Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  She took a breath and shook her head. This didn’t sit well with her, I knew that, but she knew what needed to be done.

  “Teach him,” she said.

  “This is no house of magicians,” Kurt said. “He won’t learn no philosophy from me, nor mathematics beyond his ’rithmetic. I don’t scry the stars like they do in Dannsburg, nor summon up demons and make pacts with them neither. That’s high magic, and I don’t do that.”

  I doubted that the magicians in Dannsburg did that either, but then I wouldn’t know. I nodded and held my peace about that.

  “What can you teach him, Old Kurt?”

  Kurt snorted again and waved at the fireplace. There was a sharp crack, and the coals in the grate caught and burned with an acrid smoke that his chimney did a poor job of removing. Anne hissed and took a step back, her hands going to her daggers.

  “Easy, Bloody Anne,” I cautioned her. “This is what we’re here for.”

  “I can teach him the cunning, if he has the wits and the will to learn,” Kurt said. “Cunning is about real things in the real world, not stars and demons and debating high ideas. Sorcery, the magicians call that. Low magic. They look down their noses at it as being beneath them. Maybe it is, with all their money. A man as rich as a magician has servants to lay his fire for him, but a cunning man don’t so he makes his life easier the best way he can. A cunning man can set fires and quench them, mend hurts and cause them. A cunning man can tell you things you’ve forgotten you knew, and divine what tomorrow might bring.”

  “What do you think, Billy?” I asked the lad. “Do you want to learn from Old Kurt here?”

  Billy glanced at the fire and it abruptly went out, the last of the smoke curling slowly into the room.

  “I’ll be staying here,” he said again, and it seemed his mind was set on it.

  I nodded and looked at Kurt. He had a frown on his face and was staring hard at Billy. It occurred to me that perhaps it hadn’t been Kurt who had put the fire out. The old man cleared his throat like he was about to say something, perhaps change his mind, and I didn’t want that.

  “You’ll want paying,” I said.

  “I will,” Kurt agreed, and maybe it was talk of money that swayed him in the end. “A silver mark a week, for my time and his keep. Not a copper less, and I won’t dicker on this. If I’m teaching the lad I’ll have little time for anything else, and why should I be short of pocket? A mark a week, Piety, and I’ll take six weeks up front or you can fuck off.”

  That was a lot of money, but I had it. The price wasn’t something anyone else needed to know about, which meant I could draw on my hidden coin for it and no one would be the wiser. I nodded.

  “All right,” I said. “But you keep this between us, Old Kurt. The Pious Men know Billy is coming to learn from you, but the price has to be kept a secret and it has to stay that way. Does that sound fair?”

  Kurt nodded.

  “That’s fair,” he said.

  He stood and spat in his palm, and I spat in mine and we shook hands on it, the old way. I dug in my pouch and took out six silver marks and gave them to him. He nodded again, and it was done.

  That was how Billy the Boy started on the path to become a magician.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When we got back to the Tanner’s Arms my aunt was waiting for me, sitting in the common room with a mug of beer in her hand. She had the same look on her face that she had always got when I had been a child who was about to get a switching.

  “Aunt Enaid, what a pleasure,” I said.

  Brak was standing behind her chair like a bodyguard, and his expression said he felt somewhere between proud and foolish to be doing it. I hadn’t seen him since Enaid had got her house back, and I could only wonder what old stories she had been filling his head with of an evening.

  “Come and sit down, Tomas, and talk to your fat old aunt,” she said, and it wasn’t so much an invitation as an order.

  I did as she said, while Bloody Anne disappeared into the back to put her weapons away.

  “How are you, Auntie?” I asked her. “I hope the house is adequate.”

  “My house is fine and never mind that,” she said, fixing me with a glare from her one bright eye. She lowered her voice and leaned forward across the table toward me. “Who is that tart behind our bar, and where the fuck did she come from?”

