The Thief-Taker's Apprentice (17 page)

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Authors: Stephen Deas

BOOK: The Thief-Taker's Apprentice
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‘Where we going tomorrow?’ asked Berren from behind a faceful of pie.
‘Bedlam’s Crossing. Kasmin bought his bottle of Malmsey from a trader in Bedlam’s Crossing. I know him.’
‘Bought his what?’
The start of a smile played around the corner of Master Sy’s mouth, but it didn’t get very far. ‘Wine, lad. The bottle of wine he had. I’ll teach you about wine one day. I’m afraid that’s something I know rather more about than is useful. ’ He sighed, picked up his beer and took another deep draft before staring at what was left. ‘Malmsey is a strong sweet wine, usually from the vineyards around Helhex. They don’t make very much so it’s quite rare. One of the first ships to be attacked in the harbour had ten thousand bottles in its hold and they all vanished. I knew they’d start to show up again one day.’ He shook his head. He’d still hardly touched his pie. Berren eyed it hungrily while the thief-taker drained his second flagon and waved over a third. Berren had never seen him drunk and had no idea what it would look like. Master Hatchet mostly liked to hit people. The thief-taker, Berren thought, would be one of those morose and moody drunks who got miserable and talked too much about stuff no one else cared about.
‘Was that man a friend of yours?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Which man, lad?’
‘The old bloke in the Barrow of Beer. I thought you’d kill him, what with him being a thief.’ Belatedly he remembered the look on Master Sy’s face as they’d come away from Kasmin’s tavern. Too much pie was making him bold. He tried to look shamefaced, ready for the rebuke, but it didn’t come. Master Sy simply looked sad again.
‘I didn’t kill you, did I?’ he asked, gently.
Berren bowed his head. ‘Sorry, master.’
‘Lad, what you saw when we met wasn’t something that happens every day. A thief-taker doesn’t fight. Not unless he has to, and even then, you don’t kill a man without a very good reason.’ The thief-taker took a long swallow from beer number three and smacked his lips. His face was starting to glisten. Berren didn’t know much about getting drunk himself, except for his one disaster in the Eight, but he’d learned how to spot it in other people. Drunks had always been his first bet for lifting a few pennies. The only trouble being that they often didn’t have any.
‘When you first met me in that alley, what you saw then is not a thief-taker’s life.’ Master Sy was starting to slur his words. Only very slightly, but enough to notice. ‘You can’t win every fight, lad, and you only have to lose one to be dead. No, you don’t fight unless you have no choice.’ He patted his chest, rattling the ringmail under his shirt. ‘Of course, I do try to make sure that any fight I’m in I’m going to win.’ He tried grinning again, but it didn’t really work.
‘I seen people go funny like that,’ Berren said. He was treading on dangerous ground and chose his words carefully. ‘Like he knew he was in big trouble the moment you came in. Seemed like you knew him pretty well, though. Like you were friends for a real long time.’
Master Sy took a deep breath and sighed. ‘Kasmin? Yes. I’ve known Kasmin since I was a boy, maybe since I was half your age. He was a soldier. He worked . . .’ The thief-taker frowned. ‘He helped my father from time to time. He was a brave man once. A strong one, too, and a leader. When the . . . When I was forced to leave my home, Kasmin came with me. I’d lost most of my family. I was a bit older than you, but not much. I had a younger brother to look after. And another . . .’ He stared at Berren long and hard. Stared right through him, off into some other place and time. ‘Yes, another brother, who looked a bit like you do now. We had lots of friends. Or people who said they were our friends. People who should have been. Kasmin came with us. He helped me for a while. When things were at their worst, he was always there.’ Master Sy smiled. ‘Truth is, he probably saved my life more than once and I never even knew anything about it. He was a good man, but the wandering broke him. He so wanted to go back home, and he could have, too. He had family, but that would have meant leaving us and abandoning his duty. Eventually we heard that they’d been killed, months later. Robbers. He always drank too much, Kasmin. One day he just vanished. Had enough. Walked out into the night and didn’t come back. Years later I washed up in Deephaven. I started thief-taking, and then one day there he was, on the wrong end of my sword. I was afraid for a moment, because I knew he knew how to fight. But he didn’t. He gave himself up to me; and for all the things he’d done for me and mine before he left us, I let him go. I even helped him a bit to buy the Barrow. It’s not the first time he’s fallen in with the wrong sort and I don’t suppose it’s going to be the last.’
