The Lies of Locke Lamora (76 page)

“Gray King,” he said.

“Thorn of Camorr.”

“I’m pleased,” said Locke. “I thought you might have left already. But I’m sorry…you needed that frigate, didn’t you? I had my good friend, the Countess Amberglass, send it to the bottom of the fucking bay.”

“That deed,” said the Gray King in a weary voice, “will lose its savor in a few minutes, I assure you. Where’s Jean Tannen?”

“On his way,” said Locke. “On his way.”

Locke walked forward slowly, cutting the distance between them in half.

“I warned the Falconer not to toy with Tannen,” said the Gray King. “Apparently, my warning wasn’t heeded. I congratulate you both for your improbable resilience, but now I fear I’ll be doing you a favor by killing you before the Bondsmagi can take their revenge.”

“You’re assuming the Falconer is dead,” said Locke. “He’s still breathing, but he’ll, ah, never play any musical instruments again.”

“Interesting. How have you done all this, I wonder? Why does the Death Goddess scorn to snuff you like a candle? I wish I knew.”

“Fuck your wishes. Why did you do it the way you did, Luciano? Why didn’t you try for an honest accommodation with us? One might have been reached.”

“Might,” said the Gray King. “There was no room for ‘might,’ Lamora. There were only my needs. You had what I needed, and you were too dangerous to let live once I had it. You’ve made that only too clear.”

“But you could have settled for simple theft,” said Locke. “I would have given it all to keep Calo and Galdo and Bug alive. I would have given it
all
, had you put it to me like that!”

“What thief does not fight to hold what he has?”

“One that has something better,” said Locke. “The stealing was more the point for us than the keeping; if the keeping had been so fine, we would have found something to fucking do with it all.”

“Easy to say, in hindsight.” The Gray King sighed. “You would have said something different, when they were still alive.”

“We stole from the
peers
, you asshole. We stole from them
exclusively
. Of all the people to double-cross…You aided the nobility when you tried to wipe us out. You gave the people you hate a gods-damned gift.”

“So you relieved them of their
money
, Master Lamora, scrupulously refraining from taking lives in the process…. Should I applaud? Name you a brother-in-arms? There’s always more
money
, Lamora. Theft alone would not teach them the lesson they had coming.”

“How could you do it, Luciano? How could a man who lost what you lost, who felt what you felt for Barsavi do the same to
me
?”

“The same?” The Gray King leapt up; the rapier was in his hand. “The
same
? Were your parents murdered in their beds to protect a lie, Master Lamora? Were your infant siblings put to the knife so they could never grow old enough to revenge? Thief! You don’t know what crime truly
is
.”

“I lost three brothers at your hands,” said Locke. “I almost lost four. You didn’t need to do it. When you thought you were finished with me, you tried to kill
hundreds
. Children, Luciano,
children
—born years after Barsavi murdered your parents. It must be nice to be righteous; from where I’m standing it looks like fucking lunacy.”

“They were sheltered by the Secret Peace,” said the Gray King. “They were parasites, guilty by birth. Save your arguments, Priest. Don’t you think I’ve had them with myself on too many nights to count over the past twenty-two fucking
years
?”

The Gray King took a step forward, the tip of his blade rising in Locke’s direction.

“If it were in my power,” he said, “I would knock this city to the ground and write the names of my family in its ashes.”

“Ila justicca vei cala,”
Locke whispered. He stepped forward once again, until they were separated by barely two yards. He slid Reynart’s rapier out of its scabbard and stood at guard.

“Justice is red.” The Gray King faced Locke with his knees bent, the true edge of his rapier facing the ground, in the position Camorri fencers called the
waiting wolf
. “It is indeed.”

Locke struck out before the Gray King had finished speaking; for an eyeblink darting steel cut an afterimage in the air between the two men. The Gray King parried Locke’s thrust, forte to foible, and riposted with speed more than equal to Locke’s own. Lamora avoided a skewering only by an undignified backward lunge; he landed in a crouch with his left hand splayed out to keep himself from going ass-over-elbows on the hard wood of the deck.

Warily, Locke circled in the direction the lunge had knocked him, barely rising from his crouch. A dagger appeared in his left hand as though by legerdemain; this he twirled several times.

“Hmm,” said the Gray King. “Tell me you don’t mean to fight Verrari-style. I find the school insipid.”

