The man carefully closed the door and pulled down his scarf. Berren gasped. The man’s chin and mouth were a mass of scars.
‘People come to Sandor to forget.’ His speech was as broken as his face. ‘Not to look.’
‘Man with an axe tattooed on the top of his arm. Scar on his neck, two on his face. Short black hair. Foreigner. Spee lah thees eh.’ The thief-taker’s accent was so perfect that it startled Berren out of his reverie of smells. Master Sy opened a hand to show a silver crown. The scarred man nodded.
‘More than one like that,’ he mumbled.
‘Doesn’t matter to me. They all came from the same place. Where are they staying? Any of them.’
The scarred man looked hungrily at the silver in the thief-taker’s palm. He hesitated and then his shoulders slumped. He snatched for the coin but Master Sy’s fingers closed before he could take it. The scarred man shrugged. ‘Little Caladir. The Two Cranes.’
Master Sy cocked his head. ‘That’s a way away. Like their Moongrass did they?’
‘They came to sell, not to smoke.’
The thief-taker opened his hand. The coin vanished. The man pulled his scarf back over his face and a cloud of smoke billowed into the street as he opened his door and closed it again. Master Sy tossed another crown to the younger of the two boys. The boy yelped for joy and ran; the older one dithered for a moment, looked at Master Sy, saw he wasn’t going to get anything and gave chase.
‘Should have split it between them,’ muttered Master Sy.
Berren didn’t say anything. He’d been both of those boys. Splitting it wouldn’t make any difference. Sooner or later the older one would catch the younger one and then the crown would be his, and that was simply the way of things. ‘What’s the Two Cranes?’ he asked instead. His head was clearing now, the fuzziness slowly fading. Which was sad, in a way, because the fuzziness had felt nice. That’s what everyone said about a touch of Moongrass. Nice. The trouble started when a touch became a headful and you completely forgot who you were.
‘A place where the sun-king’s sailors stay, the ones who can afford it. The sort of place we might find the Headsman.’
‘So are we going there now?’
The thief-taker glanced up at the sky. Then he shook his head. ‘No. We’re going home and getting you ready for your sword-monk lessons tomorrow.’
Berren stared pointedly at the thief-taker’s leg. ‘All the way back up the Avenue?’
Master Sy winced. ‘All the way, lad. No hurry now. We know where he is and we know he knows we’re here. This needs some thinking.’
Berren gave his master a steady look. Thinking. He was coming to learn what that meant. It meant pacing up and down all day — or rocking back and forth in his chair. It meant shouting at Berren about little things that didn’t really matter. And in the end … in the end …
Master Sy nodded. He smiled and patted his sword-hilt, almost as though he was reading Berren’s mind. ‘Getting dark soon. Press gangs will be about. Don’t want to wake up and find myself a skag on some ship.’
However true that was on the surface, they both knew that in the two years Berren had been Master Sy’s apprentice, the thief-taker hadn’t once shown himself in the least bit bothered by such things. What he meant was that this was
And that was all right, because standing out here in the afterglow of a touch of Moongrass, Berren realised he had some business of his own now. That black powder smell he’d picked up from the wagon beside the imperial soldiers in the docks — mix that with a bad dose of rotting fish, and
He was going to find out who it was.
PART TWO
13
The afternoon sun shone on the temple yard, hot and hard like the earth under Berren’s feet. Sweat dripped off his face and spattered around his feet. The other monks hardly seemed troubled at all, either by the heat or by the effort of holding a sword straight out in front of them for hours on end. Their shoulders, Berren decided, must have been made of iron; or else they had some sort of magic that made their swords lighter. They’d been doing this to him for days.
First thing in the morning they went for a simple run, down to the sea-docks and back. The monks took it easy enough down the hill and then sprinted for the entire mile back up again, leaving Berren wheezing and gasping in their wake. As soon as they got back they started jumping. Jumping on the spot, long jumps, high jumps, hurdles and things that Berren couldn’t even begin to work out how to do — backflips, handsprings, things that would have made an acrobat gasp — the monks almost seemed to bounce for fun. Eventually, when his legs had given up, they made him lie down and lift weights instead. The monks lifted each other. The worst of it wasn’t that they were all so much better than he was, it was that none of them said anything. They never spoke a word of praise or disdain, only the bare basic instructions.
A couple of hours of lessons with Sterm the Worm and his cane were almost a relief after that. Then he was back out into the practice field, this time for stretching, bending himself into shapes that a normal person simply wasn’t supposed to make. Every time he thought he’d contorted himself into as position that couldn’t possibly get more painful, Tasahre would come over and kick his feet further apart, or sit on some part of him or rearrange him into some other shape that hurt ten times more. She rarely said anything either and her face was always a mask, but he could feel the malice in the sharpness of her movements. The monks, Berren was sure, hated him.
On Sun-Days and Moon-Days, that was all they did before their midday prayers, an hour of standing, sitting or lying in positions that made them look as though they’d had to break several bones to get there, then half an hour to either run and eat some food or else lie in a heap waiting for the pain to go away, your choice. After prayers, Berren had Sterm again and the relief of sitting in the shade of a cool cell with nothing being stretched, torn, ripped or otherwise abused. On Tower-Days and Mage-Days, the monks cut their stretching short and went running again instead, only this time they didn’t run in the streets but along the rooftops down among the warehouses by the docks. They climbed walls, leaped alleys and danced from roof to roof. At least when they did this Berren could keep up. He knew the city better than the monks and he’d been up to these places before with Master Sy. Between hard high alley walls, whispers had nowhere to escape save for eager ears listening from above, and no one thought to look up at night. He came to like Tower-Days and Mage-Days. Council-Days were the worst, when the monks all vanished and he was left with Sterm right through the middle of the day.
And then, on every day except Abyss-Day, in the heat of the late afternoon, he did this: standing stock still, holding a waster straight out in front of him with Tasahre standing across the small fighting circle she’d drawn in the dirt, staring right back at him. Today she was balancing an hourglass on the end of her sword to make the exercise a little harder for herself — and to remind Berren that, although it might feel like he’d stood there for hours, although it might feel like his shoulder was slowly turning to molten lead, they had in fact been doing this for five minutes and he had another five to go.
She had the hourglass balanced on the flat of her blade and she wasn’t shaking at all. He hated her.
On the first day, he’d lasted four minutes before his arm had simply given up. On the second day it had been five. Today it was seven. He’d hated it at first, the realisation of how useless he was. But now he counted the seconds, and if he counted one more than the day before, that seemed like a victory.
Tasahre stayed completely still for the last three minutes then smoothly let the hourglass go. ‘Guard,’ she said, and nothing else. She spent a minute or two fiddling with Berren’s stance, twisting his arm and and wrist,
