They were not quite secrets, these things-to any priest of a Therin order, the thought of someone being audacious enough to offend the gods by falsely seeking initiation was utterly alien. Even those who knew of the slightly heretical idea of the Thirteenth, and even the minority who actually believed in him, failed to imagine that anyone would want to do what Chains and his boys were doing.
Invariably, after several months of excellent accomplishments, each sterling young initiate would die in a sudden accident. Calo favored “drowning,” for he could hold his breath a very long time, and he enjoyed swimming underwater. Galdo preferred to simply disappear, preferably during a storm or some other dramatic event. Locke constructed elaborate little mummeries that took weeks to plan. On one occasion, he vanished from the Order of Nara (Plague Mistress, Lady of Ubiquitous Maladies) by leaving his initiate’s robe, torn apart and splashed with rabbit’s blood, wrapped around his copy-work and a few letters in an alley behind the temple.
Thus enlightened, each boy would return and teach the others of what he had seen and heard. “The point,” said Chains, “is not to make you all candidates for the High Conclave of the Twelve, but to allow you to throw on whatever robes and masks are required and pass as a priest for any short period of need. When you’re a priest, people tend to see the robe rather than the man.”
But there was no apprenticeship under way at the moment; Jean was drilling at the House of Glass Roses, and the other boys waited for him on the southern edge of the Shifting Market, on a crumbling stone pier at the end of a short alley. It was a warm spring day, breezy and fresh, with the sky half-occluded by crescents of gray and white clouds sweeping in from the northwest, heralding storms.
Locke and Calo and Galdo were watching the results of a collision between a chicken-seller’s boat and a transporter of cats. Several cages had flown open when the small boats cracked against one another, and now agitated merchants were stepping warily back and forth as the battle between birds and felines progressed. A few chickens had escaped into the water and were flapping uselessly in little circles, squawking, for nature had conspired to make them even worse at swimming than they were at flying.
“Well,” said a voice behind them. “Have a look at this. These little wasters seem very likely.”
Locke and the Sanzas turned around as one to see a half dozen boys and girls their own age standing behind them, spread out across the alley. They were dressed much as the Gentlemen Bastards were, in unassuming clothes of common cut. Their apparent leader had a thick, dark mane of curly black hair, pulled behind him and tied with a black silk ribbon-quite a mark of distinction for an urchin.
“Are you friends of the friends, lads? Are you the right sort of people?” The leader of the newcomers stood with his hands on his hips; behind him, a short girl made several hand gestures used for common identification by Capa Barsavi’s subjects.
“We are friends of the friends,” said Locke.
“The rightest sort of right,” added Galdo, making the appropriate countergestures.
“Good lads. We’re the seconds to the Full Crowns, in the Narrows. Call ourselves Half-Crowns. What’s your allegiance?”
“Gentlemen Bastards,” said Locke. “Temple District.”
“Who’re you seconds to?”
“We’re not seconds to anyone,” said Galdo. “It’s just the Gentlemen Bastards, one and all.”
“Savvy,” said the leader of the Half-Crowns, with a friendly grin. “I’m Tesso Volanti. This is my crew. We’re here to take your coin. Unless you want to kneel and give us your preference.”
Locke scowled. “Preference,” in the parlance of the Right People, meant that the Gentlemen Bastards would proclaim the Half-Crowns the better, tougher gang; make way for them on the street and tolerate whatever abuse the Half-Crowns saw fit to heap upon them.
“I’m Locke Lamora,” said Locke as he rose slowly to his feet, “and excepting the capa, the Gentlemen Bastards bend the knee to nobody.”
“Really?” Tesso feigned shock. “Even with six on three? It’s soft talk, if no’s your answer.”
“You must not hear very well,” said Calo, as he and his brother stood up in unison. “He said you get our preference when you pick the peas out of our shit and suck on ’em for dinner.”
“Now that was uncalled-for,” said Tesso, “so I’m gonna make some noise with your skulls.”
