Текст книги "The Republic of Thieves"

Автор книги: Scott Lynch

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 44 страниц)

INTERLUDE

THE UNDROWNED GIRL

1

THE WORLD BROADENED for Locke Lamora in the summer of the seventy-seventh year of Sendovani, the summer after Beth vanished, the summer he was sold out of the Thiefmaker’s care and into that of Father Chains, the famous Eyeless Priest at the Temple of Perelandro. Suddenly his old worries and pains were gone, though they were replaced by a fresh set of bafflements on a daily basis.

“And what if a priest or priestess of another order should walk by?” asked Chains, adjusting the hooded white robe the Sanza twins had just thrown over Locke’s head.

“I make the sign of our, um, joined service.” Locke enfolded his left hand within his right and bowed his head until it nearly touched his thumbs. “And I don’t speak unless spoken to.”

“Good. And if you cross paths with an initiate of another order?”

“I give the blessing for troubles to stay behind them.” Locke held out his right hand, palm up, and swept it up as though he was pushing something over his left shoulder.

“And?”

“Um, I greet if greeted … and say nothing otherwise?”

“What if you meet an initiate of Perelandro?”

“Always greet?”

“You missed something.”

“Um. Oh yeah. Sign of joined service. Always greet. Speak, ah, cordially with initiates and shut my mouth for anyone, um, higher.”

“What about the alternate signals for when it’s raining on a Penance Day?” said one of the Sanza twins.

“Um …” Locke coughed nervously into his hands. “I don’t … I’m not sure …”

“There isno alternate signal for when it’s raining on a Penance Day. Or any other day,” muttered Chains. “Well, now you look the part. And I think we can trust you with exterior ritual. Not bad for four days of learning. Most initiates get a few months before they’re trusted to count above ten without taking their shoes off.”

Chains stood and adjusted his own white robe. He and his boys were in the sanctuary of the Temple of Perelandro, a dank cave of a room that proclaimed not only the humility of Perelandro’s followers but their apparent indifference to the smell of mildew.

“Now then,” said Chains, “twit dexter and twit sinister—fetch my namesakes.”

Calo and Galdo scrambled to the wall where their master’s purely ceremonial fetters lay, joined to a huge iron bolt in the stone. They raced one another to drag the chains across the floor and snap the manacles on the big man.

“Aha,” said the first to finish, “you’re slower than an underwater fart!”

“Funny,” said the second. “Hey, what’s that on your chin?”

“Huh?”

“Looks like a fist!”

In an instant the space in front of Locke was filled with a mad whirl of Sanza limbs, and for the hundredth time in his few days as Chains’ ward, Locke lost track of which brother was which. The twins giggled madly as they wrestled with one another, then howled in unison as Chains reached out with calm precision and caught them each by an ear.

“You two savants,” he said, “can go put your own robes on, and carry the kettle out after Locke and I take our places.”

“You said we weren’t going to sit the steps today!” said one of the brothers.

“You’re not. I’m just not in the mood to carry the kettle. After you bring it out, you can go downstairs and mind your chores.”

“Chores?”

“Remember those customs papers I said I was forging up last night? They weren’t customs papers, they were arithmetic problems. A couple pages for each of you. There’s charcoal, ink, and parchment in the kitchen. Show your work.”

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.” The sound of simultaneously disappointed Sanza brothers was curiously tuneful. Locke had already heard the twins practicing their singing voices, which were quite good, and by accident or design they often harmonized.

“Now, get the door, Locke.” Chains tied on the last and most important part of his costume: the blindfold precisely adjusted to suggest his total helplessness while still allowing him to avoid tripping over the hem of his robe. “The sun is up, and all that money out there won’t steal itself.”

Locke worked the mechanism concealed behind one of the room’s moldering tapestries, and there was a faint rumble within the temple walls. A vertical line of burning gold appeared on the eastern wall as the doors creaked apart, and the sanctuary was quickly flooded with warm morning light. Chains held out a hand, and Locke ran over to take it.

“Ready?”

“If you say I am,” whispered Locke.

Hand in hand, the imaginary Eyeless Priest and his newest imaginary initiate walked out of their imaginary stone prison, into a morning heat so fierce that Locke could smell it baking up from the city’s stones and taste it on his tongue.

