Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies

Locke and Jean began to walk forward once again, glancing warily around. The little girl who had done most of the speaking for the Bondsmagi was now sitting beside an elderly man, sorting through little baskets of dried figs under his supervision. She smiled shyly as they passed.

"I hate them," whispered Locke. "I hate this. Do you think they" ve really got something planned for us, or was that just a put-on?"

"I suppose it works either way," said Jean with a sigh. "Gods. Strat peti. Do we flinch, or do we keep betting? Worst case, we've got a few thousand solari on account at the "Spire. We could cash out, take a ship, be gone before noon tomorrow." "Where to?" "Anywhere else." "There's no running from these arseholes, not if they're serious." "Yes, but—"

"Fuck Karthain." Locke clenched his fists. "You know, I think I understand. I think I understand how the Grey King could feel the way he did. I" ve never even been there, but if I could smash Karthain, burn the fucking place, make the sea swallow it… I'd do it. Gods help me, I'd do it."

Jean suddenly came to a complete stop. "There's… another problem, Locke. Gods forgive me." "What?"

"Even if you stay… I shouldn't. I'm the one who should be gone, as far from you as possible." "What the fuck nonsense is this?" "They know my name!" Jean grabbed Locke by his shoulders, and Locke winced; that stone-hard grip didn't agree with the old wound beneath his left clavicle. Jean immediately realized his mistake and loosened his fingers, but his voice remained urgent. "My real name, and they can use it. They can make me a puppet, like these poor people. I'm a threat to you every moment I'm around you." "I don't bloody well care that they know your name! Are you mad?" "No, but you're still drunk, and you're not thinking straight." "I certainly am! Do you want to leave?" "No! Gods, no, of course not! But I'm—" "Shutting up right this second if you know what's good for you." "You need to understand that you're in danger!"

"Of course I'm in danger. I'm mortal. Jean, gods love you, I will not fucking send you away, and I will not let you send yourself away! We lost Calo, Galdo and Bug. If I send you away, I lose the last friend I have in the world. Who wins then, Jean? Who's protected then?"

Jean's shoulders slumped, and Locke suddenly felt the beginning of the transition from fading inebriation to pounding headache. He groaned.

"Jean, I will never stop feeling awful for what I put you through in Vel Virazzo. And I will never forget how long you stayed with me when you should have tied weights around my ankles and thrown me in the bay. Gods help me, I will never be better off without you. I don't care how many Bondsmagi know your damned name." "I wish I could be sure you knew best about this."

"This is our life," said Locke. "This is our game, that we've put two years into. That's our fortune, waiting for us to steal it at the Sinspire. That's all our hopes for the future. So fuck Karthain. They want to kill us, we can't stop them. So what else can we do? I won't jump at shadows on account of those bastards. On with it! Both of us together."

Most of the Night Market merchants had taken note of the intensity of Locke and Jean's private conversation and had avoided making further pitches. But one of the last merchants on the northern fringe of the Night Market was either less sensitive or more desperate for a sale, and called out to them.

"Carved amusements, gentlemen? Something for a woman or a child in your lives? Something artful from the City of Artifice?" The man had dozens of exotic little toys on an upturned crate. His long, ragged brown coat was lined on the inside with quilted patches in a multitude of garish colours — orange, purple, cloth-of-silver, mustard yellow. He dangled the painted wood figure of a spear-carrying soldier by four cords from his left hand, and with little gestures of his fingers he made the figure thrust at an imaginary enemy. "A marionette? A little puppet, for memory of Tal Verrar?"

Jean stared at him for a few seconds before responding. "For memory of Tal Verrar," he said, quietly, "I would want anything, beg pardon, before I would want a puppet."

Locke and Jean said nothing else to one another. With an ache around his heart to match the one growing in his head, Locke followed the bigger man out of the Great Gallery and into the Savrola, eager to be back behind high walls and locked doors, for what little it might prove to be worth.

Locke Lamora had arrived in Vel Virazzo nearly two years earlier, wanting to die, and Jean Tannen had been inclined to let him have his wish.

Vel Virazzo is a deep-water port about a hundred miles south-east of Tal Verrar, carved out of the high rocky cliffs that dominate the mainland coast on the Sea of Brass. A city of eight or nine thousand souls, it has long been a sullen tributary of the Verrari, ruled by a governor appointed directly by the Archon.

A line of narrow Elderglass spires rises two hundred feet out of the water just offshore, one more Eldren artefact of inscrutable function on a coast thick with abandoned wonders. The glass pylons have fifteen-foot platforms atop them and are now used as lighthouses, manned by petty convicts. Boats bring and leave them to climb up the knotted rope ladders that hang down the pylons. That accomplished, they winch up their provisions and settle in for a few weeks of exile, tending red alchemical lamps the size of small huts. Not all of them come back down right in the head, or live to come back down at all.

Two years before that fateful game of Carousel Hazard, a heavy galleon swept in toward Vel Virazzo under the red glow of those offshore lights. The hands atop the galleon's yardarms waved, half in pity and half in jest, at the lonely figures atop the pylons. The sun had been swallowed by thick clouds on the western horizon and a soft, dying light rippled across the water beneath the first stars of evening.

A warm, wet breeze was blowing from shore to sea, and little threads of mist appeared to be leaking out of the grey rocks to either side of the old port town. The galleon's yellowed canvas topsails were close-reefed as she prepared to lay-to about half a mile offshore. A little harbourmaster's skiff scudded out to meet the galleon, green and white lanterns bobbing in its bow to the rhythm of the eight heaving oarsmen. "What vessel?" The harbourmaster stood up beside her bow lanterns! s and shouted through a speaking trumpet from thirty yards away.

"Golden Gain; Tal Verrar," came the return shout from the galleon's waist. "Do you wish to put in?" "No! Passengers only, coming off by boat."

The lower stern cabin of the Golden Gain smelled strongly of sweat and illness. Jean Tannen was newly returned from the upper deck and had lost some of his tolerance for the odour, which lent further edge to his bad mood. He flung a patched blue tunic at Locke and folded his arms.

"For fuck's sake," he said, "we're here. We're getting off this bloody ship and back onto good, solid stone. Put the bloody tunic on; they're lowering a boat."

Locke shook the tunic out with his right hand and frowned. He was sitting on the edge of a bunk, dressed only in his breeches, and was thinner and dirtier than Jean had ever seen him. His ribs stood out beneath his pale skin like the hull timbers of an unfinished ship. His hair was dark with grease, long and unkempt on every side, and a fine thistle of beard fringed his face.

His upper left arm was crisscrossed with the glistening red lines of barely sealed wounds; there was a scabbed puncture on his left forearm, and beneath that a dirty cloth brace was wound around his wrist. His left hand was a mess of fading bruises. A discoloured bandage partially covered an ugly-looking injury on his left shoulder, a scant few inches above his heart. Their three weeks at sea had done much to reduce the swelling of Locke's cheeks, lips and broken nose, but he still looked as though he'd tried to kiss a kicking mule. Repeatedly. "Can I get a hand, then?"