by Stephen Deas
‘She was my friend.’ Friend wasn’t the right word but it would do. No reason for anyone else to know any more. ‘She was a sword-monk.’
‘Sun and moon!’ Talon stared at him in wonder. ‘Well, there’s a thing. Syannis has no idea. So Syannis killed your. . friend and you ran away straight into the arms of a press gang? Is that what I’m supposed to think?’
Berren nodded. ‘Same night.’
‘And that was all, what? A little over two years ago now. And how long have you been in Kalda looking for him?’
‘Few months.’
Talon shook his head. He rocked forward in his chair. ‘While I’m deciding what to do with you, you can tell me what you know of Saffran Kuy.’
The warlock. Berren shivered. He couldn’t speak.
‘You look like you just ate a lemon.’ Talon didn’t smile. ‘Tarn, go and find out why it’s taking so long to get some more candles! It’s not as though they’re mountain lilies, for pity’s sake!’
While Tarn got up and left, Berren took a moment to gather himself, to push away Tasahre and everything that came with her. ‘I used to think there were good men and there were bad men,’ he said, ‘and that most men, when it came down to it, were bad ones. But Saffran Kuy was something else. He was far more than bad. He was wicked. Evil. .’ He pushed his lips together, struggling to find words for the warlock who’d made him cut out a piece of his own soul, who’d made him murder a man he didn’t even know. He held up the stump of the little finger on his left hand. ‘That’s the least of what he did to me.’
‘Saffran Kuy is a monster, is he?’ Berren nodded and Talon smiled. ‘Well then, Berren of Deephaven, I suppose I won’t be dumping your headless corpse in the sea tonight after all. But you’d best tell me the rest of your story while I decide what I am going to do with you. And you can end it with exactly what you were going to do with that knife. The truth, mind. Lie to me and I’ll know it.’
So Berren told him about Master Sy, about how the Headsman had come to Deephaven and murdered the thief-taker’s old friend Kasmin and how Master Sy had hunted him down no matter what he had to do. He told Talon about the priests and the sword-monks and Tasahre and what the warlock had done to them both. When he got to the coming of Radek and the fight aboard his ship, he had to push back the tears again. By the end, with Radek dead and Tasahre bleeding out at his feet, he couldn’t stop them any more. Talon listened in silence. Outside, through the windows, the sky was starting to lighten. Dawn was coming. They’d been up all night.
‘I’ll tell you a bit more about Radek one day,’ Talon said after a long silence. ‘Let’s go onto the roof and watch the sunrise. I always find that helps.’ He stood up and Berren followed him out of the door into a hallway, and then through another to a balcony. The slope of the city faced south and east, and in winter the sun came up over the cliffs of the canyon. Talon stood beside Berren. The sky on the horizon was already turning pink. For a moment they were alone. ‘And then you got press-ganged?’
Berren stared out over the water, lost in memories. There was more, but the rest was his own, to be held and cherished. He shrugged. ‘We sailed into Kalda one day. I saw a ship come by next to mine. There was a man on the deck. It was Master Sy. I couldn’t just do nothing.’
‘You were going to kill him?’
‘It was all his fault, everything that happened to me.’
‘Really?’
‘And then I stabbed that man in the Bitch Queen. He was from my ship and he deserved it, but now. .’ He stared across the city. He could run. Run right from here. Leap across the rooftops and down to the streets, into the alleys and away. They’d never catch him. But he didn’t. Not yet. ‘Now I don’t know any more.’ He bit his lip.
‘It won’t change anything.’
‘I know.’
‘They caught him. I’ll tell you that much. Syannis, I mean. You were right: they did hunt him and they caught him and they sent him to the mines. He told me that and told me he deserved it too. I didn’t understand what he meant and he wouldn’t say, but I suppose perhaps now I do. Anyway he never got there. Someone helped him escape and put him on a ship and sent him back to me. He won’t say who but I know it was Kuy. Warlocks.’ He spat. ‘The sooner someone puts an end to them the better.’
Berren nodded. ‘Give me a sword and tell me how.’ Them? There’s more than one?
