The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Lynch, Scott Page 0,152

buttons on the front of her fur-trimmed coat as she continued to mount the steps.

At the top—the very peak of the inner tower—there was a heavy oaken door reinforced with iron joints and bands. She pulled forth a key that hung around her right wrist on a silk cord. This she inserted into the silver lockbox above the crystal knob while carefully pressing a certain decorative brass plate in a wall sconce. A series of clicks echoed within the walls and the door fell open, inward.

Forgetting the brass plate would be a poor idea; she’d specified a rather excessive pull for the concealed crossbow trap, when she’d had it installed three decades earlier.

This was the solarium, then, another eight stories up from the level of the terrace. The room took up the full diameter of the tower at its apex, fifty feet from edge to edge. The floor was thickly carpeted. A long curving brass-railed gallery, with stairs at either end, spread across the northern half of the space. This gallery held a row of tall witchwood shelves divided into thousands upon thousands of cubbyholes and compartments. The transparent hemispherical ceiling dome revealed the low clouds like a bubbling lake of smoke. Doña Vorchenza tapped alchemical globes to bring them to life as she mounted the stairs to her file gallery.

There she worked, engrossed, heedless of the passage of time as her narrow fingers flicked from compartment to compartment. She pulled out some piles of parchment and set them aside, half considered others and pushed them back in, muttering remembrances and conjecture under her breath. She snapped out of her fugue only when the solarium door clicked open once more.

The man who entered was tall and broad-shouldered; he had an angular Vadran face and ice-blond hair pulled back in a ribbon-bound tail. He wore a ribbed leather doublet over slashed black sleeves, with black breeches and tall black boots. The little silver pins at his collar gave him the rank of captain in the Nightglass Company; the blackjackets, the Duke’s Own. A rapier with straight quillons hung at his right hip.

“Stephen,” said Doña Vorchenza without preamble, “have any of your boys or girls paid a recent visit to Don and Doña Salvara, on the Isla Durona?”

“The Salvaras? No, certainly not, m’lady.”

“You’re sure? Absolutely sure?” Parchments in hand, eyebrows arched, she stalked down the steps, barely keeping her balance. “I need certain truth from you right now as badly as I ever have.”

“I know the Salvaras, m’lady. I met them both at last year’s Day of Changes feast; I rode up to the Sky Garden in the same cage with them.”

“And you haven’t sent any of the Midnighters to pay them a visit?”

“Twelve gods, no. Not one.”

“Then someone is abusing our good name, Stephen. And I think we may finally have the Thorn of Camorr.”

Reynart stared at her, then grinned. “You’re joking. You’re not? Pinch me, I must be dreaming. What’s the situation?”

“First things first; I know you think fastest when we nurse that damned sweet tooth of yours. Peek inside the dumbwaiter; I’m going to have a seat.”

“Oh my,” said Reynart, peering into the chain-hoist shaft that held the dumbwaiter. “It looks as though someone’s already made a merry work of this poor spice cake. I’ll put it out of its misery. There’s wine and glasses, too—looks like one of your sweet whites.”

“Gods bless Gilles; I’d forgotten to ask him for that, I was in such haste to get to my files. Be a dear dutiful subordinate and pour us a glass.”

“Dear dutiful subordinate, indeed. For the cake, I’d polish your slippers as well.”

“I’ll hold that promise in reserve for the next time you vex me, Stephen. Oh, fill the glass, I’m not thirteen years old. Now, take your seat and listen to this. If everything signifies, as I believe it shall, the bastard has just been delivered to us right in the middle of one of his schemes.”

“How so?”

“I’ll answer a question with a question, Stephen.” She took a deep draught of her white wine and settled back into her chair. “Tell me, how much do you know of the body of lore surrounding Austershalin brandy?”

3

“POSING AS one of us,” Reynart mused after she’d finished her tale. “The sheer fucking cheek. But are you sure it’s the Thorn?”

“If it isn’t, then we could only presume that we now have another equally skilled and audacious thief picking the pockets of my peers. And I think that’s presuming a bit much.