Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  With my greatest regards,

  Your sasura

  I folded the letter, and nodded with satisfaction.

  Then I unfolded it and read it again, and reread it, and I frowned.

  Do not tell my daughter of our meeting, should you happen to speak to her.

  If we were completely estranged, as he was supposed to think we were, why the fuck would I happen to speak to her? Ailsa was convinced her parents thought she was just a courtier, but I had to wonder. She had to have won her knighthood somehow, after all, and that wasn’t something that usually happened to the daughters of immigrant Alarian merchants, however much money their fathers had managed to make in Dannsburg. My sasura was a very shrewd man indeed, for all that he tried to hide it behind whiskers and brandy fumes, and I wondered if perhaps he suspected more about her life than he let on. It honestly wouldn’t have surprised me.

  In Dannsburg everyone is watched, and perhaps none so much as the Queen’s Men themselves. As I have written, everyone who matters knows one when they see one. I had been very publicly knighted not so long ago myself, and I doubted that Sasura had failed to hear of that. For all his pretence of being a wealthy retired merchant, tired and sleepy in his study with a glass of brandy always at his elbow, I thought the old pirate probably had a fair idea of which way the wind was blowing in Dannsburg in those days.

  Which was precisely why I wanted to speak to him, of course. Ailsa’s father was a wise man, a man I respected, and more importantly than that, he was a connected one.

  I was depending on it, the same way I was depending on Lady Lan Yetrov honouring her unspoken debt to me. I was reasonably sure that she would, to be fair – at least to an extent – but Ailsa’s father was a different matter. I held an uncharacteristic affection towards him, but I knew that if the dice fell bad in the future his loyalty would be first and foremost to his wife and daughter. How could it be otherwise? Sasura was a family man, and I could respect that.

  He wouldn’t be the man I thought him if he didn’t put his own daughter first, but then I wasn’t actually going against Ailsa in this. I just wasn’t involving her in it. That was a different thing, to my mind, but we would see if Sasura saw it the same way. I knew he didn’t involve his family in his own business dealings, to the extent that even Ailsa at least pretended to believe he had never been anything other than an honest merchant, but I supposed we would see about that. Whether she truly believed it was another matter, of course, but on the carriage ride home from that first brandy afternoon in his study I thought I had seen a tiny glimpse of a wounded little girl in her face when I had mentioned her father’s past.

  Wounded childhood was something I understood all too well, and I remember how I had wanted to take her in my arms in the back of that carriage, drunk as I had been at the time.

  I hadn’t dared.

  Fool, fucking fool.

  She would probably have stabbed me if I had tried it, but I had seen the need in her eyes, nonetheless. Not for romance, no, but for simple human comfort. Somehow that had been so much sadder. Sometimes we all just need a little comfort, and are denied it by circumstance and the harshness of the worlds we build around us.

  The Queen’s Men denied us everything.

  Hearts of steel, that was what Vogel wanted. Stone lionesses and iron tigers. There was no place for feelings in the Queen’s Men. I’m not what you’d call a caring man, I have to allow. I haven’t got that bit, after all, and perhaps that was what they saw in me in the first place. All the same, there came a point where you just . . . I don’t know.

  I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, quite how to phrase it.

  I mean, I don’t care about people I don’t know. I never have done, and I’ve written of that before. Except . . . except sometimes I do. Take Beast, as an example. I had cared about him, and I have given him a job when he asked me for one.

  But then I could see that Beast was useful. Would I have cared about someone who wasn’t?

  I really didn’t know.

  Was that the kind of man I was, one who would take in someone useful and overlook another who at first glance might appear not to be? Again, I honestly didn’t know. I had cared about the Lady Lan Yetrov, I supposed, and I hadn’t known her, but I’d had reason enough to hate her husband. But then a good part of why I had hated him had to do with how he treated her, and she had been no one I knew. I could tie my head in knots trying to untangle that one.

