The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3)

by Stephen Deas

  ‘Stand fast!’ screamed Tarn.

  Berren took a step back. The two cohorts had formed a single line of shields. All he had behind him was the sea, the boats still struggling through the waves back towards Talon’s ship. A madman with an axe rushed at him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw someone fall, staggering back as though he’d been shot. He made himself stand firm and never mind how his heart was racing or how much he was sweating and his hands shaking. His mouth was dry with fear, his hands too tight on his sword, his legs had lost all strength and his feet had grown roots. It wasn’t an axe coming at him, he realised, it was a cleaver and it looked big enough to fell a horse. He was going to die!

  And then it was almost as though he stood and watched and it was someone else who calmly stepped aside. The man with the cleaver tore past and swung, but where Berren had been only his blade remained. The man took a few more steps, stumbled, then fell face down onto the sand, his guts spilling around him. Berren blinked. The world seemed to go quiet for a moment. He stared at the man on the sand behind him, doubled up, clutching at himself as he spread a red strain across the beach. Then he looked at his hand, already holding his sword straight out in front of him, aimed at the eyes of the next man racing towards him. He stared at the steel, at the blood dripping from it . . .

  . . . and snapped back to where the air was filled with shouts from so many voices that nothing made any sense, with the ringing sounds of steel on steel and with screams. The next man came at him with a sword. Berren didn’t move, didn’t flinch, just kept his own steel pointed straight at the man’s face. The man’s charge faltered. He slowed; the look in his eyes changed, fear winning out over fury, until he almost stopped, and it was the easiest thing in the world for Berren to step forward, lunge and stab him in the neck.

  The Hawk to Berren’s right fell, ribs smashed open by the blow of an axe. The force knocked him sideways and he clawed at Berren’s arm as he died. The man who’d killed him was screaming bloody murder and already swinging again. Berren jumped out of the way of both of them. He stepped inside the swing of the axe, chopped the axeman’s arm off with one blow, smashed him with his shield and then stabbed him between the ribs.

  More raiders were emerging from the woods. Bodies littered the sand now, some of them dead, most still moving, the crippled and the dying simply trying to get away. Outnumbered like this the two cohorts of the Hawks were supposed to form a single circle of swords and shields that would simply shrink back into itself whenever a man fell. They all knew it but they hadn’t drilled it, and Berren had no idea how it was supposed to work when the only thing you could do was jump out of the way of an axe and your own dying brother trying to drag you to the ground. They were all muddled together now, the mercenaries and the men from the woods, in a swirling melee where every man fought for himself with no idea of what was going on around him.

  Berren danced amid the press of swords, dodging whichever way would keep space around him. Men fell, Hawks and raiders both. He had no idea how many there were, how hopeless the battle might be, whether they were on the brink of victory or defeat. All he could see was the space around him, the circle that marked the reach of his sword and anything that breached it. Another man with an axe came at Berren and lost his hand, and at the same time a heavy blow landed on his back. It knocked him forward but he was already spinning and pushing himself away. The man who’d attacked him had a club, raised for another blow. Berren split his face in half before he could bring it down.

  Then he saw Tarn with three of the enemy around him. He leaped through the fight the way Tasahre had taught him, moving so fast that no one could touch him, chopped most of the way through the first man’s neck and barged the second aside with his shield. Tarn finished the third. Berren lunged again, but then there was another coming at him and he had to jump away, back towards Tarn, except Tarn wasn’t where he’d been, and now there was another man coming at him, this time with a spear, and all he could do was bat that aside and jump again, swinging at another raider as he did, missing, all the while feeling the sharpness seeping from his arms and his legs, the edge of speed draining away.

  And then the raider in front of him turned his back and ran; and as Berren took a step after him, he saw that they were all running, twenty or thirty of them, fleeing back up the sand towards the woods. There were bodies everywhere.

