Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  The Tanner’s was a welcome sight. I clapped Black Billy on the arm as he held the door open for me, and smiled to see Hari already pouring brandies for us. The Tanner’s was home, in a way that I thought the big house off Trader’s Row could never be.

  “Usual table, boss?” Billy asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I’ll be in the back.”

  Once we had our drinks I took Anne to one side and led her through to the back room.

  “You have the look of a woman who wants to say something,” I said, taking my seat at the table.

  “Perhaps I do,” Anne said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t.”

  I frowned at that. She was still standing, I noticed, when normally she would have taken her seat at my right hand by then.

  “You’re my second, Bloody Anne, and you know I respect you. If you’ve thoughts, then I want to hear them.”

  “All right, then, I’ve thoughts,” she said, and she sounded angry now. “We’re rich, all of us. We control half the city. Yes, the Sons tried to have you killed, but who can blame them? We fucking started it, and we’re still doing it now. If I was their boss, I’d want you dead too.”

  “What do you suggest I do, Bloody Anne?” I asked her. “Sit here and wait for the next assassin to come?”

  “You lived alongside Ma Aditi and her Gutcutters for years before the war, so I’m told. What’s wrong with a truce, like you had then? Why the fuck can’t you draw up a border with the Sons and let well alone?”

  I looked at her, and I held my peace for a long moment. I had known it would come to this, sooner or later. I’m taking my businesses back, that’s what I had told my crew when I had led them home from war. Well, I had done that, and more besides. I had destroyed the Gutcutters and taken over the Wheels and the docks, and now here I was looking to the west of the city and the Northern Sons. I had no doubt that Anne wasn’t the only member of the Pious Men to have noticed this, but it spoke well of her loyalty that she was voicing those concerns to me in private instead of spreading them among the men.

  Of course, what I was really doing was following Ailsa’s orders, orders from the Queen’s Men. This wasn’t about territory and taxes, and it never had been. It was about the Skanians and preventing the possibility of another war. I couldn’t tell Anne the truth, though, and that pained me, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  “I had a border with the Gutcutters, aye,” I said. “For a long time, and look how that ended. Truces don’t last, Bloody Anne, not ever. You only have to look at our country’s history to see that. One war after another, with one neighbor or another. We’ve had enemies who were good and loyal friends barely a year before it came to the exchange of cannon between us. It’s the same in business. We’re strong now, and I’m capitalizing on that. If I make a peace instead, then well and good, but what happens afterward? What happens next year or the year after, if the Sons are stronger than us by then? They come down on us like all the devils in Hell, that’s what happens. We die, and so do our families and everyone we love. Do you want to see Chandler’s Narrow fall to Bloodhands?”

  Anne gave me a long look. I knew she was in love with Rosie, and I thought those feelings might even be returned. Anne knew what would happen if the Sons took Chandler’s Narrow.

  “You’re holding that over me?” she whispered at last.

  “No, of course I’m not,” I said. “I’m just pointing out the realities of how things work in Ellinburg. Because you asked.”

  “Aye,” Anne said. “I did.”

  She turned and left the room then, leaving me sitting at the head of my table.

  Alone.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Your job is very important, Fat Luka,” I told him the next morning. “My people need to know how well I govern them. It’s your job to tell them, and to make sure they understand why my decisions are good ones.”

  Luka nodded.

  “Is there a problem?” he said.

  “There might be,” I said.

  I didn’t want to name Bloody Anne to him. She was my second, not him, and I needed him to respect her. All the same, something had to be done, and soon.

  “Oh?”

  “The raid on that stew last night, the Badger’s Rest,” I said. “Some of the new lads looked a sight uncomfortable with what they saw, and maybe with what they did.”

  Luka nodded again and took a sip of his breakfast beer.

  “They’re young,” he said. “Those of us who were at Abingon . . . well, it takes a lot to make us uncomfortable. Perhaps we forget that not everyone has seen what we have.”

  “Aye, perhaps,” I said. “All the same, I want it put around the crew why we have to take down the Northern Sons. The whole crew. Everyone’s got money now, and it might be that’s making some of them complacent. Just because they’re comfortable now doesn’t mean the threat goes away. It doesn’t make Bloodhands go away, or his skinning knife either. You understand that, don’t you, Fat Luka?”

  “Course, boss,” he said. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure everyone understands it.”

  “Everyone,” I said again.

  Luka just nodded. He was a good man, I knew that.

  I got up and wandered through to the kitchen to find something to eat, and when I came back I looked round the common room. Black Billy gave me a nod, but I thought he looked like maybe he had something on his mind as well. He never said much, but he was no one’s fool, wasn’t Billy. I had been expecting this, as I have written, but now that I saw it starting to unfold in front of me I realized that perhaps I hadn’t truly been prepared for it. Now I’d be depending on Luka to make it right and, while I knew I could do that, the thought made me uncomfortable. Fat Luka always supported me, always and without question, but that was still a lot of faith to be putting in a single man, whoever he was.