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!’

Here’s a cow that gives milk, and a pig that’s for ham

Here’s a cur and a goat and a lamb;

Here’s a horse tall and proud, and a well-trained old hawk,

But the thing you should see is this excellent cock!”

“Where could you possibly have learned that?” shouted Chains. Calo broke up in a fit of giggles, but Galdo picked up the song with a deadpan expression on his face:

“Oh, some cocks rise early and some cocks stand tall,

But the cock now in question works hardest of all!

And they say hard’s a virtue, in a cock’s line of work

So what say you, lovely, will you give it a—”

There was the unmistakable echoing slam of the burrow’s secret entrance, in the Elderglass-lined tunnel beside the kitchen, being thrown shut by someone who didn’t care that they were overheard. Chains rolled to his feet. Calo and Galdo ran behind him, putting themselves in easy reach of the kitchen’s knives. Locke stood up on his chair, arithmetic slate held up like a shield.

The instant he saw who it was coming around the corner, the slate slipped from his fingers and clattered against the floor.

“My dear,” cried Chains, “you’ve come back to us early!”

She was, if anything, taller even than Locke remembered, and her hair was well-dyed a uniform shade of light brown. But it washer. It was undeniably Beth.

3

“YOU CAN’T be here,” said Locke. “You’re dead!”

“I certainly can be here. I live here.” Beth dropped the brown leather bag she was carrying and unbound her hair, letting it fall to her shoulders. “Who might you be?”

“I … um … you don’t know?”

“Should I?”

Locke’s astonishment merged with a sour disappointment. While the gears of his mind turned furiously to conjure a reply, she studied him. Her eyes widened.

“Oh, gods. The Lamora boy, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Chains.

“Bought him as well, have you?”

“I’ve paid more for some of my lunches, but yes, I’ve taken him from your old master.” Chains ruffled Beth’s hair with fatherly affection, and she kissed the back of hand.

“But you were dead,” insisted Locke. “They said you’d drowned!”

“Yeah,” she said, mildly.

“But why?”

“Our Sabetha has a complicated past,” said Chains. “When I took her out of Shades’ Hill, I arranged a bit of theater to cover the trail.”

Beth. Sabetha. They’d mentioned Sabethaat least a dozen times since he’d come to live here. Locke suddenly felt like an idiot for not connecting the two names before … but then, he’d thought she was dead, hadn’t he? Beneath his astonishment, his embarrassment, his frustration, a warmth was rising in the pit of his stomach. Beth was alive … and she lived here!

“Well, where have … where did you go?” Locke asked.

“For training,” said Sabetha.

“And how was it?” asked Chains.

“Mistress Sibella said that I wasn’t as vulgar and clumsy as most of the Camorri she teaches.”

“So you … are, um—,” said Locke.

“High praise, coming from that gilded prune,” said Chains, ignoring Locke. “Let’s see if she was on the mark. Galdo, take Sabetha’s side for a four-step. Complar entant.”

“Must I?”

“Good question. Must I continue feeding you?”

Galdo hurried out from behind Chains and gave Sabetha a bow so exaggerated his nose nearly brushed the floor. “Enchanted, demoiselle. May I beg the pleasure of a dance? My patron won’t feed me anymore if I don’t pretend to enjoy this crap.”

“What a bold little monkey you are,” said the girl. The two of them moved into the widest clear area of the room, between the table and the counters.

“Calo,” said Chains, “if you would.”

“Yes, yes, I have it.” Calo fiddled with his harp for a moment before he began to pluck out a fast, rhythmic tune, more complex than the ditties he’d been playing before.

Galdo and Sabetha moved in unison, slowly at first but gaining confidence and speed as the tune went on. Locke watched, baffled but fascinated, as they danced in a manner that was more controlled than anything he’d ever seen in a tavern or a back alley. The key to the dance seemed to be that they would strike the ground with their heels forcefully, four taps between each major movement of the arms. They joined hands, twirled, unjoined, switched places, and all the while kept up a near-perfect rhythm with their feet.

