"Requin," said Gallardine with a long, dry sigh, "set that man inside a wooden frame, chained there, on his left side. The frame was filled with alchemical cement, which was allowed to harden. The frame was tipped up — so you see, the man was half-sealed into a stone wall, all along his left side, from his feet to the top of his head. He was tipped up and left standing in Requin's vault to die. Requin would go in himself and force water down the man's throat each day. His trapped limbs rotted, festered, made him sick. He died slowly, starving and gangrenous, sealed into the most perfectly hideous physical torture I have ever heard of in all my long years.
"So you will forgive me," she said, taking Jean gently by the arm and leading him toward the left-hand window, "if Requin is one client with whom I intend to maintain absolute faith until the Lady Most Kind sweeps my soul out of this old sack of bones." "But surely, there's no need for him to know?"
"And just as surely, Master de Ferra, there is the fact that I would never chance it. Never." "But surely, a small consideration—"
"Have you heard," interrupted Gallardine, "of what happens to those caught cheating at his tower, Master de Ferra? He collects their hands, and then he drops their bodies onto a stone courtyard and bills their families or business partners to have the remains cleaned up. And what about the last man who started a fight inside the Sinspire, and drew blood? Requin had him tied to a table. His kneecaps were cut out by a dog-leech and red ants were poured into the wounds. The kneecaps were lashed back down with twine. That man begged to have his throat slit. His request was not granted.
"Requin is a power unto himself. The Archon can't touch him for fear of aggravating the Priori, and the Priori find him far too useful to turn on him. Since Selendri nearly died, he's become an artist of cruelty the likes of which this city has never seen. There is no mortal reward that I would consider worth provoking that man."
"I take all that very seriously, madam. So can we not carefully minimize your involvement? Settle for a basic schematic of the vault mechanisms, the most general overview? The sort of thing that could never be specifically tied to you?" *You haven't really been listening." She shook her head and gestured toward the left-hand window of her house. "Let me ask you something else, Master de Ferra. Can you see the view of Tal Verrar beyond this window?"
Jean stepped forward to gaze out through the pane of glass. The view was southward, over the western tip of the Artificers" Crescent, across the anchorage and the glimmering silver-white water to the Sword Marina. There the Archon's navy rode at anchor, protected by high walls and catapults. "It's a… very lovely view," he said.
"Isn't it? Now, you must consider this my final statement on the matter. Do you know anything of counterweights?" "I can't say that I—"
At that moment, the guildmistress yanked on one of the leather cords that hung down from her ceiling.
The first notion Jean had that the floor had opened up beneath his feet was when the view of Tal Verrar suddenly seemed to move up toward the ceiling; his senses conferred hastily on just what this meant, and were stumped for a split second until his stomach weighed in with nauseous confirmation that the view wasn't doing the moving.
He plunged through the floor and struck a hard square platform suspended just beneath Gallardine's house by iron chains at the corners. His first thought was that it must be some sort of lift — and then it began to plummet toward the street forty-odd feet below.
The chains rattled and the sudden breeze washed over him; he fell prone and clung to the platform with white-knuckled alarm. Roofs and carts and cobblestones rushed up toward him and he braced himself for the sharp pain of impact — but it didn't come. The platform was slowing down with impossible smoothness… sure death slowed to possible injury and then to mere embarrassment. The descent ended a bare few feet above the street, when the chains on Jean's left stayed taut while the others went slack. The platform tilted with a lurch and dumped him in a heap on the cobbles.
He sat up and sucked in a grateful breath; the street was spinning slightly around him. He looked up and saw that the chain-platform was rapidly ascending back to its former position. A split second before it drew home into the underside of Gallardine's floor, something small and shiny tumbled out of the trap door above it. Jean managed to flinch away and cover his face just before glass shards and liquor from the exploding bottle of brandy mix sprayed over him.
He wiped a good few solari-worth of White Plum Austershalin out of his hair as he stumbled to his feet, wide-eyed and cursing.
"A fine afternoon to you, sir. But wait, don't tell me. Let me guess. Proposal not accepted by the guildmistress?"
Jean, befuddled, found a smiling beer-seller not five feet to his right, leaning against the wall of a closed and unmarked two-storey building. The man was a tanned scarecrow with a broad-brimmed leather hat that drooped with age until it nearly touched his bony shoulders. He drummed the fingers of one hand on a large wheeled cask, to which several wooden mugs were attached by long chains.
"Urn, something like that," said Jean. A hatchet slipped out of his coat and clattered against the cobblestones. Red-faced, he bent, retrieved it and made it vanish again.
"You might call this self-serving, and I'd certainly be the first to agree with you, sir, but you look to me like a man in need of a drink. A drink that won't bust open against the cobbles and damn near break your skull, that is." "Do I? What have you got?"
"Burgle, sir. Presuming you" ve heard of it, it's a Verrari speciality and if you" ve had it in Talisham you haven't had it at all. Nothing at all against Talishani, of course. Why, I" ve got family in Talisham, you know."
Burgle was a thick, dark beer usually flavoured with a few drops of almond oil. It had a kick comparable to many wines. Jean nodded. "A full mug, if you please."
The beer-seller opened the tap on his cask and filled one of the chained mugs with liquid that looked almost black. He passed this to Jean with one hand and tipped his cap with the other. "She does it a few times a week, you know."
Jean quaffed the warm beer and let the yeasty, nutty flavour flow down the back of his throat. "A few times a week?"
"She's a mite impatient with some of her visitors. Doesn't wait to terminate conversation with all the usual niceties. But then you knew that already." "Mmm-hmmm. This is pretty tolerable stuff."
"Thank you kindly, sir. One centira the full mug… thank you, thank you kindly. I do a brisk business with folks falling out of Guildmistress Gallardine's floor. I usually try to stake this spot out just in case it rains a customer or two. I'm very sorry you didn't find satisfaction in your meeting with her."
"Satisfaction? Well, she might have got rid of me before I expected, but I think I did what I set out to do." Jean poured the last of the beer down his throat, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and passed the mug back. "I'm really just planting a seed for the future, is all."
CHAPTER FOUR
Blind Alliances
1
"Master Kosta, please be reasonable. Why would I be holding anything back from you? If I had a treatment to suggest, it would mean a fair bit more gold in my pocket, now wouldn't it?"
Pale Therese, the Consulting Poisoner, kept a rather comfortable parlour in which to discuss confidential business with her clients. Locke and Jean were seated cross-legged on soft, wide cushions, holding (but not sipping from) little porcelain cups of thick Jereshti coffee. Pale Therese, a serious, ice-eyed Vadran of about thirty, had hair the colour of new sail-canvas that bobbed against the collar of her black velvet coat as she paced the room across from her guests. Her bodyguard, a well-dressed Verrari woman with a basket-hiked rapier and a lacquered wooden club hanging from her belt, lounged against the wall beside the room's single locked door, silent and watchful.