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

But… Doña Vorchenza, there must be some way to confirm that they are what they say they are.”

“You say Midnighters are robbing you?”

“No,” said Sofia, biting her upper lip. “No, it’s not the Midnighters themselves. They are… supposedly watching the situation and waiting for a chance to act. But something… something is just wrong. Or they are not telling us everything they perhaps should.”

“My dear Sofia,” said Doña Vorchenza. “My poor troubled girl, you must tell me exactly what has happened, and leave out not one detail.”

“It is… difficult, Doña Vorchenza. The situation is rather… embarrassing. And complicated.”

“We are all alone up here on my terrace, my dear. You have done all the hard work already, in coming over to see me. Now you must tell me everything. Then I’ll see to it that this particular bit of gossip speeds on its way to the right ear, I promise you.”

Sofia took another small sip of tea, cleared her throat, and hunched down in her seat to look Doña Vorchenza directly in the eyes.

“Surely,” she began, “you’ve heard of Austershalin brandy, Doña Vorchenza?”

“More than heard of, my dear. I may even have a few bottles hidden away in my wine cabinets.”

“And you know how it is made? The secrets surrounding it?”

“Oh, I believe I understand the essence of the Austershalin mystique. The fussy black-coated vintners of Emberlain are, shall we say, well served by the stories surrounding their wares.”

“Then you can understand, Doña Vorchenza, how Lorenzo and I reacted as we did when the following opportunity supposedly fell into our laps by an act of the gods…”

2

THE CAGE containing Doña Salvara creaked and rattled toward the ground, growing ever smaller and fading into the background gray of the courtyard. Doña Vorchenza stood by the brass rails of the embarkation platform, staring into the night for many minutes, while her team of attendants pulled at the machinery of the capstan. Gilles wheeled the silver cart with the near-empty pot of tea and the half-eaten Amberglass cake past her, and she turned to him.

“No,” she said. “Send the cake up to the solarium. That’s where we’ll be.”

“Who, m’lady?”

“Reynart.” She was already striding back toward the door to her terrace-side apartments; her slippered feet made an echoing slap-slap-slap against the walkway. “Find Reynart. I don’t care what he’s doing. Find him and send him up to me, the moment you’ve seen to the cake.”

Inside the suite of apartments, through a locked door, up a curving stairway… Doña Vorchenza cursed under her breath. Her knees, her feet, her ankles. “Damn venerability,” she muttered. “I piss on the gods for the gift of rheumatism.” Her breathing was ragged. She undid the 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