Stephen Deas - The Thief-Takers Apprentice

‘Thief-taker king, is it?’ laughed the Bloody Dag. ‘I don’t see no ladies’ gown on yer head. You cross the dirty daughter with yer thoughts full of slaughter, and all for a pocket full of brewer’s mould? Cheap rum, that’s what you are.’

The mudlark with the club took another step. One more and he’d be close enough to swing it at Master Sy. No one else was moving. Berren still stood frozen. Paralysed.

‘Anyway.’ The Bloody Dag shrugged. He wasn’t moving either, but then he could see what Master Sy couldn’t, could see what was about to happen. ‘So what? So maybe it happens you’re right. Maybe me and my lads have been slipping across the daughter and helping ourselves to a few trinkets from your rich friends. But it’s not like they don’t know about it, eh?’

Berren couldn’t think. The club-man’s eyes burned at him, holding him fast.

‘If you’re the wedding-ring of thief-takers, you came to the wrong place. I’m the jack right enough. But just the jack.’

As Berren watched, the mudlark with the club drew a finger slowly across his throat. He didn’t know what to do. Shout a warning? But what? What should he say? Something, and quickly! But it had to be right…

‘Seems to me you should be looking somewhere else. How would me and my lads know which of your salty dips were ripe for plucking, eh?’ The mudlark in front of Berren slowly took the last step he needed. His eyes still didn’t flicker. His spare hand slowly went to the club, poised up in the air. The Bloody Dag grinned. He lowered his axe a fraction. ‘Tell you what, thief-taker. You turn around and beggars luck back off to yer Deepie friends, and I’ll tell you who it is. Everyone wins. How’s that sound?’

The thief-taker chuckled. The club lifted a fraction higher. Berren’s whole body started to tingle. His mouth opened, but all the words he could think of piled up into each other at the back of his throat and got stuck. The mudlark’s fingers tightened. Berren closed his eyes. The tingling stopped. With a scream, he launched himself forward, hurling himself at the man with the club. He had no idea what he was doing. Something. He was doing something. Anything. Anything was better than nothing.

The rest seemed to happen so slowly that he was amazed he couldn’t do anything about it. The club swung through the air towards him. He tried to duck out of the way, bending sideways, but the club ducked too. It caught him on the shoulder and clipped the top of his head, and he was flying sideways and not towards the mudlark any more. Except the mudlark’s head was suddenly lifting up off the top of his body in a fountain of blood. Behind him, Master Sy was a blur. The Bloody Dag with his axe was on the move too, with a roar of his own. The axe went up and came down, but by then the thief-taker was three steps to the left and it missed. Berren landed; pain crashed in and the world went dark and started to spin. Something heavy fell on top of him. There was more screaming, far, far away, and then all he could hear was his own heart, thumping away, his head throbbing to every beat. For a moment he thought he was dead, but the pain kept on coming and he could still hear the sound of the sea, lapping at the piles under the hut.

He gritted his teeth and pushed up against the weight that held him down, rolling the dead mudlark off his chest. He sat up and opened his eyes and moaned. The only other people left in the hut were the thief-taker and the Bloody Dag. The Dag was lying on the floor, missing his right hand.

‘Is he…?’ He tried standing up, but his legs didn’t seem to belong to him any more. The pain in his head was blinding. When he touched his scalp, his fingers came away bloody.

‘He’s passed out.’ Master Sy came and crouched beside Berren and poked at the wound on his head. Berren flinched away. ‘Head wound. Seen a few of those in my time. Not too bad as they go. You’re going to have a lump and a headache for a few days.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, sometimes people just die for no good reason over a thump on the head. But then if you were worried about that sort of thing you wouldn’t have hidden in a boat last night, instead of sitting on the waterfront in the sunset with a pretty young girl beside you.’ He pulled Berren to his feet. ‘Come on, lad. You did good. We’ll get Garrent to take a look at that when we get back. In the meantime, if you think you’re going to be sick, try to make sure it’s not all over me.’

Berren barely remembered the return to Deephaven. Master Sy found another boat from somewhere, a tiny little rowing boat barely big enough for the three of them. Justicar Kol’s men, it seemed, would be fending for themselves. As far as Berren could see, that wasn’t going to be a problem for them.

At some point the Bloody Dag woke up. He screamed and screamed at Master Sy, making threats that Berren could hardly understand. And then later, when the threats didn’t work, then came the pleading, the begging, the whining. Nothing made any difference to the thief-taker. Nor much to Berren, who lay curled up in a ball with his eyes tightly shut, moaning and whimpering at the pain in his head. At some point they must have arrived at the docks. There were bumps and jolts and screaming while someone seemed to drive nails into his skull. Then a big black hole of noise swallowed him up. For some reason, his dreams were of the same thing, over and over again. The moon-temple hall, with its column of stone in black and silver and its broken altar to a broken god…

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor, staring at a roof that he knew like his own hands. His roof, over his floor, in his room, in the thief-taker’s house. Lying still, flat on his back, staring into space. From downstairs, he could hear voices.

He shifted and groaned. The voices stopped. He heard feet running up the stairs and then Master Sy was looking down at him, with Teacher Garrent beside him. Garrent crouched beside him.

‘How do you feel?’

Behind the priest, Master Sy only looked impatient. There were still noises from downstairs, too. Someone else. Tentatively, he touched his fingers to his scalp. There was a bruise there all right, a tender lump, a scab but no blood. No open wound. Mostly what he felt was… hungry.

‘The worst is gone, Berren,’ said Garrent gently. ‘There’s a young fellow from the City of Spires. Tigraleff. Been learning our ways and he has a good touch for healing. I managed to get him to have a look at you.’

‘You’ve been asleep for three days,’ grumbled the thief-taker. ‘If you’re well again, we’ve got work to do.’

‘Syannis!’

‘What?’

They both stopped and looked guiltily at Berren. ‘You rest, young master Berren,’ soothed the priest.

Master Sy nodded sharply. ‘Don’t rest for too long. I’m going to the docks tonight. You can stay here and roll about in your nice warm blankets for another day or so or you can come and be about some thief-taking again.’ He leaned closer. ‘Lilissa will be there too.’

‘Syannis!’

The thief-taker shrugged. He let himself be dragged outside, but closing the flimsy door behind them didn’t make either of them less noisy as they argued. Berren couldn’t make out all the words, but he could make out some: Something about him and the Justicar and mudlarks and the Bloody Dag and the docks. Something about Lilissa; then something about letters and teaching Berren to read and write and how Teacher Garrent didn’t want to do it until Berren was ready and how the thief-taker didn’t give two hoots what Teacher Garrent thought, actually, and in fact he’d already paid the solar monastery down in the Armourers’ Quarter by Deephaven Fort to take him in for as long as it took. The voices faded as the thief-taker and the priest creaked away down the stairs, until Berren heard them again, through the window now, out in the yard, making their farewells. He shuddered. Letters? Again? The horror!