Текст книги "The Republic of Thieves"

Автор книги: Scott Lynch

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 44 страниц)

“I’ll eat, but only to give the wine some ballast. There’s no other point to it, Jean. There’s no cure forthcoming.”

“If you can’t be cured, you’ll have to endure. Outlast it, until it breaks like a fever.”

“The poison’s more likely to last than I am.” Locke coughed and dabbed at his mouth with one of his sheets. “Jean, you’ve called down some trouble by stealing this little weasel out of his house. Surely you can see that.”

“I was very careful.”

“You know better! He’ll remember your face, and Lashain’s not so very big. Look, take the money that’s left. Take it and get out of town tonight. You can slip into a dozen trades at will, you speak four languages, you’ll be wealthy again in—”

“Incomprehensible babble.” Jean sat on the edge of the bed and gently pushed Locke’s sweat-slick hair out of his eyes. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

“Jean, I know you. You’ll kill half a city block when your blood’s up, but you’ll neverslit the throat of a sleeping man who’s done us no real harm. That means constables will kick our doors down sooner or later. Please don’t be here when they do.”

“You brought this upon yourself when you cheated that antidote into my glass. The consequences are yours to—”

“Like hell. You would have robbed me of that choice, too! Gods, all this maneuvering for moral advantage! You’d think we were married.” Locke coughed and arched his back. “The gods must truly have it in for you, to make you my nurse,” he said quietly. “Not once but twice, now.”

“Hell, they made me your nurse when I was ten years old. You can knock down kingdoms on a whim. What you need is someone to make sure you don’t get hit by a carriage each time you cross the street.”

“That’s all over now, though. And it might have been kinder for you if I had been hit by a carriage—”

“You see this?” Jean took the tightly bound lock of dark, curly hair out of his coat pocket and held it up. “You see this, you bloody bastard? You know where it came from. I’m done losing. Do you fucking hear me? I am donelosing. Spare me your precious self-pity, because this isn’t a stage and I didn’t pay two coppers to cry my eyes out over anyone’s death speech. You don’t fucking get one, understand? I don’t care if you cough up buckets of blood. Buckets I can carry. I don’t care if you howl like a dog for months. You’re going to eat and drink and keep fighting.”

“Well,” said Locke after a few moments had passed in silence. He smiled wryly. “If you are going to be an intractable son of a bitch, why don’t you uncork that wine so we can start with the part about drinking?”

9

JEAN LEFT Zodesti in an alley about three blocks west of the Villa Suvela, taking care to conceal him well and cover his bag with trash. He wouldn’t be at all pleased when he awoke, but at least he’d be alive.

Locke’s condition changed little that night; he slept in fits and starts, sipped wine, grudgingly chewed cold beef and soft bread, and continued bleeding. Jean fell asleep sitting up and managed to spill ale over a useless treatise on poisons. Most of their nights had been like this, recently.

The rain kept up well into the next night, enfolding the city in murk. Just before the unseen sundown Jean went out to fetch fresh supplies. There was a merchants’ inn not ten minutes from the Villa Suvela that was used to dealing in necessities at odd hours.

When Jean came back, the front door was completely unmarked. He had no reason to suspect that anything was amiss, until he glanced down in the entry and saw the great mess of water that had recently been brought across the threshold.

Movement on both sides—too many attackers, too prepared. A basket of food and wine was no weapon at all. Jean went down under a press of bodies. With desperate strength he smashed a nose, kicked a foot, tried to claw out the space he needed to pull and use his hatchets—

“Enough,” said a commanding voice. Jean looked up. The door to the inner apartment was open, and there were men standing over Locke’s bed.

“No!” Jean yelled, ceasing his fight. Four men seized him and dragged him into the inner room, where he counted at least five more visible opponents. One of them grabbed a towel from the linens table and held it up to his bleeding nose.

“I’m sorry,” said Locke, hoarsely. “They came right after you left—”

“Quiet.” The speaker was a rugged man about Locke and Jean’s age, with a brawler’s scarred jaw and a nose that looked like it had been used to break a hard fall. His hair was scraped down to stubble, and he wore quality fighting leathers under a long black coat. Had Jean been thinking straight, he would have realized that the consequences of Zodesti’s abduction might come back to them from directions other than the Lashani constabulary. “How’s your head, Leone?”

