“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.
Markos lay upon the stones, his arms at full extension, with the ball touching but not quite crossing the chalked line. Gervain pushed aside the crowding players, stared down at Markos for a few seconds, and then said, “Not across the line. No point.”
The riot and the celebration that broke out afterward were indistinguishable from one another. Some say the yellowjackets killed a dozen men while battling it back; others say it was closer to a hundred. At least three of the city’s capas died in a little war that broke out over reneged bets, and Markos vowed never to speak to Gervain again. The two had fished together on the same boat since boyhood; now the Cauldron as a whole warned Gervain’s entire family that their lives wouldn’t be worth sausage casings if any one of them set foot in that district, ever again.
Twenty years passed, thirty, thirty-five. The first Duke Nicovante rose to eminence in the city. Markos and Gervain saw nothing of one another during this time. Gervain traveled to Jeresh for many years, where he rowed galleys and hunted devilfish for pay. Eventually, homesick, he took passage for Camorr. At the dockside, he was astounded to see a man stepping off a little fishing boat-a man weathered and gray and bearded just like himself, but certainly none other than his old friend Markos.
“Markos,” he cried. “Markos, from the Cauldron! Markos! The gods are kind! Surely you remember me?”
Markos turned to regard the traveler who stood before him; he stared for a few seconds. Then, without warning, he drew a long-bladed fisherman’s knife from his belt and buried it, up to the hilt, in Gervain’s stomach. As Gervain stared downward in shock, Markos gave him a shove sideways, and the former handball Justice fell into the water of Camorr Bay, never to surface again.
“Not across the line, my ass,” Markos spat.
Verrari, Karthani, and Lashani nod knowingly when they hear this story. They assume it to be apocryphal, but it confirms something they claim to know in their hearts-that Camorri are all gods-damned crazy.
Camorri, on the other hand, regard it as a valuable reminder against procrastinating in matters of revenge-or, if one cannot take satisfaction immediately, on the virtue of having a long memory.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. AT THE COURT OF CAPA RAZA
1
THEY HAD TO steal another little boat, Locke having so profligately disposed of their first. On any other night, he would have had a good laugh.
And so would Bug, and Calo, and Galdo, he told himself.
Locke and Jean drifted south between the Narrows and the Mara Camorrazza, hunched over in old cloaks from the floor of the Wardrobe, locked away from the rest of the city in the mist. The soft flickering lights and murmuring voices in the distance seemed to Locke as artifacts of an alien life he’d left long ago, not elements of the city he’d lived in for as long as he could remember.
“I am such a fool,” he muttered. He lay along a gunwale, aching, feeling the dry heaves rise up again from the battered pit of his stomach.
“If you say that one more time,” said Jean, “I will throw you into the water and row the boat over your head.”
“I should have let us run.”
“Perhaps,” said Jean. “But perhaps not everything miserable that happens to us stems directly from one of your choices, brother. Perhaps bad tidings come regardless of what we do. Perhaps if we’d run, that Bondsmage would have hunted us down upon the road, and scattered our bones somewhere between here and Talisham.”
“And yet…”
“We live,” said Jean forcefully. “We live and we may avenge them. You had the right idea when you did for that Gray King’s man back in the burrow. The questions now are why, and what next? Quit acting like you’ve been breathing Wraithstone smoke. I need your wits, Locke. I need the Thorn of Camorr.”
“Let me know when you find him. He’s a fucking fairy tale.”