The Gentleman Bastard Series (47 page)

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“I figured if you were being adequately cautious, they’d never be able to get the better of you. Looks like your attention was somewhere else.”

“They said they wanted our preferences.”

“Yeah,” said Chains. “It’s a juvie game. Most of the seconds don’t get to pull real jobs just yet, so they train themselves up by pushing other
seconds around. You should be proud of yourselves; you finally got noticed. Now you’ve got a little war until one of you cries mercy. Soft talk only, mind you.”

“So,” Locke said slowly, “what should we do?”

Chains reached over and grabbed Locke’s fist, then mimed swinging it into Calo’s jaw. “Repeat as necessary,” said Chains, “until your problems are spitting up teeth.”

“We
tried
that. And they jumped us while Jean was away. And you know I’m not much good at that sort of thing.”

“Sure I do. So next time, make sure you’ve got Jean with you. And use that devious little brain of yours.” Chains began melting a cylinder of sealing wax over a small candle. “But I don’t want to see anything too elaborate, Locke. Don’t pull the watch or the temples or the duke’s army or anyone else into it. Try and make it look like you’re just the pack of ordinary sneak-thieves I tell everyone you are.”

“Oh, great.” Locke folded his arms while Calo and Galdo washed one another’s bruised faces with wet cloths. “So it’s just another bloody
test
.”

“What a clever boy,” muttered Chains, pouring liquid wax into a tiny silver vessel. “Of
course
it is. And I’ll personally be very upset if those little shits aren’t begging and pleading to give you
their
preference before midsummer.”

2

THE NEXT day, Locke and the Sanza brothers sat on the very same pier at the very same time. All over the Shifting Market, merchants were hauling down canvas tarps and furling canopies, for the rains that had drenched the city all night and half the morning were long gone.

“I must be seeing things,” came the voice of Tesso Volanti, “because I can’t imagine that you shit-wits would really be sitting there right where we beat the trouser gravy out of you just yesterday.”

“Why not,” said Locke, “since we’re closer to our turf than yours, and you’re going to be using your balls for tonsils in about two minutes?”

The three Gentlemen Bastards arose; facing them were the same halfdozen Half-Crowns, with eager smiles on their faces.

“I see you’re none better at sums than you were when we left you,” said Tesso, cracking his knuckles.

“Funny you should say that,” said Locke, “since the sums have changed.” He pointed past the Half-Crowns. Tesso warily shifted his head
to look behind him, but when he saw Jean Tannen standing in the alley behind his gang, he laughed.

“Still in our favor, I’d say.” He strolled toward Jean, who simply looked at him with a bland smile on his round face. “What’s this? A fat red bastard. I can see your glass eyes in your vest pocket. What do you think you’re doing, fatty?”

“My name’s Jean Tannen, and I’m the ambush.”

Long months of training with Don Maranzalla had left Jean looking little different than when he’d first begun, but Locke and the Sanzas knew that a sort of alchemy had taken place
beneath
his soft exterior. Tesso stepped within his reach, grinning, and Jean’s arms lashed out like the brass pistons in a Verrari water-engine.

Tesso reeled backward, arms and legs wobbling like a marionette caught in a high wind. His head bowed forward; then he simply collapsed in a heap, his eyes rolling back in their sockets.

A minor sort of hell broke loose in the alley. Three Half-Crown boys charged Locke and the Sanzas; the two girls approached Jean warily. One of them tried to dash a handful of alley gravel in his face. He sidestepped, caught her arm, and swung her easily into one of the alley’s stone walls. One of Don Maranzalla’s lessons: let walls and streets do the work for you when you fight with empty hands. As she bounced backward, Jean clothes-lined her with a swift hook from his right arm and sent her face-first to the gravel.

“It’s
not
polite to hit girls,” said her companion, circling him.

“It’s even less polite to hit my friends,” said Jean.

She replied by pivoting on her left heel and snapping a swift kick at his throat; he recognized the art called
chasson
, a sort of foot-boxing imported from Tal Verrar. He deflected the kick with the palm of his right hand, and she whirled into a second, using the momentum from her first to send her left leg whirling up and around. But Jean was moving past it before she struck. Her thigh rather than her foot slapped into his side, and he snaked his left arm around it. While she flailed for balance, he let her have a vicious kidney punch, and then he hooked her right leg out from beneath her, sending her to the gravel on her back, where she lay writhing in pain.

