“Nor me, Ves.”
“Yeah. How’s that for sad, you little piss-pants? You want dinner, you can eat your own shit.”
Locke was too used to the sort of laughter that now rose in the tunnel to pay any attention to it. He tried to get up and was kicked in the throat for his trouble.
“I just want to know,” he gasped, “what happened—”
“Why do you care?”
“Please … please …”
“Well, if you’re gonna be civil about it.” Veslin dropped Locke’s takings into a dirty cloth sack. “Windows had themselves a bad night.”
“Cocked up proper, they did,” said Gregor.
“Got pinched hitting a big house. Not all of ’em got clear. Lost one in a canal.”
“Who?”
“Beth. Drowned, she did.”
“You’re lying,” whispered Locke. “YOU’RE LYING!”
Veslin kicked him in the side of his stomach and Locke writhed. “Who says … who says she’s—”
“I fuckin’ say.”
“Who told you?”
“I got a letter from the duke, you fuckin’ half-wit. The master, that’s who! Beth drowned last night. She ain’t coming back to the Hill. You sweet on her or something? That’s a laugh.”
“Go to hell,” whispered Locke. “You go to—”
Veslin cut him off with another hard kick to the exact same spot.
“Gregor,” he said, “we got a real problem here. This one ain’t right in the head. Forgot what he can and can’t say to the likes of us.”
“I got just the thing for it, Ves.” Gregor kicked Locke between the legs. Locke’s mouth opened, but nothing came out except a dry hiss of agony.
“Give it to the little shit-smear.” Veslin grinned as he and Gregor began to work Locke over with hard kicks, carefully aimed. “You like that, Lamora? You like what you get, you put on airs with us?”
Only the Thiefmaker’s proscription of outright murder among his orphans saved Locke’s life. No doubt the boys would have pulped him if their own necks wouldn’t have been the price of their amusement, and as it was they nearly went too far.
It was two days before Locke could move well enough to work again, and in that interval, lacking friends to tend him, he was tormented by hunger and thirst. But he took no satisfaction in his recovery, and no joy in his return to work.
He was back to playing dead, back to hiding in corners, back to rule one and rule two. He was all alone in the Hill once again.
I HER SHADOW
I CANNOT tell you now;
When the wind’s driveand whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind’s a whisper at last—
Maybe I’ll tell you then—
some other time.
—Carl Sandburg from “The Great Hunt”
CHAPTER ONE: THINGS GET WORSE
1
WEAK SUNLIGHT AGAINST his eyelids drew him out of sleep. The brightness intruded, grew, made him blink groggily. A window was open, letting in mild afternoon air and a freshwater smell. Not Camorr. Sound of waves lapping against a sand beach. Not Camorr at all.
He was tangled in his sheets again, light-headed. The roof of his mouth felt like sun-dried leather. Chapped lips peeled apart as he croaked, “What are you …”
“Shhhh. I didn’t mean to wake you. The room needed some air.” A dark blur on the left, more or less Jean’s height. The floor creaked as the shape moved about. Soft rustle of fabric, snap of a coin purse, clink of metal. Locke pushed himself up on his elbows, prepared for the dizziness. It came on punctually.
“I was dreaming about her,” he muttered. “The times that we … when we first met.”
“Her?”
“Her. You know.”
“Ah. The canonical her.” Jean knelt beside the bed and held out a cup of water, which Locke took in his shaking left hand and sipped at gratefully. The world was slowly coming into focus.
“So vivid,” said Locke. “Thought I could touch her. Tell her … how sorry I am.”
“That’s the best you can manage? Dreaming of a woman like that, and all you can think to do with your time is apologize?”
“Hardly under my control—”
“They’re your dreams. Take the reins.”
“I was just a little boy, for the gods’ sakes.”
“If she pops up again move it forward ten or fifteen years. I want to see some blushing and stammering next time you wake up.”
“Going somewhere?”
“Out for a bit. Making my rounds.”
“Jean, there’s no point. Quit torturing yourself.”
“Finished?” Jean took the empty cup from him.
“Not nearly. I—”
“Won’t be gone long.” Jean set the cup on the table and gave the lapels of his coat a perfunctory brushing as he moved to the door. “Get some more rest.”
“You don’t bloody listen to reason, do you?”
“You know what they say about imitation and flattery.”
The door slid shut and Jean was gone, out into the streets of Lashain.
2
LASHAIN WAS famous as a city where anything could be bought and anything could be left behind. By the grace of the regio, the city’s highest and thinnest order of nobility (where a title that could be traced back more than two generations qualified one for the old guard), just about anyone with cash in hand and enough of a pulse to maintain semiconsciousness could have their blood transmuted to a reasonable facsimile of blue.
From every corner of the Therin world they came—merchants and criminals, mercenary captains and pirates, gamblers and adventurers and exiles. As commoners they entered the chrysalis of a countinghouse, shed vast quantities of precious metal, and as newborn peers of Lashain they emerged into daylight. The regio minted demibarons, barons, viscounts, counts, and even the occasional marquis, with styles largely of their own invention. Honors were taken from a list and cost extra; “Defender of the Twelvefold Faith” was quite popular. There were also half a dozen meaningless orders of knighthood that looked marvelous on a coat lapel.
Because of the novelty of this purchased respectability to those who brokered it for themselves, Lashain was the most violently manners-conscious city Jean Tannen had ever visited. Lacking centuries of aristocratic descent to assure them of their worth, the neophytes of Lashain overcompensated with ceremony. Their rules of precedence were like alchemical formulae, and dinner parties killed more of them each year than fevers and accidents combined. It seemed that little could be more thrilling for those who’d just bought their family names than to risk them (not to mention their mortal flesh) over minor insults.
The record, as far as Jean had heard, was three days from countinghouse to dueling green to funeral cart. The regio, of course, offered no refunds to relations of the deceased.
As a result of this nonsense, it was difficult for those without titles, regardless of the color of their coin, to gain ready access to the city’s best physikers. They were made such status symbols by their noble clients that they rarely had to scamper after gold from other sources.
The taste of autumn was in the cool wind blowing off the Amathel, the Lake of Jewels—the freshwater sea that rolled to the horizon north of Lashain. Jean was conservatively dressed by local standards, in a brown velvet frock coat and silks worth no more than, say, three months’ wages for an average tradesman. This marked him instantly as someone’s man and suited his current task. No gentleman of consequence did his own waiting at a physiker’s garden gate.