The Gentleman Bastard Series (96 page)

“You seem resigned to that without much of a—”

“I’m not resigned, Jean. I’m angry. We need to cease being powerless as soon as possible.”

“Right. So where do we start?”

“Well, I’m going to go back to the inn. I’m going to pour a gallon of cold water down my throat. I’m going to get into bed, put a pillow over my head, and stay there until sunset.”

“I approve.”

“Good. Then we’ll both be well rested when it comes time to get up and find a black alchemist. I want a second opinion on latent poisons. I want to know everything there is to know about the subject, and whether there are any antidotes we can start trying.”

“Agreed.”

“After that, we can add one more small item to our agenda for this Tal Verrar holiday of ours.”

“Kick the archon in the teeth?”

“Gods yes,” said Locke, smacking a fist into an open palm. “Whether or not we finish the Requin job first. Whether or not there really is a poison! I’m going to take his whole bloody palace and shove it so far up his ass he’ll have stone towers for tonsils!”

“Any plans to that effect?”

“No idea. I’ve no idea whatsoever. I’ll
reflect
on it, that’s for damn sure. But as for not being rash, well, no promises.”

Jean grunted. The two of them turned and began to plod along the quay, toward the stone steps that would lead laboriously to the island’s upper tier. Locke rubbed his stomach and felt his skin crawling … felt
violated
somehow, knowing that something lethal might be slipping unfelt into the darkest crevices of his own body, waiting to do mischief.

On their right the sun was a burning bronze medallion coming up over the city’s horizon, perched there like one of the archon’s faceless soldiers, gazing steadily down upon them.

REMINISCENCE

The Lady of the Glass Pylon

1

Azura Gallardine was not an easy woman to speak to. To be sure, hers was a well-known title (second mistress of the Great Guild of Artificers, Reckoners, and Minutiary Artisans), and her address was common knowledge (the intersection of Glassbender Street and the Avenue of the Cog-Scrapers, West Cantezzo, Fourth Tier, Artificers’ Crescent), but anyone approaching that home had to walk forty feet off the main pedestrian thoroughfare.

Those forty feet were one
hell
of a thing to contemplate.

Six months had passed since Locke and Jean had come to Tal Verrar; the personalities of Leocanto Kosta and Jerome de Ferra had evolved from bare sketches to comfortable second skins. Summer had been dying when they’d clattered down the road toward the city for the first time, but now the hard, dry winds of winter had given way to the turbulent breezes of early spring. It was the month of Saris, in the seventy-eighth year of Nara, the Plaguebringer, Mistress of Ubiquitous Maladies.

Jean rode in a padded chair at the stern of a hired luxury scull, a low, sleek craft crewed by six rowers. It sliced across the choppy waters of Tal Verrar’s main anchorage like an insect in haste, ducking and weaving between larger vessels in accordance with the shouted directions of a teenage girl perched in its bow.

It was a windy day, with the milky light of the sun pouring down without warmth from behind high veils of clouds. Tal Verrar’s anchorage was crowded with cargo lighters, barges, small boats, and the great ships of a
dozen nations. A squadron of galleons from Emberlain and Parlay rode low in the water with the aquamarine-and-gold banners of the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows fluttering at their sterns. A few hundred yards away, Jean could see a brig flying the white flag of Lashain, and beyond that a galley with the banner of the Marrows over the smaller pennant of the Canton of Balinel, which was just a few hundred miles north up the coast from Tal Verrar.

Jean’s scull was rounding the southern tip of the Merchants’ Crescent, one of three sickle-shaped islands that surrounded the Castellana at the city’s center like the encompassing petals of a flower. His destination was the Artificers’ Crescent, home of the men and women who had raised the art of clockwork mechanics from an eccentric hobby to a vibrant industry. Verrari clockwork was more delicate, more subtle, more durable—more
anything
, as required—than that fashioned by all but a handful of masters anywhere else in the known world.

Strangely, the more familiar Jean grew with Tal Verrar, the odder the place seemed to him. Every city built on Eldren ruins acquired its own unique character, in many cases shaped directly by the nature of those ruins. Camorri lived on islands separated by nothing more than canals, or at most the Angevine River, and their existence was shoulder-to-shoulder compared to the great wealth of space Tal Verrar had to offer. The hundred-odd thousand souls on Tal Verrar’s seaward islands made full use of that space, dividing themselves into tribes with unusual precision.

