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.”
“One bolt,” said Locke. “Two of us.” Jean groaned from the floor behind him. “The situation bears thinking on.”
“You don’t look so well, and the boy don’t look like much. I said don’t move, boy.”
“One bolt won’t be enough,” said Bug, his eyes cold with an anger Locke had never before seen in him. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”
“One bolt,” repeated Locke. “It was for Bug, wasn’t it? If I weren’t here, you’d have shot him first thing. Then done for Jean. A commendable arrangement. But now there’s two of us, and you’re still armed for one.”
“Easy, gents,” said the Gray King’s man. “I don’t see either of you eager for a hole in the face.”
“You don’t know what you’re up against. What we’ve done.” Bug flicked his wrist, slightly, and something fell into it from his sleeve. Locke only barely caught the motion-what was that thing? An Orphan’s Twist? Oh, gods…that wouldn’t do any good against a crossbow quarrel…
“Bug…,” he muttered.
“Tell him, Locke. Tell him he doesn’t know who he’s fucking with. Tell him he doesn’t know what he’s going to get! We can take him.”
“First one of you moves an inch, I let fly.” The crossbowman backed off a stride, braced his weapon with his left arm, and swung his aim back and forth between Locke and Bug.
“Bug, don’t…”
“We can take him, Locke. You and I. He can’t stop both of us. Hell, I bet he can’t stop either of us.”
“Bug, listen…”
“Listen to your friend, boy.” The intruder was sweating nervously behind his weapon.
“I’m a Gentleman Bastard,” said Bug, slowly and angrily. “Nobody messes with us. Nobody gets the best of us. You’re going to pay!”
Bug sprang upward from the floor, raising the hand that held the Orphan’s Twist, a look of absolute burning determination on his face. The crossbow snapped, and the whip-crack of its unleashed cord echoed sharply from the enclosed glass walls of the kitchen.
The bolt that was meant to catch Bug between the eyes took him in the neck instead.
He jerked back as though stung by an insect; his knees buckled only halfway into his leap, and he spun backward, his useless little Orphan’s Twist arcing out of his hands as he fell.
The Gray King’s man threw down his crossbow and reached for a blade at his belt, but Locke was preceded out the doorway by the hatchet he’d concealed, flung with all of his rage. Jean could have split the man’s head with the blade; Locke barely managed to crack him hard with the ball side of the weapon. But it was enough. The ball caught him just beneath his right eye and he flinched backward, crying out in pain.
Locke scooped up the crossbow and fell upon the intruder, howling. He swung the butt-stock of the weapon into the man’s face, and the man’s nose broke with a spray of blood. He fell backward, his head cracking against the Elderglass of the passage wall. As he slid down, he raised his hands before him in an attempt to ward off Locke’s next blow. Locke smashed his fingers with the crossbow; the screams of the two men mingled and echoed in the enclosed space.
Locke ended the affair by slamming one curved end of the bow into the man’s temple. The assassin’s head spun, blood spattered against the glass, and he sagged into the passage corner, motionless.
Locke threw down the crossbow, turned on his heel, and ran to Bug.
The bolt had pierced the boy’s neck to the right of his windpipe, toward the outer edge of his neck, where it was buried up to its rounded feathers in a spreading pool of dark blood. Locke knelt and cradled Bug’s head in his hands, feeling the tip of the crossbow quarrel on the back of Bug’s neck. Slick warmth poured out over Locke’s hands; he could feel it coursing out with every ragged breath the boy took. Bug’s eyes were wide, and they fixed on him.
“Forgive me,” Locke mumbled through his tears. “Gods damn me, Bug, this is my fault. We could have run. We should have. My pride…you and Calo and Galdo. That bolt should have been me.”