‘So he did.’
They went downstairs. Master Sy ran his hands over the dead body by the door. When he stood up, he had another key in his hand and a gleam in his eye. He led Berren back to the stone passage with the heavy doors. One of them was open now and the thief-taker moved slowly inside. The room beyond was pitch black, with no windows. They felt their way around, blind in the darkness. Pushed up against the far wall was a wooden chest bound in metal. It was too big and heavy for even two men to lift and carry away. Master Sy fumbled with the key he’d taken from the dead man with the cane. There was a click. Berren reached to open it.
‘Careful.’ Together they lifted the lid. Berren was sure it would be laden with gold and treasure, but when he reached inside, all he felt were bundles of parchment. Underneath those were round cases, hard and leathery, the sort you might use to store a map. Then his fingers finally closed on something hard and metallic. He couldn’t see what it was in the darkness but it felt like a buckle for a belt or a cloak. He imagined it to be silver or even gold, maybe even covered in gems! He slipped it into his pocket.
‘Come!’
At the far end of the strongroom passage there was another door. It was a heavy thing bound in iron, impossible to see in the dark until you walked right into it. Master Sy fiddled with his ring of stolen keys once more until he found the one that opened it. Berren sighed with relief — he could see his feet again. Shadows were one thing; shadows were for hiding and watching and he liked shadows. But full pitch dark where a man couldn’t even see where he was treading, that was a different matter.
He stepped out. They must have been in one of the myriad alleys that ran around the back of the docks and Reeper Hill, one that he didn’t know. He looked for the moon but it had dipped below the warehouses. The door, he saw, had no keyhole and no handle on the outside. In fact, from the outside, you’d barely know it was a door at all.
‘Stay here. I won’t be long.’ Master Sy trotted away down the alley. He was limping again, quite badly. When he came back, he was pushing an enormous handcart. A tarpaulin lay bundled up inside.
‘You’ll have to help me,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move the bodies.’
‘The bodies? Why, master?’ No one had seen the killings. ‘What if the watch stop us?’
Master Sy went inside. Berren followed.
‘Khrozus Blood! What a mess!’ The thief-taker started to laugh.
Three men dead on the floor downstairs, two more upstairs, blood everywhere and papers strewn about the place. ‘The soldiers and the snuffers — they saw us, master! They’re going to know!’
‘They saw Weasel and his men too.’ The thief-taker rounded on Berren. ‘Listen, lad: When the harbour-masters find this, they’re going to have fits. And yes, they’re going to know who was here, and yes, they’re going to want us all strung up — you, me, the Headsman, the lot of us.’ He pointed at the bodies. ‘One way or the other, we have to disappear now, lad. We leave them all behind us, everyone knows how it turned out. We all vanish, no one knows but us.’ The thief-taker shook his head. ‘With a bit of luck, people will think we’re dead. Maybe the Headsman might start wondering about Weasel and his snuffers, and how much can he trust them? Uncertainty makes for fear, Berren, and fear is always the thief-taker’s friend.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘We can get Kol doing our work for us — your monks would string the Headsman up as quick as look at him. What business has he got at a temple though?’ He looked at the bodies again and sucked air between his teeth. ‘Kol could take the bodies to his catacombs and then try and get a priest to talk to them, but …’ The thief-taker was frowning furiously. ‘Or Kuy could do it. I dare say he’s not the only one. But these ones don’t know anything. Except about us.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘No, they’ve all got to go.’
Kuy! He meant Saffran Kuy, the witch-doctor from the House of Cats and Gulls. ‘So it’s true then? The witch-doctor can really make dead people talk?’ He’d never seen the witch-doctor in the flesh, but that was what the city whispers had always said: if the dead had secrets to spill, take them to the witch-doctor.
‘He really can. Now be quiet and get to work. We need to be up to Wrecking Point and back before it gets light.’
Whatever past Master Sy and the witch-doctor shared, the thief-taker kept it to himself. As best Berren could make out, they’d both come from the same place, a long time ago, both running from the same enemies. He shrugged and bowed his head, wise enough to know when there wasn’t any point in arguing, and got on with the job of dragging two corpses, bumping them down the stairs and out to the back door. He helped heave them into the handcart on top of the ones from downstairs; then Master Sy dragged the last corpse from the front door of the House of Records out to the back. It took both of them with all their strength to lift him in as well. When they were done, Berren’s hands were sticky with blood. It was on his shirt too.
‘This won’t do,’ growled Master Sy. ‘This won’t do at all.’ Berren ran around, arranging the tarpaulin on top of the cart. Master Sy circled a few paces away, pointing out where a hand or a boot or a lock of hair had broken free and was hanging out for all to see. All the while, Berren’s heart pounded. What if the watch came by? It was the middle of the night and the alley was dark and deserted, but still, this was the docks! And if not the militias, there were plenty of other gangs all ready to be full of trouble.
But no men came, no drunken sailors who’d lost their way, no shady men with cloaks and daggers and hoods to hide their faces, no gangs with padded jackets and big sticks. When the bodies were properly hidden, Berren and Master Sy went back to the strongbox. They scooped up the piles of paper and map-cases and went back to the cart. With five bodies, it took both of them to push it into motion.
‘Master, why are we doing this? What if someone stops us?’
‘Why would they?’
‘Because it’s the middle of the night!’
Master Sy shrugged. ‘But this is the docks. Is it that unusual to see a respectable citizen and his apprentice pushing a heavy cart up towards the Wrecking Point road in the middle of the night?’
Berren rather thought that yes, it was quite unusual indeed, but he held his tongue, and whatever Master Sy thought, the thief-taker kept to the alleys and the back-streets nonetheless. They pushed their cart into the warren of Reeper Hill, up steep narrow little roads that were never quite deserted, not even in the middle of the night. Here and there shadows lurked in doorways to let them pass, or else saw them coming and flitted a different way, out of their path.
When they reached the top they were both gasping for breath. The higgledy-piggledy houses of Reeper Hill fell away until there was nothing but the long crescent of broken cliff-top that was Wrecking Point. There was a road and then a path along the top, one that ran all the way to an old watchtower that no one used any more, except you couldn’t get there unless you brought a bridge with you because of the great cracks that ran right across the rock. No one came out to Wrecking Point at night. Not for anything good.
The path stopped abruptly. A chasm as wide as a man barred their way. Sheer walls of black stone fell forty feet down into the sea. The path picked up again on the other side, but only for those agile enough to jump the gap. The rest of Wrecking Point was an island.
Berren slumped against the handcart. He was drenched with sweat. The thief-taker already had the tarpaulin off, but it took both of them to lift out a body. Master Sy seemed all ready to simply hurl it off the edge into the water below; Berren had other ideas — he set to work on the man’s boots.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Good boots, master. Good armour, too. They’d be worth something. We might as well take it as not, master, especially if there’s no work to be had for the rest of the year. They don’t need them any more.’