Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  Billy the Boy had wanted to come too, and I indulged him. He was recovered then, but it had taken him three days to regain his strength after his battle with the Skanian magician. He looked quite the young lordling himself, since I had lavished him with new clothes by way of thanks for his efforts.

  “What’s that place, Uncle Tomas?” he asked, indicating a baker’s shop.

  The sign above the door said clearly what it was, but I remembered Old Kurt telling me that Billy seemed unable to read any hand but his own. All the same, the good smells wafting from the open door of the shop were enough to tell anyone what the owner’s trade was. He grinned at me to say he was making mischief, and I returned his smile.

  “Are you hungry again?” Anne asked in mock surprise.

  The lad had done nothing but eat since he regained consciousness, but still he remained painfully thin.

  “I could fancy a pastry,” he admitted.

  “Then you shall have one,” I said, and ducked through the low doorway of the shop with Anne behind me.

  “Mr. Piety!” the baker exclaimed when he saw me, his plump, floury hands fluttering nervously at the front of his apron. “I’m not late, am I, sir? I swear I paid my taxes not three days ago.”

  “That you did, Georg,” I assured him. “Our lad is hungry, that’s all. You know how growing boys are, I’m sure. You’ve two of your own, as I recall.”

  “I have, sir, and it’s good of you to remember,” he said.

  Georg flustered and fussed about behind his counter, and a moment later he presented me with two dried fruit pies and a spiced pastry, wrapped up in waxed paper. Those were his best wares, I knew, but he waved away my coin.

  “No charge for you, Mr. Piety,” he said. “There’s no charge for the Pious Men, not in here there isn’t.”

  I nodded and accepted the wrapped package.

  “My thanks, Georg,” I said.

  We left the shop, and I let Billy bury his face in the pastries. It was good to have my streets back again, and I wouldn’t forget the respect that Georg had shown me.

  It may sound strange, that I taxed these people and they still gave me their wares for free, but that was how respect worked in Ellinburg. They knew that I taxed them fairly, and that my protection actually would protect them. Also, I wouldn’t see a family starve in the Stink, and that was known too. I had found work for many of their sons and brothers in my businesses, and their daughters too, as guards and messengers and card dealers, as doormen and draymen and cooks and porters. Those who were sick and couldn’t afford even Doc Cordin’s services had been treated at my expense. Those who were hungry had been fed. That was how I protected my streets, and that was how I earned the respect of the folk who lived there. It was a closed system, to be sure, and participation wasn’t optional, but it worked well enough once everyone accepted that.

  Anne cadged a mouthful of pastry from Billy and stood on the street corner, munching thoughtfully.

  “We should check on your aunt,” she said, brushing crumbs from her chin as she spoke.

  “Aye,” I said. “I suppose we should, at that.”

  I had arranged a new house for Aunt Enaid, to replace the one we blew up, and she and Brak had recently moved in. Brak was most of the way to healed by then, although whether his left arm would ever work properly again was still in some doubt.

  I saw that he was well paid for his troubles, of course, and everyone else too. The Pious Men were rich again, richer now than we had been before the war. All my crew were dressed like lords, although they were still a long way from learning to act like them.

  The new house was down at the end of Cobbler’s Row and it was twice the size of her old place. I had hired a maid for her too, one of Doc Cordin’s granddaughters, and put a couple of the new boys on duty there to make sure there was no repeat of what had happened last time.

  An Alarian lad called Desh had the front door when we came strolling down the row, and he stood up smart when he saw me coming. I think he would have saluted if he had known how, but he had been just slightly too young to be conscripted and had missed the war by a matter of months. He was almost a grown man now, though, and he had a shortsword at his hip and a crossbow hidden behind the garden wall where he could reach it easily.

  “Morning, boss,” he said.

  He was a good lad, from a poor family down on Hull Patcher’s Row. When I had been recruiting new men he had been among the first to take my coin. I thought perhaps Desh might well have grown up wanting to be a Pious Man.

  I nodded to him. “Is my aunt in?”

  “Yes sir,” he said, and opened the front door for us.

  Anne and I went inside, but Billy was still eating and spraying crumbs everywhere so I left him outside with Stefan and the guards. It wouldn’t do to have him making a mess all over Aunt Enaid’s freshly swept floors, I knew that much.

  She met us in the hall and ushered us into her parlor, where Brak was taking his ease in front of the fire with his left arm still bound up in a sling.

  “Morning, Auntie,” I said.

  She squinted at me with her one bright eye.

  “That it is,” she said. “What brings you here, Tomas Piety?”

  “Can’t I pay a social call on my favorite aunt?”

  She snorted and waved us to seats. I spoke briefly with Brak, and then Aunt Enaid picked up her stick and hauled her bulk back out of her chair again.

  “Anne and Brak will have a lot to discuss, I’m sure,” she said, although I couldn’t think what. “Come through to the kitchen with your fat old aunt.”

  There was something on her mind that she wanted to say in private, that was clear enough, so I got up and followed her. Once in the kitchen she chased Cordin’s girl out and closed the door behind her.

