“I promise you a death-offering, brothers,” Locke whispered when he’d finished. “I promise you an offering that will make the gods themselves take notice. An offering that will make the shades of all the dukes and capas of Camorr feel like paupers. An offering in blood and gold and fire. This I swear by Aza Guilla who gathers us, and by Perelandro who sheltered us, and by the Crooked Warden who places his finger on the scale when our souls are weighed. This I swear to Chains, who kept us safe. I beg your forgiveness that I failed to do the same.”
Locke forced himself to stand up and return to work.
A few old garments had been thrown into the Wardrobe corners; Locke gathered them up, along with a few components from the spilled Masque Box: a handful of false moustaches, a bit of false beard, and some stage adhesive. These he threw into the entrance corridor to the burrow; then he peeked into the vault. As he’d suspected, it was utterly empty. Not a single coin remained in any well or on any shelf. No doubt the sacks loaded onto the wagon earlier had vanished as well.
From the sleeping quarters at the back of the burrow, he gathered sheets and blankets, then parchment, books, and scrolls. He threw these into a heap atop the dining room table. At last, he stood over the Gray King’s assassin, his hands and clothes covered in blood, and waited for Jean to return.
6
“WAKE UP,” said Locke. “I know you can hear me.”
The Gray King’s assassin blinked, spat blood, and tried to push himself even farther back into the corner with his feet.
Locke stared down at him. It was a curious reversal of the natural way of things. The assassin was well muscled, a head taller than Locke, and Locke was particularly unimposing after the events of this night. But everything frightening about him was concentrated in his eyes, and they bore down on the assassin with a bright, hard hatred.
Jean stood a few paces behind him, a bag over his shoulder, his hatchets tucked into his belt.
“Do you want to live?” asked Locke.
The assassin said nothing.
“It was a simple question, and I won’t repeat it again. Do you want to live?”
“I…yes,” the man said softly.
“Then it pleases me to deny you your preference.” Locke knelt beside him, reached beneath his own undertunic, and drew forth a little leather pouch that hung by a cord around his neck.
“Once,” said Locke, “when I was old enough to understand what I’d done, I was ashamed to be a murderer. Even after I’d paid the debt, I still wore this. All these years, to remind me.”
He pulled the pouch forward, snapping the cord. He opened it and removed a single small white shark’s tooth. He grabbed the assassin’s right hand, placed the pouch and the tooth on his palm, and then squeezed the man’s broken fingers together around them. The assassin writhed and screamed. Locke punched him.
“But now,” he said, “now, I’ll be a murderer once again. I will set myself to slay until every last Gray King’s man is gone. You hear me, cock-sucker? I will have the Bondsmage and I will have the Gray King, and if all the powers of Camorr and Karthain and Hell itself oppose me, it will be nothing-nothing but a longer trail of corpses between me and your master.”
“You’re mad,” the assassin whispered. “You’ll never beat the Gray King.”
“I’ll do more than that. Whatever he’s planning, I will unmake it. Whatever he desires, I will destroy it. Every reason you came down here to murder my friends will evaporate. Every Gray King’s man will die for nothing, starting with you.”
Jean Tannen stepped forward and grabbed the assassin with one hand, hauling him to his knees. Jean dragged him into the kitchen, oblivious to the man’s pleas for mercy. The assassin was flung against the table, beside the three covered bodies and the pile of cloth and paper, and he became aware of the cloying smell of lamp oil.
Without a word, Jean brought the ball of one of his hatchets down on the assassin’s right knee; the man howled. Another swift crack shattered his left kneecap, and the assassin rolled over to shield himself from further blows-but none fell.
“When you see the Crooked Warden,” said Locke, twisting something in his hands, “tell him that Locke Lamora learns slowly, but he learns well. And when you see my friends, you tell them that there are more of you on the way.”
He opened his hands and let an object fall to the ground. It was a piece of knotted cord, charcoal gray, with white filaments jutting out from one end. Alchemical twist-match. When the white threads were exposed to air for several moments, they would spark, igniting the heavier, longer-burning gray cord they were wrapped in. It splashed into the edge of a pool of lamp oil.
Locke and Jean went up through the concealed hatch into the old stone temple, letting the ladder cover fall shut with a bang behind them.
In the glass burrow beneath their feet, the flames began to rise.
First the flames, and then the screams.
INTERLUDE
The Tale of the Old Handball Players
Handball is a Therin pastime, as cherished by the people of the southern city-states as it is scorned by the Vadrans in their kingdom to the north (although Vadrans in the south seem to love it well enough). Scholars belittle the idea that the game had its origin in the era of the Therin Throne, when the mad emperor Sartirana would amuse himself by bowling with the severed heads of executed prisoners. They do not, however, deny it out of hand, for it is rarely wise to underestimate the Therin Throne’s excesses without the very firmest sort of proof.
Handball is a rough sport for the rough classes, played between two teams on any reasonably flat surface that can be found. The ball itself is a rubbery mass of tree latex and leather about six inches wide. The field is somewhere between twenty and thirty yards long, with straight lines marked (usually with chalk) at either end. Each team tries to move the ball across the other side’s goal line. The ball must be held in both hands of a player as he runs, steps, or dives across the end of the field.
The ball may be passed freely from player to player, but it must not be touched with any part of the body below the waist, and it must not be allowed to touch the ground, or possession will revert to the other team. A neutral adjudicator, referred to as the “Justice,” attempts to enforce the rules at any given match, with varying degrees of success.
Matches are sometimes played between teams representing entire neighborhoods or islands in Camorr; and the drinking, wagering, and brawling surrounding these affairs always starts several days beforehand and ends when the match is but a memory. Indeed, the match is frequently an island of relative calm and goodwill in a sea of chaos.
It is said that once, in the reign of the first Duke Andrakana, a match was arranged between the Cauldron and Catchfire. One young fisherman, Markos, was reckoned the finest handballer in the Cauldron, while his closest friend Gervain was thought of as the best and fairest handball Justice in the entire city. Naturally, the adjudication of the match was given over to Gervain.
The match was held in one of the dusty, abandoned public squares of the Ashfall district with a thousand screaming, barely sober spectators from each side crowding the wrecked houses and alleys that surrounded the square. It was a bitter contest, close-fought all the way. At the very end, the Cauldron was behind by one point, with the final sands trickling out of the hourglass that kept the game’s time.
Markos, bellowing madly, took the ball in his hands and bashed his way through an entire line of Catchfire defenders. With one eye blackened, his hands bruised purple, blood streaming on his elbows and knees, he flung himself desperately for the goal line as the very last second of the game fell away.