  ‘After them!’ Berren felt a fresh surge of energy, his first rush of victory. He raced the other mercenaries, seeing which of them would be the first to bring a man down, but then they were at the edge of the woods and Tarn was screaming at them to stop, to hold, to watch for ambushes and archers. The hunger for more was strong, the urge to rush on and finish the enemy almost too much to resist. Berren tried to catch his breath and then, when he’d done that, he tried to work out what had actually happened.

  ‘Hold! Hold here!’ That was Tarn trying to sort out who was alive and who was dead, how many could still fight and how many were hurt. The men who’d made it to the woods were unscathed or else carried only small wounds, a nick or a sprain. There were others, though, left on the beach. You didn’t get in the way of a man swinging an axe and come out with just a scratch, after all. The scouts had taken the worst of it. Most of Tarn’s cohort was still standing as far as Berren could see, and so far they all had the usual number of arms and legs.

  ‘You fought like a man possessed. Like a demon.’ Tarn grinned as he passed. ‘Hurt?’

  Berren shook his head.

  ‘How many did you send back to the sun?’

  ‘Four, I think. Maybe five.’

  ‘Maybe six or seven, more likely.’ Tarn laughed. ‘There’s about twenty of them lying on the beach back there and there’s six of us gone to the sun. Think about that.’ He nodded. ‘Glad to be your sergeant, soldier.’

  They waited at the edge of the woods, tense and on their guard in case whoever had attacked them came back, but there was no more fighting. When the boats returned to the shore once more, Talon was with them with two fresh cohorts. There were a few hasty words with Tarn and then they were all at a run, Talon at the front, straight through the woods. The cohorts that followed would burn the dead and tend to the wounded, but for now Talon wanted to bring the raiders to bay before they had a chance to escape.

  Ten minutes later they were standing in fields staring at a collection of huts that had been crudely thrown together from mud and wood. The Hawks swarmed through. Berren and Tarn kicked in door after door, shields raised and blades poised, but one after another the huts were empty. Berren was shaking: the excitement of the fight and then the charge through the woods and now the air of danger, the threat of every shadow, they all had a hold on him. His eyes flicked this way and that, and with every sign of movement, his hand flashed to his sword.

  They passed a hut whose door was hanging broken from its frame. Tarn went straight past, but Berren thought he caught a flicker of movement, and when he stopped and looked again, he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him from the far corner of the floor. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but when he took a step through the doorway, the eyes rose and a woman scrabbled to her feet, showering cold ashes everywhere. She was dressed in rags, old and with a bad leg. Someone who couldn’t run. She had a knife and she was pointing it at him, holding it as far away from her as she could. She’d hidden in the firepit, covering herself with ash and half-burned wood and they’d almost missed her.

  For a second they stared at each other and neither said a word, and then the woman lunged at him, stabbing at his face with her knife, hissing. Berren stepped around the knife and flicked the tip of his sword at her throat. Blood sprayed across the room and she collapsed where she stood. A stroke of mercy, he thought, but as he stared at her lying on the ground in a pool of blood all he saw was Tasahre on the deck of Radek’s ship, and she was shaking her head at him, and the last light in her eyes as they died was full of sadness. Action without thought. An old woman with a blunt and pit
ted knife. There were so many ways he could have spared her and yet his instinct had killed her. He looked at his hands. They’d betrayed him. They’d shown him who he really was.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ asked Tarn behind him. Berren turned his back on both of them and walked out of the hut. Outside, the search of the village was largely over. He walked blindly through it. I’ve become him, he thought. I’ve become Master Sy.

  ‘Hey!’ Tarn came after him. ‘Who made you the bloody judge of life and death?’

  Berren didn’t answer and the killing was forgotten before long, at least by everyone else, but the name would stick to him for ever. The Bloody Judge.