  “What is it, Auntie?” I asked her.

  She sat at the kitchen table, and I joined her there, letting her take her time.

  She didn’t take her time at all.

  “What in the names of the gods are you playing at?” she demanded, as soon as I had sat down.

  That made me blink.

  “In what way?”

  “You attacked the Wheels, last week. You burned down the fucking Stables, the way I heard it.”

  “Aye, I did,” I said.

  “You’ve got the business back, Tomas,” she said. “It’s done. Why go making more blood with Aditi? Everything worked well enough before the war, didn’t it?”

  “Did it? Was anything well enough, while that filthy place was open?”

  “That was never your affair,” she said. “You run the Stink your way, Ma Aditi runs the Wheels her way, that’s just how it is.”

  “Maybe that’s not enough,” I said. “Maybe I want the Wheels too. Maybe, my dear aunt, I just couldn’t stand the thought of that fucking place staying open another week.”

  She turned and spat on the floor, and never mind that we were in her own kitchen. Enaid would always be a soldier at heart.

  “They’ll make fucking war over it!” she hissed at me. “I should have found a way to keep myself out of that bloody convent. I should have kept a hand on the tiller while you were away, like I said I would. Then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “You should have married,” I said. “A long time ago. Made some poor man a terrifying wife, and left me alone.”

  “And done what, raised brats?” She snorted. “This country has twice the mouths it can feed already; that’s why we’re always at bloody war. No, no brats for me, Tomas. My brother raised two, and that’s more than enough Piety boys in the world, to my mind.”

  Her brother was my da, of course, and I didn’t want the conversation going that way.

  “This is a good thing for the Pious Men,” I said instead. “I’ve got money coming in now, lots of it, and I’m spending it wisely. There’s ne
w weapons on their way from Dannsburg, and the men to use them. I mean to clean Ma Aditi out of the Wheels and take them for myself.”

  “That’s blood for blood’s sake,” she said. “You don’t need the Wheels.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s for the sake of the Pious Men,” I said. “It’s to secure everything we’ve always worked for.”

  It was because Ailsa and the Queen’s Men said so, of course. It was to save us all from the horrors of another Abingon, from siege and starvation and slavery, but that was nothing my aunt needed to hear.

  “There’s a devil in you, Tomas Piety,” Enaid said. “There always has been, and there’s no blaming the war for it. I remember how you were, even as a lad. You were twelve years old when you came to my house in the dead of night with your little brother at your side and you said, ‘Da’s dead,’ and there was no sorrow on your face.”

  No, there wouldn’t have been.

  It seemed there was no keeping the talk away from that subject now. I wondered if Aunt Enaid even remotely suspected what had really happened to Da. I didn’t think that she did.

  I didn’t want to think about it, but her words had opened that strongbox in the back of my mind now and the horrors were crawling out whether I wanted them or not. I felt sweat on the palms of my hands, felt my throat wanting to close up. I could see my da’s face all over again.

  He’d hit me often enough, hit me and worse beside. Ma died two years after birthing Jochan, and times had been hard. Da was violent and he drank, but that was often the way of men in the Stink. He was still my da, and most fathers had heavy hands. That was nothing in itself, but Da did more than hit me. Da put his rough bricklayer’s hands where they weren’t wanted too. No one wants their own da stuffing his hand down their britches, but I was young when that started. I had only had six or seven years to me, and I thought at the time that perhaps most fathers did that too. I was wrong about that, of course, but at the time I hadn’t known any better. By the time I learned different, I was too ashamed to tell anyone.

  When I turned nine, he came into my bedroom one night and he forced himself on me and he used me like boys were used at the Stables.

  That went on for three fucking years, and I suffered it.

  I suffered it because I had to, because I was a little boy and he was my da and I still loved him, despite everything. He told me that if I loved him then I’d let him do it to me. He told me that I deserved it, and that I owed it to him, and he made me believe that those things were true. I was only young and he was my da and I loved him and I trusted him, so of course I believed him. But eventually he had grown bored with me, or I had got too old for him, and he left me be and started on little Jochan, who had just turned eight.

  I heard his wails, night after night, and I suffered that too. That was the debt I owed Jochan, the debt I could never repay. I should have done a thing and I didn’t, not until it was too late. I remembered lying in my bed one night listening to Jochan cry out in pain in the next room and I knew it was wrong and still I didn’t fucking do anything. I didn’t do anything because he was my da and if I told anyone then they’d know it had happened to me as well, and I couldn’t face that. I couldn’t face the fucking thought of how they would have looked at me, and the pity and the shame. So I hid my face in my pillow and I wept, and next door my little baby brother sobbed and suffered because I was a coward.

  Eventually, though, a thing happened that broke something inside me, something that has never healed. It had been well after midnight, and Da was passed out drunk in the parlor downstairs. Jochan crawled into my blankets with me, crying for what Da had done to him. I tried to comfort him, and Jochan . . . Jochan offered to let me use him, how Da did.

