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

Receiving a piercing stare from Selendri was a curious thing; her left eye was nothing but a dark hollow, half-covered with a translucent awning that had once been a lid. Her single good eye did the work of two, and damned if it wasn’t unnerving.

‘Are you deaf, madam? Every single one. Cheating. All the way up and down this precious Sinspire, cheating floor after floor, taking your other guests for a very merry ride.’

‘I wonder,’ she said in her slow, witchy whisper, ‘if you truly understand what it means to say that to me, Master Kosta. Are you drunk?’

‘I’m as sober as a suckling infant.’

‘Is this something you’ve been put up to?’

‘I am completely serious,’ said Locke. ‘And it’s your master I would speak to about my motivations. Privately.’

The sixth floor of the Sinspire was quiet. Locke and Selendri were alone, with four of Requin’s uniformed attendants waiting about twenty feet away. It was still too early in the evening for this level’s rarefied crowd to have finished their slow, carousing migration up through the livelier levels.

At the heart of the sixth floor was a tall sculpture within a cylinder of transparent Elderglass. Though the glass could not be worked by human arts, there were literally millions of cast-off fragments and shaped pieces scattered around the world, some of which could be conveniently fitted to human use. There were Elderglass scavenging guilds in several cities, capable of filling special needs in exchange for exorbitant fees.

Within the cylinder was something Locke could only describe as a copperfall - it was a sculpture of a rocky waterfall, taller than a man, in which the rocks were shaped entirely from silver volani coins, and the ‘water’ was a constant heavy stream of copper centira, thousands upon thousands of them. The clatter within the soundproof glass enclosure must have been tremendous, but for those on the outside the show proceeded in absolute silence. Some mechanism in the floor was catching the stream of coins and re-circulating it up the back of the silver ‘rocks’. It was eccentric and hypnotic . . . Locke had never before known anyone to decorate a room with a literal pile of money.

‘Master? You presume that I have one.’

‘You know I mean Requin.’

‘He would be the first to correct your presumption. Violently.’

‘A private audience would give us a chance to clear up several misunderstandings, then.’

‘Oh, Requin will certainly speak to you - very privately.’ Selendri snapped the fingers of her right hand twice and the four attendants converged on Locke. Selendri pointed up; two of them took firm hold of his arms, and together they began to lead him up the stairs. Selendri followed a few steps behind.

The seventh floor was dominated by another sculpture within an even wider Elderglass enclosure. This one resembled a circle of volcanic islands, again built from silver volani, floating in a sea of solid-gold solari. Each of the silver peaks had a stream of gold coins bubbling from its top, to fall back down into the churning, gleaming ‘ocean’. Requin’s guards maintained a pace too vigorous for Locke to catch many more details of the sculpture or the room; they passed another pair of uniformed attendants beside the stairwell and continued up.

At the heart of the eighth floor was a third spectacle within glass, the largest yet. Locke blinked several times and suppressed an appreciative chuckle.

It was a stylized sculpture of Tal Verrar, silver islands nestled in a sea of gold coins. Standing over the model city, bestriding it like a god, was a life-sized marble sculpture of a man Locke recognized immediately. The statue, like the man, had prominent curving cheekbones that lent the narrow face a sense of mirth - plus a round protruding chin, wide eyes and large ears that seemed to have been jammed into the head at right angles. Requin, whose features bore a fair resemblance to a marionette put together in haste by a somewhat irate puppeteer.

The statue’s hands were held outward at the waist, spread forward, and from the flaring stone cuffs around them two solid streams of gold coins were continually gushing onto the city below.

Locke, staring, only avoided tripping over his own feet because the attendants holding him chose that moment to tighten their grip. Atop the eighth-floor stairs was a pair of lacquered wooden doors. Selendri strode past Locke and the attendants. To the left of the door was a small niche in the wall; Selendri slid her brass hand into it, let it settle into some sort of mechanism and then gave it a half-turn to the left. There was a clatter of clockwork devices within the wall and the doors cracked open.

‘Search him,’ she said as she vanished through the doors without turning around.