  16

  THE STONES BY THE SEA

  The village was no raiders’ camp after all. Women and children had lived there, though they’d fled before the Hawks arrived. They’d had livestock and poultry which they’d hurriedly driven away. There were farm tools. It had been a village, a living village and not some summer camp like the one the Hawks had left outside Forgenver. As the rest of the soldiers landed from the ship, Talon called a company council. This sounded like a grand thing to Berren until he saw that it was simply Talon and all the cohort sergeants getting together for a chat, and anyone else who wanted to join in was perfectly welcome. Berren left them to it. Slaughtering women and children, razing villages, salting the earth, all these things were anathema to a soldier, or at least they were supposed to be. Berren had no idea whose kingdom they were in but this place surely belonged to someone. There would be consequences for what the Hawks had done here.

  The old woman he’d killed haunted him. He wandered away from the village looking for some solitude, and took a path that went back into the woods towards the beach. It led him to the sea by a cluster of boulders, some as big as a house. The ground underfoot was sandy and he could hear the waves and taste the salt in the air. He found himself a slab to lean against, warm in the sun, and stared out across the sea, out to the ship that had brought them here.

  Why did you do it? Why? He couldn’t even begin to answer. Before today he’d killed two men: Radek of Kalda because the warlock Saffran Kuy had made him do it, and he’d killed the sailor Klaas. Klaas had been a pig and a bully, a thief and a coward who’d got exactly what he deserved, but Berren had still thought about what he’d done for weeks afterwards, wondering if there could have been some other way. Maybe he could simply have run? Before that he’d barely even been in a fight, unless you counted the childhood fisticuffs with Master Hatchet’s boys. And now, today, he’d killed half a dozen men he didn’t even know, who didn’t know him, and he’d killed a woman too.

  What troubled him most was how he remembered it. Everything was a blur, even the woman. He remembered exactly what he’d done but as though he was watching someone else do it, the same way he’d felt in the battle. He’d killed her but he couldn’t begin to say why. Because she’d come at him with a knife, yes, but what sort of reason was that when he was a soldier, armoured and with a sword, and she’d had almost nothing? Instinct, that’s what it was. Simple instinct, and his had been to kill, because that’s what they’d all taught him, one after the other: Master Sy, Master Silvestre, even Tasahre, although she would have wept at what he’d done today.

  There’d been another man in the battle, too – he remembered now. They’d exchanged blows, and then Berren had lunged. He’d felt his sword hit something but then another soldier had barged into him, almost knocking him flat, and when Berren had looked up, the man he’d been fighting was gone. Now he was left not knowing whether the man was even injured, and the not-knowing bothered him. Was there someone out there who would forever see scars on his belly and think of that dark-skinned wiry short-arse on the beach?

  A movement in the corner of his eye shattered his thoughts. He dodged sideways in time to see a hammer smash into the rock where his head had been. He grabbed hold of the hand that held it and pulled, yanking a man even smaller than he was out into the open. For a few seconds they wrestled, Berren and a shrieking, swearing fireball of elbows, knees, feet and fists, until he managed to smack his attacker’s head into a rock and put an end to it. Berren had his own dagger in his hand at once, then stopped. The stunned man groping in the sand at his feet wasn’t a man at all – he was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old but no more.

  Another figure appeared from a crack between the rocks – a woman, much older. ‘Please, sir! Please!’ The crack was tight and she was having trouble getting out. Berren watched her and all the while he rested one foot on the boy’s neck to make sure he stayed on the ground. The flash of bloodlust that had made him draw his dagger was gone now.

  The woman freed herself from the rocks and stopped where she was. ‘Please don’t hurt him! He’s all I have. Oh please!’ Berren cocked his head, waiting to see what she would say next. The woman’s eyes glistened. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. ‘We don’t have anything. I swear! Nothing!’

  ‘Is there a harbour here? A big one?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But ships come here, yes?’

  This time she nodded.

  ‘What happens when they come?’

  ‘The men go away.’ As terrified as she was, Berren saw a moment of hesitation. She was wondering whether to pretend she didn’t know or perhaps make up some lie about where they went. He put a little more pressure on the boy’s neck, making him gasp. The woman bowed her head.

  ‘And what do they do when they’re away?’

  She didn’t answer until Berren forced another whimper out of the boy. ‘They go fighting,’ she said.

