Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  Vogel had made his move, and it had worked. I only hoped he could do what needed to be done to halt the Skanian threat before it came to the exchange of cannon between us, but at what cost to liberty?

  *

  I attended court the next morning, on Rosie’s advice, and I found that Ailsa and Iagin and Konrad were there ahead of me. We congregated together, in an oasis of space in the busy throne room.

  The throne room was full almost to capacity, as was only to be expected given the recent tragic news. No one wore mourning clothes for the Prince Regent, I noticed, but then of course he was officially a suicide and that wasn’t a thing to be mourned. Suicides weren’t something to grieve over, in Our Lady’s eyes, as the person had journeyed to the grey lands of their own choice and so She welcomed them with open arms.

  So said the doctrine of the temple, anyway. To my mind if someone I cared about took their own life I would grieve for them the same, probably even more, than if they had died of disease or been murdered or fallen in battle, and there I had a point of difference with Our Lady’s doctrine.

  If someone close to me took their life, I would always ask myself, should I have known? Should I have seen it coming, and done something to help, something to stop them? Would that even have been my right to do, if their minds were made up? Would that be in accordance with Our Lady’s plan for that person, or contrary to it? That was a theological question, I supposed, and priest though I may be I was hardly schooled in theology. The army hadn’t much cared about that, when they had needed a new priest to hear the confessions of their superstitious soldiers.

  The point was that no one was mourning the Prince Regent, and that was quite obviously deliberate. He would have a state funeral, of course, but it would be nothing like the scale of that held in honour of the late queen. The sooner he was forgotten the better, in Vogel’s eyes. That message was plain enough, and in the court of Dannsburg woe betide any who failed to hear it.

  That aside, the business of court continued almost as normal.

  Almost.

  The Princess Crown Royal sat on her throne staring into space in a drugged stupor as she always did, but instead of the Prince Regent sitting on the consort’s throne with Ailsa whispering in his ear, there sat Lord Vogel.

  The Lord Chief Judiciar sat on the regent’s throne, in his rightful place by law. The Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men, in his place taken through political manoeuvring and manipulation, misinformation and outright lies.

  The new Prince Regent.

  And no one whispered in his ear. No one at all.

  Vogel ruled there in truth now, and there could be no more doubt about it.

  Part Two

  Chapter 36

  Dannsburg looked a lot less grand as winter hit, and turned the skies to an ashen grey by day and a moonlit vista by night, robbed of the usual city streetlights due to the shortage of oil. Lamp oil came from Skania, where the great whales were hunted, and all trade with Skania was suspended now that their ships were banned from Varnburg’s docks. Prices were becoming astronomical, far too high for the city to pay just to light the streets. Even at the state funeral of Prince Wilhelm that I had been forced to sit through, there had been far fewer lamps in the Grand High Temple of All Gods than I had been expecting, much to the evident displeasure of the new Arch High Priest.

  The trees that lined the wide avenues were leafless skeletal hands scratching at the heavens, and a bitter wind whipped through their branches and down the dark, fire-filled streets. Riots were rampant. The supporters of the house of magicians and the house of law clashed on an almost daily basis, and the City Guard were overwhelmed trying to keep the peace.

  ‘Lady’s sake, Tomas,’ Anne said as she slammed down another brandy and poured refills for us both. ‘What the fuck is going on?’

  ‘Change, Anne,’ I said, and I lifted my glass and looked at her through the dark amber spirit. ‘It happens. We usually don’t like it, but it happens all the same. Change is a constant we can’t stop, much as we might like to.’

  We were sitting in my unofficial office at the back of the Bountiful Harvest that I had claimed as a Queen’s Man. I had recently given the innkeeper another five gold crowns, and asked for a rug to keep the chill off the wooden floor. A magnificent Alarian carpet had appeared with his compliments the very next day, so at least my feet were warm if nothing else.

  Anne had the seat at my right hand, where she had always sat when she was my second in the Pious Men before I became governor of Ellinburg. The Pious Men were Anne’s now, so far as I was concerned, and I had made my peace with that. Not that I could afford to let her return to Ellinburg to lead them. Change, as I say. It’s something we all have to make our peace with, in time. It’s seldom pleasant and never easy, but it’s a fact of life and nothing to be done about that.

  ‘Change, aye, and not for the better. I had this from your aunt yesterday.’

  She took a folded letter out of her pouch and passed it to me.

  My esteemed big sister,

  I hope this letter finds you well. There are new arrivals in Ellinburg, come from where you are now. Men in blue robes who call themselves magicians, although I have no idea if that is true or not. They bring a great deal of gold to our streets and that is a good thing, but they have taken a guildhall on Trader’s Row and posted guards outside, and no one knows what they do within. The people are uneasy. I thought you should know.

  Your little sister,

  Enaid

  I nodded slowly. Jochan had already told me, in one of his reports. I didn’t show those to Anne, not wanting to share some of the more personal news Jochan told me about his life.

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ I said. ‘With things how they are here, it’s only natural for the magicians to want to protect their knowledge and as many of their number as can slip out of Dannsburg. As the nearest major city, Ellinburg was the obvious place for them to go.’

