The Republic of Thieves

“I can count! And so what? I’m not leaping into your arms? I’m not tearing your clothes off under one of these tables? You may have noticed that I passed those five years without crawling back to Camorr in search of you. Nor did I find you exactly dogging my heels!”

“I meant … I meant to—”

“You meant,” she said. “There’s a worthless coin, Locke. The past isn’t something we can negotiate. I might not have come back for you, but you certainly didn’t strike out after me.”

“There were difficulties.”

“Oh,” she said, “so you’re the man whose life develops complications! I’ve so longed to meet you; the rest of us here in this world have it much too easy, I’m afraid.”

“Calo and Galdo are dead,” said Locke.

Sabetha leaned back against the nearest table, folded her arms, and stared out the windows for some time. “I had my suspicions,” she said at last.

“When Jean and I came alone to Karthain?”

“I passed through Camorr about a year ago,” she said. “I thought it best not to announce myself. It’s like it was in the old days, before Barsavi. Thirty capas and no Secret Peace. I heard some confusing things … You’d been cast out by Barsavi’s usurper, and no one had seen you since the mess.”

“The hammer came down on everyone,” said Locke. “Capa Raza used us, then betrayed us. We were all meant to die, but they only got the Sanzas. The Sanzas, and a younger friend.… We had a new apprentice. You’d have liked him.”

“Well,” she said, “whoever he was, you certainly did him a grand turn as a garrista, didn’t you?”

“I’d have died, Sabetha, I’d have died if it would have saved them! I didn’t have a fucking chance. And some help you were, wherever the hell you’d gone off to—”

“How could I stay?” she said. “How could I help you pretend to keep house? You wanted everything the same—same glass burrow, same temple, same schemes, and now I learn that you even started taking apprentices. Boys, of course.”

“Of all the damned unfair—”

“Roots are for vegetables, Locke, not criminals. Chains had enough blind spots of his own, thank you very much. The last thing I ever could have done was prance along hand in hand to your pale imitation!

“I might have been able to live with you as a partner,” she continued. “As priest, garrista, father figure, no. Not for an instant! Gods, that fucking pile of money Chains left us was the biggest curse he could have dreamed up if he’d spent his whole life planning it. I wish he’d thrown it into the sea. I wish we’d burned that temple ourselves.”

“We did burn it ourselves,” said Locke. “And I did throw the money in the sea.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had the whole mess of it sunk in Camorr’s Old Harbor. As Calo and Galdo’s death-offering.”

“It’s really all gone?”

“To the sharks and the gods, every last copper.”

“Thank you for that,” she whispered, and she reached out to set the back of her right hand against his cheek.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, reached up, and felt the heat surge in his blood when she didn’t draw away from the pressure of his hand on hers.

“For losing everything?” he said.

“For the Sanzas.”

“Ah.”

“You’ve grown some lines since I saw you last,” she said.

“It was a bad poisoning,” said Locke. “And it wasn’t my first.”

“I can’t imagine how anyone as charming and easy to get along with as yourself could ever incite someone to poison you,” she said. “I am sorry about Calo and Galdo. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help. For what it’s worth.”

“I suppose I’m sorry I was such a shitty garrista,” said Locke.

“Maybe in a better life I could have stayed to watch these lines grow on you. Perhaps put them there myself,” she said with a thin smile. “But it’s not as though I didn’t arm you with the clearest possible expression of my feelings before I chose to go.”

“Frankly, sometimes, I was surprised you stayed with us as long as you did.”

“I didn’t nerve myself up to leave overnight.” She lowered her hand and slipped it out of his grasp. “When Chains died, you thought you had to preserve everything the way it had been. Freeze our lives in amber. Maybe that was your way of mourning. It couldn’t be mine.”

“Well, I, uh … did trace you as far as Ashmere,” Locke said. “I never told anyone but Jean. I had someone up there that owed me a favor. After that …”

“Come here,” she said, pulling out the nearest chair. “Sit down. We’re pacing like servants.”

“Is that the chair with the trapdoor beneath it?”

“Oh, don’t be an ass. Choose any one you like.”

Locke pulled a chair away from a table on his side of the aisle and set it down next to the one Sabetha had offered. He gestured for her to go first, and when she was seated he eased into his, facing the door to the room. They were not quite facing one another, but turned inward at an angle with their knees almost touching.

“I did what I’d planned,” said Sabetha. “I circulated in the Kingdom of the Marrows. Started in Emberlain and moved west, hitting rich bachelors and the occasional married lord with a wandering eye.”

“Did they come up with a legendary name for you?”

“I’m sure they came up with a lot of names for me.” She smirked. “But once I was in the thick of things I decided it was better to stay anonymous than to build a myth.”

“You know I didn’t start that Thorn of Camorr bullshit—”

“Peace, Locke, it wasn’t a rebuke.”

“So why’d you leave the Marrows? Get bored?”

“The Marrows are getting dangerous. Emberlain means to break from the rest of them. All the cantons are buckling on their swords. It seemed a good time to be elsewhere.”

“I’ve been hearing this for years,” said Locke. “Emberlain is always about to secede. The king is always about to fall over in his tracks. I even used this nonsense as the basis for a scheme. Hells, I fully expect the peace in the Marrows to outlive me.”

“Then you must be planning to die in the next month or two,” she said. “Trust someone who’s been up there, Locke. The old king is heirless and out of his wits. It’s an open secret that he’s ordered his privy council to choose his successor when he finally dies.”

“How does that guarantee a war?”

“It means that there are about ten noble families that would get a vote, and a hundred that wouldn’t. Do you think they won’t prefer to just pull steel and get to work? They’ll be hip-deep in corpses once they start really trading opinions.”

“I see. So, you were dodging that, and you got a job offer for a sojourn here in Karthain?”

“I was leaving Vintila,” she said. “One moment I was alone in my carriage; the next I was having a conversation with a Bondsmage.”

“I know what that’s like.” Locke took a deep breath before asking the next question. “And … they told you about Jean and me before you took the job? That you’d be set against us, I mean.”

“I was told.”

“Before—”

“Yes, before. And I agreed to the job anyway. Do you want a moment to think very, very hard before proceeding on this point?”

“I … You’re right, I have no cause to say anything.”

“We’re not enemies, Locke; we’re rivals. Surely we’re both accustomed to the situation. And tell me, how would you have answered if our positions were reversed?”