Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  Anne looked at the pile of bodies and shook her head.

  “I need some air,” she said. “Coming?”

  We went back out into the courtyard again, and this time there were eleven men out there waiting for us. Anne was about to yell for the crew when I held up a hand to say be quiet. This lot were from the biggest, best-armed, and meanest gang in Ellinburg—the City Guard.

  I knew the one who led them. Captain Rogan was the city governor’s chief thug. I should have been honored to warrant a visit from him in person, I supposed. He had almost fifty years to him, a strong, solidly built man who wore a plain steel breastplate over his mail, with a gold star on each shoulder to show his rank. It was a running street joke that those stars looked like the bawd’s knot, but it would be a brave lad who called Rogan the governor’s whore in the hearing of a guardsman. Heads had been broken for less, after all, and sometimes people just disappeared and weren’t seen again.

  “Captain Rogan,” I said. “What a pleasure.”

  He met my eyes and scowled.

  “Piety,” he said. “You’re coming with us. Hauer wants a word with you.”

  I had thought he might, sooner or later. Looked like it was sooner.

  “It’s all right, Anne,” I said. “Tell Jochan I’ve gone to see Grandfather.”

  “Right,” she said.

  She didn’t move, though. She just stood there with her hands hanging by her sides, near the hilts of her daggers. There were eleven of the Guard, but I knew she would have waded in if she’d had to, buying me time until the crew could get to us. Bloody Anne was the best second a man could want and no mistake.

  “It’s all right,” I said again, and let Captain Rogan and his men lead me away.

  TEN

  The governor of Ellinburg wasn’t really my grandfather, of course—that was just street cant. “Going to see Grandfather” meant that you had been taken in but that it wasn’t bad. If it was bad you were “going to see the widow,” and that was a different matter. If I had said that, there would have been a pitched battle between my crew and the Guard, and I wasn’t sure how that would have ended. Our numbers were roughly even, but the guardsmen were sober and better fed and their mail was in good order, and each one carried steel along with his club, and a whistle that would bring more men running. No. All in all I was glad to be going to see Grandfather.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be back,” Rogan said to me as we marched through the narrow by the dim light of a couple of lanterns. “I heard it was rough, down south.”

  “Aye, it was rough,” I said.

  Rogan had fought in the last war, in Aunt Enaid’s war, and I knew his understatement wasn’t meant as an insult. It was just how veterans spoke of things, in terms that made them seem less than they had been. You don’t dwell on the memories so much, that way.

  “Aye,” he said. “Well, here you are, Tomas Piety, and the big man wants to see you.”

  Of course he did. I had been expecting this, but not so soon. Word travels fast on the streets of Ellinburg, though, and my face was remembered.

  “And see me he shall, Captain,” I said. “I’ve no quarrel with the Guard, you know that. I’m just finding my feet and putting my house in order. Then regular payments will resume, and we’ll all go back to how we were before the war.”

  Of course I’d had an arrangement with the City Guard, one that had involved my silver in exchange for their blind eyes. A fair quantity of that silver had gone to Rogan himself.

  “We’ll see,” he said, but I could see the corner of his mouth curling slightly with avarice.

  Captain Rogan was a hard man and a ruthless bully, but he was also greedy and he had his vices. Gambling was chief among them—before the war, on a good week at the racetrack, I could take back the bribes I had paid him and more besides.

  “I hope we will, Captain,” I said. “I hope we will.”

  I let them lead me out of the narrow and on up the hill toward the governor’s hall that lay in the shadow of the Great Temple of All Gods. There was no castle in Ellinburg, but the governor’s hall was the closest thing to one that a building could be. A great lump of gray stone with narrow windows and iron doors, it squatted near the end of Trader’s Row like a war elephant from Alaria.

  Lanterns hung on iron hooks projecting from the walls, casting a yellowish glow on the ground outside where the uneven cobbles gave way to good flagstones. A single royal standard flew from the rooftops, the red banner looking almost black in the darkness. There were two of the City Guard stationed at the front door at all times, and regular patrols around the building day and night.

  Rogan greeted the men on guard duty, and they opened the heavy double doors to admit our party. We trooped up the steps and into an echoing stone hall. Lamps burned in there, but not many. The hour was late, and the governor was a frugal man, or so he let it be thought.

  “You know the drill,” Rogan said.

  I unbuckled my sword belt and handed over the Weeping Women, Remorse and Mercy heavy in their scabbards as I held the belt out to Rogan. He passed it to one of his men and looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  “Is that everything?” he asked me.

  “I was out on business, not riding to battle,” I said. “That’s everything.”

  They searched me anyway, but I hadn’t been lying. Eventually Rogan grunted and sent half his men back to their barracks. The other five of them escorted me down a long corridor and up a flight of narrow stairs meant for servants. The grand staircase in the main hall wasn’t for the likes of me; that message was plain enough.

