The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,216
tower, by your leave.”
“By all means,” said Sofia. She leaned close to Locke’s ear and whispered, “Doña Vorchenza is a dear old thing, something like a grandmother to all of us Alcegrante ladies. She is the arbiter of all our gossip, you might say. She is not well—she is more and more distant with every passing month—but she is still very close to us. I hope you will have the chance to make her acquaintance.”
“I shall look forward to it, my lady Salvara.”
Reynart ushered them into the tower of Raven’s Reach itself, and the sight that met Locke’s eyes drew an unwilling gasp from his mouth.
From the outside, Raven’s Reach was opaque silver. From the inside, at least on the levels he could see, it was nearly transparent. A smoky haze seemed to live within the glass, cutting out the glare of the sun, reducing it to a plain white circle overhead that the naked eye could easily bear to regard. But in all other ways it let in the view as though it were not there at all. The hilly countryside and the wide Angevine lay to the north, while all the islands of the lower city lay spread like illustrations on a map to the south. Locke could even make out the thin black shapes of ships’ masts bobbing past the southern edge of the city. His stomach fluttered with the thrill of vertigo.
On the level of the tower just above them, the Sky Garden began; there were said to be a hundred tons of rich earth in the pots and troughs atop that roof. Vines cascaded down the sides; well-tended bushes and full-sized trees sprouted from the apex of the tower—a little round forest in miniature. In the branches of one of those trees, facing south to the Iron Sea, was a wooden chair that was regarded as the very highest point in Camorr any sane person could reach. The Sky Garden would be full of children; it was where all the youngest nobles would be released to amuse themselves while their parents tended to the business of the court beneath their feet.
The floor they stood on did not cover the full hundred-foot width of the tower; it was a hemisphere, covering only the north half of the tower’s diameter. Locke grasped a rail at the southern edge of the floor and looked down; there were four other hemispherical galleries beneath them, each about twenty feet below the one above, and each one full of men and women. The vertigo threatened to swallow him again. Staring down at least eighty feet to “ground,” with the transparent side of the tower and that mind-twisting southern view spread out before him, he felt almost as though the world were tilting on its axis. The hand of Don Salvara on his shoulder brought him back to the present.
“You’ve got Raven’s Reach disease, Lukas,” the don laughed. “You’re clutching that rail like a lover. Come have some refreshments; your eyes will sort out the views in time, and it will all come to seem perfectly normal.”
“Oh, my lord Salvara, if only that should prove to be the case! But I would be glad to visit the banquet tables.”
The don led him through the press of silks and cottons and cashmeres and rare furs, nodding here and waving there. Sofia had vanished, along with Reynart.
The banquet tables (or perhaps these were merely the appetizer tables; the light afternoon refreshments at a feast like this could rival the main course from any lesser occasion) were laid out with silver-trimmed linen cloths, fifty feet from end to end. Guild Chefs—the masters of the Eight Beautiful Arts of Camorr—stood at attention in their cream-yellow ceremonial robes and black scholars’ caps with hanging gold cords behind their ears. Each chef, male or female, had intricate black tattoos on each of the four fingers of their hands; every design representing mastery of one of the Eight Gourmet Forms.
At one end of the banquet table were desserts (the Fifth Beautiful Art): cherry cream cakes encased in shells of gold leaf that were intended to be eaten; cinnamon tarts painstakingly assembled with honey-paste glue into the shape of sailing vessels, a whole fleet of little ships with white marzipan sails and raisins for crewmen. There were hollowed-out pears, their cores replaced with cylinders of river-melon fruit or brandy creams; there were shaved river-melons, their green exteriors scraped down to reveal the pink flesh inside. Every exposed pink face bore