The Republic of Thieves (67 page)

“Don’t tell me they started a fight,” said Locke, straining to banish the sudden mental image of a Sanza insulting Lord Boulidazi, and all the intersections of flesh and steel that might result.

“No, gods, no! Sylvanus bet that they couldn’t chug the Ash Bastard.
Nobody
can chug the Ash Bastard. So they tried, and got what was coming. Ha!”

Locke seized Alondo by the sweat-stained collar of his tunic and briefly forgot that the Esparan had half a decade of growth on him. “Razi,” he growled, “what the cock-blistering hell is an Ash Bastard?”

“Come down,” said the unsteady young actor. “Best see for yourself.”

Locke and Sabetha followed him to the common room, where they found the company and the evening ale-swillers even more scattered and dissipated than usual. Calo and Galdo were lying on their sides, artfully symmetrical, in the middle of a slick black-red puddle. The smell in the air was somewhere between wet animal fur and an unwashed torture chamber, but all the non-Sanza onlookers were quivering with mirth. Mistress Gloriano was the only exception.

“I said take it out to the yard! Idiots! Pink-skinned Therin infants!” She noticed Locke and Sabetha, and encompassed them with her glower. “What kind of fool tries the Ash Bastard indoors?”

“What the hell are you people
talking
about?” said Locke. He knelt beside Calo. The twins were alive, though they were liquored out of their wits and had clearly lost a fight with those potent joint antagonists, vomit and gravity.

“The Ash Bastard,” said Jasmer, who was leaning against a nearly comatose Sylvanus, “is that ghastly spittoon.”

Locke glanced where Jasmer pointed, and saw a tar-colored cask about two feet long resting sideways on the floor. The stuff spilling from it looked like campfire ashes after a hard rain.

“It’s a quaint ritual of the house,” smirked Jasmer.

“Performed in the yard!” bellowed Mistress Gloriano.

“True enough. But the gist of it, dear Lucaza, is that the Bastard collects tobacco ash and spit for weeks, when people remember not to use the floor. We test the mettle of brash young pickle-wits like your friends there by challenging them to chug the Bastard, which means we fill it to the brim with a hideous black juniper wine Mistress Gloriano imports directly from hell. We swirl it around and make them drink the slurry.”

“That’s idiotic,” said Sabetha, who was making sure Galdo still had a pulse.

“Completely,” laughed Jasmer. “No one in the history of the company has ever chugged the Ash Bastard without hucking it right back up. And lo, the Bastard is victorious once again!”

“Jasmer,” said Sabetha, lowering her voice, “not to put too fine a point on it, but we need these two unpoisoned if they’re going to keep rehearsing. In fact, we need everyone! Can’t you idiots dry out a bit—”

Sylvanus, though he seemed barely aware of the existence of his own face let alone the world beyond it, gave an elephantine snort.

“Green gills or no,” said Jasmer, “the company always takes the stage, my dear. Besides, this can hardly even be called a proper debauch by our lofty standards. Your friends hold their liquor like sieves, is the problem.”

“Sorry to make this your trouble,” said Alondo, sinking into a chair, “but we needed some help with the floor, and moving the Asinos, and we’re all too blotted to be much use, and we can’t find Jenora or Jovanno … Hey, did you two see Lord Boulidazi? He was here, too!”

“We know,” said Sabetha. “Mistress Gloriano, we need some water buckets. Lucaza, we’d better drag these two out to the yard and get to work. They’ll be stuck to the floor like barnacles if we let them alone.”

“I was going to thank you again for prying me out of Boulidazi’s grasp,” whispered Locke, “but now I think I’ll wait and see how the evening ends first.”

“How do you think I feel?” She squeezed his arm and flashed him a hint of a smile, like a fellow desert traveler sharing out precious water. “Now, pick arms or legs. Let’s heave this one outside.”

“Where the hell is Jovanno?” muttered Locke.

JEAN HAD
watched Locke ascend the stairs, skin of wine in hand, with a mix of relief and annoyance. It was past time for Locke and Sabetha to sort themselves out, or pitch themselves out of a high window. Jean’s own peace of mind would be the benefactor in either case.

He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and let the wall do the job of holding it up for a moment. What a time he must be having, when merely sitting alone and not pretending that his bruises didn’t hurt felt like an immoderate indulgence.

