The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,22

into a streetside pile of brown glop in Camorr, you knew going in that it wouldn’t smell like rosewater. Bug shook his head to clear the white sparks dancing behind his eyes, and twitched his legs to be sure they would serve. Nothing appeared to be broken, thank the gods. He would reevaluate his own claims on immortality when all of this was over.

“Watch-sergeant,” Bug hissed thickly, letting more blood spill out over his lips (damn, his tongue burned with pain). “Watch-sergeant…”

“Yes?” The man’s eyes were going wider. “Can you move your arms and legs, boy? What can you feel?”

Bug reached up with his hands, casually, not entirely feigning shakiness, and clutched at the watch-sergeant’s harness as though to steady himself.

“Watch-sergeant,” Bug said a few seconds later, “your purse is much lighter than it should be. Out whoring last night, were we?”

He shook the little leather pouch just under the watch-sergeant’s dark moustaches, and the larcenous part of his soul (which was, let us be honest, its majority) glowed warmly at the sheer befuddlement that blossomed in the man’s eyes. For a split second, the pain of Bug’s imperfect landing in the rubbish heap was forgotten. Then his other hand came up, as if by magic, and his Orphan’s Twist hit the watch-sergeant right between the eyes.

An Orphan’s Twist, or a “little red keeper,” was a weighted sack like a miniature cosh, kept hidden in clothes (but never against naked skin). It was traditionally packed full of ground shavings from a dozen of Camorr’s more popular hot peppers, and a few nasty castoffs from certain black alchemists’ shops. No use against a real threat, but just the thing for another street urchin. Or a certain sort of adult with wandering hands.

Or an unprotected face, at spitting distance.

Bug was already rolling to his left, so the spray of fine rust-colored powder that erupted from his Twist missed him by inches. The watch-sergeant was not so lucky; it was a solid hit, scattering the hellish-hot stuff up his nose, down his mouth, and straight into his eyes. He choked out a string of truly amazing wet bellows and fell backward, clawing at his cheeks. Bug was already up and moving with the giddy elasticity of youth; even his bitterly aching tongue was temporarily forgotten in the all-consuming need to run like hell.

Now he definitely had the foot patrol’s undivided attention. They were shouting and leaping after him as his little feet pounded the cobbles and he sucked in deep stinging gulps of humid air. He’d done his part to keep the game alive. It could now go on without him while he gave the duke’s constables their afternoon exercise.

A particularly fast-thinking watchman fumbled his whistle into his mouth and blew it raggedly while still running—three short bursts, a pause, then three more. Watchman down. Oh, shit. That would bring every yellowjacket in half the city at a dead run, weapons out. That would bring crossbows. It was suddenly deadly important that Bug slip the squad at his heels before other squads started sending spotters up onto roofs. His anticipation of a merry chase vanished. He had perhaps a minute and a half to get to one of his usual cozy-holes and pull a vanish.

Suddenly, his tongue hurt very badly indeed.

6

DON LORENZO Salvara stepped out of the temple portico into the stark bright dampness of high Camorri noon, little imagining the education a certain boy thief was receiving in the concept of too clever by half just across the district. The trilling of watch-whistles sounded faintly. Salvara narrowed his eyes and peered with some curiosity at the distant figure of a lone city watchman, stumbling across the cobbles and occasionally bouncing off walls, clutching his head as though afraid it was going to float off his neck and up into the sky.

“Can you believe it, m’lord?” Conté had already brought the horses around from the temple’s unobtrusive little stabling grotto. “Drunk as a baby in a beer barrel, and not a heartbeat past noon. Fucking pissant lot of softies, these new goldenrods.” Conté was a sun-wrinkled man of middle years with the waistline of a professional dancer and the arms of a professional oarsman; the manner in which he served the young don was obvious even without a glance at the pair of thigh-length stilettos hanging from his crossed leather belts.

“Hardly up to your old standards, eh?” The don, on the other hand, was a well-favored young man of the classic Camorri blood,