The Republic of Thieves

  “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 capable of 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 might be 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,” said 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 little you 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.”

  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 is no 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.