Berren decided to try and push his luck one more time. ‘He called you a prince,’ he said, which wasn’t quite true, but close enough.
‘No he didn’t.’
‘Well he called you something like that.’ Yes, and it wasn’t the first time either.
Behind Master Sy’s eyes, the shutters had come down. Berren had gone too far; or else the thief-taker had realised that he’d said too much. Master Sy shook his head and took another swig of beer. ‘We’ve known each other for a long time, lad. We used to call each other all sorts of things.’
Which might have been true, but certainly wasn’t the truth he’d been looking for. Something to remember for the next time he ever saw his master drunk, perhaps. But enough for now. Instead, Berren waved his fork at Master Sy’s plate.
‘Can I have your pie then?’ He put on his best grin, showing off his teeth. Master Sy didn’t smile though. He merely pushed the plate across the table.
‘Go ahead, lad. I think I should go to sleep. You’re in the stables, in the hayloft.’
‘Master? When I woke you up on the boat, you said something. I didn’t understand. What did you mean?’
‘Said something?’ Master Sy shook his head, and there came that forced half-smile again. ‘No, lad. I didn’t say anything. If you really want to know, I was dreaming I was back home again. Some time years from now. And nothing had changed for the good.’ He grunted and shrugged. ‘Seeing Kasmin, you see. Brings it all back.’
Berren watched him go. The thief-taker walked steadily, no sign that he was half in his cups. For a few seconds, Berren even wondered if it had all been an act, whether Master Sy hadn’t been drunk at all. But that was foolish and didn’t really make much sense when you came to look at it.
With a happy sigh, he turned back to the remains of the thief-taker’s pie. His master might have gone to sleep, but the night was yet young and he had every intention of making the best of it.
20
BEDLAM’S CROSSING
B
erren yawned and rubbed his eyes. The lightermen worked around him, oblivious. Now and then they threw him a sly glance. He’d spent half the night with them. They hadn’t known anything much about Master Sy or thief-taking, but they’d known a lot about Bedlam’s Crossing, and about the river, too. And they’d known a lot about how to prize pennies out of Berren’s purse. He’d listened to their stories with eager ears and marvelled, paying for each of them with more flagons of pale ale. Stories of the City of Spires with its five curving towers of gleaming white stone, so tall that they scratched the sky. Of Varr and its palaces and temples, all carved from lumps of solid gold as big as a ship. Of swamp-hags who swam across the river from the other side at night and lured men away to a watery grave. Of the river mermaids who sometimes saved them and who were more beautiful even than the emperor’s new queen. Of the strange lands further up the river, of three-headed lions and giant snakes with the faces of men and witches who turned sailors to stone. Of sea-monsters that swallowed entire ships.
They were laughing at him now but he didn’t mind. After he’d left them, he’d crept back through the way station and found the last few drunks, hopelessly in their cups. He’d quietly cut their purses. Master Sy would probably throw him in the river if he ever found out, but he wouldn’t and old habits died hard. No, on the whole the night had gone well.
‘There’s a thing I’ve learned,’ whispered a voice at his shoulder. Berren jumped a full foot into the air, spun around, lost his balance and almost fell over the side of the barge. When he finally gathered himself together, the thief-taker stood over him. His face looked bleak. Berren’s heart raced. The lightermen had left at the crack of dawn, when the way station drunks were still snoring at their tables. He couldn’t know what Berren had done.
Can’t possibly know.
Didn’t matter what he told himself, though. Believing it was something else.
But the thief-taker’s thoughts were somewhere else. He sat down beside Berren and stared at the water, at the rippling waves rolling steadily by.
