The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3)

by Stephen Deas

  He jumped down from the wall and ran out of the castle into the brightening dawn. Eyes followed him but no one made any move to stop him. He was the Bloody Judge, after all, Talon’s trusted right arm. He sprinted down the steep road that wound around the side of the gorge and into the market district. Half the Thousand Ghosts were ahead of him, screaming and shouting and burning. The air already carried the taint of smoke.

  There was more than one ship anchored out in the bay. He had no way of knowing which one might be hers, but that didn’t matter. If that was where she was, that was where he’d find her, even if he had to search ship by ship. Syannis? Well, no need to look. Once the thief-taker knew what he’d done, he would come.

  32

  A FAIR REWARD

  Berren ran down through the city to the harbour. He had blood on his sword now from some fool who’d taken him for a looter and come at him with a knife. For a moment, through the smoke, he’d thought he’d seen Syannis, face stained with tears and carrying a body. But it couldn’t have been, and when he’d looked again it had been some stranger, lost and confused, carrying a bundle of sticks in a blanket.

  From the waterfront, he knew exactly which ship must be Gelisya’s. A fast sloop lay anchored only a few hundred yards from the shore. It was the ship he’d seen years ago outside the slaver camp where he’d shot Saffran Kuy, and the colours she flew were the same colours that flew from the castle, the colours Talon had worn on the day they’d killed Meridian. Down here, amid the sprawl of the docks, the pall of smoke over the market looked distant and small, the noise from the castle muted and indistinct. A few morning drunks stood grouped together, gawping at it, raising their fingers to test the wind, idly taking bets as to which way it would turn and how the fire might spread, but otherwise the sailors and teamsters and wagoneers were already about their normal business, the air tantalising him with the smells of fish from the smoking houses and hot grease off the braziers.

  He found himself a longboat, gave a couple of pennies to a pair of burly sailors who didn’t seem to have much to do, and they rowed him out to the sloop. He’d imagined he’d have to fight his way on board, yet as the boat drew close a voice from the deck shouted directions and a rope ladder was thrown down. He climbed aboard, hands always floating beside his sword. On the deck a dozen or so king’s guard watched him. He saw Lucama and they exchanged a cautious nod of greeting. A few sailors sat idly around, staring out at the city and the blot of smoke that hung next to the castle. Neither Gelisya nor Syannis was on deck, yet none of the guards seemed surprised that Berren was there.

  ‘Fasha!’ he shouted. ‘Where’s Fasha?’ The shouting made the soldiers stir uneasily. ‘Princess Gelisya’s bonds-maid! Where is she?’ As he moved to search the ship, the scrape of swords half drawn brought him to a halt. ‘Aimes is dead!’ he shouted at them. ‘The king is dead. The king you were supposed to protect.’

  Lucama regarded him with a puzzled look. Then a door to the inside of the ship flew open, and Vallas the soap-maker emerged into the light. Berren bared his teeth. ‘No little child to hide behind this time?’ A dozen guards. He couldn’t take them all, not at once, but he could hold them off for long enough to run a length of steel through a warlock. His hand gripped the hilt of his sword.

  Vallas was smiling at him. Berren had seen a warlock stabbed by a sword once before. Even with the blade sticking right through him it hadn’t been enough. The soap-maker beckoned. ‘Come inside, Master Crown-Taker. If the king is dead, come and claim your reward.’

  ‘Where’s Syannis?’

  ‘He will come. Your slave is here.’

  Berren took a step closer. He drew his sword and held out in front of him, straight at the soap-maker’s face. ‘I still might kill you, warlock.’

  ‘You might as well draw a knife across your slave’s throat then. But try it if you wish.’ He turned his back and Berren him followed into the bowels of the sloop, sword drawn, point inches from the warlock’s skin. The guards made no move to stop him. Vallas led him down almost to the bilges, into a low cargo hold. Crates and sacks and boxes lay scattered about in the gloom. A dozen candles flickered, making a circle of dim light. The air was hazy with their smoke and Berren’s eyes burned. In the middle of the circle Gelisya sat, legs crossed, looking at him. She was holding a knife, the golden-hilted knife, the thief-taker’s knife, the blade that Saffran Kuy had used to cut a piece out of Berren’s soul. Lit up by the candles as she was, Berren could see how much she’d changed. The girl he remembered had become a woman.

