“Look here, Locke-after-your-father Lamora,” the Thiefmaker said, “no ginger oil this time, I assure you, but I would greatly prefer your teases to veer sharply from the entertaining and back to the practical.”
Locke merely stared up at him and shuffled his feet.
“I shall speak plainly, then. The other teasers are going out day after day to watch you, not to do their bloody jobs. I’m not feeding my own private theater troupe. Get my crew of happy little jack-offs back to their own teasing, and quit being such a celebrity with your own.”
For a time after that, everything was serene.
Then, barely six months after he arrived at the hill, Locke accidentally burned down the Elderglass Vine tavern and precipitated a quarantine riot that very nearly wiped the Narrows from the map of Camorr.
The Narrows was a valley of warrens and hovels at the northernmost tip of the bad part of the city. Kidney-shaped and something like a vast amphitheater, the island’s heart was forty-odd feet beneath its outer edges. Leaning rows of tenement houses and windowless shops jutted from the tiers of this great seething bowl; wall collapsed against wall and alley folded upon mist-silvered alley so that no level of the Narrows could be traversed by more than two men walking abreast.
The Elderglass Vine crouched over the cobblestones of the road that passed west and crossed, via stone bridge, from the Narrows into the green depths of the Mara Camorrazza. It was a sagging three-story beast of weather-warped wood, with rickety stairs inside and out that maimed at least one patron a week. Indeed, there was a lively pool going as to which of the regulars would be the next to crack his skull. It was a haunt of pipe-smokers and of Gaze addicts, who would squeeze the precious drops of their drug onto their eyeballs in public and lie there shuddering with visions while strangers went through their belongings or used them as tables.
The Seventy-seventh Year of Morgante had just arrived when Locke Lamora burst into the common room of the Elderglass Vine, sobbing and sniffling, his face showing the red cheeks, bleeding lips, and bruised eyes that were characteristic of Black Whisper.
“Please, sir,” he whispered to a horrified bouncer while dice-throwers, bartenders, whores, and thieves stopped to stare. “Please. Mother and Father are sick; I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I’m the only one who can move-you must”-sniff-“help! Please, sir…”
At least, that’s what would have been heard, had the bouncer not triggered a headlong exodus from the Elderglass Vine by screaming “Whisper! Black Whisper!” at the top of his lungs. No boy of Locke’s size could have survived the ensuing orgy of shoving and panic had not the badge of illness on his face been better than any shield. Dice clattered to tabletops and cards fluttered down like falling leaves; tin mugs and tarred leather alejacks spattered cheap liquor as they hit the floor. Tables were overturned, knives and clubs were pulled to prod others into flight, and Gazers were trampled as an undisciplined wave of human detritus surged out every door save that in which Locke stood, pleading uselessly (or so it seemed) to screams and turned backs.
When the tavern had cleared of everyone but a few moaning (or motionless) Gazers, Locke’s companions stole in behind him: a dozen of the fastest teasers and clutchers in Streets, specially invited by Lamora for this expedition. They spread out among the fallen tables and behind the battered bar, plucking wildly at anything valuable. Here a handful of discarded coins; there a good knife; here a set of whalebone dice with tiny garnet chips for markers. From the pantry, baskets of coarse but serviceable bread, salted butter in grease-paper, and a dozen bottles of wine. Half a minute was all Locke allowed them, counting in his head while he rubbed his makeup from his face. By the end of the count, he motioned his associates back out into the night.
Riot drums were already beating to summon the watch, and above their rhythm could be heard the first faint flutings of pipes, the bone-chilling sound that called out the duke’s Ghouls-the Quarantine Guard.
The participants in Locke’s smash-and-grab adventure threaded their way through the growing crowds of confused and panicked Narrows dwellers, and scuttled home indirectly through the Mara Camorrazza or the Coalsmoke district.
They returned with the largest haul of goods and food in the memory of the Shades’ Hill orphans, and a larger pile of copper half-barons than Locke had hoped for. He hadn’t known that men who played at dice or cards kept money out in plain view, for in Shades’ Hill such games were the exclusive domain of the oldest and most popular orphans, and he was neither.
For a few hours, the Thiefmaker was merely bemused.
But that night, panicked drunks set fire to the Elderglass Vine, and hundreds tried to flee the Narrows when the city watch was unable to locate the boy who’d first triggered the panic. Riot drums beat until dawn, bridges were blocked, and Duke Nicovante’s archers took to the canals around the Narrows in flat-bottomed boats, with arrows to last all night and then some.
The next morning found the Thiefmaker once again in private conversation with his littlest plague orphan.
“The problem with you, Locke fucking Lamora, is that you are not circumspect. Do you know what circumspect means?”
Locke shook his head.
“Let me put it like this. That tavern had an owner. That owner worked for Capa Barsavi, the big man himself, just like I do. Now, that tavern owner paid the Capa, just like I do, to avoid accidents. Thanks to you, he’s had one hell of an accident-even though he was paying his money and didn’t have an accident forthcoming. So, if you follow me, inciting a pack of drunk fucking animals to burn that place to the ground with a fake plague scare was the opposite of a circumspect means of operation. So now can you venture a guess as to what the word means?”
Locke knew a good time to nod vigorously when he heard it.
“Unlike the last time you tried to send me to an early grave, this one I can’t buy my way out of, and thank the gods I don’t need to, because the mess is huge. The yellowjackets clubbed down two hundred people last night before they all figured out that nobody had the Whisper. The duke called out his fucking regulars and was about to give the Narrows a good scrubbing with fire-oil. Now, the only reason-and I mean the only reason-that you’re not floating in a shark’s stomach with a very surprised expression on your face is that the Elderglass Vine is just a pile of ashes; nobody knows anything was stolen from it before it became that pile of ashes. Nobody except us.
“So, we’re all going to agree that nobody in this hill knows anything about what happened, and you are going to relearn some of that reticence I talked about when you first arrived here. You remember reticence, right?”
Locke nodded.
“I just want nice, neat little jobs from you, Lamora. I want a purse here, a sausage there. I want you to swallow your ambition, shit it out like a bad meal, and be a circumspect little teaser for about the next thousand years. Can you do that for me? Don’t rob any more yellowjackets. Don’t burn any more taverns. Don’t start any more fucking riots. Just pretend to be a coarse-witted little cutpurse like your brothers and sisters. Clear?”
Again, Locke nodded, doing his best to look rueful.
“Good. And now,” the Thiefmaker said as he produced his nearly full flask of ginger oil, “we’re going to engage in some reinforcement of my admonishments.”
And, for a time (once Locke recovered his powers of speech and unlabored breathing), everything was serene.