The Thief-Takers Apprentice ta-1

by Stephen Deas

  ‘How did he find us?’

  Berren skittered to a halt. Running into the far end of the alley was One-Thumb. There was another boy with him, one that Berren didn’t recognise.

  ‘Shit!’ He pulled Lilissa off again, this time down a different passageway, one so narrow that the sun barely touched it between its tall walls.

  ‘Get him!’

  ‘He’s gone down Wellbottom!’

  ‘Waddler!’

  He heard another whistle from Hair, two shrill notes. He could see the end of Wellbottom, emptying into the daylight of Bottlemaker Street. A few minutes either way from there and they’d be out of The Maze. He tugged on Lilissa’s hand. ‘Come on!’ Fifty yards and they’d be out in the open. Forty yards. What passed for open in The Maze, anyway. Thirty. At least there’d be witnesses. There wouldn’t be any stabbings, not with witnesses. Twenty yards…

  A shape stepped into the alley in front of them. Too much in the shadows to be more than an outline, but an outline was enough. Waddler.

  ‘Stop him!’ One-Thumb was gaining on them from behind. Waddler stood at the entrance, hovering uncertainly, but still in the way. ‘Get him, you prozzy’s hanker!’

  Berren let go of Lilissa. He ran at Waddler. ‘Out the way!’ Waddler was all right. He’d never been one for this sort of trouble.

  ‘Grab him!’

  ‘Move!’

  Waddler stayed where he was. He didn’t try to grab Berren, he simply didn’t move. Berren ploughed into him, bowling him over, bundling them both into the street. He staggered and lost his balance, rolling across the cobbles. He saw Lilissa emerge from the alley and stop.

  ‘Run!’ he shouted, scrambling back to his feet, pointing off towards the market end. ‘That way! That way!’ Waddler snatched at his ankles. Berren kicked him, turned and ran. One-Thumb was right behind them now.

  ‘I’m going to cut you, thief-taker boy. Gut you like a fish!’

  He glanced over his shoulder. Jerrin was only about ten yards behind him, but Berren was faster and they both knew it. For a moment, Lilissa was on her own, ahead of them both. ‘Catch me if you can, leper-boy!’

  A flash of motion caught his eye and then something barrelled into him from the side, sending him flying and knocking him halfway across the street. Then they were on him, Jerrin, the boy Berren didn’t know and Sticks. It could only be Sticks, blind-siding him like that.

  ‘Get the girl! Quick!’ Sticks ran off. Jerrin and the other boy grabbed hold of Berren. A few dozen yards down the street, an old pedlar watched them. He didn’t move, though, and then Berren was being dragged away into another alley. Somewhere quiet. Back behind him, he heard a shriek that could only be Lilissa. He struggled as hard as he could, but the other boys were both stronger. When he started kicking, Jerrin punched him in the face.

  ‘What do you want?’ he choked. They were well into the shadows now. Jerrin didn’t say anything. They just wrestled Berren to the ground and pinned his arms.

  ‘Get him up,’ barked Jerrin.

  The new boy pulled Berren to his feet, holding him fast. One-Thumb slipped a knife out of his belt.

  ‘Thought you’d gotten away from us, eh? Thought you were clever.’

  ‘Who’s your new friend, One-Thumb? Is he your new arse or are you his? I can’t tell.’

  Jerrin spat in Berren’s face. ‘We’re the Harbour Men. Told you that before. We got new friends now. What did we do, Mouse? What did we do to make you want to leave, eh?’

  ‘I’ve never seen him. He’s not one of Master Hatchet’s is he?’ Berren spat back. ‘Hatchet don’t know what you’re doing, does he? He’s going to tear your bones out, One-Thumb. ’

  He’d touched a nerve. He saw that in Jerrin’s face, right before One-Thumb punched him real hard in the gut. ‘Yeh, we all got our little surprises ain’t we, eh? Who’d have thought, Mouse running about with a nice piece of soft skin like that. Who is she, Mouse? She your girl?’

  ‘Leave her out of this!’

  ‘Can’t, Mouse. Old Hatchet, he’s just a little fish. We’re a part of something else now. Something big. Got to do her too. Don’t mean I can’t have a bit of fun first though, eh? What’s she like, Mouse? She a screamer?’ He stood back and looked at his knife. Berren tried to lunge at him.

