Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  It looked like Bloody Anne had already pronounced her own harsh justice.

  Very harsh, to my mind.

  I turned and went back outside to where they were waiting.

  “I can fight my own fucking battles,” Anne growled.

  She turned her horse and rode up the alley without looking at me. I mounted up and followed her. She could, I knew that. Bloody Anne had earned her name at Messia, and I knew what she could do. Coming home, going back to my old ways, had perhaps made me forget who I was with. She had been harsher with the man than was deserved, and under other circumstances I might have been angry about that, but I knew I had made her feel small and that was ill done of me. Fat Luka kept his eyes on his horse and held his peace, and that was wise of him.

  We rode up through the Narrows, leaving the Stink behind us as we wound our way into the more affluent parts of the city. Even there it was obvious that hard times had come to Ellinburg. The market square had barely half the traders it should have done at that time of year, and the prices I heard being cried for simple food were ridiculous.

  “The fuck has happened?” Fat Luka wondered aloud.

  “War happened,” Anne rasped, and I knew she had the right of it.

  “Aye,” I said, but she ignored me.

  We carried on through the city and out of the west gate. We turned off the West Road and headed up the hill, the horses plodding as the way grew steeper. Anne’s silence was a cloak of anger around her, and I knew better than to disturb her. Later I would have to apologize, I knew that, to make it right between us, but now wasn’t the time. The convent loomed above us on its hill, and that was where my attention needed to be.

  It was time to have words with my aunt.

  SEVEN

  We were met at the convent gates. Those gates were never closed, except when there was rioting in the city, but that didn’t mean all were welcome. There were two nuns standing guard, big burly women in gray habits with halberds in their hands. Their weapons moved together to bar the way ahead of us.

  “What’s your business here, Tomas Piety?” one of them asked.

  It seemed I hadn’t been completely forgotten in my own city, and that was good.

  “I’m here to see my aunt,” I said.

  The nun looked from me to Luka to Anne, assessing us and the weight of our weapons and armor. Her lips tightened into a hard line.

  “Sister Enaid is doing penance and is not allowed visitors,” she said.

  I couldn’t help but smile. That didn’t surprise me, knowing my aunt as I did. She had been a soldier in the last war, and she took no shit from anyone.

  “Perhaps you could make an exception,” I said. “Her favorite nephew has just come back from the war. She’ll want to know I’m alive, if nothing else.”

  “We’ll be sure to tell her,” the other nun said. “When she has finished her penance.”

  Bloody Anne looked up then and took her cue. She was no fool, wasn’t Anne, and she had been right in part. There had been one reason in particular why I had wanted her along for this.

  “I seek sanctuary, sister,” she said. “I am a woman returned from war, and I wish to take holy orders. These men are my witnesses.”

  The first nun scowled at her. She was obviously no fool either and could quite clearly tell that Anne didn’t mean it, but those were the words and I knew she couldn’t refuse them. This was a convent of the Mother of Blessed Redemption, the goddess of female veterans and the survivors of war. If Anne said she wished to take their holy orders, then they had to let her in, and her witnesses with her. Traditionally her witnesses were supposed to be women too, but nothing said they absolutely had to be, and Anne had known that. So had I, of course.

  They grudgingly uncrossed their halberds and allowed us through the gate.

  “You’ll have to put your case to the Mother Superior,” one of them called after us. “That won’t be so easy.”

  Thankfully it didn’t have to be. Once through the wall we found ourselves in a wide-open space where vegetable patches and fruit trees were laid out in front of the gray bulk of the convent itself, and there on her knees in the dirt was Aunt Enaid.

  I dismounted and left Fat Luka holding the reins of my horse, still sitting his saddle like a sack of turnips. I approached my aunt, who picked up her stick and got to her feet slowly and with obvious pain. Her gray habit was bunched up into her belt to spare it the worst of the muck, and her bare knees were muddy. She leaned on her stick and looked at me. I stared into her twinkling blue left eye, avoiding the stained brown leather patch that covered the missing one.

