Their first legitimate target was taken unawares, and his possessions made his job plain. He wore a mottled gray-brown cloak ideal for blending into city shadows, carried a spyglass, and the remains of a cold meal were spread beside his hiding place. In an instant, Jean flung him down on his stomach and crouched atop him, wrenching the poor fellow’s arms behind his back. Locke knelt at the man’s head, bemused at how familiar he and Jean were becoming with the old Threatening Voice / Silent Brawn act.
“You try to cry out,” whispered Locke, “and we’ll rip your arms off. Shove one down your throat and one up your ass so you’ll look like meat on a spit. How many of you are watching Josten’s?”
“I don’t know,” hissed the man.
Locke gave him a shove on the back of the head, bouncing his face off the roof tiles. Hard, but not too hard.
“It’s not worth it,” said Locke. “Your employer doesn’t expect life-or-death loyalty, surely. But we willhurt you to send a message.”
“There’s one more,” spat their captive. “One that I know of. Maybe more. Look out past this parapet. Four rows down, roof of the apothecary shop. He’s there somewhere. I swear that’s all I can tell you.”
“Good enough,” said Locke. He pulled his dagger and slashed the man’s cloak into strips. When Sabetha’s agent was gagged and thoroughly trussed, Locke gave him a pat on the back. “Now, don’t fret. Once we’ve finished clearing out all your friends, we’ll tip one of them off and you’ll be collected. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours. Don’t do anything stupid.”
The second agent was crouched atop the apothecary shop as indicated, but he was a touch more alert and met them with a drawn cosh. What followed was a proper scrum, with Locke clinging to the man’s legs while Jean attempted to wrestle and disarm him, hampered by the need to avoid killing him. Such was the fellow’s fighting spirit that they ultimately had to pummel him unconscious before they could have a word.
As they neared the end of their circuit around the neighborhood, perhaps ten minutes later, they found a third and likely final observer, fortunately no more on guard than the first.
“All your friends are dealt with,” said Jean cheerfully as he dangled the man over the back-alley side of the building by his jacket collar. “Trussed up like festival chickens.”
“Great gods, mate, it’s nothing personal,” sobbed the man as he stared into the shadows four stories below. “We’re just doing our bloody job!”
“Find another job,” said Locke. “This is us being very, very cordial. Next time we catch spies lurking in this neighborhood, we cripple them. This isn’t Karthain right now, it’s the sovereign state of Fuck Off and Go Home.”
“But—”
“Take a good look at that alley,” said Locke. “Imagine what those cold, hard stones will feel like when we throw you off this roof. You come round here again, you’d best have wings. Now, your comrades are tied up in their usual spots. Fetch them and run hard.”
“Couldn’t we discuss—”
“Get the dogshit out of your ears, you witless corpse-fart,” growled Jean. “Do you want to do as you’re told, or do you want to kiss that pavement?”
It turned out he wanted to do as he was told.
11
“HAVE YOU ever thought about how badly Chains fucked us all up?”
“Gods above!’ Locke narrowly avoided choking on his beer. “How tipsy are you?”
“Not at all.” Sabetha held her own glass rock-steady for several moments to support the assertion.
“I understand your frustration with the way some things played out,” said Locke. “You knowI listened to you.”
“I do.”
“And you know I think you had some points. But Chains was a generous man. A generous and caring man, whatever his faults.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. He wanted a family, very desperately. You’ve realized that?”
“Of course. I never thought of it as a defect.”
“I often think he wanted a family more than he wanted a gang.”
“Again—”
“A conscience is a dead weight in our profession.” She stared into the amber depths of her half-full glass. “Make no mistake, he shackled each of us with one. Even Calo and Galdo, rest their souls. For all that they did most of their thinking with their cocks and the rest with their balls, even they wound up with essentially kindly dispositions. Chains got us all in the end, good and hard.”
Their second dinner, the night following the alchemical “disaster” at the Sign of the Black Iris, was held aboard the Merry Drifter, a flat-topped dining barge complete with gardens and lacquered privacy screens. The barge had floated gently through the heart of Karthain, beneath the strange music of the Elderglass bridges, before finally laying anchor in the Amathel just off the Ponta Corbessa. As the sky had darkened and the alchemical globes flicked to life, little boats had ferried other diners to and from shore, but Locke and Sabetha had held their choice table at the barge’s stern all the while.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from someone who came out of Shades’ Hill,” said Locke. “Is that what you would have preferred? Getting beaten and starved? Maybe buggered here and there when it suited him?”
“Of course not—”
“Sabetha, you know how much I respect you, but if you can’t see what a gods-damned paradisewe lucked into when Chains picked us, you need to set that beer down this instant.”
“I don’t regret the comforts or the education. He was a faultless provider. Except in one respect … he trained a gentle streak into us and let us pretend it would never cost us.”
“You think we should have been more cruel? Ready to turn on each other like sharks in blood, like every other gods-damned gang around us? I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but that wasn’t weakness he bred into us. It was loyalty. And loyalty’s a hell of a weapon.”
“You have the luxury of thinking so.”
“Oh, not this again. The Jean situation, right? Straight and simple, gorgeous, don’t you daresit there and hit me with self-righteous envy for a friendship I kept and you walked away from.”
She set her beer down and stared coldly at him. Then, just as Locke’s heart started to sink in expectation of another one of their habitual misunderstandings, the chill thawed, and she attempted a smile. She whistled, mimicking the sound of an arrow in flight, and clutched at an imaginary shaft just above her heart.
“I’m sorry,” they both said, in Sanza-esque unison, and chuckled.
“You’re dwelling on something,” said Locke, reaching across the table to rest his free hand on hers. “Let it go. Just be here. Just be Sabetha, having dinner, floating on the Amathel. Let the world end at the sides of this barge.”
“I amdwelling on something.”
“Well, don’t take such a poisonous view of our upbringing. Come on. We lie for a living; it’s not healthy for us to lie to ourselves.”
“What do we do BUT lie to ourselves, Locke? Aren’t we supposed to be rich? Aren’t we supposed to be in command of our lives, free to go when and where we please, with all the honest simpletons of the world throwing coins at our feet? Here we are, halfway around the world, working for the gods-damned Bondsmagi just to stay alive.”
“You know, Jean’s slapped me out of a lot of moods like the one you’re in right now.” Locke took a long pull on his beer. “You’re taking the world awfully personally. Didn’t Chains ever tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?”
“The what?”
“The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition.”
“What is it?”
“He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone’s got a place in the queue, you can’t get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular.”