Locke was rapidly stripped of his coat; he was then poked, prodded, sifted and patted down more thoroughly than he’d been during his last visit to a brothel. His sleeve-stilettos (a perfectly ordinary thing for a man of consequence to carry) were confiscated, his purse was shaken out, his shoes were slipped off and one attendant even ran his hands through Locke’s hair. When this process was finished, Locke (shoeless, coatless and somewhat dishevelled) was given a less-than-gentle shove toward the doors through which Selendri had vanished.

Beyond them was a dark space not much larger than a wardrobe closet. A winding black iron staircase, wide enough for one person, rose up from the floor toward a square of soft yellow light. Locke padded up the stairs and emerged into Requin’s office.

This place took up the whole of the ninth floor of the Sinspire; an area against the far wall, curtained off with silk drapes, probably served as a bedroom. There was a balcony door on the right-hand wall, covered by a sliding mesh screen. Locke could see a wide, darkened sweep of Tal Verrar through it, so he presumed it looked east.

Every other wall of the office, as he’d heard, was liberally decorated with oil paintings - nearly twenty of them around the visible periphery of the room, in elaborate frames of gilded wood. Masterworks of the late Therin Throne years, when nearly every noble at the Emperor’s court had kept a painter or sculptor on the leash of patronage, showing them off like pets. Locke hadn’t the training to tell one from another by sight, but rumour had it that there were two Morestras and a Ventathis on Requin’s walls. Those two artists - along with all their sketches, books of theory and apprentices - had died centuries before, in the firestorm that had consumed the imperial city of Therim Pel.

Selendri stood beside a wide wooden desk the colour of a fine coffee, cluttered with books and papers and miniature clockwork devices. A chair was pushed out behind it, and Locke could see the remnants of a dinner - some sort of fish on a white-iron plate, paired with a half-empty bottle of pale golden wine.

Selendri touched her flesh hand to her brass simulacrum, and there was a clicking noise. The hand folded apart like the petals of a gleaming flower. The fingers locked into place along the wrist and revealed a pair of blackened-steel blades, six inches long, previously concealed at the heart of the hand. Selendri waved these like a claw and gestured for Locke to stand before the desk, facing it.

‘Master Kosta.’ The voice came from somewhere behind him, within the silk-curtained enclosure. ‘What a pleasure! Selendri tells me you’ve expressed an interest in getting killed.’

‘Hardly, sir. All I told your assistant was that I had been cheating steadily, along with my partner, at the games we’ve been playing in your Sinspire. For nearly the last two years.’

‘Every game,’ said Selendri. ‘You said every single game.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Locke with a shrug, ‘it just sounded more dramatic that way. It was more like nearly every game.’

‘This man is a clown,’ whispered Selendri.

‘Oh, no,’ said Locke. ‘Well, maybe occasionally. But not now.’

Locke heard footsteps moving toward his back across the room’s hardwood floor. ‘You’re here on a bet,’ said Requin, much closer.

‘Not in the way that you mean, no.’

Requin stepped around Locke and stood before him, hands behind his back, peering at Locke very intently. The man was a virtual twin of his statue on the floor below; perhaps a few pounds heavier, with the bristling curls of steel-grey hair atop his head receding more sharply. His narrow frock coat was crushed black velvet, and his hands were covered with brown leather gloves. He wore optics, and Locke was surprised to see that the glimmer he had taken for reflected light the night before was actually imbued within the glass. They glowed a translucent orange, giving a demonic cast to the wide eyes behind them. Some fresh, expensive alchemy Locke had never heard of, no doubt.

‘Did you drink anything unusual tonight, Master Kosta? An unfamiliar wine, perhaps?’

‘Unless the water of Tal Verrar itself intoxicates, I’m as dry as baked sand.’

Requin moved behind his desk, picked up a small silver fork, speared a white morsel of fish and pointed at Locke with it.

‘So, if I’m to believe you, you’ve been successfully cheating here for two years, and aside from the sheer impossibility of that claim, now you just want to give yourself up to me. Case of conscience?’

‘Not even remotely.’

‘An earnest wish for an elaborate suicide?’

‘I aim to leave this office alive.’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t necessarily be dead until you hit the cobblestones nine storeys below.’

