by Peter McLean
It came to me then that Hauer didn’t much care what had happened to Vhent. We were past that now, I realized, past the time for fronts and blinds and pretending. The time for proxy wars between the governor and me was over and done. It was time now to settle this, and settle it I would, the only way I knew how.
It was time for blood.
FIFTY
The time for blood came sooner than I had expected. Sooner than anyone had expected, I think, even Ailsa. Two days after the governor’s reception, the City Guard stormed the Tanner’s.
There must have been fifty of the fuckers, and we never stood a chance. I was in the back room with Luka and Bloody Anne when the shouting started, followed by the crash of breaking glass and a brief exchange of steel on steel. A moment later the door was kicked in, and there was Captain Rogan. He had a naked blade in his hand, and ten armed men at his back. Half of them at least held loaded crossbows.
“You’re done, Piety,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I mean it this time. I have to take you to see the widow.”
Going to see the widow, that was what it was called. That was street cant for when you were taken in and it was bad, really bad. Men who went to see the widow usually didn’t come back again.
I was on my feet then with Luka and Anne beside me, but there was nothing to be done. There were too many of them and they had crossbows, and I could tell just from the sounds floating down the hallway that the rest of the Tanner’s had already fallen. It wasn’t worth crossing the river, not yet.
“Aye, as you say, Captain,” I said, careful to keep my hands well away from the hilts of the Weeping Women. “Anne, Luka, see that my wife is told of this.”
“Yes, boss,” Luka said.
Bloody Anne said nothing, just edged closer to me and slightly in front. She was ready to fight, I realized. She had nothing on her but a pair of daggers and she wasn’t even wearing her mail, but she was ready to fight all the same. Bloody Anne was like a fucking force of nature in a close-quarters battle, but even she couldn’t face this many armed men and hope to live. No one could, not even Cutter.
“No, Anne,” I said. “No.”
“They’ll fucking kill you, Tomas,” she whispered.
“No one’s killing anyone, not yet,” Rogan said. “Put him in irons. He’s for the cells, and the governor’s justice.”
“Stand down, sergeant,” I ordered Anne, and she reluctantly did as I said.
I met Rogan’s eyes as two of his men relieved me of my swordbelt and locked heavy iron manacles around my wrists. He looked troubled by what he was doing, and I thought that might be a good thing.
“Do you remember what I told you that night at the Golden Chains, Captain?” I asked him. “That if you ever get orders you don’t feel you can follow with a clear heart, you should come and talk to me about them before you do something you might regret. Do you remember that?”
“I’m a soldier,” he growled. “I follow my orders, and it’s not for the likes of you to be questioning them.”
“Aye, perhaps not,” I said. “Perhaps I thought you had more honor than this.”
One of his men hit me then, and I swayed on my feet but shot Anne a look to tell her to stay back. She was a moment away from disobeying orders herself, I knew. There were five or six bows trained on her and Luka, at a range even a child couldn’t have missed from. It was no good, and I knew it.
“You’ll shut your mouth and come with us in peace or I’ll have my men shoot the pair of them,” Rogan said, indicating Anne and Luka.
“I’ll come,” I said. “Don’t you worry about me, Captain.”
He gave me a sour look but nodded, and his men slowly lowered their crossbows.
“Make sure Ailsa hears,” I said again. “At once.”
With that I was dragged out of the room, and the door kicked shut behind us.
The common room of the Tanner’s was full of guardsmen. Hari and Mika and Emil were standing against one wall with crossbows pointing at them, while Simple Sam was inexpertly trying to stem the flow of blood from a wicked gash in Black Billy’s shoulder.
“Sorry, boss,” Billy said when he saw me, his dark face looking pale and sweaty from shock and blood loss.
“You did what you could,” I said. “There’s no shame in not doing the impossible.”
“Aye.”
Then I was out of the door and in the street, the cold winter wind blowing my open coat out behind me. Another twenty or so of the City Guard were out there, and I started to wonder if there were any more left anywhere else in the city. Some of this lot were the new men Hauer had been recruiting, I saw, not Rogan’s old veterans. Almost all of the City Guard had been thrown against the Pious Men that day, and if I’d still had the slightest doubt that Hauer was now in the pay of the Skanians that would have ended it. This was a fucking act of war, there was no other way of looking at it. This was an invasion of my streets by an enemy force.
I was born in the Stink. I lived there my whole life until the war broke out, and I knew those streets like the back of my hand. I knew the people too, the Stink people. I knew what they were like and how they thought, and what they believed in and what was important to them. I was a prince in Ellinburg, as I have written, and a prince looks after his people and he keeps the peace. A prince is respected on his streets, even loved. But when others break that peace and threaten the prince, what then? When they drag him out of his place of business in irons, with crossbows trained on him, how do his people react to that?
How do you fucking think.
It was barely two minutes before the first cobble was thrown.
It slammed into a guardsman’s shoulder as they marched me down the road, knocking him off balance and into the man next to him. Then the shouting started. No one saw where that cobble had come from, or the next one, or the one after that. The Stink is all alleys and narrow, winding streets, cramped little houses and shops that lean out over the roads between them until they almost touch. It’s all shadows, even in the daytime, and if Stink people know one thing it’s how to hide from the Guard.
