35
SYANNIS
There were children playing in the yard again, the
same scruffy half-a-dozen ragamuffins who came in every few days
and sang songs and chased each other with sticks until someone else
in turn chased them away. As Berren came into the yard, soaked to
the skin, they were dancing. The rain didn’t seem to trouble them
at all.
‘Man with no shadow that nobody knows
Comes to harvest that which he sows
Great white tower made of stone that grows
Home to the makers of all of man’s woesFour great wizards come out of the sky
Lay to rest the dead that rise
Two born low and two born high
Touched by silver, three will dieDragon-king and dark lord’s bane
Each will wax and then will wane
The Bloody Judge lifts his hand
All is razed to ash and sandBlack moon comes, round and round
Black moon comes, all fall down.’
Today Berren ignored
them, hurrying past and into the thief-taker’s house. The door was
open, and when he got inside, there was Master Sy, sitting at the
table, bright and awake. There was food on the table. Fruit and
bread, but no sign of Lilissa. Berren stood in the doorway, and
stared.
‘Are you . . .’ He
didn’t know what to say.
‘Am I what, boy?’ The
thief-taker’s face was clouded. He looked angry and troubled.
Carefully, Berren put down the buckets of river water just inside
the door. Outside, the children had stopped their game. He could
feel their eyes on his back.
‘We ran away into The
Maze and there were mudlarks and everything. We hid in this place I
know. And then we came back and you weren’t here.’ He wondered
whether he should say anything about One-Thumb and the Harbour
Men.
Master Sy looked at
him. Looked through him, as though looking at something that was
inside Berren that neither of them had ever seen before. ‘I was
careless, lad. I got cut. I should never have fought four at once.
That’s always too many, no matter how many tricks you know. Best
you know that.’
Berren nodded. This
was more like it. Four men! Four men with swords! He’d fought them
and he’d nearly won. Had won. Like in
the alley but even better. ‘I went to get water. When I was coming
back, I saw you. You came out of the house on the river docks. The
one where Garrent said not to go. That why you were there? Where’s
Lilissa?’
‘The House of Cats
and Gulls.’ The thief-taker laughed, but his face was cold and
unfriendly. ‘Funny place to wake up. But if I hadn’t then I would
have gone there anyway to find out why I wasn’t dead.’ He lifted
his shirt. In the hollow of his arm was a livid scar, as long and
as thick as a finger. ‘They didn’t just cut me, boy. They good as
killed me. And Lilissa’s gone home, boy. Where she should be, back
with her fishmonger’s son and well away from the likes of
us.’
Berren stared at the
scar. That was from last
night?
‘Well? Do you like
the rain so much, boy, or are you coming in?’
‘The witch-doctor did
that?’
Master Sy rolled his
eyes. ‘Witch-doctor? Is that what they’ve told you he is?’ He shook
his head. ‘I’ll take you to him someday. But no, a snuffer did
that. One of them touched me, and badly. Saffran healed a wound
that would likely have killed me.’ He straightened his shirt, sat
down at the table and gestured to the seat next to him. ‘You want
to know about me and the witch-doctor on the docks? Then come in
and break some bread with me. I’ll tell you about where we come
from. And after that we have work to do.’
Berren looked at his
feet. ‘I took your purse to go and buy some food.’ He showed Master
Sy the purse, and then the little bag of spice cakes he’d bought on
Godsway for him and Lilissa to eat.
‘Well now you can
give it back to me. Besides, as you see, I have another. So that
being the case, come here and sit down. Do it now.’ He had steel in
his voice this time.
Berren walked in,
closed the door behind him and sat at the table with Master
Sy.
‘Do you remember,
when I first brought you back here, I told you that someone had
stolen something from me a long time ago? You asked me what had
happened to them, and I said that nothing had happened. Nothing at
all. Do you remember that?’
Berren nodded. Behind
him, someone shouted something out of a window. The children in the
yard yelled and cursed back and then ran away. Everything went
quiet.
‘They stole my family
from me, Berren. They stole my family and my kingdom.’
Berren stared in
disbelief. ‘They stole a kingdom?’ That seemed impossible. How
could a . . .
‘How could a poor
thief-taker in a city like Deephaven have once been a king? Is that
what you’re thinking?’ Master Sy laughed, bitterly. ‘Yes, indeed.
How could he? Well I was never a king, Berren. But I was the eldest bastard son of one.’ The thief-taker
picked up a knife and cut a strange-looking fruit in two. Red juice
ran down his fingers and then his chin as he bit into one half. The
other half he put on a wooden plate and pushed it along the table.
‘Dragonfruit. Don’t suppose you’ve ever had one of these
before?’
‘No.’
‘Well you’d best have
one now. You might not get another chance and they’re not to be
missed. They grow them in the south and ship them up the coast.
They don’t reach the markets in Deephaven all that often. Usually
they go straight to the tables up on The Peak, or else they go down
the river to Varr.’ He shrugged. ‘There must have been a good
harvest this year. Food for princes, this. It’s bruised and past
its best, but still.’ He took another bite. ‘What do you want, lad?
Had enough of thief-taking now you’ve seen the nasty side of it?
You want to go back to your Master Hatchet?’
‘No.’ Berren shook
his head. ‘I can’t. They’d kill me. And . . .’ he took a deep
breath and let it out slowly. ‘Even if I could, I thought about it
and I don’t want to.’ The three men in the alley, the Bloody Dag’s
mudlarks, now the snuffers on the Avenue of Emperors. That’s what
he wanted. To be like that. Deadly.
