Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  “Reload the crossbow and give it to Anne,” I hissed at Luka. “It’s the only way we’ll get that fucking—”

  I stopped in astonishment as the sides of the magician’s neck burst open in a spray of blood that decorated the wall beside him and the low ceiling over his head. He twisted and fell with a gurgling rattle, blood still gouting from his neck, and I saw Cutter standing behind him with his tiny knives dripping gore.

  “Fuck a nun, you took your time,” Jochan said. “Scuttle quicker next time, you little bastard.”

  Oh, yes, Cutter had his uses all right. I could see that now.

  Jochan got to his feet and laughed. There was a single guard left alive in the room with us, white-faced with fear. Jochan planted his axe in the man’s head without comment and showed me his savage grin. I could still hear pounding on the front door, and however strong it was I knew it wouldn’t hold forever.

  “Where have those fuckers got to?” Luka wondered aloud, voicing my own thoughts.

  A moment later there was a thud, then a scream, and I heard the thump of crossbows and the sound of more impacts. The ten lads I had hired from around the Stink and armed with crossbows had finally come out of the alleys they had been hiding in, then.

  Thank the Lady for that.

  Someone pounded on the door and called out, “Pious, in Our Lady’s name!”

  Those were the right words. I nodded to Luka. “Go let them in,” I said. “Erik, get that fucking fire out before it takes in the plaster and we all burn to fucking death.”

  Bloody Anne was staring at the dead magician, and at the tattered shreds of cloth and flesh and the huge red stain on the floor that had once been Grieg.

  “I don’t . . .” she started to say, before Jochan kicked a table back the right way up and jumped up onto it.

  “We’re the Pious Men!” he roared, arms outstretched and his axe in his hand with bits of the guard’s head still clinging to the blade.

  I counted eleven of the wealthy patrons left alive, all of them staring at Jochan as though he were some sort of devil, escaped from Hell. This wouldn’t do, I realized. I picked up my sword belt and buckled it on, and sheathed the Weeping Women as the first of the hired crossbowmen came into the room with reloaded weapons in their hands. Luka was still outside in the cold, directing the defense of the building. I took a step into the center of the room and gave Jochan a look that said to be quiet.

  “My name is Tomas Piety,” I said. “I don’t normally look like this, but I’m sure you’ll make allowances under the circumstances. I am a businessman, and I own the Golden Chains.”

  “Gangsters,” a woman said, fanning herself rapidly with her hand.

  “Businessmen,” I corrected her. “The Chains was mine before the war, and now it is mine again. This has been a business disagreement, no more than that, and now it’s settled.”

  “That man exploded!” a weak-chinned fellow shouted, waving vaguely at the stain where Grieg had been.

  “Aye, he did,” I said. “They had a magician, and I didn’t expect that. It won’t happen again.”

  “I daresay it won’t,” the woman said. “The magician appears to no longer be with us.”

  She tittered, then giggled, then fainted into the arms of the man beside her.

  “For fuck’s sake,” I heard Bloody Anne mutter to herself.

  Still, it was done. Not done easily perhaps, but as I had told the men, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

  TWENTY-NINE

  There was no chance that an assault with crossbows would have gone unnoticed in the middle of the city, especially not so close to Trader’s Row. I let the patrons go and sat down with a drink to wait for the City Guard to arrive. There were far too many bodies for us to attempt to hide them, so we didn’t bother.

  Captain Rogan came in person, as I had thought he might, leading a full troop of twenty men armed with crossbows as well as their shortswords and clubs. I was paying taxes to Governor Hauer again by then, of course, large ones, so I wasn’t overly concerned what Rogan might think of the evening’s events.

  All the same, he was furious, and he made no attempt to hide it.

  “What in the name of all the gods do you think you’re doing, Piety?” he demanded. “I know who you are, all of you. No amount of mummer’s paint will change that.”

  He was standing in the main gaming hall with ten of his men around him while the rest of them dragged corpses out into a waiting cart, and he was far too close to me for my liking. I looked into his ugly, brutish face and held his stare.

  One thing you didn’t do in front of a bully like Rogan was back down or show weakness, not ever. Back down once and you’d never stop doing it, I knew that. My da had taught me that much, at least.

  “I am conducting a business takeover, Captain Rogan,” I said. “The Golden Chains is now back under its rightful management and will be open for business again in a few days’ time.”

  “You’ve conducted a fucking massacre, in full view of half the city!” he roared at me. “Take him in.”

  We had done it in view of some of the city’s nobility was what he meant, of course. That meant he had to be seen to do something, and that inconvenienced him. Being inconvenienced meant having to do some work, and that put Rogan in a foul temper at the best of times. I had been expecting this.

  “I’m going to see Grandfather,” I told Jochan, who nodded back at me.

  “You’re too sure of yourself by far, Piety,” Rogan growled at me, but I ignored him.

  I was untouchable, and we both knew it.

  “We’ll be open for business again soon,” I said instead. “I don’t recall that you used to be a member here, Captain. Perhaps that could change.”

