The Thief-Takers Apprentice ta-1

by Stephen Deas

  Lilissa watched him from the open door to the yard. Berren pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Master?’ he whispered again. From inside he heard the knocking of a window shutter against the wall. Caught in a breath of breeze perhaps.

  ‘Master?’ he said again, louder this time. There was no answer. The shutter fell silent. Berren’s fingers settled on the handle of the door and then paused. He’d never been into the thief-taker’s room. The door had no lock; sometimes it was even ajar, and he’d sneaked a peek. But he’d never gone in. Never dared.

  He took a deep breath. Quiet as he could, he eased the door open.

  The inside of the thief-taker’s room was plain enough. An empty bed, a wooden rack for hanging clothes, and beside them, a table. In another room the table would have seemed perfectly ordinary. Here, though, it looked almost like an altar. Short squat candles were arranged around three sides in a semi-circle. There was a quill and a pile of papers and a bundle of letters, tied in ribbon. And there was a closed box. A plain wooden thing almost as long as his arm.

  That was all. No chests, no closets, no space under the bed, nowhere for someone to hide. There was no one here.

  He stepped across the threshold, still poised to run. A purse hung from one end of the wooden clothes-rack – he couldn’t help but notice that. The shutters of the window that looked out over the yard were open. A faint wind drifted in through the room and down the stairs, carrying the smell of the city. He went to the window and peered outside into the yard, but it was empty.

  ‘Berren?’ Lilissa’s voice came at him from the window and the door, both at once. ‘Are you all right?’

  He frowned and scratched his head. He was sure he’d heard someone in the room when he’d come in, but where were they now? He peered down out of the window. It was a long drop. You couldn’t simply jump out and expect to just run away. And Lilissa would surely have seen…

  ‘Yeh,’ he called. His eyes moved restlessly about. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe the creak of the floor had been nothing. Old houses did that sometimes; yet he couldn’t shake the sensation that he wasn’t alone, even now. He shivered.

  He was about to leave when his gaze stopped again on the table and its temptations. He paused. The box was open. Berren stared. He was certain, as certain as he could be, that the box had been shut when he’d come in. Yet now it wasn’t. Inside it was a knife. A strange thing; the blade was an unusual shape, more like a cleaver than a knife.

  For some reason he couldn’t fathom, his hand reached out and he picked it up. When he took the knife out of its sheath, the blade shone like polished silver. Strange curling patterns marked it. Berren noticed all these things, but most of all, he noticed that the hilt was made of pure, carved gold. He weighed the knife in his hand. It was heavy, much heavier than it looked.

  It was solid.

  He tried to think about how much it must be worth. Then he tried not to. Next to this, ten emperors was nothing. And yet here it was, in Master Sy’s room, next to his bed. Unguarded.

  ‘Berren!’ Lilissa again. Her voice had an urgent ring to it.

  He wanted to put the knife back but his hands wouldn’t move.

  ‘Berren!’

  Berren… whispered the air. He stared at the blade, his eyes wide. It seemed that the patterns in the steel had begun to shift and swirl…

  ‘Berren! Please!’

  With a shudder he threw down the knife. It clattered on the floor, loud and accusing. Biting his lip, half closing his eyes, he picked it up again and quickly put it away. As an afterthought, he closed the box. Just in case. Just in case of what, he wasn’t sure, but he did it anyway. Then he snatched the thief-taker’s purse and ran down the stairs.

  Lilissa looked at him, eyes wide. ‘What’s up? You look pale as a ghost!’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s just wait. I’m sure he’ll be back.’ She smiled, but Berren barely noticed. He needed space, that’s what he needed. Space and to be away from the thief-taker’s house for a bit.

  ‘I’m going out,’ he said. ‘Ought to get some bread. Need some clean water too. You want to come? Or do you want to wait? In case he comes back?’

  ‘One of us should stay.’ Lilissa let out a deep sigh. ‘You come back quick, all right? Please?’

  Berren nodded vigorously. ‘Yeh. Back as quick as I can.’ On impulse he stopped and turned, pulled her to him with one hand and cupped her face with the other. He kissed her, sharply aware of the warmth of her against him from his chest down to his thighs. For a moment, all he wanted was to pick her up and run, somewhere far far away. He kissed her again, looking for a sign, the slightest sign that she felt the same.

  No sign came. He let go. He couldn’t read her expression at all. Amused, maybe. A little surprised, perhaps? Definitely not overwhelmed with desire, that much was for sure. He scowled and then nodded.

