by Peter McLean
“What makes you say that, Billy?”
He shrugged.
“Cutter,” Billy said again. “He’s lonely. I’ll be his friend.”
If I had to choose a friend for my adopted nephew, a professional murderer more than twice his age wouldn’t have been my choice. Billy had that tone in his voice, though, the way he sounded when he knew that a thing would be so. I looked at him.
“Are you sure about that, Billy?” I asked him. “I know you get on well with Hari and Black Billy and Desh, but Cutter . . . well, Cutter isn’t like the other men in my crew.”
“He isn’t like Sir Eland, either,” Billy said, and he sounded certain of that.
I nodded. Sir Eland liked young lads, that was no secret, but he had only tried it on with Billy once. Whatever Billy had done to him that night had been enough that he had left well alone after that.
“Well and good,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean he won’t hurt you.”
“He won’t,” Billy said. “Not for no reason.”
I blinked at him, but he had picked up his book again by then, and taken up his pen. He bowed his head over his work, whatever it may have been, and it seemed that was to be the end of it. The pen scratched softly against the velum page.
Billy could write but he seemed unable to read any hand but his own, and I still couldn’t understand how that came to be. Old Kurt had had no answer for it either, I remembered.
Touched by the goddess, I thought.
The boy’s fucking possessed, Old Kurt had told me once.
I looked at Billy, sitting up in bed with the lamplight casting half his face in shadow, and wondered if perhaps we were both right.
“Good night, Billy,” I said, and closed his bedroom door behind me.
THREE
The three of us sat down to breakfast together the next morning, an intimate family group in the smaller of our two dining rooms with only Salo our steward, Ailsa’s lady’s maid, two footmen, and a houseman to attend us. Being outnumbered by servants seemed ridiculous, to my mind, but then I wouldn’t know how these things were supposed to be done in polite society.
“I’ll go and visit Cutter today,” Billy announced.
I was drinking a shallow bowl of steaming hot tea while the steward served my food. It was something made from smoked fish and eggs, so far as I could tell, and little grains that could have been anything. The tea at least was good, for all that it cost a queen’s ransom even without the import tax that I didn’t pay. I would have been happier with small beer and black bread or salt pork, but of course Ailsa wouldn’t have heard of that at her table. That was for commoners and servants, apparently, and that meant I wasn’t allowed it even though she plainly regarded me as both of those things.
“Take one of the footmen with you, and Stefan,” I said.
“I don’t need anyone,” Billy said, and I supposed that was true enough.
“You’ll do as you’re told,” Ailsa said. “You must never leave this house unguarded, Billy.”
It seemed we were of a mind about that, if nothing else.
Billy shoved a forkful of fishy eggs into his mouth and scowled.
That was the way my brother found the three of us when one of the other footmen showed him into the small dining room.
“Fuck a nun, Tomas.” He laughed. “What the fuck are you eating?”
“I have no idea,” I said.
I tossed my fork down and turned to look at him. Jochan smelled of brandy, and he had a black eye and a scabby cut on his left cheek, and his knuckles were grazed and raw. I could see that I had been right about how he had spent his evening. I could feel Ailsa quietly simmering at his language, but I ignored that.
“Tea?” I asked him.
“Fuck off,” he said good-naturedly, and pulled another chair up to the table.
“What’s the lay of things?”
“Well enough,” he said with a shrug. “There’s been no noise from the Northern Sons about those couple of cunts yesterday, so there’s that.”
The Northern Sons, that was what the Skanians were calling their new operation in western Ellinburg. Bloodhands was their boss, I knew that much, but beyond that we had been hard-pressed to learn anything about them. Fat Luka had sent his spies into Sons territory, but more often than not they went out and didn’t come back. With Bloodhands as their boss, that didn’t surprise me.
I thought about what Cutter had done to the two spies in the Wheels yesterday. He had killed them, aye, but at least it had been quick. I doubted that Fat Luka’s men had fared half so well in the hands of the Northern Sons. Rumor on the streets was that Bloodhands liked to flay people alive, and that that was how he had earned his name. I didn’t want to think about that, though, not while I was eating. Or at all, truth be told.
“Brother-by-law, can I send for something for you?” Ailsa asked, her voice like cracked ice. “Salt pork and small beer, perhaps? I dare say there are both, in the servants’ kitchen.”
I knew she meant it as a cutting insult, but that was what Jochan had for breakfast every day, and he took her at her word.
“Aye, thanks,” he said, without looking at her.
I would hear about this after he left, I knew.
“Billy’s going to visit Cutter later,” I said.
“What the fuck for?” my brother wanted to know.
I shrugged.
“He’s lonely,” Billy said.
Jochan paused and looked at the boy.
“Aye,” he said after a moment, and he looked uncomfortable about it. “I’ll allow that he might be, I suppose. I haven’t . . . spent much time with him recently. He’s an odd one and no mistake.”
I frowned at that. I had never had the opportunity to speak to my brother about Cutter before, not without looking like I was prying into a past that perhaps didn’t bear close inspection. All the same, that sounded like an opening.
