by Peter McLean
“Aye, well, I suppose what a man wears is his own business,” I said. “At least it’s not a kirtle and bonnet. Take his blade and get him in here.”
That got a halfhearted laugh from the folk in the common room, but no more than that. Keeping morale up was becoming difficult, I had to allow. All the same, ten minutes later Captain Rogan was escorted through the barricade and brought into the Tanner’s Arms.
He walked stiffly upright, proud, in a parade ground march. He was alone, as the runner had said, his eyes fixed straight ahead in a way that I didn’t know how to read. He was wearing an old-fashioned army uniform, the sergeant’s stripes still bright on his tattered sleeve. An empty scabbard hung at his hip where my men had disarmed him, but it hung from an old leather swordbelt that had been polished to a glossy shine.
That uniform was from the last war, I realized, from Aunt Enaid’s war. She stood up and saluted him when he came in, and he returned the gesture of respect with such rigid discipline that it was plain he was keeping himself under an iron control.
“What can I do for you, Captain?” I asked him.
“I want to talk to you,” he said. “You and the corporal, but no one else.”
It took me a moment, but then I realized he meant my aunt. Perhaps they had known each other in their war, perhaps even fought together. Truth be told, I had never thought to ask, but I supposed it wasn’t impossible.
I met Ailsa’s eyes across the room, and she gave me a tiny nod.
“Aye,” I said after a moment. “We can do that.”
A minute later Aunt Enaid and me and Captain Rogan were in the back room of the Tanner’s where other ears couldn’t hear us.
“I am not a traitor,” Rogan said, once the door was closed behind us. “I love my country and I love my queen, you have to understand that. These foreign magicians . . . That’s not right, it can’t be. Withholding justice from the streets, shooting at our own people, that’s not right either. That’s injustice, right there, and that’s what I’ve always tried to stop. That’s why I joined the fucking Guard in the first place. Aye, I take bribes and I can’t deny that to you, but I don’t hold with injustice. Five years I was at war for my country, and no one can ever take that away from me.”
“No one here is trying to,” I told him. “I respect you, Captain Rogan, for all that we haven’t always been friends. I respect you, but I don’t respect your boss. Governor Hauer has done things that I can’t let pass, you have to understand that.”
Rogan nodded, and I could see the pain that it caused him. He was a conflicted man, was Captain Rogan. He was a hard man and a ruthless bully and he had his vices, as I have written, but he was still a soldier and he still had his honor, too.
“I’m no fucking saint of the temple,” Rogan admitted, “and I’ve done things I’m not proud of. I’ll work for a corrupt man, aye, if he pays well enough, but I won’t work for a traitor. These fucking foreigners, these magicians . . . that’s not right, I know it’s not. Where are they from, and why are they here? Why is there law in half the city and not the other half? That ain’t right either, and I don’t like it. I had to do it, I had my orders, but . . . but it’s not right, is it?”
He was close to tears, I could tell. This proud old soldier had reached the limits of what he could overlook for Hauer, of what he could do for silver without his conscience stabbing him in his sleep.
I cleared my throat and looked at my aunt.
“Let us have a minute, Auntie,” I said.
She frowned at that, she who had been the one who had served with Rogan, but she took my word and she nodded and stepped out of the room to give us the private moment that I needed.
“Governor Hauer is a traitor,” I said. “He’s a traitor to the crown, to the queen and the realm and to everything we fought for in our wars. Hauer fucking spits on everything we did, everything we went through. I mean to take him down.”
I locked eyes with Captain Rogan, and I reached into my belt pouch and took out the thing that Ailsa had given me.
I held it open so he could see what it contained.
“You see this, Captain?” I asked him. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
Rogan’s eyes widened as he stared at the Queen’s Warrant, and I think that was the moment that I truly realized just how much power I held right there in my hand.
An official license to do absolutely anything.
Ailsa had told me that, and of course she should know.
The full and unconditional backing and funding of the crown.
That was the power of a god, or close enough as made no difference on the streets.
I am above the law. I am untouchable.
Captain Rogan stared at me for a very long time, or so it seemed. Then he straightened up and he stiffened his spine, and he saluted me.
“I’m your man, sir,” he said. “I will follow you, and my men will follow me.”
I nodded and showed him out.
That done, I called all the Pious Men into the back room. I called them all in, and Florence Cooper and all her Flower Girls, and the Headhunters who had come down from the docks when Anne called the knives. Everyone who mattered was there, everyone I trusted. I left Ailsa out of it; this was between me and my crew, and the less any of them knew about her the better.
They crowded into the room with the Pious Men seated at the table and the members of the vassal gangs standing around the walls, all of them waiting on me to speak.
I took my place at the head of the table, but I didn’t sit. I stood there and I took out the Queen’s Warrant and I showed it to them, and I told them what it meant.
There was fucking uproar.
I heard cries of disbelief, and anger, and betrayal. I heard rage against the system, against how the common folk were oppressed by what that warrant represented. No one dared to quite come flat out and say it, but reading between their words I heard what a cunt they thought I was. This, I realized, could be about to go very badly for me.
