Priest of Bones

by Peter McLean

  There was a stranger in the entrance, leaning on the counter with his hands clutching a wound in his side. I gave him Mercy without breaking stride. The sound of fighting was coming from down the corridor. Bloody Anne kicked the door open with her daggers drawn.

  Sir Eland had retreated to the parlor door, and there he was making his stand.

  He hadn’t had time to get into his armor when they attacked, of course, and he was standing there in his shirt and britches and bleeding from a dozen cuts, his long sword running scarlet in his hands. Four more men lay dead on the boards, but there must have been another six facing him. One man can hold a narrow space against many, until his strength deserts him or he is overcome by his wounds. It looked like Sir Eland was close to both of those things.

  Just as Anne stormed into the corridor a crossbow bolt burst through the neck of one of the Gutcutters, and I heard a ratchet being cranked from behind Sir Eland as someone frantically reloaded. Anne and Mika and me waded into the rear of the Gutcutters while the rest of our crew spread out through the building, searching the bedrooms and killing every stranger they found.

  Eland’s face split into a savage grin when he saw us, and he attacked.

  The hammer and the anvil, that was how we cleared the corridor in Chandler’s Narrow. That’s a terrible thing in such a confined space, and we butchered them until all of us were red to the elbows and it was done. The floor was littered with corpses, just like it had been at Messia.

  “Rosie!” Anne shouted.

  She shoved past Sir Eland and into the parlor, and now I could see the women he had been protecting. Rosie was at the front of them, with the crossbow in her hands. Three of the bodies on the floor had bolts in them, I noticed. Rosie had given a good account of herself while Eland held the door.

  I clapped Sir Eland on the shoulder.

  “You fought well,” I told him.

  “I really did,” he said, and collapsed at my feet.

  “Boss!” someone shouted from behind me.

  “See to Eland,” I snapped at Anne, and turned back down the corridor.

  Stefan led me up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms. There were more dead Gutcutters there, who I supposed had been looting the building, and two customers whom the Gutcutters had obviously killed themselves. I saw two of the women dead too, and that pained me. Will the Wencher was sprawled on the floor out cold with an ugly purple bruise on his temple. It looked like he had been trying to protect the girls who had been working when the Gutcutters attacked, but he had been unarmed at the time and had never stood a chance. I respected him for trying, all the same.

  Billy the Boy was waiting in that room, and he had something for me.

  I recognized the man at once. He wasn’t wearing his purple shirt that night, but I recognized him anyway. This was Gregor, Luka’s man in the Gutcutters. My man, bought and paid for. My man, who should have given us ample warning of this attack, and who had said nothing.

  He was backed against the wall, and Billy was staring at him. I didn’t know what Billy was doing to him, but it was plain to see that Gregor was pinned there as helpless as he would have been if four strong men had been holding him in place.

  “You’ll want this one alive,” Billy said, and as always he was right.

  I walked slowly toward the helpless man, Remorse and Mercy dripping red in my sticky hands.

  “Hello, Gregor,” I said, my voice taking on the tone that meant harsh justice was coming, and soon.

  “Mr. Piety, I can explain,” he said.

  I nodded slowly and turned and used Remorse to point at the half-naked woman lying dead on the floor with her guts hanging out of a ragged wound in her stomach. She couldn’t have had more than twenty years to her.

  “Explain that,” I said. “Explain to me why two of my girls are lying dead because I didn’t know there was going to be an attack on my stew. Explain to me why no cunt told me that.”

  “I can’t—” Gregor started, and I dropped and rammed Mercy through his calf hard enough to smash his shinbone.

  He howled.

  “Try again,” I said.

  “He’s got my son!” he gasped around the agony. “I couldn’t . . . He found out I was informing . . . I couldn’t!”

  Some people aren’t your friends, however much you pay them. They’re just scared to be your enemy. If someone finds a way to scare them more than you do, someone like Bloodhands, then you’ll lose them. I knew that well enough.

