Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say yes,” I told her. “Say you’ll make Florence Cooper your second, or my aunt, if you want. You can’t have Luka, but there’s Mika too, whoever you think fit, anyone but Jochan. I’ve a long road ahead of me with the workers and the Northern Sons and the Alarian Kings, the nobility and the queen’s fucking tax collectors. I need to know my streets are in safe hands. In your hands.”

  Bloody Anne looked at me for a very long time, then took a step toward the chair. I wasn’t sure how to read the look on her face, just then. Resignation, aye, and certainly weariness, but I thought perhaps there was something else there, too.

  I thought it might be pride.

  At last she sat down and took her place at the head of the table.

  It suited her.

  FIFTY-SIX

  I had been the governor of Ellinburg for three weeks, and still the cold rage hadn’t left me.

  Fat Luka spent his days in sit-downs now, with Bloody Anne and the man who had taken over the Northern Sons after Bloodhands, and with the head of the Alarian Kings. They were working out truces and borders between them, but I couldn’t concern myself with that sort of business any longer. As long as it got done, that was good enough.

  My business was governing the city now, and there Ailsa had been right. It wasn’t so different, not really. A larger scale, perhaps, and different problems, but I found I knew how to deal with them. All but one, anyway.

  There was still trouble among the workers, and that was because someone was still causing trouble. And I thought I knew who it was.

  Old Kurt’s sore with you, Billy had told me once. He’ll make trouble, later.

  It seemed that time had come.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Captain Miller said, “but can I ask why . . .”

  He tailed off and gestured to Billy and Mina, who were sitting there in the governor’s study, with him and me and two of his sergeants.

  In my study.

  “Why are there children at a council of war, Captain Miller? That’s a good question,” I said. “This is Billy, and he’s my son but he’s also a cunning man so strong that he’s fought Skanian magicians and won. The lass with him is Mina, and she’s . . . like him.”

  “I’m his woman,” Mina said, and Billy smiled and he reached out and took her hand.

  They were young for that, to my mind, but I let it pass. They held hands and their fingers entwined in a way that told me they had found love, and I wished them well of it.

  “They’re here because it’s my belief that the cause of our troubles is Old Kurt, the cunning man from the Wheels. You know who I mean, Captain?”

  Miller looked uncomfortable, and he twisted the fingers of his right hand together to make some religious sign that I didn’t recognize.

  “Aye, sir,” he said at last. “I know who that is.”

  “Well, Old Kurt went missing a while back, after the last workers’ uprising I put down, and he hasn’t been seen since. Old Kurt believes in the working folk. He could have made himself rich with what he can do but he never did, choosing instead to stay in his hovel down in the Wheels. He made it so Stink folk and Wheelers alike had free access to his door. He believes in equality, does Old Kurt, and rights for folk that don’t have any, and other things that make my life fucking difficult.”

  “He’s dangerous,” one of Miller’s sergeants said.

  “That he is,” I allowed, “but so are these two. That’s why they’re here, in case I’m right and we have to fight Old Kurt when we go.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but I still say you shouldn’t be coming,” Miller said.

  “I know, Captain, and I’ll take it under advice, but I’m going to ignore that advice and do it anyway. I’m new to the governorship and I need to be seen, and I will be seen. I am not Hauer, gentlemen. I’m not a governor who will sit and drink wine and polish the chair under him with his arse while he hides behind his walls. I am a governor that people will learn to fear.”

  “Aye, sir, as you will,” Miller said. “The men are ready. We go when you give the word.”

  I nodded and stood up.

  The Weeping Women hung heavy on my hips. Governor I might be, the most heavily guarded man in Ellinburg, but Lady help me, I needed to kill someone.

  Anyone.

  Ailsa’s betrayal had driven me into a fury so deep and so cold I didn’t know if I could ever climb out of it again. I’d had to explain to young orphan Billy that his mother had left us, had left him, and he had hugged me and he had wept. He had buried his face in my shoulder and wept great shaking, racking tears of despair and rejection, and for that alone I would never forgive her.

  At least he had Mina, and that was good.

  I had my cold devil to keep me company, and that was enough.

  “We go at first light,” I said.

  * * *

  * * *

  The sun was still coming up above the rooftops when the Guard formed up in the square outside the governor’s hall. I joined them there, wearing mail under my coat with the Weeping Women buckled over it. Billy the Boy met me there, and he too was mailed and armed like a man and he had a hard set to his young face.

  He had Bloody Anne with him.

  The factory was on her streets, after all, and I knew she would want to see this was done right. I could respect that. I nodded a greeting to her.

  “I let Mina sleep,” Billy said. “I can take Old Kurt down, if I have to.”

  I thought again how tight the lad’s face looked, his eyes overbright under his smooth young brow, but I put it out of my mind. Too much youthful fucking and not enough sleep, that was all it was, and never mind that he had been wrong about that last magician.

  Never mind that. Bury it, along with everything else. Forget it and move on.

  “Old Kurt was the one who taught you,” I reminded him. “Are you sure, Billy?”

  “I’m sure,” he said, and his voice was flat and cold. “Remember the rats, Papa?”

  I swallowed, and nodded. I remembered what Billy had done to those rats, and how that had given Old Kurt the fear so bad he had sent the lad back to me and refused to teach him anymore.

  The boy’s fucking possessed.

  Well, so was Old Kurt, to my mind, possessed by the sort of idealism that wasn’t welcomed by the crown.

  Fuck idealism. Where had that ever got anyone?

  Duty, honor, love.

  Fuck it all.

