The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,187
keys to the Bowsprit Suite at the Tumblehome Inn, where extra clothing suitable to Lukas Fehrwight was neatly set out in a cedar-lined closet… locked away behind a clockwork box that no lock-charmer with ten times the skill Locke had ever possessed could tease open.
“Damn,” said Locke. “We can’t get to anything. We need money, and we can get that from the Salvaras, but I can’t go to them like this. I need gentleman’s clothes, rose oil, trifles. Fehrwight has to look like Fehrwight, and I can’t conjure him for ten crowns.”
Indeed, the clothes and accessories he’d worn when dressed as the Vadran merchant had easily come to forty full crowns—not the sort of sum he could simply tease out of pockets on the street. Also, the few tailors that catered to appropriately rarefied tastes had shops like fortresses, in the better parts of the city, where the yellowjackets prowled not in squads but in battalions.
“Son of a bitch,” said Locke, “but I am displeased. It all comes down to clothes. Clothes, clothes, clothes. What a ridiculous thing to be restrained by.”
“You can have the ten crowns, for what it’s worth. We can eat off the silver for a long time.”
“Well,” said Locke, “that’s something.” He heaved himself back down on the sleeping pallet and sat with his chin resting on both of his hands. His eyebrows and his mouth were turned down, in the same expression of aggrieved concentration Jean remembered from their years as boys. After a few minutes, Locke sighed and looked up at Jean.
“If I’m fit to move, I suppose I’ll take seven or eight crowns and go out on the town tomorrow, then.”
“Out on the town? You have a plan?”
“No,” said Locke. “Not even a speck of one. Not the damnedest idea.” He grinned weakly. “But don’t all of my better schemes start like this? I’ll find an opening, somehow… and then I suppose I’ll be rash.”
Interlude
The White Iron Conjurers
It is said in Camorr that the difference between honest and dishonest commerce is that when an honest man or woman of business ruins someone, they don’t have the courtesy to cut their throat to finish the affair.
This is, in some respects, a disservice to the traders, speculators, and money-lenders of Coin-Kisser’s Row, whose exertions over the centuries have helped to draw the Therin city-states (all of them, not merely Camorr) up out of the ashes of the collapse of the Therin Throne and into something resembling energetic prosperity… for certain fortunate segments of the Therin population.
The scale of operations on Coin-Kisser’s Row would set the minds of most small shopkeepers spinning. A merchant might move two stones on a counting-board in Camorr; sealed documents are then dispatched to Lashain, where four galleons crewed by three hundred souls take sail for the far northern port of Emberlain, their holds laden with goods that beggar description. Hundreds of merchant caravans are embarking and arriving across the continent on any given morning, on any given day, all of them underwritten and itemized by well-dressed men and women who weave webs of commerce across thousands of miles while sipping tea in the back rooms of countinghouses.
But there are also bandits, warned to be in places at certain times, to ensure that a caravan flying a certain merchant’s colors will vanish between destinations. There are whispered conversations, recorded in no formal minutes, and money that changes hands with no formal entry in any ledger. There are assassins, and black alchemy, and quiet arrangements made with gangs. There is usury and fraud and insider speculation; there are hundreds of financial practices so clever and so arcane that they do not yet have common names—manipulations of coin and paper that would have Bondsmagi bowing at the waist in recognition of their devious subtlety.
Trade is all of these things, and in Camorr, when one speaks of business practices fair or foul, when one speaks of commerce on the grandest scale, one name leaps to mind above and before all others—the Meraggio.
Giancana Meraggio is the seventh in his line; his family has owned and operated its countinghouse for nearly two and a half centuries. But in a sense the first name isn’t important; it is always simply the Meraggio at Meraggio’s. “The Meraggio” has become an office.
The Meraggio family made its original fortune from the sudden death of the popular Duke Stravoli of Camorr, who died of an ague while on a state visit to Tal Verrar. Nicola Meraggio, trader-captain of a relatively fast