  ‘You touch her and I’ll kill you! I’ll rip off your head and spit down the hole!’

  Jerrin shook his head. ‘Really? Maybe she just needs someone a bit better than you to look after her, eh? Mouse hides out in The Maze. You think I don’t know where to look? The word’s out on you, Mouse, you and your thief-taker. Every gang in the docks is out looking, but I showed you that place, Mouse. Remember? I always know where you go.’ He laughed. ‘What’d you do, you and your swanky shit-boots master, eh? What’d you do to get the dockside snuffers after you like this?’ He shrugged. ‘Not as I really care. Pay me for you in silver, they will. Not pennies.’

  The boy holding Berren was getting restless. ‘Come on! Chop and grill him and be done with it.’ He had an accent. Like the men they’d hidden from the night before. Not from the city. Mudlarks again.

  Jerrin shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’d have done you for the fun of it, Mouse, but now I get some nice shiny crowns for the pleasure. So thanks. Thanks for the money. Thanks for the girl. And now I’m going to rip off your head.’

  The mudlark boy behind him tensed. Jerrin drew back the knife.

  32

  FLASHING BEFORE YOU

  The River Gate. The Canal. Reeper Hill. As he lay dying, Syannis knew the missing piece of the puzzle. The reason he couldn’t work out how the Bloody Dag’s men were crossing the city was because they weren’t. They were going under it. Bloody long-winded and bizarre way to go about having a revelatory vision, that was, but he supposed there was no logic to that sort of thing. Not much use either, not when you were bleeding to death. A revelatory vision a few days ago about being stabbed in the armpit, now that would have been useful.

  Something scraped his cheek, then his nose. Bloody stray cat again. He could hear it purring. Didn’t have the energy to shoo it away.

  ‘Syannis, Syannis, Syannis,’ it seemed to purr. ‘Not yet, not yet. This isn’t your time or your place.’ The cat spoke with a soft voice, sprinkled with a lilting trace of something foreign. He felt its whiskers tickle his face. A paw rested lightly on his lips. He opened his eyes for what he supposed would be the last time. A face stared back at him. A brown face with a hooked nose and a pair of wild lashing eyebrows streaked with white. An old face, from a long time ago. He smiled.

  The face smiled back, but there was nothing welcoming in that smile. It was a greedy and hungry smile. Avaricious. Syannis could smell his own blood, thick in the air. The end was seconds away, the last flickerings of life quietly bleeding from him. Strange way to die, he thought. He had no idea where he was. Not lying in a gutter in the Kingsway any more, that was for sure. He didn’t remember walking the rest of the way, but maybe he’d made it after all. ‘Where the Bloody Khrozus…’

  A flash of gold caught the moonlight. Then a flash of steel. A knife, with a strange blade.

  ‘I’m not done with you,’ said the voice. ‘Not yet.’

  PART THREE

  JUDGEMENT

  33

  THE VANITY OF LADY YGALA AN D THE UPSIDE-DOWN TEMPLE

  ‘Bye bye, Mouse.’ Jerrin’s fingers on the knife clenched tight. He hesitated, though. Perhaps it wasn’t so easy to kill someone held helpless in front of you.

  The mudlark boy’s grip loosened. ‘Watch…!’ A shape rose up behind Jerrin and then a large piece of wood crashed down on his head. He dropped the knife and staggered, both hands clutching his scalp, moaning. Blood was pouring down his face. The other boy let go of Berren and ran. Berren stood exactly where he was, too amazed to move. Lilissa lifted her piece of wood again and swung it with all her strength into Jerrin’s back. Jerrin screamed and arched and fell over, one hand still plastered to his head, the other now pressi
ng into his ribs.

  ‘Oh gods! Please! Please don’t kill me!’ He looked up and for a moment his eyes met Berren’s. ‘Mouse! Please! Please don’t let him kill me! I wasn’t really going to…’

  He didn’t get any further before Berren kicked him in the face.

  ‘You…! You…! I…!’ Rage left him incoherent. Dimly, he felt a tugging on his arm.

