Stephen Deas - Warlock's shadow

With that, she turned and almost ran out of the door.

Yes , he thought. I will. But I’m coming back. I promise. I will find a way .

He stood, frozen to the spot for a time with a head so full that he couldn’t think. Outside, as he walked across the empty practice yard, he felt a lightness on his shoulders and a spring in his step. He’d go to Justicar Kol, that’s what he’d do. They’d go to the Emperor’s Docks while it was still light with a company of the Emperor’s men. Kol could take Radek away and Berren could sit there and wait for dark. That’s when Master Sy would come, and then he’d tell the thief-taker everything and no one would get murdered and just maybe they wouldn’t have flee the city and he’d get to come back to the temple for the last week before the Festival of Flames ended and Tasahre sailed away, and that was enough time that anything could happen, right?

The thought of his hand on Tasahre’s cheek made him shiver as he walked past the temple guard, out through the gates. Even so early in the morning, the city was getting ready for the summer festival. The days were at their longest, the nights hot and humid and short. He crossed Deephaven Square, still quiet at this hour, and went down the Avenue of the Sun to Four Winds Square which was anything but. He smiled to himself. It seemed like almost forever since he’d been out in the city crowds. They felt like an old and loved shirt, easily slipped on and immediately comfortable. For no better reason than he could, he made a game of it, pretending there was a whole militia gang after him. He zigged and zagged his way around the square. Everything felt so right today.

He crossed in front of the courthouse and turned down the street that ran beside it, past the fountain and into The Eight. He stood on the threshold and savoured the familiar smells — good strong beer, pipeweed, damp wood, earth and the ivy. For a moment he felt a pang of sadness. The Eight was a familiar place. Now he was here, he missed it. It had always felt safe.

It was also empty. Thief-takers, he reminded himself, were night people and it wasn’t even mid-morning. Although it was early enough that some of them might not have gone to bed yet …

He breathed a sigh of exasperation. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing. If Kol was looking for the thief-taker then there’d be gold on his head by now and there might be a crown on Berren’s as well. Finding the justicar was one thing, but running into one of the thief-takers he barely knew, maybe that was another. He tried to think. He had no idea at all where Justicar Kol lived and the courts, where he might have asked, were closed on Abyss-Day. He wandered aimlessly down through the backside of the Courts District, skirting the edge of the Maze until he reached the sea-docks, right down the end by the Reeper Gate where the harbour-masters lived beside their House of Records. For a while he lost himself among the crowds there. He made his way to the harbour wall, to all the little jetties stuck out into the water and sat for a while, watching the boats going back and forth to the ships out in the bay. He bought himself a bun stuffed with pickled fish, the sort that he and Master Sy used to eat together when they came down to the docks, then slipped inside a warehouse when the guards weren’t looking, climbed up to the top, out through the open windows and onto the roof. It was barely mid-morning and now he had to wait for dusk and the Night of the Dead and the start to the Festival of Flames before Master Sy would come. He settled back to eat his bun and doze a little in the warm summer sun, fingering the token around his neck. One day. One day, that was where he was going. If they had to flee Deephaven, at least they had a place to go, up the river to Varr. There could be rewards for what they’d done, if he had the right of it.

There had to be some way, didn’t there? Some way to take Tasahre with him? He mulled the thought over, looking at it from every way he could imagine, until suddenly the middle of the morning had become the early afternoon and he was stiff from sleeping too long on the hard uneven roof.

He yawned and stretched and eased himself back into the warehouse and down to the docks again, slipping past the half-drunk sentries as easily as though they were statues. On the Day of the Dead before the Festival of Flames, no one in Deephaven was going anywhere in a hurry. Even the constant stream of wagons between the river and the sea, the pulse of the city, had stopped. The air was already rank with sweat and smoke and sour cheap wine, filled with raucous shouts and the occasional scream as someone accidentally set themselves on fire. Past the entrance to the Avenue of Emperors Berren pushed his way onwards, up the Kingsway and down the other side of The Peak. In time, the ground under his feet changed into the worn hard stone of the Old Fort Road. The jetties and the boats and the hustle and bustle they brought with them gave way to jagged stone. The crowds shrank to scattered clumps of revellers, mostly drunks who’d started the day far too early. Further along the shore, right at the far end of the estuary, stood Deephaven Fort. The city had had a navy once, Master Sy said. A small fleet that had guarded the mouth of the river, there to stop the Taiytakei slave-galleys and the sun-king’s war-galleons from sailing the river towards Varr. Batteries of light ballistae and stone-throwers had once lined the shore. The ships and most of the stone-throwers were gone now — the sun-king might have been a threat a hundred years ago, but Aria had grown vast and almost immeasurably powerful. The Emperor had sorcerers now.

The fort was still there though, still filled with the Emperor’s soldiers. Around it the Armourer’s District had grown. Toolmakers Square. Sword Street. The infamous Forge Tavern. Every other alley was a this-smith or a that-smith. Hammersmiths’ Passage was the one he wanted, the one that led to the Emperor’s Docks, otherwise no different from any of the rest. It wasn’t a part of the city that Berren knew well, and he had no idea whether anyone still made hammers here, or swords or shields or anything else for that matter, or whether they’d all gone away with the stone-throwers and the ballistae. No one used the Emperor’s Docks any more; hardly anyone in the wider city even knew they were there, but they were: tiny, exposed, but the one place in Deephaven where a tall ship could anchor right up against the land if it didn’t mind taking its chances with the winds and the tides and the rocks of the Blue Cliffs.

Old instincts forged in the rough streets of Shipwrights’ guided him off the Old Fort Road and into the side streets. They were wide here, broad enough for the carts that used to carry charcoal and ore from the docks to the smithies. The river brought steel now, forged somewhere far to the north, and the streets were quiet and empty. Militia gangs kept order in most districts, but as with The Peak, the Overlord took a more direct hand in this part of the city.

He was still a good few streets from the docks when he spotted the first of the Emperor’s soldiers, distinct in their pale silver shirts and flaming eagle crests. They were heading the same way as he was, carrying bundles of festival torches. Berren flitted back across Old Fort Street, never quite letting the soldiers out of sight but never getting any closer than needed. They crossed the wide open space of Royal Parade, the old city’s version of the Avenue of Emperors, and reached the Fort, on the river side of Toolmakers’ Square.

Three more soldiers came the other way, broadswords jangling at their sides. The two groups stopped outside the district courthouse, laughing and joking together. The smell of beer wafted around them as Berren walked past, and then he was there: Hammersmith’s Passage. He turned into its shadows. The cobbles sloped steeply down towards the river. His skin prickled. He was close. Master Sy would come, sooner or later.