Stephen Deas - Warlock's shadow

He ought to run. He could slip back out to the roof and be away. No one would possibly hear him now. Yet he couldn’t move. He could barely even breathe.

As suddenly as it had started, the chaos from below came to an end. There was no more crashing, no more shouting. The flickering light of a candle appeared.

‘Men will come now,’ breathed the whispering voice. ‘Soon and fast.’

‘All right, Kuy,’ said Master Sy. ‘We’ll do it your way.’

Berren heard sobbing.

‘You see, in the end, you fat feeble prick, I don’t care why you were here. I don’t care why you came. I don’t care what you’ve got in your ship dressed up as crates of black tea. I don’t care who or what or why or what war you’re trying to start and I don’t care what you think you could offer me to leave you be. You took my life, you murdering shit.’

The Headsman’s voice, when he spoke, was tight with pain. ‘A pox on you, bastard! You say you’re a godly man and you serve a thing like that …’

‘I serve my kingdom,’ answered the thief-taker evenly. He punched the Headsman in the face, knocking him out of Berren’s view. The Headsman lapsed into sobbing whines. Berren couldn’t see either of their faces.

‘I’ll give you anything I have.’

‘No, no. Gods! It’s too late for that . All you have that I want is your silence. I want you to disappear. I want you to end .’

‘Quickly, Syannis!’ hissed the witch-doctor from the House of Cats and Gulls.

‘I know about Radek! He’s coming! He’s …’

The Headsman said no more. His last sound was a punctured sigh. Then there came a heavy thud. Try as he might, Berren couldn’t find a crack in the floor wide enough to let him see what had happened.

‘I know, I know,’ said Master Sy softly. ‘He’s been looking for me for a long time, and now word is on its way to him that I’m here. We’ll hear all about it later, won’t we now.’ Wet fleshy sounds floated up through the floor, mixed with the sort of crunching Berren was used to hearing from dogs when they were chewing on a bone. Very slowly, he eased himself to where there was a slightly bigger crack in the floor.

Master Sy was hacking through the Headsman’s neck with his sword.

Berren’s heart nearly flew out of his chest. He rolled away and stared at the ceiling and clamped a hand over his mouth, partly to stop himself from gasping and partly to stop himself from being sick. He lay very still, wishing he was invisible. Kasmin had been decent, Master Sy was right enough about that. He’d saved Berren’s life once, back when Jerrin One-Thumb had been about. He’d become something of a gruff-but-kindly uncle and Berren wouldn’t shed a single tear for the man who’d killed him. But still, hacking a man’s head off? Why?

When it was done, Berren thought he heard the thief-taker and the witch-doctor, slipping away. He couldn’t be sure. His ears were still filled with the terrible sound of Master Sy’s sword slicing at the man’s flesh. For a long time he lay where he was, flat on his back, not daring to move. What if Master Sy hadn’t gone anywhere? What if he was simply lurking downstairs in the darkness? What if the witch-doctor was still there, waiting for him?

There were bodies in the room downstairs for sure. He didn’t know how many, but more than one.

No, he needed to move, to get away, and as if to prove it, a gang of snuffers from the Two Cranes burst in, six or seven of them with lanterns from the inn.

‘Holy Kelm!’

‘Khrozus’ Blood!’

He couldn’t know what they were seeing, but he could imagine it. Three dead men and a fourth with his head missing, blood everywhere.

‘Sun and Moon!’

‘Well don’t just stand there, you onion-eyed oaf! Go and get someone!’

‘Who?’

‘Gods! I don’t know! Everyone! Don’t touch anything!’

The snuffers moved back outside. As quietly as he could, Berren tip-toed back to the window. He slipped out and closed the shutters behind him and lay quiet and still on the stable roof. The little yard behind the inn had half a dozen snuffers in it now. He didn’t dare move.

A few seconds later, they found the bodies of the two men who’d been guarding the back gate, the ones Master Sy had paid off to let him in. That was enough. They ran back inside, filling the night with cries of murder and alarm. Berren waited until they were gone, then jumped down into the yard, bolted for the open gate, and fled into the night as fast as he could.

Berren slipped across the city, silent and unseen, back into the temple and crept to his bed. He lay there with his arms wrapped around his head, trying to cast out the sounds so that he could sleep; except, even when he did sleep, they came back in his dreams. That was worse. His imagination provided what his eyes couldn’t. He saw himself watching Master Sy split the Headsman’s head from his shoulders. In his dreams, the Headsman was never quite dead. His tongue lolled, his eyes rolled and strange noises escaped his lips. As his head fell from his neck, some last word guttered from his throat, so bent and broken that Berren couldn’t understand what it was, no matter how many times he heard it. He woke up, sweating, his rough woollen blanket twisted around him. This was his thief-taker master? It seemed like madness. Master Sy was always so calm, always so assured. Never kill unless you have to. If you draw a blade you have already failed .

No, not always so calm. Underneath the surface was a rage like no other. Berren had seen it before. He’d seen more than a dozen men die on the end of his master’s blade, and the thief-taker wasn’t shy to use it once his ire was raised. But Master Sy had never chopped a man’s head off his shoulders before. It had been so … messy, that was the thing. Not a clean single stroke like an executioner, but hacking over and over, like a butcher with a cleaver having at a thick joint of meat. And the blood …

He was late to practice that morning, but once there, he immersed himself in it. He let his muscles do what they did every day, stopped thinking, turned his mind blank and in his head, he walked away from everything. By the end of the day, he’d had more curses and taps from Sterm’s cane than he could count, and Tasahre was giving him the strangest of looks. He thought he might have fought unusually well when they’d sparred.

Why? Why had Master Sy taken the man’s head? A ghoulish trophy? Kasmin was more than just a friend for Master Sy, but still — that wasn’t the thief-taker he knew; no, there had to be a reason for it.

The dreams left him alone that night. The next morning, Tasahre was shaking him awake.

‘A girl monk in with the boy novices?’ he mumbled at her. ‘Whatever will the elder dragon say?’

Tasahre glared at him. ‘Come,’ she hissed. ‘Quickly.’

Outside it was still dark. On the eastern horizon, out across the estuary, the sky was tinged with pink. Today was Abyss-day, the day the old gods pierced a hole through the heart of the world. What did she want with him on Abyss-day? There wasn’t supposed to be any training.

Outside, there were soldiers in the temple. Not just the usual ones in yellow with their sunburst shields but soldiers in the colours of the city Overlord, lots of them, passing yawns between them as though it was some sort of game. The other dragon-monks were there too, still as statues, watching, tense and prickling with hostility. At the open gates, he caught a glimpse of a man dressed in grey robes leaning quietly against the walls, his face hidden beneath a cowl. Grey was the colour of death. He thought he saw the man meet his eye and wag a finger, but then some soldiers passed between them and when they were gone, so was the man in grey; instead Berren saw someone else, almost the last person he’d expected to see, striding across the temple yard with a cadre of soldiers trailing behind him. Justicar Kol. Whatever this was, it wasn’t about a naughty novice who played truant in the night.