Orange fire burst across the horizon and the first brilliant rays of the sun struck the city. ‘He’s sorry,’ said Talon after a while longer. ‘Sorry for the way things ended between you.’ Out across the estuary, the waves began to glitter. ‘He doesn’t say it, but I see it in his face.’
‘That doesn’t change anything either. She’s still dead.’
‘I suppose it doesn’t.’ Talon took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘What now, Berren? I wish I’d never seen you. I wish I’d left you where you were. But I did neither of those things and so here we are. Syannis is my brother. I can’t simply let you go, not if it’s going to be with a knife in your hand. I could murder you — that would be simple and quick but I think that would haunt me. If I could then I would make things back as they were, but I can’t bring the dead back to life. I don’t think anyone can do that. So what, then? What would be fair, do you think?’
Berren didn’t answer. Talon was right about not bringing the dead back to life. Past that, he couldn’t think.
‘I’ll send you home,’ Talon said after a while. ‘That’s what I should do. I should put you on a ship back to Deephaven and in return you will swear to me that you will never cross the seas again.’
‘There’s nothing in Deephaven for me any more,’ said Berren.
‘There’s nothing for you here either. I’ll get you some proper clothes and send you off with a purse full of silver and the rest will be up to you. That’s as right as I can make it. Start a new life and forget the old one. Yours if you want it. Otherwise I give you to Tarn and the sea.’
Berren shrugged. A purse and a set of clothes? Couldn’t argue that wasn’t better than being dumped in the sea with a rock tied around his ankles. As to what he did once he’d taken Talon’s gifts, well, that was up to him.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’
‘No. Not “I don’t know.” I want your oath, boy, and I want it now.’
‘Then I swear. When you send me away, I’ll never come back.’
‘Swear on the memory of your sword-monk.’
Berren swallowed hard. ‘I swear. On her memory. I will not come back.’ He clenched his fists.
‘There won’t be any ships crossing the ocean until spring now.’ Talon turned to look at him. He met Berren’s eyes with a stare that Berren couldn’t answer. ‘You’ll be one of us for now, Berren of Deephaven, but understand this: I will be kind to you while you are here. I will look after you because it is a little right to set against what you have suffered. But do not mistake my kindness for trust. My brother is still my brother, and if you run from me with a knife in your hand then I will send Tarn and his company after you and I will not ask them to be kind.’ The steel in his eyes twinkled to a grin and he slapped Berren on the shoulder. ‘Now, in the name of the four gods, let’s share a drink and get some damned sleep. Unless you’d prefer to return to where I found you?’
5
THE CITY WITH NO DOORS
Berren tried to sleep. He tossed and turned restlessly on a pallet of straw tucked in a tiny storeroom full of shelves and empty jars. The blankets Talon had given him scratched his skin. Light filtered in under the door. The silence of the early morning nagged at him and cold draughts of winter air danced across his face. Everything was wrong and all he could do was doze. Before long he heard the noises of men moving elsewhere in the house, and then the first smells of cooking slunk through the gap under the storeroom door and wrapped themselves around him. Hot fat! Warm bread! Butter! He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten well.
No, that wasn’t
true. He could remember it exactly. It had been two years ago, give or take. The afternoon before the Festival of the Flames in Deephaven with nothing much to do and a pocket full of pennies. He’d eaten pickled fish and warm sour-bread and it had been delicious.
He got up and followed the smell. His nose led him to a hall with a table long enough to sit twenty men, although it was mostly empty. Talon was already there with a few others. They were tucking into the biggest breakfast Berren had ever seen.
‘Berren! Berren of Deephaven!’ Talon clapped his hands and waved Berren over. ‘Sit! Eat! I bet it’s been a while since you had a meal that left your belly bulging.’
Berren met his eye. ‘Years.’ He sat down at the end of the table.
‘No, no, come over here.’ Berren got up again. A part of him still wondered whether he should be running away, but a larger part was certain that, whatever the answer, it could wait until after breakfast. ‘We’re going to have to do something about you,’ Talon said. ‘Look at you!’
Berren looked. His feet were bare; so were his legs below the knees and his arms below the shoulders. The rest of him was covered with a mishmash of whatever he’d managed to get hold of, patched together with pieces of sacking. ‘I look like a beggar,’ he said. He’d not really thought about it before. All sailors looked worn and battered, didn’t they?
