The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,223

up in a nauseous torrent; his throat seemed to be on the verge of granting the request.

Gods, he thought, I wonder if I’m on one of the transparent sections of the tower? I must look pretty fucking funny.

There was a creaking noise from overhead; he looked up and gasped.

One of the elevator cages was coming down toward him; it would be in line with him on the face of the tower, and it would pass by about three feet from the wall he was clinging to.

It was empty.

“Crooked Warden,” Locke whispered, “I’ll do this, but the only thing I ask, the only thing, is that when this is done, you make me fucking forget. Steal this memory out of my head. And I will never climb more than three feet off the ground as long as I draw breath. Praise be.”

The cage creaked down; it was ten feet above him, then five feet, and then its bottom was even with his eyes. Breathing in deep, ragged, panicky gasps, Locke turned himself around on the tower, so that his back was against the glass. The sky and the world beneath his feet both seemed too big to fit into his eyes; gods, he didn’t want to think about them. The cage was sliding past; its bars were right there, three feet away over fifty-some stories of empty air.

He screamed, and pushed himself off the glass wall of the tower. When he hit the blackened iron sidebars of the cage, he clung as desperately as any cat ever clung to a tree branch; the cage swayed back and forth, and Locke did his best to ignore the incredible things that did to the sky and the horizon. The cage door; he had to slip the cage door. They closed tight but didn’t have elaborate locks.

Working with hands that shivered as though the air were freezing, Locke slipped the bolt on the cage’s door and let it fall open. He then swung himself gingerly around the corner, from the exterior to the interior, and with one last burst of dreadful vertigo reached out and slammed the door shut behind him. He sat down on the floor of the cage, gasping in deep breaths, shaky with relief and the aftereffects of the poison.

“Well,” he muttered, “that was fucking hideous.”

Another elevator cage full of noble guests drew upward, twenty feet to his right; the men and women in the cage looked at him very curiously, and he waved.

He half dreaded that the cage would lurch to a halt before it reached the ground and start to draw back up; he decided if it did that he would take his chances with the Palace of Patience. But the cage continued all the way down; Vorchenza must still be tied to her chair, out of the action. Locke was on his feet when the cage settled against the ground; the liveried men who opened the door peered in at him with wide eyes.

“Excuse me,” said one of them, “but were you… did you… were you in this cage when it left the embarkation platform?”

“Of course,” said Locke. “That shape you saw, darting out from the tower? Bird. Biggest gods-damned bird you ever saw. Scared the piss right out of me, let me tell you. I say, are any of these carriages for hire?”

“Go to the outer row,” said the footman, “and look for the ones with the white flags and lanterns.”

“Much obliged.” Locke rapidly perused the contents of Doña Vorchenza’s coin purse; there was a very satisfactory quantity of gold and silver inside. He tossed a solon apiece to the liveried men beside the cage as he stepped out. “It was a bird, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said the other man with a tip of his black cap. “Biggest gods-damned bird we ever saw.”

6

THE HIRED carriage left him at the Hill of Whispers; he paid very well—the “forget you made this run” sort of well—and then he walked south through Ashfall on his own. It was perhaps the sixth hour of the evening when he returned to the hovel, bursting through the curtained door, yelling as he came—

“Jean, we have one hell of a fucking problem—”

The Falconer stood in the center of the little room, smirking at Locke, his hand folded before him. Locke took in the tableau in a split second: Ibelius lay motionless against the far wall, and Jean lay slumped at the Bondsmage’s feet, writhing in pain.

Vestris perched upon her master’s shoulder; she fixed him with