Even before he’d finished speaking, the Half-Crowns were moving forward, and it was six on three at the end of the pier. Locke was the smallest child involved, even counting the girls, and while he went into the melee with his little fists swinging, he caught mostly air and was quickly knocked down. One older girl sat on his back, while another kicked alley grit into his face.
The first boy to reach for Calo got a knee in the groin and went down moaning; right behind him came Tesso, with a hard right that sent Calo backward. Galdo tackled Tesso around the waist, howling, and they hit the ground scrabbling for leverage. “Soft talk” meant no weapons, and no blows that could kill or cripple, but just about anything else was on the table. The Sanzas were capable brawlers, but even if Locke had been able to hold up his end of the fight the numbers would have told against them. In the end, after a few minutes of wrestling and swearing and kicking, the three Gentlemen Bastards were dumped in the middle of the alley, dusty and battered.
“Right, lads. Preferences, is it? Let’s hear ’em.”
“Go fold yourself in half,” said Locke, “and lick your ass.”
“Oh, that’s the wrong answer, short-wit,” said Tesso, and while one of his boys pinned Locke’s arms, the leader of the Half-Crowns patted Locke down for coins. “Hmm. Nothing. Well then, sweetmeats, we’ll be looking for you again tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. Until you bend the knee, we’ll watch you and we’ll make your lives miserable. Mark my words, Locke Lamora.”
The Half-Crowns strolled off laughing, a few nursing bruises and sprains, but not nearly as many as they’d inflicted. The Sanzas arose groaning and helped Locke to his feet. Warily, they limped back to the House of Perelandro together and slipped into the glass burrow through a drainage culvert equipped with a secret door.
“You’re not going to believe what happened,” said Locke as he and the Sanzas entered the dining room. Chains sat at the witchwood table, peering down at a collection of parchments, carefully scribing on one with a fine-cut quill. Forging customs papers was a sort of hobby, one he practiced the way some men kept gardens or bred hounds. He had a leather portfolio full of them, and he occasionally made good silver selling them.
“Mmmm,” said Chains, “you got your asses walloped by a pack of Half-Crowns.”
“How did you know?”
“Stopped by the Last Mistake last night. Heard about it from the Full Crowns. Told me their seconds might be sweeping the neighborhoods, looking for other juvies to push around.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I figured if you were being adequately cautious, they’d never be able to get the better of you. Looks like your attention was somewhere else.”
“They said they wanted our preferences.”
“Yeah,” said Chains. “It’s a juvie game. Most of the seconds don’t get to pull real jobs just yet, so they train themselves up by pushing other seconds around. You should be proud of yourselves; you finally got noticed. Now you’ve got a little war until one of you cries mercy. Soft talk only, mind you.”
“So,” Locke said slowly, “what should we do?”
Chains reached over and grabbed Locke’s fist, then mimed swinging it into Calo’s jaw. “Repeat as necessary,” said Chains, “until your problems are spitting up teeth.”
“We tried that. And they jumped us while Jean was away. And you know I’m not much good at that sort of thing.”
“Sure I do. So next time, make sure you’ve got Jean with you. And use that devious little brain of yours.” Chains began melting a cylinder of sealing wax over a small candle. ?
??But I don’t want to see anything too elaborate, Locke. Don’t pull the watch or the temples or the duke’s army or anyone else into it. Try and make it look like you’re just the pack of ordinary sneak-thieves I tell everyone you are.”
“Oh, great.” Locke folded his arms while Calo and Galdo washed one another’s bruised faces with wet cloths. “So it’s just another bloody test.”
“What a clever boy,” muttered Chains, pouring liquid wax into a tiny silver vessel. “Of course it is. And I’ll personally be very upset if those little shits aren’t begging and pleading to give you their preference before midsummer.”
2
THE NEXT day, Locke and the Sanza brothers sat on the very same pier at the very same time. All over the Shifting Market, merchants were hauling down canvas tarps and furling canopies, for the rains that had drenched the city all night and half the morning were long gone.
