Free The Gentleman Bastard Series 3-Book Bundle: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Red Seas Under Red Skies, The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch Page A

usual cozy-holes and pull a vanish.
    Suddenly, his tongue hurt very badly indeed.
6
    DON LORENZO Salvara stepped out of the temple portico into the stark bright dampness
     of high Camorri noon, little imagining the education a certain boy thief was receiving
     in the concept of
too clever by half
just across the district. The trilling of watch-whistles sounded faintly. Salvara
     narrowed his eyes and peered with some curiosity at the distant figure of a lone city
     watchman, stumbling across the cobbles and occasionally bouncing off walls, clutching
     his head as though afraid it was going to float off his neck and up into the sky.
    “Can you believe it, m’lord?” Conté had already brought the horses around from the
     temple’s unobtrusive little stabling grotto. “Drunk as a baby in a beer barrel, and
     not a heartbeat past noon. Fucking pissant lot of softies, these new goldenrods.”
     Conté was a sun-wrinkled man of middle years with the waistline of a professional
     dancer and the arms of a professional oarsman; the manner in which he served the young
     don was obvious even without a glance at the pair of thigh-length stilettos hanging
     from his crossed leather belts.
    “Hardly up to your old standards, eh?” The don, on the other hand, was a well-favored
     young man of the classic Camorri blood, black-haired, with skin like shadowed honey.
     His face was heavy and soft with curves, though his body was slender, and only his
     eyes gave any hint that he wasn’t a polite young collegium undergraduate masquerading
     as a noble. Behind his fashionable rimless optics, the don had eyes like an impatient
     archer hungry for targets. Conté snorted.
    “In my day, at least we knew that getting shit-faced was an indoor hobby.” Conté passed
     the don the reins of his mount, a sleek gray mare little bigger than a pony, well
     trained but certainly not Gentled. Just the thing for short trots around a city still
     more friendly to boats (or acrobats, as Doña Salvara often complained) than to horses.
     The stumbling watchman vanished around a distant corner, vaguely in the direction
     of the urgent whistling. As it seemed to be coming no closer, Salvara shrugged inwardly
     and led his horse out into the street.
    Here the day’s second curiosity burst upon them in all of its glory. Asthe don and his man turned to their right, they gained a full view of the high-walled
     alley beside the Temple of Fortunate Waters—and in this alley two finely dressed men
     were clearly getting their lives walloped out of them by a pair of bravos.
    Salvara froze and stared in wonder—masked thugs in the Temple District? Masked thugs
     strangling a man dressed all in black, in the tight, heavy, miserably inappropriate
     fashion of a
Vadran
? And, Merciful Twelve, a Gentled packhorse was simply standing there taking it all
     in.
    After a handful of seconds lost to sheer amazement, the don let his own horse’s reins
     go and ran toward the mouth of the alley. He didn’t need to glance sideways to know
     that Conté was barely a stride behind him, knives out.
    “You!” The don’s voice was reasonably confident, though high with excitement. “Unhand
     these men and stand clear!”
    The closest footpad snapped his head around; his dark eyes widened above his improvised
     mask when he saw the don and Conté approaching. The thug shifted his red-faced victim
     so that the man’s body was between himself and the would-be interlopers.
    “No need to trouble yourself with this business, my
lord
,” the footpad said. “Just a bit of a disagreement. Private matter.”
    “Then perhaps you should have conducted it somewhere less public.”
    The footpad sounded quite exasperated. “What, the duke give you this alley to be your
     estate? Take another step and I break this poor bastard’s neck.”
    “You just do that.” Don Salvara settled his hand suggestively on the pommel of his
     basket-hilted rapier. “My man and I appear to command