The Republic of Thieves (22 page)

That’s bullshit, I know better, I’m a divine of the Crooked Warden!

“How’s that working out for you?” Bug wiped at the trails of blood running down his neck, and the blood came away on his pale fingertips as a brown powder. “Doesn’t seem to have done either of us much good.”

I’m a priest, I’d know how this works, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be! I’m a priest of the Unnamed Thirteenth!

“Well … I could tell you how far you’ll get trusting people when you don’t even know their real name.” Again the pressure on Locke’s chest grew.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming. It’s just a dream
.

“You’re dreaming. You’re dying. Maybe they’re the same thing.” The corners of Bug’s mouth twitched up briefly in a weak attempt at a smile. The sort of smile, thought Locke, that you give someone when you can see they’re in deep shit.

“Well, you’ve made all your decisions. Nothing left for you to do but see which one of us is right.”

Wait, wait, don’t—

The pain in Locke’s chest flared again, spreading sharply outward from his heart, and this time it was cold, deathly cold, an unbearable icy pressure that squeezed him like a vise. Darkness swept in behind it, and Locke’s awareness broke against it like a ship heaved onto rocks.

THEY LET HIM
out of the darkness at last, and cool air touched his skin after an hour of stuffy helplessness.

It had been a rough trip to the site of the ritual, wherever it was. The men carrying him hadn’t had much difficulty with his relatively slight weight, but it seemed they’d gone down many stairs and through narrow, curving passages. Around and around in the dark he’d been hauled, listening to the grunts and whispers of the adults, and to the sound of his own breathing inside the scratchy wool sack that covered his head.

At last that hood was drawn away. Locke blinked in the dimness of a high barrel-vaulted room, faintly lit by pale globes tucked away in sconces. The walls and pillars were stone, and here and there Locke could see decorative paintings flaking with age. Water trickled somewhere nearby, but that was hardly unusual for a structure in lower Camorr. What was significant was that this was a human place, all blocks and mortar, without a shred of visible Elderglass.

Locke was on his back in the middle of the vaulted room, on a low
slab. His hands and feet weren’t tied, but his freedom of movement was sharply curtailed when a man knelt and put a knife to his throat. Locke could feel the edge of the blade against his skin, and knew instantly that it was the not-fooling-around sort of edge.

“You are bound and compelled to silence in all ways, at all times, from now until the weighing of your soul, concerning what we do here this night,” said the man.

“I am bound and compelled,” said Locke.

“Who binds and compels you?”

“I bind and compel myself,” said Locke.

“To break this binding is to be condemned to die.”

“I would gladly be condemned for my failure.”

“Who would condemn you?”

“I would condemn myself.” Locke reached up with his right hand and placed it over the man’s knuckles. The stranger withdrew his hand, leaving Locke holding the knife at his own throat.

“Rise, little brother,” said the man.

Locke obeyed, and passed the knife back to the man, a long-haired, muscular
garrista
Locke knew by sight but not by name. The world Capa Barsavi ruled was a big place.

“Why have you come here tonight?”

“To be a thief among thieves,” said Locke.

“Then learn our sign.” The man held up his left hand, fingers slightly spread, and Locke mirrored the gesture, pressing his palm firmly against the
garrista
’s. “Left hand to left hand, skin to skin, will tell your brothers and sisters that you do not come holding weapons, that you do not shun their touch, that you do not place yourself above them. Go and wait.”

Locke bowed and moved into the shadow of a pillar. There was enough space, he calculated, for a few hundred people to fit down here. At the moment, there were just a few men and women visible. He’d been brought in early, it seemed, as one of the very first of the postulants to take the oath of secrecy. He watched, feeling the churn of excitement in his stomach, as more boys and girls were carried into the room, stripped of their hoods, and given the treatment he’d received. Calo … Galdo … Jean … one by one they joined him and
watched the ongoing procession. Locke’s companions were uncharacteristically silent and serious. In fact, he’d have gone so far as to say that both Sanzas were actually nervous. He didn’t blame them.