All the guardsmen wore mail and most of them had crossbows as well as their clubs and shortswords, but none of them had shields. A crossbow won’t save a man from a hail of missiles, and that was what they were now facing. One clanged from a guardsman’s helmet, sending him to his knees.
“Let him go!”
I didn’t know where the shout came from. It was a man’s voice, thick with the local accent and echoing from the looming buildings all around us. It could have come from anywhere at all.
“Let him go!”
That was a woman, and not a young one by the sound of her voice. A moment later the chant was taken up by a hundred throats, and I could even hear children’s voices in it too. Cobbles and rocks rained down on the Guard from alleys and windows.
“Let him go!” they chanted, and another guard was hit. “Let him go! Let him go!”
The thump of the first crossbow changed everything.
The bolt slammed into an open shutter, hurting no one, but that wasn’t the point. That was the moment the City Guard of Ellinburg started shooting at their own citizens, and there was no coming back from that.
The alleys erupted.
The riot took hold like a forest fire in high summer, and the Guard were overwhelmed in minutes. The streets of the Stink are close-packed and overcrowded, with many hundreds of people piled one on top of another in barely a square mile of reeking slums and grinding poverty. Hundreds of angry, hungry, bitter people, whose one bright light in life was their prince and the justice and protection he brought to them. Threatening that prince, putting him in irons, had been very, very fucking unwise of Captain Rogan.
No, I thought, as I watched a guardsman dragged to the ground by a dozen screaming women in patched and stained kirtles gone colorless from wear, not Rogan. He
was following his orders, I was sure. Hauer’s orders. Hauer was the fool here, and the captain just his cat’s-paw.
One of the women was astride the fallen guardsman now, her bonnet askew and wisps of dirty hair falling in her face as she lifted a big rock and brought it down in her work-worn, callused hands. There was a sick crunch of breaking skull and her rock rose and fell, rose and fell, until it was dripping crimson.
A crossbow thumped beside me and she flew backward with a bolt lodged in her chest. Her friends looked up as one, their eyes shining with furious hatred, and as one they charged with their kitchen knives flashing bright murder in their hands.
It was like Messia on the streets of the Stink that day.
Captain Rogan dragged me forward by the chain that linked my manacles, bellowing at his men to fall back, to regroup and make for the Narrows and Trader’s Row beyond.
Easier said than done, Captain. Easier said than done.
Twenty men faced the Guard across the street before us, big angry men with hammers and clubs and barrel staves in their hands. Working men, worn lean and hard as old roots by their labors. They’d had no love for the Guard to start with, not a man of them, but that was before. Now there was someone’s wife, someone’s mother, someone’s sister or aunt, dead in the street with a guardsman’s bolt through her chest.
Now, oh now there would be blood.
They were like wild animals as they fought, those men of my streets, and I could feel that the Guard were ready to break and run. Only Rogan held them, the hard old soldier with his iron discipline.
“Hold!” he roared. “Shoulder! By the numbers! Volley!”
The crossbows thumped, one after another down the line at punishingly close range, and the Stink men fell before the withering steel rain. It pained me to see it happen, but chained as I was there was little enough I could do to stop it.
“Wheel right!” Rogan bellowed. “Form on me and withdraw!”
He rammed his blade into a Stink man’s side with his free hand even as he shouted his orders. He kicked the man’s body aside and dragged me into the bottom of Carpenter’s Narrow with one meaty hand clamped around the chain between my manacles.
I could hear the guardsmen’s whistles blowing frantically for assistance, but I couldn’t think they had many men left to call on. Even if they had, they weren’t coming.
Of course it had come to blood in the end; these things always do. Rogan’s sword was running with it, with the blood of the Stink man he had killed. I wouldn’t forget that, or the woman and the men who had been shot down. I hadn’t known them, but I promised myself I would find out who they had been and make it right with their families, as much as I could. They hadn’t been the only ones to fall, but there were ten guardsmen dead in the streets behind us now, their heads bashed in with barrel staves or cobbles torn up from the road, or with kitchen knives driven between the gaps in their mail.
People are weak, as I have written before, and the poorer and more oppressed they are, the weaker they become—until they just refuse to take it anymore. Then they will rise up, and the gods help their oppressors.
Even as I watched, another guardsman was dragged down by the mob. I didn’t think he would be getting up again.
“Can you make this stop?” Rogan hissed in my ear, too low for any of his men to hear.
“No, but you can,” I said. “You can let me go.”
“I fucking can’t, you know that,” he said. “I may not be happy about this, you’ve the right of that, but I’ve got my orders.”
I shrugged and looked over the Captain’s shoulder, farther up the narrow, and I liked what I saw.
“Aye, well,” I said. “I very strongly suggest you have another think about that, Captain Rogan. Right now.”
A runner had obviously reached Ailsa, as I had ordered. Billy the Boy was coming down the narrow toward us, and he had Cutter beside him. I remembered the dream I’d had of the two of them, stalking through the bloody smoke of Abingon with dripping knives in their hands, and I realized it was coming true. Here they came now, their knives still dry but held ready. Billy’s smile was every bit the slash of murder it had been in my nightmare.
