“I should have contrived an accident to lose those green bottles,” Locke whispered to himself.
Nonetheless, after much jeering and haggling, Szaba was granted the same terms as his previous attempt at the serpent wine, and betting was brisk. Although he was wobbling by the third glass, he did manage to down the fourth. When he staggered back to Locke’s counter, his eyes had a boiled look, the bags beneath them had turned an alarming velvet-plum color, and his poison-scented breath made Locke’s last meal churn at the bottom of his throat.
“I can see you are thrilled, my young friend.” Szaba had received scattered applause and slaps on his back, which he took as though being anointed Duke of Camorr. Though he was now breathing like a man who’d just run half a mile, the creases on his face were pulled up in self-satisfaction. He pushed four silvers across the counter with a shaking hand. “Here, share the fruits of fame and a public life.”
“You had the money to do that before you tried to kill yourself again,” said Locke. He didn’t refuse the coins, of course.
“Mostly you seem to know what living in this city means, boy, but sometimes you worry me.” Szaba wobbled to his full height and rapped his knuckles on the counter in imitation of a stern tutor. “If you can walk out the door in a straight line when it’s time to go, it only means you didn’t sufficiently indulge yourself while you were here.”
Szaba matched deed to word and splashed out the door, bouncing once off the frame before catching himself and half-falling into the rain. Whether he’d done that just to be amusing or because he’d made such a severe mess of himself, Locke found it impossible to tell.
11.
“Sounds like so much nonsense to me,” said Cyril.
“All I’m saying is as I heard it.” Vilius, for some reason embarked on his annual hour or two of honest work, poured wine for a customer. “There was one loose in the flooded canal along Coin-Kisser’s Row, and they had them Berangias girls chase it down.”
“One what?” Locke, applying himself to the close scraping of the floorboards with a pumice stone, was so desperate for distraction that he dared to address the two brothers casually, and for once, neither of them took offense.
“Shark,” said Vilius. “Big wolf shark got to wandering the canals, and when the yellowjackets couldn’t bottle the situation up, they called for some of them contrarequialla. The Berangias sisters came out and speared it from a footbridge. The Capa wants to see ‘em now. Invitation to the Floating Grave means to hand out money or something.”
“Spearing sharks from a bridge,” said Cyril, “near the counting-houses and such? Doesn’t sound likely.”
“You got hit in the face by a fish that dropped out of the clouds last week, brother. Who are you to have opinions on what’s likely?”
When the great business of the storm was mostly spent, sail canvas had hung from towers and boats lay smashed in courtyards. Corpses, graves, garbage-stalls and shit-barges had been washed into the foaming gray lifeblood of the city, and while the sun was a welcome sight, the more it boiled off the flood, the more unpleasant surprises it revealed, and for a few days the air of Camorr was uncommonly noisome. Locke had been assigned to bury himself in the scraping and scrubbing of every wetted surface, lest they warp further. Locke had restrained himself from pointing out that a more ideal time for this chore would have been about eighty years before his own birth, and that one could no more roll a marble in a straight line across any floor in the Unbroken Jar than one could roll it from moon to moon in the sky.
“Next they’ll have you taking a clothes-iron to all the hills around the city, and to about as much effect,” came the voice of Mazoc Szaba from somewhere behind the counter above Locke.
“I think the same,” said Locke. “But I am not employed for philosophical reasons, I am employed to grind my knuckles into powder so Cyril and Vilius can grow old in comfort.”
“Wise lad,” said Vilius. “He’s learned a great deal, having been with us. What’s your yearning then, Szaba?”
“Two cups of that gut-shocking salamander piss you keep in your white wine casks,” said Szaba. “And then something green. Yes, tonight’s a night for something green.”
“White wine.” The note of concern in Vilius’ voice made Locke glance up at him. “But you look like shit, Szaba. You want to wrestle the serpent tonight, I’m betting against you.”
“I’ll be glad to have the action.”
That turned out not to be true. Szaba pledged himself to four glasses again, staking himself with twelve silvers. The betting was heavy against him, with the Measure adjusting the odds several times until finally cutting short the wagering before the numbers broke entirely. Szaba did well enough with the first two glasses, but halfway through the third suffered a complete loss of dignity. Spasming, sobbing, and retching he sank to his knees, and would have sprawled lengthwise on the floor if Locke hadn’t come running to buttress him and haul him out into the alley. The door closed on cheers behind them.
“Why do you do it?” he whispered. “Why do you grind yourself up like this? You’re getting worse at taking that stuff in, not better.”
“To be the center of something,” gasped Szaba, waving for Locke to set him down against a wall. “To be the reason for something. To be in everyone’s eyes, even if it’s just for a few minutes.”
“Everyone thinks you’re a fool. They pay in to see you vomit your guts all over your boots.”
“Who are they, Locke? What are their names, those people at those tables? Name them. What have they done? Could you go round that room now and tell me anything about them, anything true, anything remembered?”
“Do you want a sweaty tavern full of idiots to remember you, or do you want to live?”
“I don’t think I have much longer for the one, so I might as well seek the other.”
“Fucking hells, lay off the green poison. I’ll teach you to play Catch-the-Duke or something.”
“Not my style.” Szaba patted him on the back, and there was shockingly little strength in the gesture. “Go on, now, before you’re missed. You can only get away with dallying in my company on nights when I’m the hero.”
12.
Three nights later, a quiet evening, uncommonly cool, the sort of night the gods might offer in recompense for all the raining fish and flooded cellars, if only to shut mortal whining up for a while. Falselight was going dim when Mazoc Szaba came in through the propped-open door. He was slump-shouldered and discomposed, and when he halted before the counter he seemed to try words out a few times before he found the ones that suited him.
“Here,” he said softly, as he reached under his jacket and handed Locke a thin dagger in a businesslike scabbard, free of ornaments. “That good for one cup of white?”
“Surely you have need of that.”
“I’ve found the last work I’m likely to find, Locke. It’s this or my clothes, so far as my trading posture is concerned. Trust me, the blade smells better.”
Locke was about to take the weapon when he felt that nameless thief-instinct, the self-preserving sense that came from nowhere in the vicinity of danger, and when Locke spotted the danger he felt as though his heart were paper and it had just been folded in half. A shadow loomed by the open door to the back alley, and two similar shadows stood just outside the front door.
The woman who walked in between the shadows killed conversation. Anyone seeing her stopped talking, stopped laughing, set their cups down even if they were mid-sip. Thjs made the people near them look, and swiftly join the silence. She had black feathers braided into her ice-pale hair, black ashes drawn in lines across her ice-pale face, and black mail set into the panels of her long leather coat. A raven tattoo filled the left side of her neck, and by that Locke recognized her. Hanni Iradu, not just a Grave Walker, but garrista of the Grave Walkers. Doubtless she had weapons tucked away somewhere, but here and now she was not a person who had any need to show them off.