The Gentleman Bastard Series (70 page)

“Yes,” she said, “and by the gods, it feels good to finally fling that in the face of someone who can appreciate it.”

“But,” said Locke, “the Spider is … or at least I thought the Spider was—”

“A man? You and all the rest of this city, Master Thorn. I have always found the presumptions of others to be the best possible disguise—haven’t you?”

“Hmmm.” Locke chuckled morosely. A tingling numbness was spreading around the wound; it definitely wasn’t just his imagination. “Hanged by my own rope, Doña Vorchenza.”

“You must be brilliant, Master Thorn,” said Doña Vorchenza. “I shall give you that; to do what you’ve done, to keep my people guessing these past few years … Gods, I wish I didn’t have to put you in a crow’s cage. Perhaps a deal could be arranged, once you’ve had a few years to think it over. It must be very new, and very odd, to finally have someone spring such a trap on
you
.”

“Oh, no.” Locke sighed and put his face in his hands. “Oh, Doña Vorchenza, I’m so sorry to disappoint you, but the list of people that haven’t outsmarted me seems to be getting smaller all the fucking time.”

“Well,” said Doña Vorchenza, “that can’t be pleasant. But come, you must be feeling rather strange by now; you must be unsteady on your feet. Just say yes. Give me the location of the funds you’ve stolen, and perhaps those years in the Palace of Patience can be mitigated. Give me the names of your
accomplices
, and I’m sure an accommodation can be reached.”

“Doña Vorchenza,” said Locke forcefully, “I have no accomplices, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t tell you who they were.”

“What about Graumann?”

“Graumann is a hireling,” said Locke. “He thinks I’m really a merchant of Emberlain.”

“And those so-called bandits in the alley beside the Temple of Fortunate Waters?”

“Hirelings, long since fled back to Talisham.”

“And the false Midnighters, the ones who visited the Salvaras?”

“Homunculi,” said Locke. “They crawl out of my ass every full moon; they’ve been a problem for years.”

“Oh, Master Thorn … grief-willow will still that tongue of yours rather permanently. You don’t have to speak your secrets now; just surrender so I can give you this vial, and we can continue this conversation in more
pleasant
surroundings.”

Locke stared at Doña Vorchenza for several long seconds; he locked his gaze with those ancient eyes of hers and saw the obvious satisfaction in them, and his right hand curled into a fist of its own accord. Perhaps Doña Vorchenza was so used to her aura of privilege she forgot their disparity in
ages; perhaps she’d simply never conceived that a man of apparent refinement, even a criminal, could do what Locke did next.

He punched her square in the teeth, a whirling right that would have been comical had he thrown it against a younger, sturdier woman. But it snapped Doña Vorchenza’s head back; her eyes rolled up and she buckled at the knees. Locke caught her as she toppled, carefully plucking the vial from her fingers while he did so. He heaved her back into her chair, then uncapped the vial and poured its contents down his throat. The warm fluid tasted like citrus; he gulped it eagerly and threw the vial aside. Then, working with the utmost haste, he took off his coat and used it to tie Doña Vorchenza into her chair, knotting the sleeves several times behind her back.

Her head lolled forward and she groaned; Locke gave her a pat on the shoulder. On an impulse, he ran his hands quickly (and as politely as possible) through her waistcoat; he grunted in satisfaction when he turned up a little silk purse, jingling with coins. “Not what I was hoping for,” he said, “but we’ll call it fair payment for a gods-damned needle in the neck, hmmm?”

Locke stood up and paced for a few moments. He turned back to Doña Vorchenza, knelt before her, and said, “My lady, it wounds me to have to treat someone such as yourself so crudely; the truth is, I admire you very much and at any other time I’d be very curious to hear just where I fucked up and tipped you off. But you must admit, I’d have to be crazy to go with you; the Palace of Patience simply
does not
suit. So thank you for the very interesting afternoon, and give my regards to Don and Doña Salvara.”

With that, he pushed the wooden shutter as wide as it would go and stepped out the window.

The exterior of Raven’s Reach, considered up close, was actually covered with irregularities, with little indentations and ledges, circling the tower at virtually every level. Locke slipped out onto a slender ledge about six inches wide; he pressed his stomach up against the warm glass of the tower and waited for the pounding of the blood within his temples to cease sounding like a pummeling from a heavy man’s fists. It didn’t, and he sighed.

