The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3)

by Stephen Deas

  ‘He’s here!’ shouted a voice behind the door. ‘He’s here! To arms!’

  Old memories filled Berren’s head of all the times he’d nearly been caught as a boy. When all you could do was run and dodge, dart down the narrowest, darkest, least used alleys. Some place narrow where big men would be slow, some place high where they couldn’t reach, then some place dark where they wouldn’t see you. You hid, and you prayed.

  He’s here? They knew Syannis was coming! They’d known all along!

  ‘The sun-chapel!’ snapped Syannis. He lunged with his sword into the darkness and roared. There was a grunt and a crash. Berren fled back to the chapel, but the archway was filled with men coming the other way now. Real terror gripped him – more soldiers, and they’d been lying in wait! He must have walked right past them without knowing!

  ‘Master Sy!’

  In the darkness he couldn’t see how many there were. He had no idea even where Syannis was. He staggered. A hand clutched at his arm. He wrenched himself away.

  ‘Run, boy!’ The thief-taker’s voice. He was already ahead. Berren bolted, bouncing off the walls as he ran. He caught a glimpse of the thief-taker in the shadows of the Long Gallery. Other dark shapes were running through the far end of the hall. More soldiers!

  Syannis skidded through the hidden doorway into the armoury. Berren skittered after him. There were guards only seconds behind him, coming from both ends of the gallery, but they were all behind him now, that was what mattered. After the armoury it was a quick sprint across the guardroom and then a long straight run all the way to the Pit and the sump and out with no one standing in their way. His eyes gleamed. They would get away!

  He crashed into Syannis, who was fumbling at the guardroom door with a key. The thief-taker swore. Berren slammed the door into the Long Gallery shut behind him and put his shoulder to it. ‘For the love of the sun! Keep your exit open! First rule of thieving you daft bastard!’ The first soldiers crashed into the other side of the door and almost knocked Berren off his feet, forcing him slowly backwards. A sword stabbed through the gap, missing him by an inch.

  ‘Got it!’ Syannis had the other door open. Berren screwed up his eyes and leaped towards it. Soldiers sprawled into the armoury sending crossbows crashing all about. A hand caught his arm. The grip was strong, strong enough to spin him around before he broke free. He stumbled as he lurched out of the armoury.

  ‘Get him! Get him!’

  Syannis was ahead, darting down the steps to the cellar. Berren flashed past the dead guards slumped at their table, soldiers pouring after him. He felt the air move as someone threw a spear and missed the back of his head by a hair’s breadth. He raced through the cellar, down the steps and round the corner towards the Pit. The soldiers’ armour and swords slowed them down. He was gaining on them.

  Almost there!

  He unbuckled his belt and threw it to the floor, sword and all, ready for the sump. With a bit of luck someone would trip over it. Syannis was right in front of him now, slowing him down. They reached the cave where Hain was waiting for them. Around the pit, Berren ran one way, Syannis the other. There must have been at least a dozen soldiers chasing him, but Berren felt like laughing again, because he knew they’d never catch him. He’d reach the sump and be in and they’d never—

  Out of the darkness a figure stepped in front of him. Berren didn’t even have time to see who it was, but there was only one person it could be: Hain. They smashed into each other. Something hit Berren’s head. He stumbled a few steps, staggered into the low wall around the Pit, almost fell in, pushed himself away and then someone was on his back, bearing him down, pressing him into the ground with such force he could barely breathe. He thrashed and squirmed and watched, helpless, as Syannis reached the sump while more arms grabbed at his legs.

  But the thief-taker didn’t dive into the water; he kept coming. The soldiers holding Berren down suddenly let go and scrabbled away, and then Syannis was among them, slashing and stabbing like a wild thing. They fell back from his assault and for a moment Berren was free. He didn’t pause. As soon as he was on his feet, he ran.

  ‘Go! Go!’

  He didn’t have a sword any more, but even if he had there were too many guards. The last thing he saw before he hurled himself into the water was Syannis, backing after him, holding off half a dozen men, with more racing around the Pit to take him from behind.

  The water was like ice. On the other side, he waited, dripping wet and freezing cold, but Syannis never came. Eventually, long after he knew there was no point in waiting any more, he left. The horses were exactly where Syannis had said they would be.