  Governor Hauer was in his study on the second floor, sitting behind a large desk with a glass of wine in his hand. He looked paunchy even in his expensively tailored clothes, and he was already half bald. The governor lived well, whatever he liked to put about regarding his frugal ways. He lived to excess, in fact, and his health was the poorer for it. He looked like he had ten more years to him than he actually did.

  Rogan bade his men wait outside and followed me into the study alone. The look on the governor’s face gave me pause. I had thought I knew what this meeting was about—bribes, and taxes, and how they had no doubt gone up while I had been away. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Tomas Piety,” Hauer said.

  “Lord Governor,” I replied. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

  “No it isn’t, unexpected or a pleasure,” he said. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have Rogan break your neck.”

  “And why might you want to do that?”

  He glared at me. “You’re only a few days back in Ellinburg, and the place is already a charnel house. Corpses found floating in the river, a disturbance at the convent—and don’t think I haven’t heard all about that from the Mother Superior—and now a battle in Chandler’s Narrow. You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Piety.”

  “I’ve been to war to fight for queen and country, and I come home to find myself robbed blind and my people starving in their own homes. You think I can let that pass?”

  “You’ve been to war because you were conscripted and forced to go, so don’t give me all that horseshit,” he said. “Queen and country mean no more to you than they do to me, and we both know it.”

  He was wrong about that, to an extent anyway, but I didn’t see a need to tell him so. Not yet, anyway.

  “I see,” I said instead. “Do you expect me to sit meekly by and watch while other men profit from the businesses I built with my own hands?”

  “No,” Hauer said. “No, I don’t, and that’s why you’re still breathing. Sit down, Tomas. Have some wine.”

  I sat in the chair across the desk from him, all too aware of Rogan looming behind me. Rogan’s big, callused hands were made for wringing necks, and I was there unarmed. Not defenseless, no, but I’ve never been as good with my fists as Jochan was. If it came to it, I
knew I’d struggle against Rogan. I sat and offered a silent prayer to Our Lady that tonight wouldn’t be the night that I crossed the river.

  I reached for a goblet and the flagon and poured myself a drink. I prefer brandy to wine, but hospitality extended should never be refused. The wine was strong and cloying, too sweet for my taste, but I drank it anyway.

  “You’ve something on your mind,” I said.

  The governor took a long draft from his own goblet and cleared his throat.

  “What’ve you noticed, about these people you’ve been killing?”

  “They’re scared,” I said, thinking of the three in the boardinghouse. “Whoever’s in charge of them, they’re more scared of him than they are of me and my crew. One of them said something about their family being held hostage. That and I’ve lived in Ellinburg all my life aside from the war years, and I don’t recognize a single man of them.”

  “Someone’s got a knife held to their children’s throats,” Hauer said.

  “Who?”

  He ignored the question. “Have you seen any foreigners among them?”

  “One,” I said. “Long haired and blond and tall. Not from these parts.”

  “From Skania,” Hauer said.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  I had only spent a few years in school, enough to learn my letters and how to figure simple accounts, but that was all. History, geography, those were mysteries to me. I knew Skania was somewhere across the sea to the north, but no more than that.

  “I do say so,” he assured me. “Most of the men you’re fighting are petty scum like you, little people made to feel big by violence and stolen silver. Men from country towns by and large, and a few billy-big-bollocks they’ve brought up from Dannsburg to stiffen them. They’ve been careful not to recruit any Ellinburg men, who might have other loyalties. A man called Bloodhands leads them, so folk say, and where he came from is anyone’s guess. No one even fucking knows who he is.”

  I let the insults slide and thought about it.

  “What about the other crews?”

  The Pious Men had been influential in Ellinburg before the war, but of course we hadn’t been the only street crew doing business or paying off the Guard. The Gutcutters, the Alarian Kings, all the other crews had seen their men dragged off to war just like we had.

  “Much the same,” Hauer told me. “Our northern friends have been busy, while Ellinburg men have been at war.”

  The governor hadn’t been at war, I noted, for all that he was of an age. He might not look it, but he only had a few more years than me. Not too old to fight. No man who had less than forty years to him was called too old to fight when the recruiting parties came calling.

  “And who are they then, these mysterious northern friends?” I asked him.

  He paused to refill his goblet, and all the while Captain Rogan stood just behind my chair with his big, hard hands not so very far from my neck. This was the point of the interview, I realized. This wasn’t about the violence I had caused, or even about the bribes I owed. Whatever the governor really wanted to say to me was about to come out.

  “Foreigners, as I say,” Hauer said. “From Skania like the one you met, although he sounds like he was no one. They’re not people like you, Tomas; don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that they are. No, they’re people more like me. They’re people like the Queen’s Men, in their own land. And now they’re here.”

  That gave me pause. The Queen’s Men were a semisecret part of the royal government. They were nothing like the governor, and he was flattering himself if he thought otherwise. They were a particular order of the knighthood whose weapons were not sword and lance but diplomacy and gold and a knife in the dark. The Queen’s Men were subtle, unseen, and officially nonexistent. They were the thing businessmen like us frightened our children with. Never mind the boggart man with his long twisted fingers, that was just in stories—the sort of scary stories that children enjoy because they know they’re not real. Do what your father says or the Queen’s Men will come and take you away. Now that was something to be frightened of.

