Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  “I don’t want to hear that word again,” I whispered in Kurt’s ear. “Three marks a week if that’s what it takes to keep your mouth shut but not a copper more, and that price will never go up again, whatever he does. Don’t test me on this, Old Kurt. The boy is holy, you mark me on that, and that’s the way it’s staying. Understand?”

  Old Kurt nodded sharply and let go of me just as Billy started back down the stairs. Three marks a week was enough money to make me wince, even now. All the same it was coin well spent, to my mind. I turned to see Billy standing in the doorway clutching a great black leather book in his arms, his unblinking stare taking in the three of us.

  Where is the difference between holy and possessed? I wondered. When does miracle become magic, magic become witchcraft? Is it in the nature of the deed itself, or in the eye of the beholder? Is it decided in the telling after the fact, and if so does it depend on who does that telling? Magic was magic, to my mind, but then I wouldn’t know. That was a philosophical question, I supposed, and this was no time for philosophy.

  “What have you got there, Billy?” I asked him.

  “Show your Uncle Tomas what you’ve been working on, boy,” Kurt said.

  Uncle Tomas. That was something I had never been called before. Jochan was my only sibling and he had never fathered a child, any more than I had myself. It sounded well to my ears, I had to admit. It would be a good thing, to be an uncle. Perhaps a better one, to be a father.

  I got to my feet, and Billy opened the book and held it for me to see. The thick vellum pages were covered in his childish handwriting, scrawled with notes and diagrams that I didn’t have time to read before he turned the pages. All I could think was that that book must have cost a pile of silver, even unprinted. A book like that was well out of the reach of a common man, that was for certain. It was the sort of book that guildmasters wrote in, and that I supposed nobles did as well. Perhaps Old Kurt wasn’t overcharging me all that much after all, if he was giving Billy things like that.

  I nodded as though I knew what I was looking at, wanting to please Billy. The lad had obviously been working hard, although I couldn’t divine what at. The cunning was as far beyond me as it was most other people, and I’ve no shame in admitting it.

  Maybe one person in ten thousand has it in them to learn the cunning, if that. There had been sixty-five thousand of us at Abingon and we had had two cunning men and three women among us that I knew of. The magicians of Dannsburg hadn’t gone to war, of course. War magic was sorcery, and as Old Kurt had said they looked down on that as beneath them. Our five cunning folk had all died in battle, fighting for their country. It hadn’t been beneath them to serve the crown, I noted.

  “Look at this one, Uncle Tomas,” Billy said, turning the page to show me a diagram of almost impossible complexity.

  I stared at it, trying to work out exactly what I was looking at. I found I couldn’t really focus on it. Billy had just called me Uncle like it was the most natural thing in the world. I kept hearing that word in my head, rolling over and over like distant thunder. The image on the page seemed to squirm and shift even as I looked at it. I blinked and put a hand to my head.

  Uncle.

  The image moved, the lines redrawing themselves across the vellum before my eyes. I saw words I couldn’t pronounce, fading as fast as I made them out. I saw maps, contours and hills and buildings, lines of supply and attack and defense. I saw strategic plans, and armies arrayed across sketched terrain. I saw Ailsa’s face, staring up at me. I saw a bird’s-eye view of the Stink, of the Narrows and the houses that bordered them.

  I saw cannon, positioned on the hill by the convent.

  I saw what would happen to Ellinburg, if Abingon came here.

  Ailsa.

  Cannon.

  Smoke boiled across the page, lit red from within by the cannon’s murderous roar.

  Uncle, they bellowed.

  Uncle!

  I saw the face of Our Lady, looking back at me.

  Merciless.

  Uncle!

  Anne caught me before I hit the floor, her strong hands in my armpits. She lowered me back onto the stool by the fire and crouched down in front of me, looking intently into my face.

  “Tomas? Can you hear me?”

  I shook my head and blinked. I could see Anne’s face, her scar puckering as she frowned with concern. I pinched the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger, squeezing my eyes closed for a moment before I opened them again and nodded at her.

  “I hear you, Bloody Anne,” I said.

  I looked up at Old Kurt and saw him staring back at me, a bleak look on his face.

  “Billy drew that one himself,” he said. “I never showed him how.”

  “What is it, Billy?” I asked.

  The lad shrugged.

  “A picture,” he said. “I drew it.”

  “It’s a wyrd glyph,” Old Kurt said. “In three years’ time, maybe a bit less if he was clever and learned fast, it would have been time for me to have started teaching him how to draw those. He done that one himself, two weeks ago, and I never showed him how.”

  Old Kurt swallowed, the lump in his scrawny neck working up and down, and he said no more on the subject.

  “Well done, Billy,” a man said, but his words sounded hollow, as though he was a long way away, at the end of a tunnel. “It seems like you’re ahead of your studies. I was never very good at school, myself, but it looks like you’re making up for my failings there.”

  Had I ever been to school? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps that man had been, but I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know who he was.

  Billy just looked at me.

  “You fell down,” he said, after a moment. “I knew you would.”

  He turned and walked out of the room then, his book under his arm, and I heard his footsteps climbing the rickety wooden stairs.

