Scott Lynch

Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent. Part 1

1.

There was a place in the alley where the odorous slops and shards of daily proceedings were to be set, which was Locke Lamora’s job, until the mess could be hauled up the crooked stairs and around the block to the public dross-yard, which was also Locke Lamora’s job. This was never done before the sun was long-buried and the Falselight glass bled of illumination, so every awkward step chanced a painful adventure. Here in the Dregs, light was not so cheap that folk would gladly waste it on the eyeballs of passing strangers. One might catch a break from boat-lanterns on the canal, or from cloudless moonlight, but more often one tripped on stone or trash or bodies. Muttering curses at his own feet in the middle of the night was also Locke Lamora’s job.

How refreshing, then, to find Cyril and Vilius out back wrestling with a corpse while the thin band of sky over the alley was still hazy blue rather than starry black.

“Can’t just throw him in the canal now, too many eyes,” said Cyril.

“Can’t hardly leave the bastard here neither.”

“Cover him up!”

“Think of the smell. Think of the rats! They’re always here for the trash, they won’t miss a proper feast.”

“Bury him, then, under all these slops and scraps and timbers. Cover him tight.” Cyril deigned to notice Locke with a gesture. “Let shit-boy here sort it once the lights go down.”

“I can’t shift something that big in the dark!” Locke kept his voice low and glanced around; here in the Dregs it was one chance in ten thousand anyone might give a shit of the moral variety but getting involved in corpse-business was to put oneself at the mercy of any witnesses and whatever leverage they might desire. “What’d you two do to him?”

“Nothing by our hands,” grunted Cyril. “Found him here. Ain’t even bleeding, just dead somehow.”

“Well, after dark, we can drag him to a canal and give him the heave.” Locke set the pile of trash he was carrying down. “Or roll him into someone else’s alley. Or the dross-yard. Or bundle him over to Solana Casta’s roof garden in the Narrows. A lot of problems go into the soil in those pots, and she doesn’t charge. Or we could string him up, let the blood out, then get a good hatchet and some sacks—”

“Creeping blue fuck, boy,” said Vilius. “How many corpses you worked a disposal on?”

“Hard to remember.” Locke used the back of a forearm to wipe away the sweat dripping into his eyes. “I dunno, ten?”

That was when the corpse came back to life, swearing and flailing. Vilius and Cyril leapt back.

“You know, when it comes to corpse disposal there is a crucial first step,” said Locke.

2.

Six months since the Orphan’s Moon. If anointment as a secret initiate of the Crooked Warden had yielded Locke Lamora any benefits, they were as yet being kept from him. He was thirteen and a half, emphasis on the half. Half a man, half at ease, half-voiced. Nor was he alone. Calo and Galdo were in the midst of lingering uncomfortable changes, and Jean’s voice had started to warble.

“My broken instruments, all slack-strung and jangling,” said Father Chains. “Your mechanisms are misordered, your bodily humours are jesting at your expense. It happens to everyone but here it seems to be happening all at once.”

Even Sabetha, whose customary poise often seemed like a sarcastic commentary on the chaos around her, had been swept up in the collective fit of awkwardness. Just now she was afflicted with cramps. The boys had together made a sympathetic embassy to her cotside, where Calo squeaked out such a rusty, discordant note that she had burst into giggles and honked at him like a goose. Soon they all broke down in laughter and honking, the Sanza brothers sounding as if their geese had been force-fed wet gravel. It was a rare moment of complete levity and Chains let them have it, before he quietly swept into the room shadowed by his plans for their summer.

“Placements,” said Chains. “It’s more of that tedious, invaluable, life-saving education you’re always whining about, but you won’t be false-facing this time. You’ll be out on loan. Seconded to some of the gangs we’re on better terms with. No complicated scheming, no secrets. Just do as you’re told, watch carefully, learn everything you can. Ripen in wisdom for a few months and perhaps your throats, bones, and bowels will be less at war with you when I gather you back into the fold.”

