‘Arent, do you bear the Mark of Old Tom?’
He flinched as if she’d struck him. The lantern shook in his hand as he turned towards her. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Got it after my father disappeared, but I couldn’t tell you how. Wish I could.’
‘You’re connected to our enemy,’ she said, her pride wounded. ‘Why would you conceal that fact from me?’
‘I didn’t know how to tell you,’ he admitted, staring at his wrist. ‘My grandfather asked me to keep this secret when I was a boy, and I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. It doesn’t come natural to talk about, even to you.’
Another growl rolled through the passages, causing them to freeze. After a tense minute, all was silent again.
‘Lord above, I wish I was your size,’ said Sara, blood beating in her ears.
‘Most places I’ve been, it’s just made me a target.’ He began walking again, swinging his flame left and right, searching for danger. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to be the biggest man on a battlefield. Every archer in the enemy ranks uses you to get their eye in.’
‘Do you ever miss it?’
‘Being used as target practice?’
‘War.’
He shook his head, watching the darkness cautiously. ‘Nobody misses war, Sara. It would be like missing the clap.’
‘What about the glory, the honour? Your deeds at the battle of Breda are –’
‘Mostly lies.’ He sounded almost angry. ‘There’s no glory, except what the minstrels make up so the nobles can feel good about the slaughter they paid for. A soldier’s job is to end up dead far from home, fighting for a king who wouldn’t give them the crumbs from his table.’
‘Then why do it?’
‘I needed a job,’ he said. ‘I left home without stopping to think what would happen next, then there was just one thing after another, until I was in the mud and blood. I tried being a clerk, but my grandfather kept finding me, so I went looking for work with no connection back to him. But what did I know of the world I went into? Until that first winter on my own, I’d never been cold, not really. Never been hungry. Never even had to fetch my own food. I took the first coin somebody would pay me, which was thief-taking work.’
They were deep in the maze now. Sara’s dress had soaked up so much bilge water it was beginning to weary her.
‘What was it like being a thief-taker? You never talked about your life before Sammy in the reports.’
‘I solved petty squabbles for the most part.’ His voice had warmed, filled with fondness. ‘My first job was convincing a cordwainer off his barstool so he could keep his promise to the woman he’d spilled his seed in. I talked to that man for an hour, before I realised I was just supposed to punch him, then drag him unconscious in front of the predikant.’
‘How did you end up serving Pipps?’
‘That’s a long story.’
‘We’re in a long maze.’
He laughed, conceding the point. Considering their situation, Sara was surprised he could manage it. Danger obviously affected them very differently. She was talking to distract herself, knowing that if she stopped, she’d fly back upstairs in fright.
By contrast, Arent’s hand was steady. His tone was firm. Anybody who’d stumbled upon them might assume he was out for a pleasant walk.
‘I’d been thief-taking for a year, when I was sent to collect a debt owed by an Englishman named Patrick Hayes,’ said Arent. ‘He ambushed me, and I killed him. I didn’t mean to, but’ – He examined his huge scarred hands – ‘my strength gets away from me when my temper’s up.’
‘Is that why your temper’s never up?’
‘You’ve never seen me try to play The Ballad of Samuel Pipps on my fiddle. Whichever bard came up with that must have had nineteen fingers.’
‘Why did you take his name?’
‘The bard?’
‘Hayes,’ she sighed. ‘The man you killed.’
‘Shame.’ He glanced at her over his shoulder. ‘I wanted something to remind me how it felt to kill a man.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Still think of him now.’ Oily water fell from the distant ceiling and plinked against the lantern. ‘I thought that would be enough. I thought all I had to do was feel guilty and promise never to take another life, and that would be it. Only thing is Hayes had brothers, so they came for revenge. They had friends, and the friends had brothers. Nobody ever tells you that if you take a single life, you have to murder the mob who’ll follow after.’
The quantity of his regret made her feel foolish for suspecting him.
‘Thing about grief is that every death makes the pile lighter,’ he said, peering around a corner. ‘One death is heavier than ten and a hundred are weightless. By the time I’d killed everybody who’d tried to kill me, mercenary work seemed an obvious way to make coin. After I rescued my uncle at Breda, he bought my commission, so I didn’t have to fight in the melee any more. Then Sammy came calling.’ He smiled. ‘Truth about Sammy is that once the web’s unpicked, he couldn’t care less where the spider scurries off to. Unfortunately for him, his clients rarely felt the same way. He hired me to do the chasing and fighting he didn’t want to do.’
Sara almost stopped dead. In Arent’s reports, Sammy was forever leaping out of windows on to horses to chase down the guilty. He was courageous and brave, striking down the unjust like a bolt out of heaven. More than once, she’d imagined herself alongside the bear and the sparrow, dashing off on a new adventure. To find out Pipps was something entirely different made her feel slightly sad, and a little foolish.
‘Then why do you do it?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s righteous work,’ he replied, baffled by the question. ‘Sammy puts right wrongs others wouldn’t bother with, or wouldn’t see. Doesn’t matter if you’re a pauper who lost two coins, or a noble whose children disappeared from their beds. If the case is interesting, Sammy will investigate. Imagine if there were more people like that? Imagine if everybody had somebody to help them when the bad things happened?’
He sounded wistful, conjuring an entire world through the yearning in his voice.
‘My grandfather saw most people as disposable, there to be used and tossed away in pursuit of ever more wealth and ever more power. Nobody ever stood up for them, or protected them. If you weren’t rich and you weren’t strong, he believed you had to take whatever unjustness life saw fit to mete out. I hated that about him. And I truly hated that he was right.’
The growl came again, close enough to prickle the hairs on Sara’s neck. The lantern jumped in Arent’s hand, briefly illuminating something scratched into the wood. Sara took hold of his forearm, drawing the flame towards the nearest crate. As the light fell upon it, she felt a chill settle in the pit of her stomach.
Scarring the crate was the eye with the tail.
‘The Mark of Old Tom,’ said Arent in disgust.
He took an involuntary step back, but his light washed towards another one a little further ahead. Creeping closer to it revealed another, then another, and another.
A growl came from the end of the passage.
Spinning towards it, they saw the leper waiting for them, a small candle held in its hands.
It was watching them.
It gave them time to see it, then walked unhurriedly away. Sara grabbed hold of Arent’s arm and was relieved to see he finally looked uncertain.
‘It wants us to follow,’ she said.
‘Probably into a trap.’
‘Then why not just attack us from behind? Why go through all of this?’