“Broge my fuggin node,” said the man holding a towel to his face.

“Builds character.” The man in the black coat picked up a chair, set it down in front of Jean, then kicked him in the stomach, good and fast, barely giving him time to flinch before the pain hit. Jean groaned, and the four men holding him bore down on him with all of their weight, lest he try anything stupid.

“Wait,” coughed Locke. “Please—”

“If I have to say ‘quiet’ again,” said the black-coated man, “I’ll cut your fucking tongue out and pin it to the wall. Now shut up.” He sat down in the chair and smiled. “My name is Cortessa.”

“Whispers,” said Jean. This was much worse than the constabulary. Whispers Cortessa was a top power in the Lashani underworld.

“So they call me. I presume you’re Andolini.”

That was the name Jean had given when renting their rooms, and he nodded.

“If it’s real I’m the king of the Seven Marrows,” said Cortessa. “But nobody cares. Can you tell me why I’m here?”

“You ran out of sheep to fuck and went looking for some action?”

“Gods, I love Camorri. Constitutionally incapable of doing things the easy way.” Cortessa slapped Jean hard enough to make his eyes water. “Try again. Why am I here?”

“You heard,” Jean gasped, “that we’d finally discovered the cure for being born with a face like a stray dog’s ass.”

“No. If that were true you would have used it.” Cortessa’s next blow was no slap, but a back-handed bruise-maker. Jean blinked as the room swam around him.

“Now, I would loveto sit here and paint the floor with your blood. Leone would probably love it even more. But I think I can save us all a lot of time.” Cortessa beckoned, and one of the men standing over Locke’s bed lifted a club. “What does your friend lose first? A knee? A few toes? I can be creative.”

“ No. Please.” Jean would have bent his head to Cortessa’s feet if he hadn’t been restrained. “I’m the one you want. I won’t waste any more of your time. Please.”

“You’re the one I want, suddenly? Why would I want you?”

“Something about a physiker, I’d guess.”

“There we are. That wasn’t so hard after all.” Cortessa cracked his knuckles. “What did you think might happen when someone like Zodesti came home from the shit you pulled yesterday?”

“Certainly would have been nice if he’d never said anything at all.”

“Don’t be simple. Now, I know you’re a friend of the friends. I hear things. When you first came to Lashain you knew your business. Kept the peace, made your gifts, behaved. You clearly understand how things work in our world. So do you think Zodesti ran up and down the streets, screaming that he’d been stolen away like a child? Or do you think he sent a few private messages to people who know people?”

“Shit,” said Jean.

“Yeah. So, I got the job and I thought to myself … wasn’t there a big man looking for alchemists and dog-leeches just last week? What might they have to say about him? Oh? A bad poisoning? A man bleeding to death in bed at the Villa Suvela?” Cortessa spread his arms and smiled beatifically. “Some problems just solve themselves.”

“How can I make amends?” said Jean.

“You can’t.” Cortessa stood up, laughing.

“Please don’t do anything to my friend. He had nothing to do with the physiker. Do whatever you like with me. I’ll cooperate. Just—”

“My, you’ve gone from hard to soft, big man. You’ll cooperate? Of course you’ll fucking cooperate, you’ve got four of my men sitting on you.”

“There’s money,” said Jean. “Money, or I could work for you—”

“You’ve got nothing I want,” said Cortessa. “And that’s your problem. But I have a serious problem of my own.”

“Oh?”

“Ordinarily, this is the part where we’d make soup out of your balls and watch you drink it. Ordinarily. But we have what you might call a conflict of interest. On the one hand, you’re an outlander and you touched a Lashani with all the right friends. That says we fucking kill you.

“On the other hand, it’s plain you are or were some sort of connected man in Camorr. Big Barsavi might not be with us anymore, gods rest his crooked soul, but nobody in their right mind wants to fuck with the capas. You could be somebody’s cousin. Who knows? A year or two from now, maybe someone comes looking for you. Asks around town. Whoops! Someone tells them to look on the bottom of the lake. And who gets sent back to Camorr in a box to pay the debt? Yours truly. That says we don’tfucking kill you.”

“Like I said, I have some money,” said Jean. “If that can help.”

“It’s not your money anymore. But what does help is that your friend here is already dying … and from the looks of it, he’ll be pretty damn glad to go.”