“It’s popular with the swells,” said Chains, and Locke realized he was speaking for his benefit. “All the dancers form a circle, and the dancing master calls out partners. The chosen couple dances in the main, in the center of everything, and if they screw it up, well … penalties. Teasing. Romantic frustration, I would imagine.”

Locke was only half-listening, his eyes and thoughts lost in the dance. In Galdo he recognized the nervous quickness of a fellow orphan, the grace born of need that separated the living in Shades’ Hill from the likes of No-Teeth. Yet Sabetha had that and something more; not just speed but fluidity. Her knees and elbows seemed to vanish as she danced, and to Locke’s eyes she became all curves, whirls, effortless circles. Her cheeks turned red with exertion, and the golden glow of the chandelier lightened her brown hair until Locke, hypnotized, could almost imagine it red as well .…

Chains clapped three times, ending the dance if not Locke’s spell. If Sabetha knew she was being stared at she was either too polite or too disdainful to stare back.

“I can see that’s a fountain of gold I didn’t shit out in vain,” said Chains. “Well done, girl. Even having Galdo for a partner didn’t seem to hold you back.”

“Does it ever?” Sabetha smiled, still acting as though Locke wasn’t in the room, and drifted back toward the table where Galdo and Chains had been playing their game. She glanced over the board for a few seconds, then said, “You’re doomed, Sanza.”

“In a donkey’s dick I am!”

“Actually, I’ve got him in three moves,” said Chains, settling back down into his chair with a smile. “But I was going to spin it out for a while longer.”

While Galdo fretted over his position on the board, he and Calo and Sabetha fell into an animated conversation with Chains on subjects of which Locke was ignorant—dances, noble customs, people he’d never heard of, cities that were only names to him. Chains grew more and more boisterous until, after a few minutes, he gestured to Calo.

“Fetch us down something sweet,” he said. “We’ll have a toast to Sabetha’s return.”

“Lashani Black Sherry? I’ve always wanted to try it.” Calo opened a cabinet and carefully withdrew a greenish glass bottle that was full of something ink-dark. “Gods, it looks so disgusting!”

“Spoken like the midwife who delivered the pair of you,” said Chains. “Bring glasses for all of us, and for the toasting.”

The four children gathered around the table while Chains arranged the glasses and opened the bottle. Locke strategically placed the Sanzas between himself and Sabetha, giving him a better angle to continue staring at her. Chains then filled a glass to the brim with the sherry, which rippled black and gold in the chandelier light.

“This glass for the patron and protector, the Crooked Warden, our Father of Necessary Pretexts.” Chains carefully pushed the glass aside from the others. “Tonight he gives us the return of our friend, his servant Sabetha.” Chains raised his left hand to his lips and blew into his palm. “My words. My breath. These things bind my promise. A hundred gold pieces, duly stolen from honest men and women, to be cast into the sea in the dark of the Orphan’s Moon. We are grateful for Sabetha’s safety.”

The Orphan’s Moon, Locke knew, came once a year, in late winter, when the world’s largest two moons were in their dark phases together. At the Midsummer-mark, commoners who knew their dates of birth legally turned a year older. The Orphan’s Moon meant the same thing for those, like him, whose precise ages were mysteries.

Now Chains filled glasses and passed them out. Locke was surprised to see that while the other children received quarter-glasses of the alarmingly dark sherry, his own was mostly full. Chains grinned at him and raised his glass.

“Deep pockets poorly guarded,” he said.

“Watchmen asleep at their post,” said Sabetha.

“The city to nurture us and the night to hide us,” said Calo.

“Friends to help spend the loot!” As soon as Galdo finished the toast Locke had already heard many times since coming to the Gentlemen Bastards, five glasses went up to five sets of lips. Locke kept both hands on his for fear of spilling it.

The black sherry hit Locke’s throat with a blast of sweet flavors—cream, honey, raspberries, and many others he had no hope of naming. Warm prickly vapors seemed to slide up into his nose and waft behind his eyes, until it felt like he was being tickled from inside his own skull by dozens of feathers at once. Knowing how ill-mannered it would be to make a mess of a solemn toast, he bent every ounce of his will to gulping the full glass down.