  Perhaps I did care, in my way. Perhaps I was just broken from what my da had done to me, and to Jochan, and from what the war had done to us both. Perhaps I was hiding my wounds behind a wall of callousness, I really couldn’t have said. That was a philosophical question, I supposed, and in those days I had a vanishingly small interest in philosophy.

  I poured myself another brandy and tried not to think about it.

  *

  The bomb went off outside the Bountiful Harvest shortly after dawn.

  I was barely out of bed, still standing shaving at the nightstand in my smallclothes when the flashstone’s percussive blast blew out the ground floor front windows of the inn. I got into my clothes as quickly as I ever had for any army drill I could remember, and reached the top of the stairs with Remorse and Mercy buckled over my untucked shirt just in time to meet Bloody Anne coming the other way down the corridor.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, before she could ask.

  She was already in full leather and mail, and that put me to shame. The woman was a born soldier.

  ‘What is it, Da?’ Billy asked, sticking his head out of his door as Anne thundered past.

  ‘Fucking terrorists,’ Anne growled as she shouldered past me and charged down the stairs.

  ‘Nothing, lad,’ I said at the same time. ‘Go back in your room and keep your head down.’

  I shot a look over my shoulder in time to see Rosie standing in her shift in their bedroom doorway, a loaded crossbow in her hands.

  ‘I’ll cover the street from our window,’ she said.

  I nodded my thanks and followed Anne at a run.

  The common room of the inn was full of smoke, the floor littered with broken glass from the shattered windows that crunched beneath my boots as I ran across it towards the charred hole where the door had been. No one was injured that I could see, but the day was young and the place had been empty at that hour anyway. This attack hadn’t been intended to hurt people so much as to send a message. Anne kicked the blackened wreckage of the front door aside and stormed out into the street with her blades in her hands, and I followed with Remorse drawn.

  There was no one in sight.

  No one at all. Curfew didn’t lift for the best part of an hour yet, and the streets were deserted. Whoever had lit the fuse of that flashstone was long gone.

  ‘Fuck,’ Anne growled, and spat on the cobbles to show what she thought of that.

  I lowered Remorse and ran my free hand over my face, pinching the last of the sleep from my weary eyes.

  ‘A warning,’ I said. ‘The house of magicians knows who we are, and now they know where we’re staying too.’

  I looked up, and saw Rosie leaning out of her and Anne’s open bedroom window with the crossbow held tight to her shoulder.

  ‘Stand down,’ I called up to her, and Anne nodded to tell her all was well.

  We met the innkeeper on our way back inside. He was only half dressed, white-faced and quivering, his hands visibly shaking as he surveyed the damage to his common room.

  ‘What happened, Sir Tomas?’ he asked me.

  ‘A terror attack,’ I said, and it spoke of the situation in Dannsburg in those days that he just nodded, accepting the facts of it without further question. ‘Nobody hurt, no real harm done. I’ll pay for the damage. Take it out of my account.’

  It had happened because of me, so that seemed only fair to my mind. I could always claim it back from the house of law, after all. Vogel paid extremely well, and he had even deeper pockets when it came to operati
onal expenses.

  ‘My . . . my thanks, Sir Tomas,’ the man said.

  He swallowed and scurried behind the bar to pour himself a no doubt much-needed brandy, which he swallowed in a single gulp. After a moment to recover himself he poured again for Anne and me. We took them and drank with thanks, for all that it was barely past dawn.

  All was well.

  Was it fuck. The house of magicians knew I was a Queen’s Man, of course they did, but now it seemed they had found out where I lived, and more than that, they had finally found the balls to act on that information and send me a message.

  We can hurt you, if we want to, that message had said.

  Well, fuck you very much.

  I could hurt them too.

  And I intended to.

  *

  By noon I was in the house of law, and I was having an argument with the master of munitions. The house of law had a truly terrifying stockpile of explosives, and it wasn’t like I wanted to requisition the lot, after all. Just enough.

  Just enough to make my fucking point.

