by Peter McLean
We might be done fighting, but that didn’t mean we could afford to grow complacent.
I let my hands fall to the hilts of the Weeping Women as they hung heavy at my belt. They were a pair of beautifully crafted shortswords that I had looted from a dead colonel after the last battle of Abingon. I had named them Remorse and Mercy, and thinking about Bloodhands had made me very much want to stab someone with them.
I couldn’t do that, though, not here. Not in front of people, not anymore I couldn’t. I was a prince in Ellinburg, and princes have men who do that sort of thing for them. I shot Fat Luka a look.
He nodded and let his horse slow until he was riding behind the rest of us. He was still no horseman, but he was getting better at it. More to the point, he knew where Cutter was in the crowd, which was more than I did.
The man could be virtually invisible, when he wanted to be, but I knew Cutter was following us on foot. He was an unremarkable-looking fellow with a little less than forty years to him, lean and wiry and bearded like so many working men in the Wheels and the Stink. He was just another face in the crowd in his nondescript laborer’s clothes.
Cutter was my brother Jochan’s man, not mine; I still had no idea where Cutter had come from or what levers moved him. He had certain skills, though, skills I knew he hadn’t learned in the army.
Luka rode up beside me again, and I looked at him and he gave me a short nod. That was done then, and there was no need to spare it another thought. Those two faces wouldn’t be seen in the Wheels again. Or anywhere else, for that matter. That would make Bloodhands think twice about trying to spy on me on my own streets.
The spies aside, our ride out went well enough. The Wheels was mostly on its way to being rebuilt by then, and many of the factories were back in operation. Those factories paid their taxes to me now, not to the Gutcutters, as did every business on Dock Road. That was good. I had never thought to see the day when the Pious Men controlled so much territory. I was rich, richer than I’d ever been, and one of the most powerful men in Ellinburg. Those things pleased me a great deal.
Every business in the Wheels had paid their protection money to Ma Aditi for years, of course they had, but come my wedding day she hadn’t been able to protect them at all. She had been too busy having her head cut off. That had been Cutter’s work too. Afterward, when the Pious Men came calling, with coin to rebuild and promises of a better future, those businesses had fallen into my lap like so much ripe fruit.
Oh, how Governor Hauer hated that.
“Good turnout,” Bloody Anne observed.
“Aye,” I said, and I was unable to stop a smile of satisfaction from crossing my face. “It is.”
“Everyone loves you, Tomas,” my brother Jochan said, but there was something in his tone that made me give him a look.
He resented me, I knew that well enough, and more than that he resented Anne’s place at my right hand. He still thought he should have been my second, for all that he was fundamentally unsuitable for the role.
“That they do,” I said softly. “That they do.”
* * *
* * *
I hadn’t wanted to return home afterward, but then I usually didn’t. Ailsa would be at home, after all, and I was in too good a mood to want to spoil it by seeing her. I went back to the Tanner’s Arms with Anne and Luka instead. I would take the company of people I knew I could trust over that of a Queen’s Man any day of the week. I didn’t know where Jochan went; he just said he had something to do, and he gave his horse to Luka and headed off on his own. He should have had a bodyguard with him, of course, but Jochan hated that. I suspected that the thing he had to do was get blind drunk and start a fight. It usually was.
Still, we were back in the heart of the Stink by then, the original Pious Men streets, and I knew he wouldn’t come to any harm. Someone else probably would, before the night was out, and tomorrow it would cost me silver to make it right with them. That happened too often these days, but Jochan was Jochan.
Cookpot met us in the stable yard and took the horses, a smile lighting up his round, sweaty face as he stroked my black mare’s nose. Cookpot had been a soldier once, and a Pious Man for a little while, but life as a groom suited him better. He was hurt in the mind, where it doesn’t show, hurt by the things he had seen and done, but the horses brought him some peace. I felt like I had owed him that much, at least, after what I had put him through.
The three of us went into the Tanner’s through the back. Hari was behind the bar, still leaning on his stick but a lot stronger than he had been six months ago after he had taken the terrible wound that had nearly killed him. Black Billy was on the door, his heavy club hanging from his belt and his shirtsleeves rolled up to display dark-skinned arms that were almost as thick around as my legs. He grinned at me as we came in, and I gave him a nod across the crowded common room. Borys was there too, I noticed, playing dice with Mika. Borys was an older man, thoughtful and trustworthy, while Mika had a sharp intelligence to him that you’d never have guessed from looking at him.
They were good lads, all of them. They were my Pious Men, but before that we had been in the army together. We had fought together in Messia and then in the Hell that had been Abingon, and we had fought together again to reclaim my streets here in Ellinburg. I would have trusted any man of them with my life.
Hari lined up brandies on the bar for us, and Luka took his and went to talk with Mika and Borys. I picked up my glass and the bottle both. Bloody Anne and me took my usual table in the corner, the one no one else ever sat at, however busy the tavern was. Simple Sam saw to that, and he came and stood there now with his back to us and his thickly muscled arms folded in front of his barrel chest to say that we weren’t to be disturbed. He was a slow lad but a faithful one, and the sheer size of him brooked no arguments.
