Warlock's Shadow (27 page)

Kuy lurched forward and slashed at Berren with the knife. He
was
like a ghost now, a translucent milky white, half there and half not, but the knife was still real enough. Desperately, Berren threw up a hand to ward off the blow. Pain seared down his left arm. ‘They hunger,’ shrieked Saffran Kuy. Black mist poured out of his mouth. His voice had become something else, a deep growling thing that seemed to come from the walls themselves and filled every corner of Berren’s head. ‘They have your scent! They will find you! However far you run, they will seek you out and gorge themselves on you! Do you understand, boy? You can’t just walk away from here, not from me!’

Behind him the room filled with light, sunlight pouring in through the broken door. Tasahre had two fingers raised, held out towards the warlock. She was quivering with tension, while the sunlight flowed around her. Her outstretched hand shone so bright Berren had to squeeze his eyes shut.

‘Shadows be gone!’ cried Tasahre. The nightmares vanished and Kuy reeled away, staggering, still with Tasahre’s swords stuck through him. His voice broke to his usual whisper.

‘Destiny!’ He staggered away into the darkness. Tasahre strode after him, burning with light. Berren followed after her.

‘Be gone!’

Kuy stumbled away, crashing past crates and boxes and piles of books, knocking down candles. A bundle of old parchments tumbled together and caught aflame. ‘You will die twice, boy! At your own hands each time!’

The warlock was falling apart, his hands dissolving like smoke. He lurched down a hallway and into another room at the end, as cavernous as the first.

‘
Be gone!
’ Tasahre was closing on him. One by one, candles flickered and died, plunging the room into darkness except for the light that shone from her. The warlock was half vanished, his arms and legs formless stumps, shadows swirling around him. But here he stopped and turned.

Tasahre’s light flared. ‘
Be gone!
’

‘No!’

The warlock’s face twisted. The shadows around him began to swirl, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

‘Tasahre!’ Now was the time to run, Berren had no doubts about that. Whatever the warlock was doing, he wasn’t dying.

She flared again but not as brightly as she had at first. Berren could see the sweat on her now. She was drenched, almost steaming. The shadows around the warlock recoiled but they didn’t vanish.

‘Tasahre!’ His hand felt as though it was on fire where the warlock’s knife had cut him. Daylight! There was no daylight here, that’s what it was, there was no sun, none at all! This was the warlock’s place, his domain, his heart! He grabbed Tasahre’s shoulder and pulled at her. The light shining from her skin flickered and failed. They were in darkness now, and a faint glimmer from where they’d entered was the only light.

She screamed at him: ‘What are you doing?’

‘It wasn’t enough!’ He pulled her to the door and then they were both running, sprinting away as fast as they could, out of the House of Cats and Gulls with Tasahre’s swords still in the warlock and the warlock still alive and flinging curses in their wake. Out into the glorious daylight, into the afternoon rains come early, up the Godsway towards the temple. Halfway there, he remembered that his hand was hurting.

It was the little finger of his left hand. Half of it was missing.

B
erren was almost sick when he saw the damage to his hand, but Tasahre pulled him on. He paused long enough to tear his sleeve and wrap some cloth around his hand, then ran the rest of the way dripping blood behind him. They didn’t stop until they were standing in the gateway to the Temple of the Sun.

They were holding hands. He didn’t remember when that had happened.

Tasahre jumped away. They were wet, both of them, soaked through. The air smelled of the rains, but the sky was clearing again, the sun breaking through the cloud.

Berren looked at his hand and whimpered. It burned. The last joint of his little finger was gone. He felt faint.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Berren blinked. What he’d expected was a torrent of anger for pulling her away, or for having gone there in the first place, or for a hundred and one other things he’d done wrong.

Tasahre put a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘He was too strong for me.’ She winced and screwed up her face, put a hand to her head. Berren looked at her then. Looked at her eyes, searching for any trace of what the warlock had done to her. There were no marks, no scars, nothing. She was scared, that was all, scared like he was.

