Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  “Dissect him?” I managed to say.

  I thought of the tutor, this magician who called himself Fischer, the one Ailsa had brought into our house, and I felt cold down to my boots. That wasn’t happening. By Our Lady’s name, that was not going to happen to my Billy.

  Vogel shrugged.

  “Or whatever it is they may do this time. Oh, you weren’t expecting those cunning women you sent to us back, were you? I do hope that you weren’t.”

  I swallowed, feeling suddenly sick. Had I sent Katrin and Gerta to their deaths, in the house of magicians? Or perhaps here, somewhere in the bowels of the house of law, where questions were asked in the screaming darkness.

  I drained my brandy and poured another, taking a step backward as I did so to look through the tall windows into the dining room. The major was sitting alone at the table, idly shuffling a deck of cards.

  It came to me then that one of our party was missing.

  “What happened to Lan Andronikov?” I asked.

  Dieter Vogel’s soulless eyes didn’t so much as flicker as they met mine.

  “Who?”

  * * *

  * * *

  I didn’t dare speak to Ailsa in the carriage on our way home, with our footmen too close for comfort. Once we were back in the house I all but dragged her into the drawing room despite the late hour and slammed the door in the servants’ faces.

  “Lan Andronikov disappeared tonight, right while I was talking to your fucking boss,” I whispered. “You had his wife; what happened to her?”

  “Oh, I let her have her pipe eventually,” Ailsa said. “The poor thing was crying for it by then, and she knew what she’d done. She betrayed him herself, you know.”

  I remembered those couple of days Ailsa had spent out of the house alone, visiting friends, and her words from the court reception came back to me.

  By the time we got to fourteen I could have made her do absolutely anything. . . . He’s said some extremely unwise things recently.

  “You made her betray him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was spreading sedition, Tomas. It’s my job to uncover that sort of thing and see that it is stopped.”

  “So now her husband’s murdered over dinner at Vogel’s word, is that the lay of things?”

  “Yes, Tomas, it is,” Ailsa snapped at me. “That is exactly the lay of things, in Dannsburg. We do not have executions here, not for traitors. There are no heroic ends, no ritual or grandeur to it. We make no martyrs and we leave nothing for others to aspire to, nothing to be emulated. They just disappear and are forgotten. Lan Yetrov’s wife was marched out of the drawing room while we were in there, by the way. What did you do to her husband, while we’re on the subject?”

  I sighed and poured myself a brandy.

  “He deserved it,” I said.

  “I’m not disagreeing with that; I asked you what you did.”

  “I gave him a kicking,” I admitted, “and he got off lightly, to my mind. And that’s another thing—when were you intending to tell me what happened to Katrin and Gerta?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t fucking give me that!” I shouted at her. “I don’t give a fuck about Lan Andronikov, but those two women were my people, Pious Men people. I sent them here for your bastard magicians to talk to, not for them to cut up to see what was inside!”

  “Ah,” Ailsa said. “I see Vogel took you into his confidence. That surprises me.”

  Tell her if you will, or don’t. I will leave that to your judgment. Vogel was testing me, I could see that much even if I didn’t have the faintest idea why he was doing it, but that was a question for another day. Of course I was fucking telling her, and I was sure that in itself was part of the test.

  I suspected that everything was.

  “Aye, he did. Would it surprise you to learn that these cunts want to do the same thing to our Billy? I’m not having it, Ailsa, I mean it. Vogel said to stop them, and I will. First thing tomorrow morning that fucking tutor’s out in the street for a start, you hear me?”

  “Vogel said to stop them?” she repeated, her brow furrowing in thought. “That’s interesting. I wonder why.”

  That was another good question, I had to allow.

  “He said Billy was too useful to waste, or something like that, and that I could get men from Grachyev’s crew if I needed them. Billy’s my son and I won’t see him hurt, but I don’t understand why Vogel cares about him.”

  “He doesn’t,” Ailsa said. “Vogel doesn’t care about anyone, but this must mean he thinks Billy will be useful at some point in the future. The house of law can’t move openly against the house of magicians, of course, as both houses serve the crown. This is precisely why we have people like Grachyev—people like you, for that matter—to do this sort of thing when it needs doing.”

  “I see,” I said. “This is like the fucking Wheels all over again, isn’t it? If businessmen do a thing, then who can say that the Queen’s Men were behind it, and if they get killed doing it, then who’s to care?”

  “It’s called plausible deniability, Tomas,” she said. “It’s very useful.”

  Her smile was like a razor, just like Vogel’s had been.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The next morning I roused Billy from his bed before the sun had fully risen. I had only been abed myself a few hours and I was tired and feeling the effects of the previous night, but I needed the lad up and awake before I spoke to this tutor of his. He was a magician, so Ailsa had told me, and I wasn’t facing one of those without a magician of my own at my side. Or my swords, for that matter. I was wearing the Weeping Women buckled over my shirt when I woke the lad, and I knew that wasn’t lost on him.

  “What is it, Papa?” Billy asked me.

  He sat up in his blankets and rubbed sleep from his eyes.