  “Hello, Auntie,” I said.

  She puffed her cheeks out with a sigh. She was a heavyset woman with some sixty years to her, short-haired and one-eyed and with a limp from a broken ankle that had never healed properly.

  “You’re dressed like a priest, Tomas,” she said, taking in my cowled robe.

  “That’s because I am a priest,” I said. “And now apparently you’re a nun.”

  “I am a fat old woman being forced to weed a vegetable patch because the Mother Inferior can’t take a fucking joke,” she said. “How was the war?”

  I could feel her weighing and measuring me, looking for the thing that I didn’t feel. The battle shock. Jochan felt it, I knew, and Cookpot and maybe even Anne for all I knew. But I didn’t.

  “I came back, thanks be to Our Lady,” I said. “This is Bloody Anne, and you might remember Luka.”

  Enaid gave them a short nod. “Well and good,” she said. “You’ll want to know what’s happened.”

  “Aye, I will,” I said. “I’ll want to know who these people are who are running my businesses. I’ll want to know who we had to fight to take back the Tanner’s last night.”

  Enaid sighed again.

  “It all went to the whores, Tomas,” she admitted. “With you and Jochan and all the lads gone off to war. We found poor Alfread floating in the river. Your horse was nobbled in a fixed race. They took the boardinghouses and stormed the Golden Chains and burned the brothel, and I couldn’t stop them. I held out for two years but . . . one fat old woman and a bunch of beardless boys and old men, what could I do?”

  “Who?” I demanded.

  Of course we Pious Men weren’t the only businessmen in the city, but the other gangs had been dragged into the war the same as we had. No one should have been in a position of strength in Ellinburg for the past three years, and certainly not strong enough to overthrow Enaid. She might say she was a fat old woman, and perhaps she was, but she was also a veteran soldier who I had personally seen break heads open with a mace. Unseating Enaid hadn’t been done easily, I knew that much.

  She shrugged.

  “Men from off,” she said, and spat on the ground. “With all the fighters gone from the city, we looked a ripe old prize. They came down the road from some town or another, I suppose. I didn’t really get the chance to ask, busy as I was not getting fucking killed.”

  “Aye,” I said. I supposed it made sense, for all that I didn’t like it. “And now you’re here, a nun.”

  “Mmmm,” she said. “A roof over my head, food in my belly, and strong walls around me looked appealing at the time.”

  “And have they lost that appeal?”

  “Oh, what do you think?” she snapped, gesturing irritably at her mud-spattered habit. “Do I look like a fucking nun to you, Tomas Piety?”

  “You most certainly do not sound like one, Sister Enaid,” a voice said, cracking like a whip across the open space.

  I turned to see a thin, shrewish-looking woman in a white habit striding toward us with one of the nuns from the gate at her side. She had perhaps forty-five years to her, with a long pointed nose and a thin-lipped mouth that looked designed to express disapproval. She was obviously the Mother Superior who couldn’t take a joke.

  Au
nt Enaid turned to face her as she drew up. The woman in white was visibly quivering with anger.

  “I don’t know why you let them in, Sister Jessica,” she snapped at the burly nun beside her. “Words or no words, this was quite obviously a falsehood. Sister Enaid is not allowed visitors while she is serving penance, and she will be serving penance for a very long time.”

  “This is the Mother Inferior,” Aunt Enaid said to me.

  “How dare you!” the other woman screamed at her. “I’ll have you switched to within an inch of your life for that!”

  “Switch this,” Aunt Enaid said, and punched the Mother Superior full in the face.

  The thin woman landed on her arse in the dirt, blood from a broken nose spattering the front of her white habit. Anne snorted laughter and lifted the crossbow from her saddle. She pointed it at the big nun.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Off the horse, boy,” Aunt Enaid told Luka. “You might be fat but I’m sure you can run, and I can’t.”

  Fat Luka dismounted in a flustered hurry, and Aunt Enaid hauled herself up into the saddle and held her stick across her knees.

