Only now he had the honor of doing all these things in his silver mask, with his peripheral vision partly blocked. Two more initiates of the Second Inner Mystery fell to a firsthand acquaintance with Death the Transition shortly after Jean’s elevation.
About a month after that, Jean was poisoned for the first time.
3
“CLOSER AND closer,” said the priestess, whose voice seemed muffled and distant. “Closer and closer to Death the Transition, to the very edge of the mystery-feel your limbs growing cold. Feel your thoughts slowing. Feel the beating of your heart growing sluggish. The warm humors are banking down; the fire of life is fading.”
She had given them some sort of green wine, a poison that Jean could not identify; each of the dozen initiates of the Second Inner Mystery in his morning class lay prostrated and twitching feebly, their silver masks staring fixedly upward, as they could no longer move their necks.
Their instructor hadn’t quite managed to explain what the wine would do before she ordered them to drink it; Jean suspected that the willingness of the initiates around him to dance gaily on the edge of Death the Transition was still more theory than actuality.
Of course, look who knows so much better, he thought to himself as he marveled at how tingly and distant his legs had become. Crooked Warden…this priesthood is crazy. Give me strength to live, and I’ll return to the Gentlemen Bastards…where life makes sense.
Yes, where he lived in a secret Elderglass cellar beneath a rotting temple, pretending to be a priest of Perelandro while taking weapons lessons from the duke’s personal swordmaster. Perhaps a bit drunk on whatever drug was having its way with him, Jean giggled.
The sound seemed to echo and reverberate in the low-ceilinged study hall; the priestess turned slowly. The Sorrowful Visage concealed her true expression, but in his drug-hazed mind Jean was certain he could feel her burning stare.
“An insight, Tavrin?”
He couldn’t help himself; he giggled again. The poison seemed to be making merry with the tight-lipped inhibition he’d feigned since arriving at the temple. “I saw my parents burn to death,” he said. “I saw my cats burn to death. Do you know the noise a cat makes, when it burns?” Another damn giggle; he almost choked on his own spit in surprise. “I watched and could do nothing. Do you know where to stab a man, to bring death now, or death in a minute, or death in an hour? I do.” He would have been rolling with laughter, if he could move his limbs; as it was, he shuddered and twitched his fingers. “Lingering death? Two or three days of pain? I can give that, too. Ha! Death the Transition? We’re old friends!”
The priestess’ mask fixed directly on him; she stared for several drug-lengthened moments while Jean thought, Oh, gods damn this stuff, I’ve really done it now.
“Tavrin,” said the priestess, “when the effects of the emerald wine have passed, remain here. The High Proctor will speak to you then.”
Jean lay in mingled bemusement and dread for the rest of the morning. The giggles still came, interspersed with bouts of drunken self-loathing. So much for a full season of work. Some false-facer I turned out to be.
That night, much to his surprise, he was confirmed as having passed into the Third Inner Mystery of Aza Guilla.
“I knew we could expect exceptional things from you, Callas,” said the High Proctor, a bent old man whose voice wheezed behind his Sorrowful Visage. “First the extraordinary diligence you showed in your mundane studies, and your rapid mastery of the exterior rituals. Now, a vision…a vision during your very first Anguishment. You are marked, marked! An orphan who witnessed the death of his mother and father…You were fated to serve the Lady Most Kind.”
“What, ah, are the additional duties of an initiate of the Third Inner Mystery?”
“Why, Anguishment,” said the High Proctor. “A month of Anguishment; a month of exploration into Death the Transition. You shall take the emerald wine once again, and then you shall experience other means of closeness to the precipitous moment of the Lady’s embrace. You shall hang from silk until nearly dead; you shall be exsanguinated. You shall take up serpents, and you shall swim in the night ocean, wherein dwell many servants of the Lady. I envy you, little brother. I envy you, newly born to our mysteries.”
Jean fled Revelation House that very night.
He packed his meager bag of belongings and raided the kitchens for food. Before entering Revelation House, he’d buried a small bag of coins beneath a certain landmark about a mile inland from the cliffs, near the village of Sorrow ’s Ease, which supplied the cliffside temple’s material wants. That money should suffice to get him back to Camorr.
