Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  ‘Oh, Tomas,’ she said, and laughed again. ‘I’m no cunning woman, at least not in the way you mean it. Let me draw for you?’

  ‘If you want.’

  She shuffled the pack of cards in her hands, her long nails clacking against the stiff pasteboard as she rapidly flicked five cards face down onto the table between us. She looked up into my eyes then, and reached out to turn the first card over.

  It was the Ten of Swords, and the image on it depicted a man face down on the ground with ten long blades buried in his back.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  The door opened then, and Iagin and Ailsa came in together. I glanced over, and caught the flash of alarm that crossed Iagin’s face before he smothered it.

  ‘Tomas, there you fucking are!’ he exclaimed, as though he had been searching high and low for me. He hadn’t been, of course, or the mess would have been the first place he would have looked. ‘Come on, I need you.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ I said, and got to my feet.

  ‘Take it,’ Sabine said, and she held the card out to me between her long-nailed finger and thumb. ‘Keep it with you, Tomas, and think on what it means.’

  I blinked at her, but I took it to be polite if nothing else.

  ‘My thanks,’ I said, although I didn’t understand.

  The picture on the card was grim enough, but what it meant beyond that was a mystery to me. If it meant anything at all, of course.

  I tucked the card into my pouch and turned and followed Iagin out of the room. As the door closed behind us I could hear Ailsa speaking to Sabine, but my already bad ears were still deadened by the earlier detonation of the cannon and I couldn’t catch her words.

  Once we were in the corridor, Iagin turned to me and blew out a breath that made his heavy moustache lift over his mouth for a moment.

  ‘Fucking blood, Tomas, don’t do that!’ he said.

  ‘Do what, talk to Sabine?’

  ‘Do anything to her, or with her, or even be in the same fucking room with her if you can help it,’ he said. ‘She’s poison, Tomas, don’t you grasp that? She’s fucking ruin.’

  Mother Ruin.

  ‘Aye, I gathered that,’ I said. ‘Why, though? What does that even mean?’

  ‘Oh, fucking fuck, not now,’ Iagin snapped. ‘Just take my bloody word for it, will you?’

  He sighed, and pushed a hand back through his thinning grey hair. I didn’t know if hearing that monster of a cannon going off had affected him the same way it had me, but I didn’t discount the idea. He was of an age to have fought in the war before mine, in Aunt Enaid’s war, and they’d had cannon then too. Either way, he clearly wasn’t quite himself.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, after a moment. ‘I just . . . well.’

  ‘Aye, it’s been a long day,’ I said.

  ‘Fucking right it has,’ he said. ‘I want a drink, and I’m not having it in there with those two. Anyway, I need to show my face to that fucking tit Grachyev. You want to come?’

  I looked at him, and I realised how badly he wanted me to say yes.

  ‘Aye, why not?’

  *

  I had thought we might end up in some midden south of the river that night, but we didn’t. Grachyev owned nearly every tavern and inn in Dannsburg, of course, including the one I was staying at myself. Iagin led me to a place called the Horn of Plenty, which turned out to be something between an inn and the sort of brothel where you could spend the whole night if you paid your girl enough.

  It was very fancy, to my eyes, almost respectable, and although the women there all wore the bawd’s knot, which meant they were licensed, they called themselves hostesses not whores. Apparently that was different, and it cost more. That put them somewhere between the sort of whores I ran back in Ellinburg and courtesans like Lady Reiter, so far as I could see, and that made sense. Part of me started wondering if it was something we could set up back home, before I remembered that I didn’t have time to do that sort of business any more. Maybe I’d send Rosie and Bloody Anne over there one night, though, and see what they thought of the idea.

  ‘Come through to the back,’ Iagin said.

  I followed him across the common room and past a hulking doorman, who nodded respectfully to him as we passed. He led me into a plushly furnished suite of rooms that obviously weren’t open to the public.

  Grachyev was in there, reclining on a red velvet couch with a fat sheaf of papers in his hands. He was a heavyset man with some fifty or so years to him, with dark hair and pockmarked cheeks and a large gold ring set with a black stone on the third finger of his right hand, and he was an utter tit.