  Nonetheless, it would have to keep for the moment. I needed to go home and face Ailsa, who had insisted we attend some pointless society function or other at Lan Barkov’s house that afternoon. At least it wasn’t another formal dinner, but it still meant mixing with a roomful of fools again when I had better things to do, and I didn’t understand the need for it.

  I rode home with three of the crew, their watchful eyes scanning the alleys and narrows for trouble as we passed. There shouldn’t be any, not there in the Stink, but after the attempt on my life at the Tanner’s I was taking no chances. Besides, it wouldn’t do for Tomas Piety to be seen in the city without bodyguards. There were certain expectations to be met, after all.

  I understood that sort of society well enough.

  THIRTEEN

  Governor Hauer was also attending Lan Barkov’s afternoon reception, which I thought might prove interesting.

  Once we were there he wasted no time in joining me by the drawing room windows, while the other guests made a show of admiring the ridiculous new painting of Lan Barkov that we were all supposed to be there to look at. The artist was standing alone in the corner nursing a glass of wine while Lan Barkov soaked up the praise of his peers as though he had done anything but sit on his fat arse while another man worked. That summed up the nobility quite neatly, to my mind.

  “I am not impressed,” Hauer murmured.

  “I know little of art, I admit, but I’m not impressed either,” I said. “It barely looks like him.”

  “Not by the stupid painting,” Hauer hissed at me. “I mean by your antics last night.”

  “What of them?”

  “Three days ago you made your promise to me. Is that how long your word is good for, Piety, three fucking days?”

  I turned and looked at the governor. His face was flushed with wine despite the hour, I noticed, and his tight collar was digging into the fat of his sweaty neck.

  “I am a man of my word, Governor,” I said. “Spill
no blood, you said. No blood was spilled.”

  Of course he knew what had happened. We had made little enough effort to disguise the mound of fresh-turned earth in the yard behind the Badger’s Rest, and it’s well known that whores gossip. That stew in particular, being cheap, was a favorite with the rank and file of the City Guard. He had heard, all right.

  “You buried him alive!”

  “That I did, but I never spilled his blood.”

  Hauer stared at me. “Do you honestly think that makes any difference to Vhent?”

  “I honestly don’t care,” I said. “My promise was to you, not to him. I don’t owe him the steam off my piss.”

  “Fuck you, Piety!”

  Hauer turned and stormed off to replenish his wine, and I glared after him. If the terms of my agreement weren’t to his liking, then that agreement was off the table. I considered the promise unmade, at that point.

  I saw Ailsa looking at me across the crowded room. She raised one eyebrow a fraction, and I gave her a small nod to tell her that Hauer already knew what I had done. She had suspected as much, of course, but if anything I thought she cared even less for the governor’s opinion than I did. I wondered how much longer her masters in Dannsburg would let Hauer remain in his position.

  They’re giving him the rope, I thought, parceling it out one indulgence at a time until he has enough to hang himself with.

  She joined me by the window a moment later.

  “A remarkable likeness, don’t you think?” she said, loud enough to be overheard by those nearest to us.

  “Remarkable,” I said.

  It was. Remarkably unlike its subject, to my mind. The artist had made Lan Barkov look tall and handsome, and he was neither of those things. Such flattery was the nature of the painter’s trade, I supposed, but it amused me that the other guests either couldn’t see that or felt they had to pretend otherwise.

  “How did he take it?” she whispered.

  “Very badly.”

  “I thought as much,” she murmured, and then more loudly, “It’s so warm in here, Tomas. Do you think perhaps we might take some air?”

  Lan Barkov was at her side a moment later, all concern and flattery as he gestured urgently for one of his footmen to open the tall windows.

  “Forgive me, Madame Piety,” he said. “I fear, with so many people come to admire my portrait, the house is quite overheated even at this time of year.”

  I saw Hauer speaking urgently to someone I didn’t know, could see the sweat rolling down his florid face.

  “Indeed it is, Lan Barkov,” I said. “Indeed it is.”

  * * *

  * * *

  By the time we were able to excuse ourselves and return home, Billy had come back from Slaughterhouse Narrow. He had been there almost every day for months now, and I still wasn’t comfortable with that. I couldn’t see that there was any real harm in it and Billy seemed happy enough, but something kept nagging at my mind.

  I joined him in the kitchen where he was tucking into a pastry. Hanne blushed bright red when she saw me, as she had every time we met since the night in the summer when I had caught her and Jochan fucking. She was plumper than ever, and I wondered just how much of my food she ate when Cook wasn’t looking.

  I drew myself a mug of beer from the barrel and sat down at the table with Billy.

  “How was your day?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. He was getting that way about him that boys get come their thirteenth or fourteenth year, when it seems they can only talk to adults in shrugs and grunts. I had been the same at that age, and so had Jochan. I hoped that was all it was, anyway. If it was anything else making him withdrawn, something to do with Cutter, perhaps, then I wanted to know about it.

  “Billy,” I said, and paused until he looked at me. “Billy, I want you to promise me something. Will you do that?”

  He shrugged again, then nodded. “Yes, Uncle Tomas,” he said.