“Waugh,” he said as soon as he was finished. It was a cross between a polite cough and the last gasp of a dying bird. He pounded on his chest. “Waugh, waugh, waugggggh!”

“Concur,” said Galdo in a harsh whisper. “Love it.”

“All the outward virtues of liquid shit,” said Chains, musing on his empty glass, “and a taste like pure joy pissed out by happy angels. Mind you, it doesn’t signify in the world at large. Don’t drink anything else that looks like this unless you want a swift release from mortal concerns.”

“I wonder,” said Locke, “don’t they ever make wine-colored wine in other cities?” He stared down into his own glass, which, like the fingers holding it, was beginning to blur around the edges.

“Some things are much more interesting when alchemists get their hands on them,” said Chains. “Your head, for example. Black sherry is renowned for kicking like a mule.”

“Yesh, renowned,” said Locke, grinning stupidly. His belly was warm, his head seemed not to weigh an ounce, and his intentions were disconnected from his actual movements by a heartbeat interval. He was aware that, if not already drunk, he was headed for it like a dart thrown at a wall.

“Now, Locke,” said Chains, his voice seeming to come from a distance, “I’ve a few things to discuss with these three. Perhaps you’d like to get to bed early tonight.”

A sharp pang pierced the bubble of warm contentment that had all but swallowed him. Go to bed early? Leave the company of Sabetha, whose blurry loveliness he was fixating on, barely managing to grudge himself the time required to blink every now and then?

“Um,” he said. “Wha?”

“It wasn’t a request, Locke,” said Chains gently. “You’ve a busy evening tomorrow, I can assure you, and you need all the sleep you can get.”

“Tomorrow?”

“You’ll see.” Chains rose, moved around the table, and carefully took Locke’s empty glass from his hand. Locke looked down in surprise, having forgotten that he’d been holding it. “Off you go.”

A tiny part of Locke’s mind, the cold wariness that had been his sentry in Shades’ Hill, realized Chains had long planned to send him, happily befuddled, to an early rest. Even through his wine-induced haze, that stung. He’d been feeling more and more at home, but no sooner had Sabetha walked through the door than it was Streets and Windows all over again, and he was packed off to some dark corner without the privileges enjoyed by the older children.

“I,” he muttered, taking his eyes of Sabetha for the first time in several minutes, but directing his voice at her. “I will. But … I’m g-glad you’re here.” He felt the urge to say something else, something weighty and witty that would turn that beautiful head of hers and fix her attention to him, a mirror of his own. But even drunk he knew he was more likely to pull rubies out of his ass than he was to speak as older people spoke, with words that were somehow careful and powerful and right. “Sabetha,” he half mumbled.

“Thanks,” she said, looking at the table.

“I mean, I knew … you knew I meant you, Sabetha … sorry. I just … I’m glad you’re not drowned, you know.”

More than anything, at that moment, he just wanted to hear her say his name, call him anything but “him” or “the Lamora Boy.” Acknowledge his existence … their partnership in Chains’ gang … gods, he would exile himself to bed early every night if he could just hear his name come out from between those thin lips of hers.

“Good night,” she said.

4

LOCKE WOKE the next day feeling as though the contents of his skull had been popped out and replaced upside-down.

“Here,” said one of the Sanzas, who happened to be sitting next to Locke’s cot with a book on his lap. The Sanza (Locke, muddled as he was, could not quite identify which one) passed over a wooden cup of water. It was lukewarm but clean, and Locke gulped it down without delicacy, marveling at how parched he felt.

“What time is it?” he croaked when he was finished.

“Must be past noon.”

“Noon? But … my chores …”

“No real work today.” The Sanza stretched and yawned. “No arithmetic. No Catch-the-Duke. No languages. No dancing.”

“No sitting the steps,” yelled the other Sanza from the next room. “No swordplay. No knots and ropes. No coins.”

“No music,” said the Sanza with the book. “No manners. No history. No bloody heraldry.”

“What are we doing, then?”

“Calo and I are to make sure you can stand up straight,” said the Sanza with the book. “Nail you to a plank if we have to.”

“And when that’s done, you’re to do all the dishes.”

