No Camorri could have asked for a more appropriate match for the sight and stink of the Cauldron. If the Dregs were poverty-racked, the Snare disreputable, the Mara Camorrazza openly dangerous, and Ashfall dirty and falling apart, the Cauldron was all of these things with a compound interest of human desperation. It smelled something like a keg of bad beer overturned in a mortician’s storage room on a hot summer day. Most of this district’s dead never made it as far as the pauper’s holes dug by convicts on the hills of the Beggar’s Barrow. They were tipped into canals or simply burned. No yellowjackets had dared enter the Cauldron save in platoons even before the Secret Peace; no temples had been maintained here for fifty years or more. Barsavi’s least sophisticated and restrained gangs ruled the Cauldron’s blocks; brawlers’ taverns and Gaze dens and itinerant gambling circles were packed wall to wall with families crammed into ratholes.
It was commonly held that one in three of Camorr’s Right People were crammed into the Cauldron-a thousand wasters and cutthroats bickering endlessly and terrorizing their neighbors, accomplishing nothing and going nowhere. Locke had come out of Catchfire, Jean from the comfortable North Corner. Calo and Galdo had been Dregs boys prior to their stay in Shades’ Hill. Only Bug had come out of the Cauldron, and he had never once spoken of it, not in the four years he’d been a Gentleman Bastard.
He was staring at it now, at the sagging docks and layered tenements, at the clothes flapping on washlines, soaking up water. The streets were brown with the unhealthy haze of sodden cookfires. Its floodwalls were crumbling, its Elderglass mostly buried in grime and piles of stone. Bug’s coin had ceased to flow across his knuckles and stood still on the back of his left hand.
A few minutes later, Locke was privately relieved to slip past the heart of the Cauldron and reach the high, thin breakwater that marked the eastern edge of the Wooden Waste. Camorr’s maritime graveyard seemed positively cheerful by comparison once the boat had put the Cauldron to its stern.
A graveyard it was; a wide sheltered bay, larger than the Shifting Market, filled with the bobbing, undulating wrecks of hundreds of ships and boats. They floated hull-up and hull-down, anchored as well as drifting freely, some merely rotting while others were torn open from collisions or catapult stones. A layer of smaller wooden debris floated on the water between the wrecks like scum on cold soup, ebbing and resurging with the tide. When Falselight fell, this junk would sometimes ripple with the unseen passage of creatures drawn in from Camorr Bay, for while tall iron gates shuttered every major canal against intrusion, the Wooden Waste was open to the sea on its south side.
At the heart of the Waste floated a fat, dismasted hulk, sixty yards long and nearly half as wide, anchored firmly in place by chains leading down into the water; two at the bow and two at the stern. Camorr had never built anything so heavy and ungainly; that vessel was one of the more optimistic products of the arsenals of distant Tal Verrar, just as Chains had told Locke many years before. Wide silk awnings now covered its high, flat castle decks; beneath those canopies parties could be thrown that rivaled the pleasure pavilions of Jerem for their decadence. But at the moment the decks were clear of everything but the cloaked shapes of armed men, peering out through the rain-Locke could see at least a dozen of them, standing in groups of two or three with longbows and crossbows at hand.
There was human movement here and there throughout the Waste; some of the less damaged vessels housed families of squatters, and some of them were being openly used as observation points by more teams of hard-looking men. Vitale navigated through the twisting channels between larger wrecks, carefully making obvious hand gestures at the men on guard whenever the gondola passed them.
“Gray King got another one last night,” he muttered, straining against his pole. “Lots of twitchy boys with big murder-pieces keeping an eye on us right now, that’s for damn sure.”
“Another one?” Calo narrowed his eyes. “We hadn’t heard yet. Who got it?”
“Tall Tesso, from the Full Crowns. They found him up in Rustwater, nailed to the wall of an old shop, balls cut off. His blood ran out, is what it looked like.”
Locke and Jean exchanged a glance, and Nervous Vitale grunted.
“Acquainted, were you?”
“After a fashion,” said Locke, “and some time ago.”
Locke pondered. Tesso was-had been-garrista of the Full Crowns; one of Barsavi’s big earners, and a close friend of the capa’s younger son, Pachero. Nobody in Camorr should have been able to touch him (save only Barsavi and the Spider), yet that damned invisible lunatic calling himself the Gray King had touched him in no uncertain terms.
“That’s six,” said Jean, “isn’t it?”
“Seven,” said Locke. “There haven’t been this many dead gods-damned garristas since you and I were five years old.”
“Heh,” said Vitale, “and to think I once envied you, Lamora, even with this tiny little gang of yours.”
Locke glared at him, willing the puzzle to come together in his head and not quite succeeding. Seven gang leaders in two months; all of them given the distance, but otherwise having little in common. Locke had long taken comfort in his own lack of importance to the capa’s affairs, but now he began to wonder. Might he be on someone’s list? Did he have some unguessed value to Barsavi that the Gray King might want to end with a crossbow bolt? How many others were between him and that bolt?
“Damn,” said Jean, “as if things needed to get more complicated.”
“Maybe we should take care of…current business.” Galdo had shifted against the side of the gondola and was looking around as he spoke. “And then maybe we should get lost for a while. See Tal Verrar, or Talisham…or at least get you out, Locke.”
“Nonsense.” Locke spat over the side of the boat. “Sorry, Galdo. I know it seems like wisdom, but do the sums. The capa would never forgive our running out in his desperate hour. He’d rescind the distance and put us under the thumb of the most graceless pig-hearted motherfucker he could find. We can’t run as long as he stays. Hell, Nazca would break my knees with a mallet before anyone else did anything.”
“You have my sympathy, boys.” Vitale shifted his pole from hand to hand, using precise shoves to warp the gondola around a chunk of debris too large to ignore. “Canal work ain’t easy, but at least nobody wants me dead for more’n the usual reasons. Did you want me to leave you at the Grave or at the quay?”
“We need to see Harza,” said Locke.
“Oh, he’s sure to be in a rare mood today.” Vitale began poling hard for the northern edge of the Waste, where a few stone docks jutted out before a row of shops and rooming houses. “The quay it is, then.”
4
THE PAWNSHOP of No-Hope Harza was one of the major landmarks of the reign of Capa Barsavi. While there were many shops that paid slightly more and a great many with less surly proprietors, there were no others located a bare stone’s throw from the very seat of the capa’s power. Right People cashing in their creatively acquired loot with Harza could be sure that their presence would be reported to Barsavi. It never hurt to reinforce the impression that one was an active, responsible thief.
“Oh, of course,” said the old Vadran as Jean held the barred and armored door open for the other four Gentlemen Bastards. “Figures only the least important garristas would dare show their faces on a day like this. Come in, my ill-looking sons of Camorri bitches. Rub your oily Therin fingers on my lovely merchandise. Drip water on my beautiful floors.”