Red Seas Under Red Skies recap

Two years after Camorr, Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen are deep into a long confidence game in Tal Verrar, aimed at the vault of the Sinspire, the gambling tower run by the untouchable Requin. The city's military ruler, Archon Maxilan Stragos, seizes them, poisons them both, and forces them to sea to manufacture a pirate threat that will make Tal Verrar fund his navy. Neither can sail; their ship is lost and they are captured by Captain Zamira Drakasha of the Poison Orchid, whose crew they join and whose first mate, Ezri Delmastro, falls in love with Jean. Locke persuades the free captains to stage the raids the Archon wants, then returns to Tal Verrar and sells the Archon's secret to Requin instead of robbing him. A rival pirate captain, unwilling to risk the islands, attacks the Orchid, and Ezri is killed. The Archon's scheme collapses and he is broken, but he yields no antidote. Locke and Jean leave the city grieving, nearly penniless, and still poisoned.

In Camorr, Locke Lamora led the Gentlemen Bastards, a small crew of confidence artists raised beneath a temple by the fraudulent priest Father Chains and trained to rob the nobility while passing for ordinary thieves. Their trade broke the Secret Peace, the arrangement under which Camorr's underworld left the aristocracy alone. A masked figure calling himself the Grey King, backed by a hired sorcerer of the Bondsmagi of Karthain called the Falconer, destroyed the crime lord Capa Barsavi and took his place as Capa Raza, in revenge for a family Barsavi had murdered years earlier. On the way he killed three of the Gentlemen Bastards - Calo, Galdo and Bug - and took everything the crew had saved. Locke and Jean Tannen broke the Falconer, mutilating him so that he could never work sorcery again, warned the duke's secret intelligence chief in time to stop an attack on Camorr's assembled nobility, and Locke killed Raza aboard his own ship. The two of them left Camorr by sea, the last survivors of their crew, pursued by nobody but marked by the Bondsmagi, who do not forgive what was done to one of their own.

Two years later Locke and Jean are in the free city of Tal Verrar, living as the gentlemen Leocanto Kosta and Jerome de Ferra. They are two years into a game aimed at the Sinspire, the great gambling tower whose owner, Requin, holds the debts and secrets of the city's rich and has never been robbed. The tower's upper floors open to a player only as their winnings rise, so the approach has to be earned in public over months of cards, with Requin's maimed, brass-handed second Selendri controlling everything that reaches him. Chapters looking back fill in the intervening years: Locke's collapse into grief and drink after Camorr, Jean's refusal to leave him there, and the slow construction of the Tal Verrar game out of nothing. In the present, the two of them are attacked by professional killers they cannot account for - an interruption that has nothing to do with the Sinspire and everything to do with someone else taking an interest in who they really are.

The attacks turn out to have been a lever. Locke and Jean are taken by soldiers of Maxilan Stragos, the Archon of Tal Verrar, the city's military commander and effective dictator, whose office the merchant council is steadily working to abolish. Stragos has them both poisoned with a slow alchemical compound that will kill them unless he supplies its counteragent at intervals, and then names his price: pirates. Tal Verrar has been free of raiding for years, and a frightened city pays for its navy without argument. He orders them to sea to manufacture the threat he needs. Neither of them can sail, so he provides a ship, the Red Messenger, a crew who must never learn the truth, and an old sailing master named Caldris to drill Locke in enough seamanship and shipboard superstition to give orders without being unmasked. The Sinspire game is left standing while they go.

The voyage fails almost immediately. Caldris dies before the ship is properly clear of land, leaving Locke and Jean in command of a vessel they do not understand, and the crew works out what they are and takes the ship away from them. What saves their lives is capture: the Poison Orchid, under Captain Zamira Drakasha, comes alongside. Instead of being killed they are offered the only bargain pirates offer, which is work, and they set about earning a place aboard on Drakasha's terms and under the eye of her first mate, Ezri Delmastro. Drakasha keeps her two young children aboard and runs the Orchid by articles and vote rather than by fear. Locke, who cannot tell a single useful lie about the sea, has to make himself valuable in other ways, and Jean and Ezri fall into something neither of them was looking for.

Locke eventually gives Drakasha a version of the truth: that they were sent to sea by the Archon of Tal Verrar to provoke exactly the piracy she practises, and that his poison is the only reason they are still working for him. At the free port of Prodigal, where the captains of the Ghostwind Isles keep an uneasy peace among themselves, the proposal goes to the others - staged raids close enough to Tal Verrar's shipping to serve the Archon's purpose without bringing his navy down on the islands. Not every captain believes the risk can be contained, and Jaffrim Rodanov of the Dread Sovereign in particular has his own reasons for wanting the Ghostwinds to stay invisible. Locke and Jean go back to Tal Verrar committed to running two games at once, the Sinspire against Requin and the Archon against everyone, while the poison keeps to its own schedule.

In Tal Verrar, Locke goes over the Archon's head. He takes what he knows straight to Requin and Selendri, trading the truth about Stragos's scheme for a working relationship with the one private power in the city capable of moving against the Archon, and gambles that being useful to Requin is worth more than the money he came for. The double game holds together longer than it has any right to, with Selendri as the channel through which it runs. At sea, meanwhile, Drakasha's arrangement with the other free captains proves less solid than it looked at Port Prodigal: Rodanov, who never accepted the risk, comes after the Poison Orchid.

The Dread Sovereign catches the Poison Orchid and the two crews settle it by boarding. Drakasha's people win, but Ezri Delmastro is killed in the fighting, and Jean is left with a loss he has no way to carry. In Tal Verrar the Archon's manufactured crisis turns on him: the piracy he ordered arrives on terms he cannot control, Requin and the merchant council move while he is exposed, and Locke and Jean reach Stragos in person. He has nothing worth giving them. The doses he supplied were a leash rather than a remedy, there is no cure to be had from him, and he is finished as a power in the city either way. The Sinspire's vault stays shut; the long game against Requin ends in an understanding instead of a theft, and most of the fortune Locke spent two years approaching stays where it was. Zamira Drakasha takes the Orchid back to the Ghostwind Isles. Locke and Jean leave Tal Verrar with little money, each other, and the poison still in them.

Jaffrim Rodanov's Dread Sovereign runs down the Poison Orchid and the two crews fight it out hand to hand. Drakasha's people win, and Ezri Delmastro dies in the boarding, which takes from Jean the one thing he had found for himself since Camorr. In Tal Verrar the Archon's manufactured crisis destroys him: the piracy he ordered arrives on terms he cannot steer, Requin and the merchant council move against him while he is exposed, and Locke and Jean get to Stragos face to face. He gives them nothing. The doses he had been handing out were a leash rather than a cure, no antidote exists to be extracted from him, and the two of them walk out of his palace still carrying the poison and no closer to knowing how long it leaves them. The Sinspire keeps its vault: the two-year game against Requin ends in a working understanding rather than the theft it was built for, and the money Locke came to Tal Verrar for stays where it was. Zamira Drakasha sails the Poison Orchid back to the Ghostwind Isles with her children and her crew. Locke and Jean take ship out of Tal Verrar with very little left, looking for anyone - physiker, alchemist or worse - who can undo what the Archon did to them, and with the Bondsmagi of Karthain still carrying an unsettled account for what happened in Camorr.