‘Perhaps I can convince you I’m worth more to you intact.’ Requin chewed his fish before speaking again. ‘Just how have you been cheating, Master Kosta?’

‘Fast-fingers work, mostly.’

‘Really? I can tell a card-sharp’s fingers at a glance. Let’s see that right hand of yours.’ Requin held out his gloved left hand and Locke hesitantly put his own forward, as though they might shake.

Requin snatched Locke’s right hand above the wrist and slammed it down atop his desk - but rather than the sharp rap Locke expected, his hand tipped aside some sort of disguised panel and slid into an aperture just beneath the surface of the desk. There was a loud clack of clockwork and a cold pressure pinched his wrist. Locke jerked back, but the desk had swallowed his hand like the unyielding maw of a beast. Selendri’s twin steel claws turned casually toward him, and he froze.

‘There now. Hands, hands, hands. They get their owners into such trouble, Master Kosta. Selendri and I are two who would know.’ Requin turned to the wall behind his desk and slid back a lacquered wood panel, revealing a long, shallow shelf set into the wall.

Within were dozens of sealed glass jars, each holding something dark and withered . . . dead spiders? No, Locke corrected himself - human hands. Severed, dried and stored as trophies, with rings still gleaming on many of their curled and desiccated fingers.

‘Before we proceed to the inevitable, that’s what we usually do,’ Requin said in a lightly conversational tone. ‘Right hand, ta-ta. I’ve got it down to a pretty process. Used to have carpets in here, but the damn blood made for such a mess.’

‘Very prudent of you.’ Locke felt a single bead of sweat start its slow slide down his forehead. ‘I am as awed and chastised as you no doubt hoped. Might I have my hand back?’

‘In its original condition? I doubt it. But answer some questions and we’ll see. Now, fast-fingers work, you say. But forgive me - my attendants are extremely adept at spotting card-sharps.’

‘I’m sure your attendants mean well.’ Locke knelt down before the desk, the most comfortable position possible, and smiled. ‘But I can finger-dance a live cat into a standard deck of fifty-six and slip it back out at leisure. Other players might complain about the noise, but they’d never spot the source.’

‘Set a live cat on my desk, then.’

‘It was, ah, a colourful figure of speech. Live cats, unfortunately, aren’t in fashion as evening accessories for gentlemen of Tal Verrar this season.’

‘Pity. But hardly a surprise. I’ve had quite a few dead men kneeling where you are now, offering colourful figures of speech and little else.’

Locke sighed. ‘Your boys removed my coat and my shoes, and if they’d patted me down any more thoroughly they would have been fingering my liver. But what’s this?’

He shook out his left sleeve and held up his left hand to show that a deck of cards had somehow fallen into it.

Selendri shoved her blades toward Locke’s throat, but Requin waved her back with a smile on his face. ‘He can hardly kill me with a pack of cards, darling. Not bad, Master Kosta.’

‘Now,’ said Locke, ‘let’s see.’ He held his arm straight out to the side, with the deck held firmly upright between his thumb and all four fingers. A twist of the wrist, a flick of his thumb, and the deck was cut. He began to flex and splay his fingers, steadily increasing his tempo until they moved like a spider taking fencing lessons. Cut and shuffle, cut and shuffle - he sliced the deck apart and slid it back together no fewer than a dozen times. Then, with one smooth flourish, he slapped it down on the desk and spread it in a long arc, displacing several of Requin’s knick-knacks.

‘Pick one,’ said Locke. ‘Any one you like. Look at it, but don’t show it to me.’

Requin did as instructed. While he peeked at the card he’d drawn, Locke gathered the rest of the deck with a reverse slide across Requin’s desktop; he shuffled and cut once more, then split the deck and left half on top of the desk. ‘Go ahead and place your chosen card atop that half of the deck. Remember it, now.’

When Requin returned the card, Locke slapped the other half of the deck down on top of it. Taking the full deck in his left hand, he did his one-handed cut-and-shuffle another five times. Then he slid the top card from the deck - the four of Chalices - onto Requin’s desk and smiled. ‘This, Master of the Sinspire, is your card.’

‘No,’ said Requin with a smirk.

‘Shit.’ Locke flicked out the next card from the top, the Sigil of the Sun. ‘Aha - I knew it was around there somewhere.’

