The Republic of Thieves

  “Easy, Locke, easy. Just because you’ve been uncouth doesn’t mean you might not have a point. But hear me now—this is a small home we live in. The temple might seem marvelous compared to living and sleeping in heaps of dozens, but believe me—walls squeeze the people who live inside them, sooner or later.”

  “They don’t bother me,” said Locke quickly.

  “It’s not so much the walls, though, Locke, it’s the people. This will be your home for many years to come, gods willing, and you and Sabetha and the Sanzas are going to be as close as family. You’ll strike sparks off one another. I can’t have you shoving your thumb up your ass and doing your best impression of a brick wall every time you get annoyed. Crooked Warden help us, we’ve got to be ready and willing to talk, or we’re all going to wake up with cut throats sooner or later.”

  “I’m … I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t hang your head like a kicked puppy. Just keep it in mind. If you’re going to live here, staying civil is as much a duty as sitting the steps or washing dishes. Now, while I bask in the glow of another moral sermon delivered with the precision of a master fencer, hold your applause and let’s get back to last night. You’re upset because the situation was contrived to give you only one real means of resolving it, short of curling up into a little ball and crying yourself into a stupor.”

  “Yes! It wasn’t like it would have been, if they’d been real guards. If they weren’t, you know, watching for me.”

  “You’re right. If those men had been real agents of the duke, some of them might have been incompetent, or open to bribery, and they might not have taken their duty to guard a little girl very seriously. Correct?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Of course, if they’d been real agents of the duke, they might also have taken her somewhere truly impregnable, like the Palace of Patience. And instead of six there might have been twelve, or twenty, or the entire Nightglass company, prowling the streets looking to have an urgent personal conversation with you.” Chains leaned forward and poked Locke’s forehead. “That’s how luck works, lad. You can bitch all you like about how things could have been more favorable for you, but rest assured things can always be worse. Always. Understood?”

  “I think so,” said Locke, with the neutral tone of a student gingerly accepting a master’s assurances on something far beyond personal verification, like the number of angels that could play handball on the edge of a rose petal.

  “Well, if I can even get you thinking about it, that’s a victory of sorts, at your age. No offense.” Chains cracked his knuckles before continuing. “You, after all, have publicly vowed to never lose again, which is about as likely as me learning to crap gold bars on command.”

  “But—”

  “Let it be. I know your temperament, lad, and I’m too wise to try and give it more than a few sharp nudges at a time. So, the other thing. You’re upset that I lied about what needed to be done with Sabetha.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You feel something for her.”

  “I … I don’t, um …”

  “Quit it. This is important. You do feel something for her. There’s more to this than a little wounded pride. Can you tell me about it?”

  Slowly, grudgingly, feeling as though he might be about to get up and run away, Locke somehow found the will to give Chains the barest sketch of his first encounter with Sabetha, and of her later disappearance.

  “Hells,” said Chains quietly when the tale was finished. The sky and the city beneath it had darkened while Locke had stumbled through his explanation. “I can see why you snapped, having that rug pulled out from under you twice. Forgive me, Locke, I honestly didn’t know you’d grown feelings for her in Shades’ Hill.”

  “It’s okay,” mumbled Locke.

  “You have a crush, I think.”

  “Do I?” Locke had a vague idea of what that word meant, and somehow it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem enough.

  “It’s not meant to belittle your feelings, lad. A crush can come on hot and sharp like an illness. I know exactly what it’s like. Years to go before your body will even be ready for, ah, what comes between men and women, but a crush doesn’t care. It’s got a power all its own. That’s the bad news.”

  “What’s the good news?”

  “Crushes fade. Sure as you and I are sitting here now. They’re like sparks thrown from a fire—hot and bright for a moment, then gone.”

  Locke frowned, not at all sure he wanted to be released from his feelings for Sabetha. They were a bundle of mysteries, and every attempt to unravel them in his own mind seemed to send a pleasant warm shiver to every nerve in his body.

