The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,225

the column of black smoke rose so high it could be seen from the deep Iron Sea, far east of Camorr, and as far north as Vintila, capital of the young Kingdom of the Seven Marrows.

Even this hideous conjuring could not touch Elderglass; those structures in the city built by Eldren arts survived unscathed. But everything else the fire touched, it ate; wood and stone and metal, mortar and paper and living things. All the city’s buildings and all the city’s culture and all the city’s population who could not flee before the magi began their work were burnt into a desert of gray ashes—a desert that settled a foot deep across a black scar baked into the ground.

Those ashes swirled in the hot wind at the foot of the one human-crafted object the magi willingly preserved: the throne of the empire. That chair remains there to this day, in the haunted city of Therim Pel, surrounded by a field of ashes that time and rains have turned into a sort of black concrete. Nothing grows in Therim Pel anymore; no sensible man or woman will set foot within that black monument to the resolve of the Bondsmagi of Karthain.

It was they who broke the Therin Throne with that unearthly fire; they who cast the city-states of the south into hundreds of years of warring and feuding while the Kingdom of the Seven Marrows grew powerful in the north.

It is that image that comes to mind when most men think to cross a Bondsmage—the image of an empty chair standing alone in a dry sea of desolation.

Chapter Sixteen

Justice Is Red

1

THE FALCONER MOVED his fingers, and Locke Lamora fell to his knees, gripped by an all-too-familiar pain that burned within his bones. He toppled onto the floor of the hovel, beside Jean.

“What a pleasure,” said the sorcerer, “to see that you survived our little arrangement at the Echo Hole. I am impressed. Even despite your reputation, I had imagined we were too clever for you. Only this afternoon I thought it was Jean Tannen alone that I sought; but this is something finer by far.”

“You,” spat Locke, “are a twisted fucking animal.”

“No,” said the Bondsmage, “I obey the orders of my paying client. And my orders are to make sure the murderer of my client’s sisters takes his time in dying.” The Falconer cracked his knuckles. “You I regard as a windfall.”

Locke screamed and reached out toward the Bondsmage, willing himself forward through the pain, but the Falconer muttered under his breath, and the racking, stabbing sensations seemed to multiply tenfold. Locke flopped onto his back and tried to breathe, but the muscles behind and beneath his lungs were as solid as stones.

When the Bondsmage released him from this torment, he slumped down, gasping. The room spun.

“It’s very strange,” said the Falconer, “how the evidence of our victories can become the instruments of our downfall. Jean Tannen, for example—you must be a fantastic fighter to have taken my client’s sisters, though I see you suffered in doing so. And now they’ve struck back at you from the shadelands. A great many divinations are possible when one of my kind can get his hands on the physical residue of another man—fingernail parings, for example. Locks of hair. Blood on the edge of a knife.”

Jean groaned, unable to speak from pain.

“Oh, yes,” said the Falconer. “I was certainly surprised to see who that blood led me to. In your shoes, I’d have been in the first caravan to the other side of the continent. You might even have been left in peace.”

“Gentlemen Bastards,” hissed Locke, “do not abandon one another, and we do not run when we owe vengeance.”

“That’s right,” said the Bondsmage. “And that’s why they also die at my feet in filthy fucking hovels like this one.”

Vestris fluttered from his shoulder and settled into another corner of the room, staring balefully down at Locke, twitching her head from side to side in excitement. The Falconer reached inside his coat and drew out a sheet of parchment, a quill, and a small bottle of ink. He uncapped the bottle and set it down atop the sleeping pallet; he wet the quill and smiled down at Locke.

“Jean Tannen,” said the Falconer. “What a simple name; easy to write. Easier even than it was to stitch.”

His quill flew across the parchment; he wrote in great looping whorls, and his smile grew with every letter. When he was finished, his silver thread snaked out around