The Gentleman Bastard Series (258 page)

“Oh, shit. Good point.”

Locke stood up and looked around the room one last time.

“Key, crown, child,” he muttered. “Well, fuck you, Patience. Three things must you kiss before I let you spook me for good. My boots, my balls, and my ass.”

Locke pulled his boots on and followed Jean down the stairs, impatient to have Karthain at his back and slowly sinking into the horizon.

EPILOGUE

WINGS

1

THE BOY IS six. He stares at the Amathel, breathes the lake air, the wholesome scents of life and freshness. He stares at the glinting lights, the jewels in the blackness, the secrets of the Eldren scattered in the depths. The dock folk claim that fishermen in the water at night have been driven mad by the lights, have dived down toward them, pulling frantically, as if toward the surface, until they drowned. Or vanished.

The boy is not afraid of the lights. The boy has power the dock folk can only guess at. He feels a pressure in his temples when he stares out across the waters. He hears something lower and lovelier than the steady wash of the waves and the cries of the birds. The power of the hidden things calls to the power of the boy.

The boy knows the Amathel took his father. He has been told this, but he remembers nothing. He was too young. There is no memory to mourn. The lake of jewels means only life, beauty, soothing familiarity.

All these things. And the power that waits for his power to match it. To
reveal
it.

2

THE BOY is four, the boy is ten, the man is twenty. His body shifts in this place. Sometimes he is whole, sometimes he is pleased, sometimes his memories are bright and vivid as paintings glowing with the fire of the gods in every speck of pigment.

Sometimes he speaks in a rich rolling voice. Sometimes he moves his hands and feels the fingers there, feels them brushing over surfaces and picking things up. He does not know why this pleases him, why he feels something like the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, why the joy is so bittersweet.

Sometimes he walks in a fog. His thoughts are wrapped in dull cotton. Sometimes he is on a street and he is confused. He is bound with rope, throbbing with pain, his hands and his mouth caked with blood. His own blood. The rain comes down and men are staring at him, studying him, afraid.

Sometimes he is gazing out across the Amathel, feeling the life of the bird for the first time. A gull, an elegant white thing, wheeling in tight circles. The boy feels its needs, its hunger, the elegant simplicity of the thing at the
center of it all
. The boy visualizes this as a wheel, a piece of clockwork, a logic circle turning without friction or remorse. Strike, eat, live on the wind.
Strike, eat, live on the wind
.

The boy moves his fingers to call up his untutored power. He reaches out and takes the life of the bird like a humming thread in the hands that nobody else can see, the hands of power his mother has taught him to use.

The bird is startled.

Its wings fold awkwardly. It plummets twenty feet and bounces hard off a rock, then plops into the water, fluttering and squawking agitatedly, lucky its wings aren’t broken.

The boy needs practice.

3

THE BOY is ten. The boy has run across the hills and forests north of Karthain all night with blood in his mouth. The boy has crouched
in the center of a web, still as stone, with venom in his fangs and the faintest sensation of movement rippling across his fur, the air currents of prey fluttering ever closer. The boy has swept high into the sky, chased the sun, learned to strike, eat, and live on the wind.

“You must not,” his mother insists. His mother is powerful, his mother is teaching him her gifts, but she will not let him teach her his own.

“It is not highly thought of, among our kind,” she says. “You are a man! You will think as a man! There’s no room for a man in those tiny minds.”

“I share,” said the boy. “I command. I don’t feel small. If they really are tiny, perhaps I make them big whenever I go inside!”

“You will grow more and more sensitive,” says his mother. “You will tie yourself more and more tightly to them, do you understand? Their lives will become yours, their feelings yours. If they are hurt, you will share all their pain. If they are killed … you may be lost as well.”

The boy doesn’t understand. His mother tells him these things as though there were no compensations. The boy knows that he is alone, among all the magi his mother has presented him to, in his willingness to share the lives of animals.

There is no dissuading the boy. He has tasted life without regrets, life without remorse, life lived on the wind. It is what he is; he returns to himself after each communion feeling that part of the wild has come with, to live inside him.

His mother could make him stop. Even at ten, the boy knows what she holds over him, burns with shame at it. But she will not use it. She lectures and begs and threatens, but she will not speak the thing that would lock his will in an iron strongbox.

She cannot, or will not, but it doesn’t make the boy forgive her. He casts his awareness into hidden places for owls, ravens, hawks. He hurls himself into the sky carrying anger from the ground, and hot blood runs on his talons. He soars to forget he has legs. He kills to forget he has rules and expectations. He never shares this experience with anyone else. He goes alone to the woods, and dead songbirds fall like rain. When he is shamed in his studies or rebuked for his attitude, he remembers the blood on his talons, and he endures with a smile.

4

THE BOY is gone, the man is twenty-five, the man is … lost.

Sometimes he is in the dead gray place. His legs refuse to move. His hands feel like crippled lumps. His tongue throbs with a phantom pain, an electric tingle. He is trapped on a bed as though nailed to it. He cannot remember how he came to be in this place. He sobs, panics, tries to claw his way to freedom with his missing fingers.

Only the smell of the lake relaxes him, the cool fresh scent of the water, the occasional piquancy of dead fish or gull shit. When the wind blows these things to him he can bear the confusion and the torture of the dead place.

When the wind is wrong the shadows around him pour something cold and bitter down his throat, and he goes into the darkness cursing them wordlessly.

5

THE LAKE air blows through the dead place. He takes it in as though no other air will sustain him. It is night; the darkness is offset by the light of a single lamp. Everything is strange; he feels a buoyant force inside his chest, something rising through him like bubbles in a spring. The room is clarifying, as though layer after layer of gauze is being removed from his face.

The light stings his eyes; the new clarity is unnerving. There are shadows moving near the light, two of them.

