Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  Up your arse, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  He led us through into a reception room that wasn’t much more comfortable than the hall had been, but after the evening I had spent at the house of law I had been expecting that. We were served sweet, cloying wine in tall glasses by a footman wearing the livery of the house and a sneer of disdain.

  I already hated this place, and I would have done even if I hadn’t known what they had done to Katrin and Gerta.

  I wasn’t going to forgive them for that, and I very much doubted that Billy was either.

  “Ah, young Billy, what a magician you will make,” Greuv said, peering at the lad over his glass in a way that I really didn’t care for. “I am given to understand that you have already received a little rudimentary training from some primitive in Ellinburg.”

  Billy turned and looked a question at me.

  “He’s learned the cunning, aye,” I said. “What of it?”

  “He may have some unlearning to do,” Greuv said. “We will see that he unlearns, and then we will teach him correctly.”

  “No, I don’t fucking think so,” I said.

  I felt Ailsa stiffen at my side, but I ignored her and stared the magician down. I was preparing to make a gamble here, a very big one, based on no more than a suspicion and a memory of a conversation I’d had with Old Kurt the cunning man, two years past. I offered up a silent prayer to Our Lady that I was right.

  If not, we wouldn’t get out of there alive.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Mr. Piety, you seem to have misunderstood the purpose of your visit,” the magus said, his voice turning cold. “You were instructed to deliver the boy to us, and you have done that. You may now leave the house of magicians, and preferably leave Dannsburg altogether. Good day.”

  “Why the fuck,” I said, letting my voice fall into a flat tone, “should I listen to you?”

  “Do you presume to question the power of the house of magicians?”

  I could hear the contempt dripping from his voice as he looked down his nose at me, contempt for my accent and for my profession and my fucking presumption. I didn’t care for it, so I threw the dice and I made my gamble.

  “What makes you so special that you think you can give me orders?” I asked him. “What is it that you think you know?”

  Greuv took a step toward me and looked into my eyes with a piercing gaze.

  “The Magi know many things,” he hissed. “I know you have seen horror and lost beloved comrades. I know you have done violence and will do yet more violence. I know that the violence you have done haunts your dreams and wakes you in the darkness, sweating with night terrors. I see into your heart, Tomas Piety. I can see into your very soul.”

  He knew I was a veteran and a businessman, that was all that meant, and those things were no secret. Many veterans had battle shock too, so that was no more than a fairly safe guess. That wasn’t magic; that was just getting the measure of a man. I could do that as well as he could, and I was starting to think that I had the measure of him.

  I prayed once more to Our Lady that I was right, that this wouldn’t be the gamble that finally sent me across the river. The need to swallow was very strong, but I forced myself to hold his eyes with a steady glare.

  Don’t back down, I told myself. Never fucking back down.

  I wouldn’t, not ever. Not for this cunt and not for anyone else either. If I was wrong, then I knew I was about to damn us all, but I never back down in front of a bully.

  “Well done, you’ve asked some questions about me,” I said. “You know what I see? I see a prick in a dress who’s pretending to be clever. I see a murderer who cut up two of my people for the fucking fun of it, and who thinks I’m going to let him do the same to my son. I see a fucking fool.”

  “Tomas,” Ailsa cautioned me. “Be very careful.”

  The magus shook his head slowly.

  “I cannot expect a cheap criminal like you to understand the mysteries, Piety, but you? You, a Queen’s Man? You know exactly what we can do.”

  “Actually I don’t,” Ailsa said, and I thought that perhaps she had grasped the nature of my gamble. Ailsa was nobody’s fool, after all. “I only know what you say you can do. I agree with my husband. You can’t have Billy.”

  The magus’s face flushed red with fury above his ridiculous beard, but I met his glare and held it.

  “Show me some fucking magic,” I said.

  “I can summon the Gorgon of the Deep Hells if you push me!” Greuv bellowed at me. “I can bring forth horrors that would flay the hide from your bones with a look!”