  “Is that right?” I said.

  “It is,” Hauer assured me. “I need to be honest with you now, Tomas, and to trust you with something. Can I do that?”

  I looked at him for a moment, at his drooping jowls and the faint sheen of sweat on his broad forehead. I doubted very much that he was going to be honest with me, and I knew that he didn’t trust me any more than I trusted him. All the same, this was a change from the way our conversations usually went, and that held my interest if nothing else.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “There’s a Queen’s Man in the city right now,” he told me. “Well, a Queen’s Woman, I suppose you might say.”

  “Is there, now?”

  “There is,” he said.

  “And why’s that, then?”

  And why are you telling me that, more to the point?

  “There are things afoot, Piety. Political things, which I can’t expect a cheap thug like you to understand,” he said. “That’s all right, you don’t have to understand. You just have to do what you’re told. When the Queen’s Men say jump, you jump, you understand me? You’ll do what she tells you, if you’re wise.”

  “Why me?” I asked him.

  I had a strong suspicion I knew exactly why me, but I wanted to find out if he did.

  He shrugged.

  “I was told to put them in touch with the first gang boss who made it home from the war,” he said. “That would be you.”

  I wasn’t sure how much to believe that. From what I had seen of Ellinburg I probably was the first boss to make it home, but that sounded thin to me. I thought this might be more to do with history than anything else. History that the governor still didn’t seem to know about.

  “All right,” I said. “Who do I expect, and when?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time he sounded shaken. “A woman, that’s all. She’s a Queen’s Man, Tomas—for the gods’ sake, I never saw her face. She’ll find you.”

  I could see the fear in his eyes now and couldn’t help wondering if he had woken one night to find this woman in his bedchamber holding a knife to his balls while she made her demands. From what I knew of the Queen’s Men it wouldn’t have surprised me.

  Not one bit it wouldn’t.

  ELEVEN

  It was late when I got back to the Tanner’s Arms. Most of the men were asleep by then, but Simple Sam was on the door and Bloody Anne was inside waiting for me.

  “What in the Lady’s name happened?” she asked me.

  “It’s all right, Anne,” I said. “I got taken to see Grandfather, that’s all.”

  “Taken in,” she said, and I knew someone had explained what that meant, “but they let you go again. Why, and what for?”

  I sighed and poured myself a brandy.

  “The governor wanted a word,” I said. “You have to understand the way this works, here in Ellinburg. We’re a crew and I’m a boss, and the City Guard are a bigger crew and the governor is a bigger boss. I have to pay him taxes, the same way my people pay me taxes. It’s just business.”

  Anne frowned at me. “The governor is corrupt?”

  “He’s a businessman,” I said. “We’re all businessmen, Anne.”

  Bloody Anne was a soldier, not a criminal. I didn’t know much about her past, where she had lived or what she had done before the war, but she was honest and she was faithful. Those were admirable qualities in a sergeant, but now she was my second in the Pious Men and it was time she learned how things really worked.

  “I’m not a fucking idiot, Tomas,” Anne said. “A bribe is a bribe, so call it that.”

  “All right, we’ll call it that,” I said. “I bribe the Guard to keep them out of Pious Men business, and so do the bosses of the
other crews in the city. Captain Rogan gets a cut of that money, the guardsmen get a pittance, and the governor keeps the rest of it for himself. That’s just how it works.”

  I shrugged, making light of it, and looked around the room. Mika and Brak were sitting by the fire playing cards and looking reasonably sober, but everyone else appeared to have turned in for the night.

  “Where’s Jochan?” I asked.

  Anne was my second, but Jochan still thought that he was, so by rights it should have been him waiting up for me and not her. But it hadn’t been. That said a lot, to my mind.

  “Asleep out the back,” she said. “He’s had a drink.”

  He’d had a bottle of brandy or more and passed out, was what she meant. I nodded.

  “How’s Hari?”

  “Better,” Anne said, and now she looked uncomfortable. “Much better.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  She looked down at her boots and didn’t say anything for a long time. I knew that look. She had looked like that in Abingon, when she had needed to tell me someone else had died. That was the face Anne got when there was hard news, but if Hari was getting better then I couldn’t see what that news would be. I sipped my brandy and waited, giving her the time she needed to put her words together.

  “He’s a lot better,” she said at last. “Doc Cordin had to leave, so Billy the Boy sat with him a while, and then he was sitting up and eating and he seemed to know who he was again. Tomas, this morning he called me Colonel and asked how far it was to Abingon. He was so far gone, so nearly dead from all the blood he’d lost, and now . . . he isn’t.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  I gave Anne a look, and she nodded.

  “Aye, it’s good,” she said. “I know he’s not part of our crew, but he seems like a good man.”

  “He is part of our crew,” I said. “Now, he is. They’re all Pious Men, Anne.”