  I cleared my throat and offered up a silent prayer to Our Lady that Ailsa’s hearing wasn’t good enough to catch Enaid’s words.

  “Ailsa is a barmaid, not a tart,” I said. “She’s working here, and she’s doing a good job.”

  “That’s not all she’s doing, to hear your men talk,” Enaid said.

  She grabbed her crotch for emphasis in a way that immediately reminded me that she had been a soldier herself. All the same, that wasn’t what I wanted to see from my own aging aunt.

  “Men talk,” I said, trying to shrug it off. “What of it?”

  “I’m disappointed in you, Tomas Piety,” she said. “I thought perhaps you and Anne, yes, but this? You and some foreign tart off the tea ships?”

  “She’s not a tart,” I said again, starting to get angry with her now, “and she’s not off the tea ships. And you thought it would be Anne? No, Auntie. Never Anne.”

  “If you can’t see past a scar, then I raised you wrong, Tomas,” she growled at me. “Anne’s a good woman, I can see that.”

  “Aye, she is,” I agreed, “and she’s a good friend too. Anne doesn’t enjoy male company, Auntie, not in that way.”

  Aunt Enaid looked at me for a moment, then turned and spat on the floor.

  “Bugger,” she said.

  “The fuck is it to you, anyway?”

  “I know how strange women can get to a man,” she said. “I don’t want that one whispering ideas into your ear on the pillow at night and making you soft in the head.”

  My head had never been on the same pillow as Ailsa’s, but as I watched her serving drinks and moving among the men I had to admit to myself that I wished it had. There was something about her that fascinated me, and it wasn’t just her looks. I was impressed by the way she had adapted so smoothly to our way of life, and by the easy way she had with the crew and the customers alike. All the lads seemed to love her, and that was how it should be. If she were really my woman, I thought, that would be a good thing for me and for the Pious Men. She would make any boss a fine wife. It was out of the question, I knew that, but that didn’t stop me wanting it to be otherwise.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was a long while before I got rid of Aunt Enaid, nearly midnight, and by then Brak was having to help her walk. She had one hand on her stick and the other on his arm, and she was still swaying visibly as she tottered toward the door. It was amazing how much one old woman could drink, when she put her mind to it and it was free.

  As the door started to close behind them I saw Enaid’s hand move from Brak’s arm to his arse, but I pretended that I hadn’t. She was almost thrice his age but that was between them, to my mind, and none of my business. I knew what my aunt was like, and I just hoped that Brak understood what sort of woman she was. I sighed and looked around the room. There were no customers left in there now, just Pious Men and Ailsa. I nodded to Black Billy and told him to close up for the night.

  Ailsa was racking dirty glasses and taking them through to the kitchen, and I got up and followed her. When I came in Hari picked up his stick and limped out, giving us our privacy.

  “Your aunt doesn’t like me any, Mr. Piety,” Ailsa said with a giggle.

  I kicked the door shut behind me and looked at her.

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t, but she’ll learn to live with it.”

  “She had better,” Ailsa said, using her own voice now that the door was closed—or at least what I assumed was her own voice. Perhaps it was
another act, I didn’t know. “The last thing I need is that old warhorse making trouble. Everybody else has accepted our pretense, and she needs to learn to do the same.”

  “She will,” I said.

  “Never mind that now,” Ailsa said. “There’s news. The Skanians have noticed your return, which by now is hardly surprising. I don’t think they’ll try to retake the boardinghouses, but only because they don’t care about them and you’ve chosen too good a defensive position for them to do it easily, which I’m pleased about. They still hold the Golden Chains, and I think that’s the only one of your businesses they really wanted. They’ll try to draw you out, though, to stretch you and force you to overreach until your supply lines break and you suddenly find you haven’t got enough men to hold your territory anymore.”

  I nodded.

  “I worked that out for myself,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Consolidate,” I said. “Build up the three businesses that I have, maybe recruit some more men if I think I’ll need them. Now that there’s income again I can start to trickle some of my stored funds through the businesses, make the money look legitimate. It’s a slow game, but I know how to play it.”

