The Twilight herald

'And if it's somethin' more?'

'Then after your costs, the money is mine.'

Shandek gave a splutter of laughter and slapped him on the back.

'Wait, hear me out first,' Mayel protested. 'The condition will be that I use the money to buy a share – I'm not asking to be an equal partner, of course not, just to have a stake. I know you're not happy to stay another man's vassal, and this could help.'

'You better be careful, talkin' like that,' Shandek said softly. 'Spider, he don't like to hear such talk, and he hears more than me. It could mean both our deaths if someone overheard you there, mine just because we're cousins, and he'd not trust me again after he had you killed.'

'Is he really so paranoid?'

'You have to ask? Man's still a mystery to me, ten years on. Never met 'im, never even heard his real name.' Shandek raised his left hand, waggling the stub of his little finger, which was covered in twisted scars. 'This was a friendly reminder after I tried too hard to find that out. Other men've been killed for not getting' the message.' He pointed at the road leading to the city centre and, his voice still lowered, said, ' I hear he went back on an order a few days back. Not somethin' I've ever heard happen before. Fancy a wander through the Shambles? Tread old haunts once more? I hear there's a theatre company renovatin' the sunken theatre – it's been derelict since your old friend set fire to it two years ago.'

'Old friend? Who-Shirrel?'

'That's the bastard. Never understood why you were friends with the boy but-'

'Why we were friends?' Mayel exclaimed. 'I might have been young, but I wasn't so stupid as that. If Shirrel wanted to be your friend, you were his friend. Lest o' course you wanted to wake up on fire.'

'Well, that won't happen now. Mad bastard decided to stay inside the theatre as it burnt. Perhaps he was watchin' his own perform¬ance?'

'Don't ask me to explain how his mind worked.' Mayel was too lost in his memories of poverty and childish spite to notice Shandek's effort at a joke. 'Anyway, what about this theatre company?'

'Ah yes. Someone was sent down to collect a little token of their respect to Spider, and it turned out they had none.'

Are they mad?'

'Perhaps. The man sent got a bad beatin'. Apparently they have a few albino boys workin' for them, vicious, hairless shites, who walk around barefoot, jabberin' in some language no one else can under¬stand. They must have come from the Waste or somethin', never seen their like before. Started more than one fight in the taverns too, drink like Chetse, so I'm told. Anyway, they worked the messenger over and dumped 'im in the street. Don't talk so well now, might not walk again, neither.'

'So Spider said to burn the place down again?'

'Exactly. Only it didn't happen, for reasons I didn't get told, and Spider called back the order the next day. Said he'd come to an "accommodation" with them and they were to be left alone.' Shandek sounded less than pleased at being kept out of the loop: the theatre bordered his own fiefdom.

'Sounds scared.'

'That's what I think. Those albinos must be pretty nasty, to frighten that bastard.'

'So why are we going there?'

Mayel's expression must have betrayed what he was feeling, because Shandek look one look at him and burst out laughing. 'No, I'm not takin' you to fight them, you fool! Spider said we couldn't lean on them, and I'm not inclined to.' Shandek waved an admonishing finger In Mayel's lace. 'But he didn't say nothin' about talkin' in a friendly ma

'Which is?'

'When someone's got somethin' to hide, there's money to be made. There's somethin' going on there; might be they could find some use of a man with local knowledge, a man who knows how to find things quietly and quickly. Either that, or the authorities might pay to know more about them.'

'And if you make a powerful friend in the process?'

All the better, my lad,' Shandek declared with a chuckle. A new friend warms the heart, that's what I always say.'

The Shambles was a place of dark, narrow alleyways. The two proper streets that cut through the district had been crammed with stalls and carts almost as soon as the cobblestones were laid. The smell was just as Mayel remembered: rotting vegetables, sewage, and meat gone bad in the sun. The gutter down the middle of the street was invariably clogged with bloody entrails and what off-cuts were too rancid for even the feral animal population. The area was a warren of tiny houses that brought back a host of memories. This was where Mayel had been born; this place had been his first education. For all the squalor, the sense of community was palpable, and right now he could feel fierce eyes watching him without recognition, resenting the outsider being publicly paraded by the man whose word was law in the shadows of the Shambles.

'Do you want to go by the old house? I rented it to a ta

Mayel shook his head. He didn't trust his voice not to betray the emotion he felt now. The Shambles was smaller to his eyes, ruder and meaner than it had seemed when he'd not known better. Guilt gnawed at him. He'd left with his father, hugging his sister tight so as to not lose her in the crowd of people fleeing the city. Their mother lay on the one bed in the shack they called home, dying of the white plague. With her last breath she urged them to flee. He could still see the blood-flecked foam bubbling from her mouth as she pleaded for them to save themselves.

For some reason his father had decided a life of service to Vellern would save them – and perhaps he'd been right, though Mayel had learned at the monastery that the white plague was nowhere near as contagious as the peasants believed it. Whatever the truth, they had set off on their pilgrimage to the Island of Birds. After a week of tramping dirt roads, his sister had stumbled, and never found the strength to get up again. The memory still left a knot in his stomach. He hadn't had the strength to hate his father then, but he'd made up for it later.

'I understand.' Shandek's voice was softer now. He knew the start of the story, and recognised the pain on Mayel's face. 'You never told me what happened to your da'.'

'He died,' Mayel replied flatly. 'After a few months he realised a monastery where they didn't make wine wasn't the place for him. Tried to slip away at night in a small boat. The Bitches took him.'

'The Bitches?'

'The rocks around the island. The monks always claimed that only people who'd fished the lake their whole life are able to navigate through them. They don't even let men from the village sail alone until they've thirty summers. Everyone else ends up smashed against the Bitches.'

'Right.' Shandek lapsed into silence. Sympathy was an underused emotion of his. What could a man say? Pity was a woman's prov¬ince, and he didn't like to intrude. Instead, he let his eyes wander the familiar lines of his home. After thirty-three summers of walking these streets, he could pick up the slightest change, whether it was a rise in fortunes permitting repairs, or the subtle indications that a man or woman were drinking more than they were working nowadays. Shandek kept an eye out for these people. It didn't do to have utter misery and complete poverty. It was like he always said: make sure the sheep are fat before you fleece them.

The sunken theatre occupied a sudden open space on the eastern edge of the Shambles, where the busy thoroughfare of Long Walk was an abrupt border to the district; folk tended to emerge blinking in t he newfound light after the narrow alleys of the Shambles. Dodging the carts and sliding through the currents of humanity that flowed back and forth, Shandek led his cousin across to where low stalls and harrows encircled the theatre, unconsciously echoing the barricade of shrines around the Six Temples further north. A pair of willow trees obscured much of the theatre's southern aspect, but Mayel could see building work going on.