The Republic of Thieves (62 page)

“The invisible flower? The hypothetical flower?”

Locke arched his eyebrows and tapped the right side of his coat. Sabetha looked down, hurriedly patted her own jacket, and pulled out an unfurled stemless rose, dark purple petals limned with crimson on their tips.

“Oh, you clever little weasel,” she said. “While you poured the wine.”

“And you were watching the bottle rather than the
beau
,” said Locke with a theatrical sigh. “It’s fine. My pride’s had all the stiffness trampled out of it already. I hope you like the color, though. Karthani hothouse. It had a stem, but that made it too awkward to carry or palm.”

“I don’t mind at all.” She set the rose carefully in the middle of the table. “Assuming it doesn’t explode or put me to sleep or anything.”

“I’ve forsworn vengeance on that score,” said Locke. “But we do need to talk about that, so we might as well get it over with.”

“What’s to talk about?”

“Kidnapping,” said Locke. “Assault. Exile. Alchemy. Dirty tricks of that nature, aimed at you or me or Jean.”

“We learned a dozen ways to incapacitate someone before we were ten,” said Sabetha. “It’s perfectly routine for us. I agreed to a truce tonight—”

“We should extend the truce permanently,” said Locke. “Mutual immunity from direct personal attack. If we’re going to have this fight, let’s have it mind to mind, plan to plan, and not need to sleep under our beds because we’re afraid of waking up on a ship the next day.”

“
I’m
not afraid of waking up on a ship.”

“Push your luck, gorgeous, and eventually luck pushes back. I might be dim enough to have dinner with you in a metal cage, but consider Jean. If he’s free to make his own moves he’ll squash your little army like boiled goose liver and you’ll be on your way to Talisham in a box.”

“Fearsome as that, is he?”

“Tell me again how many people you detailed to catch him while you were busy drugging me.”

“And if the Bondsmagi interpret this as collusion—”

“It’s nothing of the sort. Hell, this only increases our entertainment value for our jackass masters. They
want
us to run this affair in our accustomed style. Skulduggery, not skull-crackery. And you can’t tell me it wouldn’t tickle your own pride.”

“Just to be clear, you’re suggesting that I should discard an approach which has already brought me one considerable success, and continue the fight at a level more suited to the restraints of your own, well, inadequacy, and I should do this because it’ll make me feel the warm glow of virtue?”

“I suppose if you discard the lovely emotional resonance of my suggestion and pin me down on cold hard meaning—”

“How strange. You sound rather like a confidence trickster. But I’ve no objection to ending a little game while I’m one-up on you,” she said with a thin smile. “Truce as discussed,
strictly
limited to you and
Jean and myself, so we can have more time to worry about the proper contest. Will you drink to it?”

“Full glass is an empty promise,” said Locke. Their glasses rang as they brought them together, and then they both gulped their wine to the last drop.

“Doubles or dishonor,” said Sabetha, speedily refilling the wine. Again they raced one another to the bottoms of their glasses, and when they finished her laugh seemed genuine enough to make Locke feel like a fresh wind had blown across whatever was smoldering in his heart.

“You have no idea,” he said, as the warm cloud of wine-haze steadily rose from his chest to his head, “how much aggravation I really am willing to put up with to hear that laugh again.”

“Oh, shit,” she said, rolling her eyes without banishing her smile. “Straight from business to skirt-chasing.”

“You’re the one plying me with wine!”

“Any woman of sense does prefer her men drunk and tractable.”

“And now you’re speaking of me possessively. Gods, keep doing that.”

“This is a far cry from the dusty mess that stormed my inn and accused me of cruelly tugging his heartstrings.”

“You try four days in the saddle without preparation and see what kind of mood it leaves you in.”

Their conversation was interrupted as an iron plank slid out from the tower and locked into place beside their cage. A waiter appeared and opened a door in the brass gridwork, through which he made several trips to deliver fresh wine and starter courses on gilded platters.

“I hope you don’t mind that I ordered for you,” said Sabetha.

“I’m at your mercy,” said Locke, whose stomach now grumbled achingly to life. Fortunately, Sabetha seemed sensitive to the awkwardness of his new appetite. She ravaged their dishes with indelicate gusto that matched his own.

