Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  I heard Bloody Anne draw breath to speak, then obviously think better of it. She poured herself another brandy, and if she put the bottle down harder than was strictly called for then that was her affair, to my mind.

  Ailsa bobbed another curtsey and showed me a smile that was a little bit more than friendly.

  “Thank you, Mr. Piety, sir,” she said. “You won’t regret it.”

  I wasn’t too sure about that, but I knew what the choice was. Ailsa might appear common and clumsy, but she was a Queen’s Man and I was swimming out of my depth in dangerous waters.

  Billy the Boy came through from the back just then, and he stood there staring at Ailsa with his mouth open. I frowned at him, and he looked at me and nodded.

  “She’ll be staying,” he announced.

  “Aye, Billy, she will,” I said, but it hadn’t sounded to me like he had been asking a question.

  “Who’s this young man then?” Ailsa asked.

  “I’m Billy,” he said.

  “Billy the Boy, we call him,” I said, “and this here’s Bloody Anne.”

  “A soldier’s name,” Ailsa said, giving Anne a long look.

  “What of it?” Anne snapped.

  “Nothing at all.”

  “There’s a room upstairs, next to mine,” I said, cutting in before the two of them fell to hard words over nothing, as strangers sometimes can. “My aunt doesn’t need it anymore so you might as well take it.”

  Ailsa nodded. Jochan and Anne were both happy enough sleeping with the crew, but I knew I couldn’t put Ailsa in there with that lot. That wouldn’t have ended well, for someone. Whichever of my boys would have been stupid enough to put his hands where they weren’t welcome, I suspected, but I knew someone would have been bound to try it. Best if that didn’t happen, to my mind.

  “Much obliged,” Ailsa said.

  I had Billy show her up to the room, and the lad even took her bag for her like a proper young gentleman. Anne waited until they were gone before she rounded on me.

  “What in Our Lady’s name are you doing, Tomas?” she demanded.

  “I need a barmaid,” I said. “It’s time we opened the Tanner’s to the public again. I’ve a mind to put Hari in charge of the business as he seems to have a feel for it, and he can’t do much else. Even so, he can’t be behind the bar all night on that leg of his. She can keep the bar and he can run the business side, with one of the others on the door.”

  “And where are we supposed to sleep and live?”

  “We’ll fit round it, for now,” I said. “Later on, we’ll have more places to choose from.”

  “Billy likes her, I see,” Anne noted, and something in her tone made me give her a look.

  “You haven’t proved anything about Billy yet,” I reminded her, “and I don’t believe that you will. Don’t jump to justice until you know if it’s deserved, Anne. That’s no way to lead.”

  She patted her pouch, the one that held Old Kurt’s witchspike.

  “I’ll know tonight,” she said. “And then we’ll see.”

  I supposed that we would, at that.

  SIXTEEN

  I let Ailsa settle in and told Hari and Jochan what I had in mind. Hari was overjoyed, obviously glad to feel useful and even more glad to know he’d be keeping a roof over his head. Jochan just leered at me.

  “The room next to yours, is it?” he said. “Boss gets first go, is that the way of it?”

  I snorted. If he wanted to think that, if all of them wanted to think that, then it made my decision to hire a stranger at a moment’s notice a lot more believable. I’d rather they thought I was keeping Ailsa as my fancy woman than that they started wondering who she might really be. That way she’d be left alone too. It was for the best, to my mind, and I can’t say that the idea was without its charms. You didn’t see many women who looked like her, not in the Stink you didn’t.

  “If you want a woman, you know where Chandler’s Narrow is,” I said. “But see that you pay for it.”

  Jochan winked at me. “Might be that I will, Tomas,” he said.

  I made a mental note to check with Will the Woman that Jochan and any of the others who went up there had paid their way. You can’t keep a stew and tell men like these they’re not to visit it, but they were going to pay full price like anyone else. Taking for free was stealing from the girls, and indirectly it was stealing from me as well. There would be harsh justice for anyone who thought he could do that and look me in the eyes afterward.