  Hain. They’d all say it was Hain who’d betrayed Master Sy, who’d warned Meridian that the thief-taker was coming, the when and the how, but Berren wasn’t so sure. Just at the very end, he’d seen a face lying in the darkness. Hain’s dead eyes, open wide, staring at some unseen terror. And in that moment he thought he’d caught a smell of something that shouldn’t have been there. A whiff of rotting fish.

  23

  THE PRINCESS AND THE SLAVE GIRL

  Berren galloped through the kingdom of Tethis. He stopped at a farm, helped himself to a barn for the night and was gone with the dawn. He rode through the countryside, skirted Galsmouth with its garrison of fifty king’s guard, crossed the river and entered Gorandale. For a few days he passed through rolling hills dotted with the occasional flock of sheep. He saw shepherds and a few quiet villages nestled in among the valleys, but little else. Syannis had left food with the horses. Hard bread, biscuits, dried meat and cheese. Enough to keep four men for two or three days; more than enough for Berren.

  His head fluttered like a moth around Syannis’s flame. They’d walked straight into a trap. Syannis could have dived into the sump and saved himself, but he’d hadn’t and now he was probably dead. Berren had thoughts about selling the horses, about taking the money and finding a ship and never coming back. But for most of the time he thought about all the things that had happened since the day in Deephaven when they’d first met in a dingy alley that smelled of blood and piss, when Syannis had been nothing more than a thief-taker with three dead men scattered at his feet. He remembered how he’d wanted to be like that, to fight like that. He’d wanted it more than anything. He’d have given his soul.

  Maybe he already had. The woman he’d murdered after the battle on the beach still haunted his dreams.

  Would Tarn have come back for him? Or Talon? Yes. But he’d never have thought Syannis would, because the thief-taker saw the world in a different way, where men and friends were sacrificed for some greater end. With regret, yes, but without remorse. The thief-taker had taught him that too. He’d taught Berren everything; now, too late, Berren found that that wasn’t who he wanted to be.

  All the things the thief-taker had done for him and all the things he’d taken away. Yet this time Syannis had come back.

  He forded a river in the middle of nowhere. The road – not much more than a muddy line through the hills – wound back to the coast. He stayed for a night in a tiny town that smelled of fish and filled his belly with something that wasn’t dry bread. Three days later he was outside Forgenver. Talon had always been decent to him. Talon deserved to know about Syannis. Then maybe he’d look for that ship.

  ‘Hey! Berren!’ he hadn’t even reached the tents before Tarn was waving at him. The two of them embraced. ‘Glad to be back?’

  ‘Hard to answer, that.’

  ‘Talon said you were in Tethis. He looked none too happy. So how’s the enemy’s strength?’ He frowned. ‘You know we’re at war with Meridian now, right?’

  ‘Yeh, I worked that one out.’

  ‘I’ve heard he has the Mountain Panther and the Black Swords hired to his cause.’ Tarn laughed. ‘Throw in the king’s guard, that’s sixteen hundred men. So is it true? Is that what he’s got?’

  ‘Yeh. The Mountain Panther was in Tethis. The Black Swords shipped in the day we left.’

>   Tarn grinned and clapped Berren on the shoulder. ‘Talon says they spent a week up the coast near Taycelmouth hunting for us until they realised we’d slipped away and taken their lancers too. Path of the Sun! That’s too many to face in the field! And they have archers and heavy armour. I reckon Talon has to sit tight for the rest of the season then. Meridian will have to let at least one of them go, and by next year we could have a company of five hundred. That’s what I’d do. At least the walls around Tethis aren’t up to much.’

  Berren snorted, thinking again of the vast half-hidden city walls of Deephaven. ‘That’s true enough.’ Then he looked out of the camp, over to the town of Forgenver which had no walls at all. ‘Better than here, though. An army coming at Tethis from the north by land would have to cross the gorge and the river. If you came by sea, you’d have to fight through the town.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘There are some big ships in Tethis harbour. I’d be more worried about them coming here.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, soldier.’ Tarn caught his eyes. ‘They come here, we’ll have a palisade wall up in no time and we’ll shred them. Talon’s promised us a hundred brand new crossbows.’ He led Berren towards a large hut in the centre of the camp, half made of wood, half pieces of scavenged canvas.