  He looked up from his papers as we came in, and Iagin gave him an insincere bow.

  ‘Boss,’ he said. ‘You remember Tomas Piety, from Ellinburg?’

  ‘Mr Piety,’ Grachyev said, raising himself from his padded velvet couch to shake my hand. ‘Good to see you again.’

  ‘Mr Grachyev, it’s an honour,’ I lied, and I returned his grip with a nod of respect that I didn’t feel.

  He was no one, of course, not really. Iagin ran Grachyev’s organisation in Vogel’s name and no doubt funnelled most of the money into the coffers of the house of law. Grachyev himself was just a figurehead, and a completely ignorant one at that. He had no fucking idea, and for that I could almost feel sorry for him.

  Almost, but not truly. Grachyev was a fool, and I have no time for fools.

  Still, that night I drank with one, and we made merry like any group of friendly businessmen would. Iagin and I at least were drinking away the memory of what we had witnessed that night, and I think Grachyev was just pleased to be among what he thought of as the right sort of people. I was Iagin’s guest and I’d met Grachyev before, and those things meant that I didn’t have to spend a copper penny in the Horn of Plenty that night. There was no charge for a friend of Mr Grachyev’s, that was plain enough. I drank the very best brandy with them both that night, probably more of it than I should have done. I was offered the company of a hostess on the house too, but I declined. I’ll run whores, aye, but I can’t make myself want to lie down with one.

  I mean no disrespect to the profession, of course, but to my mind closeness with a woman is a good deal more important than fucking is, and you can’t feel that with someone you don’t know. I thought of Ailsa then, and I wondered how close we still really were.

  Not so close as I would like, I thought, as I swallowed my brandy and poured myself another.

  Fool, I told myself. Drunken, fucking fool.

  Chapter 25

  It was very late when I returned to the Bountiful Harvest, beginning to get light in truth, but as I had expected, the lamp was still burning in Billy’s room. I paused outside for a long time, my fingers tracing the shape of the card in my pouch.

  Should I truly do this? Should I give credence to a stupid superstition that probably meant nothing?

  Mother Ruin.

  She had got that name from somewhere, after all. Eventually I tapped on his door and went in. He was awake, as I had expected.

  ‘What is it, Papa?’ he asked me.

  ‘Do you know the witch cards, Billy?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged, and he got that sulky way about him then that lads that age often get when they want to be good at a thing and aren’t.

  ‘Old Kurt taught me some,’ he said. ‘I don’t know them as well as Mina does. Mina’s better, but you didn’t let her come with us.’

  ‘Aye, well, no, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘All the same, Billy, can you read a card? It was the first one dealt for me, but then we were interrupted so that’s all I’ve got. Can you read a card like that?’

  ‘Suppose,’ he said, and he held his hand out for it. ‘I can try, anyway.’

  I fished in my pouch and produced the now slightly creased pasteboard that was painted with the image of a fallen man with ten long blades buried in his back.

  ‘Here,’ I said, and passed it to him. ‘What do you make of that, then?’


  ‘The Ten of Swords, Papa?’ Billy asked me. ‘The Ten of Swords means back-stabbing and treachery. It means defeat and betrayal, ruin and endings and loss. Is that what we’re here for?’

  ‘I hope not, lad,’ I said. ‘I really fucking hope not.’

  I sighed, and looked at the boy. He had been sitting up in his bed when I came in, his book and his quill and ink beside him on the night table next to the burning lamp, and he didn’t look like he had slept at all. He was showing little interest in his formal schooling, so his tutor had told me, but at the cunning he worked tirelessly. His face was thin and drawn, his eyes overly bright in the shadowed hollows that surrounded them. He really didn’t look well at all.

  ‘Are you all right, Billy?’ I asked him.

  He looked down at his blankets for a long moment without speaking.

  ‘I miss Mina,’ he said at last.

  ‘I know, son,’ I said. ‘It’s a hard thing, to be separated from someone you . . . well. There it is.’

  ‘Love, Da,’ he said, and he met my eyes. ‘The word is love. It won’t kill you to say it.’