There were the underwater mushrooms of the Amathel, translucent and steamed to the texture of gossamer, paired with coal-black truffles in malt and mustard sauce. There were cool buttercream
cheeses and crackling, caustic golden peppers. Spicy fried bread with sweet onions was drizzled with tart yellow yogurt, a variation on a dish Locke recognized from the cuisine of Syrune. Each of these courses was bookended with wine and more wine. Though Locke felt his own wits softening, he was heartened to see the deepening blush on Sabetha’s cheeks and the way her smiles grew steadily wider and easier as the evening wore on.

Purple twilight became full dark of night, and Karthain a sea of half-shadowed shapes suspended between blackness and alchemical sparks.

The main course was a turtle crafted to life size from glazed particolored breads. The top of the starchy creature’s shell was paper-thin, and when punched through with a serving ladle it proved to contain a lake of turtle and oyster ragout. The turtle came under enthusiastic siege from both ends of the table.

“Have you ever had a chance to look out over the Isas Scholastica before?” said Sabetha, recovering some measure of ladylike delicacy by dabbing at her chin with a silk cloth. “That’s it down behind me, just across the canal. Isle of Scholars. Home of the magi, or so they claim.”

“Claim? No, I’ve never had a chance to see it. I can’t see much now, between the darkness and the wine.”

“They don’t seem to frown on people building towers around the edges of their little sanctuary. I’ve been sightseeing up a few. I say
claim
because I’m not sure I believe they all live happily together like Collegium students in rooms. I think they’re all over the place … I think the Isas Scholastica is just where they want everyone looking.”

“All those parks and buildings and so forth down there are just a sham?”

“No, I’m pretty sure they
use
the place, just not as a sole residence.” She took a final long draught of wine and pushed her glass aside. “Though I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one down there. Not one.”

“What, would they wear signs or something? Funny hats? They’re easy enough to spot when you can see their wrists and their manners, but at a distance they must look like other people.”

“I’ve seen servants,” said Sabetha. “People driving carts, off-loading things, but those wouldn’t be Bondsmagi, surely. I’ve never seen anyone strolling the Isas Scholastica at leisure, or giving orders, or simply
talking to anyone else. No guards, no masters and mistresses, only servants. If they’re down there, they conceal themselves. Even from eyes that are hundreds of yards away.”

“They’re odd people,” said Locke, staring into the pale orange dregs of his own wine. “And I say that as a fully qualified professional odd person of the first degree. I wish they weren’t such arrogant pricks, but I suppose odd people will keep odd habits.”

“I wonder,” said Sabetha. “Do you … do you feel that your … handlers have been entirely candid with you concerning their motives for this contest of theirs?”

“Hells, no,” said Locke. “But that was an easy question. Perhaps you’ve not met my side of the magi family. Why, do you think that yours are—”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, staring out into the night. “They’ve delivered all the tools they said they would. They seem happy with my work, and I think their promises of consequences are certainly sincere. But their secrecy, their misdirection, it’s just so habitual.…”

“You’re
really
not used to feeling like a piece on a game board,” said Locke.

“No,” she said, and then she brought her brief moment of wistfulness to an end by sticking her tongue out at him. “I haven’t had all the opportunities you have to get acclimated to the sensation.”

“Oh ho! Serpent in a dress. Well, if only I wasn’t too much the gentleman to flay your spirit with a witty and cutting retort, madam, you’d be … thoroughly … um, wittily retorted at this very instant.”

“If you were any sort of actual gentleman you’d be no fun to have dinner with.”

“You admit you’re having fun?”

“I admit it’s much as I feared.” She looked down at the table for a moment before continuing. “Your presence is … steadily less of a chore and more of a comfort.”

“Well,” said Locke, chuckling, “aren’t I always delighted to be not quite the burden you were expecting!”

“Dessert?”

“Would you forgive me if I begged off?” Locke patted his stomach, which had mercifully reached the sheer physical limit of its gluttony. “I’m stuffed like a grain bag.”

“Good. You’re still too bloody thin.”

The waiter cleared their dishes and left a slate with a folded note pinned to it. Sabetha picked it up and glanced at it idly.

“What’s that?”

“Itemized bill,” she said. “They actually bring it to the table here. It’s all the rage. Lets those that can read show it off in public.”

