Stephen Deas: The Thief-Takers Apprentice

This time Berren nodded. He knew the name, although what he’d seen had been a foetid stinking mass of standing water close to the Great North Road and Pelean’s Gate. The south end of it ran off into the ground somewhere, he knew that. The north end just stopped. You could tell the people who lived next to it from their smell, even worse than the rest of the city. He wrinkled his nose at the memory.

‘Yes. Doesn’t seem much now, but I remember it choked with bodies. It used to go all the way from Pelean’s Gate down to the river.’ The priest laughed again. ‘You won’t remember that. Got covered with so many bridges during the siege that afterwards people just built on top of it. Canal’s still there though, underneath the streets and alleys. They say that if you have a good enough nose, you can follow its course from the smell.’ The priest winked. ‘Others might say that the smell is how you know you’re in the Canal District in the first place. The rest of the city past that? Talsin’s Forest? That’s what was really there. A whole forest chopped down and turned to mud by Talsin’s army. Look at it now…’ The old priest chuckled and shook his head. ‘What do you care, eh? You’re young. You don’t remember any of this. You come from up there, though. Somewhere up there. Somewhere down the wrong end of Reeper Hill and Shipwrights, I’m guessing.’

For a moment, Berren looked up, startled. How does he know? But that was easy. Master Sy could have told him days ago. He sighed and stifled a yawn.

‘Well, can’t see much of that from here. Pelean’s Gate and a bit of the hill behind it. Look the other way though. Down to the river and the Rich Docks. See where the gulls are circling right by the River Gate?’

Berren nodded. Right at the end of the docks, it must have been.

The priest’s voice dropped and his tone darkened. ‘Watch out for that house, young master Berren. A dark thing lives there and he knows your master. Keep away if you can.’ He grunted, and then gestured out across the river. ‘Now see the houses over there on the other bank?’ Berren peered in the direction the priest was pointing, over the top of the Rich Docks to the far side of the estuary. He could see something there, perhaps. A line on the other side of the water. If he was honest, his mind was still set on the towers and which was the tallest. He nodded, not sure what he was looking at or why he should care.

‘The waters of the Arr are deep on this side of the river and that’s why we have the Rich Docks where we do. On the south side it’s a different matter. There are miles of mudflats and that’s where the mudlarks live in wooden shacks built on stilts in the mud. The city would like to be rid of them. They tried once.’ He gave Berren a long hard look. ‘I imagine that would have been a couple of years before you were born. Didn’t work, but the trying changed the world too. Now the city puts up with them. Just about.’

Berren tried to keep looking at the river and the dull expanse of flat nothing that the priest was talking about. His eyes kept darting back up towards The Peak, though. For a moment, Berren felt immensely stupid. A couple of weeks ago, he’d gone to an execution and seen Master Sy given a purse of ten golden emperors and he’d been in awe. He was in the wrong place. That was where he wanted to be. In among those towers, up there on The Peak…

‘Am I boring you, son?’

Berren started, wrenched back to the mundane world of an old priest and a thief-taker. From where he was, it was hard to see which tower was the tallest. As soon as he thought he could get away with it, he turned to look at them properly.

‘Which one is the Overlord’s tower?’

The old priest gave a long sigh. ‘Here I am, trying to tell you about the people who are the poorest in our little world so you might pity them and help them, and all you care for is who are the richest and the most powerful so that you can envy and resent them.’ He gently shook his head. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Your master came here to me eight years ago, almost fresh off his ship. No money, no nothing except a belly full of rage, a head full of ambition and a heart full of…’ He frowned and then he looked at Syannis. ‘Yes. Well. He came to the temple and I brought him up here and he sat on the edge with me, just like you, and he asked me the exact same thing. All that ambition.’ He glanced back over his shoulder towards Master Sy. ‘Hasn’t really gone away, has it? And what about the rage?’

The thief-taker didn’t flinch. ‘Don’t lecture me, old man. You know what I’d lost when I came here. And when I said I brought the boy here to have an education, history was not foremost in my mind.’ Berren couldn’t help but think of the alley and the men he’d seen the thief-taker kill there. The memory made his heart trip along faster for a few beats.

‘Do you still go down to the sea-docks every day?’

Syannis didn’t answer, but the priest obviously saw something in his face. ‘Still looking in case he comes?’ He shook his head. ‘Then you’re going to teach this one all the wrong things.’ The priest looked sad. ‘You have a young man here to guide. Let it go. If you don’t, you’ll spoil him.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

Old men talking about the past. Berren had heard plenty of that in his few years. ‘So which one is the Overlord’s tower?’ he asked again, loudly. Master Sy glared at him but the priest laughed.

‘Do you see the one capped with gold? That’s the solar temple up on The Peak. The Overlord’s Palace is next to it. His tower is the one that looks like it has wings.’

From where Berren was sitting some of the other towers looked taller. There were a lot of them, all clustered together on The Peak. The Overlord’s didn’t seem that special at all. He stuck out his bottom lip. ‘I like the gold one better.’

The priest chuckled. ‘Well don’t say that to the Overlord.’

‘Real gold on the top of that tower,’ murmured the thief-taker. He took a deep breath and put on a heavy frown. ‘Teacher, I brought the boy here because I was thinking that he should learn his letters.’

‘Does he want to?’

‘I think he should.’

The priest turned to Berren. ‘Do you want to learn to read and write?’

Berren shrugged. Not really was the honest answer, but obviously not the right one. ‘I want to learn to fight,’ he said. He was staring at the towers again.

‘Oh, well, you’ve already got the right man for that.’ The old priest shook his head at Master Sy. ‘If he doesn’t want to learn, I won’t try to teach him. Bring him back when it’s something he wants.’

There were a lot of towers, all clustered together, too many to count. They were magnificent gleaming things that sucked him in with their grandeur. Towers topped with ramparts, towers topped with golden domes, with giant carved crowns; or with dragons or other beasts that Berren couldn’t name. Whenever he stopped paying attention to the priest and Master Sy, there they were, calling him.

Master Sy’s frown grew deeper. ‘Teacher…’

‘No point in trying to teach a boy who’s nearly a man something he doesn’t want to learn. Show him why he should want it.’ The priest clapped Berren on the shoulder and rose unsteadily. ‘Look at you. I can see where your mind is right enough. You come back when you’re ready.’

Berren sighed. He’d been away from Master Hatchet for two weeks. And now he was standing on the top of the city, dreaming of things he could never have, of things he’d never even dreamt he could have back when he’d spent his days picking dung off the streets. The men who built and lived in those towers probably each had enough gold to sink a ship. None of them had started as an orphan boy from Shipwrights.