“Please yourself.” Locke wiggled his dagger suggestively. “I’ll try not to get too much blood on your cloak.”

Sighing theatrically, the Gray King plucked one of two narrow-hilted daggers from his own belt, and held it out so that his blades opened in the air before him like jaws. He then took two exaggerated hops forward.

Locke flicked his gaze down to the Gray King’s feet for a fraction of a second, realizing almost too late that he was
intended
to do just that. He whipped himself to his right and barely managed a parry with his dagger; the Gray King’s thrust slid off and cut the air just an inch from his left shoulder. His own riposte met the Gray King’s dagger as though intended for it. Again, Anatolius was too fast by half.

For a few desperate seconds, the two men were fully engaged. Their blades wove silver ghosts in the air—crossing and uncrossing, feint and false feint, thrust and parry. Locke remained just out of reach of the Gray King’s longer, more muscular cuts while the Gray King caught and turned Locke’s every lunge with easy precision. At last they flew apart and stood panting, staring at one another with the resigned, implacable hatred of fighting dogs.

“Hmmm,” said the Gray King, “an illuminating passage.”

He flicked out almost casually with his rapier; Locke darted back once again and parried feebly, tip to tip, like a boy in his first week of training. The Gray King’s eyes glittered.

“
Most
illuminating.” Again, a casual flick; again, Locke jumped back.

“You’re not actually very
good
at this, are you?”

“It would be to my advantage if you thought so, wouldn’t it?”

At this the Gray King actually laughed. “Oh, no. No, no,
no
.” With one decisive gesture, he flung his cloak and mantle to the ground. A wild grin had etched deep furrows of anticipation into his lean face. “No more
bluffs
. No more
games
.”

And then he fell on Locke, his footwork a blur, his brutality unmatched by anything in Locke’s memory. Behind his blade, there were twenty years of experience and twenty years of blackest hatred. Some tiny, detached part of Locke’s mind cooly registered his own inadequacy as he desperately flailed parry after parry, chasing phantom thrusts with his eyes and hands even while the Gray King’s steel was punching through cloth and flesh.

Once, twice, three times—in between breaths, the Gray King’s blade sang out and bit Locke’s left wrist, forearm, and biceps.

Cold surprise hit Locke harder than the pain of the thrusts; then the warm blood began to flow across his sweat-slick skin, tickling devilishly, and a wave of nausea rose up from the pit of his stomach. The dagger dropped from his left hand, red with the wrong man’s blood.

“At last we come to something you cannot
pretend
your way out of, Master Lamora.” The Gray King flicked Locke’s blood from the tip of his rapier and watched it splash against the wooden deck in an arc. “Goodbye.”

Then he was moving again, and in the wine-colored light of the alchemical globes the full length of his blade was bright scarlet.

“Aza Guilla,” Locke whispered, “give me justice for the death of my friends. Give me blood for the death of my brothers!”

His voice rising to a shout, he thrust, missed, and thrust again, willing all of his desperate hatred and fear into each cut, driving the blade faster than he ever had in his life, and still the Gray King caught and turned his every thrust; still the Gray King displaced himself from the path of Locke’s cuts as though fighting a child.

“It seems that the final difference between us, Master Lamora,” said the Gray King between passages, “is that I
knew
what I was doing when I stayed here to meet you one last time.”

“No,” gasped Locke, “the difference between us is that
I
am going to
have
my revenge.”

Cold pain exploded in Locke’s left shoulder, and he stared down in horror at the Gray King’s blade, sunk three inches into his flesh just above his heart. The Gray King twisted savagely, scraping bone as he withdrew his rapier, and the sensation sent Locke tumbling to his knees, his useless left arm thrown out instinctively to break his fall.

But instinct, too, betrayed him here; his hand struck the hard deck palm-up, folded awkwardly under the full weight of his arm, and with a terrible sharp snap his left wrist broke. He was too shocked to scream. A split second later the Gray King slammed a vicious kick into the side of Locke’s head, and Locke’s world became a kaleidoscope of agony, tumbling end over end as stinging tears filled his eyes. Reynart’s rapier clattered across the deck.

Locke was conscious of the wood pressing up against his back. He was conscious of the blood that misted his vision. He was conscious of the bright, hot rings of pain that radiated from his shattered wrist, and of the slick wet agony of the hole in his shoulder joint. But most of all he was conscious of his own shame, his own terror of failure, and the great weight of three dead friends, lying unavenged, lying unquiet because Locke Lamora had
lost
.

