Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  “Then see me you shall,” I said. “I think I’ll see you in my chambers, Rosie. As I’m such a charming man.”

  Bloody Anne gave me a look, but I ignored that and ushered Rosie up the rickety stairs and into the room I had taken as my own. I closed the door behind us and turned to face her.

  “You’ll have been spoken to,” Rosie said, and all the flirting was over now. This was her talking now, not what she wore on her shoulder. “I don’t know by who, but someone’s told you.”

  “People tell me a lot of things,” I said. “I’m a priest, after all.”

  She snorted. “You’re a thug and a gangster,” she said, “but someone’s got your balls in a jar, haven’t they, Mr. Piety? I don’t know who and it’s none of my affair, but here’s what I’m to tell you: she’ll give her name as Ailsa. She’ll be here tonight, and you’re to give her a job when she asks you for one.”

  “How do I know she’s the one?”

  “She’ll say she can be trusted with money and with words alike. You hear her say that, she’s the one.”

  “Is that all?”

  She shrugged. “It’s what I was told to tell you. Don’t know what it means, and I don’t much care.”

  So this Rosie wasn’t the one, then. I was glad about that, truth be told, although I couldn’t have said why.

  “Told by who?”

  Rosie sucked her teeth for a minute and shook her head.

  “I ought to get back,” she said. “Will don’t want us being out and about on our own.”

  I blocked her way.

  “You’ll tell me if I insist,” I assured her.

  “Do you hit women, Mr. Piety?” she asked me, and I saw a sudden flash of anger in her eyes. “You probably do, but never the merchandise, I’m sure. That’d be bad for business, wouldn’t it, and you wouldn’t never want that. Get out of my way.”

  THIRTEEN

  Rosie shoved past me and out the door, a furious set to her shoulders. She might not be the Queen’s Man I had been told to expect, but I didn’t think she was quite an ordinary whore, either. Someone important trusted her enough to carry messages, anyway. I followed her down the stairs and reached the common room in time to see her pulling a good woolen cloak around her. That looked new as well, and all in all she made Bloody Anne look like she had just escaped from the poorhouse. That wouldn’t do, not for my second it wouldn’t.

  “That was quick.” Anne smirked when I came into the room.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” Rosie said to Anne, and blew her a kiss. “I hope.”

  She ignored me completely and stalked out of the tavern, letting the new door swing shut behind her.

  I looked around the common room, at the general state of the men in there, and shook my head. I rapped my knuckles on the bar to get their attention.

  “We’ve been to see Ernst the barber, Fat Luka and me,” I said.

  “Ain’t he pretty now?” Black Billy laughed, reaching out to pinch Luka’s smooth-shaved cheek.

  “He’s presentable is what he is, unlike you lot,” I said as Luka slapped Billy’s hand away good-naturedly. “Ernst is expecting the rest of you, so you’ll get yourselves up there and get made presentable too. Jochan knows the way. And there’ll be a tailor calling by tomorrow to measure you all up for some proper clothes. You’re paying for your own, but old Pawl discounts deep when he’s stitching for the Pious Men, so treat yourselves to something nice.”

  “I ain’t wasting my beer money on clothes,” Simple Sam complained. “I’m all right how I am, like. I ain’t naked, Mr. Piety.”

  “Not this time,” someone said, and got some laughs for his trouble.

  Simple Sam might not be naked, but his britches had holes in the knees and it was a wonder I couldn’t smell his shirt from where I was standing. I shook my head.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “You’re Pious Men now, and in Ellinburg Pious Men look and act a certain way. When word gets around who you are, you’ll be treated like lords, mark my words. That comes with some expectations, one of them being that you look and act like fucking lords. Isn’t that so, Jochan?”

  “Fucking right it is,” my brother said, and treated the men to his grin. “You won’t be paying for your own beer, my boys, not on our streets you won’t. The Pious Men get the finer things in life.”

