The Capa silenced him with a vicious cuff across the face. For a moment, the only sound in the room was the frightened sobbing and gasping of the two prisoners.
“I must believe you? I must do nothing, Julien. You give me bullshit, and tell me it’s steamed beef? So many of you, and you can’t even come up with a decent story. A serious attempt to lie would still piss me off, but I could understand it. Instead you cry that you don’t remember. You, the eight most powerful men in the Full Crowns, after Tesso himself. His chosen. His friends, his bodyguards, his loyal pezon. And you cry like babies to me about how you don’t remember where any of you were last night, when Tesso just happened to die.”
“But that’s just how it is, Capa Barsavi, please, it’s-”
“I ask you again, were you drinking last night?”
“No, not at all!”
“Were you smoking anything? All of you, together?”
“No, nothing like that. Certainly not…not together.”
“Gaze, then? A little something from Jerem’s pervert alchemists? A little bliss from a powder?”
“Tesso never permitted-”
“Well then.” Barsavi drove a fist into Julien’s solar plexus, almost casually. While the man gasped in pain, Barsavi turned away and held up his arms with theatrical joviality. “Since we’ve eliminated every possible earthly explanation for such dereliction of duty, short of sorcery or divine intervention…Oh, forgive me. You weren’t enchanted by the gods themselves, were you? They’re hard to miss.”
Julien writhed against his bonds, red-faced, shaking his head. “Please…”
“No gods, then. Didn’t think so. I was saying…well, I was saying that your little game is boring the hell out of me. Kindness.”
The round-headed man lowered his chin to his chest and stood with his palms out, facing upward, as though he were about to receive a gift.
“I want something creative. If Federico won’t talk, let’s give Julien one last chance to find his tongue.”
Federico began screaming before Barsavi had even finished speaking-the high, sobbing wail of the conscious damned. Locke found himself clenching his teeth to keep himself from shaking. So many meetings with slaughter as a backdrop…The gods could be perverse.
Sage Kindness moved to a small table to the side of the room, on which there was a pile of small glasses and a heavy cloth sack with a drawstring. Kindness threw several glasses into the sack and began banging it against the table; the sound of breaking, jangling glass wasn’t audible beneath Federico’s wild hollering, but Locke could imagine it easily enough. After a few moments, Kindness seemed satisfied, and walked slowly over to Federico.
“Don’t, don’t, no, don’t don’t please no no…”
With one hand holding the desperate young man’s head still, Kindness rapidly drew the bag up over the top of his head, over his face, all the way to Federico’s neck, where he cinched the drawstring tight. The bag muffled Federico’s screams, which had become high and wordless again. Kindness then began to knead the bag, gently at first, almost tenderly; the torturer’s long fingers pushed the jagged contents of the sack up and around Federico’s face. Red stains began to appear on the surface of the bag; Kindness manipulated the contents of the sack like a sculptor giving form to his clay. Federico’s throat mercifully gave out just then, and for the next few moments the man choked out nothing more than a few hoarse moans. Locke prayed silently that he had already fled beyond pain to the temporary refuge of madness.
Kindness increased the vigor with which he massaged the cloth. He pressed now where Federico’s eyes would be, and on the nose, and the mouth, and the chin. The bag grew wetter and redder until at last Federico’s twitching stopped altogether. When Kindness took his hands off the bag they looked as though he’d been pulping tomatoes. Smiling sadly, he let his red hands drip red trails on the wood, and he walked over to Julien, staring intently, saying nothing.
“Surely,” said Capa Barsavi, “if I’ve convinced you of anything by this point, it must be the depth of my resolve. Will you not speak?”
“Please, Capa Barsavi,” whispered Julien, “there’s no need for this. I have nothing I can tell you. Ask me anything, anything at all. What happened last night is a blank. I don’t remember. I would tell you, please, gods, please believe me, I would tell you anything. We are loyal pezon, the most loyal you have!”
“I sincerely hope not.” Barsavi seemed to come to a decision; he gestured to the Berangias sisters and pointed at Julien. The dark-haired ladies worked quickly and silently, undoing the knots that held him to the wooden frame while leaving the ones that bound him from ankles to neck. They cradled the shivering man effortlessly, one at his shoulders and one at his feet.
“Loyal? Please. We are grown men, Julien. Refusing to tell me the truth of what happened last night is not a loyal act. You’ve let me down, so I give like for like.” On the far left side of the great hall a man-sized wooden floor panel had been slid aside; barely a yard down was the dark surface of the water beneath the Grave. The floor around the opening was wet with blood. “I shall let you down.”
Julien screamed one last time as the Berangias sisters heaved him into the opening, headfirst; he hit the water with a splash and didn’t come back up. It was the capa’s habit to keep something nasty down beneath the Grave at all times, constrained there by heavy nets of wire-reinforced rope that surrounded the underside of the galleon like a sieve.
“Kindness, you are dismissed. Boys, when I call you back you can get some people in here to clean up, but for now go wait on deck. Raiza, Cheryn-please go with them.”
Moving slowly, Capa Barsavi walked to his plain, comfortable old chair and settled into it. He was breathing heavily and quivering all the more for his effort not to show it. A brass wine goblet with the capacity of a large soup tureen was set out on the little table beside his chair; the capa took a deep draught and seemed to brood over the fumes for a few moments, his eyes closed. At last he came back to life and beckoned for Locke and Nazca to step forward.
“Well. My dear Master Lamora. How much money have you brought me this week?”
7
“THIRTY-SIX SOLONS, five coppers, Your Honor.”
“Mmm. A slender week’s work, it seems.”
“Yes, with all apologies, Capa Barsavi. The rain, well…sometimes it’s murder on those of us doing second-story work.”
“Mmmm.” Barsavi set the goblet down and folded his right hand inside his left, caressing the reddened knuckles. “You’ve brought me more, of course. Many times. Better weeks.”
“Ah…yes.”
“There are some that don’t, you know. They try to bring me the exact same amount, week after week after week, until I finally lose patience and correct them. Do you know what that sort of garrista must have, Locke?”
“Ah. A…very boring life?”
“Ha! Yes, exactly. How very stable of them to have the exact same income every single week, so they might give me the exact same percentage as a cut. As though I were an infant who would not notice. And then there are garristas such as yourself. I know you bring me the honest percentage, because you’re not afraid to walk in here and apologize for having less than last week.”
“I, ah, do hope I’m not considered shy about sharing when the balance tilts the other way…”
“Not at all.” Barsavi smiled and settled back in his chair. Ominous splashing and muffled banging was coming from beneath the floor in the vicinity of the hatch that Julien had vanished down. “You are, if anything, the most reliably correct garrista in my service. Like Verrari clockwork. You deliver my cut yourself, promptly and without a summons. For four years, week in and week out. Unfailing, since Chains died. Never once did you suggest that anything took precedence over your personal appearance before me, with that bag in your hand.”