  ‘I don’t want fucking magicians on my streets, in my city,’ Anne growled.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb in irritation.

  ‘They just call themselves that, Anne,’ I said. ‘The magi have no magic, you know that as well as I do.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Anne said. ‘Who knows what they get up to in that house of magicians of theirs? I don’t trust them.’

  ‘Alchemy, mostly,’ I told her. ‘The making of blasting powder, which is their most useful talent. Other than that, I think they just stare at the stars and do . . . I don’t know. Debate philosophy or some bollocks, probably.’

  Anne just grunted, her brow creasing in thought. Maybe she wanted to go back to Ellinburg and see for herself, but I couldn’t allow it.

  With Vogel’s grip on Dannsburg turned into a stranglehold, I was too busy to be without Anne now. She was my chief enforcer, my strong right arm. I had Oliver and Emil and Beast for simple muscle, yes, but Bloody Anne was a force of nature with a keen tactical mind, and I wouldn’t be without her for anything. She was clever too, if uneducated, but then clever and educated are very different things. Either way, I valued her opinions. Those four, and Luka running intelligence and Rosie as my secretary, were my core operation. And Billy, of course. Billy was my secret weapon, the winning card I kept tucked up my sleeve for when I might need him. Not that that had turned out well with my plans for the young Grand Duke of Varnburg, I had to allow.

  I was becoming more and more worried about Billy, truth be told. He was young, and I could tell that his prolonged separation from Mina was troubling him. I had proposed finding him a different tutor, perhaps one who would challenge him more, but he had given me a look that told me all I needed to know about his opinions on that. Academic learning was never going to be a pleasure for Billy, I knew that, no more than it had been for me. Nonetheless he continued to fill the great black tome Old Kurt had given him, fill it with incomprehensible notes of his own making on the cunning and what he was . . . I don’t know. Teachi
ng himself, I suppose. Discovering, perhaps.

  In my darkest moments, I found myself dreading to think what he had discovered now. I remembered the tale of the rats, and how he had given Old Kurt the fear. Billy was no ordinary boy, and that was Our Lady’s honest truth.

  Still, the gears of the complex machine that was the Queen’s Men kept turning. We were all busy with surveillance and arrest warrants, all save for Sabine anyway. She was still active in the city, stirring up hatred against the house of magicians. From what I had seen on the streets of Dannsburg, it was working well enough.

  Mother Ruin.

  Oh, she was that all right. Sabine was a rabble-rouser who could give Old Kurt lessons in how it was done, I had seen that much. She was one who could tell people not to sleep with a foot out of the blankets or the boggart would get them, that there was a Skanian under the bed and best report their neighbours for anything suspicious, and they would believe her. There was something about Mother Ruin that made folk follow her.

  ‘Aye, alchemy and bollocks sounds about right,’ Anne said at last, but she had taken her good time about it and that wasn’t like her.

  Sober, Anne had always been taciturn and terse, but I knew from experience that she was a talkative drunk. She was drunk now, but all the same getting words out of her was much harder than it should have been. I wondered why that was.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ I asked her, and refilled her glass.

  ‘What’s on my mind?’ Anne said, and with those words she seemed to come to life. ‘There’s martial law in our own fucking capital city, that’s what’s on my mind, Tomas. Folk need a permit to be on the streets after dark, and even during the day the Guard want to know your business, and where you’re going and why, and who you’re seeing when you get there.’

  ‘These are troubled times,’ I said, knowing even as I spoke that those troubles had been manufactured by the very house I served.

  ‘Aye, they are,’ she snapped. ‘There are constant fucking street skirmishes between the City Guard and the Guard of the Magi, and the people themselves are splitting into factions. Say your neighbour went to the university. Now you’re questioning why, and what she learned there, and what she intends to do with that knowledge. Use the library? What for? That’s not to be trusted, is it? You should have learned a trade and stuck to it like normal people. Been to the theatre recently? That’s cause for suspicion too now, apparently. What’s that for, and what do they say there? Anyone with any learning to them, any possible ties to the house of magicians, is starting to fear for their safety in the face of the mob. So what do they do? They band together, of course they do. It’s only fucking natural, isn’t it? So now we’ve two mobs instead of one. We’re on the brink of fucking civil war, that’s what’s on my mind !’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ I assured her, although I was nowhere near as confident as I forced myself to sound.

  ‘What about the Skanians?’ Anne demanded, and as she reached for the brandy bottle it seemed she had well and truly found her voice again. ‘Why aren’t we hearing about them these days? We’re just fighting each other, and no one’s talking about the real threat any more.’

  I remembered saying something similar to Ailsa myself, back in the summer.

  ‘Aye, well,’ I said, and I took the bottle from her hand and poured myself another as well. ‘I’ve my own thoughts about that. Official line is, the Skanians are backing the house of magicians.’

  Anne gave me a level look.

  ‘And you believe that, do you?’ she asked.

  I drank, and I didn’t answer her.

  How could I?

