The King's assassin

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.

He woke again early in the morning. While the rest were still sleeping, he crept out through the door and into the dawn light and walked slowly around the walls of the castle, watched by the sour-faced night guards. It wasn’t really a castle at all. In Deephaven there was a fortified palace in the middle of the city, and this was more like that, except several hundred times smaller and less grand. Long ago, someone had built a solid stone house here. Other people had added to it later. Someone had started to turn it into a palace and then stopped. Someone else had aimed for a castle instead. Whoever the builders were, none had ever realised more than a small fraction of their ambition, and the result was an aimless shambles. Berren’s idea of a castle came from the city walls of Deephaven, thick stone piled high with towers and siege weapons and lots of soldiers — or at least, that’s what the walls had been back when there had been a use for them, before the city had swallowed them up. True, there was a wall of stone separating the castle of Tethis from the city on one side, the gorge on another and the countryside around the rest, but it wasn’t much of one and a man with a mind to climb it would have no trouble at all. In some places it was made of wood, or dry stone, and towards the gorge and the city Berren could almost step over it. It seemed not so much a barrier as an idea of one. A pair of small towers faced out across the hills and fields with a palisade between them from which men could stand and shoot down on attackers. Berren walked its length. Seventy paces, that was all. An army came, they’d just go around it, easy as anything. They’d barely have to try. Like the palace itself, the walls had been started more than once, but they’d never come close to being finished.

No one stopped him as he climbed up. Next to this sorry excuse for a palace stood a barracks for a couple of cohorts of soldiers, stables for maybe forty horses, a few clusters of sheds and workshops, all arranged around a large muddy yard. In Deephaven any one of the rich merchants who lived around the city square would have had all this and much much more. He shook his head. On the other side, away from Tethis, the river gorge ran like a scar through mile upon mile of green fields. In the far distance he could see hills and then mountains.

In the year before he’d been born a war had come to Deephaven. He knew about this because the temple priests had told him. The whys and the whos had all been desperately dull, but one day they’d taken the novices up onto the old city walls. It was the first time he’d ever been up there, and the memory still felt fresh. One of the priests had pointed out a distant hill. That’s where Talsin’s army came, he’d said. You could see them, stretched out from there to there. . And he’d pointed out two places that seemed to cover half of the horizon. An army of forty or fifty thousand. Glorious to behold. The priest had been there and seen it with his own eyes — you could hear the memory of it in his voice. There had been more, mostly about how the wicked general Kyra had used all manner of vicious tricks, even sorcery, to smash that army. But the memory that stayed with Berren was simply of standing there. He could see the army in his mind’s eye, blackening the distant fields. An awesome sight, terrifying for the city defenders.

He looked out over the fields around Tethis now and tried to imagine such an army here. It didn’t exist. It couldn’t. It would walk through Tethis without even noticing. What would you need? A few hundred men? Surely not many more. And how many did Talon have? Two, three hundred? Enough to take the palace if they were clever about how they did it. Enough to hold it? Enough to take the city as well? Was that what Talon was doing, quietly building an army, ready to take back his home?

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Berren jumped and almost fell off the palisade. Talon had climbed up next to him so quietly that Berren hadn’t even noticed. They were being watched. Three men, armed and armoured, were down below. They were pretending to have nothing much to do, but they were watchers, no doubt about it. A thief-taker learned the difference. Further across the yard, as the sun rose higher, he saw a few men scurrying back and forth dressed in white. Priests? If they were then they were the first he’d seen in Tethis.

‘I don’t know. I was thinking about Deephaven and Master S-I mean Prince Syannis.’

Talon growled. ‘Mostly I’m spending my time wondering whether Meridian will quietly cut all our throats while we’re conveniently here, and how to make sure that he doesn’t. But I’m also wondering whether the Hawks could take this city.’ He shrugged. ‘I shouldn’t, but I can’t seem to help myself.’

‘I reckon you’d need a trick or two or a good few more men.’

‘Meridian has enough to keep a free company at bay for a while. There might not be many proper soldiers here, but a city like Tethis can raise a militia of a thousand or more if it has warning. Not much use on an open field but give them a wall to hide behind and no place to run and their own homes to defend. . well, then a town militia can grow fierce.’ He clapped Berren on the shoulder and held out a small phial. ‘Is this what you needed?’

Berren took it out of Talon’s hand. He’d seen it before, this very bottle or one exactly like it, carefully packed in a wooden box lined with straw, hidden in a bag in the Hall of Swords with Tasahre standing beside him. There were words carefully etched into the glass. He peered at them, but he already knew what they would say. Poison. Blood of the Funeral Tree. Enough to kill six men. Secrete in food or drink. He shuddered. ‘I didn’t think you’d find it. The soldiers made it sound like a waste of time.’

‘We found the soap-maker’s place but there was no one there.’ Talon sniffed. ‘Looked like it had been abandoned for days. Most of it was cleared out but we found this. It was sitting on a table in plain sight. There wasn’t anything else.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘The place stank of fish. It was as though we were meant to find it.’

Berren shivered. ‘I keep saying it: Saffran Kuy is playing a game with us.’

‘With us?’ Talon cocked his head. ‘Or with you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Berren looked away. ‘Does it matter? Master Sy’s somewhere not far from here, isn’t he?’

Talon twitched. ‘Never you mind about him. First passage to Brons, you’re on it.’ He frowned. ‘Not that you’ll get a ship from here. Maybe from Forgenver, but the sooner the better. Anyway. .’ He yawned and stretched and then waved cheerily down at the three watchers below. ‘If this is all you need then we can get on and get out of here. Are you sure this will work?’

‘Not really.’ The memory of Kuy making the potion remained clear as crystal. Whatever the warlock had done, he could repeat it. How it worked and what it actually did, of that he had no idea.

‘Tarn’s dying.’ Talon swung himself over the edge of the palisade and slid down the ladder to the ground. ‘He’s dying and he’s my friend. Make it work.’

Berren followed him to the hanging shed. He set about getting ready while Talon shooed everyone else away until only the three of them remained: Berren, Talon and Tarn. Berren laid out the other ingredients the warlock had used. There was already a little fire going and a pot of steaming water hung above it. ‘What if this kills him?’

‘Then he’ll die. But he’ll also die if you do nothing.’

Berren began grinding the salt and the powdered bone together and then mixing them in the boiling water with other powders and oils. He didn’t even have to think about it, as though the warlock’s recipe was in control and he was as much a tool of it as the pot or the pestle or the mortar. Time slipped by without him noticing.

‘I need a little of his blood,’ he said absently.

Talon frowned. ‘Blood?’

‘It is a warlock’s potion, not a healer’s.’

Talon’s frown deepened, but he took a knife to fleshy part of Tarn’s left hand and made a cut and held a cup to the wound. ‘How much?’

‘A thimble will do.’ Berren stirred the pot. Once it was bubbling again, he reached into his pocket and pulled out Talon’s phial. Poison. If anything was going to kill Tarn then it was this. He hesitated. Sure? Am I really sure?

A shadow loomed behind him. When he looked up, Gelisya looked back at him. Her black hair merged into the darkness of the hanging shed while the light of the fire on her face made her eyes seem enormous. The sight of her froze him stiff and the recipe fled from his mind.

‘Two drops,’ she said, after they’d stared at each other for what felt like an age. ‘You need two drops. As soon as it boils.’ She nodded earnestly and then added: ‘It’s boiling now.’

Berren shook himself, tipped in two drops of the poison and quickly put it away.