‘Do you know what wisdom is, lad? They say that wisdom is something you get as you age. Improved by the years like a fine wine. Wisdom is spending your effort on the battles that matter and having the grace to smile at defeat in the ones that don’t. Trouble is, lad, wisdom comes too late for some. Look at Kasmin. He was a fine swordsman in his time. He was a soldier, a captain in the King’s Guard. He had a fine life, filled with everything a young man wants. Wine, women, song, swords.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure you can imagine. Everyone loved him. And then he lost it all, and in the end, instead of fighting for what mattered, he gave up. Now look at him. A drunk old man, slipping slowly towards oblivion without even knowing it. Give it another few years and you’ll find Kasmin crawling in the gutter, begging from scraps, with everything he ever had, even his dignity, stripped away. Or you’ll find him in that same gutter with a knife between his ribs.’ The thief-taker shook his head. ‘If there’s one thing I’ve learned, lad, one thing that matters more than anything else, one thing I’d like to teach you more than letters or manners or swords, it’s not to regret what you can’t undo. I’m afraid, though, that that’s something you’ll have to learn from someone else.’
‘Wisdom is knowing what is beyond your power to change,’ said Berren, parroting Teacher Garrent. The thief-taker smiled and nodded.
‘So you
do
listen. No, there’s no shame in making a mistake as long as you can put it right. For the ones you can’t, learn what you can learn and then let them go. Go to a priest and find a penance if you have to and then leave it be.’
Berren nodded. ‘But master, how will you know that you truly can’t change something if you give up trying?’
‘You can’t bring back the dead, lad.’
‘But what if it’s something about the living?’
‘Then you listen to your heart, lad. Your heart will tell you when it’s time to stop.’
‘But what if it never does?’
The thief-taker stood up. ‘Kasmin’s heart told him to give up a long time ago, lad.’
‘But what if it didn’t?’
The thief-taker shrugged. ‘Then don’t.’ He shuffled away down the deck, back to his stool in the prow. Berren watched him sitting there, staring out across the water, lost in memories. It was only then that he realised the thief-taker hadn’t been talking about Kasmin at all. He’d been talking about himself.
He frowned. Did he have any regrets? Did he regret leaving Master Hatchet? Not really. Was he sorry for all the purses he’d cut? He had a good long think about that one. The beatings had hurt, when he’d been caught, but when it came to remorse . . . No. Not a trace. Did he wish he’d been born to a rich merchant prince with ships full of gold? Yes, he did, but it was hard to feel particularly resentful that he hadn’t. Did he wish that the whore in Club-Headed Jin’s brothel had let him touch her? Well yes, he did. A part of him did still smart from that. But he hardly thought about her any more, so maybe that was the sort of thing that Master Sy had been talking about. Maybe that was wisdom, letting that go.
He smiled to himself and stretched out across the top of the deck on his back, squinting at the sky. No, he hardly thought about Jin’s women at all any more. A cloud crossed the sun, stealing the heat off his face. What he thought about was Lilissa. Lilissa, who never came around any more. Lilissa who had a special friend who was a fishmonger’s son. Lilissa, who lived alone with no one to watch over her and no one to tell her what she couldn’t do. Now, could that be something he could change . . . ?
Abruptly he jerked awake. The sky was grey and filled with cloud. The wind was cool and full of noise and smelled of fish again. The middle of the morning had become the middle of the afternoon. The barge shifted beneath him. He sat up, eyes wide, and looked around. The river had changed; they were right up against the edge, bumping a little wooden jetty. The bank here was covered with hastily made wooden buildings, scrambling over each other to be close to the water. The river itself was full of boats.
The thief-taker jumped onto the roof beside him and slapped him on the back. ‘Bedlam’s Crossing, lad. Shake a leg. They won’t wait, you know. Sleep any more and you’ll find yourself in the City of Spires.’
After all the stories he’d heard from the lightermen, Berren wasn’t sure that would have been so bad. He rose unsteadily and stumbled along the side of the barge, following in the thief-taker’s wake until he scrambled up onto the wooden docks. Almost at once, the barge pulled away, back into the channel of the river.
‘I will admit, lad, that I don’t take too kindly to being on the water. It feels good to be on dry land again.’

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