  I nodded. “That’s settled then,” I said, making an end to it. “Go five at a time; I don’t want to frighten Ernst too bad all at once.”

  Hari would have to wait, of course—he might be better than he had been, but he was still a long way from healed, and I knew he wouldn’t be walking more than a few steps at a time on that leg for a long while yet. I’d have Cordin give him a shave, at least; that would have to do.

  I went behind the bar to get myself a drink while the men argued over who was going first and with who, and I found Bloody Anne waiting for me. She put her thumbs through her belt and hitched up her britches.

  “Don’t think I’m wearing a dress, because I’m not,” she growled. “I can’t fight in a dress or ride in one neither, so I’ve no use for them.”

  I shrugged. What she chose to wear was her business, to my mind, so long as it wasn’t what she was standing in now.

  “So have Pawl make you up some new britches and shirts, then,” I said. “I don’t think a woman in britches will bother him any.”

  I started to turn away before she got to what she really wanted to say, but she put her hand on my wrist and stopped me.

  “We need to talk about last night,” she said in a low voice. “About Billy.”

  “No, we don’t,” I said.

  I shook my hand free and poured myself a brandy. I hadn’t had time to think about it, or rather I had but I had chosen not to. Something about Billy the Boy had always made me uneasy, but all the same I had accepted him as my confessor. I tried to remember why I had done that, back in Abingon, and found that I couldn’t. It was a long time ago now, lost in the mists of blood and smoke and horror.

  Eventually five of the crew got themselves out of the door with Jochan in the lead. He was busy telling them tall tales about the high life the Pious Men had lived before the war. There was some truth in his words, but I noticed that he hadn’t mentioned that by the time war came there had only been him and me, Enaid, Alfread, and Donnalt left. Pious Men lived well, it was true, but not necessarily for very long.

  “Come and see Hari with me,” Anne said.

  She wasn’t going to let it pass, I could see that much. I followed her through into the kitchen, where Hari was eating another bowl of oats and a hunk of salt pork, a fresh mug of small beer on the table in front of him.

  “How are you, Hari?” she asked.

  He looked up and grinned around a mouthful of pork.

  “Good, Sarge,” he mumbled, and stuffed oats into his face to follow the pork.

  “That your fourth bowl now, Hari?”

  He shrugged, his brow furrowing in thought for a moment before he nodded.

  “Aye.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “You eat if you want it, there’s plenty. Get your strength back.”

  “Where’s Billy?” Anne asked.

  Hari jerked his head toward the fireplace, where the lad was curled up asleep on a threadbare rug by the hearth. For a moment I thought he was dead, he was so pale.

  “He looks tired,” Anne said.

  I shrugged. Perhaps he was. If he had been awake all night watching over Hari then it wasn’t surprising, to my mind. I steered her out into the corridor to let Hari eat in peace, and leaned close to speak to her.

  “Is there a point you’re getting to, Bloody Anne?”

  “You know what point I’m getting to,” she hissed. “Yesterday Hari was almost dead, and today he’s sitting up and eating enough for three men, and now Billy looks like he’s crossed the
river himself. Last night, Tomas, we saw him doing witchcraft!”

  “No, we didn’t,” I said, for all that I had no idea what we had seen. “We saw him floating in the air, and who’s to say how and why that happened. Do you know what witchcraft looks like, Anne? Because I don’t. Maybe we saw a miracle.”

  “Does Our Lady work miracles now, Tomas? Does she? Because we could have fucking done with some in Abingon, and I never saw any.”

  I took a breath. Anne was making me angry, and I didn’t want to get angry with her. I looked down the corridor into the common room and frowned.

  “Where’s my aunt?”

  “Gone home,” Anne said. “Jochan took her and a couple of the lads to her house this morning while you were out making yourself beautiful. They were going to see who was living there now, and to kick them out.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, that’s good.”