“Look, if you’ll just let him stay, he needs rest—”

“I know. That’s why I’m kicking your asses out of Lashain.” Cortessa waved his hands at his people. “Strip the place. All the food, all the wine. Blankets, bandages, money. Take the wood out of the fireplace. Throw the water out of the jug. Pass word to the innkeeper that these two fucks are under the interdict.”

“Please,” said Jean. “Please—”

“Shut up. You can keep your clothes and your weapons. I won’t send you out completely naked. But I want you gone. By sunrise, you’re out of the city or Zodesti gets to cut your ears off himself. Your friend can find somewhere else to die.” Cortessa gave Locke a pat on the leg. “Think fondly of me in hell, you poor bastard.”

“You might not be long in getting there yourself,” said Locke. “I’ll have a big hug waiting for you.”

Cortessa’s people ransacked the suite. They carefully piled Jean’s weapons on the floor; everything else was taken or smashed. Locke was left on the empty bed in his bloodstained breeches and tunic. Jean’s private purse and the one that had contained their general funds were both emptied. A few moments later, one of Cortessa’s men stuffed the empty purses into his pockets as well.

“Oh,” said Cortessa to Jean as the tumult was winding down, “one thing more. Leone gets a minute alone with you in the corner. For his nose.”

“Bleth you, bothss,” muttered Leone, gingerly poking at the swollen bruises that had spread to his lips.

“And you get to take it, outlander. Lift so much as a finger and I’ll have your friend gutted.” Cortessa patted Jean on the cheek and turned to leave. “Sunrise. Get the fuck out of Lashain. Or our next conversation takes place in Scholar Zodesti’s cellar.”

10

“JEAN,” WHISPERED Locke as soon as the last of Cortessa’s bruisers had left. “Jean! Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” Jean was huddled where the linens table had been before Cortessa’s men removed it. Leone had been straightforward but enthusiastic, and Jean felt as though he’d been thrown down a rocky hillside. “I’m just … enjoying the floor. It was kind enough to catch me when I fell.”

“Jean, listen. I took some of the money when we got here on the boat .… I hid it. Loosened a floorboard under the bed.”

“I know you did. I unloosened it. Took it back.”

“You eel! I wanted you to have something to get away with when you—”

“I knew you’d try it, Locke. There weren’t many hiding places available within stumbling distance of the bed.”

“Argh!”

“Argh, yourself.” Jean heaved himself over on his back and stared at the ceiling, breathing shallowly. Nothing felt broken, but his ribs and everything attached to them were lined up to file complaints. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll go out and find some blankets for you. I can get a cart. Maybe a boat. Get you out of here somehow, before the dawn. We’ve got a lot of darkness to use.”

“Jean, you’ll be watched until you leave. They’re not going to let you—” Locke coughed several times. “—steal anything big. And I’m not going to let you carry me.”

“Not let me carry you? What are you going to fend me off with, sarcasm?”

“You should have had a few thousand solari to work with, Jean. Could have gone anywhere … done anything with it.”

“I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. Now, you go with me. Or I stay here to die with you.”

“There’s no reasoning with you.”

“You’re such a paragon of compromise yourself. Pig-brained gods-damned egotist.”

“This isn’t a fair contest. You have more energy for big words than I do.” Locke laughed. “Gods, look at us. Can you believe they even took our firewood?”

“Very little surprises me these days.” Jean slowly stood up, wincing all the way. “So, inventory. No money. Clothes on our backs. Mostly myback. Some weapons. No firewood. Since I doubt we’ll be allowed to lift anything in the city, looks like I’ll have to do some highway work.”

“How do you plan on halting carriages?”

“I’ll throw you in the road and hope they stop.”

“Criminal genius. Will they be stopping out of heartfelt sympathy?”

“Revulsion, more likely.”

There was a knock at the front door.

Locke and Jean glanced at one another uneasily, and Jean picked up a dagger from the small pile of weapons that had been left to him.

“Maybe they’re back for the bed,” said Locke.

“Why would theybother knocking?”

Jean kept most of his body behind the door as he opened it, and he tucked the dagger just out of sight behind his back.

It wasn’t Cortessa, or a dog-leech, or even the master of the Villa Suvela, as Jean had expected. It was a woman, dressed in a richly embroidered oilcloak streaming with water. She held an alchemical globe in her hands, and by its pale light Jean could see that she was not young.

