Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  “Aye,” she said again. “Just like Billy the Boy is.”

  I nodded. I could tell that Anne was scared of Billy the Boy, and that didn’t surprise me. I knew that Sir Eland certainly was, and had been ever since that first night in the woods outside Messia. Sometimes I was scared of him too, although I’d have been hard-pressed to put my finger on exactly why.

  Touched by the goddess, I thought.

  No twelve-year-old child should be a confessor and a seer, but Billy was.

  “Is there something you’re not telling me, Bloody Anne?”

  “Maybe you ought to see for yourself,” she said.

  I followed Anne through to the kitchen, and there was Billy, watching over Hari as she had said. Hari did look better, I had to allow. He was asleep again now, but that awful waxy sheen was gone from his face and he almost had some color back in his cheeks. Billy was sitting cross-legged on the table staring at him, unblinking. He had an intense way about him sometimes, and that was nothing out of the ordinary for him.

  “What am I not seeing?” I asked her.

  “Tomas,” Anne said slowly, “he’s not touching the table.”

  I looked again and realized that she was right. There was a good inch of clear space between Billy’s arse and crossed legs and the top of the table.

  He was floating in the air.

  “By Our Lady’s name,” I whispered.

  I swallowed. Billy was touched by the goddess, I knew that. I knew that, but knowing it and seeing it weren’t the same thing.

  Billy didn’t look like he knew we were in the room. He just floated there, staring at Hari, and he gave no sign that he could see or hear us. Perhaps he couldn’t. He was in some sort of trance, to my mind, although how and why were anyone’s guess. Was the goddess really working through him, healing Hari? Perhaps. I didn’t discount the idea, but if that was the case then I had no explanation for it. Our Lady didn’t heal men, that I knew of.

  “We should send for a priest,” Anne said.

  I gave her a look.

  “I am a fucking priest,” I said, “and it’s more than I can explain. We’d need a magician to explain this.”

  Of course I didn’t know a magician, no more than I knew a real doctor. There was Old Kurt, though, down in the Wheels, who people called a cunning man. He was to a magician what Doc Cordin was to a proper doctor, I supposed. Not book-schooled, maybe, but what he did worked well enough. Most of the time, anyway. Perhaps he could explain it.

  Still, if Billy the Boy had done something to Hari, or if Our Lady had done something through Billy, then it didn’t seem to have done anyone any harm. Quite the opposite, to my mind. A man of mine who had been dying wasn’t anymore, and I wasn’t going to argue with that.

  “It’s late and I’m tired,” I said. “If Billy wants to float in the air, then I can’t see it’s hurting anyone.”

  “You’re just going to let it pass?” Anne asked.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t see what else I could do about it, short of getting hold of him and physically dragging him down onto the table. I had a feeling that wouldn’t have been wise.

  “It’s witchcraft, Tomas.”

  “I’ll pray on it,” I said. “Then I’m going to sleep.”

  I left Anne in the kitchen, watching Billy the Boy while he floated above the table and stared down at Hari, never blinking.

  I wouldn’t pray on it.

  Our Lady didn’t answer prayers, after all, and I had more pressing things to concern me than Billy the Boy. Or so I told myself at the time, anyway.

  I made my way up the rickety stairs to the garret room I had claimed as my own, and shut the ill-fitting door behind me. I could hear my aunt snoring in the next room.

  Billy the Boy would keep, I told myself, whether it was witchcraft or not, and how the fuck was I supposed to know either way? I was a priest, not a mystic, but the last thing I wanted was Anne worrying about witchcraft in our crew. I took my sword belt and mail off and flexed my shoulders, aching from the weight of the armor. She would have to keep as well; other things wouldn’t keep at all.

  There were Queen’s Men in the city, and they wanted me to work for them.

  Again.

  * * *

  • • •

  I woke early the next morning, despite not having laid my head down much before dawn. I needed to piss. I kicked my bedroll open and got up, feeling the cold morning air around my bare shins. I found the pot and stood over it in my smallclothes, thinking while I did my business. There’s nothing like a good piss in the morning to clear the head. That was better than prayer any day, to my mind, and certainly more productive.

