The Thief-Taker's Apprentice (7 page)

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Authors: Stephen Deas

BOOK: The Thief-Taker's Apprentice
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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.
‘Ach!’ The thief-taker leaned forward and spat over the edge of the balcony. ‘Boy, you could pick any of those towers on The Peak. Pick the one you want. Whichever it is, the person who ordered it built knew their letters.’
The priest grumbled under his breath and wagged a finger at the thief-taker. ‘Urlik the Grim has a place up on The Peak and he certainly didn’t know how to read and write when he got it. Doubt that’s changed.’
‘The Grim was no better than a pirate in the war and I doubt that’s changed either.’ Lines of anger filled the thief-taker’s face. He jerked his head towards the doorway. ‘Come on, boy. Time we were going.’
Berren got up. He followed the priest and the thief-taker down the stairs; with Master Sy wrapped up in a cloud of anger strong enough to crack stones, Berren kept his distance. They emerged into the back of the temple next to another enormous door. On the other side stood a smaller door, like the one into the tower. The old priest stopped. He followed Berren’s eyes. ‘That one goes down,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing there you’d want to see.’ With a deep sigh he turned and ambled around the side of the temple. Berren hesitated, but Master Sy shooed him on. Beyond the black and silver altar in the centre, Berren passed a row of five black and silver columns, each reaching up to the roof.
‘The five are for the five faces of the moon,’ said the old priest without looking round. ‘Teachers, Guardians, Seekers, Savants and Wanderers, if you care to remember them. Syannis here is on the road of the waning moon. Seekers of truth and unravellers of secrets. Obvious as though it was written on his face. You, though . . .’ The priest went to the column in the middle. He touched it and murmured something. The air crackled. ‘You I can’t read at all.’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘I can give you a blessing if you want it,’ he said. ‘You might need it.’
Berren shied away. Master Sy growled something. He’d walked straight past the columns. Set into the black wall beyond were three altars. Master Sy went to the nearest one, a golden sun set into the stone of the temple wall. He touched the sun with his fingers and then dropped to one knee for a moment. A little past the sun was a slab of black stone flecked with tiny white spots that seemed to glow in the dark. The third altar looked as though it was broken, a slab of granite half hanging out of the wall, cracked and split with pieces missing. Berren wondered what he should do, whether he should bow before one of them as well. Without really thinking he drifted towards the furthest one, the broken one. Then Master Sy was suddenly on his feet again with a hand on Berren’s shoulder.
‘Not that one, lad.’ He turned to follow the footsteps of the priest. Garrent was heading for the door through which they’d entered.
‘It looks broken.’
‘It is. There were four gods once. Something happened to one of them.’
That was too much. ‘Broken?’ he scoffed. Always there. That was the
point
of gods. The sun and the moon and the earth and the stars and the wind and the rain and the sea. Stuff like that. That was what the thief-taker had said, wasn’t it, up on the top of the tower? Broken gods? Fool’s talk!
‘Something funny, boy?’
Berren quickly bowed his head. ‘I didn’t think gods could be broken, that’s all,’ he said, as contritely as he could.
‘Really?’ Master Sy pushed Berren towards the way out. ‘And how would you know that, lad? Did I make a mistake and take a priest’s boy? Because I thought I took a little thief off the streets who had wandering fingers and a head full of nothing. Expert on gods, are you? Eh?’
Berren kept walking. He glared at the floor and didn’t say anything.
‘No, didn’t think so. Come on, out. We’ve got more places you need to see and we didn’t come here to talk about gods. Garrent here can tell you all about how the world got broken and the earth god with it on some other day. It was the moon-folk who did it, after all, so he should know.’ He pushed open the door. The light and the noise of Moon Street gushed over them. For a moment, Berren thought he meant the priests in Deephaven. He stopped, too shocked to move, and turned back to the thief-taker, mouth agape in wonder.
‘The priests . . . ?’
‘Not Teacher Garrent, you dolt!’ Master Sy roared with laughter. ‘For pity’s sake, lad, did no one tell you any stories when you were growing up?’
Berren just stared at him. He remembered stories aplenty. Stories about how he’d better do what he was told or he’d be beaten black and blue, that was the gist of them. Mixed in with a healthy smattering of stories about how he was going to die in all sorts of colourful and gruesome ways. The idea that he might receive a story as a pleasure was a new one and he didn’t quite know what to say. Slowly he shook his head.
The thief-taker looked shocked. The laughter went away. ‘No, I suppose perhaps they didn’t. Well that’s all it is, lad. Just stories. Stuff from long before the first men blew in from across the seas. I suppose gods fight just like men do.’ He sucked in a deep breath between his teeth. ‘They say the first sun-king rose up from the ruins, long long ago. Fey stories, boy. Dusty old legends. Nothing that matters any more. Keep walking.’