  ‘Come on! Let’s go! Before there’s any more of them.’ Lilissa pulled him away, dropping her plank of wood. They ran, feet skittering across the cobbles. Back out in Bottlemaker’s, Sticks was in the middle of the street, dragging himself towards a wall, knees drawn up into his belly. His face was screwed up in pain. When he saw Lilissa, he flinched away, curled up even tighter. They ran past, on up towards the warm food-smells of Market Square.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ Berren couldn’t remember ever seeing Sticks go down in a fight. Run away maybe, but never left like this.

  ‘Kicked him.’ Lilissa flashed him a grin. Her eyes were wide with an infectious excitement. ‘Like Master Syannis showed me.’

  Berren glanced back. No one was following them. Apart from Sticks, all he could see was Waddler, lurking in the shadows, trying to keep out of sight.

  At the top of the hill, The Maze tipped them out into Market Square, right next to Weaver’s Row and the way home. The crowds were suddenly thick. Men and women pushed past each other here, squeezing around the stalls and the rugs spread out on the ground, half of them pointing and shouting. Most people wore plain loose robes in pale brown or off-white, by far the most comfortable clothes for a hot Deephaven summer. Here and there, Berren saw men in breeches, with shirts open to the navel, sweat shining on their pale faces. Men from up the river, from the City of Spires or Varr. There were people painted orange, with black and white stripy hands. Others bald, with hundreds of feathers sticking out of their scalps, tattooed from head to toe. Black-skinned Taiytakei sailors with hair braided down to their knees and tiny blades at the ends. He gasped as half a dozen men wrapped in the robes of the dead walked and laughed across their path, jabbering in some strange language that he thought might be the language of the underworld, until he realised that they were probably just another bunch of foreigners who didn’t know that grey was the death-colour and thought the funny looks they kept getting were because of the spiked bands they wore around their necks and wrists. A dozen different languages washed over him, a mish-mash of words from the empire and across the seas, bundled higgledy-piggledy into something new that only existed within the four corners of the biggest marketplace in the world.

  Lilissa tugged his sleeve. ‘I’m hungry.’

  Berren’s stomach rumbled in breakfast-less sympathy. A thousand different smells all fought for his attention. Sweet spices, perfumes, scented oils, sizzling skewers of meat, roasting nuts, fruits, all layered on the city’s undertones of sweat and fish. He’d been into the market lots of times, but never in the heat of the day, never when it was busy like this. The Market District had its own gangs who gave short shrift to any intruders from the docks or from the wrong side of Pelean’s Gate. Hatchet’s dung-collectors only got to come and do their work late in the evening, when the crowds were mostly gone and what was left were the wagonners; even then they were watched.

  The thought made him uneasy. The market gangs would take it badly if they saw one of Hatchet’s boys in the square. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few pennies.

  ‘Come on then. We’d best get on.’ There could be snuffers here too, on the lookout. For all Berren knew, every snuffer in the city was looking for him now. It was a chilling thought. He stopped where a man was baking strips of dough stuffed with shredded fish in a sun-oven. While he waited, Lilissa disappeared into the crowd. When she came back, her face was flushed with excitement.

  ‘Look! Look over here!’ When he offered her a piece of fishbread, she hardly seemed to notice. ‘Come on! You have to see this.’ She pulled him over to a shady corner where the crowd was thinner. Against the pale stone wall stood a single small iron pedestal. In it was a bowl full of earth, from which grew a dark green stalk with a single pure white flower as large as Berren’s hand. A man with dark skin and red cloth wrapped around his head stood next to the pedestal, cradling an ornately decorated wooden box. Inside the box were three glass vials. Two burly snuffers with big curved swords stood guard, one on either side. They had red cloth around their heads too. From the way they stood, it seemed to Berren that they were guarding the flower rather than the man. They looked at Berren and Lilissa and sniffed. Berren knew that look. He was used to it. Not enough money.

  Lilissa didn’t seem to notice. She was pointing at the flower. ‘Look!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a Servin Mountain Lily.’

  Berren shrugged. Flowers were for girls. ‘It’s pretty,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you know anything?’ Lilissa nudged him hard in the ribs. ‘That makes the most beautiful perfume in the world, that does. They say it was that perfume that started the war.’

  Berren didn’t answer. According to Master Sy, the war stemmed from the greed of Khrozus Falandawn. According to Justicar Kol it had been the mudlarks. Now it was a flower. It had all happened before he was born, and he was fairly sure he didn’t care, even if it turned out to have been started by two fishermen having a punch-up outside the whorehouse in Loom Street.

