The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3)

by Stephen Deas

  The vision shifted. They were in the same place but on a different day and it was light outside now and Kuy was making something new. And then that faded too; another came and then another, faster and faster, until one clear memory began to emerge, hauling itself out of some far closet of the stone, shrugging off cobwebs and dusting itself down. Are you wearing it? Are you wearing the stone? Do you have him, tucked safe and warm around your soft throat, girl? Watch this one carefully careful. The need will be great. It will bring you a friend and it will bring you suspicion and it will bring you hate. More important than any of the others, yet you will use them all when their time comes. I have spoken to you of the first principle of knowledge: that we are beings of two parts. Every man, from the lowest worm to the highest king, has two souls. More important than the light of the sun, to know this, but to know is but a scratch. To understand, yes, to understand, now that is the heart beneath. What priests would exalt, I shall call the Useless Part, the one that departs for far-off ideals, for the Sun or the Moon or the Stars. Or Xibaiya or elsewhere. Delights to taste some other day. What remains we shall call the Useful Part. Mindless thoughtless fodder for the living, but useful, yes, for they are the energy we draw on to work the tiny miracles that fill our lives, consumed and eaten. But what if one were to hold its form and keep its empty aimless hunger? What shall we call such a creature? Dangerous, I name it, and most potent ally too. Ephemeral pet-things, but while they remain they hunger for a life they cannot have, and they will fight to own a new coat of flesh. Men, sometimes, lifeless although they still live. Walking the streets with empty faces as though their spirits have long departed but who have yet to understand that they are dead. Or who lie still and cannot be roused yet do not pass away. In the murky places of this wretched land you will find such as these. Or strong men filled with woes they cannot explain. The housewife sapped of energy by a mystery. Crippled souls who seem as though they must fight a constant battle merely to live, and so, indeed, they do. Now you will know the cure for both. Watch carefully, for I will show you a draught to cast aside these usurpers. They will be your friends, your allies, your servants and your soldiers. One day they will crush worlds for you, little girl.

  Suddenly he turned and seemed to stare straight at Berren. Listening are you, little ungrateful Berren-piece? Watching us now? Because it is not done between us, yet here I sense your fate is close to mine once more. You will have a want for this one too, I feel it. I see pain in our futures. Savour it! Relish it! Let it soak you through your skin and run ebullient through your veins, for if you hear these words, you have regained that which I took and I have given you a gift by it.

  He saw it all, with absolute clarity. Everything Kuy had done, every ingredient, every motion and every method. And he understood that these things Kuy described, they were the terrors he’d seen back among the slavers, the same nightmares that Kuy had called to him as he’d battled Tasahre. Most of all, he understood what lay inside Gelisya’s teaching stone. It was him. It was the piece of his soul that Kuy had taken in the House of Cats and Gulls. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do.’

  Talon frowned. ‘You do what?’

  ‘I do want it back.’

  Gelisya sniffed. ‘Well then you have to do it.’

  ‘Do what?’ Talon was close to breaking.

  Berren looked him in the eye. ‘She’s right. I do know how to save Tarn.’

  12

  THE KINDNESSES OF WARLOCKS

  Three days later, the Fighting Hawks weighed anchor off the city of Tethis. Berren, Talon and half a dozen other mercenaries climbed down into a longboat. Tarn was lowered. Talon placed his little princess cousin carefully on his lap and the soldiers began to row. Before they were halfway to the shore, the ship was on its way back out to sea.

  ‘How long will this take?’ asked Talon.