  “No, you can’t,” Billy said.

  I turned and looked at the lad. He was staring intently at the magus, I saw, and his mouth was curling into a smile.

  “How dare you, brat?” the magus snarled, and then he took two sudden, stumbling steps backward and sat down hard in a chair as Billy pushed him over with his mind.

  “You’re not a real magician,” Billy said. “You’ve got no spark at all.”

  Lady be praised, I was right!

  “Is that so?” I asked, and I drew Remorse.

  Magus Greuv stared at me with open hatred. “You dare to threaten—”

  “Aye, I do,” I said. “Now, we’re leaving and we’re taking Billy with us, and you, my lord magus, can’t fucking stop us. Billy, keep him in that chair until we’ve gone.”

  “Guard!” Greuv bellowed. “Guard, to me!”

  The doors crashed open and four of the heavily armored Guard of the Magi stormed into the room with swords drawn. Mercy was in my other hand a moment later, and I moved to put myself between them and Ailsa. I was facing four trained soldiers in full armor with war swords in their hands, and me in a coat with just a pair of shortswords. I didn’t stand a fucking chance and I knew it.

  I heard movement behind me, and then a strangled scream.

  “Put up your swords!” Greuv ordered, his voice coming out in a choked wheeze.

  I turned to see Billy behind the magus’s chair with an arm wrapped tightly around his neck and one of his wicked little knives at the side of his throat, pressing dangerously hard into the killing place. Ailsa was just standing to one side with her hands folded in front of her and an unreadable look on her face.

  “How would you like me to cut you open and look at your blood?” Billy asked him. “I think I’d like to see all of it.”

  Billy twisted his arm around Greuv’s throat in a way that gave the magus no option but to stand. He was a short man, as I have written, and he and Billy were much of a height. Billy kept the knife pressed into his neck, drawing a thin trickle of blood and seeming always on the brink of plunging through skin and flesh and opening the great vessel that would have meant almost instant death. His other hand was somewhere under the magus’s ear, the knuckle of his thumb pressing into a soft place that was obviously causing Greuv a great deal of pain.

  “We’re leaving now,” I told the Guard of the Magi, “and I suggest you stand aside if you want your master to live. Bring him to the carriage with us, Billy.”

  Billy nodded and applied the tiniest pressure with the knuckle of his thumb, enough to make Greuv gasp and stagger in the direction Billy wanted him to go. I faced down the Guard of the Magi as we passed between them, my swords in my hands and my glare meeting their faceless steel helms. They stood back as Billy forced Greuv between them, but I could feel the hatred coming off them like a living thing. Ailsa followed, a small smile on her lips now as we returned to the main hall.

  When we reached the heavy doors there were another four armored guards waiting for us, with naked steel in their hands. I could sense their indecision as they saw Greuv helpless in Billy’s grip.

  “I have the Queen’s Warrant,” Ailsa said to the air in the hall. “I am leaving now, and my family are leaving with me. This never happened.
I was never here. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said a muffled voice from within one of the great helms, and then the doors were opened for us.

  Billy waited until we were outside before he let go of Greuv. The magus fled back to his guards as Billy climbed up into the carriage with us. Then the lad turned back to stare into the hall, and he had a fierce look on his face.

  “I liked Katrin,” he said. “She was kind to me.”

  His fists clenched suddenly at his sides, and all the breath hissed out of him at once.

  The learned magus Absolom Greuv fell to his knees and pitched forward in a tide of blood and slime as he vomited his own reeking intestines across the marble floor.

  * * *

  * * *

  “How did you know?” Ailsa asked me as the carriage rattled hurriedly away from the house of magicians.

  Billy was dozing on the bench beside Ailsa, his face pale from his exertions. She had a protective arm around his shoulders, holding him close to her.

  “I didn’t, not for sure, but I suspected and I took a gamble on it.”