“Did you see the bodies?” Anne asked me. “On our way back, I mean.”
I nodded, and smiled with grim satisfaction. The two men had been sprawled at the end of Fellmonger’s Alley with their throats slit and their blood sprayed up the wall behind them. That was what happened to spies, on my streets anyway. That would send a message to Bloodhands all right, and that message was a simple one.
Stay off my streets, you cunt.
I wondered if they had even seen him coming.
Cutter would be back at Slaughterhouse Narrow by now, at the boardinghouse he ran in my name. That place was nothing special, a cheap and run-down flophouse for traveling slaughtermen and the skinners and laborers who followed them, but he seemed to like it there well enough.
“What do you make of Cutter?” I asked Anne.
“Can I be honest with you about this?”
“You’re my second and my best friend, Bloody Anne,” I said, and I smiled at her. “I’d like to think you can be honest with me about anything.”
She sucked her teeth for a moment, the long scar on her face puckering and drawing the corner of her mouth down into a twisted half-scowl.
“He gives me the fear,” she admitted at last. “I know he’s part of our crew, but . . .”
She took a swallow of her brandy.
“Go on,” I said, after a moment. “Say what’s on your mind. I won’t take it ill.”
“But he’s not, is he?” she said. “He’s your brother’s man, and that’s all he is. It’s been a year and more and still he don’t mix with the others. He doesn’t go to Chandler’s Narrow and he’s never in here. He doesn’t talk or joke or gamble or rough about like soldiers do. I know we aren’t soldiers anymore, not exactly, but . . . you know what I mean, Tomas. No one even knows where he’s from, or what he likes to do, or anything. The man hardly seems human.”
I nodded slowly.
“Aye,” I said. “He’s been a Pious Man for over a year, and he’s made no friends among the crew. Has anyone tried to befriend him?”
Anne frowned
at that, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “Truth be told, I doubt it. He’s not what you’d call likable.”
He wasn’t, at that.
“Aye, well,” I said. “Perhaps you might put it about that someone should try.”
“So long as it doesn’t have to be me,” Anne muttered.
I laughed and refilled our glasses.
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” I said, but I could see that she meant it.
There was something about Cutter that would make anyone uneasy, and I didn’t like not knowing what it was.
TWO
I had to go home eventually. I rode, with Desh and Emil and Bernd as bodyguards. They were new lads, and while Emil was a veteran from some other regiment, the other two had been too young to be conscripted. None of them were Pious Men yet, but they were working out well enough. Desh especially showed promise. He was a young Alarian lad from Hull Patcher’s Row who seemed prepared to do almost anything to earn a place at my table. That was the sort of man I wanted.
I let myself into my great house off Trader’s Row, startling the footman who had obviously been dozing in his chair in the hall. Stefan was there too, but he definitely hadn’t been asleep.
He lowered the crossbow he was holding and gave me a nod when I stepped into the hall.
“Evening, boss,” he said.
He was a solid man, was Stefan, if an unimaginative one. He was a soldier right down to his bones and no mistake.
“All quiet?” I asked him.
He inspected the mechanism of his bow for a moment, not meeting my eyes.
“No one’s bothered the house,” he said.
I sighed.
“She’s still up, then?”
“Aye, boss.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was late by then, well after midnight, and I had hoped Ailsa would have retired for the night by the time I got back. It seemed I was going to be disappointed about that.
Ailsa. My wife.
I nodded and opened the parlor door. She called it the drawing room, and I knew I was supposed to do the same, but to my mind a parlor was a parlor however many chairs it held. I still hadn’t discovered why she called it that, nor learned to draw either.
She was sitting by the fire with a lamp burning on the low table beside her chair and her embroidery hoop in her hands. Her smoothly powdered face remained expressionless until I had closed the door behind me.
“Where in the gods’ names have you been?” she demanded.
“Good evening, my love,” I said, and I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Don’t try my patience, Tomas.”
I poured myself a brandy from one of the bottles on the side table and turned to face her with the heavy crystal glass in my hand.
“I told you we were riding out into the Wheels today,” I said. “We did that, and then I went to the Tanner’s for a drink.”
“Your place is here,” she snapped.
“And my friends are there.”
Ailsa put down her embroidery and glared at me.
“Sit down,” she said, “and I will try to explain this to you one more time. I am your wife. I know that I am your wife in name only and we care not one rotten fig for each other but only we can know that. Servants gossip, Tomas, and neighbors peep between their shutters, and it is well known that you are almost never here.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my finger and thumb, idly wondering what a fig was. Something rotten, it seemed.
Ailsa was an aristocrat from Dannsburg, and I was the son of a bricklayer from the Stink. The longer our sham marriage went on, the more the distance between those two things became plain to me. I sighed and looked at her.
Ailsa, the Queen’s Man.
Oh, yes, she was that all right. Ailsa was a knight, of a very specialized order of the knighthood that answered directly to the crown. She was a diplomat and a spy, a master of the false face, and she was a tactical genius. She had planned and arranged the bombing of the Wheels herself.
