The Lies of Locke Lamora characters

Also known as The Thorn of Camorr, Lukas Fehrwight

Appears from the start

An orphan of Camorr's plague years, sold as a small boy by the master of a thieves' orphanage to a blind beggar-priest who saw what he could become. He now leads the Gentlemen Bastards, a crew that passes for a modest gang of cutpurses while quietly robbing the city's nobility for enormous sums. Slight, unremarkable to look at and no kind of fighter, he works through preparation, nerve and improvisation, wearing invented identities for months at a time and enjoying the performance more than the money, which the crew never spends. He answers to Camorr's crime lord like every other thief in the city, and breaks that man's single most important rule as a matter of daily business.

Appears from the start

Locke's closest friend and the crew's muscle. The orphaned son of prosperous Camorri merchants, he was raised to keep ledgers before a fire took his parents, and he has kept both trades: he manages the Gentlemen Bastards' accounts, reads for pleasure, and was trained in close fighting by one of the city's finest swordmasters. Heavyset, bespectacled and mild in company, he carries a matched pair of hatchets he calls the Wicked Sisters. In the crew's current game he plays the silent northern bodyguard of a foreign merchant.

Appears from the start

One of the Sanza twins, raised alongside Locke and Jean beneath the temple. He and his brother are near identical, trade on the confusion constantly, and handle the forgery, sleight of hand and quick-change work that a game needs when one man has to be in two places. Mocking, restless company, and a capable cook when his turn at the kitchen comes round.

Appears from the start

The other Sanza twin and Calo's inseparable partner in the Gentlemen Bastards' work. The pair are interchangeable to almost everyone, including on occasion their own crew, and they use it deliberately: two men who can pass for one open up tricks nobody else in Camorr can run. Like his brother he is quick, irreverent, and a better cook than any thief needs to be.

Appears from the start

The crew's apprentice, an orphan of about twelve taken out of the same thieves' orphanage that produced Locke. He does the climbing, watching and running that the games require, is desperate to be counted a full member, and is repeatedly told that the fastest way to lose the place he wants is to improvise without being asked.

Also known as The Eyeless Priest

Appears from the start

The blind beggar-priest of the god of mercy who bought Locke from the Thiefmaker and raised him, Jean, the Sanzas and the others in the vault beneath his temple. Both his blindness and his order are a long fraud: he serves the unnamed god of thieves, and his real work is training children in languages, etiquette, cookery, accounting and the confidence trade until they can sit at a noble's table without being noticed. He appears in the chapters that look back at the crew's upbringing, and his lessons underlie everything Locke does.

Appears from the start

A former scholar from the north who took Camorr's underworld by force and has held it for more than twenty years from a moored galleon called the Floating Grave. Every gang in the city pays him tribute. His rule rests on the Secret Peace, a private arrangement with the duke's people under which thieves may prey on the common folk as they like and must never touch the nobility, and he enforces it without exception, which makes the Gentlemen Bastards' actual trade a killing offence. He has grown heavier and grimmer since his wife's death, and surrounds himself with his grown children and his bodyguards.

Appears from the start

A young Camorri nobleman with a taste for speculative ventures and very little experience of being lied to. Recently married and keen to build a fortune of his own rather than live on his family's, he is the mark of the crew's current game: a chance to buy into a northern brandy house, offered to him by a foreign merchant he believes he saved from a mugging.

Appears from the start

Don Lorenzo's wife, an alchemical botanist trained at the Therin Collegium whose greenhouse work is the real source of the family's money. She is sharper and far more sceptical than her husband, checks what she is told, and is the single hardest part of keeping the Salvara game upright.

Appears from the start

Master of the Shades' Hill orphanage, who takes in Camorr's unwanted and plague-orphaned children and trains them to steal for him. He sells Locke on because the boy's ambitions have already cost lives and threaten to draw exactly the kind of attention a gang of child thieves cannot survive.

First appears in chapter 4

Capa Barsavi's only daughter and, since her brothers are blunter instruments, the most capable of his children. She has known Locke since they were both children in the same gang and treats him with rough affection. Her father intends her to inherit his position, and has settled views about whom she ought to marry in order to hold it.

First appears in chapter 4

Twin sisters who serve as Capa Barsavi's personal bodyguards and are the most celebrated shark-fighters in Camorr, drawing crowds at the floating carnival where they kill in the water for the city's entertainment. Silent, identical and universally feared, they wear trophies taken from their kills.

First appears in chapter 4

A figure nobody has seen clearly who has begun killing Capa Barsavi's gang leaders one at a time, leaving no witnesses and no explanation. He appears to want the capa's chair, and to command resources no Camorri criminal should be able to afford. Barsavi's people cannot find him, and the killings are steadily emptying the capa's court while the city's thieves take sides in advance.

First appears in chapter 5

A Bondsmage of Karthain, one of the mercenary sorcerers whose guild is feared across the continent and priced accordingly. He is accompanied everywhere by a scorpion hawk called Vestris, through whose eyes he can see. The Bondsmagi are protected by one rule that everybody obeys: harm a single member and the entire guild answers, so no one in Camorr will lift a hand against him whatever he does while under contract.

First appears in chapter 6

A Gentleman Bastard raised with Locke, Jean and the Sanzas under Father Chains, and the only girl among them. By Locke's account she is better than he is at every part of the work. She has not been in Camorr for years, and Locke, who has loved her since they were children, is unable to discuss her sensibly with anyone.

Also known as Countess Amberglass

First appears in chapter 9

The elderly Countess Amberglass, long widowed and childless, who presides over the noblewomen's gatherings in her glass tower and spends most of them apparently dozing over her knitting while her guests talk around her. Camorri society treats her as a harmless fixture and speaks freely in front of her.