“I am the king idiot,” he muttered, “of all the world’s fucking idiots.”

The warm wind pushed at his back as he inched to his right; the ledge grew wider a few moments later, and he found an indentation in which to place his hand. Confident that he was in no immediate danger of falling, Locke glanced downward over his shoulder, and immediately regretted it.

Seeing Camorr spread out behind glass offered a layer of insulation between the viewer and the vista; out here, it seemed as though the whole
world fell away in a vast arc. He wasn’t six hundred feet in the air, he was a thousand, ten thousand, a million—some incomprehensible number of feet that only the gods were fit to dare. He squeezed his eyes shut and clutched at the glass wall as though he could pour himself into it, like mortar into stones. The pork and capon in his stomach made enthusiastic inquiries about coming up in a nauseous torrent; his throat seemed to be on the verge of granting the request.

Gods
, he thought,
I wonder if I’m on one of the transparent sections of the tower? I must look pretty fucking funny
.

There was a creaking noise from overhead; he looked up and gasped.

One of the elevator cages was coming down toward him; it would be in line with him on the face of the tower, and it would pass by about three feet from the wall he was clinging to.

It was empty.

“Crooked Warden,” Locke whispered, “I’ll do this, but the only thing I ask, the
only
thing, is that when this is done,
you make me fucking forget
. Steal this memory out of my head. And I will never climb more than three feet off the ground as long as I draw breath. Praise be.”

The cage creaked down; it was ten feet above him, then five feet, and then its bottom was even with his eyes. Breathing in deep, ragged, panicky gasps, Locke turned himself around on the tower, so that his back was against the glass. The sky and the world beneath his feet both seemed too big to fit into his eyes; gods, he didn’t want to think about them. The cage was sliding past; its bars were right there, three feet away over fifty-some stories of empty air.

He screamed, and pushed himself off the glass wall of the tower. When he hit the blackened iron sidebars of the cage, he clung as desperately as any cat ever clung to a tree branch; the cage swayed back and forth, and Locke did his best to ignore the incredible things that did to the sky and the horizon. The cage door; he had to slip the cage door. They closed tight but didn’t have elaborate locks.

Working with hands that shivered as though the air were freezing, Locke slipped the bolt on the cage’s door and let it fall open. He then swung himself gingerly around the corner, from the exterior to the interior, and with one last burst of dreadful vertigo reached out and slammed the door shut behind him. He sat down on the floor of the cage, gasping in deep breaths, shaky with relief and the aftereffects of the poison.

“Well,” he muttered, “
that
was fucking hideous.”

Another elevator cage full of noble guests drew upward, twenty feet to
his right; the men and women in the cage looked at him very curiously, and he waved.

He half dreaded that the cage would lurch to a halt before it reached the ground and start to draw back up; he decided if it did that he would take his chances with the Palace of Patience. But the cage continued all the way down; Vorchenza must still be tied to her chair, out of the action. Locke was on his feet when the cage settled against the ground; the liveried men who opened the door peered in at him with wide eyes.

“Excuse me,” said one of them, “but were you … did you … were you
in
this cage when it left the embarkation platform?”

“Of course,” said Locke. “That shape you saw, darting out from the tower? Bird. Biggest gods-damned bird you ever saw. Scared the piss right out of me, let me tell you. I say, are any of these carriages for hire?”

“Go to the outer row,” said the footman, “and look for the ones with the white flags and lanterns.”

“Much obliged.” Locke rapidly perused the contents of Doña Vorchenza’s coin purse; there was a very satisfactory quantity of gold and silver inside. He tossed a solon apiece to the liveried men beside the cage as he stepped out. “It was a bird, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said the other man with a tip of his black cap. “Biggest gods-damned bird we ever saw.”

6

THE HIRED carriage left him at the Hill of Whispers; he paid very well—the “forget you made this run” sort of well—and then he walked south through Ashfall on his own. It was perhaps the sixth hour of the evening when he returned to the hovel, bursting through the curtained door, yelling as he came—

“Jean, we have one
hell
of a fucking problem—”

The Falconer stood in the center of the little room, smirking at Locke, his hand folded before him. Locke took in the tableau in a split second: Ibelius lay motionless against the far wall, and Jean lay slumped at the Bondsmage’s feet, writhing in pain.