  I remembered Captain Rogan, driven by honor and burned to a crisp in the line of duty. I looked at Billy, and I thought of how much he had loved Ailsa. How much he had loved his adoptive ma. She had only left him, in the end.

  They always fucking do.

  Fuck it all. They only hurt you, in the end.

  I would put a stop to it.

  All of it.

  Maintaining law and order was a big part of my job as governor. People are weak, as I have written, 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.

  I had thought that once, but a great deal had changed since the first battle of the Stink. I had changed. That oppressor was me now, I understood that.

  I understood it, and I accepted it.

  Perhaps law and order is just another way of saying tyranny and oppression, but I wouldn’t know. That was a philosophical question, and I couldn’t give a fuck about philosophy. What I did know was that one of the biggest factories in Ellinburg was closed down because its workers refused to work, and I had a tax levy to pay to the crown at the end of the month.

  Those were the things that mattered, not high ideals of duty and honor and love. Hard facts, those mattered. Production quotas, monthly taxes and their due dates. Those were the fucking important
things in life.

  These men refused to work, and all that meant was that I wasn’t oppressing them hard enough yet.

  They had set up a barricade in the street before the factory, and they allowed none to cross it. That barricade was coming down before the sun reached noon, and I’d hear no argument about that.

  I looked at Bloody Anne, but her eyes were fixed straight ahead in a way that I wasn’t sure I knew how to read.

  “Form up and sound the march,” I told Captain Miller.

  We set off in the dawn light, Miller and me and Anne and Billy on horseback with the sergeants, and forty heavily armed guardsmen marching ahead of us. The tramp of their boots echoed in the empty streets.

  That was how I governed my city, the only way I knew how.

  * * *

  * * *

  They were waiting for us.

  We had come with the dawn, too early for them to be prepared, but they were waiting for us just the same. They had known we were coming. They had known, and Old Kurt wasn’t there.

  That told me all I needed to know.

  I surveyed the street ahead of us, the rough barricade and the men standing on it with clubs and knives and hammers in their hands. Old Kurt wasn’t there because someone had told him we were coming.

  There had only been me and Billy and Mina, and Miller and his sergeants at that meeting.

  They had known we were coming and when, and there was only one way that could be; someone was spying for Old Kurt. Not Miller, I was sure of that. He was clearly terrified of the old cunning man, but someone. One of his sergeants, then.

  Or Mina.

  She had no family and no last name, so Fat Luka had told me, and Old Kurt was known to take in waifs and strays, like Yan Wainwright’s mute boy. Perhaps he had taken Mina in once, and filled her head with his foolish ideals. I didn’t like the idea, but I had to allow that it was possible.

  A thrown rock whistled past my head.

  “It’s the queen’s bully boy,” a man snarled at me, the one I took to be their leader. “The devil Tomas Piety!”

  “Go back to work,” I said.

  My hands were clenched tight on the reins of my horse, shaking with battle shock.

  How had it come to this?

  What the fuck would my da have said if he could see me now, about to lead a charge of the City Guard against my own people?

  Show him a fucking racehorse and a bottle and he’d have overlooked anything, I told myself, but I wasn’t sure that was true.

  Fuck it all, they only hurt you in the end.

  “They won’t grind us down if we stand together,” the man on the barricade was shouting. “We can hold this place, and we’ll be an example to all the working people of this city!”

  I rode forward then until I was at the head of the massed Guard, my rich coat flapping around me in the wind.

  I fixed him with a look.

  “You want to talk to me about working people?” I asked him, my voice taking on the flat tone of murder and loss and despair. “I’m the son of a bricklayer. Everything I’ve got, I’ve got because I’ve worked for it. The only difference I see between you and me is that you’re not fucking working.”

  They turned on us then with weapons raised, these working men who wouldn’t work. I nodded to Captain Miller.

  “Take them down,” I said.

  The guardsmen streamed past us, Bloody Anne and Captain Miller and Billy the Boy and me. I watched as battle was joined in the street. I wondered where Old Kurt was, and who had been talking.

  I wondered what I was going to say to Billy.

  Anne leaned over in her saddle to speak to me.

  “How the fuck,” she said in a low voice, “has this got anything to do with preventing another war?”

  I watched a guardsman break a man’s head with his club, and I couldn’t meet Anne’s eyes.

  I had to admit that I didn’t know anymore.

  I knew one thing, though.

  Once this was done, I was going to buy another fucking racehorse.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Book two of a series is often a difficult birth. I owe a great deal of thanks to my wonderful editor Rebecca Brewer at Ace for making me bleed onto the page to make this book what it is, and to my copyeditor Amy J. Schneider for saving me from my own inability to track a timeline properly.

  Thanks are as always due to my fabulous agent, Jennie Goloboy at DMLA—if it wasn’t for her, you wouldn’t have heard of me or be reading these books. Jennie is a guiding hand, editorial voice, cheerleader, and savior in too many ways to count. Thank you.

  I’d also like to thank Katie Anderson at Berkley for the wonderful covers, and Alexis and Jessica at Berkley and Olivia and Milly at Quercus for their tireless promotional work. Shout-outs also to all at B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog (“Peaky Blinders with swords”!), Absolute Write, Fantasy-Faction, SciFiNow magazine, Fantasy Book Review, and everyone else who welcomed Priest of Bones with open arms.

  Finally, and above all others, the greatest thanks are for Diane. I wouldn’t even be here without you, never mind writing books. Love you, hon.

  Photo by Diane McLean

  Peter McLean lives in the UK, where he grew up studying martial arts and magic before beginning a twenty-five-year career in corporate IT systems. He is also the author of the Burned Man urban fantasy series.

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