Stephen Deas: The Thief-Takers Apprentice

For all the same reasons, it was a terrible place to try and carry something like, say, four large buckets full of water. On the way back he’d have to leave the dockside by the House of Gulls and go straight up the Godsway.

Yeh. The House of Gulls, the one Teacher Garrent had shown him from the top of the moon temple. He knew more now than he had then. A witch-doctor lived there, or at least that’s what the lightermen had said. A potion-maker and a healer who dealt in curses and wishes and could speak with the dead if you brought him some token. Berren wasn’t sure how much of that was true and how much was the usual tales you got from lightermen.

The crowds thinned. The smell he was used to from Shipwrights, the stink of fish, filled the air again. All there was at the end of the Rich Docks were large wooden warehouses. Lots of them and all the same. Past the pillared arch into Godsway, before the River Gate itself, there were a few more. These ones were old and empty.

Almost empty. As he got closer to the River Gate, the smell got worse and worse. At the gate itself it was almost overpowering. He looked up. Gulls circled overhead. He had no idea which house belonged to the witch-doctor, only that it was somewhere here. The ground was slippery between the cobbles, coated in a filthy slime. Something cold in the air made his skin prickle. The smell, the horrible smell… It made him gag. It reminded him of Master Sy’s room, of the stink he’d sniffed when he’d first opened the door to the thief-taker’s house. The soldiers at the gate wore scarves over their faces, covering their mouth and nose. As he passed them, Berren smelled perfume. He hurried on, glad to be away.

Past the River Gate and the Grand Canal bridge then, because only an idiot drew their water from the docks. He quickly skirted around the back of the Poor Docks and reached the edge of the city. Here, past the last of the boats, the river water was clear and didn’t smell overly bad. Further on into Sweetwater, a cluster of little jetties had been built so that the city-folk could take their water without getting covered in mud. Anyone with any sense, or at least any sense of taste or smell, came at least as far as here to take water from the river. Master Hatchet had once told him that the villages in the River District further upstream were forbidden, by order of the Overlord, from throwing their waste into the water, just so that it stayed clean for the rich city-folk. Berren waited patiently, queuing to get onto one of the jetties. There didn’t seem to be many rich city-folk dipping their buckets in the river today. Never were. Rich folk had servants to do that for them.

Or apprentices, he thought, as he filled up his own. It was almost a ritual now, coming out here with Master Sy’s buckets, filling them up and reminding himself that he was the thief-taker’s servant. He’d come to take pride in it.

When he was done, he paused for a while by the river bank. Took a drink, washed his face, tipped a little over the lump on his head to soothe its throbbing. Then he set off back the way he’d come. Usually he went the long way home, working his way through the slums of Talsin’s Forest by the walls until he reached Pelean’s Gate. Then across Market Square and back down Weaver’s Row. It was half as long again as following the river from the docks and there was always a chance of being set upon by one of the gangs that roamed the slums, but it was cheap. The quick way cost money, a penny to go back into the city through the River Gate. On most days, that was a penny saved. But not today. Today he just wanted to get back.

And then what? What if Master Sy was dead? He couldn’t go back to Master Hatchet, that was clear enough. Couldn’t even imagine ever wanting to, either. Cleaning dung off the city streets? Cutting purses, begging, stealing, never knowing whether today was the day they caught you and cut off a finger or maybe worse? No. Not any more.

Tailoring? Weaving? Cloth-making? Leather-working? All good solid trades. Not something to ever make a man rich, but certainly good enough that a man could be sure of having food on the table each night. Not the sort of trades where a man had to worry about snuffers and mudlarks and thieves and pirates and being cursed or poisoned.

Fishmongering?

No, not that either. The thief-taker had opened his eyes. He was Berren, and one day he was going to be great. One day people were going to know his name and they’d shift on their feet and make the sign of the sun and the moon and hope he never came their way. He was going to learn swords, be the greatest swordsman ever. And the best thief-taker too, but that would just be the start. He’d sail away with a band of men and they’d conquer some place somewhere and he’d come back a king. Those were the dreams the thief-taker had given him.

The thoughts made him laugh at himself. Fool’s talk. Anyway, Master Sy wasn’t going to be dead. Most likely he’d be waiting long before Berren got back, angry and impatient as ever.

At the Grand Canal Bridge, he put down the pails of water for a quick rest. As he did, the first drops of rain started spattering around him. He snarled and raised his fist at the sky. That was the city mocking him, that was. Waiting for him to walk all that way and then starting to rain, far earlier than usual. Mocking him for his daft thoughts of sailing away from it.

Around him, people slowed and smiled at the sky. Summer rain that came this early in the afternoon was a treasure, an hour or two of unexpected relief from the heat. And then the rain would go and the clouds would part and the sun would shine and the streets would sweat and swelter like everyone else, right into the evening; and then at night every wall in the city would drip with damp and it would probably rain again.

A waft of stinking air rose up from the waters of the canal. A reeking smell of sewage that made him screw up his face in disgust. Like the mudlarks from The Maze the night before, only a lot worse. He left his buckets where they were and pushed his way to the other side of the bridge, over to where the stagnant canal waters festered their way into the outskirts of Talsin’s Forest and vanished under a web of bridges. Some were stone, some were wooden, most of them were just massive tree-trunks levered across the waters during Talsin’s siege of the city and left there ever since. According to Master Hatchet, every now and then one of them rotted and collapsed, taking half a row of slums with it. The people who lived in Talsin’s Forest just went on and filled in the hole and built on top of it again. Probably the only bits of the old canal that weren’t completely filled in with rubble by now were the bits out in the open; the bit that ran under Berren’s feet to the river, and the bit out by Pelean’s Gate. He shuddered and went back to his buckets. Some of the men who went to Club-Headed Jin’s brothel reckoned there were tunnels or caves that went all the way from Pelean’s Gate to the sea; old tunnels that supposedly got dug under Reeper Hill during the war or even before. No one went down there. Filled with monsters, that’s what they said. Evil flesh-eating man-fish things. That was what made the place stink so. Fish-men who crawled out at night and took people back down to the tunnels and ate them. That’s why people vanished sometimes. Fish-men kept the canal clear too, so they could roam right across Talsin’s Forest and across to the docks if they wanted. Berren wasn’t so sure about any of that, and he was pretty certain the thief-taker would just laugh. No one he knew had ever actually seen a fish-man, after all. But then again, people did disappear, and the canal did stink something rotten, and the bits you could actually see never did seem to dry up.

He picked up his pails, crossed over the bridge to the River Gate again and handed over his penny to the soldiers who took the toll there. Time for a different bad smell. If there was one thing Deephaven had in abundance, it was bad smells.