“He is, at that,” I said. “You never did tell me where you met him.”
“Messia,” Jochan said, and then the footman brought his pork and a mug of small beer and he busied himself with them, ending the conversation.
I made myself look at Ailsa, and I didn’t like what I saw in her face.
“Can I go, Uncle Tomas?” Billy asked me. “I’ll take Stefan and a footman if I have to.”
“You have to,” I said. “And aye, you can.”
The lad jumped down from the table and hurried out of the room, calling Stefan’s name. A few minutes later we heard them leave the house.
“You shouldn’t let him leave the table before we have finished breakfasting,” Ailsa said. “It’s bad manners.”
“If you’re waiting for me to eat that you’ll be here for fucking days,” I said, waving at the cold fishy eggs on the plate in front of me.
Jochan snorted laughter, and I stole some of his pork and we both sniggered like the young boys we had once been. I felt close to my brother then, if only for a moment. That moment lasted right up until there was a great crash from the hall, followed by the sound of running men.
We were both on our feet in seconds. Ailsa disapproved of me wearing the Weeping Women in the house, so I was unarmed, and Jochan only had a dagger on him. He would have come with bodyguards of his own, of course, even if he didn’t like it, but there was no sign of them now. A moment later the door of the small dining room flew open and six of the City Guard stormed in with bared steel in their hands.
“Tomas Piety,” their sergeant growled, and pointed her blade at me. “We’re taking you in.”
* * *
* * *
I told Ailsa and Jochan that it was all right, that I was just going to see Grandfather.
That was what it was called, in street cant, when you were arrested but it wasn’t bad. I hoped that was true. If it had been serious, if I was bein
g taken in for real, surely they would have arrested Jochan as well, and probably Ailsa too. Going to see the widow, that was what it was called when it was serious. I don’t know what would have happened if Governor Hauer had tried to take a Queen’s Man to see the widow, even without knowing who she was, but I doubted that it would have been anything good.
I let them march me out of the house and into the warm summer’s morning. Jochan’s two bodyguards had been Borys and Emil, and they were outside, with another four guardsmen covering them with crossbows. It had been raining earlier, and now the cobbled streets around Trader’s Row glistened wet under the light of a watery sun.
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“This is about my orders to take you in,” the sergeant said. “Now shut up.”
I gave her a sideways look. I didn’t know this one, and that concerned me. Most of the governor’s crew, under his chief bullyboy Captain Rogan, were career guardsmen. I knew all the officers by sight, or so I thought, but I didn’t know this one. If the governor was hiring new muscle, then I had to wonder who they were and where they had come from.
The guardsmen led me up Trader’s Row to the governor’s hall, and I didn’t resist. It would have been pointless, with six armed and armored men around me and me in my doublet and shirtsleeves without so much as a pocketknife in my hand.
Oh, what will the neighbors think? I wondered, and smirked to myself. Fancy going out in public without a coat.
“I don’t know what you’re fucking smiling about,” the sergeant growled. “Rogan wants you.”
I nodded and held my peace. She had already told me more than she should have done, and that was good. Rogan wanted me, which meant I wasn’t being flung straight into a cell. Rogan worked for the governor, but he was also a good customer of mine at the Golden Chains, and he owed me gambling money. The Golden Chains was the best and most exclusive gambling house in Ellinburg, and I owned it. He played a dangerous game, did Captain Rogan. I thought it would only be a matter of time until Hauer started questioning where his captain’s loyalties lay.
They marched me across the cobbled road to the area of smooth flagstones in front of the governor’s hall. There, another two uniformed guardsmen stood on duty outside the great iron front doors. The royal standard that flew from the roof of the building flapped sullenly in the wind, its bright red darkened by the earlier rain. I was ushered inside. The sergeant searched me before having me thrust into a small office off the main hall.
Captain Rogan was waiting for me, sitting behind a cheap desk with his big, hard hands resting on the scarred wood in front of him.
“Thank you, Sergeant Weaver,” he said. “Dismissed.”
“Morning,” I said.
“Don’t be cheeky with me, Piety,” he said. “I told you I’d get you, and I have.”
I wasn’t in irons and his men hadn’t arrested my family alongside me, so I very much doubted that. I looked at him, at his broken nose and the flecks of iron gray in his hair, and all I could see was the man who regularly lost large sums of money at my gaming tables.
“Have you?” I asked. “On what charge?”
“It’s well known that you import poppy resin,” Rogan said. “That’s illegal.”
“I’ll allow that it is, Captain,” I said. “However, I import nothing. I’m a city businessman, not a merchant. I have no ships, and no men to sail them.”
“Your bloody Golden Chains is the heart of the poppy trade in Ellinburg,” Rogan accused me.
“That it is,” I agreed. “As you would well know, being there so often yourself.”
“I don’t smoke the fucking poppy,” Rogan growled.
He didn’t, at that. Captain Rogan was a hard man and a ruthless bully and he had his vices, but the poppy wasn’t among them. Gambling was his weakness, and there he was weak indeed.