Jean scanned the curb behind her. No carriage, no litter, no escort of any sort—just misty darkness and the patter of the rain. A local? A fellow guest of the Villa Suvela?

“I, uh … can I be of assistance, madam?”

“I believe we can be of assistance to one another. If I might come in?” She had a soft and lovely voice, with something very close to a Lashani accent. Close, but not exact.

“We are … that is, I’m sorry, but we have some difficulty at the moment. My friend is ill.”

“I know they took your furniture.”

“You do?”

“And I know that you and your friend didn’t have much else to begin with.”

“Madam, you seem to have me at a disadvantage.”

“And you seem to have me out in the rain.”

“Um.” Jean shuffled the dagger and made it vanish up his tunic sleeve. “Well, my friend, as I said, is gravely ill. You should be aware—”

“I don’t mind.” She entered the instant Jean’s resolution wavered, and gracefully got out of the way as he closed the door behind her. “After all, poison is only contagious at dinner parties.”

“How the hell … are you a physiker?”

“Hardly.”

“Are you with Cortessa?”

The woman only laughed at that, and threw back the hood of her oilcloak. She was about fifty, the well-tended sort of fifty that only wealth could make possible, and her hair was the color of dry autumn wheat with currents of silver at the temples. She had a squarish face, with disconcertingly wide, dark eyes.

“Here, take this.” She tossed the alchemical globe to Jean, who caught it by reflex. “I know they took your lights, too.”

“Um, thank you, but—”

“My, my.” The woman unclasped her cloak and spun it off her shoulders as she strolled into the inner apartment. Her coat and skirts were richly brocaded with silver threads, and puffs of silver lace from beneath her cuffs half-covered her hands. She glanced at Locke. “Ill would seem to be an understatement.”

“Forgive me for not getting up,” said Locke. “And for not offering you a seat. And not being dressed. And for not … giving a damn.”

“Down to the last dregs of your charm, I see.”

“Down to the last dregs of my everything. Who are you, then?”

The woman shook out her oilcloak, then threw it over Locke like a blanket.

“Th-thank you.”

“It’s difficult to have a serious conversation with someone whose dignity is compromised, Locke.”

The next sound in the room was that of Jean slamming home the bolt on the front door. In an instant he returned to the inner apartment, knife in hand. He tossed the light-globe onto the bed, where Locke prevented it from bouncing onto the floor.

“In faith,” said Jean, “my patience for mysterious shit went out that door with the money and the furniture. So you explain how you know that name, and I won’t have to feel guilty for—”

“I doubt you’d survive what would happen if you acted on that impulse, Jean Tannen. I know your pride wouldn’t. Put your blade away.”

“Like hell!”

“Poor Gentlemen Bastards,” said the woman softly. “So far from home. But always in our sight.”

“ No,” said Jean in a disbelieving whisper.

“Oh, gods,” said Locke. He coughed and closed his eyes. “It’s you. I suspected you’d kick our door down sooner or later.”

“You sound disappointed.” The woman frowned. “As though you’d just failed to avoid an awkward social call. Would you really find death preferable to a little conversation, Locke?”

“Little conversations with Bondsmagi never end well.”

“You’re the reason we’re here,” growled Jean. “You and your games in Tal Verrar. Your damned letters!”

“Not entirely,” said the woman.

“You didn’t scare us in the Night Market.” Jean’s grip tightened on the hilt of his blade, and the pain of his recent beating was entirely forgotten. “You don’t fucking scare us now!”

“Then you don’t know us at all.”

“I think I do. And I don’t give a damn about your gods-damned rules!”

He was already in motion, and her back was to him. She had no chance to speak or gesture with her hands; his left arm went around her neck and he slammed the dagger home as hard as he could, directly between her shoulder blades.

11

THE WOMAN’S flesh was warm and solid beneath Jean’s arm one moment, and in the next his blade bit empty air.

Jean had faced many fast opponents in his life, but never one that dissolved instantly at his touch. That wasn’t human speed; it was sorcery.

His chance was gone.

He inhaled sharply, and a cold shudder ran down his back, the old familiar sensation of a misstep made and a blow about to fall. His pulse beat like a drum inside his skull, and he waited for the pain of whatever reprisal was coming—

“Oh yes,” said their visitor mildly from somewhere behind him. “That would have been very clever of me, Jean Tannen. Leaving myself at the mercy of a strong man and his grudges.”

