Warlock's Shadow (9 page)

The older one cocked his head at Master Sy.

‘I am the elder dragon here,’ he said. His tones were flat and formal, empty of either friendship or hostility. He glanced briefly at Berren. ‘Has this boy been trained at all?’

Master Sy bristled. ‘He’s had some lessons, yes. Mostly on stance and grip and basic technique.’ Berren wrinkled his nose and glanced at the sky.
A few. Nowhere near enough
.

‘Can he hold a sword?’

The thief-taker stood up and beckoned Berren to do the same. When they were both on their feet, he put his own sword into Berren’s hands. ‘Show them your guard.’

Obediently, Berren took up a defensive stance. He gritted his teeth and curled his toes as the girl shook her head and rolled her eyes. The elder dragon inspected Berren thoroughly. He put a gentle palm on Berren’s shoulder. Then, without seeming to move at all, he pushed Berren over as easily as if he’d flicked a leaf into the air.

‘Who taught him to stand like this?’ Berren’s shoulder felt as though he’d been kicked by a horse. He could hardly move his arm; he cradled it as he struggled to get back to his feet. The elder dragon had been
touching
him. How could he hit so hard from so close?

‘Actually, I did,’ frowned Master Sy. ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t break him.’

The elder dragon gave a bow. ‘Of course.’ He waved a hand and beckoned the girl forward. The more Berren looked at her, the more he thought of the silhouette he’d seen in the scent garden.
That
could have been a girl, he supposed, if it had been a girl that looked like a boy …

‘This is Tasahre. Tasahre is the youngest of my students. I am considering having her train your apprentice. Her skills are adequate.’ As though the Prince himself hadn’t singled her out! Why did he have to point at
her
? Because she’d been the closest when he’d happened to think about it? Berren clenched his teeth.

The elder dragon nodded to himself. ‘The experience will do her good.’ His voice was carefully neutral; Tasahre, however, looked anything but indifferent. She glared venomously at Berren. Berren glared back.

Master Sy frowned. ‘She and Berren must be almost the same age.’

‘Tasahre has been with the order since she was three years old. She has been holding a sword since she was six. She is not one of my better swords, but I am confident that any shortcomings in her technique will be unimportant in this case. I imagine she would have been your boy’s equal at about the age of ten, yours by the age of twelve.’

Master Sy snorted. ‘That’s a hard claim to credit.’

The elder dragon took a step to the side, beckoning the thief-taker to cross the ring in the sand. ‘You may see for yourself if you like.’

For a long time, Master Sy didn’t move. Tasahre watched him, muscles tense like a coiled snake waiting to strike.

‘The boy is yours, after all. It is right and proper that you should test his teacher.’

‘Oh, I’m quite sure it’s not your little sword-monk who’s being tested.’ Master Sy stared back at Tasahre. The elder dragon smiled blandly.

‘It will also be useful to Tasahre to see the style of her pupil’s previous teacher. This way she will see the flaws that have been brought to his training and she will know what corrections must first be made before any bad ways become habit. Assuming it is not all too late for that. As you observed, they are almost the same age. In many ways, your boy is far too old to learn.’ Berren’s stomach tightened. His heart beat faster. He was going to show her! It wasn’t as though Master Sy hadn’t taught him anything at all!

‘I’ve always been told there’s not much point in teaching a man what to do with a sword until he’s at least strong enough to hold it properly.’

‘Interesting.’ For the first time, the elder dragon allowed some emotion to show: he looked very slightly intrigued. ‘Your own teacher came from Caladir or Brons then?’

‘Kalda, actually.’ Master Sy sounded annoyed. ‘You won’t have heard of it. Small school on the fringes of the Dominion. They took their instructors from the sun-king’s court where they could. Oh, and she did a lot of real fighting. On battlefields, you understand. Killing people. We used to have a lot of that.’