  “I grieve for those two women,” I said. “I grieve for them, but I didn’t know them. You’re very lucky, very lucky indeed, that it wasn’t a different woman who died here tonight. If Bloody Anne’s woman had been killed, Gregor, I would have given you to her. I want you to understand what that would have meant. Bloody Anne would have started at your feet and filleted you like a fish, if you had got her Rosie killed. Do you understand me?”

  He nodded, his teeth clenched against the fire in his ruined leg and the pain making flecks of spit bubble between his teeth.

  “I don’t think you do,” I said, and I smashed Remorse down hilt-first into his kneecap.

  He shrieked that time, and a moment later Bloody Anne came through the door behind me.

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

  “This is the man who almost got your Rosie killed tonight,” I said. “This is the man who Luka pays to tell us what the Gutcutters are doing. This is the man who didn’t. Fucking. Tell us.”

  I swear to Our Lady that I heard Bloody Anne growl, low in her throat like an animal. I held up a hand to stay her.

  “Is Sir Eland still alive?” I asked her.

  “Aye,” she said. “He’s weak, but he’ll live.”

  “Good,” I said. “I want you to do something for me, Bloody Anne. I want you to go downstairs and borrow Sir Eland’s sword from him, and bring it up here to me. Will you do that for me?”

  “Aye,” she said again, and left the room.

  I looked Gregor in the eye, and I held his fearful stare. Remorse and Mercy are beautifully crafted weapons but they are shortswords, and they’re not designed for taking a man’s head off.

  Sir Eland’s heavy war sword, though, that was.

  FORTY-FIVE

  It was a long night, and it didn’t end with the dawn.

  Will the Wencher came round in the end, and although he was groggy and having trouble standing I didn’t think his skull was broken, so that was good. We put him to bed and left him weeping over his dead girls.

  Anne didn’t want to let Rosie out of her sight after what had happened, but there was too much to do for me to allow that. Besides, I knew Rosie could take better care of herself than Anne credited her for. Mika and me and a couple of other lads set to repairing the door, and I told Anne to patch up Sir Eland. She was no barber surgeon like Doc Cordin, but in Abingon everyone had turned their hand as best they could. Anne could clean and stitch a wound well enough, when she had to. There was little enough love between the two of them, I knew, but he had fought well that night. Very well.

  It seemed to my mind that when Sir Eland had found himself the only thing between those women and death, he might finally have become the hero he had always pretended to be. He had found his place in the world at last.

  Billy the Boy was in charge of the big leather bag, and he seemed to take a pleasure in that. It was leaking, of course, but he guarded it well all the same. We held the house on Chandler’s Narrow all through the long, tense night, waiting for another attack that didn’t come. I wanted to go to the Golden Chains, but that was almost on Trader’s Row and I couldn’t get Ailsa’s words out of my head.

  You need to distance yourself, she had told me. Remove yourself from the immediate business of the Pious Men before things start exploding.

  No blasting weapons had been used that nigh
t, so far as I knew, but a night that bloody was as good as the same thing. If my face were seen at the Chains I wouldn’t be able to undo that. I had to put my faith in my brother, for all that the thought made me uneasy.

  The sky was just beginning to get light when Borys came to the house and banged on the newly shored-up door. Mika brought him to me, and I looked at the weary expression on his face.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  Borys had been with the crew Jochan had taken to the Chains, and he looked like he had seen hard fighting that night. His mail was rent in two places, and he had dried blood splattered over his face and a seeping cut on the back of his forearm.

  “It’s done, boss,” he said. “We drove them off and secured the Chains. A lot of them got away, though. Too many.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “Where’s my brother?”

  “The City Guard are all over the Chains like flies on shit,” he said. “Jochan slipped away back to the Tanner’s, to see the lay of things.”

  To find a bottle more likely, I suspected.

  “Who’s got the Chains, then?”