  ‘Hello, murderer,’ she said, and even her voice had changed. Where her words had once sounded sharp and petulant, now they were languid and fleshy.

  ‘Aimes is dead,’ Berren said shortly. ‘You have what you wanted. Now give me what I came for.’

  Gelisya smiled at him. ‘No, no. Aimes is not enough and you know that perfectly well.’ She cocked her head. ‘I tried so hard with Syannis. I sent my slave with a love potion to make you do what I wanted, but you said you’d do it anyway, so there it was, left over. After you killed my father, I fed it to Syannis. I whispered my name three times in his ear to see what would happen. I could see how much it pained him to refuse me anything after that, but he still wouldn’t get rid of Aimes. I tried to have him poisoned with the stuff you left for me, the paste you used to make your friend better, but he caught me. I hadn’t realised how clever he was. He couldn’t do anything about it, of course, but he still wouldn’t let me get rid of Aimes. I suppose he’d spent so long thinking that Saffran was going to put his little brother back together one day that he couldn’t let go of the idea. Poor little Sy. Even with Saffran gone, even after he knew that he’d been lied to for all those years, even when he was on his knees, begging and pleading and weeping for me to forgive him, he still wouldn’t let me get rid of Aimes.’

  She made a show of inspecting the knife. ‘Then I found that he had this. Saffran has one just like it. He told me about it once, what the star-knives did, and now one of them was right in front of me. So I made Syannis give his one to me and after that I had to start cutting. Little pieces. I thought, maybe, if I cut the right piece out, he’d do what I wanted.’ Her eyes met Berren’s again. ‘So much cutting and still nothing. Then I thought of you, murderer. I think of you a lot actually. But I thought of you in a new way on my birthday, you see, because I was ready to be a queen, and no one had given me what I wanted. Did you really kill Aimes?’

  Berren nodded. ‘He’s dead.’ His head spun. Syannis deserved every sour twist fate could give him. Berren tried to shake it off, throw it all away, everything Gelisya said she’d done. The two of them deserved each other. But he couldn’t do it, not quite.

  ‘Then I suppose you’ve as good as killed Syannis as well. Aimes was really the last thing holding him together.’ She looked at the knife again. ‘You might as well finish the job.’

  ‘Where’s Fasha?’

  ‘She told you her name? She shouldn’t have. I must have her punished. Would you whip her for me again?’

  Berren snarled at her. ‘Where is she?’ I fed it to Syannis and whispered my name three times in his ear to see what would happen. ‘That potion you sent with her – you’re lying. You’d already fed it to Syannis before Talon ever marched south. While he was in the Pit.’

  Gelisya smiled again. ‘Very good, murderer. Very astute.’

  ‘And that’s why he wouldn’t keep his promise. Because you wouldn’t let him. All these years I’ve hated him and it was you!’

  ‘But you still hate him. Don’t you? Vallas, please show the murderer his slave.’ The soap-maker bared his teeth. Gelisya held the knife up to the light. ‘After everything I’ve taken from him, there’s more of him in here than in his head now. I always know how he’s feeling, and so I know that you’re telling me the truth and that Aimes is dead, because Syannis has found out. I can feel his desolation. I wonder who told him.’ She pouted and gave a little shiver of exhilaration. ‘Pity. I wanted to be
the one to tell him, but his despair is delicious. Come come, Vallas, show the murderer his prize.’

  Berren thought of the guard he’d hacked down. Could that have been Syannis? The last man standing, the one who hadn’t fled. But if so then why hadn’t they found his body?

  The soap-maker disappeared for a moment, vanishing behind a stack of crates. He emerged again dragging a body dressed in white. Fasha! For a moment Berren thought she was dead, and before he knew what he was doing, the blade of his sword was at the soap-maker’s throat. Vallas dropped her. He looked more annoyed than scared.

  ‘Don’t hurt my warlock!’ snapped Gelisya. ‘That would make me angry. I gave her Safansa water to make her sleep. You know what that is. It’s there if you look for it. In the stone. In that little piece of you. I never did want to give it back, you know, but Saffran said I had to. She’s not hurt, not yet. See for yourself.’