He scrawled a note and left it on his sleeping pallet, in the fresh new solitary chamber accorded to him for his advanced rank:
GRATEFUL FOR OPPORTUNITIES, BUT COULD NOT WAIT. HAVE ELECTED TO SEEK THE STATE OF DEATH EVERLASTING; CANNOT BE CONTENT WITH THE LESSER MYSTERIES OF DEATH THE TRANSITION. THE LADY CALLS.
– TAVRIN CALLAS
He climbed the stone stairs for the last time, as the waves crashed in the darkness below; the soft red glow of alchemical storm-lamps guided him to the top of Revelation House, and thence to the top of the cliffs, where he vanished unseen into the night.
4
“DAMN,” SAID Galdo, when Jean had finished his tale. “I’m glad I got sent to the Order of Sendovani.”
The night of Jean’s return, after Father Chains had grilled Jean in depth on his experiences at Revelation House, he’d let the four boys head up to the roof with clay mugs of warm Camorri ale. They sat out beneath the stars and the scattered silver clouds, sipping their ale with much-exaggerated casualness. They savored the illusion that they were men, gathered of their own accord, with the hours of the night theirs to spend entirely at their own whim.
“No shit,” said Calo. “In the Order of Gandolo, we got pastries and ale every second week, and a copper piece every Idler’s Day, to spend as we wished. You know, for the Lord of Coin and Commerce.”
“I’m particularly fond of our priesthood of the Benefactor,” said Locke,
“since our main duties seem to be sitting around and pretending that the Benefactor doesn’t exist. When we’re not stealing things, that is.”
“Too right,” said Galdo. “Death-priesting is for morons.”
“But still,” asked Calo, “didn’t you wonder if they might not be right?” He sipped his ale before continuing. “That you might really be fated to serve the Lady Most Kind?”
“I had a long time to think about it, on the way back to Camorr,” said Jean. “And I think they were right. Just maybe not the way they thought.”
“How do you mean?” The Sanzas spoke in unison, as they often did when true curiosity seized the pair of them at once.
In reply, Jean reached behind his back, and from out of his tunic he drew a single hatchet, a gift from Don Maranzalla. It was plain and unadorned, but well maintained and ideally balanced for someone who’d not yet come into his full growth. Jean set it on the stones of the temple roof and smiled.
“Oh,” said Calo and Galdo.
IV . DESPERATE IMPROVISATION
“I pitch like my hair’s on fire.”
Mitch Williams
CHAPTER TWELVE. THE FAT PRIEST FROM TAL VERRAR
1
WHEN LOCKE AWOKE, he was lying on his back and looking up at a fading, grime-covered mural painted on a plaster ceiling. The mural depicted carefree men and women in the robes of the Therin Throne era, gathered around a cask of wine, with cups in their hands and smiles on their rosy faces. Locke groaned and closed his eyes again.
“And here he is,” said an unfamiliar voice, “just as I said. It was the poultice that answered for him; most uncommonly good physik for the enervation of the bodily channels.”
“Who the hell might you be?” Locke found himself in a profoundly undiplomatic temper. “And where am I?”
“You’re safe, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say comfortable.” Jean Tanne
n rested a hand on Locke’s left shoulder and smiled down at him. Usually rather fastidious, he was now several days unshaven, and his face was streaked with dirt. “And some former patients of the renowned Master Ibelius might also take issue with my pronouncement of safety.”
Jean made a quick pair of hand gestures to Locke: We’re safe; speak freely.
“Tut, Jean, your little cuts are fine repayment for the work of the past few days.” The unfamiliar voice, it seemed, came from a wrinkled, birdlike man with skin like a weathered brown tabletop. His nervous dark eyes peeped out from behind thick optics, thicker than any Locke had ever seen. He wore a disreputable cotton tunic, spattered with what might have been dried sauces or dried blood, under a mustard-yellow waistjacket in a style twenty years out of date. His spring-coils of curly gray hair seemed to sprout straight out from the back of his head, where they were pulled into a queue. “I have navigated your friend back to the shores of consciousness.”