“I must be seeing things,” came the voice of Tesso Volanti, “because I can’t imagine that you shit-wits would really be sitting there right where we beat the trouser gravy out of you just yesterday.”
“Why not,” said Locke, “since we’re closer to our turf than yours, and you’re going to be using your balls for tonsils in about two minutes?”
The three Gentlemen Bastards arose; facing them were the same half-dozen Half-Crowns, with eager smiles on their faces.
“I see you’re none better at sums than you were when we left you,” said Tesso, cracking his knuckles.
“Funny you should say that,” said Locke, “since the sums have changed.” He pointed past the Half-Crowns. Tesso warily shifted his head to look behind him, but when he saw Jean Tannen standing in the alley behind his gang, he laughed.
“Still in our favor, I’d say.” He strolled toward Jean, who simply looked at him with a bland smile on his round face. “What’s this? A fat red bastard. I can see your glass eyes in your vest pocket. What do you think you’re doing, fatty?”
“My name’s Jean Tannen, and I’m the ambush.”
Long months of training with Don Maranzalla had left Jean looking little different than when he’d first begun, but Locke and the Sanzas knew that a sort of alchemy had taken place beneath his soft exterior. Tesso stepped within his reach, grinning, and Jean’s arms lashed out like the brass pistons in a Verrari water-engine.
Tesso reeled backward, arms and legs wobbling like a marionette caught in a high wind. His head bowed forward; then he simply collapsed in a heap, his eyes rolling back in their sockets.
A minor sort of hell broke loose in the alley. Three Half-Crown boys charged Locke and the Sanzas; the two girls approached Jean warily. One of them tried to dash a handful of alley gravel in his face. He sidestepped, caught her arm, and swung her easily into one of the alley’s stone walls. One of Don Maranzalla’s lessons: let walls and streets do the work for you when you fight with empty hands. As she bounced backward, Jean clotheslined her with a swift hook from his right arm and sent her face-first to the gravel.
“It’s not polite to hit girls,” said her companion, circling him.
“It’s even less polite to hit my friends,” said Jean.
She replied by pivoting on her left heel and snapping a swift kick at his throat; he recognized the art called chasson, a sort of foot-boxing imported from Tal Verrar. He deflected the kick with the palm of his right hand, and she whirled into a second, using the momentum from her first to send her left leg whirling up and around. But Jean was moving past it before she struck. Her thigh rather than her foot slapped into his side, and he snaked his left arm around it. While she flailed for balance, he let her have a vicious kidney punch, and then he hooked her right leg out from beneath her, sending her to the gravel on her back, where she lay writhing in pain.
“Ladies,” said Jean, “you must accept my deepest apologies.”
Locke, as usual, was getting the worst of his encounter, until Jean grabbed his opponent by the shoulder and spun him around. Jean wrapped his heavy arms around the boy’s waist and planted a head-butt in the boy’s solar plexus. No sooner did the Half-Crown gasp in pain than Jean straightened up, cracking the boy’s chin against the back of his head. The boy fell backward, dazed, and at that point the issue was decided. Calo and Galdo had been evenly matched with their opponents; when Jean suddenly loomed before them (with Locke at his side doing his best to look dangerous), the Half-Crowns scrambled back and put their hands in the air.
“Well, Tesso,” said Locke when the curly-haired boy arose a few minutes later, bloody-nosed and wobbly, “will you be giving over your preference now, or shall I let Jean beat on you some more?”
“I admit it was well done,” said Tesso as his gang limped into a semicircle behind him, “but I’d call us even at one and one. You’ll see us again soon.”
3
SO THE battle went, as the days lengthened and spring turned into summer. Chains excused the boys from sitting the steps with him after the first hour of the afternoon, and they began roaming the north of Camorr, hunting Half-Crowns with vigor.
