Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)

If you could stand in thin air a thousand yards above Tal Verrar’s tallest towers, or float in lazy circles there like the nations of gulls that infest the city’s crevices and rooftops, you would see how its vast, dark islands have given this place its ancient nickname. They whirl outward from the city’s heart, a series of crescents steadily increasing in size, like the stylized petals of a rose in an artist’s mosaic.

They are not natural, in the sense that the mainland looming a few miles to the north-east is natural. The mainland cracks before wind and weather, showing its age. The islands of Tal Verrar are unweathered, possibly unweatherable - they are formed from the black glass of the Eldren, unimaginable quantities of it, endlessly tiered and shot through with passages, glazed with layers of stone and dirt from which a city of men and women springs.

This Rose of the Gods is surrounded by an artificial reef, a broken circle three miles in diameter, shadows under shadowed waves. Against this hidden wall the restless Sea of Brass is gentled for the passage of vessels flying the banners of a hundred kingdoms and dominions. Their masts and yards rise in a forest, white with furled sails, far beneath your feet.

If you could turn your eye to the city’s western island, you would see that its interior surfaces are sheer black walls, plunging hundreds of feet to the softly lapping harbour waves, where a network of wooden docks clings to the base of the cliffs. The seaward side of the island, however, is tiered along its entire length. Six wide, flat ledges sit one atop the other with smooth fifty-foot escarpments backing all but the highest.

The southernmost district of this island is called the Golden Steps - its six levels are thick with alehouses, dicing dens, private clubs, brothels and fighting pits. The Golden Steps are heralded as the gambling capital of the Therin city-states, a place where men and women may lose money on anything from the mildest vices to the wickedest felonies. The authorities of Tal Verrar, in a magnanimous gesture of hospitality, have decreed that no foreigner upon the Golden Steps may be pressed into slavery. As a result, there are few places west of Camorr where it is safer for strangers to drink their brains out and fall asleep in the gutters and gardens.

There is rigid stratification on the Golden Steps; with each successively higher tier, the quality of the establishments increases, as do the size, number and vehemence of the guards at the doors. Crowning the Golden Steps are a dozen baroque mansions of old stone and witchwood, embedded in the wet, green luxury of manicured gardens and miniature forests.

These are the ‘chance-houses of quality’ - exclusive clubs where men and women of funds may gamble in the style to which their letters of credit entitle them. These houses have been informal centres of power for centuries, where nobles, bureaucrats, merchants, ships’ captains, legates and spies gather to wager fortunes, both personal and political.

Every possible amenity is contained within these houses. Notable visitors board carriage-boxes at exclusive docks at the base of the inner harbour cliffs and are hauled up by gleaming brass water engines, thereby avoiding the narrow, twisting, crowd-choked ramps leading up the five lower Steps on their seaward face. There is even a public duelling green - a broad expanse of well-kept grass lying dead-centre on the top tier, so that cooler heads need not be given any chance to prevail when someone has their blood up.

The houses of quality are sacrosanct. Custom older and firmer than law forbids soldiers or constables to set foot within them, save for response to the most heinous crimes. They are the envy of a continent: no foreign club, however luxurious or exclusive, can quite recapture the particular atmosphere of a genuine Verrari chance-house. And they are, one and all, put to shame by the Sinspire.

Nearly one hundred and fifty feet tall, the Sinspire juts skyward at the southern end of the topmost tier of the Steps, which is itself more than two hundred and fifty feet above the harbour. The Sinspire is an Elderglass tower, glimmering with a pearly black sheen. A wide balcony decked with alchemical lanterns circles each of its nine levels. At night, the Sinspire is a constellation of lights in scarlet and twilight-sky blue, the heraldic colours of Tal Verrar.

The Sinspire is the most exclusive, most notorious and most heavily guarded chance-house in the world, open from sunset to sunrise for those powerful, wealthy or beautiful enough to make it past the whims of the doorkeepers. Each ascending floor outdoes the one beneath it for luxury, exclusivity and the risk ceiling of the games allowed. Access to each higher floor must be earned with good credit, amusing behaviour and impeccable play. Some aspirants spend years of their lives and thousands of solari trying to catch the attention of the Sinspire’s master, whose ruthless hold on his unique position has made him the most powerful arbiter of social favour in the city’s history.

The code of conduct at the Sinspire is unwritten, but as rigid as that of a religious cult. Most simply, most incontrovertibly, it is death to be caught cheating here. Were the Archon of Tal Verrar himself to be detected with a card up his sleeve, he would find no appeal this side of the gods themselves from the consequences. Every few months, the tower’s attendants discover some would-be exception to the rule, and yet another person dies quietly of an alchemical overdose in their carriage, or tragically ‘slips’ from the balcony nine storeys above the hard, flat stones of the Sinspire’s courtyard.

It has taken Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen two years and a completely new set of false identities to carefully cheat their way up to the fifth floor.

They are, in fact, cheating at this very moment, trying hard to keep up with opponents who have no need to do likewise.