  “Your tutor, Mr. Fischer,” I said. “Has he ever hurt you, Billy?”

  “No,” Billy said. “Why would he?”

  “I don’t know. What has he been teaching you?”

  “Reading mostly, and my ’rithmetic and that,” the lad said. “He doesn’t teach much—he asks me questions, more than anything else.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “About the cunning. About how it works, and where it comes from, and how I do it, and about Our Lady. He’s writing a book, he says. For the university.”

  No, he fucking isn’t.

  “I see,” I said. “I want you to listen to me now; this is important. Mr. Fischer isn’t who he says he is. He’s a magician, and I didn’t know that when we hired him, but I do now and I’m throwing him out. I need you to help me with that, in case he tries to do magic at me. Can you do that for me, Billy?”

  “Yes, Papa,” Billy said, without hesitation. “I don’t like him anyway.”

  “Good lad.”

  I waited while Billy got dressed, then led him up the servants’ stair to the top floor of the house where the small garret rooms were. I kicked Fischer’s door open without knocking.

  The man was stood at his nightstand, naked apart from his smallclothes, scraping at his narrow, pointed chin with a razor. He was thin and pale, and his bare back was a mess of old, faded scars that looked like they had been left by a whip.

  “Oi,” I said. “I want a word.”

  He turned and looked at me, and at Billy beside me, the razor dripping in his hand.

  “Mr. Piety? Billy? What . . . what is this?”

  “This is me knowing who you are and who sent you,” I said. “This is me throwing you out of my fucking house. Try any of your magic on me and you’ll have Billy here to answer to.”

  “Mr. Piety, please, I can—”

  “I mean it,” I said. “Pack your shit and fuck off, right now.”

  “He won’t,” Billy said, in that way he had when he knew a t
hing was so. “He doesn’t dare.”

  “He’d fucking better.”

  But Billy was right, of course.

  When Billy said a thing would be so he was always right. Fischer looked from me to the door to Billy and back again, his eyes wide with panic. I put my hand on the hilt of Remorse and glared at him.

  “Get out, or I’ll gut you,” I promised him.

  Fischer took a stumbling step backward, and then he slashed the glittering razor across his own throat in one savage sweep.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, but it was too late.

  Blood jetted across the wall and the mirror and the nightstand, and darkened the water in the basin. Fischer sagged to his knees before collapsing to the bare floorboards in a bubbling, dying heap.

  “In Our Lady’s name,” I whispered.

  “I told you, Papa,” Billy said.

  “Aye,” I had to allow, trying to keep the tremble out of my voice. “Aye, you did. Why, Billy? Why didn’t he dare?”

  “He was more scared of them than he was of you or of dying.”

  “Who? Who was he more scared of, the magicians?”

  The lad just shrugged and looked down at his tutor, watching the lifeblood run from his ruined neck and pool on the floor around him.

  I sighed and looked around the small, cramped garret room. There was nothing there to tell me anything. A few spare clothes, some simple teaching books of the kind we had used when I had been in school myself, and that was all. I walked over to the bed, and on impulse I picked up the pillow and looked beneath it.

  There was another book hidden there, a slim volume of the sort that you could buy unprinted to write in yourself. I picked it up and flicked through the pages of spidery handwriting to the last entry.

  Boy appears to have a talent unknown to us, but whether goddess-given, demonic, or of internal origin remains to be seen. Cannot operate here in family home. Am given to understand by my learned colleagues that vivisection of the previous subjects proved inconclusive.

  Recommend extreme caution in this instance. Prone to starting fires. Propensity for physical violence also worrying, although whether product of training, wartime trauma, or familial surroundings unclear. A deeply troubled and worrying young man.

  I confess, I fear him.

  I closed the book and looked at Billy, standing across the room from me with the bloody corpse of his tutor on the floor between us.

  “Billy,” I said, “did you ever set fire to anything in front of Mr. Fischer?”

  Billy looked at his boots for a moment, then shrugged in the way that boys of that age do.

  “Suppose,” he said. “Might have done. Nothing big, though.”

  “Did you ever hurt him?”

  “I threatened him with harsh justice once, Papa,” Billy said. “He kept on about wanting to cut me so he could look at my blood through a seeing glass, so I showed him my knives and said I’d fucking cut him if he tried it. I never really hurt him, though. He was a coward, so I didn’t have to.”

  “Aye, well,” I said. “That’s good, Billy. Well done, lad.”

  The boy had picked up more from me than I had thought, I had to allow. I wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that. Part of me was proud, that he’d stood up for himself, but part of me wondered how much of that had come from me and how much from Cutter.

  A deeply troubled and worrying young man.

  I found I had to agree with the late Mr. Fischer about that.

  * * *

  * * *

  “He took his own life,” I said to Ailsa, for the third time. “One slash of the razor and he was done. There wasn’t much I could do about that.”

  “A magician dead in my home, and they know which house I work for,” she said, pacing the drawing room like a caged lioness. “What am I supposed to do with this, Tomas?”

