“Would you even have met the woman if we hadn’t intervened in your affairs? Would you have gone to sea?”
“That’s not for any of us to say—”
“So we own your misfortunes entirely, yet receive no credit for happier accidents.”
“I—”
“We’ve interfered here and there, Jean, but you’re flattering yourself if you imagine that we’ve drawn such an intricate design around you. The woman died in battle, and we had nothing to do with that. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Are you capable of feeling sorry for anything?”
The woman came toward Jean, reaching out with her left hand, and it took every ounce of his self-control not to fling himself away. He rose to his feet and stared fiercely down at her as she set warm fingers gently against his cheek.
“Time is precious,” she said. “I lift my ban upon you, Jean Tannen. This is my real flesh against yours. I might be able to stop you if you try to harm me, but now the matter is much less certain. So what will you do? Must we fight now, or can we talk?”
Jean shook; the urge to take her at her word, to smash her down, was rising hot and red within him. He would have to strike as fast as he ever had in his life, as hard as muscle and sinew could allow. Break her skull, throttle her, bear her down beneath his full weight, and pray to the gods he did enough damage to postpone whatever word or gesture she would utter in return.
They stood there for a long, tense moment, perfectly still, with her dark eyes meeting his unblinkingly. Then his right hand darted up and closed around her left wrist, savagely tight. He could feel thin bones under thin skin, and he knew that one good sharp twist—
The woman flinched. Real fear shone out from the depths of those eyes, the briefest flash before her vast self-possession rolled in again like resurging waters to drown her human weakness. But it had been there, genuine as the flesh beneath his fingers. Jean loosened his grip, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I don’t think you’re lying.”
“This is very important,” she whispered.
Jean kept his right hand where it was, and reached up with his left to push back the silver lace that sprouted from her jacket cuff. Black rings were tattooed around her wrist, precise lines on pale skin.
“Five rings,” said Locke. “All I ever heard was that more is better. Just how many can one of you people have, anyway?”
“This many,” said the woman with a hint of a smirk.
Jean released her arm and took a step back. She held her left hand up beside her head and stroked the tattoos gently with the fingers of her other hand. The blackness became silver, rippling silver, as though she wore bracelets of liquid moonlight.
As he stared at the eerie glow, Jean felt a cold itch behind his eyes, and a hard pressure against the fingertips of his right hand. Reeling, he saw images flash in his mind—fold upon fold of pale silk, needles punching in and out of delicate lace, the rough edge of a cloth unraveling into threads—the pressure on his fingers was an actual needle, moving up and down, in an endless steady dance across the cloth.…
“Oh,” he muttered, putting a hand to his forehead as the sensations receded. “What the hell was that?”
“Me,” said the woman. “In a manner of speaking. Have you ever recalled someone by the scent of their tobacco, or a perfume, or the feel of their skin? Deep memories without words?”
“Yeah,” said Locke, massaging his temples. Jean guessed that he’d somehow shared the brief vision.
“In my society, we speak mind to mind. We … announce ourselves using such impressions. We construct images of certain memories or passions. We call them sigils.” She hitched her laced sleeve back up over her wrist, where the black rings had entirely lost their ghostly gleam, and smiled. “Now that I’ve shared mine with you, you’re less likely to jump out of your skin if I ever need to speak mind to mind, rather than voice to ear.”
“What the hell are you?” said Jean.
“There are four of us,” said the woman. “In an ideal world, the wisest and most powerful of the fifth-circles. If nothing else, we do get to live in the biggest houses.”
“You rule the Bondsmagi,” said Locke, incredulously.
“Rule is too strong a term. We do occasionally manage to avert total chaos.”
“You have a name?”
“Patience.”
“What, you have some rule against telling us now?”
“No, it’s what I’m called. Patience.”
“No shit? Your peers must think pretty highly of you.”
“It doesn’t mean anything, any more than a girl named Violet needs to be purple. It’s a title. Archedama Patience. So, have we decided that nobody’s going to be murdering anyone here?”
“I suppose that depends on what you want to talk about,” said Jean.
“The pair of you,” said Patience. “I’ve been minding your business for some time now. Starting with the fragments I could pull out of the Falconer’s memories. Our agents retrieved his possessions from Camorr after he was … crippled. Among them a knife formerly belonging to one of the Anatolius sisters.”
“A knife with my blood on it,” said Jean.
“From that we had your trail easily enough.”
“And from that you fucked up our lives.”
“I need you to understand,” said Patience, “just how little you understand. I saved your lives in Tal Verrar.”
“Funny, I don’t recall seeing you there,” said Jean.
“The Falconer has friends,” said Patience. “Cohorts, followers, tools. For all of his flaws he was very popular. You saw their parlor tricks in the Night Market, but that was all I permitted. Without my intervention, they would have killed you.”
“You can call that mess ‘parlor tricks,’ ” said Jean. “That interference in Tal Verrar still made a hell of a problem for us.”
“Better than death, surely,” said Patience. “And kinder by far than I might have been, given the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?”
“The Falconer was arrogant, vicious, misguided. He was acting in obedience to a contract, which we consider a sacred obligation, but I won’t deny that he amplified the brutality of the affair beyond what was called for.”
“He was going to help turn hundreds of people into empty shells. Into gods-damned furniture. That wasn’t brutal enough?” said Jean.
“They were part of the contract. You and your friends were not.”
“Well, if this is some sort of apology, go to hell,” said Locke, coughing. “I don’t care what a humane old witch you think you are, and I don’t care how or why the Falconer went wrong in the head. If I’d had more time I would have used every second of it to bleed him. All he got was the thinnest shred of what he really deserved.”
“That’s more true than you know, Locke. Oh, so much truer than you know.” Patience folded her hands together and sighed. “And no one comprehends it quite as well as I do. After all, the Falconer is my son.”
INTERLUDE: THE UNDROWNED GIRL
1
THE WORLD BROADENED for Locke Lamora in the summer of the seventy-seventh Year of Sendovani, the summer after Beth vanished, the summer he was sold out of the Thiefmaker’s care and into that of Father Chains, the famous Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro. Suddenly his old worries and pains were gone, though they were replaced by a fresh set of bafflements on a daily basis.
“And what if a priest or priestess of another order should walk by?” asked Chains, adjusting the hooded white robe the Sanza twins had just thrown over Locke’s head.