The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1)

by Scott Lynch

“Oh-ho! Nervy little Shades’ Hill purse-clutcher, thinking you can keep me in the dark. What plan?” “The plan to steal a corpse.” “Ahem. Anything else you’d like to tell me about it?” “It’s brilliant.”

“Well, this is odd,” said the clerk, a woman of late middle years, shaped something like a bag of potatoes but perhaps not quite as warm or sympathetic. “Help you with something?”

“Embarrass me? Jean, you misunderstand.” Maranzalla kicked idly at the toy rapier, and it clattered across the tiles of the rooftop. “Those prancing little pants-wetters come here to learn the colorful and gentlemanly art of fencing, with its many sporting limitations and its proscriptions against dishonorable engagements. “You, on the other hand,” he said as he turned to give Jean a firm but friendly poke in the center of his forehead, “you are going to learn how to kill men with a sword”

“But you didn’t die.” “Clever lad,” said Chains, “to deduce that from such slender evidence after living with me for just three years.”

It is said in Camorr that the difference between honest and dishonest commerce is that when an honest man or woman of business ruins someone, they don’t have the courtesy to cut their throat to finish the affair.

It was strange, how readily authority could be conjured with nothing but a bit of strutting jackassery.