Stephen Deas - Warlock's shadow

‘Are you sure this is the place you want to be taking me, boy?’ asked Master Sy mildly. Berren knew exactly what he was thinking. There were plenty of places in the Maze where all that waited inside was a good mugging or else a sap round the back of the head and waking up five miles out to sea. Both the gangs and the muggers often sent boys out into the docks to try and lure people in.

The younger boy nodded. ‘Seen him come here, mister.’

The older one held out his hand. ‘Give us a crown then.’

Master Sy smiled at them both. ‘You come inside with us. If it turns out you were telling the truth, you’ll get your crown. If not, well, there might be a crown for me instead when I take you to a sweathouse.’

The older boy paled. The younger one didn’t seem concerned. He shrugged. ‘I seen him come here,’ he said again.

‘Good.’ Master Sy didn’t wait for any more. He pushed open the door and they all reeled as the reek of Moongrass poured out like warm treacle. Fingers of it wrapped themselves around Berren’s head, worming their way inside his skull. He coughed and staggered. Past the door, a dingy hall was filled with tables. The windows were shuttered. Half a dozen scrawny men dressed in little more than rags looked up and stared, all gaunt faces and hollow eyes in the gloomy light of a few cheap candles. None of them moved. Berren wasn’t sure how much they even noticed. They looked, but what did they see? Already he was starting to feel light-headed.

Another man emerged from the gloom as Master Sy stepped inside. This one looked like the others, but he wore a scarf over his face and his eyes had a purpose to them. He looked the thief-taker up and down and then silently held out a hand.

Master Sy shook his head. ‘I’m not here for your smoke.’

The man nodded. The scarf covered his nose and mouth and made his expression hard to decipher. He mumbled something that Berren couldn’t understand. For some reason, the scarf had caught Berren’s eye. There was something about its torn and fraying edges that was immensely fascinating. He wondered what it had been before it was a scarf. A shirt, maybe?

‘No. I’m looking for someone,’ said Master Sy.

The man frowned. He started trying to push them out of the door. Berren put his hand on his waster; to his surprise though, Master Sy let the man lead them back out onto the street. The cool crisp spring air made his skin tingle all over, like a hug of fresh water. He shivered. The city smells had never seemed so rich. Fish. Always fish.

The man carefully closed the door and pulled down his scarf. Berren gasped. The man’s chin and mouth were a mass of scars.

‘People come to Sandor to forget.’ His speech was as broken as his face. ‘Not to look.’

‘Man with an axe tattooed on the top of his arm. Scar on his neck, two on his face. Short black hair. Foreigner. Spee lah thees eh.’ The thief-taker’s accent was so perfect that it startled Berren out of his reverie of smells. Master Sy opened a hand to show a silver crown. The scarred man nodded.

‘More than one like that,’ he mumbled.

‘Doesn’t matter to me. They all came from the same place. Where are they staying? Any of them.’

The scarred man looked hungrily at the silver in the thief-taker’s palm. He hesitated and then his shoulders slumped. He snatched for the coin but Master Sy’s fingers closed before he could take it. The scarred man shrugged. ‘Little Caladir. The Two Cranes.’

Master Sy cocked his head. ‘That’s a way away. Like their Moongrass did they?’

‘They came to sell, not to smoke.’

The thief-taker opened his hand. The coin vanished. The man pulled his scarf back over his face and a cloud of smoke billowed into the street as he opened his door and closed it again. Master Sy tossed another crown to the younger of the two boys. The boy yelped for joy and ran; the older one dithered for a moment, looked at Master Sy, saw he wasn’t going to get anything and gave chase.

‘Should have split it between them,’ muttered Master Sy.

Berren didn’t say anything. He’d been both of those boys. Splitting it wouldn’t make any difference. Sooner or later the older one would catch the younger one and then the crown would be his, and that was simply the way of things. ‘What’s the Two Cranes?’ he asked instead. His head was clearing now, the fuzziness slowly fading. Which was sad, in a way, because the fuzziness had felt nice. That’s what everyone said about a touch of Moongrass. Nice. The trouble started when a touch became a headful and you completely forgot who you were.

‘A place where the sun-king’s sailors stay, the ones who can afford it. The sort of place we might find the Headsman.’

‘So are we going there now?’

The thief-taker glanced up at the sky. Then he shook his head. ‘No. We’re going home and getting you ready for your sword-monk lessons tomorrow.’

Berren stared pointedly at the thief-taker’s leg. ‘All the way back up the Avenue?’

Master Sy winced. ‘All the way, lad. No hurry now. We know where he is and we know he knows we’re here. This needs some thinking.’

Berren gave his master a steady look. Thinking. He was coming to learn what that meant. It meant pacing up and down all day — or rocking back and forth in his chair. It meant shouting at Berren about little things that didn’t really matter. And in the end … in the end …

Master Sy nodded. He smiled and patted his sword-hilt, almost as though he was reading Berren’s mind. ‘Getting dark soon. Press gangs will be about. Don’t want to wake up and find myself a skag on some ship.’

However true that was on the surface, they both knew that in the two years Berren had been Master Sy’s apprentice, the thief-taker hadn’t once shown himself in the least bit bothered by such things. What he meant was that this was his business, and his alone.

And that was all right, because standing out here in the afterglow of a touch of Moongrass, Berren realised he had some business of his own now. That black powder smell he’d picked up from the wagon beside the imperial soldiers in the docks — mix that with a bad dose of rotting fish, and that was the whiff of something sharp he’d sniffed off the assassin in the Watchman’s Rest!

He was going to find out who it was.

The afternoon sun shone on the temple yard, hot and hard like the earth under Berren’s feet. Sweat dripped off his face and spattered around his feet. The other monks hardly seemed troubled at all, either by the heat or by the effort of holding a sword straight out in front of them for hours on end. Their shoulders, Berren decided, must have been made of iron; or else they had some sort of magic that made their swords lighter. They’d been doing this to him for days.

First thing in the morning they went for a simple run, down to the sea-docks and back. The monks took it easy enough down the hill and then sprinted for the entire mile back up again, leaving Berren wheezing and gasping in their wake. As soon as they got back they started jumping. Jumping on the spot, long jumps, high jumps, hurdles and things that Berren couldn’t even begin to work out how to do — backflips, handsprings, things that would have made an acrobat gasp — the monks almost seemed to bounce for fun. Eventually, when his legs had given up, they made him lie down and lift weights instead. The monks lifted each other. The worst of it wasn’t that they were all so much better than he was, it was that none of them said anything. They never spoke a word of praise or disdain, only the bare basic instructions.