The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Lynch, Scott Page 0,2

conscience.”

“Conscience can go piss up a chimney, Chains. I’m talking avarice, yours and mine. I can’t keep the boy, and I’m offering you a unique opportunity. A genuine bargain.”

“If the boy’s too unruly to keep, why can’t you just pound some wisdom into him and let him ripen to a proper age of sale?”

“Out of the question, Chains. Limited options. I can’t just slap him around, because I can’t let any of the other little shits know what he’s, ahhh, done. If any of them had the slightest inclination to pull what he’s pulled…gods! I’d never be able to control them again. I can either kill him quick, or sell him quicker. No profit versus a paltry sum. So guess which one I prefer?”

“The boy’s done something you can’t even mention in front of the others?” Chains massaged his forehead above the blindfold and sighed. “Shit. This sounds like something I might actually be interested in hearing.”

4

AN OLD Camorri proverb has it that the only constant in the soul of man is inconstancy; anything and everything else can pass out of fashion—even something as utilitarian as a hill stuffed full of corpses.

Shades’ Hill was the first graveyard of quality in Camorr’s history, ideally situated to keep the bones of the formerly well-fed above the salty grasp of the Iron Sea. Yet over time, the balance of power shifted in the families of vault-carvers and morticians and professional pallbearers; fewer and fewer of the quality were interred on Shades’ Hill, as the nearby Hill of Whispers offered more room for larger and gaudier monuments with commensurately higher commissions. Wars, plagues, and intrigues ensured that the number of living families with monuments to tend on Shades’Hill dropped steadily over the decades. Eventually, the only regular visitors were the priests and priestesses of Aza Guilla, who sleep in tombs during their apprenticeships, and the homeless orphans who squatted in the dust and darkness of the ill-tended burial vaults.

The Thiefmaker (though of course he wasn’t known as such just yet) had wound up sharing one of these vaults at the low point of his life, when he was nothing but a miserable curiosity—a pickpocket with nine broken fingers.

At first, his relationship with the Shades’ Hill orphans was half-bullying and half-pleading; some vestigial need for an authority figure kept them from killing him in his sleep. For his part, he grudgingly began to explain to them some of the tricks of his trade.

As his fingers slowly mended (after a fashion, for most of them would forever resemble twice-broken twigs), he began to impart more and more of his crooked wisdom onto the dirty children who dodged the rain and the city watch with him. Their numbers increased, as did their income, and they began to make more room for themselves in the wet stone chambers of the old graveyard.

In time, the brittle-boned pickpocket became the Thiefmaker, and Shades’ Hill became his kingdom.

The Lamora boy and his fellow Catchfire orphans entered this kingdom some twenty years after its founding. What they saw that night was a graveyard no deeper than the dirt piled above the old tombs. A great network of tunnels and galleries had been dug between the major vaults, their hard-packed walls threaded with supports like the ribs of long-dead wooden dragons. The previous occupants had all been quietly disinterred and dropped into the bay. Shades’ Hill was now an ant-mound of orphan thieves.

Down the black mouth of the topmost mausoleum the Catchfire orphans went, down the wood-ribbed tunnel lit by the flickering silver fire of cool alchemical globes, with greasy tendrils of mist chasing at their ankles. Shades’ Hill orphans watched them from every nook and warren, their eyes cold but curious. The thick tunnel air was saturated with the smells of night soil and stale bodies—an odor the Catchfire orphans soon multiplied with their own presence.

“In! In,” cried the Thiefmaker, rubbing his hands together. “My home, your home, and welcome to it! Here we all have one thing in common—no mothers and no fathers. Alas for that, but now you’ll have as many sisters and brothers as you can need, and dry earth over your head. A place…a family.”

A train of Shades’ Hill orphans swept down the tunnel in his wake, snuffing their eerie blue candles as they went, until only the silver radiance of the wall-globes remained to light the way.

At the heart of the Thiefmaker’s realm was a vast, warm hollow with a packed dirt floor, perhaps twice the height