“Quiet!” Bloody Anne bellowed in her best sergeant’s voice, and the room fell silent.
I could count on Bloody Anne, always, but even she had nearly stabbed me when she first learned that I worked for the crown. I knew I would have to present this very carefully and in exactly the right way if I hoped to keep the Pious Men at my side.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m still the devil Tomas Piety, and we’re still the Pious Men. This changes nothing, except the amount of power we have. It’s no secret now that Governor Hauer is our enemy, and this gives me the means to do something about that. That’s all. I may work for the crown, aye, but there’s no shame in it. There’s gold in it, though, all the gold we need, and the unconditional respect and obedience of anyone I show this to. This is fucking power. This is a good thing for the Pious Men, you mark me on that.”
Gold and power and respect, those were the levers that moved the Pious Men.
“He’s absolutely right,” Fat Luka said. “The whole city will be ours before you know it.”
Bloody Anne just nodded, and she glared around the table. Folk looked down at their boots, or up into the air, anywhere but at her, and gradually heads began to nod.
“If there is anyone here,” I said softly, “who feels they can’t stay, then go now.”
It was tense for a moment, but no one moved.
“I never thought I’d see the day,” my aunt muttered, but she stayed in her place at the table and that was good.
“Nor did I, Auntie,” I said, “but these are the times we live in. Now, this has to stay between us. It’s not something the common folk need to hear of, but I don’t keep secrets from family any longer than I have to and I wanted you all to know the lay of things. Captain Rogan will be joining us later, and he works for me now. He’ll be bringing guardsmen we can trust, and I know it’s a strange thing, but we’ll be figh
ting alongside them and I need everyone to understand that. I need everyone to get used to the idea.”
Again heads nodded, and I let them file out of the room to think on what I had told them, and what it meant. My brother just gave me a nod.
“In Our Lady’s name, Her will be done,” he said, and that could have meant anything.
I didn’t know how he felt about fighting alongside Rogan, but the captain commanded the lion’s share of the City Guard and that was all that mattered.
Hauer had been recruiting new men and those owed no loyalty to Rogan, but they were woefully outnumbered. Rogan’s men knew the city and they were veterans too, by and large, tough old fuckers who knew how to break heads and were more than happy to do it.
By the end of that day, they were my men.
* * *
* * *
We went at midnight.
I never thought I’d live to see a day when Guard fought Guard on the streets of Ellinburg, but I had been wrong about that.
Billy and Mina were both still exhausted, drained by their battle with the Skanian magicians at the barricade the previous day, however much they thought they could steal another magician’s strength. Neither was fit to fight, to my mind, but both had wanted to come anyway, and that troubled me. They had an overly bright look about their eyes now, the skin of both their faces seeming as though it were stretched too tightly across the skulls beneath. I had thought that feasting on another man’s power sounded unhealthy, and they showed me nothing to change my mind on that. I held my peace about it, but I refused to let them join us all the same and left them at the Tanner’s with Ailsa keeping a motherly eye on them.
Billy had assured me there wouldn’t be any more Skanian magicians, and when Billy the Boy said a thing was so, then it was so. We would do this the old-fashioned way, just like in the army. Me and Jochan and Cutter, Florence Cooper and Jutta and Bloody Anne headed out in full mail with our lads and Florence’s crew behind us.
We met Captain Rogan at the barricade. He was back in his Guard uniform now, the gold stars on his shoulders winking in the lantern light and his heavy breastplate reflecting back a dull sheen. He had a full detachment of fifty guardsmen with him, veterans who I knew would have followed him into Hell itself.
“Captain,” I greeted him. “Have you explained the lay of things to your men?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, “and sworn them all to secrecy on the matter.”
I nodded at that. He had told them I carried the Queen’s Warrant, then, and that had been enough.
The full and unconditional backing and funding of the crown.
There were no doors that warrant couldn’t open, no loyal man or woman who wouldn’t defer to the power it stood for. A command from a Queen’s Man carried the same weight as a direct order from the queen herself. Anyone who would refuse such was by definition a traitor to the crown and subject to hang.
That was the power of a god indeed.
“Good,” I said, and I stood up on the barricade to address all those there gathered. “Tonight we march on the governor’s hall. This will be harsh work we do, I won’t lie to you about that. There will be men and women loyal to the governor, who wear the same uniform you do, who will oppose us tonight. Those men and women are traitors to the crown and are to be dealt with as such, does everyone understand that?”
Heads nodded among the ranks of guardsmen.
“Yes, sir!” a thick-bellied sergeant shouted, and the others echoed him.
“Then we march!”
FIFTY-FOUR
Shock and awe, that was how we took the governor’s hall that night.
I had over sixty with me, City Guard and Pious Men and Flower Girls together. The Guard’s losses had been heavy in the two battles of the Stink, but Hauer had maybe forty armed men and women left loyal to him in the city. That was more than I would have liked, but we still outnumbered them and more importantly they didn’t know we were coming.