“Ladies,” said Jean, “you must accept my deepest apologies.”

Locke, as usual, was getting the worst of his encounter, until Jean grabbed his opponent by the shoulder and spun him around. Jean wrapped his heavy arms around the boy’s waist and planted a head-butt in
the boy’s solar plexus. No sooner did the Half-Crown gasp in pain than Jean straightened up, cracking the boy’s chin against the back of his head. The boy fell backward, dazed, and at that point the issue was decided. Calo and Galdo had been evenly matched with their opponents; when Jean suddenly loomed before them (with Locke at his side doing his best to look dangerous), the Half-Crowns scrambled back and put their hands in the air.

“Well, Tesso,” said Locke when the curly-haired boy arose a few minutes later, bloody-nosed and wobbly, “will you be giving over your preference now, or shall I let Jean beat on you some more?”

“I admit it was well done,” said Tesso as his gang limped into a semicircle behind him, “but I’d call us even at one and one. You’ll see us again soon.”

3

SO THE battle went, as the days lengthened and spring turned into summer. Chains excused the boys from sitting the steps with him after the first hour of the afternoon, and they began roaming the north of Camorr, hunting Half-Crowns with vigor.

Tesso responded by unleashing the full strength of his little band. The Full Crowns were the largest real gang in Camorr, and their seconds had a comparable pool of recruits, some of them fresh from Shades’ Hill. Even with the weight of numbers, however, the prowess of Jean Tannen was hard to answer, and so the nature of the battle changed.

The Full Crowns split into smaller groups, attempting to isolate and ambush the Gentlemen Bastards when they weren’t together. For the most part, Locke kept his gang close at hand, but sometimes individual errands were unavoidable. Locke was beaten fairly badly on several occasions; he came to Jean one afternoon nursing a split lip and a pair of bruised shins.

“Look,” he said, “it’s been a few days since we had any piece of Tesso. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to lurk just south of the market tomorrow and look like I’m up to something. You’re going to hide a long way off, two or three hundred yards maybe. Somewhere they can’t possibly spot you.”

“I’ll never get to you in time,” said Jean.

“The point isn’t to get to me before I get beaten,” said Locke. “The point is, when you
do
get there, you pound the crap out of him. You beat
him so hard they’ll hear the screaming in Talisham. Smack him around like you’ve never smacked him before.”

“With pleasure,” said Jean, “but it won’t happen. They’ll only run away when they see me coming, as always. The one thing I can’t do is keep up with them on foot.”

“Just you leave that to me,” said Locke, “and fetch your sewing kit. There’s something I need you to do for me.”

4

SO IT was that Locke Lamora lurked in an alley on an overcast day, very near to the place where the whole affair with the Half-Crowns had started. The Shifting Market was doing a brisk business, as folk attempted to get their shopping done before the sky started pouring down rain. Out there somewhere, watching Locke with comfortable anonymity from a little cockleshell boat, was Jean Tannen.

Locke only had to lurk conspicuously for half an hour before Tesso found him.

“Lamora,” he said. “I thought you’d know better by now. I don’t see any of your friends in the neighborhood.”

“Tesso. Hello.” Locke yawned. “I think today’s the day you’ll be giving over your preference to me.”

“In a pig’s fucking eye,” said the older boy. “You know I don’t even need help to knock you flat. What I think I’m going to do is take your clothes when I’m done and throw them in a canal. That’ll be right humorous. Hell, the longer you put off bending the knee, the more fun I can have with you.”

He advanced confidently to the attack, knowing that Locke had never once so much as kept up with him in a fight. Locke met him head-on, shaking the left sleeve of his coat strangely. That sleeve was actually five feet longer than usual, courtesy of Jean Tannen’s alterations; Locke had kept it cleverly folded against his side to conceal its true nature as Tesso approached.