  For a moment Berren still stared at her. ‘If you were always Saffran’s, why did you send her after me and ask me to have him killed?’

  Gelisya pouted. ‘Can’t an apprentice have a little falling-out with her master now and then? When she doesn’t get what she wants? You know what that’s like.’ She giggled.

  ‘You’re mad.’ Berren knelt down. Fasha lay on her back, breathing peacefully, fast asleep. He put his sword away and lifted her gently in his arms. ‘And the boy? My son?’

  The soap-maker went back behind the crates and returned holding a boy, a few years old, sleeping like his mother. Gelisya smiled. ‘They won’t wake for hours. We’ve been waiting for you. I knew you’d come, you see, but I didn’t know how long it would take you. The knife tells me things, but not everything. Saffran said you held it yourself, once. Did it talk to you?’

  ‘Yes, it did.’ Berren swung Fasha over his shoulder and picked up the boy with his other arm. ‘You don’t need me for Syannis. You can clearly deal with him yourself.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Now and then when she spoke, there were sing-song traces of the child he remembered. ‘It’s almost better this way. I might even thank you.’

  ‘Aimes was a mistake. An accident.’ He gave Gelisya a nod and made to leave. ‘But you got what you wanted. All debts are paid then.’ Warlocks. Tethis. This little girl-witch. Syannis. He despised them, loathed them, all of them, and the sooner he was away the better. Far, far away.

  ‘No.’

  He stopped and looked over his shoulder. Gelisya was still sitting in her circle of candlelight. She was pointing the knife at him. Her eyes were large and black.

  ‘No, murderer,’ she said. ‘All debts are far from paid. And I still have a tiny little piece of you in here. Which makes me pleased because it means I can do whatever I like!’

  Her fingers tightened around the knife and an unearthly pain split Berren’s head in two, white-hot and unbearable. He sank to his knees. Fasha slipped from his arms.

  ‘You killed my father,’ whispered Gelisya. ‘You murdered him. You shot him in the back of his head. So no, murderer, all debts are not paid. Vallas, Syannis is on his way here. Go up and guide him to us. And tell your brother he can stop skulking and hiding. This one’s all his whenever he wants him.’

  Dimly, Berren saw the soap-maker bow. He’d got it all wrong. She wasn’t their puppet, she was their mistress! ‘Who are you?’ he croaked.

  ‘I am the Princess Gelisya.’ The pain grew stronger. She smiled. ‘Queen Gelisya now, thanks to you. You can call me Your Majesty if you like. For as long as you’re alive.’

  Berren gritted his teeth. ‘You’re not a queen yet.’ Then every nerve inside his head shrieked at once and the world went mercifully black.

  33

  THE CUTTER

  When Berren woke up, the pain was gone and so was his sword. His hands were bound together. He was still in the hold exactly where he’d fallen. Fasha lay on the floor beside him, murmuring softly in her sleep.

  ‘Look!’ said Gelisya.

  Berren craned his head to see her. She was sitting as he remembered, but now there was someone else inside the circle of candles with her. Syannis. Lying curled up with his head on her lap while she stroked his hair. Berren stared, struggling to believe what he was seeing. ‘Sun and moon! What have you done to him?’ He looked terrible. Gaunt and ragged and utterly, utterly lost.

  ‘Look,’ said Gelisya again, ‘look, my little puppy. I woke the murderer up again. What a long sleep! We all went up on deck to see what was happening at the castle and we only just came back. Imagine, you might have woken all alone. Oh!’ She put on a mock frown. ‘Wait! But the knife wouldn’t let you. Not until I say so. Syannis, why don’t you help him to his knees?’

  As though in great pain, Syannis rose. He stepped out of the circle and hauled Berren up. The candles, Berren realised, had nearly burned out.

  ‘You shouldn’t have hurt my beloved,’ he said. ‘We shouldn’t have hurt her. Either of us.’

  Berren stared at him, filled with fury and fear and bloody-minded disbelief. ‘I didn’t touch her!’ he spat. He didn’t recognise this man at all. The thief-taker he’d loved and hated and feared and admired and envied, that man was gone. What was left was a shell.

  ‘We took her father away.’ His face was a mask of anguish.

  Berren tore his eyes away from the thief-taker’s empty face. ‘What have you done to him?’