  “I know he’s your friend, and don’t take this ill, but if Cutter . . . if Cutter ever hurts you, or touches you in a way you don’t want him to, you tell me straightaway. Promise me that, Billy.”

  “He won’t do that,” Billy said. “He’s not like Sir Eland.”

  I remembered what my da had done to me, and to Jochan, and how it wasn’t something you felt you could tell folk. I didn’t want Billy feeling like that, the way that I had. I wouldn’t have wished that on anyone.

  “No, well. I hope he’s not. I just want you to know that if he was, it wouldn’t be your fault and there’d be no shame in it, so there’d be no reason to keep it from me. You understand?”

  “Of course it wouldn’t be my fault,” Billy said. “Anyway, if he did, I’d hurt him.”

  I blinked in surprise. This was Billy the Boy I was talking to, I reminded myself, not just some lad. Billy the Boy, who could kill with his mind. Billy, who had survived alone in the ruins of Messia for Lady only knew how long before we found him. Of course Billy would kill him, if it came to it.

  Just like I had killed Da.

  “Aye,” I said. “I suppose you would, at that.”

  “But he won’t,” Billy said again, and I could hear the certainty in his voice.

  When Billy said a thing would happen it did, and I supposed the same was true if he said that a thing wouldn’t. I hoped so, anyway.

  “That’s good,” I said. “What do you do together all day, Billy? He must have run out of stories to tell you by now.”

  “Stuff,” Billy said with another shrug. “I help around the boardinghouse, when there’s work wants doing. Sometimes we play cards, or go climbing or stuff.”

  “Climbing? What do you climb?”

  “The house,” Billy said.

  I blinked at him. “The what?”

  “The boardinghouse,” Billy said again. “The back wall, mostly, from the yard to the roof. There’s good handholds in the stone. Coming down again is harder.”

  “Aye, I dare say it is,” I said, and shook my head.

  I really didn’t know what was going on up at Slaughterhouse Narrow, but I didn’t think I wanted Billy spending all his time with Cutter.

  I took him to the Tanner’s with me that night, to mix with some of the others for a change.

  Jochan was in and still fairly sober, so I sat with him a while at my usual table in the corner. Billy had gone straight to the kitchen when we arrived, to see Hari and no doubt wheedle something to eat out of him. Simple Sam was guarding the table, and there was no one in earshot except my brother. I leaned closer to him anyway and voiced my concerns in quiet tones.

  “Nah,” Jochan said after I had finished. “Cutter ain’t like that. He don’t like boys, not in that way, nor women neither for that matter. Cutter don’t . . . fuck it, that’s his business. He can certainly climb a fucking wall, though; I’ve seen him do it. I don’t reckon there’s anything to worry on.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said.

  Jochan seemed to know a lot about what Cutter liked or didn’t like, to my mind, but then he had known him longer than I had so I supposed that was fair.

  I put it out of my mind.

  “What are your thoughts about Desh?” I asked him. “I’ve a mind to make him up to the table.”

  Jochan frowned for a moment and took a drink, then nodded.

  “Aye,” he said. “Aye, I reckon it might be time. He’s done well, and he held his peace through Enaid and Anne’s little mummer’s show back in the summer and he never told anyone about what he’d seen and heard at the table, so he passed that test. I reckon he’s made of the right stuff.”

  I nodded. I thought so, too.

  FOURTEEN

  Come Godsday I held confession for the crew in the back room of the Tanner’s Arms, seated at the head of the long table. That wasn’t how a priest normally heard his confessions
, to be sure, but then I wasn’t a normal priest.

  One by one they came to me to say their words, and it surprised me that Desh was among them. He knelt beside my chair and bowed his head.

  “I wish to confess, Father,” he said.

  He had never come to me before, and I wondered if this was just an attempt to win my favor. I would take it ill, if I thought that was the case.

  “Speak, in the name of Our Lady,” I said.

  “I led a raid, at the racetrack,” he said, “and I did what I was supposed to, but . . .”

  He tailed off, and I realized that no, this wasn’t for my benefit. I could tell that he had something on his conscience. I sat and waited, giving him the time he needed to find his words. Every man in his own time and his own way, that was how I held confession.

  “I had seven men under me,” Desh went on at last. “Seven men who looked to me as their boss that day, to tell them what to do and to make it come out all right. When we was done, I had five men. Two of my crew died in the fighting in the stables, you remember, Father, and . . . and that’s my fault, isn’t it? That’s been on my mind a lot, these past months. I don’t . . . I don’t sleep well, thinking about that. I shouldn’t have got them killed, Father.”

  He looked up at me, and the pain on his face told me that the guilt had been sitting heavily on his shoulders since that day in the summer. It was months ago now, and truth be told, I had all but forgotten about it, but it was plain that Desh hadn’t. I had to remind myself that he was young, and he wasn’t a veteran. He hadn’t been at Abingon, where we had lost so many comrades that after a while all their faces blurred together into one and you found you couldn’t remember their names anymore. This had been troubling him for a long time.