“Who what, you little ass-tickler?”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Wouldn’t you like to fucking know.”
“WHO?”
Locke’s hands had formed themselves into fists of their own accord, and his heart pounded as he yelled again at the top of his lungs, “WHO?”
Veslin only had to kick him once to knock him down. Locke saw it coming, saw the bully’s foot rising toward his face, growing impossibly in size, and still he couldn’t avoid it. Floor and ceiling reversed themselves, and when Locke could see again, he was on his back with Veslin’s heel on his chest. Warm coppery blood was trickling down the back of his throat.
“Where does he get off, talking to us like that?” said Veslin mildly.
“Dunno. Fuckin’ sad, it is,” said Gregor.
“Please,” said Locke. “Tell me—”
“Tell you what? What right you got to know anything?” Veslin knelt on Locke’s chest, rifled through his clothes, and came up with the things he’d managed to clutch that day. Two purses, a silver necklace, a handkerchief, and some wooden tubes of Jereshti cosmetics. “Know what, Gregor? I don’t think I remember Lamora here coming home with anything tonight.”
“Nor me, Ves.”
“Yeah. How’s that for sad, you little piss-pants? You want dinner, you can eat your own shit.”
Locke was too used to the sort of laughter that now rose in the tunnel to pay any attention to it. He tried to get up and was kicked in the throat for his trouble.
“I just want to know,” he gasped, “what happened—”
“Why do you care?”
“Please … please …”
“Well, if you’re gonna be civil about it.” Veslin dropped Locke’s takings into a dirty cloth sack. “Windows had themselves a bad night.”
“Cocked up proper, they did,” said Gregor.
“Got pinched hitting a big house. Not all of ’em got clear. Lost one in a canal.”
“Who?”
“Beth. Drowned, she did.”
“You’re lying,” whispered Locke. “YOU’RE LYING!”
Veslin kicked him in the side of his stomach and Locke writhed. “Who says … who says she’s—”
“I fuckin’ say.”
“Who told you?”
“I got a letter from the duke, you fuckin’ half-wit. The master, that’s who! Beth drowned last night. She ain’t coming back to the Hill. You sweet on her or something? That’s a laugh.”
“Go to hell,” whispered Locke. “You go to—”
Veslin cut him off with another hard kick to the exact same spot.
“Gregor,” he said, “we got a real problem here. This one ain’t right in the head. Forgot what he can and can’t say to the likes of us.”
“I got just the thing for it, Ves.” Gregor kicked Locke between the legs. Locke’s mouth opened, but nothing came out except a dry hiss of agony.
“Give it to the little shit-smear.” Veslin grinned as he and Gregor began to work Locke over with hard kicks, carefully aimed. “You like that, Lamora? You like what you get, you put on airs with us?”
Only the Thiefmaker’s proscription of outright murder among his orphans saved Locke’s life. No doubt the boys would have pulped him if their own necks wouldn’t have been the price of their amusement, and as it was they nearly went too far.
It was two days before Locke could move well enough to work again, and in that interval, lacking friends to tend him, he was tormented by hunger and thirst. But he took no satisfaction in his recovery, and no joy in his return to work.
He was back to playing dead, back to hiding in corners, back to rule one and rule two. He was all alone in the Hill once again.
I
HER SHADOW
“I CANNOT tell you now;
When the wind’s drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind’s a whisper at last—
Maybe I’ll tell you then
some other time.”
—Carl Sandburg
from “The Great Hunt”
CHAPTER ONE
THINGS GET WORSE
1
WEAK SUNLIGHT AGAINST his eyelids drew him out of sleep. The brightness intruded, grew, made him blink groggily. A window was open, letting in mild afternoon air and a freshwater smell. Not Camorr. Sound of waves lapping against a sand beach. Not Camorr at all.
He was tangled in his sheets again, lightheaded. The roof of his mouth felt like sun-dried leather. Chapped lips peeled apart as he croaked, “What are you …”
“Shhhh. I didn’t mean to wake you. The room needed some air.” A dark blur on the left, more or less Jean’s height. The floor creaked as the shape moved about. Soft rustle of fabric, snap of a coin purse, clink of metal. Locke pushed himself up on his elbows, prepared for the dizziness. It came on punctually.
“I was dreaming about her,” he muttered. “The times that we … when we first met.”
“Her?”
“Her. You know.”
“Ah. The canonical her.” Jean knelt beside the bed and held out a cup of water, which Locke took in his shaking left hand and sipped at gratefully. The world was slowly coming into focus.
“So vivid,” said Locke. “Thought I could touch her. Tell her … how sorry I am.”
“That’s the best you can manage? Dreaming of a woman like that, and all you can think to do with your time is apologize?”
“Hardly under my control—”
“They’re your dreams. Take the reins.”
“I was just a little boy, for the gods’ sakes.”
“If she pops up again move it forward ten or fifteen years. I want to see some blushing and stammering next time you wake up.”
“Going somewhere?”
“Out for a bit. Making my rounds.”
“Jean, there’s no point. Quit torturing yourself.”
“Finished?” Jean took the empty cup from him.
“Not nearly. I—”
“Won’t be gone long.” Jean set the cup on the table and gave the lapels of his coat a perfunctory brushing as he moved to the door. “Get some more rest.”
“You don’t bloody listen to reason, do you?”
“You know what they say about imitation and flattery.”
The door slid shut and Jean was gone, out into the streets of Lashain.
2
LASHAIN WAS famous as a city where anything could be bought and anything could be left behind. By the grace of the regio, the city’s highest and thinnest order of nobility (where a title that could be traced back more than two generations qualified one for the old guard), just about anyone with cash in hand and enough of a pulse to maintain semiconsciousness could have their blood transmuted to a reasonable facsimile of blue.
From every corner of the Therin world they came—merchants and criminals, mercenary captains and pirates, gamblers and adventurers and exiles. As commoners they entered the chrysalis of a countinghouse, shed vast quantities of precious metal, and as newborn peers of Lashain they emerged into daylight. The regiominted demibarons, barons, viscounts, counts, and even the occasional marquis, with styles largely of their own invention. Honors were taken from a list and cost extra; “Defender of the Twelvefold Faith” was quite popular. There were also half a dozen meaningless orders of knighthood that looked marvelous on a coat lapel.
Because of the novelty of this purchased respectability to those who brokered it for themselves, Lashain was the most violently manners-conscious city Jean Tannen had ever visited. Lacking centuries of aristocratic descent to assure them of their worth, the neophytes of Lashain overcompensated with ceremony. Their rules of precedence were like alchemical formulae, and dinner parties killed more of them each year than fevers and accidents combined. It seemed that little could be more thrilling for those who’d just bought their family names than to risk them (not to mention their mortal flesh) over minor insults.