  “Cutter, with enough men to hold it and enough coin in the strongbox to keep the Guard from looking at us too hard.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t like it. My brother put too much trust in Cutter, to my mind.

  “Well and good,” I said. “I’ll meet him at the Tanner’s, then. Come with me. You too, Anne. Billy.”

  They nodded, and the four of us slipped out into the narrow and away down the steps. I left Mika in charge at the bawdy house for the time being, and we returned to the Tanner’s Arms as the sun was rising over the riverside streets.

  I found Jochan pacing the common room with a brandy bottle in his hand, as I had expected, but when he saw us he put it down and embraced me. That surprised me, I had to admit, but I didn’t think it was a good sign. Ailsa was up already, or more likely she had been up all night again. She gave me a smile too, and a hug for appearance’s sake. All the same I could tell she was furious with me for going off to fight with the crew.

  Luka came over and clapped me on the shoulder. I gave him a hard look.

  “Billy,” I said, “give Luka the bag.”

  Billy passed the wet sack over to Fat Luka, and I held his stare.

  “Get one of your little spies over here,” I said, “and have him take that up to the Wheels and dump it in Ma Aditi’s breakfast porridge.”

  “What’s in it?” Luka asked, but I think he knew.

  “Gregor’s head,” I said.

  Luka cleared his throat. “Aye,” he said.

  I could see he felt that he had failed me. That was harsh, I knew. This wasn’t Luka’s fault, for all that intelligence was his responsibility. I reached out and put a hand on his arm as he turned away.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “They had his son. No amount of gold could have prevented this.”

  Luka nodded, understanding, and went to send Cookpot out to rouse one of his spies from their bed. I wondered what Aditi would make of my little gift. Truth be told, I hoped she choked on it.

  “How bad was it?” I asked Jochan.

  He gave me a bleak look and took up his bottle again.

  “Bad,” he said. “We had to storm the place. Erik’s dead, and six of the new lads with him.”

  Erik had been a good man.

  “In Our Lady’s name,” I said.

  “What the fuck has Our Lady got to do with it?” Jochan roared. He turned and hurled his bottle across the room to smash against the wall. “You’re no fucking priest of Our Lady, Tomas, not no more you ain’t! All you want is more blood, and more fucking death, and it’s never enough for you, is it? You’ve become a fucking priest of bones!”

  He rounded on me with fury on his face, fists clenched and the battle shock shining bright in his mad, tear-filled eyes.

  I hit him.

  I hit my own little brother, who had once crawled weeping into my blankets and offered me the only thing he had to give. I’ve never been as good with my fists as Jochan was, but I caught him just right. My knuckles slammed into the tip of his prominent chin and sent him reeling backward into a table. He lost his balance and fell on his arse on the floor.

  He started to cry.

  I was suddenly aware of Captain Larn standing in the doorway to the storeroom, watching us. If he had said a single word right then I would have murdered him with my bare hands, but he was wise and he held his peace, and he turned away.

  He had a brother too, I remembered.

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour later they came at us again.

  A runner reached me to say that Georg the baker’s shop was on fire, and there were Gutcutters on the streets of the Stink.

  I doubted that my little gift had reached Aditi’s table by then, so I figured this must have been part of their original plan. It seemed the Gutcutters were throwing everything they had at us. We were all tired, and a lot of us were carrying wounds of some sort by then. I pressed Larn and his men into service.

  “It’s your watch,” I told him. “My lads have been fighting all fucking night.”

  Larn shook his head.

  “We’ll carry out planned missions but we’re not brawling in the streets,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. If the City Guard were to capture even one of my men and find out who we really are, the implications could reach Dannsburg itself. That is out of the question. I have my orders.”

  I wanted to hurt him, right then. I hadn’t slept in far too long, and I couldn’t get the image of the dead women at Chandler’s Narrow out of my mind. Captain Larn was a donkey’s shriveled prick, to my mind, but I knew that I needed him, and more to the point I needed his men and their weapons and their expertise.

  I took a deep breath and made myself nod.

