Warlock's Shadow (28 page)

Berren got up. His hand throbbed but it wasn’t so bad now. His skin tingled. He wanted to throw himself around her and hold her close to him. He took a step closer but she stopped him, a hand against his chest, gentle and firm.

‘It would not be right.’

He took her hand in his own. Pressed it to him. He could have cried. ‘I want to …’ Wanted to what? Run away with a sword-monk? Yes, but that wasn’t ever going to happen.

A sad smile flickered over her face. ‘The crossing of our paths will be a fleeting one. The time will come when you will leave and I will stay. When you are gone, I will remember you fondly, as you will remember me. I am glad to have met you, Berren.’ She reached out with her other hand. Two fingers glowing with a faint light in the gloom, warm and yellow like the sun, touched his brow. ‘The sun’s blessing be with you.’ For a moment, her fingers lingered. He half raised his injured hand to touch her arm and then stopped. ‘We should go now. The priests will need to decide what to do. I must tell them everything you have told me. I will have no say in what is to be done, but when they are deciding your fate, I will do what I can. When the abomination turned his power on me you had a chance to run. If you had, I would have been lost, but you didn’t. I will not forget that.’ Gently she withdrew and smiled one last time. ‘I am sorry about your hand.’

‘Tasahre, who is Sunbright Ansinnas?’

She laughed and turned to look at him with a smile. ‘You’ve been in this temple for more than a year and you don’t know who Sunbright Ansinnas is? Ansinnas is the Sunherald’s aide.’

A chill ran down Berren’s spine. ‘What does he … what does he do?’

‘
She
, Berren. The Sunbright looks after the Sunherald. Come!’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that if the Sunherald desires to visit the City of Spires, Sunbright Ansinnas will be the one who makes it so. If someone wishes to see the Sunherald, they will see the Sunbright to ask for his time. Come! We must tell the priests the truth of what lurks by the river.’

‘He did something to me.’ Berren shivered. The pain in his head and in his finger were receding now, but there was still the knife. The vision of his own soul, laid out before him, cutting a tiny piece out of it with his own hands. ‘He made me …’
Made me into something. But I don’t know what!
‘I saw some of the papers that Justicar Kol was looking for,’ he murmured. ‘In Master Sy’s house.’

Tasahre shook her head. ‘Then give them to him. The Emperor is no friend to our path but we do not start wars. That is not what we are for. Come. The priests will know what to do.’ she smiled once more, and he watched her walk away through the afternoon sun towards the temple doors. He made as if to follow but lagged behind a little. She didn’t look back, didn’t wait for him but kept walking, as though she believed he was at her side.

Sooner or later, Master Sy would come looking for his old friend Kuy again.

He stared at the temple gate. He couldn’t shake the sense that there was somewhere he was meant to be, somewhere that wasn’t here.

He turned back to Tasahre, still walking away with the sun on her back, still not looking over her shoulder towards him. She was letting him go, he knew, letting him run if he wanted. She was letting him be free.

No. This
was
where he was meant to be. He’d made his choice, back in the House of Cats and Gulls, even if he hadn’t known it.

He trotted across the practice yard and followed Tasahre into the temple.

T
he monks didn’t wait for the next day. Berren watched them go, seven of them with the elder dragon himself, as many priests and a score of temple soldiers. Tasahre went with them. They were gone the next day too, Sun-Day, all of them. When Tasahre came back she had her swords with her. She held them up to Berren. ‘They were lying on the floor,’ she told him. ‘The abomination has disappeared.’ And that was all she had to say. For the rest of that day she worked him hard, mercilessly hard; the more questions he asked, the more she pushed him. Twice he tried to ask her about the golden knife, whether it had been found, tried to find the words to ask about what the warlock had done to him. Both times she came at him with a sword for an answer.
Gone
, he slowly pieced together, meant vanished gone. Not dead gone. Not
finished
.

And that was all there was. Neither of them talked about what they’d seen there. No one came with questions about Master Sy. There were no visits from Justicar Kol and for the rest of that day it was as though nothing had ever happened; at least until the next sunrise when Berren found himself being shaken out of bed.

‘We have duties,’ Tasahre told him. Once he was dressed, she told him they were going back to the House of Cats and Gulls.

‘No.’ Berren shook his head.

The look she gave him was a strange one, half sadness, half affection. ‘Yes, Berren. Yes you can and you will. We are both going. We will not be alone, it will be daylight, and the abomination is gone. He is merely driven away for now, but my brothers and sisters are hunting for him and they will find him and end him. You have nothing to fear while we are close to you.’

Berren shook his head again. ‘If he’s not there, why do we have to go back?’

