The Gentleman Bastard Series by Scott Lynch Page A

his face.
    “I put it in Veslin’s room. The one where he and Gregor slept—one of the nice dry tombs. Center of the hill. I found a loose stone and hid the purse there, and when I was sure nobody had seen me, I asked to see the master. I said that some of us had seen Veslin at one of the yellowjacket stations. That he’d taken money from them. That he’d shown it to us, and said that if we told on him he’d sell us to the yellowjackets.”
    “Amazing.” Chains scratched his beard. “You know you don’t mumble and stutter quite so much when you’re explaining how you fucked someone over?”
    Locke blinked, then turned his chin up and stared hard at Chains. The older man laughed. “Wasn’t a criticism, son, and I didn’t mean to dam the flow. Keep the story coming. How did you know your old master wouldtake offense at this? Did the yellowjackets ever offer you or your friends money?”
    “No,” Locke said. “No, but I knew the master gave them money. For favors; for information. We saw him putting coins in purses, sometimes. So I figured, maybe I could work it the other way.”
    “Ah.” Chains reached within the folds of his robe and withdrew a flat leather wallet, the color of baked bricks in the light of Locke’s lamp. From this he withdrew a scrap of paper, onto which he shook a dark powder from another corner of the wallet. This object he rapidly folded end over end until it was a tight cylinder, and with courtly grace he lit one end by holding it in the lamp’s flame. Soon he was sending ghostly gray swirls of smoke up to join the ghostly gray clouds; the stuff smelled like burning pine tar.
    “Forgive me,” Chains said, shifting his bulk to his right so his direct exhalations would miss the boy by a few feet. “Two smokes a night is all I let myself have; the rough stuff before dinner, and the smooth stuff after. Makes everything taste better.”
    “So I’m staying for dinner?”
    “Oh-ho, my cheeky little opportunist. Let’s say the situation remains fluid. You go ahead and finish your story. You tipped your old master that Veslin was working as an auxiliary member of the famed Camorr constabulary. He must have thrown quite a fit.”
    “He said he’d kill me if I was lying.” Locke scuttled to his own right, even farther from the smoke. “But I said he’d hid the coin in his room. His and Gregor’s. So … he tore it apart. I hid the coin real well, but he found it. He was supposed to.”
    “Mmmm. What did you expect to happen then?”
    “I didn’t know they’d get killed!” Chains couldn’t hear any real grief in that soft and passionate little voice, but there seemed to be real puzzlement, real aggravation. “I wanted him to beat Veslin. I thought maybe he’d do him up in front of all of us. We ate together, most nights. The whole hill. Fuck-ups had to do tricks, or serve and clean everything, sometimes get held down for caning. Drink ginger oil. I thought he’d get those things. Maybe all those things.”
    “Well.” Chains held an inhalation of smoke for a particularly long moment, as though the tobacco could fill him with insight, and looked away from Locke. When he finally exhaled, he did so in little puffs, forming wobbly crescents that fluttered a few feet and faded into the general haze. He harrumphed and turned back to the boy. “Well, you certainly learnedthe value of good intentions, didn’t you? Caning. Cleaning and serving. Heh. Poor Veslin got cleaned and served, all right. How did your old master do it?”
    “He was gone for a few hours, and when he came back, he waited. In Veslin’s room. When Veslin and Gregor came back that night, there were older boys nearby. So they couldn’t go anywhere. And then … the master just killed them. Both. Cut Veslin’s throat, and … some of the others said he looked at Gregor for a while, and he didn’t say anything, and then he just …” Locke made the same sort of jabbing motion with two fingers that Chains