  “As you say,” I said. “Hold here, then, and see that you hold fucking hard. Don’t forget you’re sitting on enough explosives to send half the Stink across the river. It wouldn’t do for you to let anyone set fucking fire to the place.”

  Larn’s jaw tightened at that. All sappers have a healthy respect for the tools of their trade, I knew. He would see that no Gutcutter got inside the Tanner’s with fire in their hands, if nothing else.

  I went to Jochan and put an arm around his narrow shoulders.

  “We have to do it again, brother,” I told him. “I know you don’t want to, but there it is.”

  Jochan looked up at me, and the tears were gone from his eyes. There was a hatred there now, not for me but for the whole world, a burning bloodlust that I hadn’t seen in a man’s face since the walls of Abingon finally fell.

  He nodded.

  “Get my fucking axe.”

  FORTY-SIX

  We stormed onto the streets of the Stink, exhausted and wounded but fueled by brandy and anger and our memories. The Gutcutters were attacking the businesses I had sworn to protect, and I couldn’t let that pass. Georg the baker was a good man. He had given me three treats for young Billy when I had only asked for one, and taken no coin for them. I have written that I wouldn’t forget that, and I hadn’t.

  By the time we got there the shop was blazing, but Georg and his family were out in the street and safe and that was all that truly mattered. He gave me a stricken look as we marched past, and I stopped to speak to him.

  “I will make this right,” I promised him, and I meant it. “I’ll bring harsh justice to those who did this, Pious Men justice, and I won’t see you out of pocket for what has happened. There’ll be a new shop for you, Georg, and all the coin you need to replace what you’ve lost.”

  “Bless you, Mr. Piety,” he said, bobbing his head in something that was almost a bow.

  I was a prince, in Ellinburg, and to my mind a prince looks after his people. That was how I ruled my streets.

/>   We turned a corner and now we had caught up with them. There were perhaps fifteen Gutcutters on Net Mender’s Row, breaking windows and setting fires. This was the poorest part of the Stink, here and Fisher’s Gate below it. The folk here had nothing worth taking from them, and I knew very well that the Gutcutters were making a deliberate effort to hurt those who had the least to spare. They wanted to make me look weak, I knew that, like the sort of man who would protect his gambling house and his stew and let his streets burn while he did it. They wanted to turn the very poorest of my people away from me, and in that I saw the hand of the Skanians. This plan had come from Bloodhands, not Aditi; I knew that much and I hated him for it. These people had done nothing!

  I drew Remorse and raised her above my head to catch the dawn light.

  “Company!” Bloody Anne bellowed at my side, in her sergeant’s voice. “Charge!”

  We fell upon them like the wrath of Our Lady.

  A glorious charge, in the light of the rising sun.

  It sounds so grand.

  It sounds like the stuff of legends, the act of heroes. Well, we were no heroes, and we were outnumbered and exhausted and hurt, and it was a fucking disaster.

  These were fresh men we were facing, and there were just too many of them. Five minutes of battle was enough to tell me that we were going to lose. Two of the new lads were down already, and Jochan was spitting blood from where someone had caught him in the mouth with the pommel of their shortsword.

  “This ain’t good,” he hissed at me when we found ourselves fighting back to back in the middle of the street.

  He was right, I had to allow. It wasn’t.

  “Anne!” I shouted over the clash of weapons. “Break and scatter!”

  “Break!” Anne roared at the top of her leather-lunged voice, a voice that carried better than mine ever would. Lady but she was loud. “Company, break and scatter!”

  The men did as they were ordered, every man who could, disengaging from his fight and fleeing into the alleyways around us. I found myself in a dank, narrow space with Jochan and Anne and young Billy beside me, watching the rest of my crew split in five different directions as the Gutcutters looked about themselves in bewilderment. These were my streets, and I knew them blindfolded. I had been born here, after all, and although most of my crew hadn’t been, they had had half a year and more to learn the lay of the area.