The Gentleman Bastard Series 3-Book Bundle: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, The Republic of Thieves (16 page)

“So … what you’re saying is, he had to do something to all of us that knew about the
coin. All of us that could … figure it out or tell about it. And I was the only one
he could sell.”

“Correct. And as for the others, well …” Chains shrugged. “It’ll be quick. Two, three
weeks from now, nobody’ll even remember their names. You know how it goes in the hill.”

“I got them killed?”

“Yes.” Chains didn’t soften his voice. “You really did. As surely as you tried to
hurt Veslin, you killed Gregor and four or five of your little comrades into the bargain.”

“Shit.”

“Do you see now, what consequences really are? Why you have to move slowly, think
ahead, control the situation? Why you need to settle down and wait for time to give
you
sense
to match your talent for mischief? We have years to work together, Locke. Years for
you and my other little hellions to practice quietly. And that has to be the rule,
if you want to stay here. No games, no cons, no scams, no
anything
except when and where I tell you. When someone like you pushes the world, the world
pushes
back
. Other people are likely to get hurt. Am I clear?”

Locke nodded.

“Now.” Chains snapped his shoulders back and rolled his head from side to side; there
was a series of snaps and cracks from somewhere inside him. “Ahhh. Do you know what
a death-offering is?”

“No.”

“It’s something we do, for the Benefactor. Not just those of us who are initiates
of the Thirteenth. Something all of us crooks do for one another, all the Right People
of Camorr. When we lose someone we care about, we get something valuable and we throw
it away. For
real
, you understand. Into the sea, into a fire, something like that. We do this to help
our friends on their way to what comes next. Clear so far?”

“Yeah, but my old master …”

“Oh, he does it, trust me. He’s a wretched miser and he always does it in private,
but he does it for each and every one of you he loses. Figures he wouldn’t tell you
about it. But here’s the thing—there’s a rule that has to be followed with the offering.
It can’t be given willingly, you understand? It can’t be something you already have.
It has to be something you go out and steal from someone else, special, without their
permission or their, ah, complicity. Get me? It has to be genuine theft.”

“Uh, sure.”

Father Chains cracked his knuckles. “You’re going to make a death-offering for every
single boy or girl you got killed, Locke. One for Veslin, one for Gregor. One for
each of your little friends in Streets. I’m sure I’ll know the count in just a day
or two.”

“But I … they weren’t …”

“Of course they were your friends, Locke. They were your very
good
friends. Because they’re going to teach you that when you kill someone, there are
consequences. It is one thing to kill in a duel, to kill in self-defense, to kill
for vengeance. It is another thing entirely to kill simply because you are careless.
Those deaths are going to hang over your head until you’re so careful you make the
saints of Perelandro weep. Your death-offering will be a thousand full crowns per
head. All of it properly stolen by your own hand.”

“But I … what? A thousand crowns? Each? A
thousand
?”

“You can take that death-mark off your neck when you offer up the last coin of it,
and not a moment sooner.”

“But that’s impossible! It’ll take … forever!”

“It’ll take years. But we’re thieves, not murderers, here in my temple. And the price
of your life with me is that you must show respect for the dead. Those boys and girls
are your
victims
, Locke. Get that through your head. This is something you owe them, before the gods.
Something you must swear to by blood before you can stay. Are you willing to do so?”

Locke seemed to think for a few seconds. Then he shook his head as though to clear
it, and nodded.

“Then hold out your left hand.”

As Locke did so, Chains produced a slender blackened-steel stiletto from within his
robe and drew it across his own left palm; then, holding Locke’s outstretched hand
firmly, he scratched a shallow, stinging cut between the boy’s thumb and index finger.
They shook hands firmly, until their palms were thick with mingled blood.

“Then you’re a Gentleman Bastard, like the rest of us. I’m your
garrista
and you’re my
pezon
, my little soldier. I have your oath in blood to do what I’ve told you to do? To
make the offerings for the souls of the people you’ve wronged?”

“I’ll do it,” Locke said.

“Good. That means you can stay for dinner. Let’s get down off this roof.”