“So we are to return intellectually and physically perfected,” croaked Galdo.

“No doubt. And bring back five hundred pounds of cut rubies on the back of a unicorn while you’re at it,” said Chains. “Though of you all… the one I might be asking to perform the greatest impossibility is Locke.”

3.

The Unbroken Jar, at the far northeastern tip of the Dregs, was a catch-basin for a dozen disreputable streams of humanity to flow into and mingle, to be drained out onto the streets at sunrise and filled to brimming again the next evening. It was not entirely a bawdy house and not entirely a scum-hole and not entirely a cloister for advanced inebriates, not entirely a trap for the unwary and not entirely a fashionable risk for slumming swells. It averaged a death every night or two, though Locke, in his weeks of working there, had never before witnessed the mortality rate amended in real time as a corpse pushed past him and through the back door.

“Well I’d have sworn he was dead as bacon grease!” said Vilius. “He smells the part.”

The odor wafting from the resurrected man was a point in Vilius’ favor, Locke was forced to admit. He ran inside, breathing through his mouth, for the master of the Jar had stepped out for a moment and the not-dead fellow seemed to know where the counter was. Locke found him slouched there a moment later, spinning a copper baron on the scratched and stained wood.

“I’m concerned about your friends,” said the man, who had a voice like an old clockwork mechanism that had been dropped down some stairs. “To mistake the sleeping for the dead is one thing, but to not go straight to the purse in a corpse’s pockets is hardly natural. I fear they lack the spirit of this city. You, now. You wanted to make gutter soup with my blood and plant me in a garden.”

“I merely proposed what seemed reasonable before you un-killed yourself. Why were you sleeping back there?”

“I was on my way over here to get drunk, but I was still drunk from the last place, and sometimes the sun, you know, it pushes down on your head and says, ‘Here’s a patch of good clean alley stone, lay yourself on it awhile.’ Still, if I ever do cack it hereabouts I want you to handle the arrangements. Foundationing a garden is fine work for any sack of bones. What’s your name, boy?”

“Locke.”

“Well, Locke, I’m now sober enough to get drunk again, so let’s have some of that wine that tastes like a sick baby took a shit in a tub of varnish.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I like the white baby shit varnish, not the red.”

That narrowed it down sufficiently. Locke uncasked a stream of the proper liquid into a clay cup, squinting against the fumes. He took the man’s coin and handed over the cup. The man’s grin drew tight the creases of his face. Wind and sun had practiced upon him; he was not young, and he had reds and purples where healthy people didn’t. He dashed the wine back in one long glug, and when he spoke again, his breath was turpentined.

“I’m Mazoc Szaba. Late of damn near everywhere. Used to sell a sword, back when I owned one.” He tapped the bar; a full copper entitled him to four cups. “These days I mostly make my living as an untidy spectacle.”

“I make my living as the shit-boy.” Locke slid over a second helping of awful wine. “I do everything at every hour and if I were killed in the street they’d throw a rag bucket at me and tell me to mop up my own guts.”

“Locke, if you’re going to sling drinks behind a counter you need to mix ten parts listen to one part tell, and the bit you tell is never woe-is-me. What are you, twelve?”

“Thirteen. Probably.”

“Thirteen. Well, thirteen’s a thicket. Thirteen’s a long suck on a sour teat. Thirteen’s not made for contentment. Anyone who loves being thirteen is the gods’ special flavor of idiot.” Szaba dashed back his wine, tapped the counter again. “You keep your eyes on me now, shit-boy, and sooner or later I’ll show you something that’ll make you feel better about your life.”

4.

“What do you mean, I’m to be ordinary?”

“Ordinary. You speak Therin, you know what the word means, you’ve seen other people embodying the concept.” Chains set his hands on Locke’s shoulders, a familiar gesture that was full of warm, affectionate strength and also prevented him from escaping. “You steal as a habit. You steal waking and sleeping. Left unattended, you strip your surroundings of interesting objects like a bird decorating a nest. You’ve done well moderating yourself over the years, but now I need you to restrain your sense of liberty, as a man in the becoming. You must make room in your life for discretion.”