  “No,” Ailsa said, her voice turning sharp and cold. “You really don’t.”

  That made me look at her, and I noticed the hard set to her jaw as she sat down at the kitchen table. She waved me to a seat as though she were receiving me in her own parlor. This was what working for the crown was like, being fucking bossed around and made to feel small in my own place of business, and a pretty face didn’t change that.

  It was this, or hang.

  I swallowed it like bitter medicine, but that didn’t mean I liked it.

  “How so?”

  “You think small, Tomas, but then you’re a small man,” she said. “We play on a greater stage than you can imagine. The last thing you should do is consolidate. You need to expand, fast and hard while they don’t expect it.”

  “Which is the opposite of what you just said,” I pointed out.

  “No, it isn’t,” she snapped. “What I said was that they will try to draw you out and overstretch you, not that you should allow it to happen. Let them think you’re playing into their hands. Take back everything you had, as hard and as fast as you can. I have the means to fund it, if you need to hire men and buy weapons. I have access to men, for that matter, trained men we can slip in among the new recruits if we have to. Dangerous men. The Skanians must be stopped, Tomas.”

  I like to think that I’m not a fool, but Ailsa seemed to be trying to make me feel like one. I didn’t care for it. Not at all.

  I leaned across the table until I was very close to her.

  “I hate to tell you this,” I started quietly, “but I don’t give a fuck about your Skanians!”

  She didn’t even blink when I shouted in her face. She just held my gaze and slowly put a finger to her lips.

  “Shhhhh,” she said, as though she were speaking to a child. “I understand, Tomas. This is my business, not yours, and you’ve been dragged into it against your will. But understand this—things have changed, and we have moved beyond could and might and possibly, and into uncomfortable certainty. If we cannot stop this infiltration, there will be another war and we will lose. There will be another Abingon, right here in our own country. If you think that what you did in the south was harsh work, you have no idea what the Skanians would do to us in war. In war, and after they have won that war.”

  I swallowed, my mouth suddenly gone as dry as dust.

  I would never forget Abingon, but it was over and done with and it had been so far away it almost felt like a dream now, some nightmare from which I had awoken. I looked into Ailsa’s dark eyes, and it seemed I could see the flames of battle reflected in them, the mouths of the cannon looking back at me from her inky pupils.

  I reached out for my brandy.

  I managed to stop my hand from shaking, but only just.

  “Tell me what you want me to do,” I said, “and I’ll think on it.”

  Ailsa started to talk, and I to listen.

  * * *

  • • •

  I couldn’t sleep that night. My thoughts kept going back to what Ailsa had said. There will be another Abingon, right here. I couldn’t allow that, not if it was in my power to help stop it. These were my streets and my people, and I wouldn’t see them reduced to the smoking rubble and rotting corpses that we had left behind us in the south.

  That was well enough, but I knew my crew wouldn’t agree.

  These weren’t imaginative men, and to their minds they were good and done with this queen who had dragged them off to war against their will. When the time came for me to announce that we would be taking back another business, I knew the crew would set to it. If word got out we were doing it because an agent of the crown said so, though, then they’d raise the gods over it and I would lose half of them at least. These men weren’t patriotic or overly concerned with what the law might or might not say. They’d have been little enough use to me as Pious Men if they had been, after all. No, these were men out for themselves, trying to put the war behind them and make something fresh of their lives.

  I had promised them they would get rich and have all the good things in life. Perhaps I could still keep that promise, but if they thought I was working for anyone but myself they would come to doubt my words, and fast. People expect things of a businessman. One of those things is self-interest, and if I did this I would have to make sure it looked like I was acting for myself and the Pious Men, and no one else.