“I don’t believe I said that you did. I don’t recall saying that at all, Captain. Not yet.”
“No one would believe that.”
“Wouldn’t they? That would rather depend on who agreed with my version of the story, to my mind.”
Many of the richest and most respected members of Ellinburg society were customers of the Golden Chains, and some of them were greatly in my debt. Some were by now slaves to the resin they smoked as well, and they knew I controlled their supply of the drug. Addiction is a strong enough lever to move almost anyone, which was why Ailsa had been so insistent that I enter the poppy trade in the first place.
Rogan glared at me, but I had him and I could see that he knew it.
“You can argue it with Hauer,” he said. “If you drag me into this . . .”
“I have no cause to do that,” I said. “You play right by me, Captain, and honor our agreement, and I don’t see that I ever will have.”
Our agreement was based on bribery, pure and simple, and those bribes funded Rogan’s gambling habit. He sucked his teeth for a moment and nodded.
“Our agreement stands,” he said.
FOUR
Rogan took a small handbell out of his desk and rang it, and two guardsmen hurried into the cramped office. They led me back out into the hall, and Rogan got up and followed. I was taken to the governor’s office through the servants’ corridors and up a back stair, not the grand staircase that I had climbed when I had attended a ball there in the spring as the governor’s guest. That message wasn’t lost on me.
It was still short of midmorning so the governor was at least sober, although from the look of his face I suspected he was feeling the effects of the previous night’s wine. He scowled up at me from behind his desk as Rogan pushed me down into the chair across from him.
“Thank you, Captain,” Hauer said. “You may leave us.”
I felt Rogan’s hesitation. I was unarmed, but Governor Hauer was a poor specimen, physically. He didn’t have many more years to him than I had myself, but he was fat and weak and unhealthy from too much rich living. I could have killed him with my bare hands if I’d had a mind to, and I could tell Rogan knew it.
“Is that wise, m’lord?”
“Get out,” Hauer snapped at him.
I heard heavy footsteps, and then the door closed behind me as Rogan left the room.
“Governor,” I said.
“Tomas Piety, here you are again,” Hauer said.
“That I am, although I’m at a loss as to why.”
“The poppy resin, as you well know,” Hauer snapped.
“As I explained to the captain, I import nothing,” I said. “What may get past your customs men at the docks is your problem, Governor. Trade within the city is fair game, as per the terms of our agreement and the taxes that I pay you.”
Those things were both true, if unrelated. The poppy resin I sold at the Golden Chains was smuggled into the city by road from Dannsburg, by Ailsa’s agents. If I could keep the governor’s attention focused on the docks and the tea ships from Alaria, then that was good. I didn’t approve of the poppy trade but it brought in a fortune, and once I had managed to convince Ailsa to keep it off the streets and confined to the idle nobility, I had just about managed to make my peace with it.
“Taxes are one thing, but this is too much, Piety.”
I leaned across the desk and met the governor’s stare.
“I pay you enough in bribes for you to overlook anything,” I reminded him. “I’m overlooking some things myself, Governor, after all. Your association with Klaus Vhent, for one.”
“Vhent is a businessman, the same as you,” Hauer said, a slight flush creeping up from under the collar of his doublet. “He heads the Northern Sons, that’s all.”
“It seems to my mind that you’re closer to the Sons than is healthy, Governor,” I said.
“For the gods’ sakes, Tomas, I am trying to keep the peace.” Hauer sighed and slumped back in his chair. “Vhent was Ma Adit
i’s second, as you well know. When she . . . died, he set up his own operation. I have to keep an eye on him, you understand that.”
“You told me something, last year,” I reminded him. “You told me about these Skanians you were worried about. That they were people like the Queen’s Men, you told me, in their own land. Are you sure you know who you’re associating with?”
I thought that he probably did, but I couldn’t prove it and I couldn’t know for sure.
“You dare to speak to me of the Queen’s Men?” he hissed.
This is why I’m really here, I thought. This interview isn’t about poppy resin. It never was.
“The Queen’s Men sought you out,” he went on. “It seems to me that happened close enough to the carnage in the Wheels for there to be a connection.”
“I had nothing to do with that,” I said. “I was getting married on that terrible day, Governor, in front of Father Goodman and all my family and friends and half the Stink beside. I have explained that. At length.”
“Yes, and isn’t that convenient? On that one day in particular you have unshakable proof of where you were and who you were with.”
I held the governor’s stare and said nothing. He knew very well I had been behind the bombings, but he couldn’t prove it, and to my mind he never would. Ailsa was no fool, I had to give her that much.
“How is your lady wife?” he asked suddenly.
I forced myself not to blink. He didn’t know who Ailsa really was, I told myself. He couldn’t know.
“Well enough.”
“Where is she from, again?”
“Dannsburg,” I said.
“She doesn’t have the look of Dannsburg to her.”
She didn’t, at that. Ailsa was obviously of Alarian descent, but she was from a wealthy, aristocratic Dannsburg family nonetheless. That carried a lot of weight, out here in the provinces, and Hauer seemed to be going out of his way to cause offense.