  ‘They go looting, pillaging and plundering?’ The woman wouldn’t look at him. ‘Slaving? Do they go slaving?’ Yes, that got a flicker out of her. ‘I’m not going to kill your boy for that,’ he said. ‘Lie to me and that’s another matter. How long are the men gone?’

  ‘Between planting and harvest time.’

  ‘So the ship would be coming for them soon, then? Or has it already been?’

  She shook her head, but no, of course the ship hadn’t come already otherwise the men he’d fought this morning wouldn’t have been here. It would come soon, then, to take them away to raid the Duke of Forgenver’s coast. Had they been looking out for it? Was that why they’d been so quick to strike at Talon’s company – because they’d been watching for a ship all along?

  ‘How do you know when?’

  ‘A man comes to the village and tells us.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘I only saw him once.’

  ‘When does he come?’

  ‘He came already. Yesterday. He said you were coming. He said to be ready.’

  ‘He told you what? That we were coming?’ So it wasn’t just a well-kept watch. And they’d not seen another ship on their whole trip up the coast, which meant that word had come from Forgenver before Talon had even set sail! Berren took his foot off the boy and walked briskly towards her. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her towards the woods. ‘This man, who is he? When was the first time he came here?’

  ‘Winter before last,’ she said. She didn’t try to pull away from him. He saw her wave frantically at the boy though. Run, run! ‘Was a hard winter and food was scarce . . .’

  ‘What does he wear? Big horse, fancy clothes, fancy sword, that sort of thing?’ He looked at her, but that wasn’t it. Something else then. A horrible thought struck him. ‘Does he wear grey?’

  His eyes drifted back towards the village. Glimpsed through the trees he could see galloping horses. Lots of them, with soldiers on their backs. He let the woman go and she and her boy were gone in a flash, running full pelt away across the beach. If she’d answered, Berren didn’t hear, but he didn’t bother chasing her; instead he raced to the edge of the woods and then stopped. A hundred yards of open field lay between the trees and the village. He’d meant to dash across it, taking his chances in the open to join his cohort, but the horsemen were too close now. The trees gave a measure of safety
and so did the houses in the village, but the open ground between them? That was a killing field. At least there weren’t as many riders as he’d feared. Perhaps thirty, certainly far fewer than Talon’s company, but in the open they still had every advantage. Anyone who crossed the fields would be slaughtered.

  They were from Aria, he realised. Soldiers from Deephaven. It wasn’t just the armour they wore or the familiar way they carried their lances either; when they passed close to the woods, Berren could see their faces. Their skin was dark like his, used to the sun, not ghostly white like Tarn and almost every other face he’d seen since Kalda. They were the men who’d attacked Talon there, on the horses he’d seen in Tethis, but how did they come to be here?

  He watched more closely. They’d claimed the ground between the village and the wood and split the Hawks in two, but they weren’t doing anything more. They weren’t charging in among the houses and burning out the men hidden there.

  Then one rode out from the middle of them. He stopped and turned his horse around on the spot, showing off, threw back his head and roared, ‘Talon! Where are you?’

  Berren froze. Talon came running out of the village waving his arms. The horseman jumped down, but not for a fight. Berren watched the two men embrace and knew he couldn’t be wrong. It was a voice he’d recognise anywhere and it struck him like a thunderbolt. The thief-taker. Talon’s brother. Master Sy.

  17

  BEER FIXES EVERYTHING

  In Forgenver the Fighting Hawks had more than two hundred soldiers, with nearly another hundred camp followers, mostly boys desperately pretending to be old enough to fight, but also a smith and his apprentices, two cobblers and an ever-changing posse of women who served as seamstresses and nurses when required, but whose true purpose Berren had slowly come to understand. Comforters, Tarn called them. There was also a victualler and his boys, a sun-priest, a scribe and at least a dozen others. These were the people who mended swords and boots, bodies and souls. Most of them had stayed in Forgenver while Talon packed as many soldiers into his ship as it could carry.