  Had I fallen down?

  I had no idea.

  I stared into the fire and shivered. I was frozen to the bone. I pulled my cloak around me, huddling for warmth in my coat and all my fine warm clothes as sweat ran tickling down my back.

  I was so cold.

  I leaned closer to the fire, until I could feel its heat making my cheeks tighten.

  So.

  Fucking.

  Cold.

  “What is it?” Someone said that, somewhere. I think it was a woman’s voice, but it was so raspy it was hard to tell. I wondered who she was. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Battle shock.”

  That was a man’s voice, an old man by the sound of him.

  I wondered who they were talking about, but my thoughts were drifting now and I found that I didn’t really care.

  I was so cold, and the fire was so far away. Why were they keeping the fire so far away from me when I was so cold?

  “He’s never shown signs of it before.”

  “Sometimes it comes out later. Sometimes, when it’s bad, it takes a long time.”

  “And you’d know about that, would you?”

  She sounded aggressive now, the raspy woman. Challenging.

  “Aye, I would,” the old man said, and the sorrow in his voice told me that he knew from bitter experience.

  I wondered who he was.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “We had to come and fucking get you,” Jochan said.

  I blinked up at him. I was lying in my bed above the Tanner’s Arms, and Jochan was standing over me. Cold morning light was shining through the window, and my little brother was giving me a telling.

  “Bloody Anne sent a runner, some Wheeler girl she found and paid,” he went on. “I dunno who she was. Urgent it is, she said, send men and a cart. Well fuck that, we both know you being carried through the Wheels in a cart would have been the end of the Pious Men. Me and Black Billy and Fat Luka came
for you, and we waited until it was full dark, and then we carried you back between us down the river path where no one could see, with Bloody Anne watching our tail. So you’re home now, Tomas. It’s all right. It’s over. You’re home now.”

  I looked up into Jochan’s face, and I could see from the pain in his eyes that he understood.

  Battle shock.

  That thing that I didn’t feel, or so I had thought. I never had felt it, not until Billy the Boy had shown me his drawing or his glyph or whatever it had been. I had . . . lost my way, for a while there.

  I knew that, but this was no time to show weakness.

  “I’m well,” I said, and sat up in my blankets. “I’m well, Jochan, and don’t let anyone think otherwise of me.”

  “It was me and Luka,” he said, “and you know you can trust Black Billy. We won’t say anything, none of us.”

  I nodded, but it left a sour taste in my mouth all the same. Was it a secret that needed keeping, that I had been affected by the war like every other man who had fought? I had been strong all the way back from Abingon, keeping my crew together until we reached Ellinburg. I had been strong for the past six months, leading them and taking back my businesses one by one, watching men die and still doing what needed to be done.

  I had been strong right up until I just couldn’t do it anymore.

  Billy the Boy had done something to me, I knew that. Something that had opened the strongbox in the back of my mind where I kept the horrors locked away. That was the place where I never went, the part of my mind where I had parceled up the memories called Abingon and vowed never to look again.

  Whatever Billy had drawn in that book, it had been something magic. Ink on vellum can’t do that to a man, not by itself. There was magic woven into the picture Billy had drawn. I knew that much, and I was starting to understand why Old Kurt had looked so scared of the lad. They were living under the same roof, after all.

  But of course, Billy had been at Abingon too.

  He had only twelve years to him when the regiment took him on at Messia, but the lad could fight. Billy had killed men in battle under the crumbling walls of the citadel. Billy had endured the noise of the cannon the same as the rest of us. Billy had done his part when it came to giving mercy to the wounded and shoveling corpses into the plague pits.

  I wondered how much of what I had seen in that picture had come from my mental strongbox, and how much from Billy’s own. Of course the lad was scarred by what he had seen, and by what he had done. We all were, but the rest of us were grown men.

  Billy was a child. A scared and scarred and broken child, who was touched by a goddess and learning magic at a frightening rate.

  I got out of my bed and took a long and deliberate piss into the pot, to show Jochan that I could. We all start the day the same way, after all, and once you’ve seen that you might not notice the otherness in someone quite so much.

  “Right,” I said as I buttoned my smallclothes. Someone had obviously undressed me and put me to bed the night before, but I didn’t know who. “Let me get dressed, and then we’ll see how the land lies.”

  “No better than it did yesterday,” Jochan said. “The Chains is still held like a fucking fortress, and without the Gutcutters we still ain’t got the men to take it.”

  No, we hadn’t, but I remembered one thing from the day before. When Old Kurt had greeted us he had almost made the mistake of calling Bloody Anne a “fine lady” again, and that had given me an idea.

  * * *

  • • •

  “Are you taking the piss?” Anne demanded, when I told her.

  We were sitting in the kitchen of the Tanner’s Arms, and Ailsa was washing glasses and listening.

  “No, Anne, I’m not,” I said. “I need the Chains back, you know that. We’ve been planning this for weeks.”

  “We’ve been planning to do it with the Gutcutters’ help, and that’s in the shithouse now,” she said. “What makes you think we can still do it at all?”

  “You remember what the captain told us about battle, don’t you, Bloody Anne? ‘Always cheat, always win,’ he said. Well, if I haven’t got the men to do this in an honest fight, then I’m going to fucking cheat.”