  The Queen’s Men.

  I thought I had seen the last of them, but it seemed like I had been wrong about that.

  I have written that I’m a businessman, and I am. I’m a priest as well, and that’s true enough. But perhaps I’m something else too. That gold hidden in the wall of the storeroom downstairs hadn’t come out of thin air, after all. I had earned that gold, and no one knew about that. Not Governor Hauer, not Jochan, not even Aunt Enaid.

  No one.

  I had earned that gold from the Queen’s Men, before the war. That was what I had been worried that Governor Hauer might have discovered. From what he had said last night it seemed that he hadn’t, and that was good even if nothing else was.

  They paid well, the Queen’s Men, I had to give them that. They had paid me very well indeed, to spy on the governor. Oh, he thought he was untouchable, did Hauer, up here in his reeking industrial city where none of the fine lords and ladies of Dannsburg would ever have wanted to set their silken feet.

  Incomes were what he said they were, to Hauer’s mind, and taxes were paid accordingly. He never thought anyone in the capital would trouble themselves to question his accounts, but then of course at the time he hadn’t known that there was a war brewing. Wars have to be paid for, in gold as well as blood. Blood might be cheap, but gold had to be wrung out of the provinces, by force if necessary. I’m no politician, but even I knew that.

  A man had contacted me maybe a year before the war broke out. He was no one I knew, just a trader from the east offering good terms on tea and silk and poppy resin. We had made some deals, that man and I, and once he had my trust he had shown me the Queen’s Warrant and offered me another deal—work for the Queen’s Men or face the queen’s justice for the dodged tea taxes and the unlicensed poppy trade.

  I knew the queen’s justice was even harsher than mine, so of course I had agreed.

  I had never thought I’d be a spy for the crown, but then I had never thought I’d be a priest either. Working for the crown had stuck in my throat like a fish bone, though, and it almost choked me. To work for the crown, to be an informer and a spy, that went against everything I believed in and I hated it.

  Better that than hang, though, or so I told myself so I could sleep at nights.

  I worked for that man for five months, passing him information on everything from the bribes that the Pious Men paid the City Guard to the number of boats that came down the river and how many bales and barrels each unloaded, and what each one had contained.

  It had cost me silver to find those things out, of course, but for every silver mark I spent it seemed the Queen’s Man was happy to repay me with a gold crown. I was careful and circumspect, and I made sure that my eyes and ears were no one that we knew. This wasn’t Pious Men business; I had known that from the start. If I had made it Pious Men business, then Jochan would have known about it and got himself involved, and it would all have gone to the whores. Even then, I realized as I finished my piss and buttoned my smallclothes, even before the war I had known I couldn’t trust my brother.

  That was over and done, or so I had thought, but it looked like I had been wrong about that. It seemed that the Queen’s Men weren’t done with me yet
. I had heard it said that the only way to leave the service of the crown is at the end of a rope, and it seemed that that might just be true after all.

  I splashed water from the basin into my unshaven face. I needed to see a barber, I thought. It wouldn’t do to greet a representative of the queen with a rough chin.

  I got dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen, buckling my sword belt as I went. I found Hari sitting up in a chair with a bowl of oats in his hands and a mug of small beer on the table in front of him. He was spooning oats into his face like he hadn’t eaten in a month. He was still a bit pale but otherwise his recovery was nothing short of miraculous. I wasn’t sure that I believed in miracles, but I believed what I could see with my own eyes.

  “Morning, boss,” Billy the Boy said from beside the fireplace.

  I gave him a look, noting how pale and drawn he seemed.

  “Morning, Billy,” I said. “Hari, it’s good to see you up and about again.”

  “Aye, boss,” Hari said. “I’m feeling a lot better. Just needed some sleep, I reckon. I’ve been awful tired, of late.”

  I wondered how much he remembered but decided to let it pass.