  It was. It wouldn’t have been good for whoever had decided they could help themselves to Aunt Enaid’s house, I was sure, but whatever Jochan had done to them was deserved, to my mind. No one stole from the Pious Men, or from their families. Not in the Stink they didn’t, not if they knew what was good for them. This way I also wouldn’t have Enaid under my feet, with her looks and her awkward questions, and that was good too.

  Jochan and I had never bothered getting homes of our own, even once we had enough money. It was easier to just live out of one of our boardinghouses, but for a long while after our da had died we had lived with Aunt Enaid in that house. I was glad she had it back now.

  “I trust someone’s staying with her, in case they come back,” I said.

  Anne nodded. “Brak is,” she said, “and stop trying to change the subject.”

  “What do you expect me to do about it, Bloody Anne?” I snapped. “I’m an army priest, not a fucking mystic. I don’t know what he was doing.”

  “There must be someone,” she said. “You said we’d need to talk to a magician.”

  “There aren’t any magicians; this isn’t Dannsburg,” I said. “There’s no house of magicians here. As far as I know they never stir themselves far from the capital and the queen’s favor. The closest thing I know to a magician is Old Kurt. People call him a cunning man, but he’s about as much a magician as Doc Cordin is a real doctor.”

  Magicians were very respectable, of course, whereas witches were to be hated and feared. The cunning folk fell somewhere between the two, but I wasn’t sure I could see the difference. Magic was magic, to my mind, whoever did it.

  “Cordin knows what he’s about,” Anne said, and from the stubborn set to her jaw I knew we weren’t going to resolve this bar shouting. “I’m not letting it pass, Tomas.”

  I could see that she wasn’t. I had never thought Bloody Anne to be a particularly superstitious woman, no more than any other soldier is, anyway, but this idea she had got into her head that Billy the Boy was a witch was obviously troubling her more than she wanted to let on.

  “All right,” I said. I’d let her have this, to keep the peace if nothing else. “All right, Bloody Anne, if it’ll make you happy we can go and talk to Old Kurt.”

  “It would ease my mind some,” Anne admitted.

  Old Kurt lived down in the Wheels, north of us between the Stink and the docks, on the edge of the river where the great waterwheels turned day and night. The waterwheels worked bellows in foundries, churns in tanneries, grinding stones in mills, anything that could be hooked up to gears and spindles. With most all the men of working age in the city dragged off to war at once, it was those wheels that had kept Ellinburg alive for the past three years. Those wheels, and women and old men. Ellinburg men age tough, like old roots, and if you ask me our women are born that way.

  Ellinburg owed its life to the Wheels, but that didn’t make it a nice part of the city.

  “You and me, then,” I said. “We’ll go down to the Wheels and find Old Kurt. You’ll want weapons and mail, and we’ll be going on foot.”

  “Should we take a couple of the crew with us, for guards?”

  I shook my head.

  “Old Kurt wouldn’t like that,” I said. “Me he knows, although we’re not friends. You he’ll tolerate just because you’re a woman, and he likes women. All the same he doesn’t like strangers, and the Wheels is the sort of place where a band of armed men will draw more attention than we want.”

  “I thought these were your streets?”

  “These are,” I said. “The Wheels ain’t. I don’t own all of Ellinburg, Anne. The Wheels is Gutcutter territory. I don’t think their boss is back from the war yet, and Our Lady willing she won’t be coming back, but even so it’s no place for the Pious Men to go in force until we mean it.”

  Bloody Anne nodded thoughtfully and went to don her leather and mail. She was still learning the city, I reminded myself. Yes, we were the Pious Men who were treated like lords, but only in the right places. The Stink was my territory, and the Narrows. Trader’s Row and the wealthy streets around it was neutral ground, under the control of the City Guard, and western Ellinburg belonged to the Alarian Kings and the Blue Bloods. They were no one much and too far away for our territories to overlap, so we left each other alone. The Wheels, though, that might as well have been a foreign country. One that we weren’t quite at war with, not at the moment anyway, but we seemed to be always on the brink of it. The Wheels belonged to the Gutcutters, and they were no friends of mine.