‘Ah.’ The elder dragon nodded solemnly as if that explained everything. Then he beckoned again. In the background, the doors to the temple were swinging open. Midday prayers were over. Finally Master Sy nodded. He took back his sword and crossed the line in the sand, walking slowly, keeping his back to the sword-monks with his blade in his hand. Tasahre didn’t move, although her eyes left Berren and followed the thief-taker instead. The novices were coming out of the temple. They weren’t allowed to run, and the sight of them walking as fast as they possibly could would have made Berren laugh, except … Except something was in the air, some sense of expectation and it made him uneasy. Master Sy was twirling his sword, loosening his arm. They weren’t using practise weapons either and Berren knew exactly how sharp Master Sy kept his steel.

The thief-taker turned around and drew up into a neutral guard. Tasahre didn’t move. More and more priests and novices were streaming out of the temple now. They sat at the edge of the ring in the sand, watching, full of anticipation. Berren stared too.

Tasahre turned to face Master Sy with slow precision. She had her back to Berren now. She half-crouched. For a moment everything was still; then she sprang and Berren had never seen anything like it. Some twenty feet separated her from the thief-taker and she covered nearly all of it in a single leap. She landed in front of him, both swords out, one blade sweeping through the air where Master Sy’s head should have been. Berren gasped. She didn’t even try to pull the attack! The thief-taker shimmied sideways at the last possible instant. He ducked the sword coming at his head and his own flicked towards the girl’s kidneys, so fast that Berren barely even saw it. The sword-monk did, though. She twisted aside, parried with her second blade and swung again. She was fast, cat-quick and every bit as agile.

‘Stop!’ called the older monk. Immediately, Tasahre jumped away from Master Sy. She held her swords in guard and didn’t move. The thief-taker watched her, wary.

The elder dragon walked across the sand. He prised first one sword and then the other out of Tasahre’s fingers and replaced them with a single wooden practice sword. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Two swords is how we learn, but your opponent has only one. Now you will have to adapt your style to your circumstances. Begin.’

She came at the thief-taker slower this time, circling around him, edging closer. They exchanged a flurry of blows, all thrusts and parries, no sweeping cuts this time. They were both so quick that Berren had no idea who was winning, if anyone was winning at all. He saw Master Sy wince. A moment later, Tasahre stepped back and threw down her wooden sword.

The thief-taker bowed. ‘You have touched me twice. You fight well.’

‘You are holding back!’ she said.

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

All the sword-monks flinched at that. The elder dragon moved quickly to put himself between Tasahre and Master Sy. There was an exchange of words, too quiet and quick for Berren to follow; then the elder dragon took up another practice sword and handed it to the thief-taker. He gave the steel one to Berren.

‘Begin!’

This time the sword-monk flew at Master Sy. The air rang with the sound of wood striking wood as she battered him slowly backwards. Every second, one sword or the other seemed to come within a whisker of striking home. Berren had seen Master Sy do this before though, let himself be pushed back; he waited, holding his breath for the time when the thief-taker would step sideways instead of backwards, flick his wrist and end the fight.

He did exactly that. Except Tasahre’s waster was somehow in the way. She blocked his lunge. For a moment they were so close they were almost touching. Quick as a snake, the sword-monk punched Master Sy in the face with her other hand, squarely on the nose. The thief-taker staggered back, blood streaming down his face, and the sword-monk went straight after him. She came low, lunging at his hips; Master Sy twisted away but there was a desperation to the way he moved this time. The sword-monk scooped up a handful of sand as she rose and threw it at his face. As he turned and raised his guard to protect his eyes, the practice sword caught him a thumping blow in the ribs. A clear win. Master Sy staggered again. His guard dropped.

The sword-monk didn’t stop. She dropped almost to the ground and cracked the waster hard against Master Sy’s leg, just above the knee. Berren winced. Somehow he didn’t go down, but Tasahre was up again, leaping into the air. She kicked, one foot thrust out, straight into the thief-taker’s chest. He flew backwards, his leg collapsed and now he was down.