“Oh, for Perelandro’s sake, Ibelius, he didn’t have a crossbow quarrel in his brain. He just needed to rest.”
“His warm humors were at a singularly low ebb; the channels of his frame were entirely evacuated of vim. He was pale, unresponsive, bruised, desiccated, and malnourished.”
“Ibelius?” Locke attempted to sit up and was partially successful; Jean caught him by the back of his shoulders and helped him the rest of the way. The room spun. “Ibelius the dog-leech from the Redwater district?”
Dog-leeches were the medical counterparts of the black alchemists; without credentials or a place in the formal guilds of physikers, they treated the injuries and maladies of the Right People of Camorr. A genuine physiker might look askance at treating a patient for an axe wound at half past the second hour of the morning, and summon the city watch. A dog-leech would ask no questions, provided his fee was paid in advance.
The trouble with dog-leeches, of course, was that one took one’s chances with their abilities and credentials. Some really were trained healers, fallen on hard times or banished from the profession for crimes such as grave-robbing. Others were merely improvisers, applying years’ worth of practical knowledge acquired tending to the results of bar fights and muggings. A few were entirely mad, or homicidal, or-charmingly-both.
“My colleagues are dog-leeches,” sniffed Ibelius. “I am a physiker, Collegium-trained. Your own recovery is a testament to that.”
Locke glanced around the room. He was lying (wearing nothing but a breechclout) on a pallet in a corner of what must have been an abandoned Ashfall villa. A canvas curtain hung over the room’s only door; two orange-white alchemical lanterns filled the space with light. Locke’s throat was dry, his body still ached, and he smelled rather unpleasant-not all of it was the natural odor of an unwashed man. A strange translucent residue flaked off his stomach and sternum. He poked at it with his fingers.
“What,” said Locke, “is this crap on my chest?”
“The poultice, sir. Varagnelli’s Poultice, to be precise, though I hardly presume your familiarity with the subject. I employed it to concentrate the waning energy of your bodily channels; to confine the motion of your warm humors in the region where it would do you the most good. To wit, your abdomen. We did not want your energy to dissipate.”
“What was in it?”
“The poultice is a proprietary conglomeration, but the essence of its function is provided by the admixture of the gardener’s assistant and turpentine.”
“Gardener’s assistant?”
“Earthworms,” said Jean. “He means earthworms ground in turpentine.”
“And you let him smear it all over me?” Locke groaned and sank back down onto the pallet.
“Only your abdomen, sir-your much-abused abdomen.”
“He’s the physiker,” said Jean. “I’m only good at breaking people; I don’t put them back together.”
“What happened to me, anyway?”
“Enervation-absolute enervation, as thorough as I’ve ever seen it.” Ibelius lifted Locke’s left wrist while he spoke and felt for a pulse. “Jean told me that you took an emetic, the evening of Duke’s Day.”
“Did I ever!”
“And that you ate and drank nothing afterward. That you were then seized, and severely beaten, and nearly slain by immersion in a cask of horse urine-how fantastically vile, sir, you have my sympathies. And that you had received a deep wound to your left forearm; a wound that is now scabbing over nicely, no thanks to your ordeals. And that you remained active all evening despite your injuries and your exhaustion. And that you pursued your course with the utmost dispatch, taking no rest.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar.”
“You simply collapsed, sir. In layman’s terms, your body revoked its permission for you to continue heaping abuse upon it.” Ibelius chuckled.
“How long have I been here?”
“Two days and two nights,” said Jean.
“What? Gods damn me. Out cold the whole time?”
“Quite,” said Jean. “I watched you fall over; I wasn’t thirty yards away, crouched in hiding. Took me a few minutes to realize why the bearded old beggar looked familiar.”
“I have kept you somewhat sedated,” said Ibelius. “For your own good.”
“Gods damn it!”