  ‘I’ll bring you back a spice cake,’ he said, and hurried out the door before either of them could say anything more. That was it. His head was full now. Completely full. Between Master Sy and Lilissa and One-Thumb and being chased by snuffers and now some weird knife, there was a good chance it was going to burst, or at least that was how it seemed. He got as far as the Godsway before he even noticed where he was. He paused there and bought spice cakes like he’d promised. He treated himself to one there and then. After the night they’d had, they deserved it, he thought. Both of them. Then he tried to think, tried to work out what he should do, but it was all too difficult, all too complicated. Wait, that’s what he ought to do. Probably go to teacher Garrent and stay there until Master Sy came back, which he surely would. And if he didn’t…

  For some reason he couldn’t make himself think about that.

  He sighed. Water, then. Whatever happened to the thief-taker, he was going to need fresh clean water when he came back. And that, at least, was something Berren could get. As soon as he’d finished gobbling down his spice cake, he ran on down to the river docks, to the Rich Docks, to the sprawl of wooden jetties that reached out into the water like the remains of some nest of monsters. The usual Tower-Day market was set out on the cobbles along the riverside. The combination of the market and the frantic loading and unloading of boats gave a crushing weight of people, all trying to move in different directions. When he’d been living with Master Hatchet, the Rich Docks had been one of his favourite haunts. Even when someone caught him picking their pocket or snatching their purse, they could never catch him. He’d simply slip away. It was a comfortable place. Felt like home.

  For all the same reasons, it was a terrible place to try and carry something like, say, four large buckets full of water. On the way back he’d have to leave the dockside by the House of Gulls and go straight up the Godsway.

  Yeh. The House of Gulls, the one Teacher Garrent had shown him from the top of the moon temple. He knew more now than he had then. A witch-doctor lived there, or at least that’s what the lightermen had said. A potion-maker and a healer who dealt in curses and wishes and could speak with the dead if you brought him some token. Berren wasn’t sure how much of that was true and how much was the usual tales you got from lightermen.

  The crowds thinned. The smell he was used to from Shipwrights, the stink of fish, filled the air again. All there was at the end of the Rich Docks were large wooden warehouses. Lots of them and all the same. Past the pillared arch into Godsway, before the River Gate itself, there were a few more. These ones were old and empty.

  Almost empty. As he got closer to the River Gate, the smell got worse and worse. At the gate itself it was almost overpowering. He looked up. Gulls circled overhead. He had no idea which house belonged to the witch-doctor, only that it was somewhere here. The ground was slippery between the cobbles, coated in a filthy slime. Something cold in the air made his skin prickle. The smell, the horrible smell… It made him gag. It reminded him of Master Sy’s room, of the stink he’d sniffed when he’d first opened the door to
the thief-taker’s house. The soldiers at the gate wore scarves over their faces, covering their mouth and nose. As he passed them, Berren smelled perfume. He hurried on, glad to be away.

  Past the River Gate and the Grand Canal bridge then, because only an idiot drew their water from the docks. He quickly skirted around the back of the Poor Docks and reached the edge of the city. Here, past the last of the boats, the river water was clear and didn’t smell overly bad. Further on into Sweetwater, a cluster of little jetties had been built so that the city-folk could take their water without getting covered in mud. Anyone with any sense, or at least any sense of taste or smell, came at least as far as here to take water from the river. Master Hatchet had once told him that the villages in the River District further upstream were forbidden, by order of the Overlord, from throwing their waste into the water, just so that it stayed clean for the rich city-folk. Berren waited patiently, queuing to get onto one of the jetties. There didn’t seem to be many rich city-folk dipping their buckets in the river today. Never were. Rich folk had servants to do that for them.

  Or apprentices, he thought, as he filled up his own. It was almost a ritual now, coming out here with Master Sy’s buckets, filling them up and reminding himself that he was the thief-taker’s servant. He’d come to take pride in it.

  When he was done, he paused for a while by the river bank. Took a drink, washed his face, tipped a little over the lump on his head to soothe its throbbing. Then he set off back the way he’d come. Usually he went the long way home, working his way through the slums of Talsin’s Forest by the walls until he reached Pelean’s Gate. Then across Market Square and back down Weaver’s Row. It was half as long again as following the river from the docks and there was always a chance of being set upon by one of the gangs that roamed the slums, but it was cheap. The quick way cost money, a penny to go back into the city through the River Gate. On most days, that was a penny saved. But not today. Today he just wanted to get back.

  And then what? What if Master Sy was dead? He couldn’t go back to Master Hatchet, that was clear enough. Couldn’t even imagine ever wanting to, either. Cleaning dung off the city streets? Cutting purses, begging, stealing, never knowing whether today was the day they caught you and cut off a finger or maybe worse? No. Not any more.

  Tailoring? Weaving? Cloth-making? Leather-working? All good solid trades. Not something to ever make a man rich, but certainly good enough that a man could be sure of having food on the table each night. Not the sort of trades where a man had to worry about snuffers and mudlarks and thieves and pirates and being cursed or poisoned.