“I am discreet. I am a shadow hiding in another shadow on a very dark day.”

“Locke, when I sent you on that errand today, to the chandler and the—”

Locke didn’t bother prevaricating. He pulled two votive candles out of his pocket, little beeswax disks scented with lemon and lavender.

“Behold the miracle,” said Chains, “of the boy who went out with coin for twenty hour-mark candles and somehow came back with two extras.”

“I have to keep in practice!”

“You are dear to me, boy, but on my soul I doubt you were thinking so constructively. You saw, you took. A bird decorating a nest.”

“HONK,” cried Sabetha, catalyzing another outburst of giggles from herself, Jean, and the Sanzas. Chains sighed the whole-body sigh of a man who freshly resolves not to murder five children every day of his life.

“Locke, you know the world will kill you, but you need to feel it under your skin and in your bones. You need to stew in the juices of being… vulnerable. Your summer will be away from here, away from me. You’ll be among Right People, they’ll know you have a garrista, but apart from that you’ll work hard and live small. You’ll take drudge wages for dogsbody toil and the only schemes you will play — the only schemes — will be the little tricks and filches any tavern boy contrives. Out of that, you will gather half a crown in total and bring it to me as your kick-up, to me and then to Capa Barsavi. Like a cur, like a slouch, like an ordinary slouch, d’you hear me?”

“May I at least come back to visit?” said Locke, quietly. “On Penance Days, maybe?”

“You must ask permission of the people I’m sending you to,” said Chains. “They have your keeping for the summer, your oath as my pezon binds you to them, and it is they you must reckon with. But cheer up, Locke. If it’s any consolation, the place I’m sending you is a nest of misadventure, full of interesting people ruining themselves.”

5.

No architect had set the Unbroken Jar in its mature state, no mason had taken orders for its warped walls and dark alcoves. It had grown out of the centuries, out of accident and happenstance, disaster and repair, thrift and expedience. In a colder place the press of warm humanity on those crooked floors, perched at crooked benches and tables, might have been welcoming, but this was Camorr in summer. The Unbroken Jar was a humid cavern of wine-soured sweat. If Father Chains truly wanted Locke to stew, he had chosen just the pot to slide him into.

Old one-handed, rheumatic Botari ran the place, but he didn’t quite own it. The Jar was held in trust by the Black Breeze, a gang that had been something, as Locke understood it, about twenty years before but now existed mostly to maintain this place as a minor landmark on the secret map of Camorr kept in the heads of the Right People. Botari’s sons, Vilius and Cyril, were on hand for the drudgery but in practice, Locke was now Vilius and Cyril nine-tenths of the time. Food, such as it was, was handled by Eight, a jagged-mannered little woman who’d been trained in two of the Beautiful Arts by Camorr’s guilds of chefs. Eight had disgraced herself or stolen something (nobody could tell Locke the truth, and asking Eight directly might be an actual danger to his health), and the two fingers on which she’d received her guild tattoos had been chopped off. Now she handled pottage and mustard-steamed dumplings for a less refined clientele.

Locke swept and fetched and carried, rolled in full casks and heaved out empty ones, stacked trash in the light and stumbled to the dross-yard in the dark. Locke’s status as a sworn pezon gave him some protection against open violence, but none against mischief, curses, and abuse. Only old Mazoc Szaba, when he was in, seemed to have any kind words for Locke, or to even view him as the repository of a human soul.

Three or four times a week, when water traffic was particularly heavy, Botari would order his boys to run out the wine-mast. This was a forty-foot pole anchored (an optimistic description, Locke thought) to the roof, from which someone could be dangled over the middle of the adjacent canal. This removed the need for boats to pull alongside the embankment for service and made it easier for impulsive crews to purchase drinks before better judgment could assert itself. Eight had been the dangler of choice but naturally this was added to the list of Locke’s duties.