  “Heh. You don’t believe me, or you don’t want to. Fair enough. But you’re going to be living with Sabetha day in and day out anytime one of you isn’t away for training. My guess is, she’ll be like a sister to you in a few years. Familiarity has a way of filing the sharp edges off our feelings for other people. You’ll see.”

  2

  TIME PASSED, days and months chaining together into years, and Jean Tannen joined the Gentlemen Bastards. In the summer of the seventy-seventh Year of Perelandro, two years after Jean’s arrival, a rare dry spell came over the city-state of Camorr, and the Angevine ran ten feet below its usual height. The canals went gray and turgid, thickening like blood in the veins of a ripening corpse.

  Canal trees, those glorious affectations that usually roamed and twirled on the city’s currents with their long float-threaded roots drinking the filth around them, now bobbed in sullen masses, confined to the river and the Floating Market. Their silk-bright leaves dulled and their branches drooped; their roots hung slack in the water like the tentacles of dead sea-monsters. Day after day the Temple District was shrouded in layers of smoke, as every denomination burned anything that came to mind in sacrifices pleading for a hard, cleansing rain that wouldn’t come.

  In the Cauldron and the Dregs, where the lowest of the low slept ten to a room in windowless houses, the usual steady flow of murders became a torrent. The duke’s corpse-hunters, paid as they were by the head, whistled while they fished putrefying former citizens out of barrels and cesspits. The city’s professional criminals, more conscientious than its impulsive killers, did their part for Camorr’s air by throwing the remains of their victims into the harbor by night, where the predators of the Iron Sea quietly made the offerings vanish.

  In this atmosphere, in the hot summer evening heavy with smoke and the stink of a hundred distinct putrefactions, the temple roof was out of the question for meetings, so Father Chains let his five young wards gather in the dank coolness of the glass burrow’s kitchen. Their recent meals, by Chains’ orders, had been lukewarm affairs, with anything cooked brought in from stalls near the Floating Market.

  They had come together that week, as a complete set, for the first time in half a year. Chains’ interwoven programs of training had taken on the complexity of an acrobat’s plate-spinning act as his young wards were shuffled back and forth between apprenticeships in assorted temples and trades, learning their habits, jargon, rituals, and trivia. These excursions were arranged by the Eyeless Priest via a remarkable network of contacts, extending well beyond Camorr and the criminal fraternity, and they were largely paid for out of the small fortune that the citizens of Camorr had charitably donated over the years.

  Time had begun to work its more obvious changes on the young Gentlemen Bastards. Calo and Galdo were dealing with a growth spurt that had given their usual grace a humbling dose of awkwardness, and their voices were starting to veer wildly. Jean Tannen was still on the cherubic side, but his shoulders were broadening, and from scuffles like the Half-Crown War he had acquired the confident air of someone well versed in the art of introducing faces to cobblestones.

  Given these evident signs of physical progress around him, Locke was secretly displeased with his own condition. His voice had yet to drop, and while he was larger than he’d ever been, all this did was maintain him
in the same ratio as before, a medium child surrounded on all sides by the taller and the wider. And while he knew the other boys depended upon him to be the heart and brains of their combined operations, it was a cold comfort whenever Sabetha came home.

  Sabetha (who, if she objected to being the only Gentle-lady Bastard, had never said so out loud) was freshly returned from weeks of immersive training as a court scrivener’s apprentice, and bore new signs of physical progress herself. She was still taller than Locke, and the natural color of her tightly plaited hair remained hidden by a brown alchemical wash. But her slender figure seemed to be pressing outward, ever so slightly, against the front of her thin chemise, and her movements around the glass burrow had revealed the hints of other emerging curves to Locke’s vigilant eyes.

  Her natural poise had grown in direct proportion to her years, and while Locke held firm sway over the three other boys, she was a separate power, neither belittling his status in the gang nor overtly acknowledging it. There was a seriousness to her that Locke found deeply compelling, possibly because it was unique among the five of them. She had embarked upon a sort of miniature adulthood and skipped the wild facetiousness that defined, for example, the Sanzas. It seemed to Locke that she was more eager than the rest of them to get to wherever their training was taking them.