Tesso responded by unleashing the full strength of his little band. The Full Crowns were the largest real gang in Camorr, and their seconds had a comparable pool of recruits, some of them fresh from Shades’ Hill. Even with the weight of numbers, however, the prowess of Jean Tannen was hard to answer, and so the nature of the battle changed.
The Full Crowns split into smaller groups, attempting to isolate and ambush the Gentlemen Bastards when they weren’t together. For the most part, Locke kept his gang close at hand, but sometimes individual errands were unavoidable. Locke was beaten fairly badly on several occasions; he came to Jean one afternoon nursing a split lip and a pair of bruised shins.
“Look,” he said, “it’s been a few days since we had any piece of Tesso. So here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to lurk just south of the market tomorrow and look like I’m up to something. You’re going to hide a long way off, two or three hundred yards maybe. Somewhere they can’t possibly spot you.”
“I’ll never get to you in time,” said Jean.
“The point isn’t to get to me before I get beaten,” said Locke. “The point is, when you do get there, you pound the crap out of him. You beat him so hard they’ll hear the screaming in Talisham. Smack him around like you’ve never smacked him before.”
“With pleasure,” said Jean, “but it won’t happen. They’ll only run away when they see me coming, as always. The one thing I can’t do is keep up with them on foot.”
“Just you leave that to me,” said Locke, “and fetch your sewing kit. There’s something I need you to do for me.”
4
SO IT was that Locke Lamora lurked in an alley on an overcast day, very near to the place where the whole affair with the Half-Crowns had started. The Shifting Market was doing a brisk business, as folk attempted to get their shopping done before the sky started pouring down rain. Out there somewhere, watching Locke with comfortable anonymity from a little cockleshell boat, was Jean Tannen.
Locke only had to lurk conspicuously for half an hour before Tesso found him.
“Lamora,” he said. “I thought you’d know better by now. I don’t see any of your friends in the neighborhood.”
“Tesso. Hello.” Locke yawned. “I think today’s the day you’ll be giving over your preference to me.”
“In a pig’s fucking eye,” said the older boy. “You know I don’t even need help to knock you flat. What I think I’m going to do is take your clothes when I’m done and throw them in a canal. That’ll be right humorous. Hell, the longer you put off bending the knee, the more fun I can have with you.”
He advanced confidently to the attack, knowing that Locke had never once so much as kept up with him in a fight. Locke met him head-on, shaking the left sleeve of his coat strangely. That sleeve was actually five feet longer than usual, courtesy of Jean Tannen’s alterations; Locke had kept it cleverly folded against his side to conceal its true nature as Tesso approached.
>
Although Locke had few gifts as a fighter, he could be startlingly fast, and the cuff of his sleeve had a small lead weight sewn into it to aid him in casting it. He flung it forth, wrapping it around Tesso’s chest beneath the taller boy’s arms. The lead weight carried it around as it stretched taut, and Locke caught it in his left hand.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tesso huffed. He clouted Locke just above his right eye; Locke flinched but ignored the pain. He slipped the extended sleeve into a loop of cloth that hung out of his coat’s left pocket, folded it back over itself, and pulled another cord just below it. The network of knotted cords that Jean had sewn inside his coat’s lining cinched tight; now the boys were chest to chest, and nothing short of a knife could free Tesso from the loop of thick cloth that tied them together.
Locke wrapped his arms around Tesso’s abdomen for good measure, and then wrapped his spindly legs around Tesso’s legs, just above the taller boy’s knees. Tesso shoved and slapped at Locke, struggling to part the two of them. Failing, he began punching Locke in the teeth and on the top of his head-heavy blows that left Locke seeing flashes of light.
“What the hell is this, Lamora?” Tesso grunted with the effort of supporting Locke’s weight in addition to his own. Finally, as Locke had hoped and expected, he threw himself forward. Locke landed on his back in the gravel, with Tesso atop him. The air burst out of Locke’s lungs, and the whole world seemed to shudder. “This is ridiculous. You can’t fight me. And now you can’t run! Give up, Lamora!”