  ‘As long as they don’t come from the armoury in Tethis.’ Berren smirked. At least they’d done something useful.

  ‘What we need is a hostage. But if it comes to fighting, we’ll just have to rely on our swords as always. Talon’s in the . . .’ He waved at the wood-and-canvas thing. ‘That.’

  Berren watched Tarn turn and walk away. The priests in Deephaven had tried to teach him things about warfare. Strategies and numbers of soldiers and how so-and-so had held such-and-such a place against an army of ten thousand for weeks or days or however long it was. Probably with six blind swordsmen and a one-armed archer who fired arrows with his teeth. Berren didn’t remember too much of any of it, only that the heroically outnumbered defenders generally came to a bad end. But still . . . They’d taught him about the civil war. How Khrozus Falandawn, with half Emperor Talsin’s strength, had seized Deephaven despite its walls and Varr despite its armies. He’d wrestled the empire away from Talsin, and how had he done it? He was good with cavalry, he was brutal and ruthless, but mostly what Berren remembered was that Khrozus had had sorcerers, that he’d used magic. He smiled. He could still see the other novices shrinking and shrivelling into their stools, almost not wanting to hear what was to come. The priest banging on about the dangers of sorcery, how it was the path to wickedness, while Berren had sat wide-eyed, listening with rapt attention. Khrozus had won his battles with sorcery. He’d cheated. ‘Hey, Tarn!’ he shouted with a laugh. ‘We need a wizard! Get us a wizard!’

  Tarn turned back to Berren and made a sign to ward off evil. ‘I’ll trust my sword, thanks.’

  Sterm. That was the priest’s name. Sterm the Worm. Remembering made Berren smile for a while, and then the smile faded as he remembered how things gone for him when it came to wizards and their ilk, and the whiff of rotten fish he’d smelled as he’d plunged into the sump; and then other memories came too: the woman he’d killed, as always, and standing in the yard of Tethis castle with a whip in his hand and tears on his cheeks. Deephaven seemed so long ago. He’d been such a fool. So naive.

  With a heavy sigh, he went and did what he’d come to do. Found Talon and told the Prince of War that his brother was gone. When he was done, Talon shook his head and sent him away without a word, though his face was pale and stony and his eyes were cold and hard. No blame, no pointed finger demanding to know how it was that Berren and Berren alone had returned. Almost as though Talon had expected it.

  ‘Meridian won’t kill him. Not while Talon’s here,’ said Tarn when the news finally spread around the camp. ‘But he’ll be happy enough to hold a hostage.’

  The weeks passed and dragged into months. Berren stared out at the sea, watching ships come and go from Forgenver, telling himself that the next one, always the next one, would take him away. Talon recruited every man he could get. Each day wagons went back and forth, full of supplies. Most of it was food, but sometimes there were arrows or spearheads or boots, and when a hundred brand new crossbows arrived just as Talon had promised, the camp buzzed with the news for days and even Berren slunk across the camp to look at them. Every morning, as he woke up, he wondered if that would be the day he’d finally vanish back to Aria; and every night as he fell asleep in the same place once more, he realised that he had nowhere else to go; until, as the weeks rolled by, the thoughts began to fade and he knew, for better or for worse, that this was his home now, and the men around him were his family.

  News came from Tethis now and then. Talon spoke of it with glee. Meridian had prepared an attack. He’d sailed two fat-bellied ships into Tethis harbour and filled them up with soldiers. They’d been ready to sail when the skies had darkened and the worst storm for twenty years had struck. One ship had broken apart and sunk right where it was, and the other needed months of repair. Dozens of soldiers, perhaps a hundred, had drowned. They heard too that Syannis wasn’t dead and was Meridian’s hostage, just as Tarn had said. Rumours shot through the camp like wildfire after this: every week there was a new story about how Syannis had escaped, or which bit of him had been cut off and sent to Talon as a warning this time.