  Ailsa was in the kitchen with Hari now, being shown the ropes. Hari had even found himself an old stained white apron in one of the storage chests out the back to make himself look like a proper tavern keeper. He could hobble about on his stick for a few minutes at a time but that was all, and I knew I’d have to make sure there were always a couple of the crew on hand once we opened up properly.

  These were my streets but that didn’t mean there was never trouble, and when folk have beer and brandy inside them and dice or cards in front of them the chances of that always go up. Hari wasn’t going to be stopping any fights by himself. That was for sure.

  I was standing at the bar thinking on who might be best for that job, who looked the part and I could trust not to get too drunk of a night, when Fat Luka strolled over.

  “The new lass seems nice,” he said, drawing himself a beer from one of the big barrels behind the bar.

  “Aye,” I said.

  Luka wouldn’t do—he drank too much, and besides, as an Ellinburg native he would be too useful doing other things for me. I didn’t want him stuck in the Tanner’s every night.

  “She knows her figures too, and she can read well enough,” he said, sounding impressed. “She could do the books and that.”

  Luka hadn’t even spent as long in school as I had, and while he could read after a fashion it was hard work for him. All the same, apart from me and Jochan, he was the only one of the crew who could read and figure at all, to my knowledge. I knew Cookpot couldn’t, school or not. Sir Eland said he could, of course, but no one had ever seen him do it. I think Luka had been dreading being asked to keep books.

  “She could,” I agreed. “Tell me something: what’s your opinion of Mika?”

  Mika was one of Jochan’s original crew and I didn’t know him well yet, but he was the one I had sent to find carpenters when I had needed them and he had managed that all right.

  “He can think for himself, which is more than some of the lads can,” Luka said.

  I nodded. That was what I had thought too.

  “Him and Black Billy, then,” I said, thinking out loud. “They can keep the peace here when the Tanner’s opens for business again.”

  Black Billy was a big lad, and he was good with his fists. Black faces weren’t unknown in Ellinburg, but they were a lot rarer than brown ones, and certainly not so common that he wouldn’t be noted. I’d put him on the door where he could be seen, I decided, and have Mika inside keeping a quiet eye on things. That would work.

  The right man for the right job, that was how I led men.

  Luka took a long drink and put his tankard down on the bar.

  “Can I say something?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s Jochan,” he said.

  I had thought it might be.

  “What about him?”

  Luka had another drink while he picked his words carefully.

  “Well, he ain’t said anything, not to me,” Luka said, “but I’ve known him since . . . ever. You too, of course.”

  I nodded. “Out with it, Luka,” I said. “I know what my brother’s like, and I don’t think you’re about to tell me anything I’d call a surprise.”

  “The Tanner’s Arms,” Luka said. “He’ll think it should have been his. You’ve put Hari in what he’ll think was his rightful place, and Hari cripp
led as well so you’ve got to set another two men to mind the place where one would have done. He’ll think that, is all I’m saying.”

  Luka coughed and gulped beer, looking worried that he’d said too much.

  “I’m disappointed that you think I don’t know that, Fat Luka,” I said. “Jochan all but has brandy for breakfast, these days. Lady knows the last thing he should be doing is running a fucking tavern.”

  “I know, boss,” Luka said, “and I didn’t mean you wouldn’t, like. I’m just saying, is all.”

  I nodded and looked at Fat Luka. I had known him since we had all been in school together, him and me and Jochan and Cookpot. He hadn’t been a Pious Man before the war, but he had been around, on the fringes of our life. He had done bits and pieces of work for me even back then, and I knew I could trust him. I wondered if perhaps he was working around the edges of saying he thought his part in things should be bigger now, and maybe he had a point about that.

  I thought on that for a moment, and I made a decision.

  “I want to ask you to do something for me, Luka,” I said. “I won’t take ill against you if you say no, but there’s silver for you if you’ll do it.”

