“Here, I fetched you a new friend for dinner,” said Mazoc Szaba one evening as lightning flashed white through the open door. He handed a red and black squid to Locke, who passed it to Eight, who had set up a special cauldron. Anyone who presented something edible from the ongoing bombardment of sea creatures could claim a portion of Eight’s perpetually simmering storm stew. “Not all of these flavors are meant to bed down together,” she had confided to Locke, “but if you add enough garlic, butter, and booze you can pass off a rat’s peeled asshole as a dainty morsel.”
“Damn thing nearly took my head off not five minutes ago,” said Szaba as he braced himself to dash back a clipped copper’s worth of varnishy wine. “I might’ve been a martyr to Iono’s sense of humor. Must be my lucky night.” Down went the wine, and he grinned his unhealthy, wolfish grin. “In fact, I’m sure it is.”
“Oh don’t,” muttered Locke. “Please fucking don’t—”
“Measure!” Szaba rose, pounded the countertop, and splashed into the center of the room. “Measure! I have the money and there’s nobody after me tonight! I require, request, and demand an opportunity for redemption!”
“I should have contrived an accident to lose those green bottles,” Locke whispered to himself.
Nonetheless, after much jeering and haggling, Szaba was granted the same terms as his previous attempt at the serpent wine, and betting was brisk. Although he was wobbling by the third glass, he did manage to down the fourth. When he staggered back to Locke’s counter, his eyes had a boiled look, the bags beneath them had turned an alarming velvet-plum color, and his poison-scented breath made Locke’s last meal churn at the bottom of his throat.
“I can see you are thrilled, my young friend.” Szaba had received scattered applause and slaps on his back, which he took as though being anointed Duke of Camorr. Though he was now breathing like a man who’d just run half a mile, the creases on his face were pulled up in self-satisfaction. He pushed four silvers across the counter with a shaking hand. “Here, share the fruits of fame and a public life.”
“You had the money to do that before you tried to kill yourself again,” said Locke. He didn’t refuse the coins, of course.
“Mostly you seem to know what living in this city means, boy, but sometimes you worry me.” Szaba wobbled to his full height and rapped his knuckles on the counter in imitation of a stern tutor. “If you can walk out the door in a straight line when it’s time to go, it only means you didn’t sufficiently indulge yourself while you were here.”
Szaba matched deed to word and splashed out the door, bouncing once off the frame before catching himself and half-falling into the rain. Whether he’d done that just to be amusing or because he’d made such a severe mess of himself, Locke found it impossible to tell.
“Sounds like so much nonsense to me,” said Cyril.
“All I’m saying is as I heard it.” Vilius, for some reason embarked on his annual hour or two of honest work, poured wine for a customer. “There was one loose in the flooded canal along Coin-Kisser’s Row, and they had them Berangias girls chase it down.”
“One what?” Locke, applying himself to the close scraping of the floorboards with a pumice stone, was so desperate for distraction that he dared to address the two brothers casually, and for once, neither of them took offense.
“Shark,” said Vilius. “Big wolf shark got to wandering the canals, and when the yellowjackets couldn’t bottle the situation up, they called for some of them
“Spearing sharks from a bridge,” said Cyril, “near the counting-houses and such? Doesn’t sound likely.”
“You got hit in the face by a fish that dropped out of the clouds last week, brother. Who are you to have opinions on what’s likely?”
When the great business of the storm was mostly spent, sail canvas had hung from towers and boats lay smashed in courtyards. Corpses, graves, garbage-stalls and shit-barges had been washed into the foaming gray lifeblood of the city, and while the sun was a welcome sight, the more it boiled off the flood, the more unpleasant surprises it revealed, and for a few days the air of Camorr was uncommonly noisome. Locke had been assigned to bury himself in the scraping and scrubbing of every wetted surface, lest they warp further. Locke had restrained himself from pointing out that a more ideal time for this chore would have been about eighty years before his own birth, and that one could no more roll a marble in a straight line across any floor in the Unbroken Jar than one could roll it from moon to moon in the sky.
“Next they’ll have you taking a clothes-iron to all the hills around the city, and to about as much effect,” came the voice of Mazoc Szaba from somewhere behind the counter above Locke.
