Warlock's shadow

money. Never mind who it was you whacked on the nose — although whether you think you’d ever manage to do that to a sword-monk is maybe something you should ponder while you’re training with them — whose purse were they taking, that’s the question! Some priest?’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘There’s Talsin’s heirs, they’re none too pleased with who’s on the throne. Maybe the Overlord himself. You think the sort of man who pays a snuffer to murder a prince is going to let an urchin from Shipwrights’ bring him down? And then yes, there’s the assassin himself. He killed two men. Slit their throats. He’s a cold snuffer, that one. Did you know … no, how would you? The soldiers at the Watchman’s Arms were poisoned, quite a few of them. Not a killing poison, but a sleeping draught to make them dopey, and that means that whoever he was, he was in the Arms earlier that night. Chances are it was one of the prince’s own men who did it. You going to go to Varr to look for him? Drop it, Berren. You stopped a murder, you got your reward. Leave it at that.’

Berren was shaking his head. ‘The soldiers he had were all big. The man I saw was our sort of size.’

Master Sy groaned. ‘Leave it, Berren. You chase after that snuffer, he’ll kill you the moment he gets a sniff of you. Stick to your lessons and keep your head down.’ Master Sy stood up once more. ‘Live to fight another day, eh? Just this once.’ He creaked his way up the stairs and went to his room and closed the door. Before long, the house shook softly with his snoring.

Live to fight another day? For what? Berren mulled that one over. Like Master Sy always said: I’m not a thief-taker for Kol’s silver, I’m a thief-taker because I don’t like thieves.

He got up and headed off for The Eight. On his way out, he thumbed his nose at the thief-taker’s snores.

14

MORE THAN A PASSING INTEREST

He went looking for the justicar, but it turned out that Kol wasn’t in The Eight that day and Berren eventually went back to the temple at dawn on Sun-Day with no idea where else to go. For the rest of that week he spent his days with Tasahre, watching the other monks, singling them out one by one, reading how they moved, how they fought, and, where he could, what they looked like from behind leaping up a wall. They were the right build, short and lithe southerners. Some of them went missing now and then — he saw that now. He asked, but Tasahre shook her head. That was business of the order and not his concern, she told him, and so he didn’t bother asking the others; still, as the week drew on, he watched. Different monks disappeared each day, usually just one or two of them but sometimes half a dozen. They were always missing in the morning and at midday but back for the afternoon. When he approached any of them, they simply walked away. None of them would talk to him, not even a word of greeting. The only time he got close to most of them was late in the afternoon in the fighting circle, and then only for as long as it took for them to bash him on the head with the flat of a sword, bow and walk away.

Whoever had been in the scent garden, they’d gone away with a bloodied nose. He would have remembered if one of the monks had had a swollen face, wouldn’t he? And Master Sy was right, he couldn’t imagine ever catching one of them so off-guard. The black-powder smell bothered him too. Did monks use black powder? He hadn’t seen any. Maybe he was wrong and it had been someone else, but that thought only made him even more determined. The Eight was on his way home from the temple, near enough. Kol was never there but he found Master Fennis and Master Velgian and asked them both to put a word in for him.

The days passed. The city fell into the madness of the Spring Festival — even Master Sy took a few nights off from watching the Two Cranes or whatever it was he did and took Berren down to the Abyss-Day celebrations at the docks — and then blearily nursed its hangover. The month of Rebirth gave way to the month of Floods and the river began to swell, living up to the name of the season hundreds of miles away around the City of Spires. Berren might have slowly forgotten his assassin, except that every day as he practised with Tasahre, he kept seeing in her shape a flicker of the silhouette he’d seen leaping the wall of the Watchman’s Arms.

It was about a month since he’d started with the sword-monks when he came out of the temple in the evening to find Master Sy slouched by the gates waiting for him, arms folded over his chest and looking cross.