  In the days they’d been at sea, Tarn had wasted away. He was still alive, but for how much longer? Talon asked the same question at least once every day and Berren always gave the same answer, the only one he could: ‘I don’t know.’ He wished that he hadn’t said anything about it now; most of the time, he even wished that Gelisya had never given him the stone. He could feel how it changed him, how it made him whole and filled the tiny missing piece that had had been cut away in Deephaven. Yet at the same time what good ever came of a warlock’s gift? What would Kuy take from him now? And how had the warlock known he would be there, in that place at that particular time? Had he known it even back in Deephaven? The thought made him shiver. If Saffran Kuy could see so much of the future then what did that mean? How did you fight a man who knew how everything would end before it even started? Dragons for one of you. Queens for both! An empress! Kuy even knew how he was going to die. I saw my apprentice kill me. That had been the golden-hafted knife, the one that cut souls. That was what showed him these things. The only thing a man could do, Berren thought, was to keep well away, and he’d have been more than happy with that. But he had to find Master Sy first. Had to, for Tasahre and her memory. And now he had to save Tarn.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘All I know is that Saffran Kuy is making all of this happen. We’re being moved about like pieces in a game of Hak-Kanad.’

  Talon shook his head and frowned. He didn’t want to hear. And who would? What did you do with knowledge like that except weep?

  Word had spread among the other mercenaries that Berren and the warlock at the camp had known each other once. The soldiers looked at him differently now, with suspicion and mistrust. More memories had begun to surface from the stone too. Memories of other potions, of Kuy brewing them, explaining carefully and clearly exactly what he was doing as if to a dullard apprentice. Sometimes the room around Kuy was empty, sometimes Gelisya was there, sometimes another boy – the boy from the slaver camp. Always Kuy spoke to his little Berren-piece. Mostly what he made were cures for this, that or the other; but there were other potions, and even knowing the ones that seemed harmless left Berren with a sense of dread. There would be a price for this, he was sure, a price heavier than he cared to imagine.

  But he was going to save Tarn.

  He shuddered. For that potion he didn’t even know what half the ingredients did; all he could remember were the names. In Deephaven he might have known how to find some of them, but here he had no idea where to even begin; then, if he did manage to lay his hands on everything, how would he know if he’d made the potion properly? He wouldn’t. For all he knew, he’d end up feeding Tarn poison. How long would it take to work? What else might it do? What other marks might it leave? He didn’t know anything except that it would cast the hungry spirit out, and that Saffran Kuy was leading him by the hand, step by cursed step. He was sinking inexorably into deep black water. Talon was right. He should have gone back home.

  But still, he was going to save Tarn.

  They reached the shore and men and women stopped to stare. The waterfront constables huddled together, wondering what to do. Talon tossed a purse full of money at Berren.

  ‘At least you can make yourself useful. When you’re done, I’ll see to it that you’re expected at the castle. The sooner we’re out of here, the better.’

  Berren snatched the purse out of the air and darted away into the thick of the town. Out of sight of Talon, he slowed to a walk and soaked in the air of the place. For once he was glad to see the back of the others. Princess Gelisya haunted him. She made him think of Saffran Kuy and Tarn and potions; or else she made him think of Radek, and that made him think of Deephaven and Tasahre and the sun-temple and Master Sy. And then he’d be thinking of all these things and Gelisya would turn and look at him with her child’s face and her black hair and her wide unblinking eyes that seemed weary with knowledge. Talon took it for granted that Saffran Kuy had abducted her for his own ends, but Berren wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t shake the notion that Gelisya had been more a willing apprentice than a helpless hostage. A bit of both, p
erhaps?

  He stopped in the street and looked around and, for a moment, forgot about everything else. He’d been here before! Not actually into the city, but as far as the harbour. When he’d been a skag, and there’d been some sort of drink that the sailors had found when they’d gone ashore. Califrax, or something like that. He’d heard it for weeks. It’s Califraxed. He was Califraxed. The word had stuck to the ship like a limpet.

  He stopped sailors in the street and asked what it was and his questions led him to a sleazy sailors’ hole, the Mermaid, a bit like the Bitch Queen of Kalda except a tenth of its size. The inside was gloomy, but made up for it through a vicious assault on all his other senses. Berren pushed his way through the crowd around the door. Lanterns were burning and the windows, such as they were, had heavy curtains drawn across them and a layer of black grime on their sills. The sun outside was high in the sky but inside it might just as easily have been midnight. As he moved through the crowd, he was bumped and battered and shouted over and occasionally splashed by raucous seamen. His nose registered the usual smell of cheap drink and drunks, but also something else. A fragrance that seemed quite out of keeping, but that he couldn’t quite place. Califrax, he found, was a vicious brown ale. After what he’d grown used to in Kalda with Talon, it was cheap and vile; still, he felt better for a glass of it. Something he’d done for himself, at last. His choice, just his. When he was done, he raised the empty glass to all the sailors of his old ship and quietly hoped they were dead.