  “And even supposing I say yes, which I haven’t, how would this make us look to the other gangs?”

  I shrugged. The only unfair fight is the one you lose, to my mind. In a year’s time nobody would remember the details of what had happened or how it was done. They would only remember who had lived and who had died.

  “It’ll make us look like the people who own the Golden Chains,” I said. “This will work, Anne.”

  She fixed me with a stare and jabbed a finger pointedly at the long scar on her face.

  “What sort of ‘fine lady’ has a face like mine, Tomas Piety?”

  “We might be able to do something about that,” I said. “Ailsa? Come here a minute.”

  Ailsa came over to the table and put her hand on my shoulder as naturally as if she really were my fancy woman and not just playing a part. She was very convincing, in everything she did. I had to keep reminding myself that playing a part was all she was doing.

  “What can I do for you, my handsome?” she asked, and giggled.

  Anne gave her a look but held her peace.

  “How good are paints and powders, really?” I asked her.

  “Oh, but they can work wonders,” she said. “And there’s other things too. Resins and dyes and . . . oh, oh, I see! Oh, why Anne, I can make that scar go away, my lovely, if that’s what you’re asking me. For a little while, at least. It’ll take a bit of filling so you didn’t ought to be smiling or you might crack, but Ailsa can make that look just—”

  “What about everyone else?” Anne interrupted.

  She thought Ailsa was no more than a foolish barmaid and my bit of fancy, and she made no pretense at liking her. Ailsa took that in her stride, of course, like she took washing glasses and flirting with drunks and everything else she did to keep up her false face.

  “These lovable louts?” she said. “Oh, I can make them look like new men, with a little touch of this and that. If that’s what you’re wanting, Tomas?”

  I nodded. It was.

  I hadn’t had the chance to discuss my plan with Ailsa yet, but I could tell she had already worked out what I had in mind. She was no one’s fool, whatever Bloody Anne might think.

  “That’s good, then,” I said. “We stick to the original plan. Godsday evening. That gives us enough time to get clothes and things bought as well. Can you do everyone in a day, Ailsa? It’ll be Anne, me, Jochan, Grieg, Cutter, and Erik.”

  Ideally I would have liked to have had Black Billy with us, but black faces weren’t so common in Ellinburg that someone wouldn’t have recognized him whatever Ailsa did. Grieg and Erik from my old crew were both good at close work, though, and Jochan’s man Cutter was a devil at it. More to the point, no one would know them.

  “What about Luka?” Anne said. “He’s hardly the only fat man in the city, and he plays the lute. That might be useful.”

  He did, at that.

  Luka had played before the war, and once he had some coin in his pocket again he had bought himself a beautiful instrument that he kept in a big leather case. It was that case that interested Anne, I realized, not the lute itself. I gave her a nod of approval. She was no one’s fool either.

  “Aye,” I said. “Luka too, then.”

  “Well, I’ll be busy, but I can do it,” Ailsa said. “For you I can, Tomas.”

  I patted her on the arse, something I could only get away with when she was playing her part, and smiled at her.

  “You’re a good lass,” I said.

  She went back to her glasses, and I pursed my lips in thought.

  “We’ll need to get you a proper dress,” I said to Anne. “Something fine, li
ke a real noble lady would wear. Footmen’s outfits for the men, I think, and finery for Jochan. I’ll be your consort.”

  “Oh, will you?” Anne said, but smiled to take the sting out of it. “That’ll be the day, Tomas Piety.”

  I returned her smile. We understood each other, Anne and I. She was still one of the best customers of the house on Chandler’s Narrow, and I think Rosie seldom saw anyone but her these days.

  “Is that a yes, Bloody Anne?”

  She sighed.

  “I suppose so,” she said, “but don’t expect miracles. I’m no actress, and I’ve told you before I can’t fight properly in a fucking dress.”

  “Keep Luka close and you won’t have to,” I said. “If we do this right, and we will, they won’t know what’s fucking hit them.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Godsday came at last, and I held confession upstairs in the Tanner’s Arms while Ailsa worked her magic on Bloody Anne in the room next to mine. I had been cultivating a mustache for the past week, and it finally looked almost presentable. As presentable as a mustache can ever look, anyway. I had kept it thin and neat, the way nobles wore them. I hated it, but it was the last thing that Tomas Piety would ever have chosen to wear on his face.

  Tonight I didn’t want to look like Tomas Piety.

  When Simple Sam had finished telling me how he had farted in Erik’s face three nights ago while he was sleeping and I had forgiven him for it, I took off my priest’s robe and went down to the common room. The Tanner’s was closed that day, as there was too much happening to have people from the neighborhood coming in and maybe carrying tales away with them.

  Grieg was already dressed in his footman’s clothes, prancing about the room and making a fool of himself practicing his bow. If Pawl the tailor had been surprised by my request for three sets of footman’s livery, a fine lady’s dress, and the clothes of a Dannsburg dandy, he had kept it to himself, and he had delivered exactly what I wanted. A good tailor should be discreet, as I have written, and Pawl was certainly that.