She looked away. ‘We must face our fears, Berren. That is what makes us strong. He touched us both and we must take back what is ours.’

However true that was, it wasn’t why they were going. Berren waited.

‘I cannot tell you,’ she said after a bit. ‘I have sworn I would not. Your master had dealings with the warlock. There may be papers. You said you had seen some.’ An uneasy look crossed her face. ‘There may be other things, too.’

Like the golden-handled knife. Berren shuddered.

‘Please.’ She looked him in the eye, full of earnest hope. ‘I cannot offer you much in return, but I will teach you what I can while we are there.’

They’d have more time together. Yes, he’d like that, but not spent in some stinking gloomy old warehouse.

‘We might find where your master is hiding.’

They wouldn’t, but he followed her anyway, out to the practice yard and the dawning sun where a few priests and a dozen temple soldiers were already gathered. The priests gave him hostile stares. One of them was Sterm. That made Berren smile.

‘They will cleanse the house,’ Tasahre told him, which made him wonder why they needed a sword-monk at all, until he realised that they didn’t, what they wanted was him, and because they wanted him, Tasahre had to be there as well. They were most of the way down the Godsway before he’d worked that one out.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘For making you be here.’

She laughed. ‘Are you
making
me be here, Berren? Are there shackles around my feet? Do you lead me in chains? I am here because the elder dragon commands it and because I choose to obey. There is no reason for you to be sorry.’

‘But it’s still my fault. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.’

‘The sun put you in my path, Berren.’ She put a calm hand on his shoulder. ‘Should I rail against the sun? What use is there in that?’

Which made him want to press her even harder. How could anyone be so calm, so accepting of whatever happened? ‘What if I
had
run away when I had the chance? What if I’d left you there with him, eh? What would have happened to you then?’

‘I don’t know. The abomination would have destroyed me. Turned me against my path, perhaps.’

‘Would that have been the sun’s fault too?’

‘Fault?’ She laughed again. ‘If that was to be my fate then yes, I suppose so. But you didn’t run, Berren.’

‘But I might have.’ She’d never know how close it had been. Or maybe she did and maybe that was why she was smiling at him.

‘But you didn’t,’ she said again, and then they were at the bottom of the Godsway and by the door to the House of Cats and Gulls and the air was full of the stink of dead fish. He watched the priests wrinkle their noses, watched Sterm screw up his face, and tried not to giggle. When you came past the River Gate often enough, eventually you got used to the stink. Sometimes, when he’d been on his way back from Sweetwater with Master Sy’s buckets pressing into his shoulders, he’d even put them down for a quick rest. He had an idea that the cats and the gulls knew when someone was coming out. He’d watch the cats gathering, vying for dominance. The gulls would flock to the warehouse roof, its windows, anywhere they could find purchase; and then someone would come out and leave their basket and hurry away and the frenzy would begin. A short, violent free-for-all between the feral cats while the air filled with gulls, wheeling in to steal whatever they could. The cats hissed and clawed at the gulls and each other alike, and the gulls snapped at anything and everything.

That had been back when he’d carried water up to Master Sy’s house every Abyss-Day morning. He’d come down the Godsway just like this, right about this time of day. Now those days were gone forever.

He took a deep breath. The eyes were there, the cats, skulking in their shadows, watching, the gulls on the window ledges and on the roof. There wasn’t much of a door left after what Tasahre had done to it. There were baskets, though, baskets that hadn’t been there the day before. Like the priests, the warlock had his faithful. How he got them … Berren shivered. He didn’t want to think about that. When he closed his eyes he could still see the web of his own soul, spread out before the golden knife. His life wouldn’t be his own, one way or another, until Saffran Kuy was dead. That alone was a good enough reason to be here, helping these priests.

‘Come.’ Tasahre led the way. There were other smells inside, smells of old and musty clothes, of decay and damp. As Berren and the priests walked cautiously from room to room, a reek of rotting flesh wafted past and then was gone. Berren thought he smelled burnt hair once. Some of the rooms were dark, the windows still shuttered and boarded; once the priests saw that, they mumbled amongst themselves and then had Tasahre and Berren rip off the last remaining boards, flinging open the shutters and letting in the light. In the deeper rooms where there were no windows and no place for the sunlight to enter, they lit candles laden with incense. The warehouse became a feast of smells, burning tallow and sulphur and a hundred scents that Berren couldn’t name adding themselves to the ever-present stink of rot and decay. The richness of the air seemed all the more imposing set against the 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.

He
could make the Headsman talk. Whatever those symbols were that he’d drawn, he was certain he could make them again. He could make the Headsman talk and make Tasahre listen and understand the truth.

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.