“Sabetha …” Locke rubbed his eyes and rolled off his cot. “She’s really one of us?”

“Course she is,” said the Sanza with the book.

“Is she … here right now?”

“Nah. Out with Chains. Looking into things for tonight.”

“What’s tonight?”

“Dunno. All’s we know is the afternoon, and the afternoon, far as you’re concerned, is dishes.”

5

THOUGH ENERGETIC enough when set a task, Calo and Galdo were virtuosos of laziness when left to their own devices. Between subtle interference and overt clowning, they managed to stretch the half-hour Locke would ordinarily have needed to tend the dishes into nearly three hours. By the time the secret door to the temple above banged shut behind the returning Father Chains, Locke’s fingers were wrinkled and bleached from the alchemical polish he’d been using on the silver.

“Ah,” said Chains. “Good, good. You look more or less among the living. Feeling spry?”

“I suppose,” said Locke.

“We’ve a job tonight. Housebreaking. Windows work, and most of it on your little shoulders.” Chains patted his broad belly and smirked. “I parted ways with climbing and scampering some time ago.”

“Windows work?” said Locke, the drudgery of his long afternoon in the kitchen instantly forgotten. “I … I’d love to. But I thought you, um, didn’t do that sort of thing.”

“For its own sake, not usually. But I need to find some things out about you, Locke.”

“Oh, good.” Locke felt his excitement cool slightly. “Another test. When do they stop?”

“When you’re buried, my boy.” Chains knelt and gave Locke a friendly squeeze on the back of his neck. “When you’re under the dirt and colder than a fish’s tits. That’s when it stops. Now listen.

“I’ve got a tip from a friend at Meraggio’s.” Chains bustled about the kitchen, snatching up chalk and one of the slates the children used for their lessons. He sketched on it rapidly. “Seems a certain olive merchant is looking to marry his useless son to a noble wife. To sweeten the deal sufficiently, he’ll need to put his family splendids back into circulation.”

“What’s that mean?” said Locke.

“Means he needs to sell his jewels and things,” said Calo.

“Sharp lad. About an hour ago, the merchant’s man left the counting house with a lot of nice old things in a bag. He’s staying at a townhouse in the Razona; just him and two guards. The old man and a bigger retinue are coming in from his estate tomorrow. So tonight we have a bit of an opportunity.”

“Why us?” Locke’s excitement was tempered with genuine puzzlement. “If he’s only got two guards, anyone who wanted to could go in there with a gang.”

“Never in life,” said Chains, chuckling. “Barsavi won’t have it. The Razona’s a quiet district where doors don’t get kicked in. That’s the Peace. Anybody breaks it, they’re liable to have their precious bits cut off and stitched to their eyeballs. So instead of sending in brutes through the door, we send a quiet type through the window.”

Chains turned the slate toward Calo, Galdo, and Locke. The top half was taken up by a rough diagram of houses and their surrounding streets and alleys. Beneath that was a sketch of a necklace, with large ovoid shapes dangling from a thick central collar. Chains tapped one of his fingers against this sketch.

“One piece,” he said. “That’s all we’re after. One from twenty or so, and they won’t have time to put up much of a fuss about it. A gold necklace with nine hanging emeralds. Pop out the stones, send them nine different directions, and melt down the gold. Untraceable profit.”

“How do we do it?” asked Locke.

“Well, that’s half the fun.” Chains scratched at his chin. “You said yourself, it’s a test. You’ll be working with Sabetha, since she’s had more experience at this sort of thing. Calo and Galdo will be your top-eyes; that is, watching the area to cover your ass. I’ll be on the ground nearby, but I won’t be directly involved. My crooked little wonders get to sort the rest out for themselves.”

Locke’s heart raced. Test or not, a chance to work together with Sabetha, on something exciting? The gods loved him!

“Where is she now?”

“Here.” Chains pointed to a square sketched on the upper portion of the slate. “On the Via Selaine. Four-story house with a rooftop garden. That’s our target. She’ll be nearby until dark; at first moonrise she’ll meet you in this alley.” Chains ran his finger up and down a set of chalk lines, blurring them. “Once the Sanzas are in position to keep an eye on the street, the rest is up to you and Sabetha.”