  Rogan shot me a look. He had his vices, as I have written, and none so strong among them as gambling. He was a regular face at the racetrack, where I had often won back the bribes I had paid him, but he had never had enough social status to earn an invitation to the Golden Chains. Letting him in might slightly lower the tone, I knew that, but after what had happened there that evening I thought the reputation of the Golden Chains might have suffered somewhat already. At least I knew he had plenty of money to lose.

  “That . . . that would please me,” he said. “I still have to take you in, you know that.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He nodded and led me from the Golden Chains with his men surrounding me, but I wasn’t in irons and I knew I’d be out again by morning.

  That was how business was done in Ellinburg.

  * * *

  • • •

  I had expected to be thrown into one of the cells under the governor’s hall, for appearance’s sake if nothing else, but instead Rogan brought me before Governor Hauer himself once more.

  It was late, but the governor was still up, although obviously much the worse for wine. He received me in his study on the second floor as he had six months ago when I was newly returned to Ellinburg. He looked even worse than I remembered, florid of face and fat, with unhealthy pink patches on his scalp that showed through his thinning hair.

  “Business is going well, I see,” Hauer said.

  He was all but reeling in his chair, and wine sloshed from his goblet onto the polished wooden surface in front of him as he gestured at me.

  I pretended not to notice that.

  “The Pious Men have always paid their taxes, Governor,” I said.

  “Not for three years they didn’t,” he said, and laughed.

  The war was nothing to make jokes about, to my mind, not by a man who hadn’t even been there. I held my peace, but I think he could see in my eyes that I had taken that ill. He cleared his throat with obvious embarrassment, and I was aware of Rogan moving that little bit closer to the back of the chair I had been pushed into.

  They had taken the Weepi
ng Women from me when I was brought before the governor, of course, and once again I wondered if I could best Rogan in a bare-handed fight. He had ten or more years than me at least, but still I doubted it. With swords, perhaps, but not fists.

  “This evening’s events were regrettable but necessary,” I said. “The Golden Chains was mine. The last time we spoke, you said you didn’t expect me to sit meekly by while men stole my businesses from me, and I haven’t. That’s all this was.”

  “You really haven’t, have you, Tomas?” the governor said, and laughed into his wine. “Oh, no, not at all you haven’t. Between you and Aditi, we’ve never had so many murders in Ellinburg in less than half a year.”

  “I pay my taxes,” I said, “and I assume Ma Aditi does the same. I wouldn’t know, but that’s between you and her. What I do know is how our arrangement works, and I can’t see that I’ve broken the terms of that arrangement.”

  “Perhaps not,” Hauer said. “Perhaps not the letter of them, anyway, but certainly the spirit. No amount of taxes can allow you to conduct open warfare on my streets.”

  “Tonight was an exception,” I assured him. “A regrettable one, as I said. I don’t intend for it to happen again.”

  “It had better not.”

  He thumped his goblet down on the table, spilling more wine, and put the elbow of his expensive silk shirt in the resulting sticky mess. His doublet strained over his gut as he leaned toward me.

  Here it comes, I thought. This is why I’m here, not just to take a telling. There’s something he’s been working his way around to saying to me.

  “Did she come to you?” Hauer asked, his voice dropping to a hoarse whisper. “The Queen’s Man?”

  I nodded, seeing no gain in lying.

  “She came,” I said.

  Hauer’s complexion visibly darkened as he realized I wasn’t about to say anything more on that. I remembered our previous conversation and the fear I had seen in his eyes when he had spoken of the woman I knew as Ailsa.

  That gave me an idea.

  “And?” he demanded. “What did she want? What did you do for her?”

  “I did what she wanted,” I said, and forced myself to swallow. “I don’t know if I’d still be here if I hadn’t, Governor, do you?”

  “And where is she now?”

  “I really couldn’t say.”

  I really couldn’t, I knew that.

  If Hauer realized I had a Queen’s Man living in my tavern, serving behind my bar even, then Lady only knew what he would have done. So far I wasn’t doing anything that he hadn’t expected, and the fact that I had only struck as hard as and fast as I had on Ailsa’s insistence wasn’t something that he needed to know, to my mind. All the same, I wondered how well he knew me, and whether he might be working it out for himself.

  “It seems to me that you’ve taken your businesses back very quickly,” Hauer said.

  I nodded.

  “I won’t sit meekly by and be robbed,” I said. “My men are soldiers, and they know what they’re doing. I have men under me who fought at Messia, and at Abingon, and came home to tell of it. They are trained, experienced, ambitious killers. Men like that need to be paid, to keep them at heel. They need to be paid well. You understand what would happen if I couldn’t pay them anymore, don’t you?”

  Hauer coughed and gulped his wine. I thought that we understood each other now. The thought of my crew unleashed on the city, leaderless and feral, was enough to give the governor pause.

  “And the Queen’s Man isn’t behind this?”

  I met his eyes.

  “I don’t even know her name,” I said, and that was true enough.

  She called herself Ailsa, but I could call myself the Baron Lan Markoff and that didn’t make it true. I knew nothing about her, I realized, not even her real name. I was the only one of the crew who had heard her speak with that beautiful Dannsburg voice, but who was to say that was really her own and not just another act? I had never seen her without her paints and powders, and I didn’t even know how old she really was.