The next hood yanked from a postulant’s head revealed Sabetha. Her lovely false-brown curls tumbled out in a cloud, and Locke bit the insides of his cheeks as the knife touched her throat. She took the oaths quickly and calmly, in a voice that had grown a shade huskier in the last season. She spared him a glance as she walked over to join the Gentlemen Bastards, and he hoped for a few seconds that she might choose to stand beside him. However, Calo and Galdo moved apart, offering her a place between them, and she accepted. Locke bit the insides of his cheeks again.

Together, the five of them watched more adults enter and more children about their own age pass under the oath-taking blade. There were some familiar faces in that stream.

First came Tesso Volanti from the Half-Crowns, with his night-black mane of oiled hair. He held Locke’s crew in high esteem despite (or probably because of) the fact that Jean Tannen had given him a thunderous ass-kicking a few summers previously. Then came Fat Saulus and Fatter Saulus from the Falselight Cutters … Whoreson Dominaldo … Amelie the Clutcher, who’d stolen enough to buy an apprenticeship with the Guilded Lilies … a couple boys and girls that must have come out of the Thiefmaker’s burrow around the time Locke had … and then, the very last initiate to have her hood yanked back, Nazca Belonna Jenavais Angeliza Barsavi, youngest child and only daughter of the absolute ruler of Camorr’s underworld.

After Nazca finished reciting her oaths, she removed a pair of optics from a leather pouch and slid them onto her nose. While nobody in their right mind would have laughed at her for doing so, Locke suspected that Nazca would have been unafraid to wear them in public even if she hadn’t been the Capa’s daughter.

Locke could see her older brothers, Pachero and Anjais, standing in the ranks of the older initiates, but her place was with the neophytes. Smiling, she walked over to Locke and gently pushed him out of his spot against the pillar.

“Hello, Lamora,” she whispered. “I need to stand next to an ugly little boy to make myself look better.”

She certainly did
not
, thought Locke. An inch taller than him, Nazca was much like Sabetha these days, closer to woman than girl. For some reason, she also had a soft spot for the Gentlemen Bastards. Locke had begun to suspect that the “little favors” Father Chains had once done for Capa Barsavi were not as little as he’d let on, and that Nazca was privy to at least some of the story. Not that she ever spoke of it.

“Good to see you here in the cheap seats with us, Nazca,” said Sabetha as she gracefully nudged Jean out of his position behind Locke. Locke’s spine tingled.

“No such thing on a night like this,” said Nazca. “Just thieves among thieves.”

“Women among boys,” said Sabetha with an exaggerated sigh.

“Pearls among swine,” said Nazca, and the two of them giggled. Locke’s cheeks burned.

It was early winter in the seventy-seventh Year of Aza Guilla, the month of Marinel, the time of the empty sky. It was the night called the Orphan’s Moon, when Locke and all of his kind became, by ancient Therin custom, one year older.

It was the one night per year on which young thieves were fully initiated into the mysteries of the Crooked Warden, somewhere in the dark and crumbling depths of old Camorr.

It was, by Chains’ best guess, the night of Locke’s thirteenth birthday.

THE DAY
’
S
activities had started with the procurement of an appropriate offering.

“Let’s toss the cake on that fellow right there,” said Jean. It was high afternoon, and he and Locke lay in wait in an alley just off the Avenue of Five Saints in the upper-class Fountain Bend district.

“He seems the type,” agreed Locke. He hefted the all-important package into his arms—a cube of flax-paper wrapped around a wooden frame, with a sturdy wooden base, the whole thing about two and a half feet on a side. “Where you coming from?”

“His right.”

“Let’s make his acquaintance.”

They went in opposite directions—Jean directly east onto the avenue, and Locke to the western end of the alley, so he could head north on the parallel Avenue of the Laurels and swing around the long way to intercept the chosen target.

The Fountain Bend was a nest of the quality; one could tell merely by counting the number of servants on the streets, and noting the character of the yellowjackets taking relaxed strolls around the gardens and avenues. Their harnesses were perfectly oiled, their boots shined, their coats and hats unweathered. Postings to an area like this came only to watch-folk with connections, and once they had the posting they took pains to make themselves decorative as well as functional, lest they be reassigned somewhere much livelier.

