The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3) (11 page)

Outside he asked directions to the market and then ambled towards it, taking time to let the town soak into him. As best he’d been able to tell from the longboat, Tethis was built around the mouth of a small river valley. Its poorer districts spread up and down the shore either side of the river, perched beside the sea and crowding into the notches in the cliffs beyond. The richer parts ran up and onto the higher land on its rim, and the market lay on the border between these two parts of the city, at the place where the river valley first widened out before it reached the sea. From the centre of its square, Berren looked up towards the back of the town, where the valley became a gorge too narrow for people to build their houses. At the top of the slopes there, overlooking everything, were the low walls of the castle where Talon would take Gelisya.

He wandered through the market, buying the things he needed. Some of them were easy. Salt. Powdered bone. Clove oil. Others he recognised when he saw them. A few earned him frowns and directions to another cart. Now and then he’d get a blank look, as if the person he was talking to had never heard of what he was asking for. Once, in an apothecary, he got a very different look, a look that showed him that the woman he was talking to
had
heard of what he was asking for, but wished she hadn’t.

The sun began to sink and the streets started to empty. Carts full of farmers from outside the town made their tired way up the hill beside the river, heading for home. He still had plenty of Talon’s money left in his purse, so Berren found himself a tea house and sat down to wet his throat and rest his legs. He went through the list of what he needed in his mind and looked at all his packages and pouches. He had almost all of it now, only two things missing. The first would come from Tarn himself: blood. The other was the sap of a Funeral Tree, whatever that was. He hadn’t the first idea what it looked like or what it did; neither, it seemed, did anyone else around the market. Which left the apothecary who’d claimed ignorance but whose eyes had said otherwise. He drained his tea and stood up and made his way back through the alleys to her tiny shop.

‘Never heard of it.’ Just as she had the first time, the apothecary clamped her mouth shut when she’d spoken and her fingers curled into fists. She set about putting her potions and powders away for the day. ‘And now I’m shutting up. Goodbye.’

Berren didn’t move. ‘I don’t know what all this is for,’ he said. ‘All I know is that a man I know, a friend, is desperately ill.’

‘Well that won’t help him,’ said the apothecary, still taking care not to look at him.

‘So you
do
know what it is then.’ He put a single gold coin on the table in front of her. ‘The sap of the Funeral Tree. Please.’

‘I don’t have any.’

‘But you know what it is.’

She took a deep breath and then she took the gold and leaned into Berren and whispered, ‘You come here asking me for poison? A drop of it will kill you. I know there’s some who use it in potions and the like, but you’d have to be a master to know what you were doing.’ She looked him up and down. ‘Sick friend? My arse. I doubt I should be selling you anything, but thankfully I don’t have any. There’s one who might. He says he’s a soap-maker, but everyone knows that’s not all he makes. Back when the warlocks were here, he came with them.’ She shuddered. ‘Likely as not he’d have some sap for you, if you’ve got more gold.’ She held up the piece he’d put on the counter and then closed her fingers around it. ‘A lot more than this, I’d say.’

Her last words passed Berren by. ‘What did you say about warlocks?’

The apothecary looked him up and down. ‘Not from here, are you? Bad luck they were, but they’re gone now. Took a while before we knew them for what they were. What brought them here was death. And then . . .’ Berren found himself on the end of a long stare. ‘Don’t know what you’ll have heard, but the old king was a fool letting the likes of them settle here. His Majesty Meridian did us all a service.’

Berren thought about that for a moment. ‘This man. This soap-maker. Where will I find him? Who is he?’

Her voice dropped to a hiss. ‘Like I said, he came with the warlocks. Maybe he’s one of them, maybe he’s not, but he’s a wicked man. His heart decayed to nothing long ago. If you want to deal with people like that, on your own soul be it. There. I’ve told you what I know. Now get gone.’

‘Who is he?’ He was sure he already knew.

‘Name he used was Vallas.’ The apothecary backed away and stuffed Berren’s gold deep into a pocket. ‘He’ll probably have what you’re looking for. Over on the western edge of town in among the fishermen. Ask for the soap-maker, they’ll know who you mean. But if I were you I’d stay far away from that place.’

Vallas. Berren thanked her for her time and walked out into the street with his head spinning. He’d heard that name before, back in Deephaven, from Saffran Kuy.

Ah, my poor brother Vallas
.

13

INCANTATION AND MEMORY

H
e swore. Then he began to walk. The apothecary’s directions hadn’t been specific about the distance, and by time Berren reached the western edge of Tethis, the sun had set and night had fallen. By the smell and the nets strung out along the beaches, he’d reached the fishing quarter. What was someone who made soap doing living here?

A shiver ran through him and he stopped. Fish. It was as though Saffran Kuy had made all this happen simply to lure him back. He was doing exactly what was expected of him. And then what? Alone with a warlock? Maybe even two of them?

‘No, Kuy. I’m not your puppet.’ He turned round and began to walk back up the hill. Maybe if he came with Talon and a dozen armed men at his back, Vallas the soap-maker, or Saffran Kuy, or whoever was waiting for him, simply wouldn’t be there. There would be no sap of the Funeral Tree. Tarn would die, but if this was all simply an elaborate trap then Tarn was meant to die anyway, and there was nothing he could do about it.

If that’s what it is, why go to all this trouble? Kuy could have taken me at the camp if he knew I was there. Something else, then, but what?
But still, he was
not
going alone. Not after the House of Cats and Gulls.

By the time he reached the top of the gorge, the stars were up. He’d been walking since the middle of the day and his feet ached. The guards outside the castle took a long look at him and waved him in. When he found where the Hawks were quartered, Talon was still up, waiting for him, pacing.

‘Did you find everything you need?’

Berren shook his head. ‘There’s one thing left.’

‘There’s something you can’t find? I want this done and I want to be out of here.’

‘I don’t know if . . .’ Berren stopped. The glare he got was like a slap in the face, and so he stood there and told Talon everything: the apothecary and what she’d said, the soap maker and who he really was, and how Berren feared it was a trap. By the time he’d finished, Talon was snarling like a wounded wolf.

‘They still have a warlock in their midst? I’d like to . . .’ He shook his head and the disgust in his voice was obvious. ‘I’ll see to it. A soap maker in the fishing district. Sap of a Funeral Tree.’

Berren watched him go, too tired to argue. The mercenaries had been given an outhouse to rest in, a damp windy shed that was good for keeping the rain off and not much else. From the smell it had spent most of its time as a hanging shed for meat and fish. It was small and there wasn’t much space, but the others made room for him. 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.’