He sucked in a great gasping breath, kindling new flickers of pain all across his chest and back, but now it was all one pain, all one red sensation that drove him up from the ground. Bellowing without an ounce of reason in his voice, he pulled his legs in and whipped himself up, attempting to tackle the Gray King around the stomach.

The killing thrust that had been falling toward Locke’s heart struck his left arm instead; impelled with every ounce of the Gray King’s ferocity, it punched fully through the meat of Locke’s slender forearm and out the other side. Wild with pain, Locke threw this arm forward and up as the Gray King struggled to withdraw; the edges of his rapier worked a terrible business on Locke’s flesh, but stayed caught, sawing back and forth at the muscle as the two men struggled.

The Gray King’s dagger loomed before Locke’s eyes; some animal instinct drove Locke to lash out with the only weapon available. His teeth sank into the first three fingers of the Gray King’s hand where they wrapped around the hilt; he tasted blood and felt bone beneath the tips of his teeth. The Gray King cried out and the dagger fell sideways, rebounding off Locke’s left shoulder before clattering to the deck. The Gray King jerked his hand free, and Locke spat the man’s skin and blood back at him.

“Give it up!” the Gray King screamed, punching Locke atop his skull, then across his nose. With his good right arm, Locke clutched for the Gray King’s sheathed dagger. The Gray King slapped his hand away, laughing.

“You can’t win. You can’t win, Lamora!” With every exhortation, the Gray King rained blows on Locke, who clutched at him desperately, as a drowning man might hug a floating timber. The Gray King laughed savagely as he pummeled Lamora’s skull, his ears, his forehead, and his shoulders, deliberately driving his fist down into the seeping wound. “You…cannot…beat me!”

“I don’t have to beat you,” Locke whispered, grinning madly up at the Gray King, his face streaked with blood and tears, his nose broken and his lips cracked, his vision swimming and edged with blackness. “I don’t have to beat you, motherfucker. I just have to keep you here…until Jean shows up.”

At that, the Gray King became truly desperate, and his blows fell like rain, but Locke was heedless of them, laughing the wet braying laugh of utter madness. “I just have to keep you here…until Jean…shows up!”

Hissing fury, the Gray King shook Locke’s grip off enough to make a grab for his sheathed dagger. As he tore his left hand from Locke’s right, Lamora let a gold tyrin coin fall from his sleeve into his palm; a desperate flick of his wrist sent the coin caroming off the wall behind the Gray King, echoing loudly.

“There he is, motherfucker!” Locke yelled, spraying blood across the front of the Gray King’s shirt. “Jean! Help me!”

And the Gray King whirled, dragging Locke halfway around with him; whirled in fear of Jean Tannen before he realized that Locke must be lying; whirled for just the half second that Locke would have begged from any god that would hear his prayer. Whirled for the half second that was worth Locke’s entire life.

He whirled just long enough for Locke Lamora to snake his right arm around the Gray King’s waist, and slide out the dagger sheathed there, and bury it with a final scream of pain and triumph in the Gray King’s back, just to the right of his spine.

The Gray King’s back arched, and his mouth hung open, gasping in the icy thrall of shock; with both of his arms he pushed at Locke’s head, as though by prying the smaller man off him he could undo his wound, but Locke held fast, and in an impossibly calm voice he whispered, “Calo Sanza. My brother and my friend.”

Backward, the Gray King toppled, and Locke slid the knife out of his back just before he struck the deck. Locke fell on top of him. He raised the dagger once again and brought it down in the middle of the Gray King’s chest, just beneath his rib cage. Blood spurted and the Gray King flailed, moaning. Locke’s voice rose as he worked the knife farther in: “Galdo Sanza, my brother and my friend!”

With one last convulsive effort, the Gray King spat warm coppery blood into Locke’s face and grabbed at the dagger that transfixed his chest; Locke countered by bearing down with his useless left side, batting the Gray King’s hands away. Sobbing, Locke wrenched the dagger out of the Gray King’s chest, raised it with a wildly shaking right arm, and brought it down in the middle of the Gray King’s neck. He sawed at the windpipe until the neck was half-severed and great rivers of blood were flowing on the deck. The Gray King shuddered one last time and died, his wide white eyes still fixed on Locke’s.