‘No,’ said Talon. He pushed a trencher towards Berren and piled it with sliced sausage and pieces of fried fish, then waved at the pitchers on the table. ‘There’s goat milk and ale. And no, you don’t look like a beggar, you look like what you are — a ship’s skag. Beggars dress better. We’ll have to do something about that if you’re going to be one of us, and I can hardly send you back to Deephaven looking like that. Tarn, you can help.’
Tarn glowered at Berren. One of us — what did that mean? Who were us? Because the men he saw breakfasting around him were surely snuffers. Half a dozen were sitting here at the table, but Talon had had more with him in the night. What did a man do with so many snuffers?
He shrugged the question away. Whatever Talon wanted from him, it couldn’t be worse than being a ship’s skag. If it got him a good breakfast and some new clothes, so much the better. He gnawed at the slices of dried sausage. The last time he’d had sausage it had been a Mirrormere Hot, the day before Master Sy had sent him to live in the temple. The memory of its burn made his mouth water even more.
Tarn was giving Talon a dirty look. ‘I have to buy him clothes now?’ he grumbled. ‘What am I, his mother?’
Talon paused between mouthfuls of egg mixed in with strips of meat and some sort of deep green vegetable that Berren had never seen before. ‘Fine, fine. I’ll take him.’ He glanced up at Berren. ‘You can tell me how Kalda compares to Deephaven. I travel a lot in this part of the world but I’ve never been across the Ocean of Storms. I hear they do things differently in Aria. Syannis told me some of it, but I’m sure he missed all the best parts. How many taverns did he take you to? Not one, I bet.’
‘He took me to a few. There was one where we used to meet. I fell asleep the first time we went there.’ The Eight, where the thief-takers used to gather behind the courthouse with the justicars and the witch-breakers. He pinched his mouth. Thinking about Deephaven only made him want to cry and shout and clench his fists. The Eight hadn’t meant much back then, but now it made him think of the other thief-takers, of Justicar Kol and all the others, men who’d never exactly been his friends but had been the closest thing until he’d met Tasahre. And then there was the Barrow of Beer and surly old Kasmin. .
‘Brothels?’
Berren shook his head. ‘Master Sy didn’t hold with them. I grew up next to one though.’
‘You did? Lucky man.’ Talon smiled.
Berren wondered about that. His memories were mostly of colours and of smells and of comfort. The women there had treated Master Hatchet’s boys with a strange mixture of tolerance and scorn. He hadn’t really understood what happened there. He knew what they did, but he didn’t understand it. That had come much later. ‘I suppose,’ he muttered. Thoughts like that led straight to Tasahre. A gloom settled around him. He stared at his food while the snuffers came and went, sitting down to eat and getting up again when they were done. They moved with confidence and treated Talon with a casual deference, like he was their sergeant, not like he was a prince at all.
Talon smiled, a real grin dancing with mischief, and his eyes glittered. ‘The past can be a terrible burden. You learn, Berren, to put it aside. It takes time but it comes.’
He chuckled. Berren’s eyes snapped up. ‘I don’t want to put it aside and I don’t want to forget.’
‘I didn’t say forget.’ The air changed in an instant, Talon suddenly sharp as a knife with the air of a prowling tiger, filled with a menacing hunger. ‘You know Syannis and I had to flee our home, don’t you? Our father and most of our family were killed by Radek and his men. We lost our friends. Everything. I wonder sometimes which one of them has my old room. Does Meridian sleep in my father’s bed? I imagine that he does, and then I wonder who has mine. Princess Gelisya? Or perhaps Radek slept there when he came by to rest from his hunting of us.’ His grin grew wider, baring his teeth to show off a vicious glee. ‘You put paid to that, though.’ Then he shook his head as if throwing something off. ‘No, I didn’t say forget, but you can learn to put it to one side, Berren, and you better had because if you don’t then it eats you. Syannis, he never threw it off. You’ve seen what it does. Find a new life and make that be the one that matters. You still remember the old one. You just learn to put it in its place.’ Talon looked distant for a moment as though he was staring straight through Berren and the wall behind him, and through the cliffs too and far, far away out to sea. Then his eyes came crashing back. ‘Eat up! We have clothes to buy!’