It was not all bad despite the swaying and the hot sun and the eye-burning flash on the rippling waters. Sometimes there were breezes, sometimes there were interesting ships to be spied in Old Harbor, sometimes there were even moments of beauty. Most of these involved canal trees, bobbing and spinning on their thick floating roots, an eccentricity prized for their fruit and their cleansing influence. The thrice-daily tides, the trees, and the strict laws about using dross-yards were the primary reasons the city’s canals were not vile beyond habitability. Sometimes, hanging just above a rustling canopy of leaves or caught in an explosion of birds or butterflies out of the scented shadows, Locke lived a momentary fantasy of a different Camorr entirely, a bobbing blue and green dream-city that was solely his private apprehension, and only because he was out there like bait on a fishing pole, to be tortured by the bored Botari boys and to have things thrown at him by ale-boat owners who didn’t appreciate having competition drop out of the sky.

Now and then, after Falselight, the wine-mast was swung about and rigged facing north rather than east. This put it near the foliage-covered walls of the Mara Camorazza, the ancient park whose pathways served as a conduit to more respectable areas of the city. Enterprising, spry, and mentally unsound Right People with an urgent interest in not being stopped by yellow-jacketed constables could climb the walls, heave ropes and scramble across the mast in the dark. Most of them made the jump. Locke always prayed for the success of whatever missions had taken these fellows into the dangers of the well-lit districts, but he never asked questions. Half a minute after the last member of any such exodus was bustled away downstairs, the wine-mast would be back in its regular configuration, just an innocent hazard to navigation meant for the inebriation of boaters.

6.

“I’ll do it! I’ll eat a cup! Give me fucking odds, I’ll eat the last glazed fragment!”

Locke sighed. The stupid asshole who’d been yelling for odds for the last ten minutes was too drunk to notice that the Jar didn’t sell anything in glazed cups. Too expensive for such short-lived objects, especially on a night like this.

Once upon a time, Locke knew, the Black Breeze had been led by a woman who called herself the Wind. She’d been some foot-boxing prodigy out of Tal Verrar who’d won a clutch of blood money and died trying to win more at the Shifting Revel. The Wind’s sister, who called herself the Measure, had taken control of the Unbroken Jar and settled into residence. When the Measure wanted to be seen, she watched the main parlor from a raised alcove guarded by black iron bars. The Measure was the Unbroken Jar’s real seat of fame, more so even than the titular jar (a centuries-old, lidded thing locked away from prying hands; legend had it that whoever broke the jar would earn a fatal curse, which was true inasmuch as Botari and sons would immediately beat that person to death).

There was gambling everywhere in Camorr; one could walk from the outermost tip of the West Needle to the last butcher-yard in Rustwater and touch no paving stone that had never served as table for a wager. At the Unbroken Jar, however, one could cry stakes for anything, even the damnedest, silliest, most unlikely thing. If the Measure saw any merit in your proposal, she would give you odds, and if anyone with coin was feeling loved by the gods then the show would begin. The Measure was an arithmetical prodigy who could discourse on the motions of the moons or multiply sums in a heartbeat, and she knew many strange things besides. The word that came down from her alcove was law.

Thus, the idiot across the way who was now confronting the eating of a ceramic cup, odds four to one against. Locke suspected he had thought too little on whether he would chew or not, but the Measure had his money and now there were only two branches his life might take: prove foolishness or prove cowardice.

Not every contest was so gruesomely stupid, though some… Some, like the games old Mazoc Szaba played, were worse. Locke preferred levity. There was a pair of complete stonewits, for example, bare-knuckle boxers from the Falselight Cutters whose skulls were cathedrals of simplicity, who came in every week to have a game of Catch-the-Duke. The men had no theory of strategy and played like children, with random enthusiasm, and as a result, their matches were strangely fascinating. The betting could be equally random. Patrons would demand odds on whether it would rain, on whether the next pour would empty an ale-cask, on whether drunks could catch throwing knives. They mostly couldn’t. Not with their hands.