  “Well?” she demanded of me as the Mother Superior struggled to her feet, spluttering with rage and streaming blood from her face. “I think we should be going, don’t you?”

  I swung up into the saddle and we spurred for the gates with Fat Luka panting along behind us on foot.

  That was how Aunt Enaid left the convent.

  EIGHT

  When we got back to the Tanner’s Arms it was to find that Jochan had finally stirred himself from his stupor, and there was a fight in progress. Cookpot was raging about how the others had been paid and him and Brak and Simple Sam hadn’t, while Jochan was just raging because he could. Sir Eland was leaning back with both elbows on the bar, watching the scene with an amused smirk on his face.

  We had already stabled the horses and left Fat Luka weeping and vomiting in the yard after his unaccustomed run, so it was Bloody Anne, Aunt Enaid, and I that came into the tavern through the back door and found the chaos waiting for us. Cookpot had a hand around Mika’s throat and his fist raised, an uncharacteristic snarl on his round face.

  “Oi!” Bloody Anne roared in her best sergeant’s voice.

  They knew that voice, these men of mine, and Jochan’s lot might not have done, but they knew a sergeant when they heard one. The shouting stopped, and Cookpot let go of Mika’s neck.

  “What the fuck,” I said quietly, “is going on here?”

  “You’re paying the men?” Jochan demanded. “What fucking with?”

  “With good silver, brother,” I said. “And there’s pay for you three too, and a mark on top for the night’s work.”

  Cookpot nodded at that, looking shamefaced at his outburst. Him and Brak and Simple Sam I gave four marks apiece, in full view of the others. Harsh work was well rewarded, and I wanted them all to understand that.

  “Where the fuck did that come from?” Jochan wanted to know. “Doc Cordin’s been telling me how the land lies out there, Tomas, and you haven’t got it from any of our other places because they’re all fucking gone!”

  He was shouting again, at me this time, in front of everyone. I couldn’t let that pass, and I could see that Aunt Enaid knew it.

  “Haven’t you got a hug for your fat old aunt, you silly drunken boy?” she said before I could speak, putting herself between Jochan and me with a practiced ease. “Come on through to the kitchen with me and we’ll catch up, my lad.”

  She steered him deftly away from me and out of my sight. That wasn’t the first time Aunt Enaid had rescued my younger brother from his own actions and the harsh justice they would have earned him, and I doubted it would be the last. Hari would still be in there, of course, lying unconscious on his pallet on the kitchen table, but I knew a thing like a near-fatal wound wasn’t likely to bother my aunt. She had been a soldier herself, after all.

  I took a breath, forcing my anger down. I looked around the tavern, and for the first time I noticed the two carpenters who were bent over their work at the front door, their heads down as they tried hard to be invisible. I nodded at Mika.

  “Well done,” I told him.

  “They reckon it’ll be done by sundown, boss,” he said. “It’ll be tomorrow before there’s glass for the window, though.”

  “That’s good enough,” I told him. “The door is the important thing.”

  Truth be told, I was glad to be able to give them work. The streets around there had always been poor, but they had been my streets, Pious Men streets, and no one had gone hungry. That had changed while I was away at war, and I couldn’t let that pass. I wasn’t going to watch my people starve, whatever it took.

  I went behind the bar and poured myself a brandy, and one for Bloody Anne as well. The crew were settling down now, going back to whatever they had been doing before the fight started. There were men sewing up holes in their clothes, others sharpening weapons or cleaning rust from their mail. Brak was giving Nik the Knife a rudimentary haircut. Black Billy was arm wrestling with Will the Woman like a fool, his stitches standing out angry red against his bulging biceps. Black Billy was proud of his arms and rightly so, but if he burst those stitches it would be his own fault. If it came to it, he’d have to pay Doc Cordin out of his own pocket to stitch him up again. I wasn’t paying for stupidity.