  Fat Luka had already told me where the archmagus Nikolai Reiter lived. Of course he knew, because he was Luka. Knowing things like that was what Luka was for.

  These fuckers had let off a bomb outside the inn where I slept. Where my son slept.

  I wasn’t having that.

  I was not having that one little fucking bit, as the house of law’s master of munitions was gradually beginning to grasp. He was a heavyset man in the late autumn of his life, and at some point his left arm had been taken off at the elbow. I wondered if he had lost it in battle, in Aunt Enaid’s war, perhaps, or had simply blown it off in an accident with one of his own creations. The more he defied me, the less I cared what life had done to him.

  ‘You need Lord Vogel’s signature,’ he said for the sixth time. ‘I’m not giving you military explosives just because someone spoiled your bloody breakfast.’

  I lost my patience at that. I leaned over the desk in front of him, glaring at him in the midday sunlight that streamed through the grimy office windows.

  ‘You know bloody well who I am,’ I said. ‘How does the queen’s signature suit you?’

  ‘We haven’t got a fucking queen,’ he said.

  That, to me, sounded like treasonous talk. Oh, isn’t it funny how definitions can twist to suit us at the time? He was absolutely right, of course, we didn’t have a fucking queen, but that was beside the point and a Queen’s Man was the last person who was likely to agree with his interpretation of the current political situation. And he worked in the house of law? No, I wasn’t putting up with that. Sometimes stupidity is a worse crime even than treason, and even less forgivable. I drew Remorse and levelled her at his throat.

  ‘I would be extremely careful, were I you, what I said next,’ I cautioned him. ‘If I may give you a little counsel – anything other than “Yes, Sir Tomas” would be very fucking unwise.’

  I left the house of law twenty minutes later with a cart and enough explosives to start a war.

  Chapter 38

  I had the afternoon free, as I wasn’t due to see Sasura until the next day. I spent that afternoon very pleasantly, with Emil and Oliver and Beast. Just four friends out for a stroll through the quiet streets of a smart residential part of Dannsburg, in the vicinity of the archmagus Nikolai Reiter’s townhouse.

  ‘No guards, that I can see,’ Oliver murmured as we rounded the corner of the neat, iron railing-enclosed public garden in the centre of the square that the four-storey terraced house faced onto. ‘It’s well-to-do, aye, but quite modest by Dannsburg standards. Especially for an archmagus.’

  It was, at that. The Reiters weren’t a wealthy family, after all. His cousin wouldn’t have been working as a fancy whore if they had been.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, after a moment. ‘It is.’

  I had to admit I was having doubts, now that we were there. Nikolai Reiter had struck me as a decent enough man when I met with him at the house of magicians back in the spring, after the queen’s funeral. I had gone to the house of law to requisition explosives full of anger and righteous indignation, ready to blow up his entire house and everyone in it, but now that I was there looking at the modest, middle-class dwelling I wasn’t so sure. There was no saying the bomber had even been acting on Reiter’s instructions. It was just that he was the head of the house of magicians and the only still-living magician I had ever met, and so naturally I had hung the blame at his door. Had this been Absolom Greuv’s residence I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment, but then of course Billy had already killed him in a public and really quite spectacular fashion. The more I thought about it, and about what I knew of Nikolai Reiter, the more I began to doubt myself.

  I had been lashing out, acting like a fool and a berserker. I was thinking like my brother, I realised suddenly, and that gave me pause. That wasn’t my way. I was a businessman, first and foremost, and it seemed I needed to remind myself of that. A frontal assault wasn’t always the best way to achieve the objective; I had learned that much in the army even if Jochan hadn’t.

  Before I knew it I was halfway to Reiter’s front door.

  ‘Boss!’ Emil hissed, but I waved him back and bade them wait for me.

  I lifted the heavy brass knocker and rapped on the door.

  A maid opened the door a moment later, and gave me a quizzical look. I was well dressed, as was my way in those days, but there was no mistaking Remorse and Mercy at my hips. The wearing of swords was still in fashion in Dannsburg, aye, but turning up uninvited at a gentleman’s door very much was not.

