“Thank you, Bug.” Jean squeezed himself down into the wet bottom of the little wooden craft; all three of them made for a tight fit. “I’ll trade off with you in just a bit.”
“What, no crack about my moral education?”
“Your moral education’s over.” Jean stared up into the sky as the dockside receded and Bug took them out into the canal’s heart. “Now you’re going to learn a thing or two about war.”
4
UNSEEN AND undisturbed, Jean quietly paddled them up against the north bank of the canal just south of their temple. The House of Perelandro was nothing more than a dark impression of mass, lightless in the silver fog above their heads.
“Smartly, smartly,” the big man muttered to himself as he brought them abreast with the drainage culvert; it was about a yard up from the water, with an opening five feet in diameter. It led more or less directly to a concealed passage just behind the ladder that led down from the temple itself. Bug slipped a hand past the iron bars at the end of the culvert and tripped the hidden locking mechanism. He then prepared to climb in.
“I’ll go first,” he said, just before Jean grabbed him by the collar.
“I think not. The Wicked Sisters will go first. You sit down and keep the boat steady.”
Bug did so, pouting, and Locke smiled. Jean pulled himself up into the culvert and began crawling into the darkness.
“You can have the honor of going second, Bug,” said Locke. “I might need a hand pulling me up.”
When all three of them were wedged safely into the pipe, Locke turned and nudged the little boat back out into midcanal with his feet. The current would carry it to the Via Camorrazza, lost in the mists, until someone ran into it with a larger boat or claimed it as a windfall. Locke then slid the pipe cover closed and locked it once again. The Gentlemen Bastards actually oiled the hinges on the grate to keep their comings and goings quiet.
They crawled forward into blackness, surrounded by the gentle echoes of their own breathing and the soft noise of scuffing cloth. There was a quiet click as Jean operated the hidden entrance into the burrow; then a line of pale silver light spilled in.
Jean stepped out onto the wooden floor of the dim passage; just to his right, the rungs ran up into the hidden entrance beneath what had once been Father Chains’ sleeping pallet. Despite Jean’s best effort to move quietly, the floor creaked slightly as he moved forward. Locke slipped out into the passage behind him, his heart pounding.
The illumination was too dim. The walls had been golden for as long as he’d known the place.
Jean crept forward, hatchets bobbing in his fists. At the far end of the passage, he whirled around the corner, crouched low-and then stood straight up, growling, “Shit!”
The kitchen had been thoroughly trashed.
The spice cabinets were overturned; broken glass and shattered crockery littered the floor. The storage cupboards hung open, empty; the water barrel had been dumped on the tiles. The gilded chairs were torn apart, thrown into a heap in one corner. The beautiful chandelier that had swung above their heads for as long as any of them had lived within the glass burrow was a total ruin. It dangled now by a few wires, its planets and constellations smashed, its armillary paths bent beyond all possible repair. The sun that had burned at the heart of it all was cracked like an egg; the alchemical oils that had lit it from within had seeped onto the table.
Locke and Jean stood at the edge of the entrance passage, staring in shock. Bug rounded the corner, hot for action against unseen foes, and came up short between them. “I…gods. Gods.”
“Calo?” Locke abandoned all thoughts of sneaking about. “Galdo! Calo! Are you here?”
Jean swept aside the heavy curtain to the door that led to the Wardrobe. He didn’t say anything or make any noise, but the Wicked Sisters fell out of his hands and clattered against the floor tiles.
The Wardrobe, too, had been ransacked. All the rows of fine clothing and costume garments, all the hats and cravats and breeches and hose, all the waistcoats and vests and thousands of crowns worth of accessories-all of it was gone. The mirrors were smashed; the Masque Box was overturned, its contents strewn and broken across the floor.
Calo and Galdo lay beside it, on their backs, staring upward in the semidarkness. Their throats were slashed from ear to ear, a pair of smooth gashes-identical twin wounds.
5
JEAN FELL forward onto his knees.
Bug tried to squeeze past Locke, and Locke shoved him back into the kitchen with all the feeble strength he could muster, saying, “No, Bug, don’t…” But it was already too late. The boy sat down hard against the edge of the witchwood table and broke into sobs.
Gods, Locke thought as he stumbled past Jean into the Wardrobe. Gods, I have been a fool. We should have packed up and run.
“Locke…,” Jean whispered, and then he sprawled forward onto the ground, shaking and shuddering as though he were having some sort of fit.
“Jean! Gods, what now?” Locke crouched beside the bigger man and placed a hand beneath his round, heavy chin. Jean’s pulse was pounding wildly. He looked up at Locke with wide eyes, his mouth opening and closing, failing to spit out words. Locke’s mind raced.
Poison? A trap of some sort? An alchemical trick left behind in the room? Why wasn’t he affected? Did he feel so miserable already that the symptoms hadn’t caught his attention yet? He glanced frantically around the room, and his eyes seized on a dark object that lay between the sprawled Sanza twins.
A hand-a severed human hand, gray and dried and leathery. It lay with its palm toward the ceiling and its fingers curled tightly inward. A black thread had been used to sew a name into the dead skin of the palm; the script was crude but nonetheless clear, for it was outlined with the faintest hint of pale blue fire:
JEAN TANNEN
The things I could do to you if I were to stitch your true name. The words of the Falconer returned unbidden to Locke’s memory; Jean groaned again, his back arched in pain, and Locke reached down toward the severed hand. A dozen plans whirled in his head-chop it to bits with a hatchet, scald it on the alchemical hearthslab, throw it in the river…He had little knowledge of practical sorcery, but surely something was better than nothing.
New footsteps crunched on the broken glass in the kitchen.
“Don’t move, boy. I don’t think your fat friend can help you at the moment. That’s it, just sit right there.”
Locke slid one of Jean’s hatchets off the ground, placed it in his left hand, and stepped to the Wardrobe door.
A man was standing at the lip of the entrance hall-a complete stranger to Locke’s eyes. He wore a long brownish red oilcloak with the hood thrown back, revealing long stringy black hair and drooping black moustaches. He held a crossbow in his right hand, almost casually, pointed at Bug. His eyes widened when Locke appeared in the Wardrobe doorway.
“This ain’t right,” he said. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“You’re the Gray King’s man,” said Locke. His left hand was up against the back of the wall beside the door, as though he were holding himself up, concealing the hatchet.
“A Gray King’s man. He’s got a few.”
“I will give you any price you name,” said Locke. “Tell me where he is, what he’s doing, and how I can avoid the Bondsmage.”
“You can’t. I’ll give you that one for free. And any price I name? You got no such pull.”
“I have forty-five thousand full crowns.”
“You did,” said the crossbowman, amiably enough. “You don’t anymore.”