  I had to admit to myself that that bothered me.

  Hauer sighed and looked over my shoulder at Rogan.

  “Who saw?” he asked.

  “Hard to say, my lord governor,” Rogan admitted. “The patrons were gone by the time my men arrived so I don’t have their names, but nobles aren’t like to gossip about something that would mean admitting they had been there with resin pipes in their hands. It’s the fight outside that’s likely to have been seen, but there’s no way of knowing by who.”

  “What to do?” Hauer wondered aloud. “I should lock you up and leave you to rot, Piety.”

  “An imprisoned man pays no taxes and earns no money to pay his men,” I said.

  “I fucking well know that!” Hauer shouted. “You’re a thorn in my side, Piety, you and Aditi both. The gods only know what will happen when the rest of your sordid peers finally drag themselves home from the war.”

  I held my peace at that.

  To date, Ma Aditi and me were still the only bosses to have come back from Abingon, but the rest of them led only minor gangs anyway. The Pious Men and the Gutcutters were the main businesses in Ellinburg, as the governor well knew. He was drunk, I could see that, but I could also see that he was scared.

  His grip on order in the city depended on maintaining good relationships with people like me, and he knew it. If he lost that grip, then Dannsburg would notice and they would send people to help him regain control. The sort of help that a failing governor would get from the Queen’s Men was probably the stuff of his nightmares, and I knew I could make something of that.

  I looked at him, and I could see he was measuring me with his bloodshot eyes, trying to work out through the haze of wine how much of what I had told him was true. I prided myself that I hadn’t told him a single lie that night, although of course many truths are open to interpretation.

  I should know.

  I’m a priest, after all.

  It was fear of the Queen’s Men that drove him, in the end, as it had driven me. For him it was fear of failure, and of intervention from the capital. Fear of an investigation that would have exposed his accounts and the queen’s ransom in taxes that he had withheld from the crown over the years. For that he would hang, just as surely as I would for the poppy trade. Under that, I could see, was a deep-rooted fear that perhaps there was still a Queen’s Man in Ellinburg.

  No, he didn’t know that I was working for Ailsa, but I thought that he might be beginning to suspect it.

  I would have to do something to change that.

  THIRTY

  I spent the night in a cell, as I had expected. There were appearances to be kept up, I understood that, and I didn’t take it ill. Rogan made sure I was fed, at least, and that I was brought drinkable water from the good wells off Trader’s Row and not the river filth that they gave to normal prisoners. I used most of it to wash the paint and powder from my face until I looked like myself again. Apart from that hideous mustache, anyway.

  I had been in the cells before, but not since I was a young man. I hadn’t missed it. The room was two floors below the entrance to the governor’s hall, a cramped and windowless stone space lit by a brazier in the corridor outside that shed a feeble light through the bars of the door. It stopped me from freezing to death too, but only just. There was a straw pallet on the floor, crawling with lice, and a wooden bucket already half full of someone else’s shit. It stank down there.

  I ignored the pallet and sat on the cold, damp floor with my back to the wall, huddled in my coat, and waited. Hauer would have to let me go in the morning, I knew, and anything can be endured for a little while. It can when you know there will be an end to it, anyway. Every soldier knows that.

  My chin sank down onto my chest, and I started to think on what the governor had said.

&
nbsp; At some point I must have dozed, and after a few hours Rogan came and shook me awake.

  He looked tired, with dark circles under his heavy eyes, and I didn’t think he had slept at all. He told me that the workings of the governor’s operation had spread the word that we were honest businessmen who had been attacked and robbed, and had merely been defending ourselves within the extent of the law.

  I just nodded.

  Stories like that didn’t have to be true, or even particularly believable, so long as they came from the right source. If the governor said a thing was so then it was so, as far as the majority of the population was concerned.

  The nobility simply didn’t care.

  I knew there would be trouble over the young dandy who had died, but luckily it had been the Skanian magician who had killed him and not one of my crew. That meant that the outrage of society was directed toward the mysterious foreigners who had so imposed themselves on a fine and upstanding member of the Ellinburg business community like me, and that was good.

  I was fed again, and come the dawn the Weeping Women were returned to me. I was released from the cells with the governor’s official apology and his public vow to maintain the peace in Ellinburg against the corrupt influence of foreigners.

  That was how business was done.

  Captain Rogan himself showed me from the governor’s hall that morning, and I got a surprise when the doors opened. I was cramped and cold and dirty from my night in the cells, but I found Bloody Anne waiting for me in the packed square outside. The mummer’s paint was gone from her face, and she looked herself again, in her men’s coat and britches with her scar standing out against her pale face. She had Jochan and Fat Luka and five of the lads with her, and a crowd of perhaps two hundred Stink folk around them. Two hundred or so people from my streets, all turned out in the cold to see me walk free with the governor’s pardon.

  There was a cheer when the morning sun touched my face, the face of a good Ellinburg man who had been wronged by outsiders and had put matters right for himself. A truth can be interpreted in many ways, and the people from my streets had obviously chosen the way in which they would hear this one.