The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,155
to close it for him afterward. We’ll take him atop Raven’s Reach; then we’ll watch the ground to see who runs, and where they run to.”
“Anything else?”
“No. Get to it, Stephen. Come back and let me have your report in a few hours. I’ll still be up… I’m expecting messages from the Floating Grave once Barsavi’s funeral procession gets back. In the meantime, I’ll send old Nicovante a note about what we suspect.”
“Your servant, m’lady.” Reynart bowed briefly and then departed the solarium, his strides long and rapid.
Before the heavy door had even slammed shut, Doña Vorchenza was up and moving toward a small scrivener’s desk tucked into an alcove to the left of the door. There she withdrew a half-sheet of parchment, scribbled a few hasty lines, folded it, and closed the fold with a small dollop of blue wax from a paper tube. The stuff was alchemical, hardening after a few moments of exposure to air. She preferred to allow no sources of open flame into this room, with its many decades of carefully collected and indexed records.
Within the desk was a signet ring that Doña Vorchenza never wore outside her solarium; on that ring was a sigil that appeared nowhere on the crest of the Vorchenza family. She pressed the ring into the stiffening blue wax and then withdrew it with a slight popping noise.
When she passed it down the dumbwaiter, one of her night attendants would immediately run to the northeastern cage platform of her tower and have himself cranked over to Raven’s Reach via cable car. There, he would place the message directly into the old duke’s hands, even if Nicovante had retired to his bedchamber.
Such was the custom with every note that was sealed in blue with nothing but the stylized sigil of a spider for its credentials.
Interlude
The Schoolmaster of Roses
“No, this is my heart. Strike. Strike. Now here. Strike.”
Cold gray water poured down on the House of Glass Roses; Camorr’s winter rain, pooled an inch deep beneath the feet of Jean Tannen and Don Maranzalla. Water ran in rivulets and threads down the face of every rose in the garden; it ran in small rivers into Jean Tannen’s eyes as he struck out with his rapier again and again at the stuffed leather target the Don held on the end of a stick, little larger than a big man’s fist.
“Strike, here. And here. No, too low. That’s the liver. Kill me now, not a minute from now. I might have another thrust left in me. Up! Up at the heart, under the ribs. Better.”
Gray-white light exploded within the swirling clouds overhead, rippling like fire glimpsed through smoke. The thunder came a moment later, booming and reverberating, the sound of the gods throwing a tantrum. Jean could barely imagine what it must be like atop the Five Towers, now just a series of hazy gray columns lost in the sky behind Don Maranzalla’s right shoulder.
“Enough, Jean, enough. You’re passing fair with a pigsticker; I want you to be familiar with it at need. But it’s time to see what else you have a flair for.” Don Maranzalla, who was wrapped up inside a much-abused brown oilcloak, splashed through the water to a large wooden box. “You won’t be able to haul a long blade around, in your circles. Fetch me the woundman.”
Jean hurried through the twisting glass maze, toward the small room that led back down into the tower. He respected the roses still—only a fool would not—but he was quite used to their presence now. They no longer seemed to loom and flash at him like hungry things; they were just an obstacle to keep one’s fingers away from.
The woundman, stashed in the little dry room at the top of the staircase, was a padded leather dummy in the shape of a man’s head, torso, and arms, standing upon an iron pole. Bearing this awkwardly over his right shoulder, Jean stepped back out in the driving rain and returned to the center of the Garden Without Fragrance. The woundman scraped the glass walls several times, but the roses had no taste for empty leather flesh.
Don Maranzalla had opened the wooden chest and was rummaging around in it; Jean set the woundman up in the center of the courtyard. The metal rod slid into a hole bored down through the stone and locked there with a twist, briefly pushing up a little fountain of water.
“Here’s something ugly,” said the don, swinging a four-foot length