‘No,’ said Requin.

‘Damn me,’ said Locke, and he rapidly went through the next half-dozen from the top of the deck. ‘Eight of Spires? Three of Spires? Three of Chalices? Sigil of the Twelve Gods? Five of Sabres? Shit. Mistress of Flowers?’ Requin shook his head for each one.

‘Huh. Excuse me.’ Locke set the deck of cards down on Requin’s desk, then fumbled at the clasp of his right sleeve with his left hand. After a few seconds, he slid the sleeve back above his elbow and re-set the clasp. Suddenly, there was another deck of cards in his left hand.

‘Let’s see . . . Seven of Sabres? Three of Spires? No, we already did that one . . . Two of Chalices? Six of Chalices? Master of Sabres? Three of Flowers? Damn, damn. That deck wasn’t so good after all.’

Locke set the second deck down beside the first on Requin’s desk, appeared to scratch an itch near the slender black sash above his breeches and then held up a third deck of cards. He grinned at Requin and raised his eyebrows.

‘This trick might work even better if I could have the use of my right hand.’

‘Why, when you appear to be doing so well without it?’

Locke sighed and flicked the top card from the new deck onto the growing pile atop the desk. ‘Nine of Chalices! Look familiar?’

Requin laughed and shook his head. Locke set the third deck down beside the ones already on Requin’s desk, stood up and conjured another from somewhere in the vicinity of his breeches.

‘But your attendants would of course know,’ said Locke, ‘if I were loaded down with four concealed decks of cards, they being so adept at spotting something like that on a man with no jacket or shoes . . . wait, four? I may have miscounted . . .’

He produced a fifth deck from somewhere within his silk tunic, which joined the little tower of cards perched ever more precariously on the edge of the desk.

‘Surely I couldn’t have hidden five decks of cards from your guards, Master Requin. Five would be quite ridiculous. Yet there they are - though I’m afraid that’s as good as it gets. To conjure more, I would have to begin producing them from somewhere disagreeable. And, I’m sorry to say, I don’t seem to have the card you took. But wait . . . I do know where it might be found . . .’

He reached across Requin’s desk, nudged the wine bottle at its base and appeared to pluck a face-down card from underneath it.

‘Your card,’ he said, twirling it in the fingers of his left hand. ‘Ten of Sabres.’

‘Well,’ laughed Requin, showing a wide arc of yellowing teeth below the fire-orange circles of his optics. ‘Very fine, very fine. And one-handed, too. But even if I grant that you could perform such tricks, continuously, in front of my attendants and my other guests . . . you and Master de Ferra have spent a great deal of time at games that are more rigorously controlled than the open card tables.’

‘I can tell you how we beat those, too. Simply free me.’

‘Why relinquish a clear advantage?’

‘Then trade it to gain another. Free my right hand,’ said Locke, mustering every last bit of passionate sincerity he could pour into his words, ‘and I shall tell you exactly why you must never again trust the security of your Sinspire as it stands.’

Requin stared down at him, laced his gloved fingers together and finally nodded to Selendri. She withdrew her blades - though she kept them pointed at Locke - and pressed a switch behind the desk. Locke was suddenly free to stumble back to his feet, rubbing his right wrist.

‘Most kind,’ said Locke with a breeziness that was pure conjuring. ‘Now, yes, we have played at quite a bit more than the open tables. But which games have we scrupulously avoided? Reds-and-Blacks. Count to Twenty. Fair Maiden’s Wish. All the games in which a guest plays against the Sinspire, rather than against another guest. Games mathematically contrived to give the house a substantial edge.’

‘Hard to make a profit otherwise, Master Kosta.’

‘Yes. And useless for the purposes of a cheat like myself; I need flesh and blood to fool. I don’t care how much clockwork and how many attendants you throw in. In a game between guests, larceny always finds a way, sure as water pushes through a ship’s seams.’

‘More bold speech,’ said Requin. ‘I admire glibness in the doomed, Master Kosta. But you and I both know that there is no way to cheat at, say, Carousel Hazard, barring four-way complicity between the participants, which would render the game absolutely pointless.’