  ‘It’s very pretty,’ he said again.

  ‘They call it Lady Ygala’s Vanity. One day, when I’m the richest seamstress in the city, that’s what I’m going to get for my perfume. I’d give anything to smell of that.’

  Now that was much more interesting to know. ‘Really?’ asked Berren archly. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Berren stepped forward and pointed at one of the vials in the box. ‘How much?’ He had an emperor, after all. An emperor ought to buy almost anything.

  Disdain met him. Even dressed up as he was in the finest clothes Master Sy could afford, he obviously wasn’t good enough. The man holding the box sneered and sniffed and then reached into his belt and pulled out a tiny piece of glass not much bigger than a pea.

  ‘This, sir, is perhaps more where sir’s purse lies. A single pure drop of the essence of the lily.’

  Berren glanced at Lilissa. She was still staring, wide-eyed and open-mouthed with hope. His heart pounded.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  ‘Two emperors,’ said the perfume-seller, with no trace of a smile. Berren’s heart jumped.

  ‘One.’

  The perfume-seller stared at him. ‘Three.’ It took a second for Berren to realise that he wasn’t joking. Cheeks burning furious red with shame, he turned away, pulling Lilissa after him.

  ‘Come on.’ Two emperors? For what? For a drop of something smaller than a fingernail? How ridiculous was that? It was absurd. It was criminal for anything to be so expensive. For a moment, he wondered about slipping back and somehow stealing a bottle, one of the proper bottles. One of them must cost about as much as the ship that had brought it to Deephaven in the first place. But no. The perfume-seller had snuffers with him, and he’d had enough of those for one day. And besides, he had to think of Lilissa.

  Except that was the trouble. He was thinking of Lilissa. He was thinking of how happy he could make her, and for that, two emperors seemed nothing short of a bargain. Right here was something that no fishmonger’s son could ever give her. He could have shown her…

  Shown her what? That he was better than whoever this other boy was? Was that it? He growled and surged forward, forcing his way to the edge of the market where it emptied out into Weaver’s Row. Lilissa had to scurry to keep up.

  ‘Hey! Berren!’ he couldn’t get her face out of his head. The look of hope when she’d thought, for that one instant, that he was somehow rich enough to buy her perfume that was named after an empress. ‘Berren! It doesn’t matter. I really like it that you asked. It’s very sweet.’

 
Sweet. That cut deeper than One-Thumb’s knife.

  ‘Is that what you call your fishmonger? Sweet?’

  The words came out, bitter and envious. Envious because he’d seen something more in that look of hope she’d worn. For an instant, he’d seen love; and now that he’d seen it, he knew he’d give anything to see it again. And bitter because, even as he spoke, he knew that in speaking those words, he’d drive her away. As soon as they were out, he would have given anything to take them back.

  For a long time she didn’t answer. Finally he stopped, turned around, ready to get it over with.

  Except she wasn’t there. She was twenty yards back up the street, standing still. She wasn’t even looking at him at all. Dragging his feet across the cobbles, he walked slowly back to join her.

  ‘Look!’ She pointed down a street that led back into The Maze. ‘It’s the upside-down temple!’

  She hadn’t heard him.

  Berren stood beside her and looked. It was true. At the end of the street was what looked exactly like a very small temple, turned upside down so that it was standing on the tops of its dome and its towers. As he looked, Lilissa slipped her arm into his and pulled him close; later, if Berren had been asked, he wouldn’t have been able to say a thing about what he’d seen as he stood in the middle of Weaver’s Row and stared at Deephaven’s most unlikely monument, but he could have talked for hours about how absurdly lucky he had felt.

  34

  THE GOLDEN KNIFE AND THE SECRETS OF THE WATERFRONT

  They walked back in silence, hand in hand, until they reached the thief-taker’s yard. As soon as he opened the door to the house, Berren could smell that someone else had been there. The air carried the taint of rotting fish, much stronger than the yard outside, and of something else. Something cold and dead. Upstairs, a board creaked.

  ‘Master?’ Berren had Stealer in his pocket and now he gripped it tight. Snuffers? Could there be snuffers here, lurking in wait? Most likely it was Master Sy, but better safe than sorry. He crept up the stairs, quiet as a ghost, and pressed his ear to Master Sy’s door.