Captain Rogan had been clever, I had to allow, using his position to make sure his own men held the city gates that night while only the governor’s loyalists were on duty in the streets and at the governor’s hall itself. We rolled over them like an armored tide, the guardsmen’s heavy boots tramping in unison as they marched. They had their clubs slung at their belts and bared steel in their hands, and that night they all carried shields.
A massed rank of well-disciplined infantry is a terrifying thing in the enclosed space of a city street. Form the shield wall and push and stab and push and stab and you drive the enemy before you in confusion and disarray, trampling the fallen beneath your boots. Hauer’s men were panicking, unable to understand what was happening. These were their own comrades attacking them, and if some didn’t understand why, then that was their problem and not mine. I had no sympathy for traitors to the crown.
After the events of the last few days and the number of bodies we had dragged off my streets I had no sympathy for anyone, that night.
Our column made its way onto Trader’s Row and there they were waiting for us, kicked out of their bunks and rallied in haste. They were led by the sergeant who had arrested me and marched me out of my house that summer morning last year. I recognized her, but I couldn’t remember her name.
She had perhaps thirty guardsmen of her own behind her, and I thought that was every one they had left, bar the few who had no doubt already broken and run. Rogan’s men would stop those ones at the city gates. I knew how that would end, for those who were traitors and deserters both, and I gave them no further thought.
“Sergeant Weaver,” Rogan shouted at her across the cobbled expanse between our two forces. “Stand down. That is an order.”
“I take my orders from the governor, not from you,” she shouted back. “You’ve turned your fucking coat, Rogan! You’re a traitor to this city and to—”
There was a loud thump by my ear, and then the sergeant’s head all but exploded as a bolt took her full in the face. Beside me, Bloody Anne was already reloading her crossbow.
Rogan raised his sword.
“Charge!”
* * *
* * *
It was a massacre.
We took no prisoners on Trader’s Row that night, and when it was done the cobbles were running red. When it was done there wasn’t a guardsman left alive that wasn’t one of Rogan’s. We had ten down of our own, nine dead and one trying to hold his reeking guts in with his hands, but done it was.
I looked at the great stone slab of the governor’s hall, at the tall iron doors, and wished for a moment that I had allowed Billy and Mina to come along after all. The cunning could have broken that place open for us, but without it I wasn’t sure how we were going to get inside. I said as much, and Rogan reached into his pouch.
“I’m still the captain of the City Guard,” he reminded me. “I’ve got the keys.”
He marched up the steps with me and Jochan, Cutter and Bloody Anne and ten of his men around him. The big key went into the lock in the iron door and turned with a satisfying click. Rogan reached up and threw the doors open, and only then did I think to wonder why no one had dropped the bar on the inside.
“Down!” I shouted, but it was too late.
The blast of fire from within incinerated Captain Rogan and two of his men where they stood.
“Witch!” Anne roared, her crossbow thumping even as she moved.
I chanced a look, and of course she was right. There he was, tall and gaunt in his long robes, standing in the great entrance hall and flanked by five of Hauer’s remaining loyalists. Anne’s bolt swerved uselessly around him as he protected himself with the cunning, but it gave us the moment we needed.
The Guard stormed into the hall, bellowing rage and revenge for their captain, and they fell on the men within in a storm of steel. Cutter moved as fast as I think I had ever seen a man move before, his
evil little knives glittering in his hands as he went for the magician.
He moved like the wind, but lightning is faster than wind.
That lightning slashed from the magician’s hands and across the knifeman’s face, sending him screaming to the tiles. Cutter thrashed on the ground with smoke rising from his face. I felt sick to my stomach. I had seen burns like that before, in Abingon, and I knew he would be unlikely to survive it.
Jochan roared like a man possessed, and he charged the magician and damn the consequences. Battle shock and love and grief and rage fueled Jochan’s charge, and right then my brother was like some demon from the old stories, some unstoppable god of war and vengeance risen up from Hell itself.
“Cunt!” he bellowed, and his axe rose and fell, rose and fell.
He wrote bloody, screaming slaughter across the walls and the ceiling until the man was nothing but tattered robes and butchered meat, and it was done. My brother dropped his axe and fell to his knees, sobbing as he cradled Cutter’s burned head in his lap.
“Yoseph,” I heard him whisper.
The governor’s hall was ours, but at great cost.
There had been a magician where no magician should have been.
There won’t be any more magicians, Papa.
Billy the Boy had told me that, and he had been wrong.
Billy, who was never wrong.
When Billy the Boy said a thing was so, then it was so, but not that night it hadn’t been. I thought about the tight look he’d had to his face, and the overly bright shine of his eyes, and how I had thought that feasting on another man’s power sounded unhealthy. I wondered if those things might be connected. That was something to think on, but another time.
I drew in a breath and looked at the charred corpse of Captain Rogan, his body almost fused to the remains of the two men who had died with him on the steps beyond the open door. Rogan had found his honor in the end, and look where it had fucking got him.
Where did honor ever get anyone?