  It was like Billy could see into my soul, sometimes, and I still wasn’t comfortable with that. Not at all I wasn’t.

  ‘Aye, you’re right. Someone you love, then.’

  ‘Like you love Mama,’ he said.

  That was the voice of Billy the Seer, Billy who was always right when he said a thing. I swallowed, and for a moment I felt cold down to my boots. Did I love Ailsa, truly? Was that what he was telling me?

  Fool.

  Of course I didn’t, not after what she had done. Forcing me into the service of the crown, bombing the Wheels and killing hundreds of innocent people in the process, deserting me when my usefulness to her was over but I needed her the most. How could I love her after that? I had sobered up a bit since I left the Horn of Plenty, and I knew that was a fool’s thinking.

  Aye, that’s exactly what it was.

  Fucking, fucking fool.

  I held Billy’s gaze for a moment, then I had to look away.

  My eyes were stinging with tears and I didn’t want him to see them.

  *

  Drink always makes me maudlin. I know that from long experience, and I had to allow I’d had a fair bit to drink at the Horn of Plenty that night.

  All the same, when I woke late the next morning my thoughts were still of Ailsa. We were close, in our way. We had never been physically intimate as man and wife, no, but we understood each other and we respected each other, and when the pressures of business weren’t in the way, I liked to think that we enjoyed each other’s company. I enjoyed her company, I knew that much anyway. She had done things that had hurt me, aye, but then I had once tried to fucking strangle her so I reckoned we were even on that score.

  I lay there in my bed for a long time, staring at the beams that crossed the low ceiling of my room and thinking about Ailsa while I waited for my brandy headache to abate. Eventually there was a knock on the door, and a moment later Bloody Anne came into my room with a mug of small beer in one hand and a plate bearing black bread and salt pork in the other.

  ‘It’s time you got up,’ she said. ‘There’s work to do.’

  I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb, and sat up in my blankets.

  ‘What work?’

  Anne put my breakfast down on the low table beside the bed, and I grunted my thanks. I wanted a piss before I did anything else, but I wasn’t doing that in front of her if I could help it. We weren’t in the army any more.

  ‘What do you think?’ she growled. ‘There’s another warrant come from the house of law for you, Tomas. More arrests, more deaths. It’s what we do now, apparently.’

  With that she turned and stalked out of the room, and closed the door behind her.

  Anne wasn’t easy with what we were doing here, I knew. She had made that plain enough, and I understood it, but all the same it saddened me to see that look on her face. Like she felt she didn’t know me any more. Was I so very changed from how I had been in the war, when we had become firm friends?

  I thought on what I had seen the evening before. I had watched a man be blown apart on the whim of a mad princess, and I had taken it in my stride as simply part of my job. Perhaps I had changed some, at that.

  I got up and had a piss and a wash, then sat down to my breakfast.

  I found I could take no joy in it.

  Eventually I got dressed and went downstairs to find Rosie waiting for me in my office. She was sitting at the table with a mug of small beer at her elbow, going through a pile of papers.

  ‘What’s the lay of things?’ I asked her. ‘Anne said there’s work.’

  ‘Aye, there is,’ Rosie said. ‘This came for you.’

  She passed me a document, and I recognised Vogel’s spidery signature at the bottom before I even looked at the rest of it. Rosie had already opened the sealed letter, of course, but I found that I was happy enough with that. I needed someone who could sift the great volume of paperwork that came with being a Queen’s Man, and only trouble me with the things that actually mattered. Rosie would keep my secrets as she had kept Ailsa’s before me and Heinrich’s before that.

  I looked at the document, and what I saw didn’t surprise me.

  It was a death warrant like Anne had said, of course it was.

  Another one.

  I scanned the page for a moment before my tired eyes picked out the key name.

  ‘Arch High Priest Rantanen,’ I said, and for a moment I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, much less saying. ‘The highest fucking priest in the country. He conducted the queen’s own funeral, for Our Lady’s sake.’

  ‘You’re not quite awake yet, are you?’ Rosie said.

  I shook my head and sat down at the table, still staring at the paper in my hand.

