by Peter McLean
To date we had had no open blood on the streets with the Gutcutters, though, and I wanted to keep it that way. For now, at least. I tried to gauge Ma Aditi’s mind on that and found that I couldn’t. Her face was expressionless, her plump hands folded on the table in front of her, where the light of the oil lamps made her many golden rings shine softly.
“Ma Aditi,” I said, breaking the silence at last. “I am glad to see you returned safely from the war.”
I was glad of no such thing, of course, and truth be told, I had prayed that she had died in Abingon. Our Lady doesn’t answer prayers, though, and Ma Aditi had returned to Ellinburg a month after I had, riding in at the head of her surviving men. This was the first time we had spoken, though, in a carefully brokered meeting that had taken Fat Luka three months to arrange to his satisfaction and that of her agent.
She nodded slowly.
“Mr. Piety,” she said. “I give thanks to the Many-Headed God for your life.”
I showed her a thin smile. The Many-Headed God was an Alarian god, not one I knew, but there was a temple to him up by the docks that served the traders off the tea ships. Perhaps Aditi held to him. I wouldn’t know, but I doubted it somehow.
“Let those be the last two lies we tell each other today,” I said. “Are we not both people of business?”
Aditi frowned, her fleshy face creasing until her small black eyes seemed almost to disappear into the folds that surrounded them.
“We are,” she agreed.
I could feel her thinking, trying to work out my intentions. The form of these rare meetings between rival bosses was usually to tell each other pleasant lies while each plotted how best to stab the other in the back. I had come close to being candid, then, and I think that had surprised her.
“Then let us speak like people of business,” I said. “We are no nobles of the court, you and I, to be hiding our knives behind smiles and sharp courtesies. I have my interests and you have yours, but as long as they don’t conflict, then I see no reason why we can’t exist together in Ellinburg. Do you?”
“The Stink is yours, the Wheels is mine,” she said. “That hasn’t changed.”
“No, it hasn’t,” I agreed. “But tell me this—how many of your businesses did you find had been taken away from you when you returned from the south?”
Her mouth tightened in an angry line, and the man seated to her left, this Gregor who was wearing a purple shirt under his fine black coat, leaned close to whisper in her ear. She thought for a moment, then nodded.
“I know the Pious Men weren’t to blame in that,” she said.
“No more than the Gutcutters were to blame for the businesses I lost during the war,” I said. “We have a mutual enemy.”
“Hauer,” she spat. “Always that fat slug wants more, and more. Taxes and bribes, permits and inspections and fees for this and fees for that. Always more, every year.”
I shook my head slowly.
“The governor is the same man we knew before the war,” I agreed, “but why would he take businesses away from us that he would then have to staff and run himself? Far easier to just tighten the screw on taxes, instead. Hauer isn’t behind this.”
“Then who?”
I recited the carefully prepared speech Ailsa had given me before the meeting.
“There are new people in the city,” I said. “Opportunists, from far northern towns that the recruiters never got to. They’re backed by someone else, though, someone big from outside Ellinburg who wants to take our livelihoods away from us.”
“Do you know who?”
“No,” I lied. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t hurt them. I’ve taken back all but one of my businesses now, and from what I hear you have been doing much the same thing. How have you fared with that?”
Ma Aditi narrowed her eyes, as though she suspected a trap. Again the man in the purple shirt leaned close to whisper in her ear, feeding her the version of the truth that Fat Luka had bought and paid for with my gold.
“I have lost men,” she admitted, after a moment. “You?”
I nodded solemnly. From what Luka’s whisperers told me, the Pious Men had fared better than the Gutcutters had, and our losses were enough.
“There have been deaths,” I agreed. “Too many Pious Men have crossed the river this last six months.”
I had lost five men since my return to Ellinburg, all told. Six, if you counted Hari, who would never fight or walk properly again. I knew Ma Aditi’s losses had been heavier, though. Much heavier, I suspected.
The Skanians had concentrated their efforts more in her territory than mine, in the Wheels where the factories and the tanneries were. They wanted the infrastructure of the city, Ailsa had explained to me, and they wanted its workforce. They had taken my businesses because they could, but they never much wanted them. Except for one, anyway. The one they still held.
Ma Aditi sat back in her chair and gestured to the man at her right hand, a big scarred brute in a voluminous coat and silver-studded black leather doublet whom I didn’t recognize. He was new to the Gutcutters, Luka had told me. I could only assume she had brought him back from Abingon with her, a recruit from whatever crew she had ended up in charge of down there, but I didn’t know for sure.
Strange that he should be at her right hand, if so.
He reached into his fine coat and produced a long clay pipe and passed it to her. She lit a taper from the lamp on the table between us and puffed her pipe into life, and the sickly sweet smell of poppy resin reached my nose.
The man obviously wasn’t the only thing that had come back from Abingon with her. I saw Bloody Anne’s eyes narrow with disapproval. Poppy resin had been a problem in Abingon, and we all recognized the smell of it.