  “Course,” he said. “I’m a Pious Man now, ain’t I?”

  He was, and he knew better than most of the others what that meant. He had seen enough of how things worked before the war to know what he was getting into, and he had been happy to join us just the same. Luka was greedy, I knew that, but he could be trusted. To a point, anyway. Knowing your men, knowing which levers move them, is a big part of leadership, to my mind.

  Fat Luka was moved by silver.

  “You are,” I said. “You’re all Pious Men now, but you’re an Ellinburg man too and you know how things work. How they really work, I mean, which might not always be how I explain things to the rest of the crew. They’re still learning the city, all except Cookpot anyway, but he was never one of us before the war. He doesn’t know how business is done any more than Simple Sam does.”

  “That’s true enough,” Fat Luka said. “What do you need, boss?”

  “Eyes and ears, and a supportive voice,” I said. “I want you to watch the men and listen to them when I’m not here. I want you to listen to their talk over dice, and when they’re in their cups. If anyone starts disagreeing with me or questioning my orders, I want you to explain to them why they’re wrong. Then I’ll want to hear about it, and who said what. Can you do that, Fat Luka?”

  He took a moment, and a long swallow of beer, then put his empty tankard down on the bar and nodded.

  “I can do that,” he said.

  I took a silver mark out of my pouch and slid it across the bar to him, and he made it disappear.

  The right man for the right job, as I said.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was late by the time I had the chance to talk to Ailsa in private. There had been enough nudges and winks and gossip exchanged throughout the evening that no one passed further comment when I went up to her room, and by that time half the crew had taken themselves off to Chandler’s Narrow to find a girl of their own. Bloody Anne had gone with them, I noticed.

  Ailsa opened her door at my knock and let me in. She turned a smile on me as I stood leaning against the inside of the door with my arms crossed. She had unpacked her few things, hung some spare clothes from nails in the beams, and spread herself a bedroll on the floor. There was a neat row of little bottles and small flat cases lined up on the windowsill above the washbasin.

  “Welcome to the Pious Men,” I said. “We live in luxury, as you can see.”

  “You did before and you will again,” she assured me as she sat in the room’s only chair.

  She sounded completely different than she had earlier, I noticed. Her voice now carried the inflections of Dannsburg aristocracy instead of a common girl from the countryside, and if she had seemed clumsy before, then that was gone too.

  “What do you know about me?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said. “Assume that I know absolutely everything, and you will never be surprised or caught in a lie that you would regret.”

  “Well, I don’t know the first thing about you, so there you have me at a disadvantage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me this, then,” I said, lowering my voice. “How does a slip of an Alarian girl become a Queen’s Man?”

  She smiled, and this time it was without warmth.

  “I was born and raised in Dannsburg,” she said. “My parents may have come from Alaria, but I have never set foot in the place. And ‘a slip of a girl,’ Tomas? Is that what you think?”

  “You’ve what, twenty-five years to you?”

  She snorted.

  “Paints and powders are worth their weight in gold,” she said, and showed me that humorless smile again. “I’m a good deal older than I look, and if you’re underestimating me based on my face and the color of my skin then you are a fool and I am pleased, because that means it’s working.”

  “I’m not a fool,” I said. “This is new to me, that’s all. I only saw a Queen’s Man once before, and he had over sixty years to him.”

  “Had he? Paints and powders, Tomas, false hair and mummer’s scars. Perhaps he was your age. Perhaps you and Luka walked past him on Trader’s Row this morning on your way to the barber’s and the tailor’s, and you never knew him.”

  I shrugged. I supposed she had a point, but that didn’t matter. She was telling me that she knew where I had been that morning, before I even met her, and who I had been with and what I had done. That wasn’t lost on me.

  “Perhaps,” I admitted.

  “You didn’t, he’s dead.”

  “Those are the times we live in.”