  ‘Apparently not,’ I said.

  ‘He conducted Her Majesty’s funeral,’ Rosie said, echoing my words. ‘I weren’t there, but I still know what happened. Too many people know what happened, Mr Piety. The common folk listen to a High Priest, and folk repeat what a High Priest says. Folk listen even harder to the Arch High Priest, and many of them believe a man that holy ain’t even capable of lying, so if he says a thing then it’s true. Best if he doesn’t say anything more about it, wouldn’t you agree?’

  ‘Aye,’ I had to say.

  Again I wondered if Anne truly knew what sort of woman she had fallen in love with. Rosie was as common as me, not an aristocrat like Ailsa, but she was every bit as deep in the Queen’s Men as my own lady wife was. Rosie understood business the way it was done in Dannsburg better than I did myself, I realised. I knew she had been right, before. I should be making better use of her than I had been.

  ‘How the fuck are we going to do this, then?’ I asked her.

  She looked surprised that I had asked, and perhaps pleased about it too. All the same, she shook her head.

  ‘It’s going to be a bugger of a job, Mr Piety,’ she admitted. ‘There’s no getting to him in that fucking temple, that’s for sure. The place is guarded almost as hard as the house of law is.’

  ‘Rosie,’ I said, ‘seeing as we’re plotting the murder of the Arch High Priest together, I reckon you can call me Tomas now.’

  That made her laugh, and she raised her mug of beer to me before she took a swallow.

  ‘Aye, good,’ she said. ‘You’re maybe starting to trust me at last, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am,’ I said, and I meant it.

  She nodded, and showed me a smile that said she appreciated it.

  ‘Well, I’ve got some questions out on the streets already. I still know some of the working girls in Dannsburg from back when I was a kid. Those of them who are still alive, anyway. There ain’t no priest so holy he doesn’t like his cock sucked now and again, in my experience, and someone’s bound to know something. Luka’s on it as well, greasing palms around the taverns and baths and gambling houses like he does. Bet
ween us we’ll find out where this bugger goes and what he likes to do when he ain’t in the temple, you mark me on that, Tomas.’

  I did, I realised. Rosie was a skilled, experienced spy, and I marked her very well indeed.

  I just hoped that Bloody Anne did as well.

  Chapter 26

  We went two nights later.

  Some of Rosie’s working girls knew one of the Grand High Temple’s junior priests, as it turned out. One of them knew him very well indeed, and she knew what he liked and how to make him talk. He gave up his boss in the end, as many men will when they find themselves faced with a saucy wink and a promise and a pretty face.

  People are so fucking weak, in my experience, and everyone has a lever that moves them. Father Braun was moved by sex, and that was cheap enough in Dannsburg. That a man of stature like him could be moved by something so base and easily obtained was disgraceful, but priests are only human, after all. I of all people should know that.

  Braun told Rosie’s friend that Arch High Priest Rantanen actually was celibate, much to her surprise, but apparently he had a shocking weakness for gambling. Worse than that, and utterly inexcusable to my mind, he was shit at it. The Grand High Temple of All Gods itself was in debt to the tune of some hundred and thirty thousand gold crowns, so we heard, and all due to the weaknesses of its Arch High Priest.

  Of course, he could hardly frequent the public gambling houses of the city. A man in his position had to be seen to be holy, and it wouldn’t have done for any of his highborn congregation to have recognised him in whatever gaming rooms they themselves might frequent. No, the Arch High Priest had to find private tables to play at, and naturally Fat Luka had already discovered where those tables were. That was what I paid him for, after all.

  That was the night when I began to fully appreciate how the power of the Queen’s Men really worked, in Dannsburg.

  It’s a thing that has to be understood, I think, that the great unwashed masses have the potential to carry the power in any centre of population. They might not have the money, no, or the influence in politics, but there are a fucking lot of them. I remembered when I had been arrested in Ellinburg the previous year, and how hundreds of common folk from my streets had come to watch me be released the next morning. That could have gone another way, of course. If I hadn’t been released, there would have been a riot up there on Trader’s Row. A riot that could well have brought down Governor Hauer right there and then.