Stephen Deas: The Thief-Taker's Blade

The knife. It was his. Wanted to be his. A treasure. Something that could buy him anything. Buy him his way home. Buy him an army. The justicar would take it if he knew. Slowly, out of sight where none could see, he slipped the knife away inside his coat.

“Sunfire,” he lied. “Kakrim's sunfire. That's what did it.”

They burned the ship before they left. Kol made some suggestion about looking in the hold to see whether the Taiytakei had left anything worth taking, but even he sounded half-hearted. No one even bothered to answer. The witch-breaker waited on the deck until the last of the thief-takers had scaled the ropes down to the waiting longboat. None of them saw what he did or how, but the ship was an inferno before they were halfway to the dockside. It sank into the harbour as they stood on the waterfront and watched.

“Best this way, I suppose,” grumbled the Justicar. He had his charts, the precious charts, taken from Fennis. The rest of them, well, they had nothing at all except the promise of a golden emperor to come.

Save Syannis, who had his knife. The idea of sticking it into the Justicar there and then crossed his mind. He was sure that none of the others would object.

“Look,” said Kol, as they watched the last of the Taiytakei ship slip below the water. “None of us knew what was out there. How was I to know?”

Sunrise wasn't far off. They'd caused enough trouble already. Out in the harbour, every ship was awake, watchmen on the lookout for drifting wreckage. There must have been plenty enough people ashore who'd heard the demon screams, gone to the windows and watched the ship burn.

“What we could do,” growled Kasmin, “is weigh you down with lead and drop you in the water where it sank. Then you could rummage around down there for as much treasure as you like.”

Kol said nothing. After a bit, he turned and left.

“Kakrim was his friend too. As much as our Justicar has any,” said the witch-breaker softly. “He'll pay you what he promised. I don't think you need worry about that.” And he left too. Fennis followed. Syannis and Kasmin were left alone.

“We don't want to be here when the sun comes up,” muttered Syannis. “Don't want anyone knowing we had anything to do with this. I'm going to bed.”

Kasmin sniffed. “I need a drink,” he said.

“You need rest, old bones.”

“No, my prince, I need a drink. You go. I'll find you in the Four Horses later.”

Syannis grunted. Kasmin walked away. He'd come back in the middle of the day, drunk as a lord, fall asleep, snore, eat for a small army and then start drinking again in the evening. More and more that was the way of it.

The thief-taker watched him go. Then he stared at the sea a while longer. The ships and the water tugged at him. Called him back to his home.

One day.

He turned to go. And there was that smell again. The smell of the dead. The smell he'd come to know, back in the old country, before he'd been forced to flee. The scent he thought he'd never smell again until he came here, and found he was by no means the first Tethis refugee to wash up in Deephaven. He didn't need to turn around. He knew who was there.

“Hello Kuy.”

“Hello Syannis.”

They stood together in silence, the thief-taker and the shadow-mage, side by side.

“You found something,” said the magician, after a while. “You brought something back.”

Syannis nodded.

“No good will come of keeping it.”

“Worth a bit though.”

“More than you can imagine.”

“Enough to buy a ship and an army of mercenaries? Enough to buy my kingdom back?”

“More even than that.”

They stood together a while longer. Long enough. Syannis turned. “Then it's mine, Kuy. You can't have it.”

But the magician had gone.

Time did what time was wont to do. Syannis and Kasmin drifted apart. Neither of them could have said why. The dreams, maybe. The nightmares that came to plague them both after their night on the demon-ship. But then Kasmin had had nightmares for years. Woke up screaming at least once every week, haunted by the faces of the wife and son he would never see again. Syannis, he dreamed of a face, of a boy he'd almost forgotten. Of a father, a family, a home. Of watching it all burn. It was the strangest thing. Half the time he seemed to be dreaming of the past, the other half of the future, yet the faces, the places, they were always the same.

Or maybe they'd simply been drifting for a long time, Kasmin one way, himself another, Kasmin trying ever harder to forget, Syannis gripping the past like vice. Maybe that was all there was to it. The Four Horses didn't want a pair of thief-takers living under its roof, and maybe that was the spur that pushed them each to go their own way. Kasmin the thief-taker only existed because of Syannis the thief-taker, because once long ago, Kasmin the soldier had taken an oath to serve Syannis the prince. Both of those people were long gone. For a week they took a room together in a tavern near the market. When the week was up, Syannis quietly moved away, to a place in the Courthouse District. Kasmin said he'd follow and then he never did. They saw each other every day for a time, met up each evening to share an ale and toast the constant master and the fickle one, the sun and the moon. With each week, Kasmin drank more and more, became morose and broody. Syannis found other things to do. Other reasons that kept him away. There were thieves to be caught, after all, and he had determined he would be the best taker in the city, the one Kol would call upon first, no matter what. It wasn't quite being a prince, but it would have to do.

Kol, for his part, honoured his promise. The thief-takers met again in The Eight, seemingly by chance a few days after the curse-ship had sunk, and there he was. He gave them what he owed them and a little more, although the little more was measured in something other than gold. He gave them understanding. He gave them the ship's log-book, written in a neat and tidy hand. Written by someone who'd learned their letters near the kingdoms that Syannis and Kasmin had called home, although Syannis kept that observation quietly to himself. So they learned of the ship's last month at sea, but the last page was missing, torn out. Whatever the origins of the strange casket, no one had thought to write them down, the two gold-handled knives were never even mentioned, and by the end, none of them were any the wiser.

“Curse-ship,” grumbled master Fennis, and that was all any of them had to say.

Summer turned to winter. Not the harsh cold winters that Syannis had known as he grew up, but the mild Deephaven winters, cool but not bitter, breezy but with no storms. Kasmin moved away from the market — or possibly he we thrown out — and into The Maze somewhere. He fell back in with his old running-mates, the dockside gangs where Syannis had found him, a hired sword for some thief-lord that one day someone like Syannis would take down. An ageing drunken snuffer in a city already filled with far to many men like that to care. Syannis didn't even know until weeks and months had passed. Once he did, he made a point of trekking down to The Maze once a twelvenight, every other Tower-day. Sometimes Kasmin wasn't there. Mostly he was, drunk, hungover. Broke.

The Leveller was the first thing Syannis saw go, Kasmin's great crossbow, sold to pay for drink. One by one, other pieces of him vanished in its wake.

“I bought you something old bones,” he said to Kasmin, as they sat in the aftermath of the mid-winter festival, nursing their heads together.

“Got everything I need right here.” Kasmin grinned and held up a bottle. He put it to his mouth and tipped it back. Wine spilled over his chin and ran down his neck. He looked tired. Worn and spent, the way he'd looked on the day Syannis had first found him sprawled across a Deephaven street.