Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  “Right you are,” he said, and waved to a footman who hurried over with a brandy for me.

  I sipped it and looked at Eland’s doublet over the rim of the glass.

  “Does it never bother you,” I said, “that one day someone might recognize those arms you stole and think you’re someone else?”

  Sir Eland just smirked at that. “I never stole these arms,” he said. “I might be a false knight, but I’m not a fool. I fucking made them up, and I paid some village woman to paint them on my shield all those years ago. Then I stole a warhorse and managed to change regiments in the confusion at Messia. I started calling myself Sir, and no one ever questioned it until I ended up in your crew.”

  That surprised me. I hadn’t thought Sir Eland to be that imaginative, truth be told.

  “Aye, well, it worked well enough,” I said. “Keep it up. Having a knight on my crew is good for business.”

  Eland nodded, but he put his hand on my arm before I could turn away.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said.

  “Aye, if you want.”

  “Did you think it was me? The traitor, I mean.”

  I took another drink while I put my answer together in my head.

  “No,” I said at last. “No, Eland, I didn’t. A year or so ago I would have done and I won’t lie to you about that, but not now.”

  “What changed?”

  “I never trusted you in the war, and I never trusted you all the way back to Ellinburg, nor in the days that followed, and that was because you never gave me a reason to. I don’t trust folk first and wait to be disappointed; that’s a fool’s errand and no mistake. I trust no fucker who hasn’t earned it, do you understand?”

  “Aye,” he said.

  “Well, that’s how it was,” I said, “and that’s how it would have stayed if you’d never given me a reason to, but you did. You showed me the sort of man you really are. First when you brought me the head of the cunt who tried to buy you, and again when you held Chandler’s Narrow alone against the attack, when you nearly died to protect those women. No, Eland, I didn’t think it was you.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and I could see in his face that he meant it.

  That meant a lot to him, I could tell, to finally hear me say it. Trust, that was the lever that moved Sir Eland the false knight.

  FORTY-FOUR

  I was thinking it was time to be on my way home when the back door of the gaming room opened, the one that led out to the shithouse in the courtyard, and Captain Rogan of the Guard walked in. He strolled straight back to the table he had been playing at before nature had called him away, and he never looked around him as he went. I knew he hadn’t seen me standing at the back of the room with Sir Eland, and that was good.

  I crossed the room and put a hand on Rogan’s broad, heavy shoulder.

  “Good evening, Captain,” I said, letting my voice go flat in that way that I knew he recognized.

  He didn’t startle, although he hadn’t known I was there until I touched him, and I give him credit for that.

  “Piety,” he said, turning slowly to look up at me standing behind his chair. “It’s rare to see you in here.”

  “I fucking own the place,” I said, as much for the benefit of the other players at the table as anything else. Rogan knew that, of course, but I didn’t know all of his company and I thought some were guests from outside the city and perhaps they didn’t. “I come in when I please.”

  “Aye, course you do,” he said.

  Captain Rogan and me had something of what you might call a complicated relationship. He worked for Governor Hauer, and he didn’t like me and he didn’t trust me, but he liked gambling and he liked the Golden Chains. He liked gambling very much indeed, and that was the lever that moved him. He also took a good deal off me in taxes, to keep the eyes of his guardsmen away from Pious Men business.

  “I want a little word,” I said.

  Rogan tossed his cards facedown on the table and got up, and I led him to a quiet corner of the room.

  “What’s this about?” he asked, wiping a meaty hand across his lips in a way that gave away his nerves.

  Rogan was a hard man and a bully, but in here without his uniformed thugs around him he was just another customer in a place where I could easily call on fifteen blades if I needed them. He knew that.

  “Tell me about the summer, Captain,” I said. “Tell me where the Guard were and who they were fighting. More to the point, tell me why they weren’t where they fucking weren’t.”

