“Look at the Gray King cry,” whispered Barsavi. “Look at the Gray King sob. A sight I will treasure to the last hour of my dying day!” His voice rose. “Did Nazca sob? Did my daughter cry, as you gave her her death? Somehow I don’t think so.”
The capa was shouting now. “Take a last look! He gets what Nazca got; he dies as she died, but by my hand!”
Barsavi seized Locke by the hair and tilted his face toward the barrel; for one brief irrational moment, Locke was grateful that there was nothing in his stomach to throw up. The dry retching still brought spasms of pain to his much-abused stomach muscles.
“With one small touch,” said the capa, actually gulping back sobs of exhilaration. “With one small touch, you son of a bitch. No poison for you. No quick way out before I put you in. You get to taste it, the whole time. All the while as you drown in it.”
And then he hefted Locke by the mantle, grunting. His men joined in, and together they hoisted him up over the rim, and then down he plunged face-first, down into thick, lukewarm filth that blotted out the noise of the world around him, down into darkness that burned his eyes and his cuts and swallowed him whole.
5
BARSAVI’S MEN slammed the lid back onto the barrel; several of them hammered it down with mallets and axe-butts until it was cinched tight. The capa gave the top of the barrel a thump with his fist and smiled broadly. Tears were still running down his cheeks.
“Somehow I don’t think the poor fucker did as well as he hoped with our negotiations!”
The men and women around him whooped and hollered, arms in the air, torches waving and casting wild shadows on the walls.
“Take this bastard and send him out to sea,” said the capa, gesturing toward the waterfall.
A dozen pairs of eager hands grabbed at the barrel. Laughing and joking, a crowd of the capa’s people hoisted it and carried it over to the northwestern corner of the Echo Hole, where water poured in from the ceiling and vanished into blackness through a fissure about eight feet wide. “One,” said the leader, “two…” And on the cusp of “three,” they flung the barrel down into darkness. It struck water somewhere beneath them with a splash; then they threw up their arms and began cheering once again.
“Tonight,” cried Barsavi, “Duke Nicovante sleeps safe in his bed, locked away in his glass tower! Tonight the Gray King sleeps in piss, in a tomb that I have made for him! Tonight is my night! Who rules Camorr?”
“Barsavi!” came the response from every throat in the Echo Hole, reverberating around the alien-set stones of the structure, and the capa was surrounded by a sea of noise, laughter, applause.
“Tonight,” he yelled, “send messengers to every corner of my domains! Send runners to the Last Mistake! Send runners to Catchfire! Wake the Cauldron and the Narrows and the Dregs and all the Snare! Tonight, I throw open my doors! The Right People of Camorr will come to the Floating Grave as my guests! Tonight, we’ll have such a revel that the honest folk will bar their doors, that the yellowjackets will cringe in their barracks, that the gods themselves will look down and cry, ‘What is that fucking racket?’”
“Barsavi! Barsavi! Barsavi!” his people chanted.
“Tonight,” he said at last, “we will celebrate. Tonight Camorr has seen the last of kings.”
INTERLUDE
The Half-Crown War
1
As time went by, Locke and the other Gentlemen Bastards were occasionally set free to roam at leisure, dressed in ordinary clothing. Locke and Jean were getting on near twelve; the Sanzas were visibly slightly older. It was more difficult to keep them cooped up beneath the House of Perelandro all the time, when they weren’t sitting the steps or away on Father Chains’ “apprenticeships.”
Slowly but steadily, Chains was sending his boys out to be initiated in all the great temples of the other eleven Therin gods. One of them would enter a temple under a false name, sped along by whatever strings Chains could pull and whatever palms he could slip coins into. Once there, the young Gentleman Bastard would inevitably please his superiors with his scribing, his theological knowledge, his discipline, and his sincerity. Advancement came quickly, as fast as it could be had; soon the newcomer would receive training in what was called “interior ritual”: the phrases and activities that priests only shared among themselves and their initiates.
They were not quite secrets, these things-to any priest of a Therin order, the thought of someone being audacious enough to offend the gods by falsely seeking initiation was utterly alien. Even those who knew of the slightly heretical idea of the Thirteenth, and even the minority who actually believed in him, failed to imagine that anyone would want to do what Chains and his boys were doing.
Invariably, after several months of excellent accomplishments, each sterling young initiate would die in a sudden accident. Calo favored “drowning,” for he could hold his breath a very long time, and he enjoyed swimming underwater. Galdo preferred to simply disappear, preferably during a storm or some other dramatic event. Locke constructed elaborate little mummeries that took weeks to plan. On one occasion, he vanished from the Order of Nara (Plague Mistress, Lady of Ubiquitous Maladies) by leaving his initiate’s robe, torn apart and splashed with rabbit’s blood, wrapped around his copy-work and a few letters in an alley behind the temple.
Thus enlightened, each boy would return and teach the others of what he had seen and heard. “The point,” said Chains, “is not to make you all candidates for the High Conclave of the Twelve, but to allow you to throw on whatever robes and masks are required and pass as a priest for any short period of need. When you’re a priest, people tend to see the robe rather than the man.”
But there was no apprenticeship under way at the moment; Jean was drilling at the House of Glass Roses, and the other boys waited for him on the southern edge of the Shifting Market, on a crumbling stone pier at the end of a short alley. It was a warm spring day, breezy and fresh, with the sky half-occluded by crescents of gray and white clouds sweeping in from the northwest, heralding storms.
Locke and Calo and Galdo were watching the results of a collision between a chicken-seller’s boat and a transporter of cats. Several cages had flown open when the small boats cracked against one another, and now agitated merchants were stepping warily back and forth as the battle between birds and felines progressed. A few chickens had escaped into the water and were flapping uselessly in little circles, squawking, for nature had conspired to make them even worse at swimming than they were at flying.
“Well,” said a voice behind them. “Have a look at this. These little wasters seem very likely.”
Locke and the Sanzas turned around as one to see a half dozen boys and girls their own age standing behind them, spread out across the alley. They were dressed much as the Gentlemen Bastards were, in unassuming clothes of common cut. Their apparent leader had a thick, dark mane of curly black hair, pulled behind him and tied with a black silk ribbon-quite a mark of distinction for an urchin.
“Are you friends of the friends, lads? Are you the right sort of people?” The leader of the newcomers stood with his hands on his hips; behind him, a short girl made several hand gestures used for common identification by Capa Barsavi’s subjects.
“We are friends of the friends,” said Locke.
“The rightest sort of right,” added Galdo, making the appropriate countergestures.