Jean turned slowly, and saw that the woman was now standing about six feet to his left, by the window where the linens table had once been.

“I hold your true name like a caged bird,” she said. “Your hands and eyes will deceive you if you try to harm me.”

“Gods,” said Jean, suddenly overcome by a vast sense of weary frustration. “Must you play with your food?” He sat down on the edge of Locke’s bed and threw his knife at the floor, where it stuck quivering in the wood. “Just kill me like a fucking normal person. I won’t be your toy.”

“What will you be?”

“I’ll stand still and be boring. Get it over with.”

“Why do you keep assuming I’m here to kill you?”

“If not kill, then something worse.”

“I have no intention of murdering either of you. Ever.” The woman folded her hands in front of her chest. “What more proof do you need than the fact that you’re still alive? Could you have stopped me?”

“You’re not gods,” said Locke, weakly. “You might have us at your mercy, but we’ve had one of you at ours before.”

“Is that meant to be some poor cousin to a threat? A reminder that you just happened to be present when the Falconer’s terrible judgment finally got the best of him?”

“How is dear Falconer these days?” asked Locke.

“Well kept. In Karthain.” The woman sighed. “As he was when agents of Camorr brought him home. Witless and comatose.”

“He didn’t seem to react well to pain,” said Jean.

“And you imagine it was your torture that drove him mad?”

“Can’t have been our conversation,” said Locke.

“His real problem is self-inflicted. You see, we can deaden our minds to any suffering of the flesh. But that art requires caution. It’s extremely dangerous to use it in haste.”

“I’m delighted to hear that,” said Locke. “You’re saying that when he tried to escape the pain—”

“His mind jailed itself, in a haze of his own making,” said the woman. “And so we’ve been unable to correct his condition.”

“Marvelous,” said Locke. “I don’t really care how or why it happened, I’m still glad that it did. In fact I encourage the rest of you to use that power in haste.”

“You do many of us an injustice,” said the woman.

“Bitch, if I had the power I’d pull your heart out of your chest and use it for a handball,” said Locke, coughing. “I’d do it to all of you. You people kill anyone you like and fuck with the lives of those that treat you fairly for it.”

“Despising us must be rather like staring into a mirror, then.”

“I despise you,” said Locke, straining to heave himself up, “for Calo and Galdo, and for Bug, and for Nazca and Ezri, and for all the time we … wasted in …Tal Verrar.” Red-faced and shuddering, he fell back to the empty bed.

“You’re murderers and thieves,” said the woman. “You leave a trail of confusion and outrage wherever you go. You’ve brought down at least one government, and prevented the destruction of another for sentimental reasons. Can you really keep a straight face when you damn us for doing as we please?”

“We can,” said Jean. “And I can take the matter of Ezri very personally.”

“Would you even have met the woman if we hadn’t intervened in your affairs? Would you have gone to sea?”

“That’s not for any of us to say—”

“So we own your misfortunes entirely, yet receive no credit for happier accidents.”

“I—”

“We’ve interfered here and there, Jean, but you’re flattering yourself if you imagine that we’ve drawn such an intricate design around you. The woman died in battle, and we had nothing to do with that. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Are you capableof feeling sorry for anything?”

The woman came toward Jean, reaching out with her left hand, and it took every ounce of his self-control not to fling himself away. He rose to his feet and stared fiercely down at her as she set warm fingers gently against his cheek.

“Time is precious,” she said. “I lift my ban upon you, Jean Tannen. This is my real flesh against yours. I mightbe able to stop you if you try to harm me, but now the matter is much less certain. So what will you do? Must we fight now, or can we talk?”

Jean shook; the urge to take her at her word, to smash her down, was rising hot and red within him. He would have to strike as fast as he ever had in his life, as hard as muscle and sinew could allow. Break her skull, throttle her, bear her down beneath his full weight, and pray to the gods he did enough damage to postpone whatever word or gesture she would utter in return.

They stood there for a long, tense moment, perfectly still, with her dark eyes meeting his unblinkingly. Then his right hand darted up and closed around her left wrist, savagely tight. He could feel thin bones under thin skin, and he knew that one good sharp twist—

The woman flinched. Real fear shone out from the depths of those eyes, the briefest flash before her vast self-possession rolled in again like resurging waters to drown her human weakness. But it had been there, genuine as the flesh beneath his fingers. Jean loosened his grip, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I don’t think you’re lying.”

