21
ON
THE TAKING OF THIEVES
‘So.’ The thief-taker rubbed his hands together.
‘Here we are. Us on the outside, thieves on the inside. What do you
suppose we do? Kick down the door and charge through, swords in
hand, screaming our heads off?’
Berren made a face.
‘Um?’
‘In some parts of the
city, probably once or twice a year,’ said the thief-taker
cheerfully, ‘what we do when we meet a door is exactly that.
There’s a little trick about throwing a lantern full of oil inside
ahead of you, too. The rest of the time, what we do is this.’ He
walked up to the front of the shop and rearranged his belt,
apparently to make his sword as obvious as possible. Then he waited
for a few seconds and banged loudly on the door. Berren tensed,
ready to run, but nothing happened. Master Sy didn’t move. Out of
the corner of his mouth he whispered: ‘Give them plenty of time to
have a good look at you, lad. If they don’t want to talk, come back
later with a posse of Justicar Kol’s militiamen. But they will. If
they don’t, that means they’re not scared of you. If they’re not
scared of you, you’ll be a very poor thief-taker.’
Almost as if the
people inside had been listening, the door swung open. A portly man
with grey hair stood on the threshold. He was clutching an
elegantly carved staff made of black wood. Behind him was a gloomy
room half shrouded in shadow. Beyond that, through another set of
rather cheaper windows, Berren could see sunlight and a yard, and
some blurry shapes that were probably a few barrels and a wagon. He
could see some movement in the shadows behind the man at the door,
too. Men, lurking back in the darkness.
The fat man with the
staff smiled a sickly smile that barely made it past his lips. His
eyes gleamed with anger. ‘Thief-taker Syannis.’ He leaned on his
staff and held out his free hand. ‘It’s been a long time since you
came our way. What can I do for you? Nice case of the Sun-king’s
red? Or his brandy, perhaps.’ The man with the staff made no move
to step aside and let the thief-taker in. Master Sy smiled back and
peered past him. Berren sidled sideways, trying to look past as
well.
‘Not inviting me in,
Barswan?’
‘What is it,
thief-taker?’
‘Well, since you’re
inquiring as to my taste in wine . . .’ Master Sy reached behind
him and rested a hand firmly on Berren’s head. ‘Don’t pry, Berren,
it’s rude. We have no interest in whatever business Master Barswan
is engaged in back there. Yet.’
The last word came
with the crisp edge of a finely honed blade. Berren saw it wasn’t
lost on the wine-seller.
‘Wine,’ smiled Master
Sy. ‘What’s drawn me to your door, Master Barswan, is a fine Helhex
Malmsey. A vintage to which I happen to be particularly partial.
One I’ve been looking for for quite some time. Quite rare at the
moment, since the only shipment into Deephaven was stolen three
months ago. Yet you appear to have some, Barswan.’
The old wine-seller
scoffed and shook his head. He took a half-step back into the
darkness and began to close the door. ‘You’re in the wrong place,
thief-taker. This isn’t Deephaven. You got the wrong
wine-seller.’
He got the door
halfway closed before it ran into Master Sy’s boot. Berren tensed,
ready to run. In the shadows beyond the door, shapes began to
move.
Master Sy pulled an
empty bottle out of his satchel and thrust it at the wine-seller.
‘This is what I’m talking about, Barswan. I know it came from here.
I know you’re not the one running the pirate gang who stole it. Do
I have to come in and have a look around for the rest? Or are you
going to tell me where you got it?’
For several seconds,
the wine-seller didn’t move. Then he growled something under his
breath, stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He put a
hand in Berren’s face and shoved him away. ‘Piss off, runt,’ he
snapped. ‘This isn’t for you.’
Berren was halfway to
whipping out Stealer and jamming it into the fat man’s leg, but he
caught sight of the thief-taker’s face and a slight shake of the
head. So he settled for growling and spitting at the fat man’s
feet, and backed away. As he did, the wine-seller started to talk
in a fast, low voice. It lasted a few seconds, that was all, and
then the fat man disappeared back into his shop and slammed the
door. The thief-taker looked at Berren. Then he beamed and strode
away, slapping Berren on the back as he did.
‘See how easy that
was,’ he said. ‘That’s how it’s supposed to be.’
‘What did he say?’
Berren couldn’t help himself, even if a part of him was still
steaming, all ready to slip back after dark and burn the place
down.
‘He said he got it
from an old friend in Siltside. Calls himself the Bloody Dag. I’ve
heard of him. He fits. He’s a fat mudlark prick who’s forgotten
that he was born in shit, lives in shit and will die in shit. You
know a man’s getting too big for his hat when he starts calling
himself “the” something.’ Master Sy was rubbing his hands together,
full of glee. ‘I’ve been half expecting to find out that he had his
fingers in this ever since it started. He was always fond of a bit
of piracy. Just never thought he’d be clever enough to find a way
to do it in the sea-docks.’ He started to wander back towards the
river. As he did, he threw back his head and laughed. ‘That’s it,
lad. That’s our job done. Now we go home, pat ourselves on the back
and open up a bottle of something good. In the morning I’ll go over
to Justicar Kol and give him what he wants.’
