by Peter McLean
Grieg just looked like himself in foolish clothes, but that was well enough. No one at the Golden Chains would know Grieg, after all, or Erik or Cutter. It was Jochan and me, and maybe Luka, that someone might recognize. I would be dressed as a lord, and I had clothes enough for that already. Jochan was to be the dandy, and posing as my friend. Grieg, Erik, and Cutter had footman’s livery, and Fat Luka was to be a bard.
Ailsa came down after a while with her pots of paints and powders in one hand and a bag in the other.
“Now, my lovely boys, who’s first?”
I went first, to show them there was no shame in it.
Ailsa could have opened a theater company with the things she had in that bag. Two hours later I had graying hair and a faded scar on my cheek, and lines around my mouth and eyes that made me look like I had twenty more years to me than I had in truth. She held the looking glass up for me and smiled.
“You look like some old duke, with a boyhood dueling scar,” she said.
I did, at that.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s fine work, Ailsa. Very fine.”
“Oh, I have my talents, Tomas. You of all people should know that,” she said, getting a laugh from the men for her sauce. “Now then, my lovelies, who’s next?”
Jochan went next. The day before he’d had Ernst style his wild hair into a pomaded swirl that the barber had assured us was how the fine gentlemen of Dannsburg were wearing theirs this season, and he had grown a fashionably thin strip of beard on his pointed chin. He looked ridiculous, to my mind, but more importantly he looked like a different man. Ailsa didn’t have to do much work on him, just some darkness around the eyes that somehow made him look like he lived an overly dissolute lifestyle and slept for too few hours a night, which wasn’t all that far off the truth. She was so skilled with her paints and powders it was almost witchcraft.
Luka was the hardest.
He had always been fat, but he had got even fatter over the past six months, and there was no hiding that. He had tried to grow a beard but with little success, and the patchy stubble on his plump cheeks just made him look like there was something wrong with him. Ailsa tutted and fussed and opened her bag and started to work with a pot of glue and a little brush.
I watched, transfixed, as Luka’s beard took shape. She had all the tools of the mummer’s trade in that bag, false hair and glues and dyes and things I couldn’t even put names to, things to hide scars and things to raise them, things to make beards and things to cover baldness.
When she was done with Luka I could have walked past him in the street and not known him. He now had a thick, full beard, and he looked older and somehow more important than he had before. He looked ready to take the stage at a grand theater in Dannsburg and act a part from one of the great tragedies. How do you make a man look like an actor? I wouldn’t know, but Ailsa obviously did.
By the time the painting was done it was dark outside so the rest of us got into our clothes, and then Bloody Anne came down the stairs and joined us.
I was pretty once, Tomas, she had told me, and I saw now that it was true.
Her hair was still short, but Ailsa had styled it with wax so that it curled around her face, and she was wearing the magnificent green silk gown that I had paid Pawl a small fortune for. Her scar was invisible, and if the side of her face didn’t move much then I doubted anyone would notice. Noblewomen weren’t renowned for smiling, after all.
“Fuck a nun,” Jochan said when he saw her. “Is that really you, Bloody Anne?”
“Fuck yourself, Jochan,” she said. “It’s me, all right, and bugger if this dress isn’t sending me half mad already.”
If I looked hard, really hard, I could just about see the line of her scar under the thick coating of powder on her face. Anyone who didn’t know it was there would never have noticed, I was sure of that. I had no idea what Ailsa had used to fill it with, but I only hoped it wouldn’t fall out before the evening’s work was done.
“Right,” I said. “Listen to me. You all know the plan, but now it’s time to put it into action so we’re going to go over it one more time. The captain always said you can’t be too prepared, and he had the right of that. Just remember that no plan survives first contact with the enemy, and tonight we’re going right into the heart of them. The Golden Chains was my business before the war, but these bastards who’ve stolen it from me have made it their stronghold. There’s money in the Chains, not just silver marks but real gold crowns money. This is where the rich folk go to play their games of cards and smoke their fucking poppy resin, and it’s guarded tight as a virgin’s arse. We stick to the plan, boys, but as soon as it goes off we take them hard and fast. They’ll have the numbers but we’ll have surprise, so we’ve got to be quick and brutal about it. You understand?”
Heads nodded around the room, and that was good. Brutal was something these men understood, I knew that. Jochan flourished what he thought was a courtly bow, lace spilling from his cuffs as he moved his arm.
“My dear sir, we shall kill them all most terribly fucking politely,” he said, and the men laughed.
“Just remember who you’re supposed to be, and try not to say fuck too much,” I said. “The carriage will be here in a minute. Luka, have you got your lute case?”
“Yes, boss,” he said, his expression serious under his mummer’s beard as he picked up the heavy instrument case and hefted it in his hand.
Jochan might not be taking this very seriously, but I could tell that Luka was, and that was good. I could see that this felt like a grand caper to Jochan and Grieg, an excuse to dress up and play the fool, but it wasn’t. The Golden Chains was important to me, and more than that it was important to Ailsa.