  Meridian tried again late in the summer, sending his soldiers northwards on foot. His army marched a day past Galsmouth and then found their food infested with rats, rot and blight. They had no choice but to turn back. From the accounts that reached Forgenver, Meridian had been so furious that he’d had the quartermasters from each company hanged.

  The seasons turned and the weather began to change. The days grew cold and wet, the nights dark and long. In Tethis the Black Swords were rumoured to have sailed south for the winter, leaving only two cohorts of archers. Outside Forgenver the Hawks had swelled their numbers close to the five hundred that Tarn had predicted. The autumn rains set in, driven by a biting wind while Talon drilled them ever harder; unrest spread among the older soldiers, used to spending their winters in milder climes. Day after day of rain turned their camp into a sea of mud, and still Talon ordered his grumbling companies out of their tents to march back and forth until they were soaked, to practise their formations until mud covered everything and no one knew who was who any more. Berren began to think there might be a mutiny, but just when he thought that even he might revolt and run away, Tarn barged into their tent, shook the rain off his coat and beamed with glee. He threw a coin at Berren.

  ‘Two rest days and five silver crowns for each man.’ He hauled Berren up off his pile of blankets, where he’d been savouring the ever-present smell of sodden earth and listening to the thrum of rain on canvas, the pitter-patter of drips where it found its way inside their tent. Tarn was still grinning. ‘And then we march!’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Forgenver’s not going to know what hit it. We’ll drink the whole town dry!’

  ‘What do you mean we march?’

  ‘Get your coat on! We’ve got a shipment of blankets and boots and other things to get from the docks to the camp without there being any pilfering, and then. . .’ Berren threw on his long leather coat, the coat Master Sy had once worn in Deephaven. Outside they trudged, heads down through the mud. ‘Tethis, Berren.’ Tarn slapped him on the back but his tone was serious. ‘We’re going to Tethis! We’re going to war! Whatever words have never been spoken, speak them soon. A winter war takes far more lives than a summer one.’

  The road into Forgenver was churned to a thick gooey mud that sucked at Berren’s boots. The rain was relentless. Even under his cloak and his coat, he was soaked to the skin when they reached the docks. Crates lay piled up by the waterfront; men were swearing and shouting at each other over the hiss of water falling on stone. Puddles lay ankle deep. Everything was sodden and faded to a haze of grey, and in the midst of it all, barking orders and cursing, stood Talon, waving his arm over some crates stacked
beside him.

  ‘Tarn! These! Get these to the camp. I don’t care how, but get them there. Don’t drop them.’

  ‘What are they?’

  Talon glanced at Berren. He shook his head. ‘Fragile, that’s what.’ Berren saw firelight flickering through the cracks in the wooden crate. Were they . . .? He bent down to peer closer and then stopped. Talon had drawn his sword, fast as a snake, and the tip of it was hovering in front of Berren’s face. ‘Fragile. Like glass. That’s all you need to know,’ he said to Tarn, then turned his eye on Berren. ‘You I brought here for a different reason.’ His voice softened a notch. ‘You’ll know what they are when you see them.’

  Berren stepped back. He knew already. He’d seen that flickering light before. In Kalda, a bright ball of flame in the hands of a Deephaven lancer.

  Talon’s stare was strong enough to flay skin. ‘Sergeant Tarn, I suggest you put a covering over those crates when you get them to the armoury. You will take them yourself and you will let no one else come near them. Do you understand? What they hold will change the course of a battle, if used well.’

  Tarn nodded.

  ‘There’s a handcart here for you. Let no one else see them.’ Talon turned back to Berren. ‘Well, you might as well help him now.’

  The two of them gingerly loaded the crates. Berren tried to guess how many fire-globes Talon had. A dozen crates and a handful in each one, so perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred? Enough to change a battle, yes, unless the enemy had them too. They set the crates down on a bed of straw, carefully apart from one another. When they were done, Tarn helped himself to a piece of sailcloth and wedged it down on top. Further along the waterfront, a heavily loaded wagon was being forced through the mud by a team of beasts pulling from the front and a cohort of sodden swearing soldiers pushing behind.

  ‘We’ll follow them,’ said Tarn. ‘They’ll go nice and slow and find all the bumps for us,’ but Talon was shaking his head and looking at Berren.