36
THE GRAND CANAL
They went back the way Berren had come, back out
along Weaver’s Row and Moon Street, straight down the Godsway to
the River Gate. By the time they got there, the rain had stopped
and the clouds had split apart. The cobbles along the waterfront
steamed, baked under the summer sun once more. The smell was back
too, although muted and dull, as if the worst had been washed away
into the river. Berren’s pace picked up as they passed the
witch-doctor’s door. He couldn’t help but stare.
‘That’s the one, lad.
Never you mind what Teacher Garrent tells you, there’s nothing
wrong with Saffran Kuy. Maybe there’s no such thing as a mage who’s
pure, maybe all wizards have a darkness to them, but then Saffran’s
no worse than any other. Go to Kol or the Eight Pillars of Smoke if
you ever need some help, but when even that’s not enough, you come
here. Wizards, lad, can do most anything they set their mind
to.’
Berren wasn’t so sure
of that. There had to be plenty of things that wizards couldn’t do,
otherwise the emperor would be a wizard too, right? ‘If wizards can
do whatever they like, why does he live here? Why live in a
crumbling old warehouse on the stinking riverfront of a city that’s
not even his own?’ Or why didn’t he do something when soldiers had
come with swords and spears to Master Sy’s home. That was more the question Berren wanted to ask,
except he didn’t dare.
‘Go and ask him if
you like.’ Master Sy must have seen the look of horror on Berren’s
face. He laughed out loud. ‘Maybe gold and silks and women and wine
bore him, eh lad? He lives here because that’s what he chooses,
just like you and me, and that’s all there is to it. Do you still
have that knife I gave you?’
Berren shook his
head. He didn’t remember losing it, but it was gone. Maybe in the
fight with Jerrin and the mudlark boy. Still had Stealer,
though.
‘No matter.’ When
they reached the gate, Master Sy stopped to talk to one of the
guardsmen. They spoke like old friends for a minute or two while
Berren fidgeted and cast glances back at the witch-doctor’s house.
Then the soldier opened a door into one of the gate towers and went
inside. Berren hurried through the gate and out the other side,
eager to be going on, but Master Sy didn’t move. A few seconds
later, the guardsman came back and gave something to the
thief-taker. A crossbow. A big one. They exchanged a few more words
and then Master Sy carried the crossbow over to Berren. Up close it
looked huge.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve
ever held one of these before, have you?’
Berren shook his
head.
‘Going to learn now,
then. This is a military crossbow issued to soldiers in the service
of the emperor. Apparently the old emperors preferred their
longbowmen from somewhere down south and stationed them everywhere.
Your new one doesn’t seem so bothered. When we return through the
gate, remember to give it back. Right.’ The thief-taker hoisted the
crossbow over his shoulder and sauntered away down the street
towards the Grand Canal Bridge, oblivious to the stares he was
getting. Walking down the street with a sword on your hip was one
thing. A crossbow over your shoulder was quite another. Once they
reached the bridge, Master Sy headed for the riverside. He lifted
the crossbow off his shoulder and leaned nonchalantly against the
parapet wall. He cocked his head across the river.
Berren looked.
Siltside sat straight across the water from where he was standing.
The tides were low now. Between Berren and the nearest stilted
huts, there were a few hundred yards of sluggish water, and then
maybe a quarter of a mile of dead flat mud, gleaming like white
gold in the afternoon sun. Berren squinted. The reflections of the
sunlight were so bright that he could barely see the ramshackle
scatter of houses out there. If he looked hard, though, he could
see the holes that the Justicar’s soldiers had burned. The black
scars they’d left behind.
‘Have you ever seen a
piece of wood that’s just started to rot, Berren? Tiny white-capped
shoots grow out of the deep brown of the wood. If you catch the rot
then, scratch it away, cut out the roots and treat it with tar, the
wood can be saved. But if you don’t, then the rot quickly spreads.
You might still only see a few shoots on the outside, but the roots
will run everywhere. Then your wood is only good for burning.’
Master Sy glared out over the glittering water. ‘That’s what they
are, boy. They’re this city’s rot, but they’re just the bit you
see, and Justicar Kol, for all his talk, is too scared to cut out
the root. Well if that’s what he wants . . .’ The thief-taker
clenched his teeth. He had a mad look in his eye and he was
grinning. Berren wasn’t at all sure he liked the look of that. He
was quite certain that if he was a mudlark, now would be the time
to be scared and run away. Right now, while the thief-taker was
still stoking up his fire. ‘They come from there,’ he said. ‘Our
pirates. They come from over there in the middle of the night.
Right beneath us.’ He pointed at the bridge under their feet. ‘Then
they go up there.’ The other side of the bridge and Talsin’s
Forest. ‘And then they vanish under the stinking streets beside the
old wall. I reckon they must go all the way along the wall in their
little boats, all the way under the roads and the houses, but I
reckon they can’t go all the way to Pelean’s Gate, because that
means coming through the Shipwright District and out into the open
again. No, they must hide their little boats down there and then
they scuttle through the streets and back into the tunnels under
Reeper Hill. Must have other boats there. Then they muffle their
oars, row out a couple of hours before dawn, rob whatever they can
rob and slip back again before it gets light. But they’d have to
stay there, that’s the thing. They’d have to spend the day in the
tunnels and then come out when it’s dark again.’ The thief-taker
frowned furiously. ‘How do I know all this? Because the Bloody Dag
told me back in Siltside after I cut off his hand and threatened to
take the other one. Now Kol’s got him and claims he won’t say a
word. Strange. I wish he’d told me how they were getting through
Shipwrights without anyone seeing them, even in the middle of the
night, but it doesn’t really matter.’ He gave another savage grin.