  He wanted to please me, I think, his big brother, and that was the only way he knew how. That made me sick to my stomach, and I knew it was enough. Fuck the shame, and the pity, and what people might think. People didn’t have to know, I realized. I had twelve years to me by then, almost a man grown, and to my mind a man solved his own problems. Something cold woke in my head that night. This was going to stop, that cold thing said to me, and it was going to stop right fucking now.

  I got out of bed and I went into the parlor where Da was snoring. He was asleep in his chair, red-faced with drink and sweaty, his mouth half open and dribble on his chin. The hammer had been right there, in his work bag, the hammer he used to tamp down his bricks.

  I picked it up and I stood there with it in my hand, and I looked at my da for a long time. I looked at him and I felt the shame in me, the shame of what he had done to me, and more than that the shame of what I had let him do to Jochan while I looked the other way. No one was ever going to know about that, the cold thing said to me. No one ever needs to know.

  I lifted the hammer and I broke Da’s head with it.

  I hit him again, and again, and again, until his head was wet mush and I couldn’t see for the tears in my eyes.

  If it had been the first time he had done it, perhaps I could have forgiven myself. But it hadn’t been, not by a long way. I would always owe Jochan for all the nights of his suffering when I had lain in my bed and done nothing because I was a coward. I knew I could never forgive myself for that.

  When I came back to myself I roused Jochan from my bed and told him what I had done, and that it was a secret and that he had to take that secret to the grave with him. I made him promise on Ma’s memory, and together we had dragged Da’s body to the top of the stairs and pushed him out of his upstairs window onto the cobbled street below.

  Da drank, everyone in the street knew that, and a drunk man could fall from his bedroom window taking a piss in the night without raising too many hard questions. So that was how it was, and that was how it had stayed. Jochan and I never spoke of that night.

  That’s where the devil in me came from, the cold thing that killed my da, and it has never left me since.

  I looked up at Aunt Enaid, and I clenched my fists and forced the past back into the broken strongbox in my head where it belonged. I loved my aunt, but all the same my voice dropped into the flat tone that meant I was close to violence.

  “Don’t ever talk about my da,” I said.

  Enaid stared at me, and she swallowed. No, she had no idea, but she recognized that voice when she heard it and she must have realized there was something. Something she didn’t understand, and Lady willing never would.

  She nodded.

  “Aye, Tomas,” she said, and that was wise of her.

  FORTY-TWO

  Two days later word reached Ailsa that the wagons from Dannsburg were finally on their way with the men and weapons I had asked for. I started to plan my next move.

  I was holding a council of war in the kitchen of the Tanner’s with Anne and Luka at the table, and Ailsa unobtrusively listening as she swept the floor.

  “Are we going to hit them with the explosives straightaway, boss?” Luka asked.

  I shook my head.

  “No, we’re not. I don’t know these men. They come from someone I trust, but I don’t know a man of them. They’re not just bringing flashstones and powder, though. They’re coming with swords and crossbows, and we’ll try them with those first. I don’t want the Gutcutters knowing I have blasting weapons until we’re ready to go to war, and we’re not doing that until I’m sure of every man in my crew.”

  Ailsa paused in her sweeping for a moment, a thoughtful look on her face.

  “That sounds wise,” Bloody Anne said, and Luka nodded.

  “Aye,” he said. “What, then?”

  I pursed my lips in thought for a moment.

  “At the top of the riverside path there’s a factory,” I said. “Just beyond the alley that leads up to Dock Road. You know where I mean?”

  “Aye,” Luka said again. “They make . . . broadcloth, I think. I’m not sure. Something with looms, any
way, running off the big wheel at the end of the path. They’re weavers, under the mercer’s guild.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Ma Aditi takes a lot of protection money from that factory, and I know the mercers think ill of that. If we can take it, kill her guards, and smash the machines, the mercers will turn against the Gutcutters. Losing the faith of a major guild will hurt her, and hurt the . . . hurt her backers.”

  I coughed to cover my slip. It was getting taxing, remembering who knew what and who didn’t, and I had nearly said “Skanians” in front of two people who shouldn’t have ever heard that name.

  Luka just nodded, and if he had noticed my mistake he made nothing of it.

  “We can do that,” Anne said. “If we have the men take some planks and rope with them, they can get across from the pilings at the end of the path and go in under the waterwheel. They’ll need hammers too, for the looms. It won’t be pleasant work, not at this time of year, but it can be done.”

  “Good,” I said. “Anne, I’ll leave it to you to pick who goes with the new lads.”

  “Cutter,” she said at once, without hesitation. “This is sneak-and-kill work, and that’s what he’s best at. I’d have another couple of lads go with them, but we want to keep the crew fairly small for a job like this.”

  Bloody Anne knew what she was doing, so I just nodded. That sounded right to me. Cutter was the obvious choice, as she had said.

  “Are any of us going?” Luka asked.

  I thought on that for a moment, then shook my head.

  “No, we’re not,” I said. “Not this time. Cutter’s good at this sort of thing, as Anne says. Put him in charge. I can’t keep risking my top table on simple raids.”