Vestris perched upon her master’s shoulder; she fixed him with those black-and-gold eyes, then opened her beak and screeched triumphantly. Locke winced at the noise.

“Oh yes, Master Lamora,” said the Falconer. “Yes, I’d say you
do
have one hell of a fucking problem.”

INTERLUDE

The Throne in Ashes

Therim Pel was once called the Jewel of the Eldren; it was the largest and grandest of the cities that the lost race of ancients left to the men who claimed their lands long after their disappearance.

Therim Pel sat at the headwaters of the Angevine River, where they poured in a white torrent from the mountains; it sat beneath their craggy majesty and was surrounded by rich fields for two days’ ride by fast horse in any other direction. In the autumn, those fields would be swaying with stalks of amber—a bounty fit for the seat of an empire, which Therim Pel was.

All the cities of the south knelt before the Therin Throne. The engineers of the empire built tens of thousands of miles of roads to weave those cities together. The empire’s generals manned them with patrols to put bandits down, and maintained garrisons at smaller towns and villages to ensure that commerce and letters could flow, without interruption, from one end of the empire to the other—from the Iron Sea to the Sea of Brass.

Karthain and Lashain, Nessek and Talisham, Espara and Ashmere, Iridain and Camorr, Balinel and Issara—all those mighty city-states were ruled by dukes who took their crowns of silver from the hands of the emperor
himself. The few dukes who remain in present times may wield great power, but they are self-declared; the high lineages dating back to the time of the Therin Throne have long been severed.

The Therin Throne entered into decline when the Vadrans appeared from the north. A raiding sea-people, they took the Throne protectorates on the northern half of the continent; they named the seven great rivers that flowed to the northern sea their Seven Holy Marrows, and they discouraged the Throne’s efforts to reclaim its territory by smashing every army it sent north. Weakened, the Therin Throne could not sustain the effort, and so it was diminished. Diminished, but not broken.

It took the Bondsmagi of Karthain to do that.

The Bondsmagi were newly formed in the city of Karthain; they were beginning to expand the reach of their unique and deadly guild to other cities, and they showed little sign of catering to the angry demands of the emperor in Therim Pel. He insisted that they halt their activities, and they are said to have replied with a short letter listing the prices for which His August Majesty could hire their services. The emperor sent in his own royal circle of sorcerers; they were slain without exception. The emperor then raised his legions and marched on Karthain, vowing to slay every sorcerer who claimed the title of Bondsmage.

The emperor’s declaration of war was a test of resolve for the new guild’s rules. For anyone who dared to harm a Bondsmage, they had publicly vowed reciprocity that would be awful to behold.

During his march to Karthain, the emperor’s soldiers managed to kill about a dozen.

Four hundred Bondsmagi met the emperor’s legions just to the east of Karthain; the sorcerers condescended to offer a pitched battle. In less than two hours, one-third of the emperor’s forces were slaughtered. Strange mists boiled up from the ground to mislead their maneuvers; illusions and phantasms tormented them. Flights of arrows halted in the air and fell to the ground, or were hurled back upon the archers who had loosed them. Comrade turned upon comrade, maddened and misled by sorcery that could chain a man’s actions as though he were a marionette. The emperor himself was hacked to pieces by his personal guard. It is said that no piece larger than a finger remained to be burned on a pyre afterward. The empire was soundly defeated—its surviving generals routed, their remaining soldiers scampering like message-runners for Therim Pel.

But the affair did not end there. The Bondsmagi in conclave decided to
enforce their rules, and to enforce them in such a fashion that the entire world would shudder at the thought of crossing them, for as long as men might have memories.

They worked their retribution on the city of Therim Pel.

The firestorm they conjured was unnatural. Four hundred magi, working in concert, kindled something at the heart of the empire that historians still fear to describe. It is said that the flames were as white as the hearts of the stars themselves; that the column of black smoke rose so high it could be seen from the deep Iron Sea, far east of Camorr, and as far north as Vintila, capital of the young Kingdom of the Seven Marrows.