The man tries to speak, and a strangled wet moan startles him. It takes a moment to realize that the noise is his own, that his tongue is a scrap of cauterized stump.

His hands! He remembers Camorr, remembers steel coming down, remembers the shared pain of Vestris’ last moments washing over him in unbearable waves. He remembers Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen. He remembers Luciano Anatolius.

He is the Falconer, and the air in the room is heavy with the smell of the Amathel. He is alive and back in Karthain.

How long? He feels stiff, light, weak. Significant weight has vanished from his body. Has it been weeks, months?

Nearly three years
, whispers a soft voice in his head. A familiar voice. A hated voice.

“Mnnnnghr,” he rasps, the best he can do. The frustration comes on like a physical weight. He can sense the currents of magic in the room, feel the strength of his mother nearby, but his tools are missing. The power is there to be wielded, but his will slides from it like sand off smooth glass.

I’ll take care of it for both of us
.

Cold fingers of force slide across his mind, and the impotence, blessedly, is lifted. He feels the words as he crafts them, feels them going out to her, mind to mind, his first orderly communication in … three
years
?

THREE YEARS!

As I said
.

Camorr …

Yes, the Anatolius contract
.

How badly was I injured? What did they do to me?

Not enough to cause your present condition
.

The Falconer ponders the import of these words, flips desperately through his memories like the pages of a book.

A dreamsteel model of a city. Its towers falling into flat silvery nothingness.

Archedama Patience, in the Sky Chamber, warning him that he is headed into danger.

Steel rising and falling. Cauterizing heat, white bolts of pain in his mind unlike anything he has ever imagined. Vestris, dead. Before the blade can come for his tongue he tries to work the spell of pain-deadening, the old familiar technique, but on the other side of it … not welcome relief. Fog, madness, prison.

Now see it all
.

Patience speaks a word, and something comes loose in his mind. A patina cracks over an old memory, revealing the truth within the shell.

Archedama Patience. The night of his departure, a brief private audience. She warns him again. Again, he scoffs at the transparency of her ploys. She speaks another word then, and the word is urgent and irresistible. The word is his name, his true name, uttered as the cornerstone of a spell. He is bound to it, then made to forget.

You … you did it
.

A subtle compulsion. A trap. An irrevocable order sleeping in his mind until the next time he used the art of deadening pain.

YOU did this to me.…

You did it to yourself
.

YOU DID THIS TO ME!

I gave you the chance to avoid it
.

NO. THE CHANCE TO SHOW MY THROAT
.

Your arrogance again. Can’t you see that you were a problem in want of a solution?

AND YOUR SOLUTION … ASSASSINATION. FAR FROM HOME
.

I suppose that’s the only honest way to look at it
.

I’M YOUR GODS-DAMNED SON!

I wear five rings. You put yourself on the wrong side of them
.

Well
. He forces himself to lower his mental voice, to think coolly. There must be danger here. Why is she telling him this, revealing all after three years?
You certainly fucked things up, didn’t you?

All I could foresee was that you were headed into serious pain. Therefore I assumed that you would be in extreme danger … that you would do the obvious thing
.

Paralyze myself, you mean! And then it would all be over
.

Except your opponents were … scrupulous
.

Ah. Is this what scrupulous treatment feels like? Lucky, lucky me
.

I told you, it’s not what I wanted!

You and your gods-damned prescience. Your snide little hints. The way you tried to control everyone around you with them. What good was it, if you couldn’t even see THIS coming at us? Tell me, Mother, have you ever managed to have a vision of
your OWN future?

No
.

Well, that must be pleasant for you. To be the only real person in your whole damned world, and all the rest of us puppets for your private stage. How does it feel NOW?

“It’s over,” says Patience, switching to actual speech. She is beside his bed now, looking down at him. “All of it. Your associates are dead. Archedama Foresight is dead.”

How?

“Irrelevant. You are the sole survivor of your faction. All questions between us have been settled. We’re leaving Karthain, entering the time of quiet as planned. You are my final item of business before I go.”

Come to kill me last? Come to bring an end to three years of cowardice?

“Part of me wishes you were dead,” she says. “Wishes you’d died cleanly, as you would have had you been healthy and abroad in Karthain tonight. I can’t imagine wanting to live on in your … condition. And I will end your suffering, if it’s what you desire. But I felt that I had to ask. I owe you at least this much.”

She points to the other figure in the room, a burly man, balding, with a black mustache that droops to the collar of his brown tunic. There are no rings visible on either of his wrists.

“This is Eganis, your caretaker.” She offers images and impressions, revealing to the Falconer how it has been for three years.

Eganis moving him, rolling him from side to side, turning him to avoid weeping bedsores.

Eganis feeding him, gruel and pap and milk.

Eganis emptying his chamber pot.

Eganis walking him, leading the doddering Falconer by a length of leather around his neck.

A mage of Karthain … leashed …

It was necessary to preserve your health
.

Like a dog …

It was necessary!

LIKE A GODS-DAMNED DOG!

You’re the one who always sought to know the spirits of animals more intimately
.

He sends no words, but an unrelieved outpouring of hatred so hot and acidic he sees her stagger before she can manage to gird her mind against it.

“You’ll understand when you calm down,” she says. “I’ll leave this house and funds for Eganis to draw on. Without hands or voice, you’re now effectively one of the ungifted, and you will never see any of us again. If you can find some reason to live, you are invited to do so. If
you find the thought unpalatable, then I will … I will end the matter quickly and painlessly.”

I will accept nothing more from you for so long as I live. Not this house. Not Eganis. Not charity. Certainly not death
.

“On your own head be it,” she mutters. “Eganis will stay. You’re a mute invalid with three rings tattooed on your wrist, and Karthain could soon be a very … interesting place for you.”