  Whatever happened, this wasn’t a decision I could share with Anne or Jochan or anyone else, not even Aunt Enaid. Sometimes a leader has to keep things to himself and make the hard decisions alone. We had come together as soldiers, and in the army you don’t get to vote on decisions. Orders come down the line and they are obeyed, and that’s just the way of things.

  It was nearly light by then. I kicked my blankets off and padded to the window, looking out into the predawn gray of the street below. Dew glistened on the cobbles, making them shine like dark pearls. I leaned forward and rested my forehead against the inside of the pane, feeling the cold glass against my skin.

  Abingon.

  I remembered smoke and dust and noise, the siege cannon firing day and night to bring down the great walls. There had been flames everywhere, in the city. Disease was rampant. Wounds got infected, and men died screaming in their beds. Supplies were lost or looted, and men starved. Even Cookpot couldn’t produce forage from thin air, but he had caught rats for us to eat rather than see us go hungry. The water was almost always bad, and it wasn’t uncommon to see men fighting with liquid shit running down their legs from their poisoned guts.

  Abingon, where I had seen men driven so mad by the constant noise of the guns that they didn’t know their own names anymore. I remembered a fellow brought before me for confession, dragged between two of the colonel’s bullyboys. He was a man broken with battle shock who had fled the field the day before when he simply couldn’t stand it another second longer. They brought him to me to say his confession, but all he could do was weep.

  Afterward, they executed him for cowardice.

  No, there couldn’t be another Abingon. Not here, not now.

  Not ever.

  It had been horrific and yet we had been on the winning side, those of us who had laid siege to Abingon. What it had been like for the defenders, the besieged, I couldn’t even bring myself to imagine. They were eating their own dead in Abingon, before it was over, and we’d heard tales of children being killed for meat by the starving soldiers.

  We will lose.

  You haven’t truly known Hell until you have seen a city under siege. That was what would happen here, if the Skanians got their way.

  I would do anything to prevent a repeat of Ab
ingon, especially here in my own city. Sometimes a man has to balance two evils in his hands and choose the lighter one. If that meant working for the crown, then so be it.

  Those were the times we lived in.

  The decision made, I went back to my blankets and I managed to sleep at last.

  That was how I gave my loyalty to the Queen’s Men.

  PART TWO

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Winter had come to Ellinburg and brought bitterness with it. It was six months since we had come home from the war.

  I was sitting at one end of a long table in the private dining room of a fine inn on Trader’s Row. That was neutral territory, outside of my streets and anyone else’s bar the governor himself. At the other end of the table, staring back at me, was Ma Aditi.

  She was a fat woman with perhaps forty years to her, richly dressed with thick black hair that framed her dusky brown Alarian complexion. She styled herself Mother, but if she had ever borne a child I didn’t know of it.

  Bloody Anne sat at my right hand, and Jochan at my left. The arrangement wasn’t lost on him, I knew, but by then he was becoming used to it. Bloody Anne had earned her place ten times over, these past six months. Fat Luka stood behind my chair, draped in his fine new clothes, and he leaned forward to whisper softly in my ear.

  “The one in the purple shirt,” he said. “Gregor.”

  I nodded without taking my eyes off Ma Aditi, and Luka straightened again and rested his big, strong hands on the back of my chair.

  I glanced at the man he had indicated, the one seated at Ma Aditi’s left hand. He was the one who was taking Luka’s bribes, then. Our man inside the Gutcutters. I wondered if Aditi had anyone inside the Pious Men yet, although I was sure she must have. More to the point, I wondered who it was.

  One of the new recruits, I was certain. The old crew was getting thin now—we had lost another three men in the bitter fighting to reclaim my businesses, and those who were left were loyal to the bone. Even Sir Eland the false knight had finally proven himself when an agent of the Gutcutters had offered him gold to betray me. Sir Eland had brought me his head in a wet sack, and when I clapped him on the shoulder and thanked him for his loyalty he almost wept. I thought that perhaps all Sir Eland had really wanted was a place in the world, and to my mind now he had found one.