  I got into my own leather and mail and buckled the Weeping Women around my waist. I looked at my priest’s robe and decided against it. I told Fat Luka he was in charge until Jochan got back. Anne and me went out the back way, through the stable yard and along the alleys that led toward the river. We found the steps down to the water, where I had sent Cookpot with the cart and the bodies that first night back in Ellinburg.

  The steps were stone, so old each one was worn into a shallow bowl by the passing of thousands of feet over more years than I knew how to count. Those steps were death in winter, I knew that much, when the hollows filled with water and froze into ice, and a careless man could slide all the way down into the merciless cold of the river.

  “Right here,” I said to Bloody Anne, “this is the edge of Pious Men streets. South of us is the Stink, and that’s mine. Southwest is the Narrows, and that’s mostly mine too up as far as Trader’s Row. That way, north, that’s the Wheels, then the docks, and it ain’t.”

  Anne followed me down the steps to the narrow stone path that edged the riverbank, and she looked the way I was pointing. Upstream the great waterwheels ceaselessly turned, dozens of them, casting their long afternoon shadows across the water. Most of the city’s industry lay that way, all those lovely factories with all their profits, just waiting to be taxed. All the filth they pumped into the river ran downstream into the Stink and gave the place its name. The Wheels wasn’t going to stay Gutcutter territory forever. Not if I had my way.

  Before the war Ma Aditi had run the Gutcutters, and moving into her territory had been unthinkable. But Ma Aditi had gone off to war with the rest of us, leading her men like some sort of empress. Women didn’t get conscripted, but they could volunteer and she had, just like Bloody Anne, and so far she hadn’t come back. I would be very happy if it stayed that way.

  Ma Aditi was Ellinburg-born, but her skin was the same deep brown color as the men off the tea ships. Her parents must have been from somewhere in Alaria, I could only assume, not that it really mattered. Ma Aditi was very clever and very cruel, and to my mind Ellinburg was better off without her. I knew I was, anyway.

  “Are we safe then, going up there?” Bloody Anne asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Are you ever safe, Bloody Anne?” I asked her, and I was mocking her now even though I knew better. “A Pious Man lives life on the edge. You could get run over by a cart tomorrow. You could get a curse put on you by a witch.”


  I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bloody Anne move so fast.

  Before I could draw breath I was up against the slimy stone wall with her hard hand around my throat and the point of her dagger pressed into the corner of my eye.

  “You take that back!” she hissed in my face, and I could see she was pure fucking furious. “You take those words back, Tomas Piety, or I’ll fucking blind you, I mean it!”

  I didn’t move a muscle.

  “All right, Bloody Anne,” I said, offering a silent prayer to Our Lady that I wouldn’t cross the river today. “It’s all right. I’m sorry, and I take my words back. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “No,” Anne said, and she eased the dagger back from my eye and took a step away. “No, I know you didn’t. I’m sorry. It’s . . . doesn’t matter. It’s a long story, and not for telling now.”

  She looked shaken, though, I could see that, and it takes a lot to shake Bloody Anne. I blew out a breath and straightened my mail where she had grabbed me.

  “Right,” I said. I’d let it pass, but I was curious all the same. Still, that would keep for later. “Shall we?”

  Anne nodded without speaking and followed me along the path beside the river and into the Wheels.

  FOURTEEN

  The Wheels was squalid and damp, but then it always had been. This was one of the worst parts of Ellinburg, but it was also one of the most profitable territories to control. No one wanted to live near a tannery, no, but they might well enjoy the money from one.

  Ma Aditi and the Gutcutters owned the Wheels, but I knew that she wasn’t back from the war yet, so I hoped that meant most of her boys weren’t either. Even so, we went carefully, keeping our hands close to the hilts of our weapons as we made our way along the treacherous path with the oily-looking river lapping at its bank a few feet below us.