Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

JEAN FOUND him there just a minute or two later; the big man turned Locke over and slid him off the Gray King’s corpse, eliciting a sincere howl of pain from his half-conscious friend.

“Oh, gods,” Jean cried. “Oh, gods, you fucking idiot, you miserable fucking bastard .” He pressed his hands against Locke’s chest and neck as though he could simply will the blood back into his body. “Why couldn’t you wait? Why couldn’t you wait for me?”

Locke stared drunkenly up at Jean, his mouth a little O of concern.

“Jean,” Locke whispered gravely, “you have…been running. You were in…no condition to fight. Gray King…so accommodating. Could not refuse.”

Jean snorted despite himself. “Gods damn you, Locke Lamora. I sent him a message. I thought it might keep him around a while.”

“Bless your heart. I did…get him, though. I got him and I burnt his ship.”

“So that’s what happened,” Jean said, very gently. “I saw. I was watching the fire from the other side of the Wooden Waste; I saw you walk into the Floating Grave like you owned the place, and I came running as fast as I could. But you didn’t even need me.”

“Oh no.” Locke swallowed, grimacing at the taste of his own blood. “I made excellent use…of your reputation.”

At this Jean said nothing, and the forlorn light of his eyes chilled Locke more than anything yet.

“So this is revenge,” Locke mumbled.

“It is,” whispered Jean.

After a few seconds, new tears welled up in Locke’s eyes and he closed them, shaking his head. “It’s a shit business.”

“It is.”

“You have to leave me here.”

At this, Jean rocked back on his knees as though he’d been slapped. “What?”

“Leave me, Jean. I’ll be dead…just a few minutes. They won’t get anything from me. You can still get away. Please…leave me.”

Jean’s face turned bright red-a red that showed even by the light of the alchemical globes-and his eyebrows arched, and every line in his face drew so taut that Locke found the energy to be alarmed. Jean’s jaw clenched; his teeth ground together, and the planes of his cheeks stood out like mountain ridges under his gilding of fat.

“That is a hell of a thing for you to say to me,” he finally hissed in the flattest, deadliest voice Locke had ever heard.

“I made a mistake, Jean!” Locke croaked in desperation. “I couldn’t really fight him. He did for me before I could cheat my way out of it. Just promise…promise me that if you ever find Sabetha, you’ll-”

“You can find her yourself, half-wit, after we both get the hell out of here!”

“Jean!” Locke clutched weakly at the lapels of Jean’s coat with his good hand. “I’m sorry, I fucked up. Please don’t stay here and get caught; the blackjackets will be coming, soon. I couldn’t bear to have you taken. Please just leave me. I can’t walk.”

“Idiot,” Jean whispered, brushing away hot tears with his good hand. “You won’t have to.”

Working awkwardly but rapidly, Jean took up the Gray King’s cloak and tied it around his own neck, creating a makeshift sling for his right arm. This he slid beneath Locke’s knees, and straining mightily, he was able to pick the smaller man up and cradle him in front of his chest. Locke moaned.

“Quit sobbing, you damn baby,” Jean hissed as he began to lope back along the dock. “You must have at least a half beer glass of blood left somewhere in there.” But Locke was now well and truly unconscious, whether from pain or blood loss Jean couldn’t tell, and his skin was so pale that it almost looked like glass. His eyes were open but unseeing, and his mouth hung open, trailing blood and spittle.

Panting and shuddering, ignoring the wrenching pains of his own wounds, Jean turned and began to run as fast as he could.

The body of the Gray King lay forgotten on the deck behind him, and the red light shone on in the empty hall.

Father Chains sat on the roof of the House of Perelandro, staring down at the astonishingly arrogant fourteen-year-old that had grown out of the little orphan he’d purchased so many years before from the Thiefmaker of Shades’ Hill.

“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”

“Oh, please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”

THE EIGHTEENTH OF Parthis in the Seventy-eighth Year of Aza Guilla; wet Camorri summer. The whole city had a hangover and the sky did, too.

Warm rain was falling in sheets, spattering and steaming in the glow of Falselight. The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.

“Watch-sergeant! Watch-sergeant Vidrik!”

The man yelling outside Vidrik’s station at the south end of the Narrows was another watchman; Vidrik stuck his lean, weathered face out through the window beside the shack’s door and was rewarded with a stream of runoff on his forehead. Thunder boomed overhead. “What is it, son?”

The watchman approached out of the rain; it was Constanzo, the new lad just shifted in from the North Corner. He was leading a Gentled donkey; behind the donkey was an open-topped cart, with two more yellow-jacketed watchmen at its rear. They huddled in their oilcloaks and looked miserable, which meant they were sensible men.

“Found something, Sergeant,” said Constanzo. “Something pretty fucked.”

Teams of yellowjackets and blackjackets had been combing the south of Camorr since the previous night; rumors were swirling of some sort of assassination attempt at Raven’s Reach. Gods only knew what the Spider thought his boys should be doing turning over stones in the Dregs and the Ashfall districts, but Vidrik was used to never hearing the whys and the wherefores.

“Define ‘pretty fucked,’” he yelled as he slipped into his own oilcloak and threw up the hood. He stepped out into the rain and crossed to the donkey-cart, waving to the two men standing behind it. One of them owed him two barons from the previous week’s dicing.

“Have a look,” said Constanzo, sweeping back the wet blanket that covered the donkey-cart’s cargo. Beneath it was a man, youngish and very pale, balding, with a fuzz of stubble on his cheeks. He was fairly well dressed, in a gray coat with red cuffs. It happened to be spattered with blood.

The man was alive, but he lay in the cart with his fingerless hands pressed against his cheeks, and he stared up at Vidrik without a speck of sane comprehension in his eyes. “Mahhhhhh,” he moaned as the rain fell on his head, “mwaaaaaaaaah!”

His tongue had been cut out; a dark scar covered the stump at the bottom of his mouth, oozing blood.

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

“Sweet fucking Perelandro,” said Vidrik, “tell me I don’t see what I see on his wrists.”

“It’s a bondsmage, Sergeant,” said Constanzo. “It is-or it was.”

He threw the soaked blanket back over the man’s face and reached inside his oilcloak. “There’s more. Show it to you inside?”

Vidrik led Constanzo back into his shack; the two men swept their hoods back but didn’t bother taking their cloaks off. Constanzo pulled out a piece of folded parchment.

“We found this fellow tied to a floor over in Ashfall,” he said. “Pretty gods-damned weird. This parchment was on his chest.”