Eerie noises like hissing laughter fill the room as he fights to master the dreamsteel, to align it perfectly, to gild his throat.
“EGANIS,” he booms at last. The voice is cold, the words like metal grates sliding shut. “So, you would have offered me mercy, Eganis? YOU … offer ME mercy?”
“Please,” the caretaker coughs, “I meant you no harm! I’ve taken care of you!”
“I refused you as a gift.” The Falconer seizes the basin and hurls it at Eganis, spilling the remaining dreamsteel over him. “My mother should have sent you away.”
He moves his silver hand and speaks in his silver voice. The dreamsteel comes alive and crawls over Eganis, rolling toward his neck.
“No! Please, I can serve you!”
“You will serve me. As proof of concept.”
The Falconer makes a fist, and the loose dreamsteel flows into Eganis’ ears. Parallel red lines pour out beneath the silver ones, and then become rivers. Eganis screams. He clutches the top of his head, and there is a sound like wheat husks cracking. The skull shatters. A wave of silver fountains out behind hot blood and wet brains.
The results hit the floor in many different parts of the room. The Falconer calls the loose dreamsteel back to him, forming a necklace with it. He’ll need to secure more, somehow, to craft another functional hand. Still, what he has should be more than enough to give him back his wild sky.
7
THERE IS a narrow window beside the bookshelf. A gesture from the Falconer and the glass becomes sand, sliding out of the frame, blowing away into the blackly overcast night. Another gesture and the frame hinges rust; the Falconer pulls it out of the wall and lets it clatter to the floor.
He sees that he is somewhere in the Ponta Corbessa, just a block or two north of the docks. He sends his awareness forth, softly and subtly, well aware that none of the magi still abroad in the city will show him an instant’s mercy if he is located. It takes only moments to find what he wants, one of the fan-tailed carrion crows of the North Amathel, sly sociable birds with sharp eyes, sharp beaks, and sharp talons.
The Falconer takes the first crow gently and launches it into the night, using a slim thread of awareness, suppressing his delight at the sensation of soaring. A moment or two reaffirms his affinity for the work, and he extends his control to the half-dozen other crows roosting nearby.
The Falconer’s purloined murder circles over the Ponta Corbessa, hunting both for other crows and a glimpse of a certain cloaked woman. She must still be somewhere in Karthain, and he’ll know her at any distance, so long as she isn’t hidden away under a deep spell.
Seven crows becomes thirty. The Falconer directs them with the precision of a dancing master, sending more and more of his awareness out into the feathered cloud, seeing not through individual pairs of eyes but as a thrilling gestalt, a whirling composite of dark streets, rooftops, rattling carriages, and hurrying people.
Thirty crows becomes sixty. Sixty becomes ninety. They unwind in orderly spirals, north and west, search tirelessly.
It doesn’t take long to find her, at the western edge of the Ponta Corbessa. She is walking alone, toward some rendezvous, and the Falconer recognizes her beyond all possibility of doubt. Blood calls to blood.
His flights of crows, black against the black sky, converge and circle silently, three hundred feet up. In moments he has gathered one hundred and fifty, the most living creatures of any sort he has ever controlled at once. His mind is on fire with the thrill of power; now he has to be quick and certain, before Patience can bring her formidable skills into play, before any other magi can notice what’s going on.
One crow flutters and falls out of the night. The rest follow a heartbeat later.
Patience is on the pavement beside a warehouse, just passing under a swaying orange alchemical lamp. The first crow shoots past her hood from behind, brushing it, squawing and cawing all the way.
She whirls to see where it came from. The next dozen birds fly directly into her face.
Eyes, nose, cheeks, lips—there is no time to be merciful. The ball of sorcery-maddened crows pecks and claws at anything soft, anything vulnerable. Patience barely has time to scream before she is blind and on her back, flailing as more crows pour out of the sky like a black cloud given flesh.
She remembers her sorcery, and half manages a spell. A dozen birds flash into cinders, but a dozen more take their place, seeking neck and forehead, wrists and fingers. The Falconer presses Patience down to the pavement, the writhing flock a pure extension of his will, a crushing dark hand. Grinning madly, he channels a thought-sending to her, hurling his sigil against her shattered mental defenses, and then:
Is this weakness, Mother?
You never understood my talents.
The truth is, they never made me weak.
THE TRUTH IS THAT THEY GAVE ME WINGS.
The beaks and claws of the carrion birds are driven by human intelligence; in moments they have opened Patience’s wrists, pulped her hands, peeled the skin from her neck, torn out her eyes and tongue. She is helpless long before she dies.
The Falconer disperses his clouds of winged minions and sags against the window frame, gasping for breath. He has expended so much of himself .… He needs food. He must tear the house apart for anything useful. He needs clothing, money, boots .… He must be away as soon as he’s eaten, away from this nest of his enemies, away to recover himself.
“The time of quiet, Mother?” He hums the words softly to himself, savoring the eerie sensation of the dreamsteel vibrating in his throat. “Oh, I think the last thing fucking thing your friends are going to enjoy is a time of quiet.”
Hobbling uneasily, laughing to himself, he moves carefully down the stairs. First food, then clothes. Then to gather strength for the work ahead.
The long, bloody work ahead.
AFTERWORD
I’m grateful to Simon Spanton for recommending Antony Sher’s autobiographical The Year of the King, a book which didn’t so much directly influence The Republic of Thievesas whet my appetite to portray the players of the Moncraine Company from several angles I hadn’t previously considered. I hope that I may plead to enthusiasts of the theater, as I did to enthusiasts of all things nautical with Red Seas Under Red Skies, to remember that I have not sought to accurately re-create any particular tradition of troupe or performance from our own world, but to arrange selected elements of those traditions in a shape I found amusing.
I’m grateful again to Simon Spanton and Anne Groell for their long-suffering patience and support during a troublesome time; to my brilliant Sarah, who found something broken and helped put it back together; to Lou Anders, Jonathan Strahan, and Gareth-Michael Skarka, who coaxed work out of me when I badly needed to feel capable of it, and lastly to that person whose long correspondence kept me crawling forward in hope during the lowest, darkest point of my life: Thank you.
This concludes the third volume in the Gentleman Bastard sequence, which will continue with The Thorn of Emberlain.
SL
New Richmond, Wisconsin, 2008 – Brookfield, Massachusetts, 2013
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Scott Lynch is the author of The Lies of Locke Lamoraand Red Seas Under Red Skies. He lives in Wisconsin and frequently visits Massachusetts, the home of his partner, SF/F writer Elizabeth Bear. He moonlights as a paid-on-call firefighter for the city he resides in.