The Lies of Locke Lamora - By Scott Lynch Page 0,74

the barge-pole.”

3

IT WAS the third hour of the afternoon when they set out from the Temple of Perelandro, via their assorted escape tunnels and side entrances. A warm drizzle was falling from the sky, which was neatly divided as though by some ruler and stylus of the gods—low dark clouds filled the north, while the sun was just starting downward in the bright, clear southwest. The pleasant scent of fresh rain on hot stone welled up everywhere, briefly washing the usual city miasmas from the air. The Gentlemen Bastards gathered once again at the southwestern docks of the Temple District, where they hailed a gondola-for-hire.

The boat was long and shallow and heavily weathered, with a freshly killed rat lashed to the bow spar just beneath a small wooden idol of Iono; this was allegedly a peerless ward against capsizing and other misfortunes. The poleman perched at the stern like a parrot in his red-and-orange striped cotton jacket, protected from the rain by a broad-brimmed straw hat that drooped out past his skinny shoulders. He turned out to be a canal-jumper and purse-cutter of their acquaintance, Nervous Vitale Vento of the Gray Faces gang.

Vitale rigged a mildewy leather umbrella to keep some of the drizzle off his passengers, and then began to pole them smoothly east between the high stone banks of the Temple District and the overgrown lushness of the Mara Camorrazza. The Mara had once been a garden maze for a rich governor of the Therin Throne era; now it was largely abandoned by the city watch and haunted by cutpurses. The only reason honest folk even ventured into its dangerous green passages was that it was the heart of a network of footbridges connecting eight other islands.

Jean settled in to read from a very small volume of verse he’d tucked into his belt, while Bug continued practicing his coin manipulation, albeit with a copper-piece that would look much less incongruous in public. Locke and the Sanza brothers talked shop with Vitale, whose job, in part, was to mark particularly lightly guarded or heavily loaded cargo barges for the attention of his fellows. On several occasions, he made hand signals to concealed watchers on shore while the Gentlemen Bastards politely pretended not to notice.

They drew close to Shades’ Hill; even by day those heights were steeped in gloom. By chance the rain stiffened and the old kingdom of tombs grew blurred behind a haze of mist. Vitale swung the boat to the right. Soon he was pushing them southward between Shades’Hill and the Narrows, aided by the current of the seaward-flowing canal, now alive with the spreading ripples of raindrops.

Traffic grew steadily thinner and less reputable on the canal as they sped south; they were passing from the open rule of the duke of Camorr to the private dominion of Capa Barsavi. On the left, the forges of the Coalsmoke district were sending up columns of blackness, mushrooming and thinning out beneath the press of the rain. The Duke’s Wind would push it all down over Ashfall, the most ill-looking island in the city, where gangs and squatters contended for space in the moldering, smoke-darkened villas of an opulent age now centuries past.

A northbound barge moved past on their left, wafting forth the stench of old shit and new death. What looked to be an entire team of dead horses was lying in the barge, attended by half a dozen knackers. Some were slicing at the corpses with arm-length serrated blades while others were frantically unrolling and adjusting bloodstained tarps beneath the rain.

No Camorri could have asked for a more appropriate match for the sight and stink of the Cauldron. If the Dregs were poverty-racked, the Snare disreputable, the Mara Camorrazza openly dangerous, and Ashfall dirty and falling apart, the Cauldron was all of these things with a compound interest of human desperation. It smelled something like a keg of bad beer overturned in a mortician’s storage room on a hot summer day. Most of this district’s dead never made it as far as the pauper’s holes dug by convicts on the hills of the Beggar’s Barrow. They were tipped into canals or simply burned. No yellowjackets had dared enter the Cauldron save in platoons even before the Secret Peace; no temples had been maintained here for fifty years or more. Barsavi’s least sophisticated and restrained gangs ruled the Cauldron’s blocks; brawlers’ taverns and Gaze dens and itinerant gambling circles were packed wall to wall with families crammed into