‘The Eight,’ he said shortly. ‘Kol wants to talk to you. Apparently you’ve been asking questions.’ He almost frogmarched Berren across Deephaven Square and down the Avenue of the Sun. ‘Told you to leave it be, didn’t I?’ They reached Four Winds Square, marched past the courthouse and down the narrow street that ran beside it, past the bronze octopus fountain and into the ivy-covered frame of The Eight. Kol was sitting there at his usual table and he had most of his thief-takers around him. As Berren and Master Sy came in, Kol gave them both a hard look.

‘Finally. Sit. Have a drink.’

‘Got anything to eat?’ asked Berren, who was starving as usual after a day with the sword-monks. The justicar rolled his eyes. He looked around, waved at someone, pointed at Berren and snapped his fingers. As Berren and Master Sy sat down, Kol leaned in towards his thief-takers. He glared at Berren.

‘Life’s hard with our usual source of bread and shelter having been taken away, eh?’

‘Technically you never lost yours,’ muttered Master Fennis.

‘Not that his purse would tell you that,’ sniggered Master Mardan.

‘Shut it, you pair! I have a proposition. There’s no bounty, but you lot had better pay attention, because if you don’t we might have those sword-monks here for a lot longer than I thought and frankly they’re not half bad when it comes to thief-taking, even if their methods take some getting used to. Now listen: you all worked for me at the Watchman’s Arms …’

Fennis jingled his purse. ‘Best money I’ve seen for years.’

‘Well when His Highness finally buggered off back where he came from, it was to be named guardian of the Emperor’s heir, and she’s still sucking at her mother’s tit. Do you know what all of that means? No, thought not. It means that if anything happens to the Emperor, someone else gets to sit on the throne until his daughter hits sixteen. As of the spring festival, that’ll be Prince Sharda and not the Emperor’s brother like it would have been before.’ He looked straight at Berren. ‘Berren here thinks we should be looking for who it was who tried to kill him. He’s probably an idiot, but it narks me that it happened on my watch. So I’m in. My question is: are you? Think about it, my boys, because we’re not talking about thief-taking any more, we’re talking about something wholly different.’

Thief-takers Fennis and Mardan nodded enthusiastically. Master Sy shook his head.

‘Too dangerous. Not interested.’ He wasn’t the only one either. Master Velgian looked positively terrified.

‘I think it’s a terrible idea,’ he said.

‘You have no idea what you’re dealing with, Kol.’ Master Sy closed his eyes. ‘I could tell you everything I told my apprentice, but you, of all people, should know better. So what is it, exactly, you think we’re going to get out of this?’

‘Worst that can happen, we discredit these bloody sword-monks and they go home. Best that happens, we get showered with gold until we’re drowning in it, that’s what I think is going to happen. You beg to differ?’ As he was talking, a boy came to the table and set a bowl of stew down in front of Berren. Berren started shovelling it into his mouth as fast as he could.

‘Sword-monks!’ Velgian was shaking his head frantically. ‘Not good, Kol! I’m not going against sword- monks!’

Orimel the Witch-Breaker sniffed. He peered at Berren’s stew. ‘Smells good,’ he said. He spoke with an air of thoughtful quiet if he spoke at all, and so when he did speak, the other thief-takers, even the Justicar, usually stopped and listened. ‘The assassin — an assassin — tried again in Varr. He was caught that time. I’ve heard many things. On Sun-Day it was the Emperor’s brother, on Moon-Day one of the sons of the Lord of Neja, on Mage-Day a fire-mage, then a black-skinned Taiytakei mystic or one of the pale- skinned fey folk they say live far to the north. I’ve heard that the assassin is dead, that he is free, that he escaped, that he has been cut into a hundred pieces with a sorcerer questioning each and every one. Very little of what I have heard can be true, but an assassin has unquestionably been caught.’

‘Same one?’ Kol raised an eyebrow.

Orimel held up his palms. ‘Who can say, Justicar?’