  “He’s not dead in your home. I kicked him out this morning at first light, and you and Luka and a number of your guards will have seen me do it,” I said. “If he never made it back to the house of magicians across the dangerous streets of the city, then that’s a failing to lie at the door of the City Guard.”

  “He is lying dead upstairs,” she hissed at me.

  “He soon won’t be,” I said. “I know how to do this shit, trust me. You just make sure that your guards know what they saw and when.”

  There was a knock at the door then, and a footman entered and presented me with a sealed letter.

  “This came to the house, sir,” he said. “The messenger wore no livery, but I recognized him as one of Lord Lan Yetrov’s men.”

  I nodded my thanks and took it, and dismissed the footman as I broke the seal. I had hoped Lan Yetrov would just take his kicking like a soldier and learn to leave me alone, but of course he was no soldier. I could tell his mood from the furious slash of his handwriting across the expensive paper.

  Piety,

  You crossed a line last night, you pitiful oik.

  I will end you!

  Fleeing the city will do you no good. I have friends in Ellinburg, powerful ones who bear you no love and will do my bidding. You cannot escape my reach.

  Die!

  The note was unsigned, which was probably his idea of subtlety. I shook my head and showed it to Ailsa. Her brow furrowed as she read.

  “Do you think he’s talking about Hauer or Vhent?” I asked her.

  “Hauer, almost certainly,” she said. “Either way, it’s not good news. I wish you had restrained yourself last night, Tomas. This is a complication we do not need.”

  “You didn’t hear what he fucking said,” I muttered. “Never mind him. I’ll take care of it. Right now we need that body gone.”

  Ailsa tossed Lan Yetrov’s letter into the cold grate where it belonged.

  “Yes, we really do.”

  I took a moment to pen and seal a note, then opened the door of the drawing room and told the waiting footman to fetch Fat Luka to me. When he arrived I told him the lay of things.

  “Get a runner over to that Leonov fellow from south of the river,” I said, and handed him the note. “Give him this, and have him get it to Iagin. Have him send a coal wagon here too, or a dray cart or whatever they’ve got. Something that looks like it’s coming to make a delivery to the house. When they’ve done that they can take something wet away with them and lose it for me, you understand?”

  Luka nodded.

  “Aye, boss,” he said, “but this will cost us. I don’t see that they owe us any favors.”

  “If he argues tell him Iagin has already agreed to it and mention my name. There won’t be a problem.”

  I had Vogel’s personal promise that Iagin would help me against the magicians, after all, and I was going to fucking use it. For that and anything else I could get out of him.

  “Right you are, boss,” Luka said.

  “Another thing,” I said. “Once your runner’s on his way, I want you to do something for me yourself. The sort of thing you’re good at.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Find a way to get a message to Lady Lan Yetrov, a private one. Ask her how she’d like to be a very rich widow, and see if she wants to talk to me.”

  Luka just nodded at that. He was a good man, was Fat Luka, and I knew I could trust him.

  He turned and left the room, and Ailsa raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Lady Lan Yetrov?”

  “You told me she only married him for his money, and from what he said last night I have reason to suspect he’s pure misery to share a bed with,” I said.

  “Hmmm, there have been rumors,” she said, “and Lady Lan Yetrov is frequently indisposed. Perhaps you have something, there.”

  “Aye well, it seems to me that a man who’s cruel in one way is likely to be cruel in others. Be that as it may, I’m going to get tha
t cunt before he gets me, simple as that. I do not need more trouble with Hauer. This is just business now, Ailsa, and I know how to do business.”

  “I hope you do,” she said.

  “If Leonov is halfway competent he can lose a body without anyone knowing where it came from, even in this fucking city,” I said. “It’s not hard, and he must know someone who keeps pigs. I kicked Fischer out in front of half your household guard, and I don’t know where he went. That’s the story, and that’s how it’s staying. If they complain about it, we’ll accuse these magicians of putting a spy in our house and see how they take that.”

  “They will suspect I knew who he was when I took him in,” she said.

  “Know it, or suspect it?”

  “Well, they can’t admit to knowing it, you fool,” she said. “Not officially, as they don’t officially know who I am.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Fuck them then, we’ll bluff it out. Give it a few days for him to be missed, then you show them officially who you are and we’ll see what they can fucking do about it then.”

  Ailsa gave me an appraising look. She was a master at these intrigues, of course, and in her eyes I was only a blunt street thug. Me applying some street thinking to her way of doing things seemed to have thrown her.

  “They will know we’re lying,” she said, and then paused for a moment to think about it. “But of course we know they’re lying as well and they know we do so . . . yes. Yes, that actually works. That’s a stalemate that gives no one the upper hand. Your business politics aren’t so very different to mine after all, Tomas.”

  I shrugged. “It gets the job done.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “It had better.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  I was right; there hadn’t been any problems with Leonov. Vogel had obviously sent word to Iagin, which was no more than I expected, and it seemed that that same word had already been passed down to his street operatives as I had hoped. Once the dray cart had been and gone and taken the evidence away with it that was done, and best forgotten.