30
WHERE OLD THIEF-TAKERS GO
Syannis screamed: ‘Come on!’ He couldn’t remember
that ever actually working. To his amazement, this time it did. He
watched the last of the four swordsmen turn and race down the
Avenue of Emperors back towards the Captains’ Rest. He stayed very
still, watching the man go. Then he swayed and staggered. His coat
and the darkness probably hid it well enough, but he was bleeding,
and badly. Wounds like the one he’d taken killed people. There was
a good chance he was dying.
People were staring.
Well if I’m going to die, it’s not going to be
in the middle of the street surrounded by a hundred gawping
onlookers. It’s going to be somewhere where no one ever finds the
body so no one can be quite sure I’m gone.
Had to be gone before
the watch showed, too. He gritted his teeth and started to jog up
the Avenue of Emperors. Important that
VenDormen doesn’t know I’m hurt. Except he really was hurt,
and badly, and running was making it a lot worse. He lurched into
the next dark alley and stumbled up against the wall. His breathing
was much too hard and he could taste iron. No.
Not iron.
He coughed. Frothy
blood filled his mouth. He clenched his fists and screwed up his
eyes, furious with himself. Oh well done,
Syannis. Well done. Now you really have gone and got yourself
killed. And for what? For a city that isn’t even your home? For a
gang of greedy merchants who have more in common with the . .
. No. He wasn’t going to think about that. That was the
past.
The urge to sit down
was a strong one. Or maybe lie down. Curl up on the cobbles and
rest for a while. Maybe that would help him find the energy to walk
the rest of the way up the hill. Up into Four Winds Square, across
the other side, down the Godsway to the House of Gulls by the River
Gate. Yes. That was a long way. A
little rest first . . .
Syannis coughed again
and spat out another gobbet of blood. Rest meant death. He didn’t
have time. He needed to walk, and quickly, and he needed to do it
now, and how much it hurt or how hard it seemed really didn’t
matter. One foot at a time, he compelled himself to move, staring
grimly ahead. When the alley emptied him out into the Kingsway, he
hardly noticed the people who came the other way. He staggered on
up the hill towards Four Winds Square. The River Gate might as well
have been in Varr. Maybe he could get as far as the Eight. Someone
would be there. Maybe they could send for a priest. Or that
Tigraleff fellow. Whoever he was.
No. Kuy. He needed
Kuy. He needed a magician. A healer. His old friend. One step at a
time, that was all that mattered.
He was almost at the
top of the Kingsway when his legs finally failed him. They simply
stopped and buckled and pitched him forward and that was that. He
managed to roll over, onto his back, pressed up against a wall,
away from the middle of the road. Into the thickest of the shadows,
where no one would tread on him. That was the least a man could ask
wasn’t it? To get on and bleed to death quietly in a corner
somewhere and not be trodden on?
Syannis, once a
prince, now a thief-taker, thought about this for a while. A pair
of green eyes stared at him, a stray cat. It stopped beside him and
started to lick his face. And then, for a time, the thinking
stopped.