In the west, the poor clung to spots in the Portable Quarter, where those willing to tolerate constant rearrangement of all their belongings by hard sea-weather could at least live free of rent. In the east, they crowded the Istrian District and provided labor for the tiered gardens of the Blackhands Crescent. There they grew luxury crops they could not afford, on plots of alchemically enriched soil they could never own.

Tal Verrar had only one graveyard, the ancient Midden of Souls, which took up most of the city’s eastern island, opposite the Blackhands Crescent. The Midden had six tiers, studded with memorial stones, sculptures, and mausoleums like miniature mansions. The dead were as strictly sifted in death as they’d been in life, with each successive tier claiming a better class of corpse. It was a morbid mirror of the Golden Steps across the bay.

The Midden itself was almost as large as the entire city of Vel Virazzo, and it sported its own strange society—priests and priestesses of Aza Guilla, gangs of mourners-for-hire (all of whom would loudly proclaim their ceremonial specialties or particular theatrical flourishes to anyone within shouting distance), mausoleum sculptors, and the oddest of all, the
Midden Vigilants. The Vigilants were criminals convicted of grave robbery. In place of execution, they were locked into steel masks and clanking scale armor and forced to patrol the Midden of Souls as part of a sullen constabulary. Each would be freed only when another grave robber was captured to take his or her place. Some would have to wait years.

Tal Verrar had no hangings, no beheadings, and none of the fights between convicted criminals and wild animals that were popular virtually everywhere else. In Tal Verrar those convicted of capital crimes simply vanished, along with most of the city’s garbage, into the Midden Deep. This was an open square pit, forty feet on a side, located to the north of the Midden of Souls. Its Elderglass walls plunged into absolute darkness, giving no hint as to how far down they truly went. Popular lore held that it was bottomless, and criminals prodded off the execution planks usually went screaming and pleading. The worst rumor about the place, of course, was that those thrown down into the Deep did
not
die … but somehow continued falling. Forever.

“Hard larboard!” cried the girl at the bow of the scull. The rowers on Jean’s left yanked their oars out of the water and the ones on the right pulled hard, sliding the craft just out of the way of a cargo galley crammed with fairly alarmed cattle. A man at the side rail of the galley shook his fist down at the scull as it passed, perhaps ten feet beneath the level of his boots.

“Get the shit out of your eyes, you undergrown cunt!”

“Go back to pleasuring your cattle, you soft-dicked cur!”

“You bitch! You cheeky bitch! Heave- to and I’ll show you who’s soft-dicked! Begging your pardon, gracious sir.”

Seated in his thronelike chair, dressed in a velvet frock coat with enough gold fripperies to sparkle even in the weak light of an overcast day, Jean looked very much a man of consequence. It was important for the man on the galley to ensure that his verbal salvoes were accurately received; while they were an accepted part of life on the harbor in Tal Verrar, the moneyed class were always treated as though they were somehow levitating above the water, entirely independent of the vessels and laborers carrying them. Jean waved nonchalantly.

“I don’t need to get any closer to know it’s soft, lard-cock!” The girl made a rude gesture with both hands. “I can see how disappointed your fucking cows are from here!”

With that, the scull was out of range of any audible reply; the galley fell away to the stern, and the southwestern edge of the Artificers’ Crescent grew before them.

“For that,” said Jean, “an extra silver volani for everyone here.”

As the increasingly cheerful girl and her enthusiastic team pulled him steadily toward the docks of the Artificers’ Crescent, Jean’s eyes were drawn by a tumult on the water a few hundred yards to his left. A cargo lighter flagged with some sort of Verrari guild banner Jean didn’t recognize was surrounded by at least a dozen smaller craft. Men and women from the boats were trying to clamber aboard the cargo lighter while the outnumbered crew of the larger vessel attempted to fend them off with oars and a water pump. A boat full of constables seemed to be approaching, but was still several minutes off.

“Now, what the hell’s that?” Jean yelled to the girl.

“What? Where? Oh, that. That’s the Quill Pen Rebellion, up to business as usual.”

“Quill Pen Rebellion?”

“The Guild of Scribes. That cargo boat’s flying a Guild of Letter-Pressers’ flag. It must be carrying a printing press from the Artificers’ Crescent. You ever seen a press?”