  Gelisya smiled and showed her teeth. She pointed the knife and Berren felt a slight tingle inside his skull, enough to make him flinch. ‘I told you. A little cut here, a little cut there. Poor Syannis, you so nearly understood, but all the time you thought that Saffran was going to make your little brother better for you, and it was always a lie. Wasn’t it, Saffran?’

  An old familiar shape pushed out from the darkness behind her. Not the soap-maker this time, but Saffran Kuy. ‘You!’ Berren was shaking.

  ‘Hello, little Berren-piece. Do you still wear my crystal nice and tight and close?’

  Berren pulled at the ties around his wrists. ‘I will kill you, warlock. I will.’

  Kuy let out a little cackle. ‘I’ve already seen who will kill me, little Berren-piece. I told you, years ago. Not you.’

  For a moment Gelisya glared. ‘Saffran knows how to make the knives work properly.’ She bared her teeth at Berren. ‘Stupid Aimes sent him away before he showed me, so I had to work it all out for myself.’ She shrugged. ‘It would have been the easiest thing in the world to get rid of you when you were in my Pit, but he just wouldn’t do it, even though he was so, so in love with me!’

  She clapped her hands together and made a face. ‘But now Saffran is back and so are you, and it’s all the way it was supposed to be, and Syannis is my little puppy again, aren’t you, my love? You do what I say. We’ll get it done right this time. No need to be rid of you after all. But we will need to deal with that other brother. I’m afraid you’ll have to do that. He’s going to come here.’

  A coldness spread through Berren’s gut. The anger he’d nursed all these years thinking Syannis had betrayed him, and it hadn’t been Syannis at all . . .

  ‘You do love me, don’t you? Of course you do.’ Gelisya smiled again, then her face hardened. ‘Now kill my servant woman! I don’t like her any more.’

  Berren’s heart nearly stopped. Syannis looked up at Gelisya. ‘Why, my love? What is her crime?’

  ‘Does it matter? Do you have to question everything? I said kill her!’ she snapped. ‘Make it bloody. She told him her name and let him have her. I don’t want her any more and I want him to see her die. Have Vallas weigh her down and throw her into the sea and her little bastard too. Make him watch. But send the guards below decks. I don’t want them to see you do that – they won’t like it. And then . . . No, wait!’

  Her eyes widened and she waved the gold-hafted knife so that it made patterns in the air, then squealed with delight. ‘No, not the bastard. Let Vallas make him into soap! And you, Crown-Taker, you get to watch and then you can be Saffran’s little plaything. He ha
s plans for you, don’t you, Saffy? Had them for a long time. You’re going to be someone that matters. Or what’s left of you, once the Black Moon is inside you. And we all know what you did, murderer.’

  Syannis turned to Berren. He looked desolate. ‘You killed Aimes,’ he said.

  Berren nodded. Syannis’s hands were quivering above his swords and Berren knew how fast he could be. Behind his back, Berren’s hands strained at the ropes that bound them.

  ‘I thought you were him,’ Syannis said. His voice was slurred. ‘Back at the start, when I found you in Deephaven, I thought you were him. Saffran said he’d put him inside you to keep him safe, and that’s why you looked so alike. But you weren’t. You were a nothing, a nobody whose face simply looked the same.’ Instead of a sword he drew out another golden knife, exactly the one Berren remembered, the exact twin of the knife Gelisya still held.

  Syannis looked at his knife. His face was an abyss. ‘I thought I needed this to put Aimes back together. That’s all I ever wanted. To make up for wanting him dead.’ He shoved Berren back, knocking him to the floor, and then he turned away and faced Gelisya again. ‘And now, finally, he is,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she cooed. ‘And I know how much Aimes meant to you. I know your pain.’ She gripped her knife. ‘I feel it, beloved.’

  ‘Dead and gone.’

  Gelisya’s face turned petulant. She waved her knife at Berren. ‘Yes, and he killed him! And you were there, right there, and you didn’t stop it. You failed! Now make him suffer for it!’

  ‘He killed Aimes. And you told him to.’ He took a step forward and then shuddered to a halt as Gelisya shifted the point of the knife and squeezed.

  ‘Kill my slave!’ she hissed. ‘Kill her or you will never touch me again!’