The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,67

for safekeeping. And he made sure that everyone around him knew how much he liked that carpet.

“It got so that his court could tell what he was going to do to a visitor by watching that carpet; if there was going to be blood, that carpet would be rolled up and packed away safe. Without exception. Months went by. Carpet up, carpet down. Sometimes men who got called to see him would try to run the moment they saw bare floor beneath his feet, which of course was as good as admitting wrongdoing out loud.

“Anyhow. Back to his problem garristas. Not one of them was stupid enough to enter the Floating Grave without a gang at their back, or to be caught alone with Barsavi. His rule was still too uncertain at this point for him to just throw a tantrum about it. So he waited… and then one night he invited nine of his troublesome garristas to dinner. Not all the troublemakers, of course, but the cleverest, and the toughest, and the ones with the biggest gangs. And their spies brought back word that that lovely embroidered carpet, the capa’s prize possession, was rolled out on the floor for everyone to see, with a banquet table on top of it and more food than the gods themselves had ever seen.

“So those stupid bastards, they figured Barsavi was serious, that he really wanted to talk. They thought he was scared, and they expected negotiations in good faith; so they didn’t bring their gangs or make alternate plans. They thought they’d won.

“You can imagine,” said Chains, “just how surprised they were when they sat down at their chairs on that beautiful carpet, and fifty of Barsavi’s men piled into the room with crossbows, and shot those poor idiots so full of bolts that a porcupine in heat would have taken any one of them home and fucked him. If there was a drop of blood that wasn’t on the carpet, it was on the ceiling. You get my meaning?”

“So the carpet was ruined?”

“And then some. Barsavi knew how to create expectations, Locke, and how to use those expectations to mislead those who would harm him. They figured his strange obsession was a guarantee of their lives. Turns out there are just some enemies numerous enough and powerful enough to be worth losing a damn carpet over.”

Chains pointed ahead of them and to the south.

“That’s the man waiting to talk to you about half a mile that way. I would strongly recommend cultivating a civil tongue.”

3

THE LAST Mistake was a place where the underworld of Camorr bubbled to the surface; a flat-out crook’s tavern, where Right People of every sort could drink and speak freely of their business, where respectable citizens stood out like serpents in a nursery and were quickly escorted out the door by mean-looking, thick-armed men with very small imaginations.

Here entire gangs would come to drink and arrange jobs and just show themselves off. In their cups, men would argue loudly about the best way to strangle someone from behind, and the best sorts of poisons to use in wine or food. They would openly proclaim the folly of the duke’s court, or his taxation schemes, or his diplomatic arrangements with the other cities of the Iron Sea. They would refight entire battles with dice and fragments of chicken bones as their armies, loudly announcing how they would have turned left when Duke Nicovante had gone right, how they would have stood fast when the five thousand blackened iron spears of the Mad Count’s Rebellion had come surging down Godsgate Hill toward them.

But not one of them, no matter how far doused in liquor or Gaze or the strange narcotic powders of Jerem—no matter what feats of generalship or statecraft he credited himself with the foresight to bring off—would dare suggest to Capa Vencarlo Barsavi that he should ever change so much as a single button on his waistcoat.

4

THE BROKEN Tower is a landmark of Camorr, jutting ninety feet skyward at the very northern tip of the Snare—that low and crowded district where sailors from a hundred ports of call are passed from bar to alehouse to gaming den and back again on a nightly basis. They are shaken through a sieve of tavern-keepers, whores, muggers, dicers, cobble-cogs, and other low tricksters until their pockets are as empty as their heads are heavy, and they can be dumped on ship to nurse their new hangovers and diseases. They come