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wandered the streets around The Peak. The thief-taker would talk to the snuffers, the ones who still had a vestige of decency to them. Once or twice every month they’d dodge the press gangs and head into The Maze, to the Barrow of Beer and Master Sy’s friend Kasmin from the old days that he never liked to talk about. Sometimes they didn’t go any further than the yard outside Master Sy’s little house, the thief-taker clucking and shaking his head while Berren tried to cut and lunge with his waster until the light failed.
    That was before.
    It seemed he’d only just managed to fall asleep when Master Sy was shaking him awake again to sit for hours in the dark of the scent garden, bleary and cold, listening to people snore. And then, as everyone else was getting up and thinking about breakfast, there was Master Fennis, chasing him on his way with nothing but a crust of yesterday’s bread in his pocket, back up the hill to Deephaven Square and the temple in time to catch a lash of Teacher Sterm’s cane for being late. And that was when he realised that he hadn’t asked Master Sy about Kelm, whoever he was, and sure enough, Sterm had him straight up to the front first to share his ignorance.
    That was the way his days became – woken up in the middle of the night, cold and thankless hours sitting in the dark of the garden, more cold and thankless hours of sitting in the gloom at the temple, snatching leftovers to eat whenever he had a spare moment, always rushing from one misery to the next. His head was full of things he wanted, of princes and their women, swordplay and blade-dancing, and he was getting none of it, no swords, no thief-taking, nothing. He barely even saw the prince he was supposed to be guarding. In the temple, the other novices only jeered at him when he tried to tell them how important he was. The solar priests, it turned out, didn’t much care for Prince Sharda of Varr. If they’d known half the truth, they’d probably have rolled on the floor and wept with laughter.
    The novices to serve the monks from Torpreah were chosen – not Berren of course. They might have been the most gracious and the most penitent but that didn’t stop them strutting like peacocks when none of the priests were looking, and for once Berren envied them. Monks of the fire-dragon were the best fighters in the world, even Master Sy said so, and now he’d probably never even see them. His misery was complete.
    ‘Here.’ Master Velgian beckoned Berren over one evening when the Watchman’s Arms was busier than usual. Velgian had replaced Master Mardan, who had apparently said something he shouldn’t and been thrown out. Velgian fancied himself a poet and always carried the same battered old book of verses from Caladir and Brons with him wherever he went. On quiet evenings in The Eight, he sometimes read to the other thief-takers whether they wanted him to or not. There were more soldiers than Berren was used to tonight; there were other faces too, men and women he hadn’t seen before, wandering in and out through the yard around the moonpool. They were dressed in the silks and satins of rich city lords from The Peak, laced with gold and silver and decked with jewels. They looked agitated.
    Berren shrugged. It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do. As best he could tell, the prince was somewhere off and about, most likely up on Reeper Hill again. He’d taken Master Sy with him too.
    ‘Get a torch, lad.’
    Velgian was sitting beside the archway to the scent garden with a square piece of metal on the ground in front of him. Berren got a torch and sat down beside him.
    ‘Keep that away for a moment.’ Velgian had a waxed paper pouch in his hand. He tipped it over the metal plate, shook out a little pile of black powder then shuffled back a little. ‘Go on. Touch the torch to that then.’
    Berren poked the torch at the metal plate. There was a whoosh, a flash of orange light, a puff of smoke and a wave of heat.