“Clearly, my judgment was sound, as you would have had no will to rest otherwise. And it made it easier to use a series of fairly unpleasant poultices to greatly reduce the swelling and bruising of your face. Had you been awake, you surely would have complained of the smell.”
“Argh,” said Locke. “Tell me you have something at hand I can drink, at least.”
Jean passed him a skin of red wine; it was warm and sour and watered to the point that it was more pink than red, but Locke drank half of it down in a rapid series of undignified gulps.
“Have a care, Master Lamora, have a care,” said Ibelius. “I fear you have little conception of your own natural limitations. Make him take the soup, Jean. He needs to regain his animal strength, or his humors will fade again. He is far too thin for his own good; he is fast approaching anemia.”
Locke devoured the proffered soup (boiled shark in a milk-and-potato stew; bland, congealed, many hours past freshness, and positively the most splendid thing he could recall ever having tasted), and then stretched. “Two days, gods. I don’t suppose we’ve been lucky enough to have Capa Raza fall down some stairs and break his neck?”
“Hardly,” said Jean. “He’s still with us. Him and his Bondsmage. They’ve been very busy, those two. It might interest you to know that the Gentlemen Bastards are formally outcast, and I’m presumed alive, worth five hundred crowns to the man that brings me in. Preferably after I stop breathing.”
“Hmmm,” said Locke. “Dare I ask, Master Ibelius, what keeps you here smearing earthworms on my behalf when either of us is your key to Capa Raza’s monetary favor?”
“I can explain that,” said Jean. “Seems there was another Ibelius, who worked for Barsavi as one of his Floating Grave guards. A loyal Barsavi man, I should say.”
“Oh,” said Locke. “My condolences, Master Ibelius. A brother?”
“My younger brother. The poor idiot; I kept telling him to find another line of work. It seems we have a great deal of common sorrow, courtesy of Capa Raza.”
“Yes,” said Locke. “Yes, Master Ibelius. I’m going to put that fucker in the dirt as deeply as any man who’s ever been murdered, ever since the world began.”
“Ahhh,” said Ibelius. “So Jean says. And that’s why I’m not even charging for my services. I cannot say I think highly of your chances, but any enemy of Capa Raza is most welcome to my care, and to my discretion.”
“Too kind,” said Locke. “I suppose if I must have earthworms and turpentine smeared on my chest, I’m very happy to have you…ah, overseeing the affair.”
“Your servant, sir,” said Ibelius.
“Well, Jean,” said Locke, “we seem to have a hiding place, a physiker, and the two o
f us. What are our other assets?”
“Ten crowns, fifteen solons, five coppers,” said Jean. “That cot you’re lying on. You ate the wine and drank the soup. I’ve got the Wicked Sisters, of course. A few cloaks, some boots, your clothes. And all the rotting plaster and broken masonry a man could dream of.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yes, except for one small thing.” Jean held up the silver mesh mask of a priest of Aza Guilla. “The aid and comfort of the Lady of the Long Silence.”
“How the hell did you arrange that?”
“Right after I dropped you off at the edge of the Cauldron,” said Jean, “I decided to row back to the Temple District and make myself useful.”
2
THE FIRE within the House of Perelandro had yet to finish burning when Jean Tannen threw himself down, half-dressed, at the service entrance to the House of Aza Guilla, two squares northeast of the temple the Gentlemen Bastards had called their home.
Elderglass and stone could not burn, of course, but the contents of the House of Perelandro were another matter. With the Elderglass reflecting and concentrating the heat of the flames, everything within the burrow would be scorched to white ash, and the rising heat would certainly do for the contents of the actual temple. A bucket brigade of yellowjackets milled around the upper temple, with little to do but wait for the heat and the hideous death-scented smoke to cease boiling out from the doors.
Jean banged a fist on the latched wooden door behind the Death Goddess’ temple and prayed for the Crooked Warden’s aid in maintaining the Verrari accent he had too rarely practiced in recent months. He knelt down, to make himself seem more pathetic.
After a few minutes, there was a click, and the door slid open a fraction of an inch. An initiate, in unadorned black robes and a simple silver mask, so familiar to Jean, stared down at him.