‘That’s
it?’
‘That’s it, lad.
Siltside isn’t a place for people like us. Not unless we’ve got a
small army at our backs. Goes one of two ways with people who have
nothing. People with nothing always want to be people with
something, and you can use that. But people with nothing have
nothing to lose, either. That’s the way it is in Siltside. They’re
not scared of thief-takers there, never will be.’ Master Sy walked
on past the docks to a tavern. There were a lot of them, Berren
noticed. All called The Boatman’s Rest or The Waterman, or A Piece
of Dry Land and so forth. It slowly dawned on him what Master Sy
had meant about Bedlam’s Crossing. Without the boats on the river,
the town wouldn’t be there. Simply wouldn’t exist at
all.
The thief-taker chose
a place called The Pirate’s Head and went inside. He handed over a
few pennies for a room and a pie, just as he had at the river way
station. Berren waited, fidgeting impatiently, slowly getting more
and more wound up as the thief-taker chatted to the barkeep about
this and that and nothing much. By the time their pie came out with
a pair of plates, he was almost hopping from one foot to the other
to contain himself.
‘Well?’ asked Master
Sy as he sat down and cut himself a slice. ‘What is it?’ The smell
was delicious. For a moment, Berren hesitated, torn between his
desire for food and his curiosity. Too many years of being hungry
meant that the pie won, but as soon as he’d shovelled a few
mouthfuls down his throat, he gave the thief-taker an accusing
look.
‘We haven’t
done anything!’ He said angrily. ‘How
can we have finished? We haven’t taken any thieves! We came all the
way down the river and for what? For a quick chat with a bloke who
sells wine? And that’s it?’ He shook his head. ‘We haven’t done
anything!’ he said again.
Master Sy shrugged.
‘We got a name. That’s all we need.’
‘But what if the fat
wine-man was lying?’
‘He
wasn’t.’
Berren banged his
knife on the table in frustration. ‘But how do you know? People lie all the time, and that’s just
ordinary people. When it comes to thieves, well . . .’
For a moment, the
thief-taker paused in his eating and glared. ‘Manners, boy,’ he
hissed. Berren bowed his head.
‘Sorry,
master.’
‘Better.’
‘But I don’t
understand. All we did was wander around the city and talk to a few
people and now suddenly we’re done. Done with what? I don’t even
know!’
‘We’ve found the
thieves we were looking for, that’s what we’ve done.’ Then Master
Sy made a face. ‘No, we’ve found the thieves that Justicar Kol will
pay us for. That’s more the truth of
it. Do you understand the difference?’
Berren grunted, not
understanding the difference at all. ‘So we’re looking for someone else?’
Master Sy grinned.
The sort of toothy devouring grin that he’d given the wine-seller.
‘Yes, we most certainly are. Our friend
the Justicar is looking for pirates. He wants them to stop, but
what he wants even more is to have a gang of men he can put in
chains and show off to his lords and masters before he bundles them
into a barge and ships them away to the mines. Kol pays in gold, so
our first job is to give him what he wants. Now the Bloody Dag is
exactly the right sort to put a gang of thugs together and have a
go at a bit of piracy, and I don’t doubt he’s our man. But
someone’s telling him what ships to raid and we still don’t know
how he’s moving his gang across the city. Justicar Kol doesn’t care
about those things and he won’t pay us to find them out, but a good
thief-taker needs to know.’ Master Sy smiled. ‘It’s a long road,
lad, and you’re right at the start of it. But yes, wandering around
the city and talking to people is largely what we do. We ask
questions. The skill is asking the right questions in the right
places. Every time a ship was attacked, I took a list of what had
been taken from one of the harbour-masters. I went through that
list and found a few things that would be easy to find if they
started showing up in the city markets. Then I looked for them.
It’s taken the best part of three months, but one of them was bound
to show up sooner or later. You might think the city’s so large,
how could you ever look for anything? Well, the trick there, lad,
is that you don’t. You tell a few people you know who move wines
through the city that you’re interested in a certain vintage of
Malmsey and you’ll pay in silver to know who’s got some, and they
do the looking for you. Then you wait. You wait and you wait and to
pass the time, maybe you take on an apprentice, and then finally
one of them comes back to you and says yes, they’ve found what
you’re looking for, and your old friend Kasmin has it, of all
people. So you give them a shiny silver crown, or maybe a gold
emperor, and after that it’s easy. You’ve seen it for yourself.’ He
shrugged again. ‘It’s not so hard. You just have to know people.
After we’ve given Justicar Kol what he wants, we’ll find out all
the other people who’ve had a part in this. We don’t take them
though, not when there’s no coin in it. We just find out who they
are for next time, and make our work just a little bit easier when
that next time comes around.’ He followed Berren’s gaze. ‘And no,’
he said, ‘this time you can’t have my pie.’ Then he grinned and
passed Berren a few coins. ‘Go on. Get us another one. We’re
celebrating, after all.’