  ‘Good day, m’lord?’ she said, obviously unsure of my status.

  ‘I need to see the archmagus,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’

  ‘I . . . I would have to enquire, m’lord,’ the maid said. ‘Who should I say is calling?’

  ‘Sir Tomas,’ I said, and left it at that.

  There was no need to show her the warrant. The learned magus would know who that was, if he was actually in, and if so he would admit me at once – and if he wasn’t, there was no need to put the fear into this poor maid for no fault of her own. Obviously one should have left a calling card, or received an invitation, but it was this or set off a bomb on his doorstep at midnight so I hoped he would forgive a minor breach of etiquette. If he genuinely wasn’t there then the maid would say so, and I would believe her. Reiter wasn’t a coward, I had established that at our first meeting. I respected him, for all that we currently stood on opposite sides of the matter.

  She retreated into the hall and I waited politely on the doorstep, aware of my three men watching from where they lounged against the black iron railings that framed the garden at the centre of the square. I was glad to have them there, but by Our Lady they were obvious. There was no hiding Beast, that was for certain, and I could almost feel the archmagus’ neighbours twitching their curtains and wondering what manner of man had come calling on him. No gentleman, surely, would have friends who looked like those three.

  The maid returned a couple of minutes later, and ushered me into a clean and well-polished if narrow hallway. She dipped me a curtsey and led me to a door that opened into Archmagus Reiter’s study.

  He smiled at her as she held the door open for me.

  ‘Thank you, Tissia,’ he said. ‘Tea for my guest and myself, please.’

  The door closed behind me.

  ‘Archmagus,’ I said.

  ‘Sir Tomas,’ he replied. ‘To what do I owe this most unexpected visit?’

  Yes, I had made a social gaffe coming unannounced, I knew that well enough, and he had no reason to point it out save to remind me that he was more highly placed in Dannsburg society than I was. But then I was a knight and Queen’s Man and he was neither of those things, so fuck him, house of magicians or not.

  All the same there was an innocence in his eyes that I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed. I decided to be honest with him. That had worked the last time we spoke, and in my experien
ce what had worked once would work again.

  ‘I had a choice,’ I said. ‘I had a choice between coming to speak to you unannounced, or blowing your house up tonight. I thought perhaps we’d talk.’

  ‘I . . . I am glad you chose to talk,’ he said, going a little pale. ‘Why, may I ask, were you considering blowing up my home? I have children, Sir Tomas. Four of them.’

  ‘And I have a young son,’ I said, ‘and yet someone bombed my inn this morning.’

  ‘Not me,’ Archmagus Reiter assured me.

  I looked into his eyes, and I believed him.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, after a long moment. ‘I didn’t truly think so. But someone did, and I think you know who that was.’

  Nikolai Reiter sat back in his seat and ran a hand over his face. The maid came back in just then and set a tea tray down on the desk between us, and left without speaking. After a moment I reached forward and took a bowl, and inhaled the vapours while the magician put his answer together in his head.

  After a long moment he picked up his own tea and looked at me through the aromatic steam that rose from his bowl.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘but then our houses aren’t really on speaking terms at the moment, are they, Sir Tomas? Why would I tell you even if I did?’

  After his mention of four children I didn’t like to press the point, but I knew I had to.

  ‘I was going to blow your house up,’ I reminded him. ‘I still could.’

  ‘Could you, knowing there are children living under this roof ?’ he countered, and I had to admit he had me there. ‘I have no doubt that you’re a ruthless man, Sir Tomas, but I don’t think you are an evil one.’

  Lord Vogel might want heartless iron tigers but I wasn’t that, at least not where children were concerned. Konrad might well have been but I wasn’t, and it was obvious that Reiter had come to that conclusion by himself. He was a shrewd fellow, and I think that he had, at least to a degree, got the measure of me.