The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,135

cards from around the table and shuffled them. “They’re where our food comes from.”

“Yes, but… I don’t know anything about farming.”

“Of course not. You didn’t know how to cook, serve, dress like a gentleman, or speak Vadran when I bought you, either. So now you’re going to learn something else new.”

“Where?”

“Up the Angevine, seven or eight miles. Little place called Villa Senziano. It’s tenant farmers, mostly beholden to the duke or some of the minor swells from the Alcegrante. I’ll dress as a priest of Dama Elliza, and you’ll be my initiate, being sent off to work the earth as part of your service to the goddess. It’s what they do.”

“But I don’t know anything about the Order of Dama Elliza.”

“You won’t need to. The man you’ll be staying with understands that you’re one of my little bastards. The story’s just for everyone else.”

“What,” said Calo, “are we going to do in the meantime?”

“You’ll mind the temple. I’ll only be gone two days; the Eyeless Priest can be sick and locked away in his chambers. Don’t sit the steps while I’m away; people always get sympathetic if I’m out of sight for a bit, especially if I cough and hack when I return. You two and Jean can amuse yourselves as you see fit, so long as you don’t make a bloody mess of the place.”

“But by the time I get back,” said Locke, “I’ll be the worst card player in the temple.”

“Yes. Best wishes for a safe journey, Locke,” said Calo.

“Savor the country air,” said Galdo. “Stay as long as you like.”

2

THE FIVE Towers loomed over Camorr like the upstretched hand of a god; five irregular, soaring, Elderglass cylinders, dotted with turrets and spires and walkways and much curious evidence that the creatures that had designed them did not quite share the aesthetic sense of the humans who’d appropriated them.

Easternmost was Dawncatcher, four hundred feet high, its natural color a shimmery silver-red, like the reflection of a sunset sky in a still body of water. Behind it was Blackspear, slightly taller, made of an obsidian glass that shone with broken rainbows like a pool of oil. At the far side, as one might reckon by looking across the Five with Dawncatcher in the middle of one’s vision, was Westwatch, which shone with the soft violet of a tourmaline, shot through with veins of snow-white pearl. Beside it was stately Amberglass, with its elaborate flutings from which the wind would pull eerie melodies. In the middle, tallest and grandest of all, was Raven’s Reach, the palace of Duke Nicovante, which gleamed like molten silver and was crowned with the famous Sky Garden, whose lowest-hanging vine trailed in the air some six hundred feet above the ground.

A network of glassine cables (miles and miles of spun Elderglass cords had been found in the tunnels beneath Camorr, centuries before) threaded the roofs and turret tops of the Five Towers. Hanging baskets passed back and forth on these cables, drawn along by servants at huge clacking capstans. These baskets carried both passengers and cargo. Although many of the residents of lower Camorr proclaimed them mad, the nobles of the Five Families regarded the lurching, bobbing passage across the yawning empty spaces as a test of honor and courage.

Here and there, large cargo cages were being drawn up or lowered from jutting platforms on several of the towers. They reminded Locke, who stared up at all this with eyes that were not yet sated with such wonders, of the spider cages at the Palace of Patience.

He and Chains sat in a two-wheeled cart with a little walled space behind the seat, where Chains had stashed several parcels of goods under an old canvas tarp. Chains wore the loose brown robes with green and silver trim that marked a priest of Dama Elliza, Mother of Rains and Reaping. Locke wore a plain tunic and breeches, without shoes.

Chains had their two horses (un-Gentled, for Chains misliked using the white-eyed creatures outside city walls) trotting at a gentle pace up the winding cobbles of the Street of Seven Wheels, the heart of the Millfalls district. In truth, there were more than seven wheels spinning in the white froth of the Angevine; there were more in sight than Locke could count.

The Five Towers had been built on a plateau some sixty-odd feet above the lower city; the Alcegrante islands sloped up toward the base of this plateau. The Angevine came into Camorr at that height, just to the