BEHIND THE curtained door at the rear of the sanctuary there was a grimy hall leading
to several grimy rooms; moisture and mold and poverty were on abundant display. There
were cells with sleeping pallets, lit by oiled-paper lamps that gave off a light the
color of cheap ale. Scrolls and bound books were scattered on the pallets; robes in
questionable states of cleanliness hung from wall hooks.

“This is a necessary nonsense.” Chains gestured to and fro as he led Locke into the
room closest to the curtained door, as though showing off a palace. “Occasionally,
we play host to a tutor or a traveling priest of Perelandro’s order, and they have
to see what they expect.”

Chains’ own sleeping pallet (for Locke saw that the wall-manacles in the other room
could surely reach none of the other sleeping chambers back here) was set atop a block
of solid stone, a sort of heavy shelf jutting from the wall. Chains reached under
the stale blankets, turned something that made a metallic clacking noise, and lifted
his bed up as though it were a coffin lid; the blankets turned out to be on some sort
of wooden panel with hinges set into the stone. An inviting golden light spilled from
within the stone block, along with the spicy smells of high-class Camorri cooking.
Locke knew that aroma only from the way it drifted out of the Alcegrante district
or down from certain inns and houses.

“In you go!” Chains gestured once again, and Locke peeked over the lip of the stone
block. A sturdy wooden ladder led down a square shaft just slightly wider than Chains’
shoulders; it ended about twenty feet below, on a polished wood floor. “Don’t gawk,
climb!”

Locke obeyed. The rungs of the ladder were wide and rough and very narrowly spaced;
he had no trouble moving down it, and when he stepped off he was in a tall passage
that might have been torn out of the duke’s own tower. The floor was indeed polished
wood, long straight golden-brown boards that creaked pleasantly beneath his feet.
The arched ceiling and the walls were entirely covered with a thick milky golden glass
that shone faintly, like a rainy-season sun peeking out from behind heavy clouds.
The illumination came from everywhere and nowhere; the wall scintillated. With a series
of thumps and grunts and jingles (for Locke saw that he now carried the day’s donated
coins in a small burlap sack) Chains came down and hopped to the floor beside him.
He gave a quick tug to a rope tied to the ladder, and the false bed-pallet fell back
down and locked itself above.

“There. Isn’t this much nicer?”

“Yeah.” Locke ran one hand down the flawless surface of one of the walls. The glass
was noticeably cooler than the air. “It’s Elderglass, isn’t it?”

“Sure as hell isn’t plaster.” Chains shooed Locke along the passage to the left, where
it turned a corner. “The whole temple cellar is surrounded by the stuff. Sealed in
it. The temple above was actually built to settle into it, hundreds of years ago.
There’s not a break in it, as far as I can tell, except for one or two little tunnels
that lead out to other interesting places. It’s flood-tight, and never lets in a drop
from below even when the water’s waist-deep in the streets. And it keeps out rats
and roaches and suckle-spiders and all that crap, so long as we mind our comings and
goings.”

The clatter of metal pans and the low giggle of the Sanza brothers reached them from
around the corner just before they turned it, entering into a comfortably appointed
kitchen with tall wooden cabinets and a long witchwood table, surrounded by high-backed
chairs. Locke actually rubbed his eyes when he saw their black velvet cushions, and
the varnished gold leaf that gilded their every surface.

Calo and Galdo were working at a brick cooking shelf, shuffling pans and banging knives
over a huge white alchemical hearthslab. Locke had seen smaller blocks of this stone,
which gave off a smokeless heat when water was splashed atop it, but this one must
have weighed as much as Father Chains. As Locke watched, Calo (Galdo?) held a pan
in the air and poured water from a glass pitcher onto the sizzling slab; the great
uprush of steam carried a deep bouquet of sweet cooking smells, and Locke felt saliva
spilling down the back of his mouth.