  I could still remember what Bloody Anne had told me, about how the City Guard had seemed to be concentrating their efforts to keep the peace in the west of the city where the Northern Sons ran the streets, and how they had let the Stink and the Wheels fend for themselves while they were doing it.

  They might as well not exist, not on our streets anyway, Anne had told me. The Blue Bloods are all but wiped out now, and those as still live have bent the knee and joined the Sons . . . The Guard had a hand in that, you mark me.

  I wanted to hear what Captain Rogan had to say about that.

  “I have my orders, and I follow them,” Rogan said, but I could see something in his face that told me he wasn’t entirely comfortable with what those orders had been.

  He didn’t like me, no, but then I dare say he didn’t like Bloodhands either. The thing that has to be understood about Captain Rogan is that he was a soldier, before all else. Oh, he took bribes and he had his vices, and gambling was chief among them, but I didn’t think he was truly a corrupt man. Rogan had fought in the last war, in Aunt Enaid’s war, and like so many old soldiers he still carried a piece of that war around with him in his heart. It was buried deep perhaps, aye, but it was there.

  I was aware of Bloody Anne coming up behind Rogan with her hands on the hilts of her daggers, her card game abandoned and one eyebrow raised to ask the obvious question. If I had nodded, I knew Anne would have killed him right there in front of everyone and fuck what anyone thought of it.

  Bloody Anne was the best second a man could have asked for and no mistake, but I knew Captain Rogan still had his honor, somewhere deep inside him.

  “Aye, you were following orders,” I said, and I put a hand on his shoulder and leaned close enough to be sure no one else could hear us even as I held up the other to tell Anne to be still. “I understand that, Captain, but let me put something to you. If you ever get orders you don’t feel you can follow with a clear heart, you come and talk to me about them before you do something you might regret. Will you promise me that?”

  “I . . . I’ll think on it,” Rogan said, and I supposed I couldn’t ask for more than that.

  * * *

  * * *

  Two days later a runner came to the Tanner’s to tell me that Cutter was back at Slaughterhouse Narrow and that he had something for me. My brother and I went up there together with a few of the lads as a bodyguard, but we left the hired men out in the narrow and only the two of us went inside.

  I hadn’t seen the inside of the boardinghouse on Slaughterhouse Narrow for a long time, and I was surprised by how clean and tidy it was. Cutter obviously ran a tight ship, I was pleased to see. He was waiting for us in the main room, with a look of grim satisfaction on his bearded face.

  “I hear you’ve brought me a gift, Cutter,” I said.

  “Told you I would,” Cutter said. “No one gets away from me. No one.”

  I cleared my throat. Cutter was enough to put the fear into anyone, as I have written, and I’ve no shame in admitting that included me.

  “Aye, well done,” I said.

  “Where is he, then?” Jochan asked, and there was an eagerness in his voice that I didn’t like.

  I looked at my brother, and he was staring at Cutter in that way he had about him now, like he was always looking into the distance. His hand was on his
axe and his fingers were moving like he was stroking it, like he couldn’t wait to use it on someone. I wondered if he even knew he was doing it.

  “In the cellar,” Cutter said. “I’ll show you.”

  He led us through a door and down a flight of narrow stone steps, into a damp space lit by a single lamp. There were things down there that surprised me and a thing that didn’t.

  He had targets set up along the wall for practicing the throwing of knives and hatchets, and big canvas bags stuffed with wool and sawdust for punching, like we’d had in the army. There were other things, too, things that I couldn’t put names to. I saw frames made of wood, with blades sticking out of them at strange angles and padded leather places that I could only guess you were supposed to hit. There were big jars full of sand, canvas sacks stuffed so full of iron filings they were like rock, even a couple of small cannonballs. This was where he had been training Billy, I assumed, and that was all well and good even if I didn’t know what half of it was for. It was the other thing that interested me, the thing in the corner.

  The cage.