Berren shook his head and turned his mind back to the world outside. After the quiet of the temple, stepping out into Moon Street felt like stepping out into a war. Even though the steps were shallow and wide, he took them carefully. His head was spinning.
‘When you’ve learned to be civil, I’ll take you to one of the solar temples. They’ll tell you all the stories you want, if you have the courtesy to open your ears.’
Another voice rang down from the top of the stairs. Teacher Garrent, standing at the door behind them. ‘But if Syannis ever tries to teach you anything about the gods and the four paths himself, you’d best know now that he’s probably wrong about almost everything, young Berren! You should always listen attentively to your master, mind, but come back here afterwards and I’ll tell it to you properly. ’ The priest smiled and closed his mouth and waved farewell, but Berren heard him whispering in his ear.
And remember what I told you, young man. Beware the house on the docks.
Further up the hill beside the market, the cart that had been blocking the street was gone.
8
WHERE THIEVES FEAR TO TREAD
‘C
ome on boy, don’t dawdle!’ Master Sy marched away from the temple in big swinging strides, forcing Berren to run to keep up. The thief-taker was positively steaming. ‘If you ever have any trouble, boy, go to Teacher Garrent. He’s kind and he’s safe and he’ll look after you. If you ever want any actual
help
, though, then you might want to consider looking somewhere else.’ He cut sharply right off Moon Street and wove between the alleys into the traffic of the Godsway. The road here was every bit as busy as Weaver’s Row, but it was a different kind of busy. This was a steady, orderly procession of carts, rolling up and down the hill between Four Winds Square and the river docks. No, the
Rich
Docks, that’s what the priest had called them. Berren wondered why.
At the top of the hill in the huge open space of Four Winds Square, the carts scattered. Master Sy ignored them. He marched straight across the middle towards the city courthouse on the other side, the place where the execution scaffolds had been. As Berren walked beneath where they’d stood, the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. He stopped to peer at the ground and look for traces of blood; but before he could find any, Master Sy was yelling at him to keep up and he had to run again.
The thief-taker passed the courthouse. He went down a narrow street that ran alongside it and arrived at a much smaller square that opened out along the back. On the far side of this square, the smell of beer and a loud rumble of talk washed out of a low house wrapped in ivy. In the middle, a small fountain in the shape of an octopus bubbled and gurgled. Berren stared. He’d never seen anything like it.
‘Oh come on, lad. Have you never seen a fountain?’ Berren shook his head. He reached out to touch the water with his hand and then drank a few drops. It tasted clean. ‘Where does it come from?’
Master Sy shook his head impatiently. He pointed up to the roof of the courthouse. ‘Rain. They catch the rain in great big buckets the size of houses.’ He pulled Berren gently away. ‘Come on. They use it to make beer, too. I’ll get you one. Proper beer, lad. Not like the rat-piss they sell in Shipwrights.’
As they ducked under the ivy and in through the wide-open door of the drinking house, the conversation died away. People looked up and stared. They stared at
him
, Berren realised, not at Master Sy. Then their heads dropped, one by one, and the chatter resumed.
‘This is the Eight Pillars of Smoke, or the Eight as most of us call it,’ murmured Master Sy. ‘As I said, if you need looking after, go to Teacher Garrent. If you need some actual help, come here.’ He made a gesture at the barkeeper and wandered in among the low tables and the squat stools that surrounded them. The air, Berren thought, was unusually fresh and he could even feel a wind. Then he looked up and saw that the house had no roof. Just a criss-cross of beams thickly wrapped in ivy. The thief-taker picked his way to a far corner where three grim men sat together. Life had taught Berren a great deal about reading faces, but these three were impossible. They were blank. He didn’t like blank. Blank made his skin crawl. Whatever they were talking about, they stopped long before Berren could overhear anything. They looked up, waiting patiently as Master Sy approached them. They obviously knew him. Berren found himself nervously scanning for a clear path to the door, for a fast way out, but the floor was too cluttered, the tables and the stools too closely packed. From table to table, over the top. That was the only way to do it . . .
The nearest of the men got up. He was taller and heavier than Master Sy, with thick curly black hair and a thick curly black beard. The man’s eyes narrowed. He bared his teeth and clenched his fists, and then he leapt at Master Sy, wrapped his arms around the thief-taker and crushed him. Berren jumped a yard backwards. He almost bolted.

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