Locke sighed. The stupid asshole who’d been yelling for odds for the last ten minutes was too drunk to notice that the Jar didn’t sell anything in glazed cups. Too expensive for such short-lived objects, especially on a night like this.
Once upon a time, Locke knew, the Black Breeze had been led by a woman who called herself the Wind. She’d been some foot-boxing prodigy out of Tal Verrar who’d won a clutch of blood money and died trying to win more at the Shifting Revel. The Wind’s sister, who called herself the Measure, had taken control of the Unbroken Jar and settled into residence. When the Measure wanted to be seen, she watched the main parlor from a raised alcove guarded by black iron bars. The Measure was the Unbroken Jar’s real seat of fame, more so even than the titular jar (a centuries-old, lidded thing locked away from prying hands; legend had it that whoever broke the jar would earn a fatal curse, which was true inasmuch as Botari and sons would immediately beat that person to death).
There was gambling everywhere in Camorr; one could walk from the outermost tip of the West Needle to the last butcher-yard in Rustwater and touch no paving stone that had never served as table for a wager. At the Unbroken Jar, however, one could cry stakes for anything, even the damnedest, silliest, most unlikely thing. If the Measure saw any merit in your proposal, she would give you odds, and if anyone with coin was feeling loved by the gods then the show would begin. The Measure was an arithmetical prodigy who could discourse on the motions of the moons or multiply sums in a heartbeat, and she knew many strange things besides. The word that came down from her alcove was law.
Thus, the idiot across the way who was now confronting the eating of a ceramic cup, odds four to one against. Locke suspected he had thought too little on whether he would chew or not, but the Measure had his money and now there were only two branches his life might take: prove foolishness or prove cowardice.
Not every contest was so gruesomely stupid, though some… Some, like the games old Mazoc Szaba played, were worse. Locke preferred levity. There was a pair of complete stonewits, for example, bare-knuckle boxers from the Falselight Cutters whose skulls were cathedrals of simplicity, who came in every week to have a game of Catch-the-Duke. The men had no theory of strategy and played like children, with random enthusiasm, and as a result, their matches were strangely fascinating. The betting could be equally random. Patrons would demand odds on whether it would rain, on whether the next pour would empty an ale-cask, on whether drunks could catch throwing knives. They mostly couldn’t. Not with their hands.
“Are you sampling your own wares tonight, boy?”
Locke blinked. Woolgathering. There’d been little sleep the sweltering night before, on his little patch of stone in the buttery where Botari let him attempt his rest.
“Oh, hello, Master Szaba. I’m… just tired.”
“Having trouble sleeping? Sounds like a goat’s ballsack problem to me, Locke.”
“What’s that?”
“Means you’ve got a face like a goat’s ballsack.” Szaba clapped at himself, coughed, and flashed one of his wrinkled-leather smiles.
Locke twitched a corner of his lip faintly upward. That joke, he thought, would be funnier when he brought it home to unsheath it against one of the Sanza brothers. Theft was life.
“Haven’t seen you for a few days,” he said.
“Shitty week for making a living. I’m not sure if anyone has broached the subject with you yet, boy, but it seems Camorr can be an unforgiving place.” Szaba drummed his fingers on the counter. “What the hell. I need a break. Might as well shake my ass at Venaportha and see if she’s embracing low standards at the moment. I’ll drink the serpent.”
“Oh, fuck, come on, sir, don’t do that—”
“I shall drink the serpent,” bellowed Szaba. “Master Botari, fetch me the green bottle, and Mistress Measure, give me odds! Silver bet! Let’s go four tonight, shall we?”
That caused a stir, as it always did, which was of some use to the unfortunate drunk now spitting bloody ceramic fragments out of his mouth. No coward, at least, and with a fresh spectacle to excite the crowd, he could give up quietly. Money changed hands. He’d have to pay Botari for the cup, too.
“Mazoc Szaba wants the serpent wine,” said the Measure. “Four would not normally be a challenge. Even odds. But Mazoc Szaba seems desperate tonight. Interesting. Four glasses. Eight to seven against.”
“Stake me,” Szaba whispered, waving to the crowd but peering wide-eyed at Locke.
“What?”
“Stake me. I haven’t the money. I told you it was a shitty week. Please, Locke. Don’t leave me hung out in front of everyone. I can do four glasses easy and you’ll have your coin back in ten minutes.”
Locke’s head whirled. All the weeks he’d swept and sweated and dangled and grown dark circles under his eyes had been to gather the sum of one tyrin, half of what he needed to bring back to Chains when this was all over, half the whole point of everything. Ten silver solons in a tyrin, and Szaba was asking for eight of those. Fuck. All that work balanced against the thought of humiliating this man, this near-friend, this presumptuous idiot who was trying so hard to kill himself. This fellow thief who either trusted or needed Locke enough to let him see vulnerability.
The cold part of him, the part that could walk past death or even plan it, the part that shrugged off the fountains of blood and misery Camorr put into the world, did not half understand the warm part of him. But tonight, in accordance with the mysteries, the warm part of Locke was holding his purse.
“Do not fuck this up,” hissed Locke, startled at himself, speaking to a grown man with an authoritative demand, with the voice of a Right Person, a Capa’s man. So what if that voice cracked?
Serpent wine was alchemical venom, emerald sludge that roiled the stomach and set the blood pounding in one’s temples, an impractical poison devoid of subtlety. Somewhere between one glass and a whole bottle was anyone's mortal breaking point. The entertainment lay in seeing whether a drinker had an accurate notion of where that point was. Szaba had called for odds on serpent wine three times: once in competition and twice against himself. He seemed to love the attention and even claimed to love the wine, though at each victory he’d staggered a bit more, had taken longer to finish, and his eyes had grown more bloodshot.
Given a choice between one glass or eating an entire ceramic cup, Locke would have gladly set to work stuffing broken fragments into his mouth. Szaba now proposed to drink four glasses of poison, and to do it with unaffected grace.
“Do not fuck me up,” Locke whispered, and with the quietest, faintest motion he could manage, he passed his money to Mazoc Szaba.