  “Young lady,” said Father Chains as he entered the kitchen, “and young gentlemen, such as you are. Thank you for your prompt attention to my summons, a courtesy which I shall now repay by setting you on a path to frustration and acrimony. I have decided that you five do not fight amongst yourselves nearly enough.”

  “Begging your pardon,” said Sabetha, “but if you’ll look more closely at Calo and Galdo you’ll see that’s not the case.”

  “Ah, that’s merely communication,” said Chains. “Just as you and I speak by forming words, the natural, private discourse of the Sanza twins appears to consist entirely of farts and savage beatings. What I want is all five of you facing off against one another.”

  “You want us to start … hitting each other?” said Locke.

  “Oh, I volunteer to hit Sabetha,” said Calo, “and I volunteer to be hit by Locke!”

  “I would also volunteer to be hit by Locke,” said Galdo.

  “Quiet, you turnip-brained alley apes,” said Chains. “I don’t want you boxing with one another. Not necessarily. No, I’ve given you all a great many tasks that have pitted you against the world, as individuals and as a group, and for the most part you’ve trounced my expectations. I think the time has come to pry you out of your comfortable little union and see how you fare in competition against one another.”

  “What sort of competition?” said Jean.

  “Highly amusing competition,” said Chains, raising his eyebrows. “From the perspective of the old man who gets to sit back and watch. It’s been three or four years of steady training for most of you, and I want to see what happens when each of you tries to pit your zest for criminal enterprise against an opponent with a similar education.”

  “So, uh, just to be clear,” said Calo, “none of us are going to be fighting Jean?”

  “Not unless you’re inconceivably stupid.”

  “Right,” said Calo. “What’s the plan?”

  “I’m going to keep you all here for the rest of the summer,” said Chains. “A break from your apprenticeships. We can enjoy the marvelous weather together, and you can chase each other across the city. Starting with—” He lifted a finger and pointed it at Locke. “You. Aaaaaaand …” He slowly shifted his finger until it was pointed at Sabetha. “You!”

  “Um, meaning what, exactly?” said Locke. Butterflies instantly came to life in his stomach, and the little bastards were heavily armed.

  “A bit of elementary stalking and evasion, on Coin-Kisser’s Row. Tomorrow at noon.”

  “Surrounded by hundreds of people,” said Sabetha coolly.

  “Quite right, my dear. It’s easy enough to follow someone when you’ve got the whole night to hide in. I think you’re ready for something less forgiving. You’ll begin at the very southern end of Coin-Kisser’s Row, carrying a handbag with an open top. Inside the bag will be four small rolls of silk, each a different color. Easily visible from ten or twenty feet away. You’ll take a leisurely stroll up the full length of the district.

  “Somewhere in your wake will be Locke, wearing a jacket with a certain number of brass buttons, also easily counted from a fairly narrow distance. The game is simple. Locke wins if he can tell me the colors of the silk. Sabetha wins if she crosses the Goldenreach Bridge from Coin-Kisser’s Row to Twosilver Green without revealing the colors. She can also win if Locke is clumsy enough for her to count the number of buttons on his coat. Each of you wishing to report to me will have only one chance to be accurate, so you can’t simply keep guessing until you get it right.”

  “Hold on,” said Locke. “I get one way to win and she gets two?”

  “Perhaps you can try burning down the Goldenreach Bridge,” Sabetha said sweetly.

  “Yes, she gets two,” said Chains, “and fortunately for Camorr, the bridge is made of stone. Sabetha has a package to guard, and must, as I have said, move at a leisurely pace, with dignity. No running or climbing. Locke, you’ll be expected to cause no scenes, but your freedom of movement will be less restricted.”

  “Ah.”

  “You’re not to physically touch one another. You may not simply cover up the silk or the buttons. You may not have your opponent harmed or restrained in any fashion. And neither of you may call upon any of the other Gentlemen Bastards for help.”

  “Where do we get to be, then?” said Galdo.

  “Safely at home,” said Chains, “sitting the steps in my place.”

