The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,66

you can believe it. Taught rhetoric. He got a few gangs under his thumb and he started cutting. Not like a back-alley slasher, but more like a physiker cutting out a chancre. When Barsavi took out another capa, he took their gangs, too. But he didn’t lean on them if he didn’t have to. He gave them full territories and let them choose their own garristas, and he cut them in on his take.

“So—five years ago, there were thirty. Four years ago, there were ten. Three years ago, there was one. Capa Barsavi and his hundred gangs. The whole city—all the Right People, present company included—in his pocket. No more open war across the bloody canals. No more platoons of thieves getting strung up all at once at the Palace of Patience. Nowadays they have to do them two or three at a time.”

“Because of the Secret Peace? The one I broke?”

“The one you broke, yes. Good guess, presuming I’d know about that. Yes, my boy, it’s the key to Barsavi’s peculiar success. What it comes down to is, he has a standing agreement with the duke, handled through one of the duke’s agents. The gangs of Camorr don’t touch the nobles; we don’t lay a finger on ships or drays or crates that have a legitimate coat of arms on them. In exchange, Barsavi is the actual ruler of a few of the city’s more charming points. Catchfire, the Narrows, the Dregs, the Wooden Waste, the Snare, and parts of the docks. Plus the city watch is much more… relaxed than they ought to be.”

“So we can rob anyone who isn’t a noble?”

“Or a yellowjacket, yes. We can have the merchants and the money-changers and the incoming and the outgoing. There’s more money passing through Camorr than any other city on this coast, boy. Hundreds of ships a week; thousands of sailors and officers. We don’t have any problem laying off the nobility.”

“Doesn’t that make the merchants and the money-changers and the other people angry?”

“It might if they knew about it. That’s why there’s that word ‘Secret’ in front of ‘Peace.’ And that’s why Camorr’s such a lovely, fine, safe place to live. You really only need to worry about losing your money if you don’t have much of it in the first place.”

“Oh,” said Locke, fingering his little shark’s-tooth necklace. “Okay. But now I wonder… You said my old master bought and paid for, um, killing me. Will you get in trouble with Barsavi for not… killing me?”

Chains laughed. “Why would I be taking you to see him if that’d get me in trouble, boy? No, the death-mark’s mine to use, or not, as I see fit. I bought it. Don’t you see? He doesn’t care if we actually use ’em, only that we acknowledge that the power of granting life or death is his. Sort of like a tax only he can collect. You see?”

Locke nodded, then allowed himself to be trundled along silently for a few minutes, absorbing all of this. His aching head made the scale of what was going on a bit difficult to grasp.

“Let me tell you a story,” said Father Chains after a while. “A story that will let you know just what sort of man you’re going to meet and swear fealty to this evening. Once upon a time, when Capa Barsavi’s hold on the city was very new and very delicate, it was an open secret that a pack of his garristas was plotting to get rid of him just as soon as the chance presented itself. And they were very alert for his countermoves, see; they’d helped him take over the city, and they knew how he worked.

“So they made sure he couldn’t get all of them at once; if he tried to cut some throats the gangs would scatter and warn each other and it’d be a bloody mess, another long war. He made no open moves. And the rumors of their disloyalty got worse.

“Capa Barsavi would receive visitors in his hall—it’s still out there in the Wooden Waste; it used to be a big Verrari hulk, one of those fat wide galleons they used for hauling troops. It’s just anchored there now, a sort of makeshift palace. He calls it the Floating Grave. Well, at the Floating Grave, he made a big show of putting down this one large carpet from Ashmere; a really lovely thing, the sort of cloth the duke would hang on a wall