The Bloody Judge took a step closer to Berren. ‘And how I came to Kalda and saw Master Sy again by chance, went after him and found his brother, Prince Talon, joined his company and so joined his war against King Meridian to help Syannis sit on his throne again.’ He glanced over his shoulder at One-Eye. ‘Do you remember that, Tallis? Do you remember me telling you about Fasha, the bondsmaid, and how I didn't kill the Dark Queen when I should have, and what happened after I took my Fasha and my son back again? Do you remember the tears I wept when I told you that. Falling-down drunk we were. What did they call that brew we were drinking? Devil's finger?’
‘Devil's foot,’ said Berren hopelessly. He shook his head, lost, then lifted his eyes and met the Bloody Judge's gaze. ‘I am Berren. I am the Bloody Judge, however much you don't want to believe it. Maybe we both are. Do you remember that night in the Maze with Lilissa? After we went with Master Sy into the Captain's Rest and the harbour master set his snuffers on us all? If you really are me, you know where we hid.’
The Bloody Judge nodded. ‘The Sheaf of Arrows. The old cellar. You could slip into it off the backstreet if you knew how.’ He smiled. ‘I remember Lilissa, yes. And if you're me, you'll remember who was waiting for us when we came out.’
‘One-Thumb.’
‘Yeh, but it was Hair who saw us first.’ For a moment Berren and the Bloody Judge looked into one another, each trying to fathom the other out. Then the Judge shook his head. ‘I know who I am, warlock.’ He turned away.
Berren lunged against the chains again. ‘One-Eye! Ask him how he lost his finger, One-Eye. Ask him how he really lost it.’
The Bloody Judge roared with laugher. He looked back to glare at Berren and his eyes blazed. ‘Which story should I tell him, warlock. Should I tell him the one I told him when we first met, how it was cut off in my first battle as a Fighting Hawk, or shall I tell tell him the one he's never heard where it was cut off by the warlock Saffran Kuy on the day he cut a piece out of my soul with this cursed knife.’ He turned back, shaking his head, baring his teeth and chuckling to himself, and as he came closer he drew out the golden-hafted knife again. ‘Three little cuts, warlock. You. Obey. Me. I see it now. That's how you know so much about me, is it?’ He touched the stone that Berren had worn around his neck every day for the last dozen years, the stone that Gelisya had given back to him when they'd been friends. The stone that made him whole again, or so it had always seemed. ‘Saffran's little piece of me. That's how you know. I always thought it was too good to be true that he'd give it back.’ He held the Starknife in front of Berren's face. ‘I should cut you and make you my slave, warlock.’
‘Cut me with that and you'll see everything I say is true! Cut me, then! Do it! I'm begging you!’ But The Bloody Judge was already backing away and shaking his head.
‘I don't make men into slaves, warlock. I'm not like you.’
Tallis One-Eye spat at Berren's feet. ‘So do we hang him, Judge? He's a warlock after all.’
The Judge stared a long time, off into the distance, then shook his head. ‘Maybe so, One-Eye, but he can go with the rest. You never know.’ He turned and walked away.
Berren closed his eyes and gasped. For a moment he'd almost believed that there were two of them, that they were both him. But no. The stone with Saffran Kuy's piece of him inside it. That was how this this usurper knew everything about him. It had been a trick then, had it? A trap right from the very start? He bit his lip. And who was it who'd given the stone and that piece of his soul inside back to him? Gelisya. The Dark Queen herself, back when she'd been nothing more than a girl. Twelve years old.
He wept then, knowing he was doomed. The soldiers unchained their prisoners one by one and manacled them back together in a single line. The first of the queensguard to struggle was beaten swiftly and brutally to death. After that the others were mute and meek. By the time they were done and filing out into the glare of the sunlight, the two warlocks the Judge had singled out were already dead and hanging from their gibbets. All along the seafront other men hung by their necks, swinging slowly back and forth in the morning breeze whipping off the sea. The warlocks of Tethis. Berren stared at them with disbelief because it was exactly as he'd planned. Hang them by the sea and then burn them in a pyre, all of them together, then scatter their ashes over the waves. Give them to any god who'd take them, any but their own. And now it was done, finally done. A dozen years of war and they were broken once and for all, and someone else had done it. Someone who wore his skin. One of them. So they weren't really broken at all.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered, and turned and tried to catch the eye of the impostor, to ask him, to tell him that this wasn't done, not finished, not over, not ever for as long as he breathed. I will hunt you and I will kill you, stealer of my skin. But the Bloody Judge never looked back, and when Berren snarled and rattled his chains, soldiers turned and raised their sticks. They'd kill him. They weren't afraid to do that. In fact, it wouldn't trouble them at all.
The air tasted of salt. The stones on the beach crunched under his feet. The soldiers separated them into groups of six. There were boats waiting, rowing boats, and Taiytakei sword-slaves, and standing on the shore with them was a single black man in a cloak of tattered feathers. He handed a purse to Gaunt — of course it had to be Gaunt who was dealing with slavers — who smiled at them all in turn. ‘Tethis thanks you kindly for your contribution to its coffers.’ He jingled his bag of coins, happy and jaunty as he walked away.
The wind tugged at the rags of Berren's stolen robe, stinging him with salt, stealing the warmth of the sun until he shivered. Among the beached fishing boats, ropes rattled and banged against their masts and sails flapped where they'd been hung to dry. Waves crashed and sucked, the relentless rhythm of the sea that Berren had once known so well. The Taiytakei's feathered cloak kept whipping back in his face. He looked them up and down, barked an order and walked away. Out in the harbour his slaving ship rocked, sleek and lean like all their ships. Far out to sea the skies were leaden. It would be raining again before long. Did feathered cloaks hold off the rain?
Berren the Crowntaker, the Bloody Judge of Tethis, looked back at the town that had given him its name, still searching for the man who'd stolen his life. He stared until someone threw a sack over his face and pushed him forward and hissed in his ear, ‘Forget it, slave. You'll never see it again.’
And he never would.
13
The Watcher waited. When the grey dead finally walked away from his tomb-like shrine deep under the Sun and Moon Temple, the Watcher became the floor on which he walked, the shadows he wore for his cloak, the air he breathed. Outside, through the colours and bustle of the Harub, he was the sunlight of the day. At the foot of the Visonda he became one with the Silver Mountain's feet, with the outcrop of rock on which the fortress-palace was built.
The grey dead climbed the wide sweeping steps and walked in through cavernous open gates of black wood studded with rust-brown iron. The Watcher became the vast slope of the walls, the air amid the neat straight rows of windows that broke its upper tiers, the myriad coloured tiles of the near-flat roofs of its many different levels.
The heart of the lower Visonda was a high-walled space as big as a field with a second pair of great gates on the inner side. The Watcher followed the grey dead from on high, a dull speck among the hundreds of rainbow-draped Taiytakei in their silks and feathers and their slaves in pristine white. At the second gates the grey dead stretched out his arms, palms up, letting his sleeves fall back from his wrists to show the slave brands on his forearms. He had the sign of a two-masted ship burned into each that said to any who cared to know that he was a sword-slave made in distant Shevana-Daro, not here in Vespinarr. By the gate, soldiers decked in bright mustard yellows and tasselled in silver waved him through.