  “A very large gamble,” she said, and the sharpness in her tone was unmistakable.

  “Aye,” I allowed, “but I was right. It was something Old Kurt told me when I first took Billy to him for training, about how high magic and the cunning are different things. He told me the cunning was sorcery, about doing real things in the real world, and about how the magicians look down on that as beneath them. And they didn’t go to war neither, saying war magic was beneath them too. When a man sneers at something and looks down on it, that means he doesn’t understand it, and maybe that he fears it too. That got me thinking perhaps high magic is nothing but stars and mathematics and talking, and those things are no magic at all.”

  “Suppose you had been wrong? Suppose he had called up a demon against us—what then?”

  “Aye, well,” I said. “It was a gamble, like I said.”

  Ailsa looked as though she was wondering very seriously whether to stab me.

  “The Magi have no magic,” she murmured instead, thinking aloud now, “but the Skanian magicians very much have.”

  “That’s true enough,” I said. “I reckon they’re cunning folk, like ours, only the Skanians don’t call them that and they treat them a sight better. Now your magicians are trying to study the cunning and learn how to do what they can’t, to fight the Skanians.”

  “To keep their grip on power and remain relevant, more likely,” Ailsa said. “The house of magicians is a major political force in Dannsburg, and they won’t surrender that power lightly.”

  “That’s why Vogel wants rid of them,” I said.

  “He can’t move against them, I told you that. That’s not our problem, anyway. We need to return to Ellinburg as quickly as possible.”

  “Not until I’ve settled things with Lan Yetrov.”

  “Are you mad?” Ailsa demanded. “We need to return to Ellinburg with what we know and recruit as many cunning folk as can possibly be found. If the Skanians come in force and we can’t rely on the magicians, then we shall need every single one of them.”

  “Aye, I know that, and I want to go home as much as you do, but I’ve unfinished business here. The last thing we need is that arsehole making trouble for us with Hauer. From what Anne said, things are bad enough at home as it is. I can’t risk it, Ailsa.”

  Our time in Dannsburg was finally drawing to a close, but before we left the city I wanted blood.

  And I was going to have it.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Ailsa urged me to make haste at least, but I didn’t think that would be a problem.

  As I had hoped, Iagin had put Leonov and his entire crew at my disposal. Of course that meant now Vogel knew what I was about, but I didn’t think it mattered anymore. The death of the learned magus Absolom Greuv would have pleased him enormously, I was sure, so to my mind he owed me this one indulgence. If he had thought differently, then I was sure I would have heard about it, but no word came from the house of law, and that was good.

  While Luka and Leonov made their plans, it seemed there was one more thing to do.

  “I shall have to say good-bye to my parents before we leave,” Ailsa told me. “I . . . I need to try again. I’m sorry, Tomas.”

  “No, I understand,” I said. “But that will need to be soon. It won’t take Leonov long to get things moving with Lan Yetrov, and once the thing is done I think we’ll need to leave the city in something of a hurry.”

  Ailsa nodded. She was sitting in the drawing room, with Billy perched on the stool at her feet. He was holding her yarn for her as she worked at her needlecraft, the way her maid sometimes did. They looked like a real mother and son, and the sight pleased me greatly. Ailsa and I still might not have found the closeness I was beginning to wish for, but that at least was a good start. One step at a time, that was how it was done.

  “I agree,” she said. “I’ve arranged for us to visit them this afternoon.”

  “Can I come, Mama?” Billy asked her. “I’ve never had a grandma before.”

  “I’m sorry, my love,” Ailsa said. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea. Not this time, anyway.”

  Billy looked saddened by that, but Ailsa put down her needles and pulled him into a hug that made it right with him at once. I smiled and went to change my clothes in readiness for our afternoon visit.