‘True. There is no way to cheat the carousel or the cards, at least not here in your ’Spire. But when one cannot cheat the game, one must cheat the players. Do you know what bela paranella is?’

‘A soporific. Expensive alchemy.’

‘Yes. Colourless, tasteless and doubly effective when taken with liquor. Jerome and I were dusting our fingers with it before we handled our cards during each hand last night. Madam Corvaleur has a well-known habit of eating and licking her fingers while playing. Sooner or later, she was bound to take in enough of the drug to pass out.’

‘Well!’ Requin looked genuinely taken aback. ‘Selendri, do you know anything about this?’

‘I can vouch for Corvaleur’s habits, at least,’ she whispered. ‘It appears to be her preferred method of irritating her opponents.’

‘That it did,’ said Locke. ‘It was quite a pleasure to see her do herself in.’

‘I’ll grant your story is remotely plausible,’ said Requin. ‘I had been . . . curious about Izmila’s strange incapacity.’

‘Indeed. The woman’s built like an Elderglass boathouse. Jerome and I had more empty vials than her side did; what she’d drunk wouldn’t have got her eyelashes alone drunk, if not for the powder.’

‘Perhaps. But let’s discuss other games. What of Blind Alliances?’

A game of Blind Alliances was played at a circular table with tall, specially designed barriers before each player’s hands so that everyone but the person directly across from them (their partner) could see at least some of their cards. Each silent participant set his or her right foot atop the left foot of the person on their right, all around the table, so no player could tap signals to a partner below the table. Partners therefore had to play by instinct and desperate inference, cut off from one another’s sight, voice and touch.

‘A child’s stratagem. Jerome and I had special boots constructed, with iron-shod toes beneath the leather. We could slide our feet carefully out of the backs of them, and the iron would continue to provide the sensation of a full boot to the person beside us. We could tap entire books to one another with the code we’ve got. Have you ever known anyone to dominate that game as thoroughly as we did?’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘I can show you the boots.’

‘Well. You did have an extraordinary run of luck . . . but what about billiards? You scored a rather famous victory against Lord Landreval. How could you have finessed that? My house provides all the balls, the sticks and the handling.’

‘Yes, so naturally those three things couldn’t be fiddled. I paid Lord Landreval’s consulting physiker ten solari for insight into his medical complaints. Turns out he’s allergic to lemons. Jerome and I rubbed our necks, cheeks and hands with sliced lemons each night before we played him, and used other oils to mostly cover up the scent. Half an hour in our presence and he’d be so puffed up he could barely see. I’m not sure he ever realized what the problem was.’

‘You say you won a thousand solari with a few slices of lemon? Nonsense.’

‘Of course you’re right. I asked politely if he’d lend me a thousand solari, and he offered to let us publicly humiliate him at his favourite game out of the kindness of his heart.’

‘Hmmmph.’

‘How often did Landreval lose before he met Jerome and me? Once in fifty games?’

‘Lemons. I’ll be damned.’

‘Yes. When you can’t cheat the game, you’d best find a means to cheat the player. Given information and preparation, there’s not a player in your ’Spire Jerome and I can’t dance along like a finger-puppet. Hell, someone with my talents who knew enough about me could probably string me right along, too.’

‘It’s a good story, Master Kosta.’ Requin reached across his desk and took a sip of his wine. ‘I suppose I can charitably believe at least some of what you claim. I suspected that you and your friend were no more merchant-speculators than I am, but at my tower you may claim to be a duke or a three-headed dragon provided you have solid credit. You certainly did before you stepped into my office this evening. Which brings us only to the most important question of all - why the hell are you telling me this?’

‘I needed your attention.’

‘You already had it.’

‘I needed more than that. I needed you to understand my skills and my inclinations.’

‘And now you have that as well, inasmuch as I accept your story. What exactly do you think that gets you?’

‘A chance that what I’m going to say next will actually sink in.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m not really here to take your guests for a few thousand solari here and a few thousand solari there, Requin. It’s been fun, but it’s secondary to my actual goal.’ Locke spread his hands and smiled apologetically. ‘I’ve been hired to break into your vault, just as soon as I find a way to haul out everything in it from right under your nose.’