Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent. Part 1

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?”