It had been known in Ellinburg before the war—I had traded in unlicensed resin myself, of course, with the first Queen’s Man I had known, which was how the bastard had snared me in the first place—but it had been rare, and I had only sold it to doctors who used it for treating those in unbearable pain. In Abingon it had been used for the same purpose, to start with, until men discovered that smoking it when you weren’t half dead from wounds made you feel good.
Men smoked resin to make themselves feel good, to escape the horrors in their minds, to let them sleep at night. Eventually they discovered that once you start smoking poppy resin, you can’t stop.
Then there had been problems.
Since the war we had been seeing more and more of it in Ellinburg, and seeing what it did to people. There were resin smokers driven onto the streets, having sold everything they owned to feed their habits. Petty crimes were the highest I had ever seen them, and even on my own streets my newly recruited watchmen were hard-pressed to keep honest households safe.
Those who smoked resin and turned to crime to feed their habits, I had ejected from the Stink.
Those I caught selling it, I had killed.
I looked down the table at Ma Aditi, at the tendrils of blue smoke curling up from her nostrils, and I knew this meeting had been a waste of time.
* * *
• • •
“She wouldn’t have helped us take the Golden Chains even if I could have brokered a truce between the Pious Men and her Gutcutters,” I explained to Ailsa that night, in her room next to mine above the Tanner’s Arms.
It was after midnight by then, and the tavern had closed over an hour ago. Snow swirled over the stable yard below Ailsa’s window and settled gently on the wooden frame.
“So what did you say to her?” Ailsa snapped, in her cut-crystal Dannsburg accent. “‘I’m terribly sorry but you seem to be a poppy smoker so we can’t work together, good-bye’?”
She was sitting in the only chair in the room, knitting by the light of an oil lamp on the windowsill.
I took a swallow from the brandy bottle in my hand and glared at her.
“No, Ailsa. I didn’t,” I said. “I spoke the platitudes to her, how I was supposed to. I used the backup speech you gave me in case it all went to the whores, which it fucking well did. ‘Yes, Ma Aditi, we’re all friends and fellow businessmen. No, Ma Aditi, I’m not looking to take over the Wheels. Thank you, Ma Aditi, it was an honor. Bend over, Ma Aditi, and I’ll kiss your fat fucking arse.’ When I think how much Luka paid that purple-shirted bastard Gregor and he never mentioned she was a fucking resin smoker . . . !”
I turned and slammed a fist into the wall beside the door, cracking the plaster and hurting my hand with equal success.
“Be calm, Tomas,” Ailsa said, which irritated me so much I could almost have thrown the bottle at her.
Almost.
Her knitting needles clicked together, the sound boring through my head and making me feel like live things were crawling around inside my ears. I took a long swallow of brandy and a shuddering breath.
“It wouldn’t have worked, you see that, don’t you?” I said. “She’s probably their best fucking customer by now.”
“Yes, of course I see that,” Ailsa said. “I’m thinking, that’s all.”
“Well, think quickly,” I said. “We’re supposed to be taking the Chains back next Godsday, and now we’ve no Gutcutters to support us and no fucking plan.”
“Godsday is still five days away,” Ailsa said. She sighed and put down her knitting. “Without the Gutcutters, an all-out assault like we had planned is out of the question. We simply don’t have the numbers for it.”
I clenched my teeth. I knew by then that Ailsa often thought out loud, but to my mind a lot of the time that sounded like she was explaining my own business to me as though she were addressing a simple child. I knew that was just her way, but all the same I had to remind myself not to take ill against her for it.
“I realize that,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm.
“There are ways and means, Tomas. There always are,” she said. She looked up at me then, and smiled brightly in the way that she did when she was about to change the subject with a lurch so hard it gave me a headache. “You should go and see Billy tomorrow.”
“Aye,” I said, happy for anything that steered the conversation away from that evening’s failure of a meeting with Ma Aditi. “Perhaps I’ll do that.”
“Take him seriously, Tomas,” Ailsa cautioned me. “You haven’t seen him since he began his time with the magician and he may seem different to you now, but see that you take him seriously. The time may come when we might need him.”
We were back to may and might again, I noticed. The habit of the Queen’s Men of never speaking in certainties was chafing me, I had to admit.
I said good night to her and went to my own room to sleep.
That wasn’t easy, but with the help of the rest of the brandy I managed it in the end.
TWENTY-FIVE
I don’t know why I took Bloody Anne with me the next morning, but it seemed like the right thing to do. She had been the one who had had the problem with Billy the Boy in the first place, of course, and without her worries he would never have ended up at Old Kurt’s.
Going alone was out of the question, especially after my useless meeting with Ma Aditi the day before, but I could have taken any of the men with me as a bodyguard. I hadn’t, though. I had brought Bloody Anne and no one else.
That was risky, these days. The last time we had trod the riverside path into the Wheels I had only been back in Ellinburg a short time, and word about that had yet to completely get around. That was then, though. Anne and I had managed to pass for any scruffy returning veterans wandering the bad parts of the city, but I couldn’t do that anymore.