  People were watching him. One tall man in particular, all elbows, bones sticking out of his wrists, long fingers that couldn’t stay still and with restless darting eyes, but what Berren noticed most were the tattoos on his cheeks and his neck that ran down under his shirt. Berren couldn’t see one, but he was quite sure the man was carrying a knife. People like this used to come to Master Hatchet with sacks full of things that weren’t theirs. Old times, old ways. They would never quite leave him.

  Outside he asked directions to the market and then ambled towards it, taking time to let the town soak into him. As best he’d been able to tell from the longboat, Tethis was built around the mouth of a small river valley. Its poorer districts spread up and down the shore either side of the river, perched beside the sea and crowding into the notches in the cliffs beyond. The richer parts ran up and onto the higher land on its rim, and the market lay on the border between these two parts of the city, at the place where the river valley first widened out before it reached the sea. From the centre of its square, Berren looked up towards the back of the town, where the valley became a gorge too narrow for people to build their houses. At the top of the slopes there, overlooking everything, were the low walls of the castle where Talon would take Gelisya.

  He wandered through the market, buying the things he needed. Some of them were easy. Salt. Powdered bone. Clove oil. Others he recognised when he saw them. A few earned him frowns and directions to another cart. Now and then he’d get a blank look, as if the person he was talking to had never heard of what he was asking for. Once, in an apothecary, he got a very different look, a look that showed him that the woman he was talking to had heard of what he was asking for, but wished she hadn’t.

  The sun began to sink and the streets started to empty. Carts full of farmers from outside the town made their tired way up the hill beside the river, heading for home. He still had plenty of Talon’s money left in his purse, so Berren found himself a tea house and sat down to wet his throat and rest his legs. He went through the list of what he needed in his mind and looked at all his packages and pouches. He had almost all of it now, only two things missing. The first would come from Tarn himself: blood. The other was the sap of a Funeral Tree, whatever that was. He hadn’t the first idea what it looked like or what it did; neither, it seemed, did anyone else around the market. Which left the apothecary who’d claimed ignorance but whose eyes had said otherwise. He drained his tea and stood up and made his way back through the alleys to her tiny shop.

  ‘Never heard of it.’ Just as she had the first time, the apothecary clamped her mouth shut when she’d spoken and her fingers curled into fists. She set about putting her potions and powders away for the day. ‘And now I’m shutting up. Goodbye.’

  Berren didn’t move. ‘I don’t know what all this is for,’ he said. ‘All I know is that a man I know, a friend, is desperately ill.’

  ‘Well that won’t help him,’ said the apothecary, still taking care not to look at him.

  ‘So you do know what it is then.’ He put a single gold coin on the table in front of her. ‘The sap of the Funeral Tree. Please.’

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  ‘But you know what it is.’

  She took a deep breath and then she took the gold and leaned into Berren and whispered, ‘You come here asking me for poison? A drop of it will kill you. I know there’s some who use it in potions and the like, but you’d have to be a master to know what you were doing.’ She looked him up and down. ‘Sick friend? My arse. I doubt I should be selling you anything, but thankfully I don’t have any. There’s one who might. He says he’s a soap-maker, but everyone knows that’s not all he makes. Back when the warlocks were here, he came with them.’ She shuddered. ‘Likely as not he’d have some sap for you, if you’ve got more gold.’ She held up the piece he’d put on the counter and then closed her fingers around it. ‘A lot more than this, I’d say.’

  Her last words passed Berren by. ‘What did you say about warlocks?’