His head throbbed, a searing ache that pushed through the pain of his finger and slowly devoured it.

‘Why did you go to that place, Berren?’

‘I thought I might find Master Sy. I’m sorry. You saved my life.’

‘And you mine,’ she said. ‘Come. You have unmasked a monster. It cannot be allowed to escape.’

‘No.’ Berren shook his head. ‘You go.’ The more he looked at her, the more it hurt that he’d have to leave again. He would though. He couldn’t stay here. The House of Records, the Headsman, now the warlock, they were all too much. No, he couldn’t stay. ‘You tell them. I can’t … Look, I just can’t. There’ll be lots of questions and I’m so tired. I can’t.’ His head was crippling him.

Tasahre stared at him and he didn’t know what to make of what he saw in her face. Longing? Or was that just a reflection of his own? She touched his cheek. ‘Stay here. I won’t be long.’

Master Sy had said something like that. He nodded, knowing full well he’d be gone before she got back.

‘Stay,’ she said again.

He bit his lip. Made to touch her and then thought better of it.

‘Your hand!’

She took his hand in her own and looked at it, and then all of a sudden he was telling her everything, right from the start. The prince, the assassin in the scent garden, Kasmin, Kol, the Headsman, the papers they’d found and what he’d seen in the Two Cranes and what the Headsman had said after he was dead, all of it. It was too much to keep inside him any more and he had to let it out. He watched her as he spoke, looking for any sign of what she already knew. When he was done she looked at him, brow furrowed and face fierce.

‘Show me the wound.’

Berren held out his finger. It was hurting badly now. Blood was oozing out from under his makeshift bandage. He didn’t dare look. Thinking about it made him shiver and feel sick.

She looked at him then shook her head. ‘This needs to be dressed, and properly. Come!’

‘It’ll be all right. Don’t you need to go tell someone about the witch-doctor?’

‘More likely than not the abomination has already fled, if he has the power, and this will not take long. Today is the day of the Abyss, the day of the dark, a bad time to face such a creature. Perhaps that’s why my strength was not enough to break him, even as wounded as he was. Come!’

The practice yard was empty. The clouds had unveiled the sun and the sky was bright again. All the monks and the priests and the novices were closeted away in their temples. Tasahre took Berren into a small low hut with a sliding door, the place where the monks kept the tools and devices they used for training along with their weapons; and, it turned out, other things. Berren stared, wide-eyed. He’d seen lots of swords in one place in the Armourer’s Quarter, certainly he’d seen bigger swords there, but here … there were so many! Straight swords, curved swords, swords with a hook on the end, all short-bladed and in pairs to be used the way the dragon-monks liked to fight. He’d never seen so many different styles and designs.

Tasahre smiled. ‘When an elder dragon merges with the sun, his swords are left to the order. That is how we have remembered those who guide us for more than five hundred years, since before the schism. Since before the first of the sun-king’s ships with their Taiytakei guides cast anchor in Aria.’ She opened a small chest by the entrance, filled with neatly arranged pots of powders and salves.

Berren tried to grasp how long that was and failed. He started to count the pairs of swords instead but there were too many. There must have been close to a hundred.

‘Every sword has its story.’ Tasahre sat Berren down on a bench. Several of the swords were missing their twin, he noticed, and a few had clearly seen a good deal of fighting. ‘Berren! Look at me!’

She jabbed him in the neck with one finger, somewhere near where his jaw met his ear. He gasped, paralysed and swamped by a pain that ran up the entire side of his face as though all his skin had been torn off. After a second or two it ebbed and he could breath again.

‘What …? What was that for?’

Tasahre dangled something in front of him. He was starting to notice that his hand hurt. Really hurt. Warm blood was running down his palm and dripping onto his legs. Oh Gods – now she’d ripped his makeshift bandage off him.