In the air over the witchwood table, a striking chandelier blazed; Locke would, in
later years, come to recognize it as an armillary sphere, fashioned from glass with
an axis of solid gold. At its heart shone an alchemical globe with the white-bronze
light of the sun; surrounding this were the concentric glass rings that marked the
orbits and processions of the world and all her celestial cousins, including the three
moons; at the outermost edges were a hundred dangling stars that looked like spatters
of molten glass somehow frozen at the very instant of their outward explosions. The
light ran and glimmered and burned along every facet of the chandelier, yet there
was something
wrong
about it. It was as if the Elderglass ceilings and walls were somehow drawing the
light
out
of the alchemical sun; leavening it, weakening it, redistributing it along the full
length and breadth of all the Elderglass in this uncanny cellar.

“Welcome to our real home, our little temple to the Benefactor.” Chains tossed his
bag of coins down on the table. “Our patron has always
sort of danced upon the notion that austerity and piety go hand in hand; down here,
we show our appreciation for things by
appreciating
, if you get me. Boys! Look who survived his interview!”

“We never doubted,” said one twin.

“For even a second,” said the other.

“But now can we hear what he did to get himself kicked out of Shades’ Hill?” The question,
spoken in near-perfect unison, had the ring of repeated ritual.

“When you’re older.” Chains raised his eyebrows at Locke and shook his head, ensuring
the boy could see the gesture clearly. “
Much
older. Locke, I don’t expect that you know how to set a table?”

When Locke shook his head, Chains led him over to a tall cabinet just to the left
of the cooking hearth. Inside were stacks of white porcelain plates; Chains held one
up so Locke could see the hand-painted heraldic design (a mailed fist clutching an
arrow and a grapevine) and the bright gold gilding on the rim.

“Borrowed,” said Chains, “on a rather permanent basis from Doña Isabella Manechezzo,
the old dowager aunt of our own Duke Nicovante. She died childless and rarely gave
parties, so it wasn’t as though she was
using
them all. You see how some of our acts that might seem purely cruel and larcenous
to outsiders are actually sort of
convenient
, if you look at them in the right way? That’s the hand of the Benefactor at work,
or so we like to think. It’s not as though we could tell the difference if he didn’t
want us to.”

Chains handed the plate to Locke (who clutched at it with greatly exaggerated care
and peered very closely at the gold rim) and ran his right hand lovingly over the
surface of the witchwood table. “Now this, this used to be the property of Marius
Cordo, a master merchant of Tal Verrar. He had it in the great cabin of a triple-decker
galley. Huge! Eighty-six oars. I was a bit upset with him, so I lifted it, his chairs,
his carpets and tapestries, and all of his clothes. Right off the ship. I left his
money; I was making a point. I dumped everything but the table into the Sea of Brass.

“And that!” Chains lifted a finger in the direction of the celestial chandelier. “That
was being shipped overland from Ashmere in a guarded wagon convoy for the old Don
Leviana. Somehow, in transit, it transformed itself into a box of straw.” Chains took
three more plates out of the cabinet and set them in Locke’s arms. “Damn, I was fairly
good back when I actually worked for a living.”

“Urk,” said Locke, under the weight of the fine dinnerware.

“Oh, yeah.” Chains gestured to the chair at the head of the table. “Put one there
for me. One for yourself on my left. Two for Calo and Galdo on my right. If you were
my servant, what I’d tell you to lay out is a
casual setting
. Can you say that for me?”

“A casual setting.”

“Right. This is how the high and mighty eat when it’s just close blood and maybe a
friend or two.” Chains let the set of his eyes and the tone of his voice suggest that
he expected this lesson to be retained, and he began to introduce Locke to the intricacies
of glasses, linen napkins, and silver eating utensils.

“What kind of knife is this?” Locke held a rounded buttering utensil up for Chains’
inspection. “It’s all wrong. You couldn’t kill
anyone
with this.”

“Well, not very easily, I’ll grant you that, my boy.” Chains guided Locke in the placement
of the butter knife and assorted small dishes and bowls. “But when the quality get
together to dine, it’s impolite to knock anybody off with anything but poison.
That
thing is for scooping butter, not slicing windpipes.”

“This is a
lot
of trouble to go to just to eat.”

“Well, in Shades’ Hill you may be able to eat cold bacon and dirt pies off one another’s
asses for all your old master cares. But now you’re a Gentleman Bastard, emphasis
on the
Gentleman
. You’re going to learn how to eat like this, and how to serve people who eat like
this.”