The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Lynch, Scott Page 0,107
slipped his hatchets into one hand and put that hand behind his back, then stood against the north wall, a few feet to the right of the door. Calo and Galdo reached under their shirts for their daggers, Galdo pushing Bug back behind him as they did so. Locke stood in the center of the room, remembering that his stilettos were still wrapped up in his Fehrwight coat.
“What’s the price of a loaf,” he shouted, “at the Shifting Market?”
“One copper flat, but the loaves ain’t dry,” came the response. Locke untensed just a bit—that was this week’s proper greeting and countersign, and if they’d been coming to haul him off for anything bloody, well, they’d have simply kicked in the door. Signaling with his hands for everyone to stay calm, he drew out the bolt and slid the front door open just wide enough to peek out.
There were four men on the platform outside his door, seventy feet in the air above the Last Mistake. The sky was the color of murky canal water behind them, with just a few twinkling stars vanishing slowly here and there. They were hard-looking men, standing ready and easy like trained fighters, wearing leather tunics, leather collars, and red cloth bandannas under black leather caps. Red Hands—the gang Barsavi turned to when he needed muscle work and he needed it fast.
“Begging your pardon, brother.” The apparent leader of the Red Hands put one arm up against the door. “Big man wants to see Locke Lamora right this very moment, and he don’t care what state he’s in, and he won’t let us take no for an answer.”
INTERLUDE
Jean Tannen
1
In the year that followed Locke grew, but not as much as he would have liked. Although it was difficult to guess his true age with any hope of accuracy, it was obvious that he was more than a little runty for it.
“You missed a few meals, in your very early years,” Chains told him. “You’ve done much better since you came here, to be sure, but I suspect you’ll always be a bit on the…medium side.”
“Always?”
“Don’t be too upset.” Chains put his hands on his own round belly and chuckled. “A little man can slip out of a pinch that a greater man might find inescapable.”
There was further schooling. More sums, more history, more maps, more languages. Once Locke and the Sanzas had a firm grasp of conversational Vadran, Chains began having them instructed in the art of accents. A few hours each week were spent in the company of an old Vadran sail-mender who would chide them for their “fumble-mouthed mangling” of the northern tongue while he drove his long, wicked needles through yard upon yard of folded canvas. They would chat about any subject on the old man’s mind, and he would fastidiously correct every consonant that was too short and every vowel that was too long. He would also get steadily more red-faced and belligerent as each session went on, for Chains paid him in wine for his services.
There were trials—some trivial and some quite harsh. Chains tested his boys constantly, almost ruthlessly, but when he was finished with each new conundrum he always took them to the temple roof to explain what he’d wanted, what the hardships signified. His openness after the fact made his games easier to bear, and they had the added effect of uniting Locke, Calo, and Galdo against the world around them. The more Chains tightened the screws, the closer the boys grew, the more smoothly they worked together, the less they had to say out loud to set a plan in motion.
The coming of Jean Tannen changed all that.
It was the month of Saris in the Seventy-seventh Year of Iono, the end of an unusually dry and cool autumn. Storms had lashed the Iron Sea but spared Camorr, by some trick of the winds or the gods, and the nights were finer than any in Locke’s living memory. He was sitting the steps with Father Chains, flexing his fingers, eagerly awaiting the rise of Falselight, when he spotted the Thiefmaker walking across the square toward the House of Perelandro.
Two years had removed some of the dread Locke had once felt toward his former master, but there was no denying that the skinny old fellow retained a certain grotesque magnetism. The Thiefmaker’s spindly fingers spread as he bowed from the waist, and his eyes lit up when they seized on Locke.