Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent. Part 1

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.