I can even get you thinking about it, that’s a victory of sorts, at your age. No offense.” Chains cracked his knuckles before continuing. “You, after all, have publicly vowed to never lose again, which is about as likely as me learning to crap gold bars on command.”

“But—”

“Let it be. I know your temperament, lad, and I’m too wise to try and give it more than a few sharp nudges at a time. So, the other thing. You’re upset that I lied about what needed to be done with Sabetha.”

“Well, yeah.”

“You feel something for her.”

“I … I don’t, um …”

“Quit it. This is important. You
do
feel something for her. There’s more to this than a little wounded pride. Can you tell me about it?”

Slowly, grudgingly, feeling as though he might be about to get up and run away, Locke somehow found the will to give Chains the barest sketch of his first encounter with Sabetha, and of her later disappearance.

“Hells,” said Chains quietly when the tale was finished. The sky and the city beneath it had darkened while Locke had stumbled through his explanation. “I can see why you snapped, having that rug pulled out from under you twice. Forgive me, Locke, I honestly didn’t know you’d grown feelings for her in Shades’ Hill.”

“It’s okay,” mumbled Locke.

“You have a crush, I think.”

“Do I?” Locke had a vague idea of what that word meant, and somehow it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem
enough
.

“It’s not meant to belittle your feelings, lad. A crush can come on hot and sharp like an illness. I know exactly what it’s like. Years to go before your body will even be ready for, ah, what comes between men and women, but a crush doesn’t care. It’s got a power all its own. That’s the bad news.”

“What’s the good news?”

“Crushes fade. Sure as you and I are sitting here now. They’re like sparks thrown from a fire—hot and bright for a moment, then gone.”

Locke frowned, not at all sure he wanted to be released from his feelings for Sabetha. They were a bundle of mysteries, and every attempt to unravel them in his own mind seemed to send a pleasant warm shiver to every nerve in his body.

“Heh. You don’t believe me, or you don’t want to. Fair enough. But you’re going to be living with Sabetha day in and day out anytime one of you isn’t away for training. My guess is, she’ll be like a sister to you in a few years. Familiarity has a way of filing the sharp edges off our feelings for other people. You’ll see.”

TIME PASSED
, days and months chaining together into years, and Jean Tannen joined the Gentlemen Bastards. In the summer of the seventy-seventh Year of Perelandro, two years after Jean’s arrival, a rare dry spell came over the city-state of Camorr, and the Angevine ran ten feet below its usual height. The canals went gray and turgid, thickening like blood in the veins of a ripening corpse.

Canal trees, those glorious affectations that usually roamed and twirled on the city’s currents with their long float-threaded roots drinking the filth around them, now bobbed in sullen masses, confined to the river and the Floating Market. Their silk-bright leaves dulled and their branches drooped; their roots hung slack in the water like the tentacles of dead sea-monsters. Day after day the Temple District was shrouded in layers of smoke, as every denomination burned anything that came to mind in sacrifices pleading for a hard, cleansing rain that wouldn’t come.

In the Cauldron and the Dregs, where the lowest of the low slept ten to a room in windowless houses, the usual steady flow of murders became a torrent. The duke’s corpse-hunters, paid as they were by the head, whistled while they fished putrefying former citizens out of barrels and cesspits. The city’s professional criminals, more conscientious than its impulsive killers, did their part for Camorr’s air by throwing the remains of their victims into the harbor by night, where the predators of the Iron Sea quietly made the offerings vanish.

In this atmosphere, in the hot summer evening heavy with smoke and the stink of a hundred distinct putrefactions, the temple roof was out of the question for meetings, so Father Chains let his five young wards gather in the dank coolness of the glass burrow’s kitchen. Their recent meals, by Chains’ orders, had been lukewarm affairs, with anything cooked brought in from stalls near the Floating Market.

They had come together that week, as a complete set, for the first time in half a year. Chains’ interwoven programs of training had taken on the complexity of an acrobat’s plate-spinning act as his young wards were shuffled back and forth between apprenticeships in assorted temples and trades, learning their habits, jargon, rituals, and trivia. These excursions were arranged by the Eyeless Priest via a remarkable network of contacts, extending well beyond Camorr and the criminal fraternity, and they were largely paid for out of the small fortune that the citizens of Camorr had charitably donated over the years.

Time had begun to work its more obvious changes on the young Gentlemen Bastards. Calo and Galdo were dealing with a growth spurt that had given their usual grace a humbling dose of awkwardness, and their voices were starting to veer wildly. Jean Tannen was still on the cherubic side, but his shoulders were broadening, and from scuffles like the Half-Crown War he had acquired the confident air of someone well versed in the art of introducing faces to cobblestones.

Given these evident signs of physical progress around him, Locke was secretly displeased with his own condition. His voice had yet to drop, and while he was larger than he’d ever been, all this did was maintain him in the same ratio as before, a medium child surrounded on all sides by the taller and the wider. And while he knew the other boys depended upon him to be the heart and brains of their combined operations, it was a cold comfort whenever Sabetha came home.

Sabetha (who, if she objected to being the only Gentle-lady Bastard, had never said so out loud) was freshly returned from weeks of immersive training as a court scrivener’s apprentice, and bore new signs of physical progress herself. She was still taller than Locke, and the natural color of her tightly plaited hair remained hidden by a brown alchemical wash. But her slender figure seemed to be pressing outward, ever so slightly, against the front of her thin chemise, and her movements around the glass burrow had revealed the hints of other emerging curves to Locke’s vigilant eyes.

Her natural poise had grown in direct proportion to her years, and while Locke held firm sway over the three other boys, she was a separate power, neither belittling his status in the gang nor overtly acknowledging it. There was a seriousness to her that Locke found deeply compelling, possibly because it was unique among the five of them. She had embarked upon a sort of miniature adulthood and skipped the wild facetiousness that defined, for example, the Sanzas. It seemed to Locke that she was more eager than the rest of them to get to wherever their training was taking them.

“Young lady,” said Father Chains as he entered the kitchen, “and young gentlemen, such as you are. Thank you for your prompt attention to my summons, a courtesy which I shall now repay by setting you on a path to frustration and acrimony. I have decided that you five do not fight amongst yourselves nearly enough.”

“Begging your pardon,” said Sabetha, “but if you’ll look more closely at Calo and Galdo you’ll see that’s not the case.”

“Ah, that’s merely communication,” said Chains. “Just as you and I speak by forming words, the natural, private discourse of the Sanza twins appears to consist entirely of farts and savage beatings. What I want is all five of you facing off against one another.”

“You want us to start … hitting each other?” said Locke.

“Oh, I volunteer to hit Sabetha,” said Calo, “and I volunteer to be hit by Locke!”

“I would also volunteer to be hit by Locke,” said Galdo.