“Heard of them. For the first time just a few months ago, in fact.”

“The scribes don’t like ’em. Think they’ll put their trade out of business. So they’ve been running ambushes when the Letter-Pressers try to get one across the bay. There must be six or seven of those new presses on the bottom of the water by now. Plus a few bodies. It’s a big fat weeping mess, you ask me.”

“I’m inclined to agree.”

“Well, hopefully they won’t come up with anything that can replace a good team of honest rowers. Here’s your dock, sir, quite a bit ahead of schedule if I’m correct. You want us to wait around?”

“By all means,” said Jean. “Amusing help is so hard to find. I expect I won’t be but an hour.”

“At your service, then, Master de Ferra.”

2

THE CRESCENT was not exclusive to the Great Guild of Artificers, though it was where the majority of them chose to settle, and where their private halls and clubs loomed on virtually every street corner, and where they were most tolerated in their habit of leaving incomprehensible and occasionally hazardous devices out in plain sight.

Jean made his way up the steep steps of the Avenue of the Brass
Cockatrice, past candle merchants and blade sharpeners and veniparsifers (mystics who claimed to be able to read the full sweep of someone’s destiny from the pattern of blood vessels visible on their hands and forearms). At the top of the avenue he dodged away from a slim young woman in a four-cornered hat and sun veil walking a
valcona
on a reinforced leather leash.
Valcona
were flightless attack birds, larger than hunting hounds. With their vestigial wings folded back along their stout bodies, they hopped about on claws that could tear out fist-sized chunks of human flesh. They bonded like affectionate babies to one person and were perfectly happy to kill anyone else in the entire world, at any time.

“Good killer bird,” muttered Jean. “Pretty threat to life and limb. What a lovely little girl or boy or thing you are.”

The creature chirruped a little warning at him and scampered after its mistress.

Huffing and sweating, Jean made his way up another set of switchback stairs and made an irritated mental note that a few hours of training would do his spreading gut some good. Jerome de Ferra was a man who viewed exercise solely as a means of getting from bed to the gambling tables and back again. Forty feet, sixty feet, eighty feet … up from the waterfront, up the second and third tiers of the island, up to the fourth and topmost, where the eccentric influence of the Artificers was at its strongest.

The shops and houses on the fourth tier of the Crescent were provided with water by an extremely elaborate network of aqueducts. Some of them were the stones and pillars of the Therin Throne era, while some were merely leather chutes supported by wooden struts. Waterwheels, windmills, gears, counterweights, and pendulums swung everywhere Jean looked. Rearranging the water supply was a game the Artificers played amongst themselves; the only rule was that nobody’s supply was to be cut off at the point of final delivery. Every few days, a new offshoot of some duct or a new pumping apparatus would appear, stealing water from an older duct or pumping apparatus. A few days later another artificer would divert water through another new channel and the battle would continue. Tropical storms would invariably litter the streets of the Crescent with cogs and mechanisms and ductwork, and the artificers would invariably rebuild their water channels twice as strangely as before.

Glassbender Street ran the full length of the topmost tier. Jean turned to his left and hurried along the cobbles. The strange smells of glassmaking wafted out at him from shop fronts; through open doors he could see artisans spinning glowing orange shapes at the ends of long poles. A small
crowd of alchemists’ assistants brushed past him, hogging the street. They wore the trademark red skullcaps of their profession and displayed the chemical burns along their hands and faces that were their badges of pride.

He passed the Avenue of the Cog-Scrapers, where a small crowd of laborers were seated before their shops, cleaning and polishing pieces of metal. Some were under the direct scrutiny of impatient artificers, who grumbled unhelpful directions and stamped their feet nervously. This intersection was the southwestern end of the fourth tier; there was nowhere else to go except down—or out along the forty-foot walk to the home of Azura Gallardine.

At the cul-de-sac end to Glassbender Street was an arc of shop fronts with one gap like a tooth knocked out of a smile. Jutting beyond this gap was an Elderglass pylon, anchored to the stone of the fourth tier for some unfathomable Eldren reason. The pylon was about a foot and a half wide, flat-topped, and forty feet long. It speared out into the empty air, fifteen yards above the rooftops of a winding street down on the third tier.