“Strange,” said Locke. “But that’s the west for you. So what now, Mistress Gallante? A walk, a carriage ride, maybe an—”

“Now we rest on our laurels.” She rose from the table and stretched, revealing how precisely her gown and jacket were fitted to her curves. “Look, it’s not that I haven’t appreciated the break, but some things … just have to go slow.”

“Slow,” said Locke, knowing he was failing miserably to conceal his disappointment. “Of course.”

“Slow,” she repeated. “We’ve got five years and more of sharp edges to file down. I might be willing to work at it, but I don’t think I can do it in one night.”

“I see.”

“Oh, don’t give me that drowning-puppy look.” She touched his waist and gave him a kiss on the cheek that was not quite passionate but a shade longer than merely polite. “Let’s do this again. Three nights hence. I’ll pick some other interesting place.”

“Three nights hence,” said Locke, still feeling the warm press of her lips against his skin. “Three nights. All right. Just try and stop me.”

“I can’t. I seem to have promised to fight clean.” She drew a pair of leather gloves from her jacket and pulled them on.

“Can I at least walk you to your carriage?”

“Mmmmm … don’t think so,” she said mischievously. “I try to live by a cardinal rule of our shared profession, namely, ‘always leave a sucker wanting more.’ ”

She reached under the table and pulled out a coil of demi-silk rope previously hidden there. Locke watched, puzzled, as she conjured a slender metal pick in her other hand and applied it to the mechanism of the waiter’s door. It opened in seconds.

“Hey, wait a minute—”

“It was in case you tried anything tricky. Whether I would have used it to escape or hang you can remain an open question.”

“Are you serious?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she said with a grin. “But I’m definitely
sincere
. Thanks for the flower. I left you a little something in exchange.”

Then she was gone. The rope was anchored to a point on the cage beneath the table; Sabetha kicked it out the door and rappelled into the night, without a harness, sliding down on the friction of boots and gloves with her gown billowing like the petals of a wind-whipped flower.

“Gods
damn
,” whispered Locke as he watched her land safely and vanish far below. After a moment her last words finally squeezed past the film of wine clinging to his brain, and he frantically patted himself down. A piece of paper was in his left jacket pocket. A note? A love letter?

He unfolded it in haste, and discovered the bill for dinner.

“
MOVE! MOVE!
For your life, move!”

Doormen scattered from a snorting pair of barely controlled horses dragging a rickety dray tended by a single wild-eyed driver. The back of the vehicle was loaded with sacks and barrels, one of which had bled an expanding trail of gray smoke all the way down the street. With a lurching crash, the dray broke a wheel against the curb and toppled, spilling its contents in a pile before the front doors of the Sign of the Black Iris.

“It’s alchemy!” The driver, a slender, white-bearded fellow in a voluminous rat-chewed coat, leapt to the ground as smoke billowed past him. Sparks leapt and flickered amidst the spilled cargo, and he unyoked his frantic animals. “Heaps of alchemy! Fetch water and sand, or run for your gods-damned lives!”

Patrons, servants, and guards poured out of the inn to investigate the commotion, only to reel back in dismay as smoke boiled past them into the building. Crackling noises rose ominously within the haze, and fires of eerie colors burst to life. The driver of the crashed dray led
his horses across the street, where he found several boys in Black Iris livery watching the unfolding disaster.

“Here,” he shouted, thrusting the reins into one boy’s hands. “Watch my animals! I’ll be right back!”

The bearded man scuttled across the street and into the billowing murk. Green smoke, red smoke, and mustard-yellow smoke uncoiled from the spreading fire, tendrils wafting like sinister serpents of the air. The new hazes bore nauseating odors of garlic, brimstone, and mortified flesh. The entire street side of the Sign of the Black Iris was subsumed in a picturesque alchemical nightmare.

More or less hidden in the rising smoke, through which the masked afternoon sun shone dimly bronze, the driver darted down an alley beside the inn. He threw his coat and hat behind a pile of empty crates, then yanked away his baggy trousers and boots to reveal black hose and polished shoes. The beard was the last to go. Freshly peeled like a human fruit, smooth-cheeked and well-dressed, Locke Lamora strolled casually out the end of the smoky alley and into the court behind the inn.