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  • The first time a Bondsmage is encountered, there's a cut to a flashback explaining just how powerful, influential and downright deadly the guild and it's members are. Father Chains does his best to impart onto Locke how important it is to generally get out of a Bondsmages way as quickly and politely as possible whenever you encounter one, assuming you don't want you and everyone you've ever met to die a terrible death. So how does Locke greet the first Bondsmage he meets?
    Locke: Nice bird, asshole.
  • "I cut off his fingers to get him to talk, and when he'd confessed everything I wanted to hear, I had his fucking tongue cut out, and the stump cauterized. I called him an arsehole, too. He didn't like that."
  • At one point, Locke and Jean are sneaking out of their apartments in order for Locke to impersonate the Gray King by climbing down a trellis outside the building. This endeavor is interrupted by one woman's adulterous lover escaping out the same trellis; he is somewhat perturbed by finding two other men outside the window. Unfortunately, the trellis can't take the weight of Locke and Jean and the newcomer, so Locke and Jean are forced into the woman's room, while the lover ends up crashing to the ground. And that's when the woman's husband shows up...
  • In Red Seas Under Red Skies Locke and Jean have to leave a city because Locke went a bit overboard stealing to make a point. Specifically, he steals four purses, a knife, two bottles of wine, a pewter mug, a brooch, gold pins, earrings (while they were being worn), a bolt of silk, a box of sweetmeats, two loaves of bread, and the necklace of the mistress of the governor: she was wearing it at the time. "In the governor's manor.... In the governor's bed.... With the governor sleeping next to her.". In four hours. While he was half-drunk.
    Locke: We may have to leave town.
  • During a flashback in Republic of Thieves, we discover that Locke walked in on Jean and the troupe's seamstress, Jenora, just after Jean's, ah, first lesson in exchanging bodily fluids.
    Locke: [Jean], it's the [Sanza] brothers, you wouldn't believe what they oh my gods holy shit! I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn't realise —
    Jean: Those idiot twins, are they in trouble?
    Locke: No. No, no, no. Actually, it's not important at all. We've got it handled. You, uh, you just... hell, I can sleep in the common room, you two just forget I exist. Sorry. Have, uh, have a good time!
    Jenora: We are.
    Locke: Great! Well! Excellent! Just... going now!
  • In Republic of Thieves, after Sabetha has successfully drugged Locke and he awakens to find himself prisoner on a luxury cruise ship on an extended voyage to keep him out of the way of the elections, he discovers Jean has also been captured, and also roughed up as he's sporting new bruises.
    Locke: Gods. What the hell happened to you?
    Jean: Remember how she joked about twenty armed men being in the next room? There were twenty armed men in the next room.
  • Locke and Jean dealing with a man who had been bribed by Sabetha to fumigate Nikoros's offices in typical Camorri fashion:
    Locke doubled the amount of his proposed bribe while Jean picked Bilezzo up by his lapels, scraped the ceiling with his head, and cheerfully offered to nail his tongue to the back of a carriage and whip the horses around the city.
    [...]
    Nikoros came away from the meeting having learned several new words, as well as some novel hyphenations of familiar ones, and a fascinating twist to the art of negotiation that his education had previously neglected.
  • After Chains tells the Bastards that he's shipping them off to Espara to get them to work together as a team again, the group is shocked into silence. And then Chains mentions that he actually wore a pin for the occasion, takes it out, and drops it on the floor.
    Chains: One of those expressions I've always wanted to put to the test.
  • How the election plot in Republic of Thieves ends: The Black Iris, Sabetha's party, wins by one seat - for all of a minute. Then it turns out that Locke and Jean bribed the man (Secondson Lovaris) in question into becoming a third party on his own if the race turned out to be a close one, and tricked Sabetha into delivering it to them. The second that Lovaris announces his independence, the party devolves into a riot. Even the narrative describes it as "the crescendoing clusterfuck of the Karthani social season".
    • Prior to that, Locke, Jean and Sabetha sit back and discuss their schemes and how the other party counteracted them.
      Jean: Oh, Perelandro's balls, we filled her house with stolen goods! What possible grease could you apply to that?
      ...
      Sabetha: Didn't even bother much with that one.
      Locke: Well, you did try to bribe her cook. And her driver. And her doorman. And her footmen. And her solicitor. And her carriage driver. And her tobacconist.
      Sabetha: I succeeded in bribing the doorman. I just couldn't find anything constructive to do with him.
  • The end of Jean's time with the priesthood of Aza Guilla - while drugged with something that simulates Death the Transition, he babbles for a minute about his parents' death and all the different ways he can kill someone. At first, he thinks he's royally screwed up, but the priest who listened to him is thrilled, and reveals that he's been inducted into the ranks of the Third Inner Mystery. Said Third Inner Mystery involves such fun activities as swimming in shark-infested waters, exsanguination, being hanged, and so on.
    • Becomes an ongoing joke in the series; Jean used the name Tavrin Callas to get in to the priesthood, and when he left the temple, he left a note saying that he couldn't wait for the mysteries of death any longer and would go and kill himself. When adult Jean and Locke use the name later, they figure that if anyone traces it back to Jean's time in the priesthood, the church of Aza Guilla will consider it some kind of miraculous visitation from the deceased initiate.

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