Tasahre stepped away. She bowed, once to Master Sy, now gasping in the sand, once to the elder dragon, and once to the assembled priests. Then, quietly and calmly, although she was still shaking from the fight, she took her place with the other sword-monks. The elder dragon waited until she was seated and then went to look at Master Sy. He knelt down and poked at the thief-taker’s leg, then put his hand on the thief-taker’s knee. Master Sy let out a cry of pain. The monk said something too quiet for anyone but the thief-taker to hear, got up and walked away. He gestured as he did, and immediately, two more sword-monks jumped to their feet. They ran to Master Sy, lifted him up between them and dragged him to Berren.

‘Master?’

The thief-taker steadied himself on Berren’s shoulders. His face was tight with pain. ‘You will have to help me,’ he said, his teeth clenched together, ‘to get home.’

T
he monks started on something else but Berren had lost interest. Master Sy could barely walk. He could hop, but his injured leg couldn’t bear weight at all, not without the thief-taker clenching up in agony. Berren found himself a handcart but the thief-taker shook his head. No, it wouldn’t do for the city’s most feared thief-taker to be seen pushed about in a cart.

So they walked, Master Sy’s arm around Berren’s shoulders, three good legs between them. Afternoon bells rippled out from The Peak, chasing after them, and by the time they reached Four Winds Square, Berren’s legs ached and his arms were burning. People turned to stare as they passed. A man being half-carried across the city might have been common enough down by the waterfront or the sea-docks, but not up here. People knew him too, knew Master Sy. Now and then, eyes would stop and stare at them and then hurry away, muttering
thief-taker
under their breath.

Finally they were across and into the narrow web of streets and alleys and the little yard where the thief-taker lived. A small gang of weavers from nearby Clothmakers’ squeezed around them. They were familiar faces, even if Berren had no names to put to them. They filed past in silence, a nod here and there to the thief-taker, even one to Berren. After they passed they clustered together again. Berren could almost hear them whispering.

‘Should I get Teacher Garrient?’ he asked as he opened the thief-taker’s door. Garrient was the moon-priest who’d been the thief-taker’s friend from almost the moment Master Sy had set foot in Deephaven. He’d helped them before when Berren had taken a blow to the head from a mudlark over in Siltside, and on other occasions besides.

The thief-taker shook his head. He hopped into his front room, in through the little narrow door where tall men like Master Mardan had to stoop, slumped into his chair and pulled up his breeches. The skin above the side of his knee was an angry red; in the middle was a mark, pale white skin like an old scar. It was the sign of a sunburst.

‘There’s nothing he can do.’

‘What?’ Berren didn’t understand. ‘What about …?’ He wasn’t sure whether to say it.
What about the witch-doctor who lives in the House of Cats and Gulls that you pretend not to know much about?
Something ran deep there. Much as his master tried to hide it, he and the witch-doctor were bound by something, some dark secret they’d each brought with them to Deephaven. ‘What about Master Kuy?’

‘No! You stay away from him!’ For a moment the thief-taker looked wild. Then he winced in pain. ‘No. Kuy couldn’t break a seal of the sun. Much as he might wish otherwise.’

Berren stood. He ought to find something to do. At times like this, he’d learned, the best thing to do was simply to keep out of the thief-taker’s way. But he couldn’t keep himself from blurting out: ‘Why did you let that stupid monk win?’

‘What?’

‘Why did you let that monk win? Why?’

Deep furrows folded Master Sy’s brow. ‘
Let
her win? I didn’t let her win, boy.’

‘You did! You didn’t fight properly!’

‘Boy!’

‘You
let
her … A
girl
!’

Crippled leg or not, Master Sy was out of his chair in a heartbeat. He grabbed Berren’s shirt and shook him, then staggered and nearly lost his balance. ‘I didn’t
let
her, boy,’ he shouted, inches from Berren’s face. ‘She was
better
than me!’ He let go. Took a deep breath and flopped back down. ‘I’m sorry. But she was. A lot better.’

Berren glared. ‘She smashed your leg!’

Master Sy looked at his knee. ‘Yes, and she would have left me a cripple, too, but it will heal soon enough. Her teacher promised me that much. The mark of the sun will see to that.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Smells of dust in here.’