  “One of his informers betrayed him a year ago,” she said. “Someone sent him back to Dannsburg on four different trade caravans, a piece at a time. This is ‘harsh work’ we do, as you would put it, and our enemies are every bit as harsh as we are.”

  I cleared my throat and looked at her. Now that she had told me, I could almost see her age. There was something in the way she held her head, keeping her neck out of the light of the lamp with an ease that spoke of practiced skill. Something in the way her hands were neatly folded in her lap that was helping her hide the telltale signs of age on the backs of her knuckles. She was good, though. She was very, very good, and I would never had guessed if she hadn’t told me and I hadn’t been trying hard to look for those signs.

  “Tell me about the Queen’s Men, then,” I said. “I thought you were supposed to be knights.”

  “We are,” she said. “A particular order of the knighthood, one that answers directly to the crown. You won’t have seen any of us on the battlefield, though, not and known who we were. The sort of knight you’re thinking of, their weapons are the sword and lance and battle-axe. My weapons are gold and lace, and paints and powders. And the dagger, when it’s needed. You can hide a dagger very well indeed, behind enough lace.”

  I supposed that you could, at that.

  The right man for the right job, I thought. I wondered exactly what job Ailsa was here to do.

  SEVENTEEN

  I was still awake and sitting in the common room with Black Billy when those of the crew who had gone out came blundering back from Chandler’s Narrow in the small hours of the morning, drunk and looking pleased with themselves. Bloody Anne looked the most pleased with herself of all, and I hoped that she had found what she was looking for up there. I remembered how her and Rosie had been talking in the Tanner’s, and I thought that she probably had. It was only then that I noticed Billy the Boy was with them.

  I snagged Jochan’s arm as he swayed past.

  “Tell me you didn’t get Billy a woman,” I said. “He’s only got twelve years to him.”

  Jochan laughed. “He’s too young for that
,” he said. “He’ll have a pecker like your little finger. He said he wanted to come with us so I let him, but he just sat there staring at Sir Eland all night while we had our fun. Fuck knows why. The lad’s strange in the head, Tomas.”

  I saw Anne’s scar twitch at that, and her hand go to her pouch again. She’d be putting that nail under Billy’s bedroll tonight. I knew she would. I just hoped that Our Lady was kind and Billy didn’t wake up screaming from some nightmare, or I dreaded to think what Anne was likely to do.

  “Eland must have been pleased to see him,” I said, knowing he would have been nothing of the sort. “How’s Will the Woman getting on?”

  Jochan shrugged. “He knows what he’s about,” he said. “The place is the cleanest I can remember it, and the girls too. None of them have taken ill against him, anyway, so he must be doing right by them.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Licensed whores don’t grow on trees, and you have to keep them happy. Rosie might have said they had nowhere else to go, but I knew Ma Aditi’s Gutcutters would have taken them in tomorrow, and I thought that she probably knew that as well. The bawd’s knot had to be earned and paid for, after all, and it was what sets them apart from common street scrubs. That meant higher prices and more money all round. It sounded like Will was working out well up there in Chandler’s Narrow.

  “Go to bed, the lot of you,” I said. “It’s Godsday tomorrow, and I’ll be taking confession from those that want to give it.”

  Godsday fell every eighth day, the day when all the temples were opened and the priests of the various gods held confession and gave absolution to their faithful. Traditionally no one worked on Godsday. When times were as hard as they were now in Ellinburg, though, and folk had to work if they wanted to eat, most priests let that pass. In the army it had been irrelevant anyway, and sometimes it had been hard to even keep track of what day it was.

  At Abingon I had taken confession whenever someone wanted to give it. There was no saying they would still be alive come the appointed day, after all, but now we were back home it seemed only right that I put some formality into it. People expect certain things from a priest, in the same way they expect things from a businessman. They expected certain ways of being and of acting. I knew I’d need to remember that. Being a priest in a city in peacetime was different to being one in the army during a war. I knew that much, and I had never done it before.