She was responsible for the deaths of over five hundred people on our wedding day, and those were just the ones I knew of.
If three people die in a fire it’s hard news, and if ten die then folk call it a tragedy. But five hundred? There comes a point where it’s just a number, where your mind can’t accept the reality of what happened. Abingon had been like that. If she had done that then Our Lady only knew what else she had done before I met her. A murderous stranger, I had thought her that morning, and as I looked into her dark eyes I felt the truth of that.
“I am almost never here,” I started quietly, “because I have a fucking business to run!”
I knew I shouldn’t be shouting, not where the servants could hear us, but over the last six months she had worn my patience thinner than an old linen shirt. There had been a time when I had thought I was falling in love with Ailsa, but that had been before the Wheels. Now the distance between us seemed too great for that. The distance, and what she had done. Ailsa was concerned with politics and the crown’s orders, not with business, with the Skanians and with what society thought of us. The Skanians were one thing, but as far as I could see society in Ellinburg consisted of Governor Hauer, who was a cunt, and a small collection of factory owners and guild masters and pointless minor aristocrats. I didn’t give a fuck what any of them thought of me.
Ailsa ignored my outburst.
“Your business interests me where it concerns the Skanians,” she said. “Otherwise, not at all.”
“Cutter killed two of their spies this morning,” I said.
“While you were there?”
“I’d ridden past by then, but aye, while I was there.”
Ailsa hissed with irritation. “Distance yourself, I told you. You’re a respectable businessman now, Tomas, or at least you must appear to be. You know as well as I do that Vhent has the governor’s ear. How would it look to society if he were able to implicate you in any wrongdoing?”
I stared at her. Klaus Vhent was the name Bloodhands was using in public, and as she said it seemed he had got himself close to Governor Hauer. That implied the governor was taking Skanian coin. I knew that, and it concerned me greatly. Society didn’t.
“For the Lady’s sake—” I started, but she cut me off.
“We’ll speak in the morning, when you have a clear head,” Ailsa announced.
I thumped my glass down on the side table and glared at her. It was tempting to keep shouting at her, but whenever I did that she made me regret it one way or another. Besides, shouting at a woman who could order me hanged with a word wasn’t something that I’d call wise. I drew a breath and forced myself to nod at her.
“Aye,” I said. “We’ll do that. I’m going to bed.”
I left her to her embroidery and slowly climbed the stairs to the upper floor where our adjoining rooms stood at the end of the corridor. Adjoining rooms, I supposed that was something. At least no one expected me to lie down with my murderous lioness of a wife, and I was grateful for that. Sharing a house with her was trial enough, never mind a bed. I had always thought that owning half of Ellinburg and living in a big house off Trader’s Row would have made me happy, and to an extent it had, but I had never stopped to consider who I might have to share that house with. Me, married to a Queen’s Man? It was preposterous, unthinkable, and it had stayed that way right up until it had suddenly been forced upon me. I sighed and shook my head, and walked down the corridor past the room where Billy the Boy slept.
I tried to be quiet, but either I woke young Billy or he hadn’t been sleeping anyway.
“Uncle Tomas?” he called out as I passed his door.
I paused, then opened the door and looked inside. The lad was in bed, but he was obviously wide awake, and the lamp o
n his nightstand was burning. There was a big leather-bound book facedown on the blankets that covered him, and a quill and ink beside the lamp.
“Hello, Billy. I’m sorry if I woke you,” I said, although I plainly hadn’t.
“I wasn’t sleeping. I was working on my notes.”
“Aye, well that’s good,” I said, “but a young lad like you needs his sleep.”
“I don’t sleep much,” Billy said.
No, that didn’t surprise me.
I had moved Billy in with us shortly after the wedding, as my adopted nephew. He called us Uncle and Auntie, but he was still the orphan boy I had found in the ruins after the sack of Messia, the boy our regiment had taken in. The boy who had learned the cunning and given Old Kurt the fear.
The boy who had torn a Skanian magician inside out with the power of his mind.
“Aye, well,” I said, for want of anything better.
“I heard you and Auntie Ailsa fighting,” he said.
“Fighting? No, not that. Just words, Billy, how husbands and wives have sometimes. It’s nothing to worry about.”
That wasn’t strictly true, of course. I thought it very much was something to worry about, but that was nothing young Billy needed to hear.
“You should be friends,” Billy said, his young face solemn and serious.
He had somewhere around thirteen or fourteen years to him by then, no one was really sure, but on occasion he spoke wisdom beyond his years.
“We are,” I assured him.
“Everyone needs a friend,” Billy went on. “Even Cutter.”
I blinked at him.
Billy was a seer; I knew that. Billy was touched by the goddess, for all that Old Kurt insisted he was possessed by some devil from Hell. Billy was touched by Our Lady, and that made him holy, to my mind. Sometimes Billy saw things no one else could see, and when he said a thing would be so he was always right. Even so, it made me shiver to think he seemed to know what I had been talking to Anne about that evening, half the city away.