“Are you sampling your own wares tonight, boy?”

Locke blinked. Woolgathering. There’d been little sleep the sweltering night before, on his little patch of stone in the buttery where Botari let him attempt his rest.

“Oh, hello, Master Szaba. I’m… just tired.”

“Having trouble sleeping? Sounds like a goat’s ballsack problem to me, Locke.”

“What’s that?”

“Means you’ve got a face like a goat’s ballsack.” Szaba clapped at himself, coughed, and flashed one of his wrinkled-leather smiles.

Locke twitched a corner of his lip faintly upward. That joke, he thought, would be funnier when he brought it home to unsheath it against one of the Sanza brothers. Theft was life.

“Haven’t seen you for a few days,” he said.

“Shitty week for making a living. I’m not sure if anyone has broached the subject with you yet, boy, but it seems Camorr can be an unforgiving place.” Szaba drummed his fingers on the counter. “What the hell. I need a break. Might as well shake my ass at Venaportha and see if she’s embracing low standards at the moment. I’ll drink the serpent.”

“Oh, fuck, come on, sir, don’t do that—”

“I shall drink the serpent,” bellowed Szaba. “Master Botari, fetch me the green bottle, and Mistress Measure, give me odds! Silver bet! Let’s go four tonight, shall we?”

That caused a stir, as it always did, which was of some use to the unfortunate drunk now spitting bloody ceramic fragments out of his mouth. No coward, at least, and with a fresh spectacle to excite the crowd, he could give up quietly. Money changed hands. He’d have to pay Botari for the cup, too.

“Mazoc Szaba wants the serpent wine,” said the Measure. “Four would not normally be a challenge. Even odds. But Mazoc Szaba seems desperate tonight. Interesting. Four glasses. Eight to seven against.”

“Stake me,” Szaba whispered, waving to the crowd but peering wide-eyed at Locke.

“What?”

“Stake me. I haven’t the money. I told you it was a shitty week. Please, Locke. Don’t leave me hung out in front of everyone. I can do four glasses easy and you’ll have your coin back in ten minutes.”

Locke’s head whirled. All the weeks he’d swept and sweated and dangled and grown dark circles under his eyes had been to gather the sum of one tyrin, half of what he needed to bring back to Chains when this was all over, half the whole point of everything. Ten silver solons in a tyrin, and Szaba was asking for eight of those. Fuck. All that work balanced against the thought of humiliating this man, this near-friend, this presumptuous idiot who was trying so hard to kill himself. This fellow thief who either trusted or needed Locke enough to let him see vulnerability.

The cold part of him, the part that could walk past death or even plan it, the part that shrugged off the fountains of blood and misery Camorr put into the world, did not half understand the warm part of him. But tonight, in accordance with the mysteries, the warm part of Locke was holding his purse.

“Do not fuck this up,” hissed Locke, startled at himself, speaking to a grown man with an authoritative demand, with the voice of a Right Person, a Capa’s man. So what if that voice cracked?

Serpent wine was alchemical venom, emerald sludge that roiled the stomach and set the blood pounding in one’s temples, an impractical poison devoid of subtlety. Somewhere between one glass and a whole bottle was anyone's mortal breaking point. The entertainment lay in seeing whether a drinker had an accurate notion of where that point was. Szaba had called for odds on serpent wine three times: once in competition and twice against himself. He seemed to love the attention and even claimed to love the wine, though at each victory he’d staggered a bit more, had taken longer to finish, and his eyes had grown more bloodshot.

Given a choice between one glass or eating an entire ceramic cup, Locke would have gladly set to work stuffing broken fragments into his mouth. Szaba now proposed to drink four glasses of poison, and to do it with unaffected grace.

“Do not fuck me up,” Locke whispered, and with the quietest, faintest motion he could manage, he passed his money to Mazoc Szaba.

Content

Scott Lynch
Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent. Part 1

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.