“This is very important,” she whispered.

Jean kept his right hand where it was, and reached up with his left to push back the silver lace that sprouted from her jacket cuff. Black rings were tattooed around her wrist, precise lines on pale skin.

“Five rings,” said Locke. “All I ever heard was that more is better. Just how many can one of you people have, anyway?”

“This many,” said the woman with a hint of a smirk.

Jean released her arm and took a step back. She held her left hand up beside her head and stroked the tattoos gently with the fingers of her other hand. The blackness became silver, rippling silver, as though she wore bracelets of liquid moonlight.

As he stared at the eerie glow, Jean felt a cold itch behind his eyes, and a hard pressure against the fingertips of his right hand. Reeling, he saw images flash in his mind—fold upon fold of pale silk, needles punching in and out of delicate lace, the rough edge of a cloth unraveling into threads—the pressure on his fingers was an actual needle, moving up and down, in an endless steady dance across the cloth .…

“Oh,” he muttered, putting a hand to his forehead as the sensations receded. “What the hell was that?”

“Me,” said the woman. “In a manner of speaking. Have you ever recalled someone by the scent of their tobacco, or a perfume, or the feel of their skin? Deep memories without words?”

“Yeah,” said Locke, massaging his temples. Jean guessed that he’d somehow shared the brief vision.

“In my society, we speak mind to mind. We … announce ourselves using such impressions. We construct images of certain memories or passions. We call them sigils.” She hitched her laced sleeve back up over her wrist, where the black rings had entirely lost their ghostly gleam, and smiled. “Now that I’ve shared mine with you, you’re less likely to jump out of your skin if I ever need to speak mind to mind, rather than voice to ear.”

“What the hell are you?” said Jean.

“There are four of us,” said the woman. “In an ideal world, the wisest and most powerful of the fifth-circles. If nothing else, we do get to live in the biggest houses.”

“You rule the Bondsmagi,” said Locke, incredulously.

“Rule is too strong a term. We do occasionally manage to avert total chaos.”

“You have a name?”

“Patience.”

“What, you have some rule against telling us now?”

“No, it’s what I’m called. Patience.”

“No shit? Your peers must think pretty highly of you.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, any more than a girl named Violet needs to be purple. It’s a title. Archedama Patience. So, have we decided that nobody’s going to be murdering anyone here?”

“I suppose that depends on what you want to talk about,” said Jean.

“The pair of you,” said Patience. “I’ve been minding your business for some time now. Starting with the fragments I could pull out of the Falconer’s memories. Our agents retrieved his possessions from Camorr after he was … crippled. Among them a knife formerly belonging to one of the Anatolius sisters.”

“A knife with my blood on it,” interrupted Jean.

“From that we had your trail easily enough.”

“And from that you fucked up our lives.”

“I need you to understand,” said Patience, “just how littleyou understand. I saved your lives in Tal Verrar.”

“Funny, I don’t recall seeing you there,” said Jean.

“The Falconer has friends,” said Patience. “Cohorts, followers, tools. For all of his flaws he was very popular. You saw their parlor tricks in the Night Market, but that was all I permitted. Without my intervention, they would have killed you.”

“You can call that mess ‘parlor tricks,’ ” said Jean. “That interference in Tal Verrar still made a hell of a problem for us.”

“Better than death, surely,” said Patience. “And kinder by far than I might have been, given the circumstances.”

“Circumstances?”

“The Falconer was arrogant, vicious, misguided. He was acting in obedience to a contract, which we consider a sacred obligation, but I won’t deny that he amplified the brutality of the affair beyond what was called for.”

“He was going to help turn hundreds of people into empty shells. Into gods-damned furniture. That wasn’t brutal enough?” said Jean.

“They were part of the contract. You and your friends were not.”

“Well, if this is some sort of apology, go to hell,” said Locke, coughing. “I don’t care what a humane old witch you think you are, and I don’t care how or why the Falconer went wrong in the head. If I’d had more time I would have used every second of it to bleed him. All he got was the thinnest shred of what he really deserved.”

“That’s more true than you know, Locke. Oh, so much truer than you know.” Patience folded her hands together and sighed. “And no one comprehends it quite as well as I do. After all, the Falconer is my son.”