Now I was Tomas Piety again, head of the Pious Men, and everyone knew who I was. By rights I should have had six armed men at my back wherever I went, but we were heading into Gutcutter territory and it wasn’t on official Pious Men business. I had told Anne once before that the Pious Men wouldn’t enter the Wheels in force until we meant it, and that was still true. All the same I could feel the eyes on us, watching us from the grimy windows of the wooden tenements we passed.
The river path was treacherous in the winter, and thin skins of ice floated downriver past us. It was freezing by the water, and despite our fine coats, cloaks, and gloves both of us were chilled to the bone by the time we reached Old Kurt’s front door. The rat nailed to it looked to be frozen solid.
I raised a hand to knock, drawing breath to call out the words, but the door opened before I touched it. Billy the Boy stood in the entrance looking up at us.
“Tomas,” he said. “Bloody Anne.”
I nodded. “How are you, Billy?”
He had the first fluff of a mustache on his upper lip, I noticed, and he looked to me as though he had grown almost an inch for each of the months he had been with Old Kurt. Not literally, perhaps, but truth be told, the lad wasn’t all that far off my height already. All the same he looked to be painfully thin under his loose shirt and britches. I thought perhaps his thirteenth nameday had come and gone unmarked while he was away, and it pained me to have missed his coming of age.
“Well enough,” he said. “You’ll be coming in.”
As always with him it was a statement, not a question, and I wondered just how prescient Billy the Boy was. Did Our Lady truly speak to him, telling him what was to come? I wouldn’t know. Perhaps it was the cunning in him, or perhaps he was just a good judge of human nature, or just mad. Whatever it was, he was right.
“We’d like that, Billy,” I said.
He nodded and stepped back to let us into Old Kurt’s house.
He led Anne and me through into Kurt’s parlor, where the old man was sitting in his chair close to a fire that burned fiercely in the grate. Kurt looked older than I remembered, pale and drawn. That was passing strange, to my mind, as he seemed to have aged little in the years between my childhood and my return to Ellinburg. Life catches up with all men in the end, I supposed.
He looked up at us and grinned his ratty grin.
“Tomas Piety and the fine . . . and Bloody Anne,” he said, and I knew that he had remembered Anne’s words. “How fare you?”
“Well enough,” I said.
I took the stool across from him, there being no other chair in the room, and Anne stood behind me with her hands never far from her daggers. I knew she didn’t trust Kurt even now, and I thought she still wasn’t easy in her mind with what was being done in this house.
Kurt laughed, a sound full of phlegm and age.
“Well enough,” he repeated. “Well enough that you’re dressed like a lord and have the whole of the Stink bowing and scraping to you again. You and Aditi both, back from your war and it’s as though nothing ever happened.”
I thought of Jochan, and Cookpot, and my own bleak memories, and I shook my head.
“It happened,” I said. “We survived it, that’s all.”
“Well and good,” Kurt said. “You look rich. Maybe I should put my prices up.”
“We agreed on the price,” I said. “A mark a week for his tuition and keep, that’s more than fair.”
“Well, growing boys eat a lot,” Kurt said, and he looked evasive now.
His gaze shifted from the fire to his boots to me to the door, his eyes always moving like restless animals in his face.
“What is it, Kurt?”
He coughed, and I realized Billy was standing in the doorway listening to us.
“Boy,” Kurt said, his voice quavering a little despite his attempt to put authority into it. “Go upstairs and fetch your notes.”
Billy nodded and left the room, and a moment later I heard his footsteps on the stairs. I looked at Kurt and raised my eyebrows as he beckoned me close with a surprising urgency. I leaned toward him to listen.
“Three marks a week or you’
re having him back.”
“What’s the problem?” I asked him.
Kurt grabbed me by the back of the neck and dragged me closer, so he could whisper in my ear. I held up a hand to tell Bloody Anne to be calm, and I listened.
“Touched by a goddess my wrinkly cock,” Kurt hissed in my ear, so quiet I was sure Anne couldn’t hear him. “He gives me the fear, and I don’t say that lightly of anyone. No unschooled lad should be that strong. The boy’s fucking possessed!”
I remembered the day we had first brought Billy to Kurt’s house, how Kurt had lit the fire with cunning and a gesture and how Billy had put it out again with just a look. I hadn’t known he could do that, and it had been clear that Kurt hadn’t expected it either. I wondered what he could do now, after half a year of teaching.
I had always been a little bit scared of Billy myself, truth be told, although I could never have clearly said why. I knew Sir Eland walked in fear of him too, even more so after Billy’s visit to Chandler’s Narrow, but I didn’t know what had happened that night and I never expected to learn the answer. I had said my confessions to Billy, during the war, and that was because one night in Abingon after I had done things that troubled me he had come to me in my tent and told me that I would confess.
He had told me.
There was never any question, with Billy. If he said a thing would happen, it did. He said I would confess to him, and I did, and I still didn’t know why. Touched by the goddess, I had thought. That was how I had explained it to myself, and to the men, and that was well enough. That made Billy holy, in their eyes.
Holy and possessed were perhaps two sides of the same coin, but one was acceptable, laudable even, and the other very much wasn’t. I knew I couldn’t let this pass, not when that would mean the risk of others hearing it.
