The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,35

clear it of what he’d just heard. “They can’t be serious. Your state is… smaller than the Duchy of Camorr! Exposed to the sea on two sides. Impossible to defend.”

“And yet the preparations are under way. Emberlain’s banks and merchant houses do four times the yearly business of the next richest canton in the Marrows. The Black Table fixates upon this. Gold should certainly be considered potential power; the Black Table errs by imagining it to be direct power, in and of itself.” He finished his drink in one long, deliberate draught. “In two months, civil war will have broken out anyway. The succession is a mess. The Stradas and the Dvorims, the Razuls and the Strigs—they are all sharpening knives and parading men. Yet, as we speak, the merchants of Emberlain are moving to arrest the remaining nobility while the Graf is away. To claim the navy. To raise a levy of ‘free citizens.’ To hire mercenaries. In short, they will now attempt to secede from the Marrows. It is unavoidable.”

“And what, specifically, does this have to do with you coming here?” The doña’s knuckles were white around her wine flute; she grasped the full significance of Fehrwight’s story. A fight larger than anything seen in centuries—civil war mixed with possible economic disaster.

“It is the opinion of my masters, the House of bel Auster, that rats in the hold have little chance to take the wheel of a ship that is about to run aground. But those same rats may very easily abandon the ship.”

3

IN THE center of the Shifting Revel, a great many tall iron cages had been sunk into the water. Some of these served to support wooden slats on which performers, victims, fighters, and attendants could stand; a few particularly heavy cages restrained dark shapes that circled ominously under the translucent gray water. Platform boats were rowed around at a steady clip, showing off rope dancers, knife throwers, acrobats, jugglers, strongmen, and other curiosities; the excited shouts of barkers with long brass speaking trumpets echoed flatly off the water.

First up at any Revel were the Penance Bouts, where petty offenders from the Palace of Patience could volunteer for mismatch combat in exchange for reduced sentences or slightly improved living conditions. At present, a hugely muscled nichavezzo (“punishing hand”), one of the duke’s own household guard, was handing out the beatings. The soldier was armored in black leather, with a gleaming steel breastplate and a steel helmet crested with the freshly severed fin of a giant flying fish. Scales and spines scintillated as the soldier stepped back and forth under the bright sun, striking out seemingly at leisure with an iron-shod staff.

The nichavezzo stood on a platform that was small but rock-steady; a series of circular wooden flats surrounded him, separated by an arm’s-length span of water. These wobbly, unstable platforms were occupied by about two dozen slender, grimy prisoners, each armed with a small wooden cudgel. A concerted rush might have overwhelmed their armored tormentor, but this lot seemed to lack the temperament for cooperation. Approaching the nichavezzo singly or in little groups, they were being dropped, one after another, with skull-rattling blows. Little boats circled to fish out unconscious prisoners before they slipped under the water forever; the duke, in his mercy, did not allow Penance Bouts to be deliberately lethal.

“Mmmm.” Locke held his empty wine flute out for just a second; Conté plucked it out of his fingers with the grace of a swordsman disarming an opponent. When the don’s manservant stepped toward the liquor cabinet, Locke cleared his throat. “No need to refill that particular glass just yet, Conté. Too kind, too kind. But with your permission, my lord and lady Salvara, I should like to offer a pair of gifts. One as a matter of simple hospitality. The other as a… well, you’ll see. Graumann?”

Locke snapped his fingers, and Jean nodded. The heavyset man moved over to a wooden table just beside the liquor cabinet and picked up two heavy leather satchels, each of which had iron-reinforced corners and small iron locks sewn into their covers. Jean set these down where the Salvaras could easily see them, and then stepped back so Locke could unseal the satchels with a delicate key of carved ivory. From the first satchel, he withdrew a cask of pale aromatic wood, perhaps one foot in height and half that in diameter, which he then held out for Don Salvara’s examination. A plain black brand on the surface