‘No, I didn’t think
so.’ Master Sy stabbed the knife into the wooden table. For a
moment, Berren felt a tremor of doubt, a little voice that told him
to run, run away now, that that was the best thing to do. But it
was only a little voice, half lost in a crowd. Swords. He wanted to
learn swords. A hundred other things, too, but mostly swords. He
wanted to be someone who could face down four men in a street and
be the one who walked away. And the only person who could ever give
him that was sitting down in front of him, offering him the fruit
of princes. The thief-taker pushed the plate to him. Berren eyed it
hungrily. He could smell its juices, sweet and sharp both at
once.
‘I was born in a city
called Tethis. You won’t have heard of it.’ Master Sy chuckled.
‘Kasmin and your witch-doctor Saffran Kuy are probably the only
others in Deephaven who have. Tethis had a king. Still does, I
suppose. We and the other Small Kingdoms were vassals of the
sun-king, but we were so small and so far away that no one much
cared about us. I doubt he even knew we existed.’ He laughed again,
sad, lost in memories. ‘We used to fight each other a lot.
Mercenary armies, since none of us could afford one of our own. And
only in the summer months, between planting and harvest. We were
all so gods-damned poor. Must seem strange to you, living in this
empire of yours, with an emperor grand enough to rival the sun-king
himself, and this his second greatest city. Look across the river,
over at the mudlarks. That was our world. We didn’t even have any
temples, any priests, not any worth speaking of. But still, it was
my kingdom, and I was a prince and I
lived in a palace, even if it wasn’t a grand one.’ He looked at
Berren and then looked at the dragonfruit. ‘I’ve never had one of
these before either, but I’m told the air does something to them.
After a few minutes they go bland and sour. It’s like eating
mulched paper. So are you going to eat that or not?’
Berren picked up the
fruit and sniffed it. It was the best thing he’d ever
smelled.
Which made him think
of the perfume seller on Market Square, and his look of disdain as
Berren had asked how much a vial of his Servin Lily scent would
cost. He bit into the red flesh of the fruit and couldn’t help
smile as the flavours of spring and flowers and all the passions
he’d ever known blossomed inside his mouth. Deadly. Deadly and
rich. That’s what he
wanted.
‘Good,
eh?’
He
nodded.
‘Saffran Kuy and his
brothers came to Tethis when I was about your age, give or take a
year or two. Garrent doesn’t much like him. I suppose you might
have noticed that.’ Master Sy paused, watched the blank shrug in
Berren’s face, and nodded in satisfaction. ‘That’s just the edge of
it. The sun-priests hate him. They’ve tried to drive him away from
here more than once. They call him a necromancer and say that he
raises the dead. Rubbish, all of it, but that sort of persecution
was why they came to Tethis. It was a place where they could work
in peace. Or so they thought.’ His voice trailed away. Berren took
another mouthful of fruit. The juices made his head
buzz.
‘What work?’ he
asked, without really thinking.
‘Oh, I don’t really
know.’ The thief-taker’s brow furrowed. ‘Whatever magi do. If
there’s a dark side to them then I certainly never saw it. I never
really asked too many questions. Saffran saved my life once and now
he’s done it again. That’s all I need to know. When a man saves
your life, that’s a debt that goes far beyond anything else.’ He
winced. ‘I paid that debt once. Now I suppose I shall have to pay
it all over again.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Where was I? Oh,
Tethis. Yes. I did a terrible thing, back in Tethis. Or rather,
Saffran did a terrible thing because I’d asked him to. Such a
mistake. And we never had a chance to put it right, either, because
they hadn’t been with us for a year before . . .’
The thief-taker
abruptly got up and walked across the room. ‘I think you know the
rest. Soldiers came. Mercenaries hired by the merchantmen of Kalda.
The kingdom was taken. Stolen. Come on, lad. Eat your fill and then
let’s go.’
‘You were really a
prince?’ First Garrent and then Kasmin, but he’d never quite
believed it. Couldn’t. Not Master Sy the thief-taker.
‘I was.’ The
thief-taker shrugged. ‘That was along ago, lad. A past best
forgotten.’ The way his eyes flashed told Berren it was anything
but. ‘Kasmin, Saffran Kuy, me, plenty of others – fate picked us up
and scattered us. Some of us fell here in Deephaven. And that’s all
there is; nothing more to know.’
‘Master . . .’ He
wanted to ask about the knife up in Master Sy’s room. Was that some
king’s treasure he’d stolen as he fled? But the thief-taker was
getting ready to leave and Berren knew better than to press his
luck. Another time, perhaps. When they’d had their next little
victory and the thief-taker let his guard down for a moment.
‘Master, where are we going?’
‘I know where the
last of our pirates are hiding. Time to put them in
irons.’
‘You
do?’
He smiled. ‘Yes.
Kol’s going to be there, and his soldiers too. It’ll be messy.
Worse than Siltside. But I know where they keep their boats now. I
know where they come from and how they move through the city, and I
know who’s been helping them do it. I didn’t understand before, but
now I do, and so now we finish our work. You want to learn about
how to be a thief-taker? You want to see it happen, the real truth
of it? Then now is the time. You can come, at least for a part of
it.’
Berren stuffed the
rest of the fruit into his mouth and grabbed a hunk of bread and a
slab of cheese. Master Sy smiled.
‘Good lad. I’ll keep
you safe this time, I promise you. And I promise you I’ll never
take Lilissa a-thief-taking again. That was stupid. I never thought
Regis was a part of this, but it was stupid anyway. I could have
seen you both killed and then where would I be?’
The thief-taker
picked up his belt and his sword and buckled them around his waist.
He moved with a smooth, quick purpose, like the Master Sy that
Berren had always known. Berren grinned and jumped to his
feet.
‘Where are we
going?’
Master Sy paused for
a breath at the door. ‘To Talsin’s Forest, lad. To the canal. Don’t
forget your ringmail.’