The days passed. Talon laughed and joked as though he and Berren had known each other for half their lives. He showed Berren around Kalda and taught him the ways of this part of the world. Somewhere very far away there was an emperor like the emperor in Aria, only this one was called the sun-king and he’d lived for ever and could never die. He was powerful beyond imagining and he ruled over half the world. Kalda belonged to him, and the city’s king wasn’t really a king at all, and changed depending on the whims of that faraway court. Talon waved a hand over all that — too boring to talk about; instead, he whispered gleefully about the scandals that surrounded the high priests of the temples and the secret vices of the merchant princes. In the evenings they went drinking, and wherever they went, people knew him: the Prince of Swords. Men clapped him on the shoulder and bought him drinks or else glared at him from a distance. Women draped themselves over him. A handful of snuffers always came too, with Tarn never far from Talon’s side. When Talon talked about soldiering, his eyes almost glowed. He might even have become a friend if Berren had been able to see Talon without seeing Syannis and, with the thief-taker, always Tasahre. That was the last gift that both Syannis and Deephaven had given him, and why he could never go back.
‘Did Syannis bring Saffran Kuy back with him?’ he asked one day. ‘Was he here too?’
For a moment Talon looked as if Berren had pulled a knife and stabbed him. ‘Syannis and I don’t agree on much,’ he said at last. ‘We argue and bicker all the time. Sometimes we can’t stand each other for weeks. But that’s what brothers do, stand each other, and Syannis kept us alive. I was ten, you see. Syannis was fifteen. For three years we ran from city to city, country to country, looking for somewhere that would have us. Somewhere we could be safe when all we had were our names and what little we’d been able to carry. He kept me alive. I owe him a lot. And we would both like our kingdom back, even if it was only a little one. But Saffran Kuy. .’ He shook his head. ‘No, as far as I know Syannis did not bring any warlocks back with him from Deephaven. I pray to the gods that it stays that way but I fear it probably won’t. Something runs between those two. Some unpleasant cord that binds them.’ He smiled an
d then laughed again. ‘It’s actually nice to have someone who doesn’t think the sun shines out of his arse. You know we’ve got another brother? Or half-brother anyway.’
Berren nodded. ‘The one who looks like me.’
‘Aimes the idiot, yes. Looks a lot like you indeed. When he was little he got kicked in the head by a horse. Syannis acts like he was to blame. He has a mad idea that Saffran Kuy can find a way to make our little brother whole again.’ He stopped and turned to look Berren up and down. ‘In the end I think that’s how you got to him. When he saw you, he saw Aimes. It’s hard to imagine him wanting an apprentice. I can’t see him being a very good master.’
‘He was. .’ Berren didn’t know what to say to that. ‘He tried to be.’ That was fair. Master Sy had always tried. Hadn’t always managed it, but most of the time he hadn’t been too bad at all. ‘He taught me a lot.’ And that was fair too, and yet all Berren could think of was Tasahre, of holding her hand. Of feeling her heartbeat stop.
Talon smiled, pushing the tension away. ‘Oh, Syannis was always good at trying. The thing he never learned was how to stop, and the gods know how much of a pain in the arse it can be to live with someone who’s constantly trying to be perfect.’ He shook his head. ‘Tethis isn’t much more than a castle with a few fields around it. It’s not worth much, but now that Syannis is back in the game, some tiny little thing will happen and the dam will break. Blood will flood our little kingdom once more. You’ll see murder.’ He sighed. Then he looked at Berren and pursed his lips. ‘Well, you won’t, if you’ve got any sense, because you’ll be on a ship back to where you came from. You wouldn’t like to take him with you, would you?’ Talon’s lips laughed as he spoke, but his eyes were still and dark and spoke of storms.
A week passed and then another and Berren found himself sitting on a jetty in the small hours one morning, looking across the water at the ships in the dark, his head full of beer-fog and a silly smile on his face. When he looked up into the horseshoe of the city rising around him, he could see the whole of it all at once, smudged among the cliffs, a stain floating where smoke from the night fires still hung in the air waiting for a morning breeze to pick it up and carry it away. Talon sat beside him.