‘We’ll find that out the easy way. By asking. Do you want to know
why I’m the best thief-taker in this city? It’s because I wait and
I wait and I wait.’ He took the crossbow and unhooked a metal bar
from underneath it. Then he stuck the metal bar into another part,
braced the crossbow with his feet and cranked the string back. ‘Are
you watching? Yes. I wait until I know everything, and then I
strike. I cut out the rot, root and all. I burn the wound and seal
it with tar.’ He picked up the crossbow and squinted at it. ‘Our
friend the Justicar knows a lot more than he’s telling, and
something’s got him rattled. I reckon he’s known our friend Regis
is up to his neck in it for some time and wants to leave him be.
Well I can’t be doing with that. Here.’ He passed the crossbow to
Berren. ‘Point it out over the water. They attacked another ship
last night. I knew they would, Bloody Dag or no Bloody Dag. Too
obvious a prize to miss. I’ve been waiting for this one for more
than a month. That’s why we went to the
Captains’ Rest last night, why it had to be exactly last night. I
didn’t think it was Regis, and I certainly didn’t think he’d be
quite as mad and bold and arrogant as to have us cut down in the
street outside, but I knew it was someone. My mistake. It won’t
happen again. Now we have to finish it the bloody, messy way. Did
you see any mudlarks in The Maze last night?’
Berren nodded. ‘Stank
of the canal they did, too.’
‘Well there you go.
Might even have been our pirates then.’ He stood behind Berren and
showed him where to put his hands on the weapon, how to hold it,
how to stroke it with his fingers and press it against his cheek.
‘Hold it steady but not tight. The emperor’s crossbows aren’t the
best in the world by any means but they’re made well enough. Right.
Got it steady?’
There was a moment of
stillness and then Master Sy carefully fitted a bolt in front of
the crossbow string. ‘What you’re holding, lad, is the most
powerful weapon in the world, in its way. It takes a man about a
year of constant practice to become any good with a blade and
another ten to truly master it. The same goes for a longbow. Now
I’ll admit that either is a better weapon than what you’ve got,
once it’s mastered, but that’s not the point. The point is, lad,
that with a crossbow, all you have to do is hold it steady, find
your target, point it and then a little click on the trigger and if
you hit a man out to fifty paces or even more, it doesn’t much
matter what armour he’s wearing, down he goes. A vulgar weapon for
thugs if you ask me, but no one did. Go on. Point it at something
and pull the trigger.’
Berren picked a
seagull, sitting on the water about a hundred feet away. He pointed
the crossbow as carefully as he could and pulled the trigger. He
felt the crossbow jerk, sideways and upwards. The seagull cawed and
flapped up into the air. Berren reckoned he must have missed by a
good three feet.
‘Much more gentle.
I’ve got four more bolts and that’s it. You can practice with one
more and then we go. Come on, come on! You missed! Get
cranking!’
‘Go
where?’
‘Never mind that! I
want you to pretend your enemy is running at you with an enormous
axe!’
‘Then I want to
pretend I’m running away!’ Berren struggled to re-arm the crossbow.
Master Sy had made it seem simple enough, but in Berren’s hands the
bow almost had a life of its own. Every time he tried to pull the
metal crank, the bow slipped out of his hands.
‘Harder, lad! Much
harder! Ach! Give it here.’ A moment later the crossbow was armed
again. Master Sy handed Berren a bolt. Berren loaded it, picked
another seagull, pulled the trigger and missed a second time.
Master Sy shrugged. ‘Around about now, Justicar Kol and his solders
are going down into the tunnels under Reeper Hill. By the end of
tomorrow, half these pirates will be dead and if I don’t get to
them first, so will the other half. If that happens, I’ve got no
one to point a finger at the harbour-master. Kol will sit on his
hands and a month from now it’ll be like we never did any of this.’
The thief-taker snorted. ‘Enjoy your crossbow. It’s the sort of
weapon for a day like this. Me, if I had one, I’d have brought a
big axe. Come on then. Time to cause trouble for some bad
people.’
The thief-taker
finished crossing the bridge and turned sharply left to walk along
the bank of the stinking Grand Canal, past the row of battered
grain silos that marked the start of the Poor Docks. The path was
narrow, overgrown and littered with a sprinkling of dead rats,
killed by the poison lures around the silos. Berren knew about the
silos. There was good eating on a dead rat, but not if it came from
here. Even the cats and the birds, it seemed, had learned. Nothing
had picked at the bodies. Fifty yards on, past the end of the
silos, a massive tree-trunk spanned the canal, the first of
hundreds. The water turned black and vanished beneath a chaos of
rickety huts and washing-lines, of mongrel dogs and shouting.
Talsin’s Forest.
‘During the siege,
Talsin had the biggest trees he could find felled right up the
river, past Varr even. They took the branches for arrows and spears
and floated the trunks down the river to span the canal. He’d
pretty much finished the job by the time Khrozus seized Varr and
made the whole siege a waste of time. So here it is. Talsin’s
Forest.’ The canal path simply vanished, blocked by a wall of wood.
Even sideways, the first of Talsin’s trees was still taller than
Berren. All the bark had been stripped away. For kindling, he
supposed. There were footholds cut into the wood.
‘Right.’ Master Sy
started to climb up. ‘Remember one thing, lad. Around Talsin’s
Forest, no one likes a thief-taker. ’