  The apothecary looked him up and down. ‘Not from here, are you? Bad luck they were, but they’re gone now. Took a while before we knew them for what they were. What brought them here was death. And then . . .’ Berren found himself on the end of a long stare. ‘Don’t know what you’ll have heard, but the old king was a fool letting the likes of them settle here. His Majesty Meridian did us all a service.’

  Berren thought about that for a moment. ‘This man. This soap-maker. Where will I find him? Who is he?’

  Her voice dropped to a hiss. ‘Like I said, he came with the warlocks. Maybe he’s one of them, maybe he’s not, but he’s a wicked man. His heart decayed to nothing long ago. If you want to deal with people like that, on your own soul be it. There. I’ve told you what I know. Now get gone.’

  ‘Who is he?’ He was sure he already knew.

  ‘Name he used was Vallas.’ The apothecary backed away and stuffed Berren’s gold deep into a pocket. ‘He’ll probably have what you’re looking for. Over on the western edge of town in among the fishermen. Ask for the soap-maker, they’ll know who you mean. But if I were you I’d stay far away from that place.’

  Vallas. Berren thanked her for her time and walked out into the street with his head spinning. He’d heard that name before, back in Deephaven, from Saffran Kuy.

  Ah, my poor brother Vallas.

  13

  INCANTATION AND MEMORY

  He swore. Then he began to walk. The apothecary’s directions hadn’t been specific about the distance, and by time Berren reached the western edge of Tethis, the sun had set and night had fallen. By the smell and the nets strung out along the beaches, he’d reached the fishing quarter. What was someone who made soap doing living here?

  A shiver ran through him and he stopped. Fish. It was as though Saffran Kuy had made all this happen simply to lure him back. He was doing exactly what was expected of him. And then what? Alone with a warlock? Maybe even two of them?

  ‘No, Kuy. I’m not your puppet.’ He turned round and began to walk back up the hill. Maybe if he came with Talon and a dozen armed men at his back, Vallas the soap-maker, or Saffran Kuy, or whoever was waiting for him, simply wouldn’t be there. There would be no sap of the Funeral Tree. Tarn would die, but if this was all simply an elaborate trap then Tarn was meant to die anyway, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  If that’s what it is, why go to all this trouble? Kuy could have taken me at the camp if he knew I was there. Something else, then, but what? B
ut still, he was not going alone. Not after the House of Cats and Gulls.

  By the time he reached the top of the gorge, the stars were up. He’d been walking since the middle of the day and his feet ached. The guards outside the castle took a long look at him and waved him in. When he found where the Hawks were quartered, Talon was still up, waiting for him, pacing.

  ‘Did you find everything you need?’

  Berren shook his head. ‘There’s one thing left.’

  ‘There’s something you can’t find? I want this done and I want to be out of here.’

  ‘I don’t know if . . .’ Berren stopped. The glare he got was like a slap in the face, and so he stood there and told Talon everything: the apothecary and what she’d said, the soap maker and who he really was, and how Berren feared it was a trap. By the time he’d finished, Talon was snarling like a wounded wolf.

  ‘They still have a warlock in their midst? I’d like to . . .’ He shook his head and the disgust in his voice was obvious. ‘I’ll see to it. A soap maker in the fishing district. Sap of a Funeral Tree.’

  Berren watched him go, too tired to argue. The mercenaries had been given an outhouse to rest in, a damp windy shed that was good for keeping the rain off and not much else. From the smell it had spent most of its time as a hanging shed for meat and fish. It was small and there wasn’t much space, but the others made room for him. They looked at him askance as Talon came back and led them out, but then they’d looked at him like that ever since the slaver camp, as if they weren’t sure any more whether he was a friend. When they were gone, he found a corner and drifted into nightmares of Saffran Kuy and Tasahre and the thief-taker’s golden-hilted knife, and only woke from them when the soldiers stomped and clattered back inside in the middle of the night, bored and surly. Half asleep, Berren heard them talking quietly, until the whispers faded into rasps of heavy breathing and snores. It sounded as though their expedition had been a waste of time.