  * * *

  * * *

  Masha met our carriage that afternoon as he had done before, and this time the elderly steward’s bow welcomed me as a family member rather than a stranger. I could only assume Sasura had spoken to him in advance. As before, we were shown into the grand old house, where a footman was waiting to usher Ailsa into the drawing room and her mother’s presence. Another was holding open the door of Sasura’s study for me, and it was plain how this was going to work. Ailsa took a deep breath and squeezed my hand unexpectedly, then turned away. I watched the drawing room door swing shut behind her.

  Sasura was waiting for me in his study, and he waved the footman out. My father-by-law turned to me then, and his bearded face split open in a welcoming grin.

  “Ah, Tomas, it is good to see you again, my son-by-law,” he said.

  “You too, Sasura,” I said, and gave him a respectful bow.

  “Enough of that.” He laughed, and pulled me into a firm embrace. “Come come, let us drink brandy while Chandari and her mother once more raise the roof of my house.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come to that again,” I said, although in truth I suspected that it would.

  I didn’t know Madame Shapoor, but she had birthed a lioness. I couldn’t think she was likely to be much different herself, and I thought the chances of either of them backing down were extremely thin.

  Sasura poured drinks for us both and we settled into comfortable chairs. He raised his glass to me, and his eyes narrowed as he looked at me over the rim.

  “So, Tomas,” he said. “The thing that we discussed with the lady, here in my study. Will she get her wish?”

  How would you like to be a very rich widow? That was what I had asked Lady Lan Yetrov. You would be wealthy, and free, and with time you might finally heal.

  She had told us everything we wanted to know, my Sasura and me, and now Fat Luka and Leonov were using that information to put my plans into place.

  “She will,” I said.

  Sasura chuckled into his brandy.

  “I love you, my son-by-law,” he said, “but I think you are a very dangerous man.”

  He had the right of that, I thought.

  Sadly Ailsa fared no better with her mother than she had before, and our visit to her parents’ house was a brief one. I bade Sasura a fond farewell, as I knew I wasn’t likely to see him again.

  Once the thing was done we would be leaving Dannsburg, and with all ha
ste.

  * * *

  * * *

  Two nights later I was in a very respectable inn close to the Lan Yetrov house, with Fat Luka, Oliver, and Emil from my crew. The inn belonged to Mr. Grachyev, as most public establishments in Dannsburg seemed to, and we met Leonov and six of his boys there in a private dining room.

  “Iagin sends his regards,” Leonov said as he gave my arm a friendly squeeze.

  Iagin, I noted, not Mr. Grachyev. I wondered if perhaps this Leonov was better connected than he had let on before. It wasn’t impossible that he knew who Iagin really worked for, I realized. In Dannsburg everyone seemed to have secrets and webs of hidden connections, and of course Grachyev was nothing but a figurehead. This was Iagin’s crew in all but name, and Lord Vogel’s in truth. That gave me pause, I have to allow. Did I even really still run the Pious Men, or was Ailsa working me like a puppet in the same way Iagin worked Grachyev?

  No, I told myself, she wasn’t that close to Pious Men business. She and Iagin had different ways of doing things, that was all.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said, and Leonov nodded.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” he said. He showed me a grin. “We’ve no more love for that prick than you have.”

  “Aye, good.”

  I wondered who he meant when he said we—his crew, or Iagin and the Queen’s Men. It didn’t matter. We were doing this; that was the important thing.

  “Right, listen,” Fat Luka said, and we gathered around him in the private room at the back of the inn. “I’ve bought off the captain of the household guard and his three top lads. The gates are unlocked and Lady willing so is the front door, and everyone we could get rid of for the night has been got rid of. There’ll still be a few guards but not many, and two of the footmen belong to me now.”

  “What about the pitmaster?” I asked.

  That was very important to me.

  Luka gave me a look. He didn’t like this part of my plan, I knew he didn’t, but that was nothing I cared about. He didn’t have to like it, so long as he did it. I had a point to make that night, and I was going to fucking make it whatever he or anyone else thought.