Scott Lynch
Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent. Part 1
1.
There was a place in the alley where the odorous slops and shards of daily proceedings were to be set, which was Locke Lamora’s job, until the mess could be hauled up the crooked stairs and around the block to the public dross-yard, which was also Locke Lamora’s job. This was never done before the sun was long-buried and the Falselight glass bled of illumination, so every awkward step chanced a painful adventure. Here in the Dregs, light was not so cheap that folk would gladly waste it on the eyeballs of passing strangers. One might catch a break from boat-lanterns on the canal, or from cloudless moonlight, but more often one tripped on stone or trash or bodies. Muttering curses at his own feet in the middle of the night was also Locke Lamora’s job.
How refreshing, then, to find Cyril and Vilius out back wrestling with a corpse while the thin band of sky over the alley was still hazy blue rather than starry black.
“Can’t just throw him in the canal now, too many eyes,” said Cyril.
“Can’t hardly leave the bastard here neither.”
“Cover him up!”
“Think of the smell. Think of the rats! They’re always here for the trash, they won’t miss a proper feast.”
“Bury him, then, under all these slops and scraps and timbers. Cover him tight.” Cyril deigned to notice Locke with a gesture. “Let shit-boy here sort it once the lights go down.”
“I can’t shift something that big in the dark!” Locke kept his voice low and glanced around; here in the Dregs it was one chance in ten thousand anyone might give a shit of the moral variety but getting involved in corpse-business was to put oneself at the mercy of any witnesses and whatever leverage they might desire. “What’d you two do to him?”
“Nothing by our hands,” grunted Cyril. “Found him here. Ain’t even bleeding, just dead somehow.”
“Well, after dark, we can drag him to a canal and give him the heave.” Locke set the pile of trash he was carrying down. “Or roll him into someone else’s alley. Or the dross-yard. Or bundle him over to Solana Casta’s roof garden in the Narrows. A lot of problems go into the soil in those pots, and she doesn’t charge. Or we could string him up, let the blood out, then get a good hatchet and some sacks—”
“Creeping blue fuck, boy,” said Vilius. “How many corpses you worked a disposal on?”
“Hard to remember.” Locke used the back of a forearm to wipe away the sweat dripping into his eyes. “I dunno, ten?”
That was when the corpse came back to life, swearing and flailing. Vilius and Cyril leapt back.
“You know, when it comes to corpse disposal there is a crucial first step,” said Locke.
2.
Six months since the Orphan’s Moon. If anointment as a secret initiate of the Crooked Warden had yielded Locke Lamora any benefits, they were as yet being kept from him. He was thirteen and a half, emphasis on the half. Half a man, half at ease, half-voiced. Nor was he alone. Calo and Galdo were in the midst of lingering uncomfortable changes, and Jean’s voice had started to warble.
“My broken instruments, all slack-strung and jangling,” said Father Chains. “Your mechanisms are misordered, your bodily humours are jesting at your expense. It happens to everyone but here it seems to be happening all at once.”
Even Sabetha, whose customary poise often seemed like a sarcastic commentary on the chaos around her, had been swept up in the collective fit of awkwardness. Just now she was afflicted with cramps. The boys had together made a sympathetic embassy to her cotside, where Calo squeaked out such a rusty, discordant note that she had burst into giggles and honked at him like a goose. Soon they all broke down in laughter and honking, the Sanza brothers sounding as if their geese had been force-fed wet gravel. It was a rare moment of complete levity and Chains let them have it, before he quietly swept into the room shadowed by his plans for their summer.
“Placements,” said Chains. “It’s more of that tedious, invaluable, life-saving education you’re always whining about, but you won’t be false-facing this time. You’ll be out on loan. Seconded to some of the gangs we’re on better terms with. No complicated scheming, no secrets. Just do as you’re told, watch carefully, learn everything you can. Ripen in wisdom for a few months and perhaps your throats, bones, and bowels will be less at war with you when I gather you back into the fold.”
“So we are to return intellectually and physically perfected,” croaked Galdo.
“No doubt. And bring back five hundred pounds of cut rubies on the back of a unicorn while you’re at it,” said Chains. “Though of you all… the one I might be asking to perform the greatest impossibility is Locke.”
3.
The Unbroken Jar, at the far northeastern tip of the Dregs, was a catch-basin for a dozen disreputable streams of humanity to flow into and mingle, to be drained out onto the streets at sunrise and filled to brimming again the next evening. It was not entirely a bawdy house and not entirely a scum-hole and not entirely a cloister for advanced inebriates, not entirely a trap for the unwary and not entirely a fashionable risk for slumming swells. It averaged a death every night or two, though Locke, in his weeks of working there, had never before witnessed the mortality rate amended in real time as a corpse pushed past him and through the back door.
“Well I’d have sworn he was dead as bacon grease!” said Vilius. “He smells the part.”
The odor wafting from the resurrected man was a point in Vilius’ favor, Locke was forced to admit. He ran inside, breathing through his mouth, for the master of the Jar had stepped out for a moment and the not-dead fellow seemed to know where the counter was. Locke found him slouched there a moment later, spinning a copper baron on the scratched and stained wood.
“I’m concerned about your friends,” said the man, who had a voice like an old clockwork mechanism that had been dropped down some stairs. “To mistake the sleeping for the dead is one thing, but to not go straight to the purse in a corpse’s pockets is hardly natural. I fear they lack the spirit of this city. You, now. You wanted to make gutter soup with my blood and plant me in a garden.”
“I merely proposed what seemed reasonable before you un-killed yourself. Why were you sleeping back there?”
“I was on my way over here to get drunk, but I was still drunk from the last place, and sometimes the sun, you know, it pushes down on your head and says, ‘Here’s a patch of good clean alley stone, lay yourself on it awhile.’ Still, if I ever do cack it hereabouts I want you to handle the arrangements. Foundationing a garden is fine work for any sack of bones. What’s your name, boy?”
“Locke.”
“Well, Locke, I’m now sober enough to get drunk again, so let’s have some of that wine that tastes like a sick baby took a shit in a tub of varnish.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“I like the white baby shit varnish, not the red.”
That narrowed it down sufficiently. Locke uncasked a stream of the proper liquid into a clay cup, squinting against the fumes. He took the man’s coin and handed over the cup. The man’s grin drew tight the creases of his face. Wind and sun had practiced upon him; he was not young, and he had reds and purples where healthy people didn’t. He dashed the wine back in one long glug, and when he spoke again, his breath was turpentined.
“I’m Mazoc Szaba. Late of damn near everywhere. Used to sell a sword, back when I owned one.” He tapped the bar; a full copper entitled him to four cups. “These days I mostly make my living as an untidy spectacle.”