  It was only about two feet high and maybe four square, made of narrowly spaced iron bars and bolted securely to the wall and the floor. It was the sort of cage that folk who went in for cockfighting kept their prize birds in, and I could only assume that had been what the previous owner of the house had used it for, but Cutter had found a new use for it.

  I walked over to that corner and looked down through the bars to where Borys was huddled on the floor in the confined space, naked and bleeding from a number of cuts and abrasions. He’d had more than one vicious beating, by the looks of him, and that was good.

  “He was out west,” Cutter said, “trying to hide in one of the mining camps. He didn’t hide well enough, though. No one ever does.”

  I nodded slowly. That didn’t surprise me any. I didn’t think many men had ever escaped Cutter, not once he’d set his eye on them. Whatever else he might be, Cutter was a trained, professional murderer. A Sacred Blade, he had called himself, and I knew he took pride in his work and I respected that.

  “Well done,” I said.

  Jochan growled and took out his axe.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “In Our Lady’s name.”

  I held up a hand to tell him to be still.

  “Tonight,” I said. “Not now.”

  I leaned over the cage and I looked down at Borys, and I spat on him.

  * * *

  * * *

  That evening all the Pious Men gathered in the back room of the Tanner’s Arms, and took their places around the table in uneasy silence. I could have cut that silence with a knife as they filed into the room one after another, all wearing the fine coats they had bought for themselves with Pious Men money.

  It’s a thing I’ve noticed about people, and that I’ve written of before; no one wanted to live near a tannery, no, but they might well enjoy the money from one. In the same way, my Pious Men liked the money they made from the sort of business we did, but perhaps they didn’t always want to face the harsh realities of what that meant.

  Well, tonight they would fucking face it.

  I had made Billy the Boy stay back at the house with Ailsa. He was part a Pious Man and he part wasn’t, but either way he was too young to take part in this. I knew he had probably seen worse in the war but that wasn’t the point, and there Ailsa and me had been of one mind whether he liked it or not. He could sulk about it all he wanted but he wasn’t there, and that was good.

  Everyone else was, though. I had the Flower Girls and the Headhunters minding the businesses just for that one night so all the Pious Men could be there at the table together. The Tanner’s was closed to the public that night, and so was the Chains.

  That was how important this was.

  Some of them, Fat Luka and Jochan, who were Ellinburg born, I suspected they already knew what they were going to see before they came into that room.

  I knew fucking well that my aunt did.

  She had known exactly what she was going to see, and there I didn’t disappoint her. I had even included Cookpot, just for this one night, and he was an Ellinburg man too. He wasn’t a Pious Man anymore and I knew he didn’t want to be there, but he had known Borys before and he needed to stand witness and do his part, the same as the others.

  Some, like Mika and Sir Eland, well, they could think for themselves and if they hadn’t known quite how it was going to be, then I was sure they had formed a fair idea in their minds of what to expect.

  Simple Sam and Hari and Will the Wencher, Black Billy and Brak and Stefan, they had just stared in shocked silence, and had said nothing.

  Borys was nailed to the table.

  Earlier in the day I’d had Bloody Anne and Cutter bring him down to the Tanner’s from the house on Slaughterhouse Narrow in the back of a cart, gagged and bound hand and foot inside a big sack. They had held him down, and I had personally hammered a great roofing spike through each of his wrists and ankles and deep into the wood below. He was pinned there like an exotic butterfly in a gentleman’s collection of curiosities. By the time the Pious Men gathered, he had been there for some hours.

  All the Pious Men were seated now, around that table that was dark with Borys’s blood and piss, and him mewling pitifully between them like a wounded animal caught in a trap.

  In front of each place I had set a dagger.

  No one spoke until I had taken my seat at the head of the table, the Weeping Women hanging heavy at my sides.