When he opened his eyes again, Jenora was smiling at him from two feet away.

“I’ve found a threadbare boy!” she said. “Let me help you back up to your room.”

“Oh, uh, my room?”

“Trust me,” she said, hauling him to his feet. “Until the rest of the company’s too drunk to move, you never want to be the first to fall asleep around ’em. Gods know what mischief you’ll wake up to.”

There was a strange heat on his cheeks, like the warmth of too many ales. Jenora’s hand was around his waist as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and together they made a quick exit from the common room.

“So what are you not telling me, Jovanno?” She closed the door to Locke and Jean’s chamber softly, then put her arms on his shoulders.

“Not telling you?”

“Oh, come now.” Her fingers began to work the knots between his shoulder blades. “You read, write, and figure, but scribes don’t get muscles like
this
pushing quills. I know you speak Vadran as well as Therin. You can handle a needle and thread. You fought a grown man to a standstill … not just any man, but Bert. Bert’s a scrapper and a half.”

“I’ve had a, ah, strange education,” said Jean, feeling his wits loosening as agreeably as his muscles under Jenora’s ministrations.

“You’re all strange, you Camorri. And strangely educated.”

“It’s nothing sinister. We’re just …”

“Slumming, hmm? Isn’t that what they usually call it when someone dresses down and plays beneath their station?”

“Jenora!” Jean turned around, grabbed her hands, and halted the massage. His well-soothed wits grudgingly rose to the occasion. If she’d been snooping on them a flat denial would probably be useless. “Look, imagine whatever you like, but
please
believe me … everyone is better off just taking things at face value.”

“Is there some sort of danger in my being curious?”

“Let’s just say there’s absolutely no danger in
not
being curious!”

“Rest easy. It’s an informed guess, Jovanno. Your cousin Lucaza, well, he seems a little surprised every time he notices that the world isn’t revolving around him. And Verena, she’s no scullery maid, you know? Manners, diction, learning, poise. Then there’s swordsman’s calluses on these hands of yours.” She ran her fingers lightly over his palms, and the sensation made Jean’s blood run hot in more than one place. “The gods put you all together from odd parts. There’s a story to be told.”

“There isn’t. There are so many trusts I’d be breaking … Jenora, please.”

“All right,” she said soothingly. “I can live with a bit of mystery. Let’s work on what ails you, then.”

“What ails … I don’t … oh, well, ha—”

She slipped her hands under his tunic and ran them up his back, where they started to gently but firmly put his sore muscles into something resembling their proper order. This had the natural effect of bringing them together; her breasts were warm against his upper chest, and her lips were parted in a half-smile just in front of his nose.

“Heh.” She blew playfully on his optics, fogging them over. “Not frightened of older, taller women, are you?”

“I, uh, wouldn’t really know what to be frightened of.”

“Oh? So you’re an untapped vintage, hmmm?”

“Jenora, I’m not used … surely you can see that I’m not thought of as, uh, you know—”

“You know what I
don’t
like, Jovanno?” She moved her hands and teased the thin line of hair that ran down his stomach. “Stupid men, weak men, illiterate men. Men who can’t tell a play from a pile of kindling.”

Their lips came together, and as they kissed she slowly, deliberately guided one of his hands until it rested atop a breast. She squeezed for
both of them, pushing his fingers, and Jean felt his awareness of the world narrowing to the delightful corridor of heat that seemed to be rising between them.

“Lucaza,” he whispered. “He might—”

“I have a feeling your friends are going to be up on the roof for a very long time,” she murmured. “Don’t you?”

Soon enough, by some process halfway between legerdemain and wrestling, their clothes were off and they fell into his bed. Jean could barely tell where light skin ended and dark skin began. He lay wrapped in the taste and smell and warmth of her, with smoke-colored hair falling around him like a teasing shroud. Jenora seemed very much at ease taking the lead, staying on top of him, alternately slowing and quickening the rhythm of their coupling. All too soon he reached the limit of his untrained endurance, and with a joyful, aching eruption there was one less mystery in Jean Tannen’s life.

Exhilarated, exhausted, and pleasantly bewildered, he clung to her for some time as their heartbeats slowed from a gallop to a canter. The pains of his tussle with Bertrand the Crowd seemed a hundred years in the past.

