Just under seventeen thousand crowns in half a week; the Don Salvara game was well ahead of their original plans, which had called for a two-week span between first touch and final blow-off. Locke was certain he could get one more touch out of the don in perfect safety, push the total up over twenty-two or maybe twenty-three thousand, and then pull a vanish. Go to ground, take it easy for a few weeks, stay alert and let the Gray King mess sort itself out.
And then, as a bonus miracle, somehow convince Capa Barsavi to disengage him from Nazca, and do so without twisting the old man’s breeches. Locke sighed.
When Falselight died and true night fell, the glow never seemed to simply fade so much as recede, as though it were being drawn back within the glass, a loan reclaimed by a jealous creditor. Shadows widened and blackened until finally the whole park was swallowed by them from below. Emerald lanterns flickered to life here and there in the trees, their light soft and eerie and strangely relaxing. They offered just enough illumination to see the crushed stone paths that wound their way through the walls of trees and hedges. Locke felt as though the spring of tension within him was unwinding itself ever so slightly; he listened to the muted crunch of his own footsteps on gravel, and for a few moments he was surprised to find himself possessed by something perilously close to contentment.
He was alive, he was rich, he had made the decision not to skulk and cringe from the troubles that gnawed at his Gentlemen Bastards. And for one brief moment, in the middle of eighty-eight thousand people and all the heaving, stinking, ever-flowing noise and commerce and machinery of their city, he was alone with the gently swaying trees of Twosilver Green.
Alone.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and the old cold fear, the constant companion of anyone raised on the streets, was suddenly alive within him. It was a summer night in Twosilver Green, the safest open park in the city, patrolled at any given time by two or three squads of yellowjackets with their night-lanterns waving on poles. Filled, sometimes to the point of comedy, with the strolling sons and daughters of the wealthy classes, holding hands and swatting insects and seeking the privacy of nooks and shadows.
Locke gazed quickly up and down the curving paths around him; he was truly alone. There was no sound in the park but for the sighing of the leaves and the buzzing of the insects; no voices or footsteps that he could hear. He twisted his right forearm, and a thin stiletto of blackened steel fell from his coat sleeve into his palm, pommel-down. He carried it straight against his arm, rendering it invisible from any distance, and hurried toward the southern gate of the park.
A mist was rising, seeping up as though the grass were pouring gray vapors into the night; Locke shivered despite the warm, heavy air. A mist was perfectly natural, wasn’t it? The whole city was blanketed in the stuff two nights out of three; a man could lose track of the end of his own nose in it sometimes. But why-
The southern gate of the park. He was standing before the southern gate of the park, staring out across an empty cobbled lane, at a mist-shrouded bridge. That bridge was the Eldren Arch, its red lanterns soft and ominous in the fog.
The Eldren Arch leading north to the Isla Durona.
He’d gotten turned around. How was that possible? His heart was beating so fast, and then-Doña Sofia. That cunning, cunning bitch. She’d done something to him…slipped him some alchemical mischief on the parchment. The ink? The wax? Was it a poison, drawing some cloud around his senses before it did its work? Was it some other drug, intended to make him ill? Petty, perfectly deniable revenge to sate her for the time being? He fumbled for the parchment, missing his inner coat pocket, aware that he was moving a bit too slowly and clumsily for the confusion to be entirely in his imagination.
There were men moving under the trees.
One to his left, another to his right…The Eldren Arch was gone; he was back at the heart of the curving paths, staring out into a darkness cut only by the emerald light of the lanterns. He gasped, crouched, brought up the stiletto, head swimming. The men were cloaked; they were on either side; there was the sound of footsteps on gravel, not his own. The dark shape of crossbows, the backlit shapes of the men…His head whirled.
“Master Thorn,” said a man’s voice, muffled and distant, “we require an hour of your attention.”
“Crooked Warden.” Locke gasped, and then even the faint colors of the trees seemed to drain from his vision, and the whole night went black.
3
WHEN HE came to, he was already sitting up. It was a curious sensation. He’d awoken before from blackness brought on by injuries and by drugs, but this was different. It was as though someone had simply set the mechanisms of his consciousness moving again, like a scholar opening the spigot on a Verrari water-clock.
He was in the common room of a tavern, seated on a chair at a table by himself. He could see the bar, and the hearth, and the other tables, but the place was dank and empty, smelling of mold and dust. A flickering orange light came from behind him-an oil lantern. The windows were greasy and misted over, turning the light back upon itself; he couldn’t see anything of the outside through them.
“There’s a crossbow at your back,” said a voice just a few feet behind him, a pleasantly cultured man’s voice, definitely Camorri but somewhat off in a few of the pronunciations. A native who’d spent time elsewhere? The voice was entirely unknown to him. “Master Thorn.”
Icicles seemed to grow in Locke’s spine. He racked his brains furiously for recall of those last few seconds in the park… Hadn’t one of the men there called him that, as well? He gulped. “Why do you call me that? My name is Lukas Fehrwight. I’m a citizen of Emberlain working for the House of bel Auster.”
“I could believe that, Master Thorn. Your accent is convincing, and your willingness to suffer that black wool is nothing short of heroic. Don Lorenzo and Doña Sofia certainly believed in Lukas Fehrwight, until you yourself disabused them of the notion.”
It isn’t Barsavi, Locke thought desperately. It couldn’t be Barsavi… Barsavi would be conducting this conversation himself, if he knew. He would be conducting it at the heart of the Floating Grave, with every Gentleman Bastard tied to a post and every knife in Sage Kindness’ bag sharpened and gleaming.
“My name is Lukas Fehrwight,” Locke insisted. “I don’t understand what you want or what I’m doing here. Have you done anything to Graumann? Is he safe?”
“Jean Tannen is perfectly safe,” said the man. “As you well know. How I would have loved to see it up close, when you strolled into Don Salvara’s office with that silly sigil-wallet under your black cloak. Destroying his confidence in Lukas Fehrwight just as a father gently tells his children there’s really no such thing as the Blessed Bringer! You’re an artist, Master Thorn.”
“I have already told you, my name is Lukas, Lukas Fehrwight, and-”
“If you tell me that your name is Lukas Fehrwight one more time, I’m going to put a bolt through the back of your upper left arm. I wouldn’t mean to kill you, just to complicate your life. A nice big hole, maybe a broken bone. Ruin that fine suit of yours, perhaps get blood all over that lovely parchment. Wouldn’t the clerks at Meraggio’s love to hear an explanation for that? Promissory notes are so much more attention-getting when they’re covered in gore.”
Locke said nothing for quite a long while.