“Your pride,” the boy whispered. “Justified. Gentleman…Bastard.”
Locke pressed his fingers against Bug’s wound, imagining he could somehow dam the flow of blood, but the boy cried out, and Locke withdrew his shaking fingers.
“Justified,” Bug spat. Blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. “Am I…not a second. Not…apprentice. Real Gentleman Bastard.”
“You were never a second, Bug. You were never an apprentice.” Locke sobbed, tried to brush the boy’s hair back, and was aghast at the bloody handprint he left on Bug’s pale forehead. “You brave little idiot. You brave, stupid little bastard. This is my fault, Bug, please…please say this is all my fault.”
“No,” whispered Bug. “Oh gods…hurts…hurts so much…”
The boy said nothing more. His breathing came to one last ragged halt while Locke held him.
Locke stared upward. It seemed to him that the alien glass ceiling that had shed warm light on his life for so many long years now took a knowing pleasure in showing him nothing but dark red: the reflection of the floor on which he sat with the motionless body of Bug, still bleeding in his arms.
He might have stayed there, locked in a reverie of grief for the gods only knew how long-but Jean groaned loudly in the next room.
Locke remembered himself, shuddered, and set Bug’s head down as gently as he could. He stumbled to his feet and lifted Jean’s hatchet up off the ground once more. His motions were slow and unsteady as he walked back into the Wardrobe, raised the hatchet above his head, and brought it down with all the force he could muster on the sorcerous hand that lay between the bodies of Calo and Galdo.
The faint blue fire dimmed as the hatchet blade bit down into the desiccated flesh; Jean gasped loudly behind him, which Locke took as an encouraging sign. Methodically, maliciously, he hacked the hand into smaller pieces. He chopped at leathery skin and brittle bones until the black threads that had spelled Jean’s name were separated and the blue glow faded entirely.
He stood staring down at the Sanzas until he heard Jean moving behind him.
“Oh, Bug. Oh, gods damn it.” The big man stumbled to his feet and groaned. “Forgive me, Locke. I just couldn’t…I couldn’t move!”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” Locke spoke as though the sound of his own voice pained him. “It was a trap. It had your name on it, that thing the mage left for us. They guessed you’d be coming back.”
“A…a severed hand? A human hand, with my name stitched into it?”
“Yes.”
“A Hanged Man’s Grasp,” said Jean, staring at the fragments of flesh, and at the bodies of the Sanzas. “I…read about them, when I was younger. Seems they work.”
“Neatly removing you from the situation,” said Locke, coldly. “So one assassin hiding up above could come down, kill Bug, and finish you.”
“Just one?”
“Just one.” Locke sighed. “Jean. In the temple rooms up above. Our lamp oil…please fetch it down.”
“Lamp oil?”
“All of it,” said Locke. “Hurry.”
Jean paused in the kitchen, knelt, and slid Bug’s eyes closed with his left hand. He buried his face in his hands and shook, making no noise. Then he stumbled back to his feet, wiping away tears, and ran off to carry out Locke’s request.
Locke walked slowly back into the kitchen, dragging the body of Calo Sanza with him. He placed the corpse beside the table, folded its arms across its chest, knelt, and kissed its forehead.
The man in the corner moaned and moved his head. Locke kicked him once in the face, then returned to the Wardrobe for Galdo’s body. In short order, he had the Sanzas laid out neatly in the middle of the ransacked kitchen, with Bug beside them. Unable to bear the glassy stare of his dead friends’ eyes, Locke covered them with silk tablecloths from a smashed cabinet.
“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.