  “We’re a family,” I said, and I looked around the table as I spoke and I met each of their eyes in turn, and no one looked away. “Each of us here, man or woman, is a Pious Man. That’s a bond between us, a bond either of blood or of trust and comradeship forged in the fires of war. That’s not a thing to be taken lightly. We’re family, and we’re comrades, and we stand by each other until the very last breath. That’s what it means, to be a Pious Man. That’s how this fucking works. Does anyone disagree on that?”

  Again I looked around the table, and no one spoke. Borys made some noise into the ball of rags that Cutter had stuffed into his mouth and tied tight with a length of cord to keep him quiet, but no one paid him any mind. It was clear to everyone there gathered which way the wind was blowing that night. No one challenged me, and that was wise of them.

  “Well and good,” I said, after the silence had stretched almost to the breaking point. “Those of you who are from Ellinburg will have heard of the Rite of the Betrayer, and those who ain’t ought to have got the general idea by now, but if anyone’s feeling slow tonight this is how it is. Borys betrayed us. Borys sold Billy the Boy to people you don’t even want to fucking think about, and he sold our stew on Convent Street back to the Sons, too. Borys is a traitor. Borys took your trust, and the comradeship you forged together in the war, and he pissed on it. That’s what you mean to him. Nothing. Nothing but something to be pissed on, for silver. For that, for silver, we pay him back in steel. That’s how this is done, in Ellinburg.”

  Anne went first, as my second. She stood and took up the dagger I had set before her place and she rammed it into Borys’s forearm just below the elbow, pinning him tighter to the wood. He screamed through his gag, but he’d get no mercy that night. Not after what he had done and the words I had said he wouldn’t.

  Jochan went next and he took Borys’s left calf, striking with such ferocity that he shattered the shinbone. After him went my aunt, and there was no hint of pity in her single eye as she struck. Then each man around the table took his turn, each avoiding the killing places. Even Cookpot took his turn, for all that I knew he didn’t want to, and I could see the deeply buried battle shock in his eyes as he rammed his blade through Borys’s left biceps with a snarl of rage.

  The final blow was to be mine, and for that he would have to wait.

  When it was done, Borys barely looked human.
He had fourteen daggers in him by then, all told, each one pinning him hard to the long table beneath him and blood flowing in rivers, but none of them in a killing place. Not quite.

  I stood over him, and in place of a dagger I drew Remorse from her sheath.

  “This is Remorse, Borys,” I told him. “On my other hip is Mercy. One might earn you the other, if you’re lucky. Tell me what you have to say.”

  I nodded at Cutter then, and he used one of his evil little knives to slice the cord that held Borys’s gag. Borys choked and retched and spat the wad of sodden, rancid cloth out of his mouth at last.

  “You’re worse than them,” he croaked, working his mouth to try to get enough spit into it to speak clearly. The pain must have been indescribable by then, but still somehow he managed to form words. “The governor’s corrupt and the magicians are scheming, but you’re fucking worse. The . . . dear gods . . . lesser of two evils, they told me, and I hold to that. Since we came back from the war you’ve . . . killed more men than the plague did. You’re the . . . Lady save me . . . worst of all the choices, Piety. You’re a fucking devil.”

  “If you had concerns, you should have laid them before me,” I said. “You went against the family. You betrayed us all.”

  Borys was dying, I could see that, but he managed one last defiance.

  “Fuck . . . your family!”

  Remorse came down so hard she split his fucking head in two.

  FORTY-FIVE

  It was three months since I had said the Rite of the Betrayer over Borys, and a harsh winter was then upon us.

  There was no invitation to the governor’s midwinter ball that year, and it seemed society in Ellinburg was doing its very best to shun us. That was no loss, but I knew Ailsa was displeased by it. Trade at the Golden Chains had all but dried up as well, and that I did take ill. Some of my wealthy customers still sent their servants to my door to buy the poppy resin their masters couldn’t live without anymore, but few folk now came to play cards at my tables. That was Hauer’s influence at work, I knew, all of it was. Even Rogan had stopped coming to the Chains, and that could only be because he had been ordered to.