The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Lynch, Scott Page 0,6
(as the Thiefmaker himself opined) to swallowing the smoldering ashes of poison oak.
Those who wouldn’t open their mouths had it poured into their noses while older children held them upside down. This never had to happen twice to anyone.
In time, even those with ginger-scalded tongues and swollen throats learned the rudiments of coat-teasing and “borrowing” from the wares of unwary merchants. The Thiefmaker enthusiastically instructed them in the architecture of doublets, waistcoats, frock coats, and belt pouches, keeping up with all the latest fashions as they came off the docks. His wards learned what could be cut away, what could be torn away, and what must be teased out with deft fingers.
“The point, my loves, is not to hump the subject’s leg like a dog or clutch their hand like a lost babe. Half a second of actual contact with the subject is often too long by far.” The Thiefmaker mimed a noose going around his neck and let his tongue bulge out past his teeth. “You will live or die by three sacred rules: First, always ensure that the subject is nicely distracted, either by your teasers or by some convenient bit of unrelated bum-fuckery, like a fight or a house fire. House fires are marvelous for our purposes; cherish them. Second, minimize—and I damn well mean minimize—contact with the subject even when they are distracted.” He released himself from his invisible noose and grinned slyly. “Lastly, once you’ve done your business, clear the vicinity even if the subject is as dumb as a box of hammers. What did I teach you?”
“Clutch once, then run,” his students chanted. “Clutch twice, get hung!”
New orphans came in by ones and twos; older children seemed to leave the hill every few weeks with little ceremony. Locke presumed that this was evidence of some category of discipline well beyond ginger oil, but he never asked, as he was too low in the hill’s pecking order to risk it or trust the answers he would get.
As for his own training, Locke went to Streets the day after he arrived, and was immediately thrown in with the teasers (punitively, he suspected). By the end of his second month, his skills had secured him elevation to the ranks of the clutchers. This was considered a step up in social status, but Lamora alone in the entire hill seemed to prefer working with the teasers long after he was entitled to stop.
He was sullen and friendless inside the hill, but teasing brought him to life. He perfected the use of over-chewed orange pulp as a substitute for vomit; where other teasers would simply clutch their stomachs and moan, Locke would season his performances by spewing a mouthful of warm white-and-orange slop at the feet of his intended audience (or, if he was in a particularly perverse mood, all over their dress hems or leggings).
Another favorite device of his was a long dry twig concealed in one leg of his breeches and tied to his ankle. By rapidly going down to his knees, he could snap this twig with an audible noise; this, followed by a piercing wail, was an effective magnet for attention and sympathy, especially in the immediate vicinity of a wagon wheel. When he’d teased the crowd long enough, he would be rescued from further attention by the arrival of several other teasers, who would loudly announce that they were “dragging him home to Mother” so he could see a physiker. His ability to walk would be miraculously recovered just as soon as he was hauled around a corner.
In fact, he worked up a repertoire of artful teases so rapidly that the Thiefmaker had cause to take him aside for a second private conversation—this after Locke arranged the inconvenient public collapse of a young lady’s skirt and bodice with a few swift strokes of a finger-knife.
“Look here, Locke-after-your-father Lamora,” the Thiefmaker said, “no ginger oil this time, I assure you, but I would greatly prefer your teases to veer sharply from the entertaining and back to the practical.”
Locke merely stared up at him and shuffled his feet.
“I shall speak plainly, then. The other teasers are going out day after day to watch you, not to do their bloody jobs. I’m not feeding my own private theater troupe. Get my crew of happy little jack-offs back to their own teasing, and quit being such a celebrity with your own.”
For a time after that, everything was serene.
Then, barely six months after he arrived at the hill, Locke