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 knowndangers, 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. Salutinghim! Gods above.
Inside the temple, down in the secret burrow that lay beneath its façade of poverty, further transmutations were underway. 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.
Within days of his arrival he’d been trained as an “initiate of Perelandro,” and the lessons only grew more intense from there. Chains was nothing like the Thiefmaker—he didn’t allow Calo and Galdo to actually terrorize Locke, and he didn’t punish failure by pulling out a butcher’s cleaver. But Chains could be disappointed. Oh, yes. On the steps of the temple he could marshal his mysterious powers to sway passersby, to plead logically or sermonize furiously until they parted with hard-earned coins, and in his tutelage he focused those same powers on Locke until it seemed that Chains’ disappointment was a rebuke worse than a beating.
It was a strange new set of affairs, to be sure. Locke feared what Chains might do if provoked (the leather pouch Locke was forced to wear around his neck, with the shark’s tooth inside, was an inescapable reminder), but he didn’t actually fear Chains himself. The big bearded man seemed so genuinely pleased when Locke got his lessons right, seemed to give off waves of approval that warmed like sunlight. With his two extremes of mood, sharp disappointment and bright satisfaction, Chains drove all of his boys on through their constant tests.
There were the obvious matters of Locke’s daily training—he learned to cook, to dress, to keep himself reasonably clean. He learned more about the order of Perelandro and his fictional place within it. He learned about the meanings of flags on carriages and coats of arms on guards’ tabards, about the history of the Temple District, about its landmarks.
Most difficult of all, at first, he learned to read and write. Two hours a day were spent at this, before and after sitting the steps. He began with fragmentary knowledge of the thirty letters of the Therin alphabet, and he could do simple sums when he had counters in front of him, like coins. But Chains had him reciting and scribing his letters until they danced in his dreams, and from there he moved to puzzling out small words, then bigger ones, then full sentences.
Chains began leaving written instructions for him each morning, and Locke wasn’t allowed to break his fast until he’d deciphered them. Around the time short paragraphs ceased to be his match in a battle of wits, Locke found himself up against arithmetic with slates and chalk. Arriving at the answers in his head was no longer sufficient.
“Twenty-six less twelve,” said Chains one night in early autumn. It was an unusually pleasant time in Camorr, with warm days and mild nights that neither drenched nor scalded the city. Chains was absorbed in a game of Catch-the-Duke against Galdo, alternately moving his pieces and giving mathematical problems to Locke. The three of them sat at the kitchen table, beneath the golden light of Chains’ fabulous alchemical chandelier, while Calo sat on a nearby counter plucking at a sad little instrument called a road-man’s harp.
“Um …” Locke scribbled on his slate, being careful to show his work properly. “Fourteen.”
“Well done,” said Chains. “Add twenty-one and thirteen.”
“Now go forth,” said Galdo, pushing one of his pieces along the squares of the game board. “Go forth and die for King Galdo.”
“Sooner rather than later,” said Chains, countering the move immediately.
“Since you two are at war,” said Calo, “how do you like this?”
He began to pluck a tune on his simplified harp, and in a soft, high voice he sang:
“From fair old Camorr to far Godsgate Hill,
Three thousand bold men marched to war.
A full hundred score are lying there still,
In red soil they claimed for Camorr.”
Galdo cleared his throat as he fiddled with his pieces on the board, and when his twin continued he joined in. Barely a heartbeat passed before the Sanzas found their eerie, note-perfect harmony:
“From fair old Camorr to far Godsgate Hill,
Went a duke who would not be a slave.
His Grace in his grave is lying there still,
In red soil he claimed for the brave.
“From fair old Camorr to far Godsgate Hill,
Is a hundred hard leagues overland.
But our host slain of old is lying there still,
In soil made red by their stand!”
“Commendable playing,” muttered Chains, “wasted on a nothing of a song shat out by perfumed fops to justify an old man’s folly.”
“Everyone sings it in the taverns,” said Calo.
“They’re supposed to. It’s artless doggerel meant to dress up the stink of a pointless slaughter. But I was briefly a part of those three thousand men, and nearly everyone I knew in those days is lying there still. Kindly sing something more cheerful.”
Calo bit the inside of his cheek, retuned his harp, and then began again:
“Said the reeve to the maid who was fresh to the farm
‘Let me show you the beasts of the yard!’