Jenora found her jacket in the mixed scatter of their clothing, pulled out a slim wooden pipe, and tamped it full of a tobacco mixture that smelled alien and spicy to Jean. They covered the room’s feeble alchemical globe and shared the pipe back and forth in the near-darkness, talking softly by the orange glow of the embers.

“So I really was your first.”

“Was it that obvious? Would you have known, even if I hadn’t said?”

“Enthusiasm is the first step,” she said. “Artfulness comes later.”

“I hope I didn’t disappoint you.”

“I’m not displeased, Jovanno. Hells, having a lover that’s new to the dance means you can train him properly. Give me a few nights and I’ll have you whipped into proper form.”

“The Asino brothers … they always, well, they always invited me to go with them when they went out. To buy it, you know.”

“There’s no shame in doing that. And there’s no shame in not having done it. But those two are
hounds
, Jovanno. Any woman could smell it a mile away. Sometimes a run with the hounds is just what
you’re in the mood for, but in the end they’ll always roll around in muck and shit on your floor.”

“Oh, they’ve got an endearing side,” said Jean. “It comes out once a month, when the first moon is full. They’re like backwards werewolves.”

“Well,” she said, “when I take someone into my bed, I prefer brains and balls in more equal proportion.”

“I like the sound of that. Hey, there’s a … sorry, beneath your legs, did we …?”

“Ah. My apprentice, allow me to introduce you to the concept of the wet spot.”

“Is that uncomfortable?”

“Well, it’s not what I’d call ideal. Hey, what are you—”

With an enthusiastic excess of groping and giggling, he applied his strength to shifting their positions. In a few moments, he’d pushed her to the dry side of the bed and taken her former place.

“Mmmm. Jovanno, you have a gallant streak. Another smoke?”

“Absolutely.”

They were just finishing carefully lighting the second bowl when the door burst open.

“Jovanno,” shouted Locke, “it’s the Asino brothers, you wouldn’t believe what they
oh my gods holy shit!
”

He stared for a second or two, then whirled away and faced out into the hall.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize—”

“The idiot twins,” said Jean, “are they in trouble?”

“No,” said Locke, with less than believable haste. “No, no, no. Actually, it’s not important at all. We’ve got it handled. You, uh, you just … hell, I can sleep in the common room, you two just forget I exist. Sorry. Have, uh, have a good time!”

“We are,” said Jenora, calmly exhaling a line of smoke.

“Great! Well! Excellent! Just … going now!”

“He’s down off the roof a lot sooner than I would have thought,” said Jenora once the door was closed again.

“Yeah,” said Jean, frowning. “Something must have happened. Whatever the Asinos did—”

“Your friends,” said Jenora. “They sort of look to you to hold them together when there’s trouble, don’t they?”

“Well, that’s a pretty flattering way of putting it, but—”

“Let ’em fend for themselves for a night,” she whispered. “Now we’ll have privacy. If Verena wants to sort Lucaza out she can always take him to my room.”

“She can,” said Jean. “She sure as hell
can
. So, uh, is it too soon to start hearing about this artfulness you mentioned?”

“
LONG SUMMER
of the Therin Throne,” shouted Calo, arms outflung to encompass the inn-yard, “ordained time for building and growing, while earth and sky are generous. These years for princely Aurin lie fallow as a field, plowed and yet unseeded with
valorrrrrruurrrrrrrgh—
”

Calo lurched to his knees and ended what had been a fine, vigorous declamation by vomiting. Locke, watching from the shade of a wall, put his hands to his forehead and groaned.

“Gods above,” said Moncraine, “I’ve seen songbirds with more iron in their gullets than you Camorri. One dance with the Ash Bastard and you’re acting like you’ve been killed in the wars. Understudy!”

Galdo, his complexion a shade green in its own right, seemed uninterested for once in making sport of Calo’s discomfort. He stepped forward and placed his hands on his brother’s shoulders.

“I can do it … . I’m fine …” panted Calo. He spat and wobbled to his feet.

“Like hell, idiot,” said Galdo. “Here’s a thought. Let’s do it together.”

“What do you mean?”

“Toss it back and forth.” Galdo faced Moncraine, and spoke with the precise tone and volume of his twin before the stumble: “Swords unblooded hang in scabbards unworn, and, sun-like in its dispensations, the imperial court sheds grandeur on the world.”