‘Distraction,’ she said. She dipped into the chest and set to work, sprinkling powders into the bleeding wound, pressing a gobbet of black mud over the top and then wrapping a piece of cloth tightly over everything. ‘You have seen how we train. There are accidents, at times. So we learn to dress them. This is how a sword-monk treats a wound, Berren. See the difference.’

He tried but there were tears in his eyes. It burned like acid and he thought he might be sick. Tasahre stood back. She held his wounded hand in her own and touched the first two fingers of her other hand gently to it. Berren winced and almost whined, squeezed his eyes shut, fearing what would come.

The pain began to recede. In the dim light of the hut, he saw, her fingers were glowing. Not much, but enough that there was no mistaking it. It was the way she’d glowed when she’d chased down the warlock.

‘You’re …’ The pain was almost gone.

‘The blessing of the sun,’ she breathed. ‘A priest would do it better, but this will suffice. The wound will heal quickly and the pain will be tolerable. You will not lose more than you already have.’ Then she picked up the bandage she’d taken off his hand and sniffed it. ‘You know I cannot be silent about what you’ve told me. Where is your master, Berren? Truly now, do you know?’

Sword-monks could smell a lie, that’s what everyone said. They could sniff them out, easy as smelling out a dead fish. Tasahre was looking at him, eyes hard, straight into him.

‘That was the only place I could think of. He wasn’t there.’ The Headsman had told him where Master Sy might be, but the Festival of Flames was months away. ‘I don’t know where else to look.’ And that was true, and if he had known, right there and then, he would have told her too. ‘How did you know where I was?’

‘I followed you through the city.’

‘You tracked me? What, followed my footprints on the cobbles or something?’

‘I followed
you
, Berren. It seemed you might go looking for your master after Justicar Kol came to ask his questions. You were not truthful when you spoke with him. I watched and then I followed. It was easy enough.’ Tasahre’s eyes narrowed. ‘What are your master’s dealings with that monster?’

Berren shrugged. ‘He never says. I think … I think … The Headsman – he said he was bringing soldiers to the city for you from across the sea. He said the priests in this temple were going to start a war. Is that true?’

Now it was her turn to look away. ‘I cannot answer that, Berren. The city men who came here today think the same. That is why they were here, and that is why they are looking for your master who they say holds the proof. They cannot say who has done this, so they point their accusations at us all. I came to Deephaven to bring the word of the Sun. I came to serve the Autarch and to protect him. That is all.’

‘But he hasn’t come.’

‘I know.’

Berren swallowed. ‘Velgian. He was dressed like a sword-monk. Was he one of you once?’

Tasahre shook her head, almost laughing. ‘We heard the story. Not then, but later. You threw a bowl of porridge at him and then hit him on the nose with a waster and he ran away, yes?’

Berren nodded. ‘He had swords like yours.’

‘Perhaps he meant to be seen? Do you think, Berren, you could have hit a true sword-monk on the nose? Even now?’

He thought hard about that. No, there was the answer. He’d spent nearly two months with Tasahre and her brothers and sisters, and no, he couldn’t have hit any of them on the nose, or probably anywhere else. Not then, before the training, and probably not even now. He shook his head.

‘He was never one of us, Berren. In your heart, you know this. We do not murder men in their sleep. That has never been our way.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I remember His Highness coming to the temple and ordering me to train you. I thought the sun was punishing me for something. I didn’t know what it was but I hated him for doing that to me, for separating me from my brothers and sisters, for giving me such a burden. I didn’t want anything to do with you. I thought you were a stupid idiot boy.’ She laughed. ‘And sometimes you are. You are uncouth, rude, you have so little respect for our ways that you could never be one of us and you would never want to be. I thought all you wanted was to learn how to kill so you could strut about like the snuffers this city seems to breed like rats. And in part, it’s true that you do, and don’t try to tell me it’s not. But we are taught to take whatever the sun passes down upon us and carry it without complaint. So I did as I was asked, and in the end you were not such a heavy stone around my neck.’