  “You take it easy,” I said.

  I reached into my pouch and gave him four silver marks. He stared at me in open astonishment.

  “You missed out on the accounting,” I told him. “It’s three marks a man for joining the Pious Men, and there’s another for you on account of being grievously wounded in my service. I look after my crew, Hari, and I reward loyalty. You remember that.”

  “Yes, boss,” he said, making the money disappear swiftly into his sweaty shirt. “Thank you.”

  The men would need new clothes, I thought. They were all filthy and ragged, every man of them, and I wasn’t much better myself. Conscripts usually were, of course, but that wouldn’t do anymore. Not now we were home it wouldn’t. The Pious Men had a certain appearance to maintain, after all.

  “Billy,” I said, and the lad looked up at me with expressionless eyes.

  “Boss?”

  I didn’t want to do this, I realized. Not now, anyway. It would keep, as I had told myself the night before.

  “Stay out of Bloody Anne’s way today,” I told him. “I’m going out.”

  I went back into the common room and found Fat Luka returning from the shithouse in the yard.

  “You’re coming into town with me,” I told him.

  He just nodded and went to get his weapons. Luka was a good Ellinburg man, and he knew how things worked. Bloody Anne was my second, no mistake about that, but I had known Luka a lot longer and he knew the city. There were some tasks he’d be better suited for.

  I knew I could trust him.

  TWELVE

  I put Luka on Jochan’s horse again, and the pair of us rode up out of the Stink toward Trader’s Row. I didn’t need anyone with me, not really, but a man in my position should never ride alone. If nothing else there are expectations to be met, and it wouldn’t look right for Tomas Piety to be about in Ellinburg without at least one bodyguard.

  Three years of war was a long time, and if people had started to forget about the Pious Men, then it was my job to remind them who we were. We were back, and I needed the whole city to know that. These Skanians that Hauer was so worried about were only half the problem, to my mind. I needed my own people to respect me, the people of Ellinburg. That wasn’t going to happen while my men and I looked like vagrants.

  Many of the streets in Ellinburg were named after the trades that had first claimed them, hundreds of years ago. Net Mender’s Row, where Doc Cordin lived, was what it sounded, a squalid street near the river in the heart of the Stink where the poor worked on the nets with their gnarled and arthritic hands until they could no longer afford to feed themselves. It backed onto Fisher’s Gate, where the river water seeped into the foundations of the houses and men pulled sickly fish from the polluted river to feed their equally sickly wives and children. Trader’s Row, though, half a city away near the governor’s hall and the Great Temple, was another matter.

  Trader’s Row was home to the halls of the guilds, and there was money there. Even these days, even with how the city was now, there was money on Trader’s Row. There was a barber’s shop near the hall of spicers that I had used to frequent before the war, and that was where we went first. It was expensive, of course, but as I say, there were expectations to be met. Doc Cordin had always been a better surgeon than he was a barber, and I wasn’t letting him near my face with a razor.

  We hitched the horses outside, and Luka pushed the door open for me. An elderly, aproned man was halfway through shaving a well-dressed stranger, and he gave Luka a disdainful look before his eyes found me. A look of shock blossomed on his pink face.

  “Mr. Piety,” he said, and if his hand trembled on the razor just a little it wasn’t enough to cut his customer’s throat, so there was that.

  “Hello, Ernst,” I said. “I’m home, and I need a shave and a haircut.”

  I have never seen a barber finish a shave so fast. Ernst had sixty or more years to him, but he could work quickly when he needed to. Whoever the man in the chair was, he was smooth and dry and out the door in less than five minutes.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Piety,” Ernst said, wringing his plump pink hands. “So sorry. It’s just me here now, you see. My apprentice boy went off to war and he hasn’t come back, not yet he hasn’t, so I’m rushed off my feet all day. Sit down, sir, sit down.”

  I shrugged out of my robes, and he ushered me into the chair in my shirtsleeves, all the while fussing around me like he had a prince of the realm in his shop. Good. That was what I wanted, after all.