There were actual Skanians there, she had told me, not just their hired agents. This was the one business of mine that they had really wanted: the place where the rich folk went. The Golden Chains was a gambling house just off Trader’s Row where hands of cards were played for more money than a working man made in a year, and now it was a place where aristocrats smoked the finest poppy resin to escape the tedium of their privileged lives.
The place had always been strong, but since the poppy trade began, the Skanians had made the Golden Chains into a fortress, beyond my means to simply storm. I wouldn’t be doing this the way I had taken back my other businesses, I knew that. My original idea had been to make a deal with the Gutcutters, to take it between us through sheer force and split the business, but when I had seen Ma Aditi smoking resin I had known that idea had gone to the whores. The Chains was the center of the resin business in Ellinburg, everyone knew that. Aditi would hardly be likely to want to kill her own supplier, after all.
No, that plan was dead and in the shithouse, as Anne had said. That left cheating, and the captain had taught me well how to cheat.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Lady Alicia Lan Verhoffen,” Anne announced herself to the five guards on the door of the Golden Chains. They looked frozen, all of them huddled in heavy cloaks against the winter night. “My consort, Baron Lan Markoff, and his friend the honorable Rikhard Spaff. My bard, and three footmen of no account.”
Ailsa had coached her well, for all that Bloody Anne had struggled to take instruction from a barmaid she regarded as no more than a tart. Her accent was passable Dannsburg, if nowhere near as sharp as Ailsa’s was when she spoke with her own voice. I nodded to the head doorman and palmed a silver mark into his hand by way of introduction.
My own accent is so strongly Ellinburg that there was nothing to be done about it, so we had agreed that I would say as little as possible. Keep a disdainful silence, Ailsa had advised me, and from what I knew of nobles that didn’t seem so far from the truth.
“Your bard?” the man asked, his breath clouding the air in front of him. “It’s not usual to bring your bard to a gaming house.”
“I enjoy music,” Bloody An
ne said, her mouth held in the tight line that was all the filler Ailsa had set into her face would allow. “I may wish for a tune, later, after I have wiped your tables clean of coin.”
I could see the doormen looking at us, obviously scanning us for weapons. Of course, there was nowhere to hide anything larger than a pocketknife in any of the ludicrous clothes we were all wearing.
“My lady enjoys music,” I repeated, giving the man a look.
I was dressed in my finest clothes, and the gray in my hair and the false dueling scar on my cheek made me look every inch a Dannsburg noble. If my accent was wrong then surely that only spoke of a man widely traveled, or so I hoped. I was very cold, and standing out in the street wasn’t helping.
The doorman fingered the coin I had given him and nodded.
“As you will, my lord baron,” he said, and finally let us in.
“Wait by the door, boy,” I told Cutter. “My lady may wish for something from her carriage during the evening.”
Cutter nodded and loitered in his footman’s costume next to the two men on the inside of the great oak-and-iron front door. They exchanged the sympathetic looks of put-upon servants.
The remaining five of us walked down the corridor and into the warmth of the main gaming hall. There were no more guards along the way, as I had suspected there wouldn’t be. I knew the Golden Chains, and I knew how it was run. I had used to run it myself, after all.
There was only one way in or out, and that was the door we had just come through. There had used to be a tradesman’s door at the back, once, but I had bricked that up myself. One door is easier to guard than two, after all, and guarded it was. There were five men outside that door, as I said, and from what Ailsa’s spies had reported there were another five patrolling around the building, watching the narrow windows.
The whole idea was to keep prospective threats out of the business. Once inside, the wealthy patrons didn’t want a horde of thugs with weapons standing over them. There were only five men in the gaming hall who were conspicuously armed, although I suspected the card dealers and footmen probably had blades of some sort hidden about their persons as well. Storming the Golden Chains by brute force would have been virtually impossible even with the Gutcutters’ help, I realized now.
This way was better.
The warm air in the main room was thick with the sickly smoke of poppy resin, and the light was dim. There were maybe a dozen patrons at the gaming tables, all of them playing the same complicated game with cards and stacks of wooden counters. I understood nothing of it, but Jochan had assured me that he knew how the game was played.
“Cards,” he announced with a joyful smile that I didn’t think he was having to feign.
“Not for me,” I said, taking a glass of wine from a tray held by a footman in the livery of the house.
“My friend the Baron Lan Markoff is a terrible bore,” Jochan went on as he drew up a chair at one of the card tables, pushing his way between a man in elegantly cut gray wool and a woman in a russet silk dress. He was affecting a ridiculous accent that made him sound somewhere between a rich drunk and a simpleton. “Never plays a bloody hand. Name’s Spaff, the honorable, et cetera. I bloody love cards. No good at it, though, but it’s only money and I’ve got shitloads of that. What’s the buy-in?”
One of the other players grinned at him, and silver moved from Jochan’s purse to the banker’s box to be replaced by a small stack of wooden counters. Why they didn’t just play for coin I didn’t know, but I suspected they may have regarded it as being beneath their honor or some such nonsense. One thing I have noticed in life is that the men who speak the most of honor are usually those who have the least of it.
“How very tedious,” Bloody Anne said loudly, in her best Dannsburg accent. “All these silly people, playing games with cards. It pleases me that you do not indulge, my lord baron.”
