“I make the sign of our, um, joined service.” Locke enfolded his left hand within his right and bowed his head until it nearly touched his thumbs. “And I don’t speak unless spoken to.”
“Good. And if you cross paths with an initiate of another order?”
“I give the blessing for troubles to stay behind them.” Locke held out his right hand, palm up, and swept it up as though he was pushing something over his left shoulder.
“And?”
“Um, I greet if greeted … and say nothing otherwise?”
“What if you meet an initiate of Perelandro?”
“Always greet?”
“You missed something.”
“Um. Oh yeah. Sign of joined service. Always greet. Speak, ah, cordially with initiates and shut my mouth for anyone, um, higher.”
“What about the alternate signals for when it’s raining on a Penance Day?” said one of the Sanza twins.
“Um …” Locke coughed nervously into his hands. “I don’t … I’m not sure …”
“There is no alternate signal for when it’s raining on a Penance Day. Or any other day,” muttered Chains. “Well, now you look the part. And I think we can trust you with exterior ritual. Not bad for four days of learning. Most initiates get a few months before they’re trusted to count above ten without taking their shoes off.”
Chains stood and adjusted his own white robe. He and his boys were in the sanctuary of the Temple of Perelandro, a dank cave of a room that proclaimed not only the humility of Perelandro’s followers but their apparent indifference to the smell of mildew.
“Now then,” said Chains, “twit dexter and twit sinister—fetch my namesakes.”
Calo and Galdo scrambled to the wall where their master’s purely ceremonial fetters lay, joined to a huge iron bolt in the stone. They raced one another to drag the chains across the floor and snap the manacles on the big man.
“Aha,” said the first to finish, “you’re slower than an underwater fart!”
“Funny,” said the second. “Hey, what’s that on your chin?”
“Huh?”
“Looks like a fist!”
In an instant the space in front of Locke was filled with a mad whirl of Sanza limbs, and for the hundredth time in his few days as Chains’ ward, Locke lost track of which brother was which. The twins giggled madly as they wrestled with one another, then howled in unison as Chains reached out with calm precision and caught them each by an ear.
“You two savants,” he said, “can go put your own robes on, and carry the kettle out after Locke and I take our places.”
“You said we weren’t going to sit the steps today!” said one of the brothers.
“You’re not. I’m just not in the mood to carry the kettle. After you bring it out, you can go downstairs and mind your chores.”
“Chores?”
“Remember those customs papers I said I was forging up last night? They weren’t customs papers, they were arithmetic problems. A couple pages for each of you. There’s charcoal, ink, and parchment in the kitchen. Show your work.”
“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.” The sound of simultaneously disappointed Sanza brothers was curiously tuneful. Locke had already heard the twins practicing their singing voices, which were quite good, and by accident or design they often harmonized.
“Now, get the door, Locke.” Chains tied on the last and most important part of his costume: the blindfold precisely adjusted to suggest his total helplessness while still allowing him to avoid tripping over the hem of his robe. “The sun is up, and all that money out there won’t steal itself.”
Locke worked the mechanism concealed behind one of the room’s moldering tapestries, and there was a faint rumble within the temple walls. A vertical line of burning gold appeared on the eastern wall as the doors creaked apart, and the sanctuary was quickly flooded with warm morning light. Chains held out a hand, and Locke ran over to take it.
“Ready?”
“If you say I am,” whispered Locke.
Hand in hand, the imaginary Eyeless Priest and his newest imaginary initiate walked out of their imaginary stone prison, into a morning heat so fierce that Locke could smell it baking up from the city’s stones and taste it on his tongue.
For the first of a thousand times, they went out together to rob passersby, as surely as if they were muggers, armed with nothing more than a few words and an empty copper kettle.
2
IN HIS first few months with Father Chains, Locke began to unlearn the city of Camorr he’d once known and discover something entirely different in its place. As a Shades’ Hill boy, he’d known daylight in flashes, exploring the upper world and then running back to the graveyard’s familiar darkness like a diver surfacing before his breath ran out. The Hill was full of dangers, but they were known dangers, while the city above was full of infinite mysteries.
Now the sun, which had once seemed to him like a great eye burning down in judgment, did nothing but make his head warm as he sat the temple steps in his little white robe. A happier boy might have been bored by the long hours of begging, but Locke had learned patience in the surest way possible—by hiding for his own survival. Spending half a night hugging the same shadow was nothing extraordinary to him, and he luxuriated in the idea of lazing around while people actually brought money to him.
He studied the rhythms of daily life in the Temple District. When nobody was near enough to eavesdrop, Chains would quietly answer Locke’s questions, and slowly the great mass of Camorri revealed themselves to him. What had once been a sea of mystifying details resolved bit by bit until Locke could identify the priests of the twelve orders, sort the very rich from the merely wealthy, and make a dozen other useful distinctions.
It still made his heart jump to see a patrol of yellowjackets walking past the temple steps, but their polite indifference was a pure delight. Some of them even saluted. It amazed Locke that the thin cotton robe he wore could provide him with such armor against a power that had previously seemed so arbitrary and absolute.
Constables. Saluting him! Gods above.
Inside the temple, down in the secret burrow that lay beneath its façade of poverty, further transmutations were under way. Locke ate well for the first time ever, sampling all the cuisines of Camorr under Chains’ enthusiastic direction. Although he started as an inept hindrance to the more experienced Sanzas, he quickly learned how to shake weevils out of flour, how to slice meats, and how to tell a filleting knife from an eel-fork.
“Bless us all,” said Chains one night, patting Locke on the belly. “You’re not the ragged little corpse that came to us all those weeks ago. Food and sunlight have worked an act of necromancy. You’re still small, but now you look like you could stand up to a moderate breeze.”
“Excellent,” said one of the Sanzas. “Soon he’ll be fat, and we can butcher him like all the others for a Penance Day roast.”
“What my brother means to say,” said the other twin, “is that all the others died of purely natural causes, and you have nothing to fear from us. Now have some more bread.”
Life in the care of Father Chains offered Locke more comfort than Shades’ Hill ever had. He had plenty to eat, new clothes, and a cot of his own to sleep on. Nothing more dangerous than the attempted pranks of the Sanza twins menaced him each night. Yet strangely enough Locke would never have called this new life easier than the one he’d left.