  Anne came to join me at the bar and nodded her thanks as she picked up her brandy. Some of the lads were shouting bets at each other over the arm wrestling match now, and Anne leaned closer to speak quietly under the noise.

  “About the money,” she said, her voice a low rasp.

  I gave her a level look. “What about it?”

  “I don’t know what you were doing in that back room,” she said, “and I know it’s none of my business, but you went in with nothing and you came out with silver. Watch your brother.”

  I drained my glass and poured another.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “If you’re hiding something, and I think you are, then Jochan will make it his business to find it.”

  I nodded. “Aye, I know my brother.”

  I started to turn away, but she reached out and touched my arm to check me. “And your aunt,” she said.

  “My aunt?”

  That made me pause. Aunt Enaid had all but raised the two of us, after all.

  “She’s been in that convent for over a year, Tomas, and I doubt she’s been enjoying it,” Anne said. “If it turns out she needn’t have been, I think she’ll take it ill.”

  That was the most words I usually heard from Bloody Anne in a day, and they had all been said in the space of a couple of minutes. I looked at her and took in the serious look on her face. She was worried, I could tell. Well and good, she was my second and worrying for me was part of her job, but she was wrong about Enaid. Jochan, yes. I didn’t need her to tell me I couldn’t put my faith in my little brother. That was why she was my second and not him. But my aunt?

  “I found Alman’s strongbox, that’s all,” I lied. “The takings from the tavern. My tavern, my silver.”

  Anne nodded and turned away to watch the arm wrestling match, her brandy in her hand. It was obvious that she didn’t believe me and that she could tell that I knew she didn’t. It didn’t matter. That was the story, and that was what she would tell Jochan and Enaid if she was pressed. I could trust Anne, out of all of them. I sighed and touched her arm.

  “About earlier,” I said. “The boardinghouse. I’m sorry, Anne. About what he said, and about not trusting you to make it right. That was ill done of me, and I apologize.”

  She gave me a look, then nodded. The long scar on her face twisted as she turned the corner of her mouth up into a sour smile.

  “If I want a whore I’ll fucking well have one, u
gly or not,” she said. “I’ve got money now, and money beats looks every time.”

  She got up then and walked across the room to join the men at the wrestling table. Black Billy had Will the Woman almost pinned, the back of his wrist barely an inch from the wood. I frowned after her. I had never known Bloody Anne to lie with a woman, but then come to think of it I’d never known her to lie with a man either. I supposed that was her business, either way.

  I swallowed my brandy and went into the kitchen after my aunt.

  Hari looked terrible but he was still alive, and the doc was with him. Jochan was pacing up and down with a bottle in his hand, and Aunt Enaid was slumped in a chair with her stick beside her, watching him. I ignored them both and spoke to Cordin.

  “How is he?”

  Doc Cordin looked up at me and shrugged.

  “The wound don’t smell rotten, so there’s that,” he said. “He’s in a bad way, though. Don’t know who he is half the time, and every time I’ve tried to sit him up he’s all but passed out. I’m giving him small beer and he’s taken a few oats, but he won’t be able to digest much. He lost so much blood, I . . . I don’t know, Tomas. Truly, I don’t.”

  I nodded. Hari was ghost white, and his breathing was shallow and uneven. There was a fresh bandage around his leg with a fresh stain on it, but the stain was red like good blood and not the greenish yellow that would have meant death. I’d seen wounds go bad before, and if it had I knew I would have been able to smell it from where I was standing.

  “Captain?” Hari croaked. “I’m so thirsty, sir. Is the oasis near?”

  “He wants water, but that filth from the river will kill him quicker than the wound could,” Cordin said. “It’s small beer or nothing, but he’s struggling with it.”

  “Keep trying,” I said, and put a hand on the doc’s shoulder as I passed him. Cordin might not be a real doctor, but he was a good man, and he was doing his best. I looked at Jochan, at the angry expression on his face and the brandy bottle in his hand, and I had to admit that neither of those things could be said of my brother.