  “Oh, balls to that, we want to see what happens!”

  “One thing the contest does not need,” said Chains, “is a chorus of gawkers stumbling along for the duration. I’ll be nearby, watching everything, and I promise to give you a very lively account upon my return. Now—” He produced two small leather bags and tossed them to Locke and Sabetha. “Your operating funds.”

  Locke opened his bag and counted ten silver solons.

  “You’ve got all night to think about what you’re doing,” said Chains. “You may come and go as you please. Don’t feel compelled to buy anything, but if you do, the coins I’ve given you are your absolute limit.”

  “What’s this all for?” said Locke.

  “To put you on the spot, and thereby—”

  “I think,” said Sabetha, “he meant to ask, what’s in it for the winner?”

  “Ah,” said Chains. “Of course. Well, other than acquiring a vast sense of personal satisfaction, the winner will hand their dinner chores over to the loser for three nights. How’s that?”

  Locke watched Sabetha, and when she nodded once, he did the same. The girl already seemed to be lost in thought, and Locke felt a touch of apprehension beneath his rising excitement. He had every confidence in his own skills, as they had fetched him everything from coin purses to corpses without much difficulty, but the full extent of Sabetha’s abilities was unknown to him. Her absences from the temple had been lengthier than those of any of the boys, and out there in the wider world she could have learned an infinite variety of nasty surprises.

  3

  SABETHA EXCUSED herself a few minutes later and vanished into the night, off to make whatever arrangements she thought were necessary. Locke followed in haste, throwing on the white robes of an initiate of Perelandro, but by the time he reached the hot, smoky air of the Temple District’s central plaza, she had long since vanished into the shadows. Might she be waiting out there, watching, hoping to follow him and learn what he was up to? The thought gave him a brief pause, but the unhappy fact was that he had no concrete plans at all, so it really didn’t matter whether or not she dogged his heels all night.

  Lacking any better ideas, he decided to tour Coin-Kisser’s Row and refresh his memory of the district’s lan
dmarks.

  He hurried along with a brisk step, fingers interlaced within the sleeves of his robe, pondering. He trusted his clerical guise to shield him from inconvenience and harm (for he was keeping to better neighborhoods), and so he remained caught up in the whirl of his own thoughts as his feet carried him down the full length of Coin-Kisser’s Row, then back up again.

  The great countinghouses were shuttered for the night, the bars and coffee shops all but empty, and the reeking canal had little of its usual drunken pleasure traffic. Locke stared at the monuments, the bridges, and the long-deserted plazas, but no fresh inspiration fell out of the sky. When he returned home, somewhat discouraged, Sabetha had not yet returned.

  He fell asleep still waiting to hear her come back down the glass tunnel from the temple above.

  4

  COIN-KISSER’S ROW at noon lay sweltering beneath the molten bronze sun, but the upper classes of Camorr had fortunes and appearances to maintain. The empty plazas of the previous night had become a lively pageant of overdressed crowds, which Locke and Sabetha now prepared to join.

  “I give you the field,” said Chains, “upon which you two shall fight your mighty battle, wherein one shall stand tall, and the other shall end up with the dishes.” Chains was ascending the unforgiving heights of fashion in a black velvet coat and pearl-studded doublet, with three silver-buckled belts taut against his belly. He wore a broad-brimmed black hat over a curly brown wig, and he had enough sweat running down his face to refill at least one of the city’s canals.

  Locke was dressed far more comfortably, in a simple white doublet, black breeches, and respectable shoes. Chains was holding Locke’s jacket, with its telltale number of buttons, until Sabetha was sent on her way. For her part, Sabetha wore a linen dress and a simple jacket, both of a darkish red that was nearly the color of cinnamon. Her hair and face were concealed beneath a four-cornered hat with hanging gray veils—a fashion that had come rapidly back into vogue in the heat and foulness of recent weeks. Chains had carefully studied and approved these clothes. Locke and Sabetha could pass for servants dressed moderately, or rich children dressed lazily, and would be able to pursue their game without suspicion or interference so long as they behaved.