Although Locke had few gifts as a fighter, he could be startlingly fast, and the cuff of his sleeve had a small lead weight sewn into it to aid him in casting it. He flung it forth, wrapping it around Tesso’s chest beneath the taller boy’s arms. The lead weight carried it around as it stretched taut, and Locke caught it in his left hand.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tesso huffed. He clouted Locke just above his right eye; Locke flinched but ignored the pain. He slipped the extended sleeve into a loop of cloth that hung out of his coat’s left pocket, folded it back over itself, and pulled another cord just below it. The network of knotted cords that Jean had sewn inside his coat’s lining cinched tight; now the boys were chest to chest, and nothing short of a knife could free Tesso from the loop of thick cloth that tied them together.

Locke wrapped his arms around Tesso’s abdomen for good measure, and then wrapped his spindly legs around Tesso’s legs, just above the taller boy’s knees. Tesso shoved and slapped at Locke, struggling to part the two of them. Failing, he began punching Locke in the teeth and on the top of his head—heavy blows that left Locke seeing flashes of light.

“What the hell
is
this, Lamora?” Tesso grunted with the effort of supporting Locke’s weight in addition to his own. Finally, as Locke had hoped and expected, he threw himself forward. Locke landed on his back in the gravel, with Tesso atop him. The air burst out of Locke’s lungs, and the whole world seemed to shudder. “This is ridiculous. You can’t fight me. And now you can’t run! Give up, Lamora!”

Locke spit blood into Tesso’s face. “I don’t have to fight you and I don’t have to run.” He grinned wildly. “I just have to keep you here … until Jean gets back.”

Tesso gasped and looked around. Out, on the Shifting Market one small cockleshell boat was heading straight toward them. The plump shape of Jean Tannen was clearly visible within it, hauling rapidly on the oars.

“Oh, shit. You little
bastard
. Let me go, let me go, let me go!”

Tesso punctuated this with a series of punches. Soon enough Locke was bleeding from his nose, his lips, his ears, and somewhere under his hair. Tesso was pounding him but good, yet he continued to cling madly to the older boy. His head was whirling with the combination of pain and triumph; Locke actually started laughing, high and gleeful and perhaps a little bit mad.

“I don’t have to fight or run,” he cackled. “I changed the rules of the game. I just have to keep you here … asshole. Here … until … Jean gets back.”

“Gods
dammit
,” Tesso hissed, and he redoubled his assault on Locke, punching and spitting and biting.

“Keep hitting,” Locke sputtered. “You just keep hitting. I can take it all day. You just keep … hitting me … until … 
Jean gets back
!”

III

REVELATION

“Nature never deceives us;

it is always we who deceive ourselves.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
From
Émile ou De l’éducation

CHAPTER NINE

A CURIOUS TALE FOR COUNTESS AMBERGLASS

1

AT HALF PAST the tenth hour of the evening on Duke’s Day, as low dark clouds fell in above Camorr, blotting out the stars and the moons, Doña Sofia Salvara was being hoisted up into the sky to have a late tea with Doña Angiavesta Vorchenza, dowager countess of Amberglass, at the top of the great lady’s Elderglass tower.

The passenger cage rattled and swayed, and Sofia clung to the black iron bars for support. The sweaty Hangman’s Wing fluttered at her hooded coat as she stared south. All of the city lay spread beneath her, black and gray from horizon to horizon, suffused with the glow of fire and alchemy. This was a point of quiet pride for her every time she had the chance to take in this view from one of the Five Towers. The Eldren had built glass wonders for men to claim; engineers had crafted buildings of stone and wood in the Eldren ruins to make the cities their own; Bondsmagi pretended to the powers the Eldren must have once held. But it was alchemy that drove back the darkness every evening; alchemy that lit the commonest home and the tallest tower alike, cleaner and safer than natural fire. It was her art that tamed the night.

At last, her long ascent ended; the cage rattled to a halt beside an embarkation platform four-fifths of the way up Amberglass’ full height. The wind sighed mournfully in the strange fluted arches at the peak of the
tower. Two footmen in cream-white waistcoats and immaculate white gloves and breeches helped her out of the cage, as they might have assisted her from a carriage down on the ground. Once she was safely on the platform, the two men bowed from the waist.

“M’lady Salvara,” said the one on the left, “my mistress bids you welcome to Amberglass.”

“Most kind,” said Doña Sofia.