I made a noncommittal noise, looking out the corners of my eyes at a tall man in an extremely expensive-looking coat who was heading our way. This was the one, I was sure. This had to be the Skanian who Ailsa had told me was running the Chains.
“Baron . . . ?” he asked, letting the question hang in the air.
“Lan Markoff,” I said in as gruff a tone as I could manage without sounding too Ellinburg.
“A pleasure,” the man said, although I noticed he offered no name of his own. “I cannot place your accent, my lord baron.”
“The accent of ships and caravans,” I said with a shrug. “I am a merchant speculator. My home is Dannsburg, although I’ve not seen the city in years.”
I had no idea what a “merchant speculator” was, but Ailsa had assured me it was a plausible occupation for a minor noble such as a baron. The man’s smile widened a little, and I could only assume she had been right about that.
“Have your travels taken you to Skania, my lord baron?”
“Not as yet,” I said, “although who knows what the future may bring? I’m not here to discuss business, not tonight.”
I looked around the gambling house, affecting boredom in an attempt to steer the conversation away from this supposed occupation of mine that I didn’t know the first thing about. The Skanian obviously caught my mood.
“If cards are not to your liking, Baron,” he said, “perhaps I might offer you and your lady something . . . a little more relaxing?”
He meant resin, of course, and I wanted no part of that. All the same, we had to stick to the plan. I turned away and coughed into my fist, taking the opportunity to glance over my shoulder. Fat Luka was two paces behind me, where he should be, with his heavy lute case in his hand. He met my eyes and nodded a fraction.
“A pipe would be most soothing,” Bloody Anne said, “don’t you think, my dear?”
“Aye,” I agreed. “Pipes it is.”
The man turned away from us and clicked his fingers at a footman, and I shot Jochan a look.
Now, I mouthed at him.
“Fucking cheat!” Jochan bellowed.
He surged to his feet with a roar and flipped the card table over, scattering drinks and counters and cards all over his astonished fellow players.
That was the signal.
I heard a grunt from down the corridor as Cutter’s tiny blades, no larger than pocketknives, sent the men inside the door on their way across the river. I could only offer up a prayer to Our Lady that Cutter could get the key turned in the lock and the heavy beam down across the inside of the door before the men outside stormed in to see what the shouting was about.
If not, we were done.
Jochan punched the man next to him full in the face, sending him reeling backward into his fellows. Anne yanked up the skirts of her dress to reveal her daggers, one sheath strapped to each pale thigh. She drew her blades and hammered one into the Skanian’s chest without word or hesitation.
Fat Luka flipped open his lute case, took out a compact crossbow, and shot the nearest guard through the gut even as he tossed my sword belt to me with his free hand. I grabbed it out of the air and drew the Weeping Women, letting the leather fall to the floor as the armed men in the room charged us with bared steel in their hands.
I was hard-pressed for a moment before Jochan vaulted the overturned card table and grabbed his axe from Luka’s open case. We felled three men between us. Luka, Grieg, and Erik took up their weapons and waded in. Even Luka wasn’t strong enough to have carried enough weapons for everyone in one hand, so this had been the plan. The surprised guards fell before us.
Our Lady smile on me, it was working.
It kept working until another Skanian came out of the back room. This one was older than his dead fellow, his long blond hair bound back from his gaunt face with a silver clasp. He was wearing robes not unlike my priest’s garb, but I knew this was no priest. His eyes were as hard as any soldier’s, his thin lips drawing tight with fury as he saw hi
s countryman lying dead on the floor in a spreading pool of blood.
Grieg took a step toward him with a guard’s shortsword held ready to do murder, and the Skanian raised his hand. A great gout of fire burst from his fingers and took Grieg full in the face.
He fell shrieking, the meat cooking from the bones of his skull even as the rest of us hastily took cover behind overturned tables. A moment later Grieg exploded as though he’d had a flashstone sewn up inside him.
“Lady save us!” I gasped, although I knew she wouldn’t. “Magician!”
Sudden panic gripped the room. The other patrons had seemed almost bemused by the earlier violence, as though armed men fighting were beneath them and none of their affair, but now they were cowering along with the rest of us and that was good. That added to the confusion.
The magician, who hadn’t seen the initial eruption of violence and didn’t know who was who, wasted precious moments burning a young man with foolish hair who had nothing to do with anything.
Anne took aim with one of her daggers and let it fly in a long overhand throw, but the blade seemed to swerve in the air as it neared the Skanian magician. The dagger made an impossible turn and ended up embedded harmlessly in the wall behind him.
“Bloody witchcraft!” Anne spat.
Something moved behind me, just outside my vision. It seemed to scuttle along the wall like an oversize rat, but it was gone before I had time to take it in. I had to duck again as a new blast of flame washed across the room from the magician’s hands, setting a tapestry on fire behind me. I didn’t have time to think about what the moving thing might have been. There was only one way in or out of the Chains, as I have said, and I could hear the guards outside pounding on that door even now. If the fire took we would all burn alive in there. It could be minutes before the second half of my plan bore fruit, and I didn’t think we had minutes to spare.