“It is the opinion of my masters, the House of bel Auster, that rats in the hold have little chance to take the wheel of a ship that is about to run aground. But those same rats may very easily abandon the ship.”

3

IN THE center of the Shifting Revel, a great many tall iron cages had been sunk into the water. Some of these served to support wooden slats on which performers, victims, fighters, and attendants could stand; a few particularly heavy cages restrained dark shapes that circled ominously under the translucent gray water. Platform boats were rowed around at a steady clip, showing off rope dancers, knife throwers, acrobats, jugglers, strongmen, and other curiosities; the excited shouts of barkers with long brass speaking trumpets echoed flatly off the water.

First up at any Revel were the Penance Bouts, where petty offenders from the Palace of Patience could volunteer for mismatch combat in exchange for reduced sentences or slightly improved living conditions. At present, a hugely muscled nichavezzo (“punishing hand”), one of the duke’s own household guard, was handing out the beatings. The soldier was armored in black leather, with a gleaming steel breastplate and a steel helmet crested with the freshly severed fin of a giant flying fish. Scales and spines scintillated as the soldier stepped back and forth under the bright sun, striking out seemingly at leisure with an iron-shod staff.

The nichavezzo stood on a platform that was small but rock-steady; a series of circular wooden flats surrounded him, separated by an arm’s-length span of water. These wobbly, unstable platforms were occupied by about two dozen slender, grimy prisoners, each armed with a small wooden cudgel. A concerted rush might have overwhelmed their armored tormentor, but this lot seemed to lack the temperament for cooperation. Approaching the nichavezzo singly or in little groups, they were being dropped, one after another, with skull-rattling blows. Little boats circled to fish out unconscious prisoners before they slipped under the water forever; the duke, in his mercy, did not allow Penance Bouts to be deliberately lethal.

“Mmmm.” Locke held his empty wine flute out for just a second; Conté plucked it out of his fingers with the grace of a swordsman disarming an opponent. When the don’s manservant stepped toward the liquor cabinet, Locke cleared his throat. “No need to refill that particular glass just yet, Conté. Too kind, too kind. But with your permission, my lord and lady Salvara, I should like to offer a pair of gifts. One as a matter of simple hospitality. The other as a…well, you’ll see. Graumann?”

Locke snapped his fingers, and Jean nodded. The heavyset man moved over to a wooden table just beside the liquor cabinet and picked up two heavy leather satchels, each of which had iron-reinforced corners and small iron locks sewn into their covers. Jean set these down where the Salvaras could easily see them, and then stepped back so Locke could unseal the satchels with a delicate key of carved ivory. From the first satchel, he withdrew a cask of pale aromatic wood, perhaps one foot in height and half that in diameter, which he then held out for Don Salvara’s examination. A plain black brand on the surface of the cask read:

Brandvin Austershalin 502

Don Lorenzo’s breath hissed in between his teeth; perhaps his nostrils even flared, though Locke kept the face of Lukas Fehrwight politely neutral. “Twelve gods, a 502. Lukas, if I seemed to be teasing you for your refusal to part with your goods, please accept my deepest-”

“You needn’t apologize, my lord.” Locke held up a hand and mimicked the don’s gesture for shooing words down out of the air. “For your bold intervention on my behalf, Don Salvara, and for your excellent hospitality this morning, fair doña, please accept this minor ornament for your cellars.”

“Minor!” The don took the cask and cradled it as though it were an infant not five minutes born. “I…I have a 506 and a pair of 504s. I don’t know of anyone in Camorr that has a 502, except probably the duke.”

“Well,” said Locke, “my masters have kept a few on hand, ever since the word got out that it was a particularly good blend. We use them to…break the ice, in matters of grave business importance.” In truth, that cask represented an investment of nearly eight hundred full crowns and a sea trip up the coast to Ashmere, where Locke and Jean had contrived to win it from an eccentric minor noble in a rigged card game. Most of the money had actually gone to evade or buy off the assassins the old man had later sent after his property; the 502 vintage had become almost too precious to drink.

“What a grand gesture, Master Fehrwight!” Doña Sofia slipped a hand through the crook of her husband’s elbow and gave him a possessive grin. “Lorenzo, love, you should try to rescue strangers from Emberlain more often. They’re so charming!”

Locke coughed and shuffled his feet. “Ahh, hardly, my lady. Now, Don Salvara-”

“Please, do call me Lorenzo.”

“Ah, Don Lorenzo, what I have to show you next relates rather directly to my reason for coming here.” From the second satchel, he drew out a similar cask, but this one was marked only with a stylized ‘A’ within a circle of vines.

“This,” said Locke, “is a sample drawn from last year’s distillation. The 559.”

Don Salvara dropped the cask of 502.

The doña, with girlish agility, shot out her right foot to hook the cask in midair and let it down to the deck with a slight thump rather than a splintering crash. Unbalanced, she did manage to drop her ginger scald; the glass vanished over the side and was soon twenty feet underwater. The Salvaras steadied one another, and the don picked his cask of 502 back up, his hands shaking.

“Lukas,” he said, “surely-surely you must be kidding.”

4

LOCKE DIDN’T find it particularly easy to eat lunch while watching a dozen swimming men being pulled apart by a Jereshti devilfish, but he decided that his master merchant of Emberlain had probably seen worse, in his many imaginary sea voyages, and he kept his true feelings far from his face.

Noon was well past; the Penance Bouts were over, and the Revel-masters had moved on to the Judicial Forfeitures. This was a polite way of saying that the men in the water were murderers, rapists, slavers, and arsonists selected to be colorfully executed for the amusement of the Revel crowds. Technically speaking, they were armed and would receive lesser sentences if they could somehow contrive to slay whatever beast they were matched against, but the beasts were always as nasty as their weapons were laughable, so mostly they were just executed.

The devilfish’s tentacles were twelve feet long-the same length as its undulating gray-and-black striped body. The creature was confined within a sixty-foot circle of cages and platforms, along with a number of screaming, flailing, water-treading men-most of whom had long since dropped their slender little daggers into the water. Nervous guards armed with crossbows and pikes patrolled the platform, shoving prisoners back into the water if they tried to scramble out. Occasionally, the devilfish would roll over in the churning red waters and Locke would catch a glimpse of one lidless black eye the size of a soup bowl-not unlike the bowl currently held in his hands.

“More, Master Fehrwight?” Conté hovered nearby with the silver tureen of chilled soup cradled in his hands; white-fleshed Iron Sea prawns floated in a heavy red tomato base seasoned with peppers and onions. Don and Doña Salvara were a peculiar sort of droll.

“No, Conté, most kind, but I’m well satisfied for the time being.” Locke set his soup bowl down beside the broached cask of “ 559” (actually a bottle of lowly fifty-crown 550 liberally mixed with the roughest overpriced rum Jean had been able to get his hands on) and took a sip of the amber liquor from his snifter. Even mixed with crap, the counterfeit was delicious. Graumann stood attentively behind Locke’s hosts, who were seated opposite Locke at the intimate little table of oiled silverwood. Doña Sofia toyed unself-consciously with a subtlety of gelled orange slices, paper-thin and arranged in whorls to form edible tulip blossoms. Don Lorenzo stared down at the snifter of brandy in his hands, his eyes still wide.