  *

  I most definitely had thoughts about that, but vanishingly few people I dared share them with. It was too soon to go to Ailsa with my suspicions, not without a shred of proof, and for all that I liked Iagin I wasn’t sure I trusted him that much. There was one man, though, one old pirate who I knew instinctively I could trust with my life. I fucking well hoped I could anyway, because that was exactly what I was about to do.

  I had Rosie pen a letter to Ailsa’s father, who had done me the great honour of allowing me to call him Sasura. That was an Alarian word, one which was like calling someone Da but when it was your wife’s father and not your own. It was sort of their way of saying father-by-law but more intimate than that, more like you were actually part of the family by blood and not just by marriage. I had been deeply touched by that. He was a man I respected, and more to the point he was a man who had done business in Dannsburg for over forty years and lived to tell the tales of it. That had to be worth something.

  My esteemed sasura,

  My separation from your respected daughter pains me, and I regret that you and I have not had the opportunity to speak since my return to Dannsburg, but matters of business have been and remain most pressing. However, there is something on which I would welcome your counsel. If you have it in your heart to forgive me even a little bit, I would be very grateful for some of your time to discuss this matter with you in private.

  Your most respectful son-by-law,

  Tomas

  I folded and sealed the letter and gave it to Fat Luka and told him to have one of his runners get it to Ailsa’s father without anyone noticing. I wondered what sort of reception it was likely to get. Ailsa’s parents had no idea what she did, or so she believed anyway, and if that was true then it stood to reason that Sasura didn’t know what I did either. I was just a gangster from Ellinburg, as far as he was concerned, a businessman who his daughter had rather inexplicably married the year before last. Still, we had got on extremely well, and it seemed we had more than a little in common where business was concerned.

  I was a pirate and a smuggler, I remembered him telling me, and that still made me smile. He was the sort of man I wished my own da had been, and no mistake.

  It doesn’t do to dwell on such things, I know, but it made me wonder all the same. A man like him had fathered my lioness in riches and privilege in the heart of the capital city, and an utter shit like my da had fathered me in the slums of Ellinburg. Our lives couldn’t have been more different growing up, and yet here we were together. We were both Queen’s Men, after all, and married to each other as well, for what that was worth.

  Perhaps the crown doesn’t see class and education, only ability and innate talent. Or perhaps the Queen’s Men only see opportunity in the moment, and seize it when it presents itself. I knew which I thought was more likely, but that was a thought for another day. It made me think of something else, though.

  ‘Oh, Luka?’ I said, as he was heading out of the door of my office with the letter in his hand. ‘One more thing.’

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘You remember the Lady Lan Yetrov, don’t you?’

  ‘That poor cow whose husband used to batter her? That cunt you fed to his own bear, I mean. Her?’

  ‘Yes, her,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, I remember,’ he said, although that was obvious now.

  ‘You might find out what she’s doing these days,’ I said. ‘I think that might be an acquaintance worth renewing.’

  I had made the Lady Leonora Lan Yetrov a staggeringly rich widow, after all, and in doing so had rescued her from her hellish marriage. From what little I had seen of her, under the veneer of diamonds and society that she hid behind, she struck me as an educated and, I suspected, very intelligent woman.

  And she was enormously in my debt.

  Seeing opportunity in the moment was a big part of being a Queen’s Man, after all, and I thought I saw an opportunity in her.

  Opportunities indeed. I waited for Luka to leave, then took out the letter I had received from Jochan and not shown to Anne.

  Tomas,

  You won’t fucking believe this. We’ve only got a house of magicians in Ellinburg now. Enaid’s probably told Anne already, but she won’t know this bit. Because I had an idea, and I haven’t told her yet and won’t until I know I was right. The gods only know what’s happ
ening there in Dannsburg but these magicians, they seem scared. I made a point of approaching one, asking for his counsel and wisdom and all that, and I bought him a few drinks. Well, you know me, I can drink, and this bloke couldn’t. I got him proper shitfaced, and he told me all about blasting powder and how they’re making stores of it here in Ellinburg, in case they need it. I reckon they could be persuaded to sell it. To us. To the Pious Men.

  Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. Stay safe, Dannsburg sounds bad.

  Jochan

  That Jochan had managed to have an idea by himself that wasn’t idiotic told me that his mental state was steadily improving, and I laid the credit for that squarely at Cutter and Hanne’s feet. Between them, and with the child, they seemed to have achieved the seemingly impossible and made my poor brother happy, and I gave thanks for that.

  I penned a reply thanking him for the news, and telling him to keep it absolutely to himself. I didn’t even want Enaid and Anne knowing about this. Not yet.

  Opportunities, as I say.

  Chapter 37

  Two days later I received another letter.

  My beloved son-by-law,

  I would be overjoyed to see you, but times are delicate. On Queensday afternoon my wife will be out with her friends, and I think that would be the best and perhaps only time for us to meet. I bear you no ill will for the marital difficulties between you and my daughter, but I fear her mother feels differently. It would go badly for us both if she knew I was receiving you in our house. Come to me two hours after noon on Queensday and we will talk and drink brandy together like gentlemen, and I will offer you what counsel I can, but for the love of the Many-Headed God, do not tell my daughter of our meeting, should you happen to speak to her.