The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,7
see a physiker. His ability to walk would be miraculously recovered just as soon as he was hauled around a corner.
In fact, he worked up a repertoire of artful teases so rapidly that the Thiefmaker had cause to take him aside for a second private conversation—this after Locke arranged the inconvenient public collapse of a young lady’s skirt and bodice with a few swift strokes of a finger-knife.
“Look here, Locke-after-your-father Lamora,” the Thiefmaker said, “no ginger oil this time, I assure you, but I would greatly prefer your teases to veer sharply from the entertaining and back to the practical.”
Locke merely stared up at him and shuffled his feet.
“I shall speak plainly, then. The other teasers are going out day after day to watch you, not to do their bloody jobs. I’m not feeding my own private theater troupe. Get my crew of happy little jack-offs back to their own teasing, and quit being such a celebrity with your own.”
For a time after that, everything was serene.
Then, barely six months after he arrived at the hill, Locke accidentally burned down the Elderglass Vine tavern and precipitated a quarantine riot that very nearly wiped the Narrows from the map of Camorr.
The Narrows was a valley of warrens and hovels at the northernmost tip of the bad part of the city. Kidney-shaped and something like a vast amphitheater, the island’s heart was forty-odd feet beneath its outer edges. Leaning rows of tenement houses and windowless shops jutted from the tiers of this great seething bowl; wall collapsed against wall and alley folded upon mist-silvered alley so that no level of the Narrows could be traversed by more than two men walking abreast.
The Elderglass Vine crouched over the cobblestones of the road that passed west and crossed, via stone bridge, from the Narrows into the green depths of the Mara Camorrazza. It was a sagging three-story beast of weather-warped wood, with rickety stairs inside and out that maimed at least one patron a week. Indeed, there was a lively pool going as to which of the regulars would be the next to crack his skull. It was a haunt of pipe-smokers and of Gaze addicts, who would squeeze the precious drops of their drug onto their eyeballs in public and lie there shuddering with visions while strangers went through their belongings or used them as tables.
The Seventy-seventh Year of Morgante had just arrived when Locke Lamora burst into the common room of the Elderglass Vine, sobbing and sniffling, his face showing the red cheeks, bleeding lips, and bruised eyes that were characteristic of Black Whisper.
“Please, sir,” he whispered to a horrified bouncer while dice-throwers, bartenders, whores, and thieves stopped to stare. “Please. Mother and Father are sick; I don’t know what’s wrong with them. I’m the only one who can move—you must”—sniff—“help! Please, sir…”
At least, that’s what would have been heard, had the bouncer not triggered a headlong exodus from the Elderglass Vine by screaming “Whisper! Black Whisper!” at the top of his lungs. No boy of Locke’s size could have survived the ensuing orgy of shoving and panic had not the badge of illness on his face been better than any shield. Dice clattered to tabletops and cards fluttered down like falling leaves; tin mugs and tarred leather alejacks spattered cheap liquor as they hit the floor. Tables were overturned, knives and clubs were pulled to prod others into flight, and Gazers were trampled as an undisciplined wave of human detritus surged out every door save that in which Locke stood, pleading uselessly (or so it seemed) to screams and turned backs.
When the tavern had cleared of everyone but a few moaning (or motionless) Gazers, Locke’s companions stole in behind him: a dozen of the fastest teasers and clutchers in Streets, specially invited by Lamora for this expedition. They spread out among the fallen tables and behind the battered bar, plucking wildly at anything valuable. Here a handful of discarded coins; there a good knife; here a set of whalebone dice with tiny garnet chips for markers. From the pantry, baskets of coarse but serviceable bread, salted butter in grease-paper, and a dozen bottles of wine. Half a minute was all Locke allowed them, counting in his head while he rubbed his makeup from his face. By the end of the count, he motioned his associates back out into the night.
Riot drums were already beating to summon the watch, and above their rhythm could be heard the first faint flutings of pipes,