Stephen Deas - The King's assassin

The ship drew into the estuary of the river Triere. Low-lying glades and salt marsh crept up out of the water on all sides, distant and barely visible. Ahead, the land rose abruptly into a line of cliffs, a solid wall a hundred feet high except for the wide canyon that the Triere had carved between them. Somewhere beyond lay a city, but Berren saw no sign of it at first, the cliffs obscuring everything beyond them; as the ship fought its way up the river through the mouth of the gorge though, the cliffs widened and then one side of the canyon fell away, curving into the shape of a horseshoe as though a giant hand had reached out from the sky and taken a scoop from the land. The ground inside the horseshoe sloped steadily upwards, away from the river to a far ridge that he could barely see. And here, nestled inside this colossal hollow, was the city of Kalda.

Beside the river the ground was flat; as it rose further from the sea, the streets grew steeper until around the edges of the bowl in which the city lay they were almost sheer. Opposite, the river widened into a lake where other ships pitched and rolled slowly back and forth. There were dozens of them, a hundred perhaps, and his own ship drew among them and threw out its anchor. He stared. Kalda. Home, once, to a man called Radek. The man he’d killed on the last terrible day of his old life.

From the deck where he stood he could see the whole city now, spread out across the fallen slopes. The sheer size reminded him of Deephaven, of standing atop the tower in Teacher Garrent’s moon-temple and looking out across streets and houses stretched out as far as the eye could see. He’d done his best to forget his home, to forget everything about it: the loves he’d found and the fears and the loss. He’d tried to forget the master who’d dragged him out of the slums of Shipwrights’, who’d taught him the art of thief-taking and then killed his first true love; now as that one memory opened the door, the rest came crashing out in a tidal wave of regret. A tear crept down his cheek. Tasahre was dead. Master Sy was likely dead too, hunted to the ends of the world by the sword-monks of Deephaven for what he’d done. They’d both become murderers and now he had nothing left, nothing at all except a remembered pain deep and bitter enough to make him gasp and stagger. Not that anyone paid him any attention.

The Deephaven press-gangs had taken him that very same day. He’d been easy for them, staggering around the old slums of the city in a daze amid the debris of the Festival of Flames. He had no idea what they’d got for selling him — a few crowns, maybe. They’d taken his sword, his boots, his purse, everything that might have been worth anything except the gold token he’d worn around his neck. They’d missed that, hidden under his shirt, but the sailors on his new ship had found it quickly enough and then he’d had nothing. It seemed fitting to wind up as a skag on some ship he barely knew after what he’d done. He’d killed a man he didn’t know, murdered him in cold blood, staved in his skull with a waster — a wooden practice sword. Not that he’d wanted to but he’d had no choice. The warlock Saffran Kuy had ripped out a piece of his soul and made him do it. Compelled him with a terrible power the warlock still possessed even now, if he ever cared to use it.

Maybe he was lucky. In Deephaven, if they’d caught him, he’d have gone to the mines, a slow hard death far worse than being a rigging slave on a ship.

The absurdity made him laugh. Lucky? A week after they’d taken him, when they were far out to sea and days away from any land, the sailors had dragged him to the edge of the deck. He’d been certain they were all set to throw him overboard and watch him drown for the sheer fun of it. They hadn’t, but that was just how life was when you were a ship’s skag. Maybe since then he’d earned a grudging respect simply for still being alive, but even if he had it wasn’t worth much. Yet in all the ports they’d visited since, he’d never once tried to escape. To what? What was the point? Back to what he was before the thief-taker had taken him in, a thief, a cutpurse? What did he have to look forward to? Nothing. A short life, vicious and pointless and a bad end, that was all. Well, he already had that.

He’d lost track of time, sailing across the oceans with only the seasons as his guide. He’d had two winters since he’d left Deephaven and so he supposed it was two years since he’d been taken; but for all the difference that made, it might as well have been one or it might as well have been ten.

The sailors lowered a longboat into the waters of the Triere and began loading it with travel-chests. Berren watched them with a distant interest. The ship’s boatswain wouldn’t let him ashore in a place like this, not where he might run away. So he watched; and as the boat strained its way further upriver and turned towards the city, all his possibilities and all the things that had been taken away from him seemed to go with it. He turned away, unable to bear the sight of land any more, and looked back through the towering mouth of the Triere cliffs at the uncaring sea beyond. The Bitch Queen, the sailors called her. That was his life now. They deserved each other.

He bowed his head and got to work. A ship in port had plenty of jobs that needed doing before it set sail again, and since he was the ship’s skag, the worst of them were his. The longboat was long gone when another ship came by, catching the last wisps of wind that blew along the canyon to take it further up the estuary. It passed close and Berren stopped what he was doing to watch it, as he watched all ships as they passed.

On the deck stood a man.

It was him.

The thief-taker.

The mob had come to watch three men die. Most of them had no idea who the men were. Nor did they particularly care. They’d come down to the Kalda docks for the spectacle, for a bit of blood, for a Sun-Day afternoon of shouting their anger and the riot that would surely follow. They’d come for a bit of a fight, to throw stones at the city officers and guardsmen and speakers. They’d come for the cold rain and the wind of winter, for everything the city had to offer, and that’s what they got.

A man ran through the burgeoning brawls with practised ease. The mob barely noticed he was there. He slipped between the larger fights around him like an eel between a fisherman’s fingers, finding space where none seemed to exist. If anyone had asked him how old he was, he might have said fifteen or he might have said twenty, depending on who was doing the asking. The truth lay somewhere in between. The truth was that he didn’t know and didn’t much care. He was small for a man who wore his first beard on his face and his name was Berren.

He hadn’t come for the executions like everyone else, nor for the rioting mob. A watcher perched on one of the rooftops overlooking the sea and taking an interest in his progress would have seen him pause now and then. With each pause came a climb to higher ground: a wall, a crane, an overturned cart, anywhere high enough to see over the sprawling chaos. The watcher, if he’d stared for long enough, might have seen that through the heaving mass of people, amid the torches and the shouts and the fists and the sticks and, yes, the swords and the knives, Berren was making his way towards the far side of the docks. To a tavern called the Bitch Queen’s Hall, where sailors and sell-swords were wont to gather, those of them that weren’t already out amid the destruction on the dockside.