  Fishmongering?

  No, not that either. The thief-taker had opened his eyes. He was Berren, and one day he was going to be great. One day people were going to know his name and they’d shift on their feet and make the sign of the sun and the moon and hope he never came their way. He was going to learn swords, be the greatest swordsman ever. And the best thief-taker too, but that would just be the start. He’d sail away with a band of men and they’d conquer some place somewhere and he’d come back a king. Those were the dreams the thief-taker had given him.

  The thoughts made him laugh at himself. Fool’s talk. Anyway, Master Sy wasn’t going to be dead. Most likely he’d be waiting long before Berren got back, angry and impatient as ever.

  At the Grand Canal Bridge, he put down the pails of water for a quick rest. As he did, the first drops of rain started spattering around him. He snarled and raised his fist at the sky. That was the city mocking him, that was. Waiting for him to walk all that way and then starting to rain, far earlier than usual. Mocking him for his daft thoughts of sailing away from it.

  Around him, people slowed and smiled at the sky. Summer rain that came this early in the afternoon was a treasure, an hour or two of unexpected relief from the heat. And then the rain would go and the clouds would part and the sun would shine and the streets would sweat and swelter like everyone else, right into the evening; and then at night every wall in the city would drip with damp and it would probably rain again.

  A waft of stinking air rose up from the waters of the canal. A reeking smell of sewage that made him screw up his face in disgust. Like the mudlarks from The Maze the night before, only a lot worse. He left his buckets where they were and pushed his way to the other side of the bridge, over to where the stagnant canal waters festered their way into the outskirts of Talsin’s Forest and vanished under a web of bridges. Some were stone, some were wooden, most of them were just massive tree-trunks levered across the waters during Talsin’s siege of the city and left there ever since. According to Master Hatchet, every now and then one of them rotted and collapsed, taking half a row of slums with it. The people who lived in Talsin’s Forest just went on and filled in the hole and built on top of it again. Probably the only bits of the old canal that weren’t completely filled in with rubble by now were the bits out in the open; the bit that ran under Berren’s feet to the river, and the bit out by Pelean’s Gate. He shuddered and went back to his buckets. Some of the men who went to Club-Headed Jin’s brothel reckoned there were tunnels or caves that went all the way from Pelean’s Gate to the sea; old tunnels that supposedly got dug under Reeper Hill during the war or even before. No one went down there. Filled with monsters, that’s what they said. Evil flesh-eating man-fish things. That was what made the place stink so. Fish-men who crawled out at night and took people back down to the tunnels and ate them. That’s why people vanished sometimes. Fish-men kept the canal clear too, so they could roam right across Talsin’s Forest and across to the docks if they wanted. Berren wasn’t so sure about any of that, and he was pretty certain the thief-taker would just laugh. No one he knew had ever actually seen a fish-man, after all. But then again, people did disappear, and the canal did stink something rotten, and the bits you could actually see never did seem to dry up.

  He picked up his pails, crossed over the bridge to the River Gate again and handed over his penny to the soldiers who took the toll there. Time for a different bad smell. If there was one thing Deephaven had in abundance, it was bad smells.

  ‘Which one’s the witch-doctor then?’ he asked nervously, sheltering for a moment from the rain. Talking to city guards was something he’d spent years learning not to do. In the world he was used to they meant nothing but trouble.

  The soldiers looked at him. One of them wrinkled his nose and pointed, straight at a narrow alley between two of the warehouses. Berren thanked him and hurried on. Fish-men. That was just silly stories told by men too far in their cups to know what they were saying. Probably the witch-doctor was the same. Being scared was silly. So he stood, just inside the gate, and stared at the alley where the guardsman had pointed. He could see a doorway right enough. In the doorway, little things were squirming in the shadows. Cats. Lots of cats, hiding from the downpour. At least the rain washed away some of the smell.

  The door opened and the cats vanished inside. Berren quickly looked away. A few seconds later, a figure appeared. For a moment it paused, shrouded in the shadows of the house. The witch-doctor. Berren was certain of it. His heart jumped. The witch-doctor, come to take him for his insolence!

  No, that was stupid. Hundreds and hundreds of people walked in and out of the River Gate every day. It was hard to imagine that even a very busy witch-doctor could curse more than a handful of them. Even so, with every step towards the Godsway arch, he half-expected to feel a heavy hand on his shoulder.

  No hand came. As he reached the arch, he risked another glance back towards the door. What he saw was a man, hurrying quickly away, heading towards him, face bowed against the rain. The man ran right past him, without seeing him, without even noticing that he was there. Berren stood absolutely still, and watched him go.

  It was Master Sy.

  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 s
omeone 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 woes

  Four 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 die

  Dragon-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 sand

  Black 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.’