  I was Tomas Piety, and in Ellinburg I was a fucking prince.

  Luka stood by the door while Ernst worked, keeping guard. Before long I was shaved smooth and my hair was cut short and neat, the way it should be. Ernst passed me a moist towel, the water scented with rose petals. That water hadn’t come from the river, that was for sure. There were good wells around Trader’s Row, after all, for the servants of the rich folk to draw their water.

  “I’ll take tea while you see to my man,” I said.

  Ernst nodded and bustled into the room behind the shop, returning a few minutes later with a shallow, steaming bowl cradled in his hands. Ernst loved his tea, I knew, and there was always a pot ready. Tea was expensive, though, very expensive, and he didn’t make a habit of offering it to customers. Only princes don’t wait to be offered, do they? Princes demand what they want, and are given it. Expectations to be met, as I have said.

  I stood by the window and sipped my tea while Luka had his shave and his haircut. He looked better for it, I had to admit, although he was still fat. There was little enough to be done about that—if he had managed to stay fat on army rations then it was just his natural shape and he’d be fat for life, to my mind.

  When we were done I paid Ernst and told him to expect my brother and some of my friends over the next few days. He looked uncomfortable about that, but he nodded anyway. Jochan frightened him, I knew, but then Jochan frightened most people. That was what he was best at.

  We left the barber’s and headed farther up Trader’s Row, past the hall of mercers and the temple of the Harvest Maiden to the shop of a tailor I knew. He looked a good part more pleased to see me than Ernst had, and he took our measurements and showed me the bolts of cloth without any unnecessary conversation. A good tailor has to be discreet, after all, and Pawl was certainly that. He was old too, older than Ernst, and he had seen enough of life to understand how it worked. I thought Pawl might have been a soldier once, but if so he had never spoken of it in my hearing. He agreed to come by the Tanner’s Arms the next day and measure up the rest of my crew. I wasn’t having any member of the Pious Men seen looking like that lot did, not now things were starting to happen.

  They might not li
ke it, but they had money now and they were going to start spending it in the right places and on the right things. Soon enough they would learn what those things were.

  I would insist on it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Luka and I returned to the Tanner’s Arms shortly before noon, and I found there was a whore waiting for me. She stood at the bar chatting to Bloody Anne, her back to me and her long red hair loose, but I could see the bawd’s knot on her shoulder clear enough. We didn’t run whores from the Tanner’s. We never had done, and I wasn’t about to start now.

  “Who’s this then?” I asked.

  Anne was about to speak when the other woman turned around and gave me an insolent grin. It was her, I realized, that redhead who seemed to be the boss of the Chandler’s Narrow girls. I had known that one was going to be trouble the moment I had first seen her.

  “Well now, don’t you smarten up fine-looking?” she said.

  She tossed her hair off her shoulder, proudly displaying the bawd’s knot. Her hair was clean now, I noticed, which was probably why I hadn’t recognized her at first. That and she was wearing a kirtle that looked new. Will the Woman had obviously started spending money on his girls now that he was in charge up there, and that was good. That was investment, and it showed initiative and that he knew what he was doing. Maybe he was one to watch.

  “What do you want?” I asked her.

  “He’s a silver-tongued devil, ain’t he,” the redhead said to Anne, and I noticed my second’s scar twitch as she tried not to smile. “What a charming man! My name’s Rosie, Mr. Piety, seeing as you didn’t ask before.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m here to see you.”

  She held my stare bold as brass and gave her hips a suggestive wiggle, and a thought struck me.

  There’s a Queen’s Man in the city right now, the governor had told me. Well, a Queen’s Woman.

  It wasn’t impossible, I realized, that I was looking at this Queen’s Woman right now. The bawd’s knot would make a fine disguise for a spy, I thought. A licensed whore comes and goes where she pleases, just about, and is seldom questioned. How far did duty to queen and country extend? I wondered. Enough to wear the knot, and do what that entailed? Perhaps it did, I wouldn’t know.