Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent. Part 1

“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.