Winter in Camorr could be pleasant when the sky wasn’t pissing like an old man who’d lost command of his bladder. Today warm sun and cool breeze hit the skin at the same time, and it was easy to forget the thousand and one ways the city had of choking, stifling, reeking, and sweating. Locke hurried north for two blocks, then veered right, onto the Boulevard of the Emerald Footfall. Dressed as he was, in servant’s clothing, it was perfectly acceptable for him to scamper along with his awkward cargo at an undignified pace.

When the boulevard met the Avenue of Five Saints, Locke turned right again and immediately spotted his quarry. Locke had beaten him to the intersection by fifty yards, and so had plenty of time to slow down and get his act sorted. No more rushing about—on this street, he became the picture of caution, a dutiful young servant minding a delicate package at a sensible speed. Forty yards … thirty yards … and there was Jean, coming up behind the target.

At twenty yards, Locke veered slightly, making it clear that there could be no possible collision if he and the stranger continued on their present courses. Ten yards … Jean was nearly at the man’s elbow.

At five yards, Jean bumped into the target from behind, sending him sprawling in just the right direction, with just enough momentum, to smack squarely into Locke’s flax-paper package. Locke ensured that the fragile cube was snapped and crushed instantly, along with the fifteen pounds of spice cake and icing it contained. Much of
it hit the cobbles with a sound like meat hitting a butcher’s counter, and the rest of it hit Locke, who artfully fell directly onto his ass.

“Oh gods,” he cried. “You’ve ruined me!”

“Why, I, I’ve—I don’t … damn!” sputtered the target, jumping back from the splattered cake and checking his clothing. He was a well-fed, round-shouldered sort in respectable dress, with a smooth leather ink-guard on his right jacket cuff that told of life lived behind a desk. “I was struck from behind!”

“Indeed you were,” said Jean, who was as well-dressed as the target, and as wide despite a threefold difference in age. Jean was carrying a half-dozen scroll-cases. “I stumbled into you entirely by accident, sir, and I apologize. But the two of us together have smashed this poor servant’s cake.”

“Well, the fault is hardly mine.” The target carefully brushed a few stray pieces of icing off his breeches. “I was merely caught in the middle. Come now, boy, come now. It’s nothing to cry about.”

“Oh, but it is, sir,” said Locke, sniffling as artfully as he ever had in his Shades’ Hill days. “My master will have my skin for bookbindings!”

“Chin up, boy. Everyone takes a few lashes now and again. Are your hands clean?” The target held a hand out, grudgingly, and helped Locke back to his feet. “It’s only the merest cake.”

“It’s not just any cake,” sobbed Locke. “It’s my master’s birthday confection, ordered a month in advance. It’s a crown-cake from Zakasta’s. All kinds of alchemy and spices.”

“Zakasta’s,” said Jean with an admirable impression of awe. “Damn! This is awful luck.”

“That’s my pay for a year,” burbled Locke. “I don’t get to claim a man’s wages for two more to come. He’ll have it out of my hide
and
my pocket.”

“Let’s not be hasty,” said Jean soothingly. “We can’t get you a new cake, but we can at least give your master his crown back.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’?” The target rounded on Jean. “Who the devil are you to speak for me, boy?”

“Jothar Tathis,” said Jean, “solicitor’s apprentice.”

“Oh? Which solicitor?”

“Mistress Donatella Viricona,” said Jean with the hint of a smile. “Of Meraggio’s.”

“Ahhhh,” said the target, as though Jean had just pointed a loaded crossbow directly at his privates. Mistress Viricona was one of Camorr’s best-known litigators, a woman who served as the voice of several powerful noble families. Anyone who slung parchment for a living was bound to know her legend. “I see … but—”

“We owe this poor boy a crown,” said Jean. “Come, we can split the sum. I might have stumbled into you, but you certainly could have avoided him if you’d been more careful.”

Locke suppressed a grin that would have reached his temples if it hadn’t been checked.

“But—”

“Here, I carry enough as pocket-money.” Jean held out two gold tyrins on his right palm. “Surely it’s no hardship for you, either.”

“But—”

“What are you, a
Verrari
? Are you that much of a scrub that two tyrins is an
imposition
for you? If so, at least give me your name so I can let my mistress know who wouldn’t—”

“Fine,” said the man, holding his hands up toward Jean. “Fine! We’ll pay for the damn cake. Half and half.” He passed a pair of gold tyrins over to Locke, and watched as Jean did the same.