dullness of any other sensation. Even as the sun rose higher and shone through the warehouse windows, the grime and the gull excrement on the dim glass reduced the light inside to a dull brown glow. Everywhere Berren went the walls were greasy to the touch. They found no sign of any food, any drink, not even any waste. Not even a pisspot.
‘Was there another place?’ Tasahre asked Berren. ‘Did he live somewhere else?’
Berren could only shrug. He watched the priests gather papers and put them into piles. They burned most of it and they never asked Berren if he recognised a single sheet; then they took artefacts and skulls and bones and smashed them methodically to powder. They sprinkled salt in circles on the floor and bathed the walls in sunlight. Several times, Berren saw one of the priests glowing the way Tasahre had flared two days before, though not as bright. After a bit, he wandered away. Tasahre came with him — she was always beside him, his watcher, his keeper, his minder. He wasn’t sure whether she was there to keep him safe or to keep him honest or whether it was both, but he didn’t mind. He wouldn’t have wanted to wander a place like this on his own. He wouldn’t have dared.
‘Is there anything we should look for?’ she asked him.
‘There’s that golden knife he had. Did more than cut my finger. Worth a bit, too.’ Maybe if they found the knife, the priests would know a way to undo what the warlock had done. ‘There’s that head he threw at you. Could tell you a bit, if any of your priests really can talk to the dead.’
She gave him a hard look and shook her head, and then it crossed Berren’s mind that the Headsman’s secrets were all about some sun-priest and so the temple was hardly likely to go digging after them.
He stood where he and Tasahre had last seen the warlock, where shadows had swirled around him just before they’d turned and run. There wasn’t any sign of him now, but Berren could feel Kay’s presence, watching him. It didn’t seem to bother Tasahre so he supposed it must have been only in his head, but that didn’t make it any better. After a bit, he had to go back to the door, out to the docks outside, just to be in the light and away from the smells. The dead fish stink didn’t bother him — you got used to that, growing up in Shipwrights’ — but the rest, the rest made him want to be sick. The incense that the priests were using. It was so … rich. It was making his head spin.
Or he could run — some part of him still wanted that. He didn’t even know why except that running was what he’d always done. Running was how a boy from Shipwrights’ stayed safe. Old habits died hard.
He must have dozed, leaning against the warlock’s wall in the summer sun, because the next thing he knew, it was Saffran Kuy standing in front of him, just his head and his shoulders, his arms and the rest of him crumbling into a fine white powder. Berren jumped with a start and a scream, and then Tasahre was there, hands on his shoulders, staring into his eyes.
‘What did you see?’
‘I saw …’ He gulped. ‘I saw Kuy.’
She nodded. ‘I smell it. A bitterness on the air.’
‘Please can we go back? Please!’
Tasahre nodded pensively. ‘I must defer to the priests,’ she said after a moment, ‘but I can ask.’
She went back inside and Berren was alone again. He took in a deep breath and forced a smile. It was the middle of the morning. The sun was shining and there was a slight wind brushing his hair. For a moment, he imagined he was free, that Kuy was gone and Radek too and everything was finished. No Master Sy, no nothing. He could just get up and head out the River Gate, off to the Poor Docks where the little fishing boats that plied the river mouth were moored. He had enough silver to buy a trip to the City of Spires. After that it would be walking. Maybe he’d get to Varr before winter and maybe he wouldn’t, but no journey ever got anywhere without a start, right?
His eyes slipped over the nearer jetties of the river docks, looking at the barges, the lightermen who might carry him all the way. Then across the glittering water with its smattering of estuary boats going back and forth, to what lay beyond, a low line of stilted houses built on the tidal mudflats. Siltside, home to the mudlarks, the people who scraped a living through whatever they could dig out of the mud or what they could steal from the ships anchored on the city side of the river.
He frowned and fingered the token around his neck. Siltside was a refuge for people who had nowhere and nothing.
‘Hello, Berren.’
He jumped. There he was, thinking of running away when no one was looking, and now here was Sterm the Worm, almost as if he knew, as if he had a sixth sense. Sterm didn’t have his cane out here but his tongue could be quite sharp enough.
‘Teacher.’ A while back he wouldn’t have said it was possible for Sterm to think any less of him, but that was before he’d been found consorting with a warlock.
Sterm gave Berren an awkward pat on the back. ‘If there’s anything you need, anything that Tasahre cannot give, I promise not to make you answer questions about Saint Kelm.’
Tasahre came back outside. She smiled at Berren. ‘It is agreed. There is too much here to be addressed in one day. We will find crates and summon wagons and take this wickedness back to our temple where it can be properly examined and destroyed. We will do as we intended, but we will do it in our sanctuary.’ She stretched and tipped her head up to the sun, soaking up its warmth and its light. ‘Finding wagons will surely be a simple matter so close to the river docks.’
‘What happens after that?’ What happens to
‘Another sunrise, Berren. And with every sunrise comes another hope. Come!’ And before he could say anything else, she’d grabbed his arm and was bounding away with him up the Godsway.
28
In the second week of the month of Lightning, a ship came from Helhex, the closest port in the far south to the holy city of Torpreah. Sunburst flags flew from its masts and word swept through Deephaven like a fire: the Autarch had come at last! But no. The ship stayed in the harbour for two weeks and then it slunk away again. Some said the Autarch had been aboard but had been too afraid to step ashore. Others that it was just a ship, that the Autarch had never left his sacred island at all. Berren wasn’t sure he cared much one way or the other, but a disappointed gloom fell over the novices and the priests, while the sword-monks were even more tense than ever. The city rumbled and grumbled. No Autarch, no holy teeth of Kelm, nothing at all except a company of fire-dragon monks who were slowly wearing out their welcome. In the temple, Berren learned swordplay and letters as before. Master Sy had vanished and the warlock had disappeared too, and without anyone quite saying it, he knew he was expected to stay within the temple walls until Kuy had been destroyed. And that was fine. He was safe there from whatever the warlock had done to him, and he knew in his heart that Kuy hadn’t lied about Syannis. He might find the thief-taker on the night before the Festival of Flames, but he wouldn’t find him before.
The relics from the House of Cats and Gulls were laid out on sheets in the same rooms where the monks kept their weapons, their Hall of Swords where Tasahre had bandaged Berren’s hand. No one stopped Berren from going in to look, although he was somehow never alone there for long. There were all sorts of things he didn’t understand. Most of it he didn’t even want to. The golden knife wasn’t there, and that was all he needed to know. None of the priests understood what Kuy had done to him. He wasn’t sure that any of them even believed him, any of them except Tasahre.
They had the Headsman, shrivelled and lying in a corner. His dead staring eyes and his gaping mouth were always there, always the first thing Berren saw every time he went inside. Hideous.
