Stephen Deas1 - The Thief-Takers Apprentice

Berren nodded. ‘Stank of the canal they did, too.’

‘Well there you go. Might even have been our pirates then.’ He stood behind Berren and showed him where to put his hands on the weapon, how to hold it, how to stroke it with his fingers and press it against his cheek. ‘Hold it steady but not tight. The emperor’s crossbows aren’t the best in the world by any means but they’re made well enough. Right. Got it steady?’

There was a moment of stillness and then Master Sy carefully fitted a bolt in front of the crossbow string. ‘What you’re holding, lad, is the most powerful weapon in the world, in its way. It takes a man about a year of constant practice to become any good with a blade and another ten to truly master it. The same goes for a longbow. Now I’ll admit that either is a better weapon than what you’ve got, once it’s mastered, but that’s not the point. The point is, lad, that with a crossbow, all you have to do is hold it steady, find your target, point it and then a little click on the trigger and if you hit a man out to fifty paces or even more, it doesn’t much matter what armour he’s wearing, down he goes. A vulgar weapon for thugs if you ask me, but no one did. Go on. Point it at something and pull the trigger.’

Berren picked a seagull, sitting on the water about a hundred feet away. He pointed the crossbow as carefully as he could and pulled the trigger. He felt the crossbow jerk, sideways and upwards. The seagull cawed and flapped up into the air. Berren reckoned he must have missed by a good three feet.

‘Much more gentle. I’ve got four more bolts and that’s it. You can practice with one more and then we go. Come on, come on! You missed! Get cranking!’

‘Go where?’

‘Never mind that! I want you to pretend your enemy is running at you with an enormous axe!’

‘Then I want to pretend I’m running away!’ Berren struggled to re-arm the crossbow. Master Sy had made it seem simple enough, but in Berren’s hands the bow almost had a life of its own. Every time he tried to pull the metal crank, the bow slipped out of his hands.

‘Harder, lad! Much harder! Ach! Give it here.’ A moment later the crossbow was armed again. Master Sy handed Berren a bolt. Berren loaded it, picked another seagull, pulled the trigger and missed a second time. Master Sy shrugged. ‘Around about now, Justicar Kol and his solders are going down into the tunnels under Reeper Hill. By the end of tomorrow, half these pirates will be dead and if I don’t get to them first, so will the other half. If that happens, I’ve got no one to point a finger at the harbour-master. Kol will sit on his hands and a month from now it’ll be like we never did any of this.’ The thief-taker snorted. ‘Enjoy your crossbow. It’s the sort of weapon for a day like this. Me, if I had one, I’d have brought a big axe. Come on then. Time to cause trouble for some bad people.’

The thief-taker finished crossing the bridge and turned sharply left to walk along the bank of the stinking Grand Canal, past the row of battered grain silos that marked the start of the Poor Docks. The path was narrow, overgrown and littered with a sprinkling of dead rats, killed by the poison lures around the silos. Berren knew about the silos. There was good eating on a dead rat, but not if it came from here. Even the cats and the birds, it seemed, had learned. Nothing had picked at the bodies. Fifty yards on, past the end of the silos, a massive tree-trunk spanned the canal, the first of hundreds. The water turned black and vanished beneath a chaos of rickety huts and washing-lines, of mongrel dogs and shouting. Talsin’s Forest.

‘During the siege, Talsin had the biggest trees he could find felled right up the river, past Varr even. They took the branches for arrows and spears and floated the trunks down the river to span the canal. He’d pretty much finished the job by the time Khrozus seized Varr and made the whole siege a waste of time. So here it is. Talsin’s Forest.’ The canal path simply vanished, blocked by a wall of wood. Even sideways, the first of Talsin’s trees was still taller than Berren. All the bark had been stripped away. For kindling, he supposed. There were footholds cut into the wood.

‘Right.’ Master Sy started to climb up. ‘Remember one thing, lad. Around Talsin’s Forest, no one likes a thief-taker. ’

‘In other parts of the city,’ said the thief-taker cheerfully, ‘what we do when we meet a door is knock, and then wait patiently for an answer. Around here, however, what we do is this.’ He walked up to the front door of a little shack, span on his heel and slammed one leg out sideways, heel first straight into the weathered wood. He didn’t so much kick it down as kick it right into the gloom beyond. The walls shook and dust rattled out of the roof. If he’d kicked much harder, Berren reckoned the whole place would have come down. Before the door even landed, Master Sy marched on in, bare steel in his hand. ‘Now you’ll notice that it’s a bit gloomy in here and it might take your eyes a moment to adjust. That can be the moment someone sticks a knife into you, so that’s why we do this.’ In his other hand he was holding a lantern, one that he’d lit two streets away. Now he smashed it into the floor in the middle of the room. Greasy burning oil spread around it. A few burning streaks spattered his boots, but the thief-taker didn’t seem to mind. The edge of a straw mattress started to take flame. Berren stayed where he was, in the doorway. The whole shack was made of flimsy bits of wood. With a bit of luck the afternoon rains they’d had might stop the whole place from going up. Or maybe not.

Out the back another door hung open, swinging back and forth on its hinges. Master Sy grunted. ‘Of course, usually we just get on with throwing the lantern on the floor instead of talking about it first.’ Ignoring the fire, he ran for the other open door. Berren had little choice but to follow.

‘But you can’t just…’ You couldn’t just go around setting places on fire! Even Berren knew that. Even Master Hatchet had known that. One house goes and next thing you know it’s the whole street and half the district. Maybe up on the other side of the city walls where almost everything was made of stone it didn’t matter, but out here… He crashed out of the back of the shack, hard on the thief-taker’s heels.

‘Oh, they’ve got buckets, they’ve got a canal. It’s right there.’ Master Sy’s words came between breaths as they raced along a maze of alleys. The man they were chasing was only half a dozen yards ahead, not quite far enough to dive out of sight, even here. He tried throwing a couple of startled early drunks and a pile of broken chicken cages in their path, but Master Sy barged right through, knocking them all flying as though they weren’t even there. ‘Besides, most people would thank you for burning down the Forest. I’m sure Justicar Kol will happily tell you that it’s every bit as bad as Siltside. Just closer.’

The thief-taker wasn’t going as fast as he could, Berren realised with a sudden jolt. He was letting the man from the shack, whoever he was, stay just ahead of them. Why would he do that?

‘I’d get a bolt ready if I were you,’ he called. ‘Here we go.’

It was almost as if Master Sy had known in advance everything that would happen. The man from the shack ducked around a corner and dived into an open doorway. Master Sy raced in right behind him, jinking sideways as he went through. A flash of sunlight glinted off metal as a dark shape lunged at the thief-taker. Shouts erupted from the gloom inside. Berren froze. He’d been too busy running to pay much attention to anything more than keeping up, but now he felt acutely aware of his surroundings. The streets in Talsin’s Forest were little more than narrow pathways between ragged rows of shacks and huts, all piled on top of each other in whatever space their builders had been able to find. The sun was still high enough to touch the ground, but half of the street was in shadow. Ragged children with wide wild eyes stared at him from doorways. When he met their gaze, some of them scuttled away only to return as he looked elsewhere. Others simply stared back, silent and unblinking. There were no men or women on the street at all, but that didn’t mean they weren’t near, only that they were hiding. The place had been full enough when he and the thief-taker had first appeared. He could feel them, watching him like the children were but hidden away in the shadows, peering out of gaps between the ill-fitting walls, out from behind curtains. He could feel them waiting, cautious but eager for the spoils of whatever was happening. Like vultures. Their hostility wrapped him up with hungry arms, eager to devour him. They could sense his hesitation, he was sure of it. His doubt.