Stephen Deas - Warlock's shadow

‘I’m not a boy any more, master.’

‘Maybe not, Berren. When there’s more than watching and waiting to be done, you can be a part of it. But for now there isn’t, so you stick with your sword-monks. Was you that tipped him over the edge so we couldn’t ask him any questions, you just remember that too.’

Berren finished his loaf of bread and wandered back to the kitchen looking for more. He came back with a couple of apples. They were soft and mushy and not crunchy at all. He made a face.

‘Late harvest from up north.’ The thief-taker shrugged. ‘They’ve been kept half-frozen in an outhouse for the winter and then sat on a wagon for a week and a ship for another. They’re not exactly fresh, but then what do you expect for apples in spring? Was thinking of boiling them up and making a paste but I suppose I’ll not bother now.’ He watched as Berren devoured the apples, core and all, and then sat, looking around the room as if searching for more. ‘You’re not still hungry are you?’ He shook his head. ‘They not feed you at the temple?’

‘Not much, no.’

The thief-taker got up. He winced as he put weight on his knee. ‘Here, then.’ He threw his purse to Berren. ‘Go feed yourself. There’s not much in it. I’m off to bed. Up all night watching the Two Cranes. Don’t forget to go and get water.’

A squeak of protest got as far as Berren’s mouth. He swallowed it back down and looked into the purse instead. A handful of pennies and that was all, not even a single crown. And he’d been looking forward to spending the day with his master, wandering the city, telling him all about the monks in the temple and asking questions, lots and lots of questions.

‘Said there wasn’t much.’

‘Master?’

‘Lad?’

‘I was thinking …’ How to ask without sounding like an idiot?

‘Usually a good way to start that, yes.’

‘Well, as well as the man with the bow, I was thinking about the assassin who wanted to kill Prince Sharda.’

The thief-taker shook his head. ‘Drop it, lad. It’s not a place you want to go.’

‘But-!’

‘No, no.’ Master Sy waved his hands dismissively. ‘I know that look on your face. That’s the hunter’s eye, that is. You’ve got scent of something and now you want to track it down. You’re thinking we should go after whoever it was, right?’

‘Well …’

‘Thought so. The answer’s no, it’s a bad idea and we’re not going anywhere near it. Another time I might humour you for something to do, but I’ve got my business to attend to and you’re not to go near that one on your own.’

‘But-!’

Master Sy sat down again. ‘Think, lad! First thing, there’s no money in it. If you found out who it was, then what? Who’s going to pay you for that?’

‘The Justicar?’

The thief-taker roared with laughter. ‘Kol? Why? It’s thieves he’s after, anyone who pricks the skin of the merchant guilds enough for them to notice, that’s all. He’s theirs. The only time he’ll care about a murder is when it’s one of those fat pigs we saw in the Golden Cup.’ The thief-taker leaned towards Berren. ‘I’ll tell you who’d pay you for that: whoever did it. They’d pay you handsomely to keep you quiet and then they’d have you killed. What sort of person, do you think, tries to have an imperial prince murdered?’

Berren’s eyes lit up. ‘Someone in the temple! Everyone knows the priests there don’t like the Emperor and his house one little bit. And it was the night the sword-monks came. What if it was one of them?’

‘No! Think , boy! If there’s one thing I’ve tried to teach you, it’s that you look for the money. Never mind who it was you whacked on the nose — although whether you think you’d ever manage to do that to a sword-monk is maybe something you should ponder while you’re training with them — whose purse were they taking, that’s the question! Some priest?’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘There’s Talsin’s heirs, they’re none too pleased with who’s on the throne. Maybe the Overlord himself. You think the sort of man who pays a snuffer to murder a prince is going to let an urchin from Shipwrights’ bring him down? And then yes, there’s the assassin himself. He killed two men. Slit their throats. He’s a cold snuffer, that one. Did you know … no, how would you? The soldiers at the Watchman’s Arms were poisoned, quite a few of them. Not a killing poison, but a sleeping draught to make them dopey, and that means that whoever he was, he was in the Arms earlier that night. Chances are it was one of the prince’s own men who did it. You going to go to Varr to look for him? Drop it, Berren. You stopped a murder, you got your reward. Leave it at that.’

Berren was shaking his head. ‘The soldiers he had were all big. The man I saw was our sort of size.’

Master Sy groaned. ‘ Leave it, Berren. You chase after that snuffer, he’ll kill you the moment he gets a sniff of you. Stick to your lessons and keep your head down.’ Master Sy stood up once more. ‘Live to fight another day, eh? Just this once.’ He creaked his way up the stairs and went to his room and closed the door. Before long, the house shook softly with his snoring.

Live to fight another day? For what? Berren mulled that one over. Like Master Sy always said: I’m not a thief-taker for Kol’s silver, I’m a thief-taker because I don’t like thieves .

He got up and headed off for The Eight. On his way out, he thumbed his nose at the thief-taker’s snores.

He went looking for the justicar, but it turned out that Kol wasn’t in The Eight that day and Berren eventually went back to the temple at dawn on Sun-Day with no idea where else to go. For the rest of that week he spent his days with Tasahre, watching the other monks, singling them out one by one, reading how they moved, how they fought, and, where he could, what they looked like from behind leaping up a wall. They were the right build, short and lithe southerners. Some of them went missing now and then — he saw that now. He asked, but Tasahre shook her head. That was business of the order and not his concern, she told him, and so he didn’t bother asking the others; still, as the week drew on, he watched. Different monks disappeared each day, usually just one or two of them but sometimes half a dozen. They were always missing in the morning and at midday but back for the afternoon. When he approached any of them, they simply walked away. None of them would talk to him, not even a word of greeting. The only time he got close to most of them was late in the afternoon in the fighting circle, and then only for as long as it took for them to bash him on the head with the flat of a sword, bow and walk away.

Whoever had been in the scent garden, they’d gone away with a bloodied nose. He would have remembered if one of the monks had had a swollen face, wouldn’t he? And Master Sy was right, he couldn’t imagine ever catching one of them so off-guard. The black-powder smell bothered him too. Did monks use black powder? He hadn’t seen any. Maybe he was wrong and it had been someone else, but that thought only made him even more determined. The Eight was on his way home from the temple, near enough. Kol was never there but he found Master Fennis and Master Velgian and asked them both to put a word in for him.

The days passed. The city fell into the madness of the Spring Festival — even Master Sy took a few nights off from watching the Two Cranes or whatever it was he did and took Berren down to the Abyss-Day celebrations at the docks — and then blearily nursed its hangover. The month of Rebirth gave way to the month of Floods and the river began to swell, living up to the name of the season hundreds of miles away around the City of Spires. Berren might have slowly forgotten his assassin, except that every day as he practised with Tasahre, he kept seeing in her shape a flicker of the silhouette he’d seen leaping the wall of the Watchman’s Arms.