“You know I—” Rogan started, and then the flames from Billy’s hands lit the narrow as they roared overhead in a warning that brooked no argument.
“Let me go, Rogan,” I said. “I don’t want to kill you, but I think young Billy does. I fucking know Cutter does. Let me go.”
Rogan looked at his remaining men, cowering from the flames and hopelessly outnumbered by the Stink folk who were still hurling rocks at them from the foot of the narrow, and he nodded.
“You know it can’t end here,” he said. “We’ll be back. You have to understand that.”
I gave him a short nod. Of course I understood.
He unlocked my manacles and gave me back my swords, and I stood and walked back down the narrow. A great cheer went up from the massed folk below, a roar of approval that made me smile as I raised my hands to them in acknowledgment. The first battle of the Stink was won, but I knew Captain Rogan had the right of it.
I might not be an educated man but this was war, and I understood that well enough.
They would be back.
FIFTY-ONE
Ailsa joined us in the Tanner’s Arms while she could still get there, and that was a relief. If Hauer had taken her hostage I would have found myself in a very difficult position. Billy threw himself into her arms, and she held him close and smiled at me over his head.
The Stink was virtually under siege now, but everyone who mattered was there. Bloody Anne had called the knives, and all the Pious Men had rallied to the Tanner’s. That was how it should be.
Matthias Wolf was there too, and Billy the Boy and Mina, the Headhunters and Florence Cooper and most of her Flower Girls, and Stefan and Brak and my aunt. Sir Eland had closed the Golden Chains and left a guard of hired men inside with crossbows and blades. The only one who was absent was Will the Wencher, and that was only because he was holding Chandler’s Narrow with five men to protect the girls, and the remaining Flower Girls were holding the Badger’s Rest the same way. Rosie was at the Tanner’s with us; Anne had insisted, and I hadn’t refused her. In truth I was glad to have her there. She was good with a crossbow, was Rosie, and she could think for herself.
There was a big barricade at the end of the main road that led toward the market square now, and another at the bottom of Dock Road, both of them manned mostly by Stink folk. If the Guard wanted to come again they’d have no choice but to come down one of the narrows, where my people could rain anything and everything down on them from the overhanging upstairs windows.
And come again they would.
Hauer had started something now that he couldn’t stop. Now that the City Guard had come to blood with the common folk, there was no turning back. I knew that, and so would he.
Jochan was at the main barricade with Cutter and Sir Eland and Simple Sam and Emil, waiting for the chance to kill someone. I didn’t think he’d have to wait long. Ailsa was in the back room of the Tanner’s with me and Anne and Fat Luka, having finally pried Billy off her and convinced him to rest. Anne knew who Ailsa really was, of course, and that was good. I wanted her at my top table.
Luka didn’t know, not officially, but he was Luka and I suspected he might have found his way to working some of it out for himself by then. Ailsa didn’t object to him being there, at least, and that was good too.
“How long is that barricade going to hold, realistically?” I asked as I paced the room, back and forth like a caged thing. “A couple of old carts and a pile of crates might hold the Guard for a while, stretched thin as they are, but it won’t stop real soldiers for an hour. It won’t stop a fucking cannon for a moment. How long until Hauer sends to Dannsburg for the army?”
“He won’t,” Ailsa said. “The ver
y last thing Hauer wants is for Dannsburg to find out what’s happening here. He has sold himself to the Skanians, and that makes him a traitor to the crown. It’s his magicians we need to worry about, not soldiers and cannon.”
“Aye, well,” I said, “we’ve Billy the Boy and Matthias Wolf and Mina, and that will have to do. Old Kurt’s fucking disappeared, his house deserted, and we haven’t time to go looking for him now. Besides, the last time I saw him we didn’t exactly part as friends.”
“Are you sure the army won’t come, Tomas?” Anne asked. “If we need to plan for—”
“I am sure,” Ailsa snapped, interrupting her, and I remembered again how little the two of them seemed to care for one another. “Hauer does not want Dannsburg to know about this matter, which is precisely why I already have a messenger riding for the capital as fast as she can. He won’t ask for soldiers, but I have. All the same, we can’t rely on help coming in time, not in this weather.”
“No, I know,” I said. “This is Pious Men business; we’ll deal with it ourselves.”
“This is crown business now, my business,” she corrected me. I shot a sideways look at Fat Luka, sitting at the table and saying nothing, but she ignored me. “A city governor and direct servant of the crown is a traitor to the realm. This cannot be anything but my business.”
“Aye, that’s fair,” I had to allow. “What do you want me to do?”
“Exactly what you are doing,” she said. “Fight him. Keep fighting him until we win or the army arrives, whichever happens first.”
“Well and good,” I said, and sighed. “We should go out and be seen, Anne, and you as well, Luka. The people need to see us among them, just now.”
When you lead, you have to be seen to lead. You might not be at the front of the charge, but you have to be there, so those who fight for you remember who they’re fighting for, and why.
“Aye, boss,” Luka said, and he and Anne headed out. Ailsa put a hand on my arm to stay me.
