Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  “You did the task that I set before you, and you led the men to do it, and that’s important,” I told him. “If you want to be followed, first you must lead. You lead men, but you don’t own them. When the steel is drawn, every man’s fate is in his own hands and those of Our Lady. Not yours.”

  “Aye,” he whispered.

  “It was their time to cross the river, and Our Lady forgives you,” I said. “In Our Lady’s name.”

  I doubted Our Lady much cared one way or the other, but it was what he needed to hear.

  Desh looked up at me, and I could see the loyalty burning fiercely in his eyes.

  “In Our Lady’s name,” he repeated, and that was done.

  After I had heard confessions I put it about that there would be a meeting of the Pious Men that evening and that all my top table and all those others who could be spared were to be there. I told Desh he was to be there too, and why.

  Come the evening we were all seated around the long table in the back room of the Tanner’s, me with Bloody Anne at my right hand and Jochan at my left, with Aunt Enaid and Fat Luka and Sir Eland and the others. I had the Weeping Women buckled around my waist.

  Anne had spoken to Desh beforehand, and now he was waiting awkwardly by the door while everyone stared at him. He was wearing his best coat and standing tall, but I could see the nervousness on his face. They were hard men and women around that table, and I could see Desh’s gaze move from Cutter to Mika to Sam to Stefan, as though looking for some sign of acceptance in their scarred faces and flinty stares.

  “This is Desh, as you all know,” I said. “He’s served us this last year, and since the summer he’s been an underboss among the hired lads. He’s done well, to my mind, and I propose to give him a seat at this table as a full Pious Man. If anyone here gathered thinks otherwise, now would be the time to say so.”

  I looked around the table and for a moment I caught my aunt’s eye, but she held her peace the same as the others and that pleased me. This was how we had done it before the war, with Alfread and Donnalt and others who had long since crossed the river. When I brought my crew back from Abingon and made them Pious Men there had been no time, and the ceremony would have meant nothing to them anyway, but Desh was Ellinburg born and bred and I knew that he’d been waiting half his life for this moment. I owed it to him to do things properly.

  I nodded and got to my feet, pushing my chair back from the table. I looked at him and pointed to the chair.

  “Sit,” I said.

  Desh cleared his throat and sat in my chair, and I drew Remorse and laid it on the table in front of him where the light of the lamps would make the steel shine. I took his left hand in mine and drew Mercy.

  I cut his palm with the edge of the blade, then curled his hand into a fist in mine and squeezed it hard. His blood dripped onto the table in front of him, and he gritted his teeth but said nothing.

  “Your blood on this table means we are now one family,” I said. “I told you once that family is important, but now it’s your life. If you would be a Pious Man you will live by the sword in front of you, in brotherhood with those here gathered, from this day forth until the day that you cross the river. Do you so swear?”

  Desh nodded, looking a little pale but with a fervor that told me he meant it.

  “I do so swear,” he said.

  I stood him up and took him by the shoulders, and then I embraced him and kissed him on both cheeks. Bloody Anne was next to welcome him into the family in her place as my second, then Jochan, then Aunt Enaid, then Luka, and so on until each man around the table had embraced him and kissed his cheeks in brotherhood.

  That was how Desh became a Pious Man at last.

  * * *

  * * *

  I was sitting behind the desk in my study in the big house off Trader’s Row, going through some papers of accounts. It was wet that morning and I was listening to the late-autumn rain pattering against my window and the crackle of the fire in the grate when a footman knocked at the door to tell me Desh was wanting me.

  “Show him in,” I said, and a minute later the lad was standing there dripping on my good Alarian carpet.

  His coat was magnificent, better than many of mine, in fact, and I knew he must have spent a small fortune on it. Status mattered to Desh, as I have written. That was the lever that moved him, and now that he was finally a Pious Man at last he obviously wanted everyone to know it. I could understand that.

  “Boss, can I have a word?” he asked me.

  I waved him to one of the chairs opposite my desk, just the way Governor Hauer had when he had received me in his own study.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  Desh cleared his throat, and he told me about a cunning man that he had found up on Rigger’s Alley and how he had put our standing offer to him. This fellow, Desh told me, had flat refused him.

  “I see,” I said, when he had said his piece. “And why’s that, then?”

  “Well,” Desh said, and he looked uncomfortable about it, “he didn’t give me the time of day, boss, but that got me thinking about why not. I know I’m new and I know I’m young, but word’s got around who I am and who I work for. I get respect on my patch, but not off this fucker I didn’t. That made me angry, but it made me curious, too. So I asked some questions and I spent a bit of coin to get them answered, and it seems to me from what I heard that maybe the Northern Sons got to him first.”

  I’d put the lad in charge of a small area in the north of the Wheels, up near the docks where the rebuilding was still going on. Desh was doing well up there, so Luka told me, establishing his authority and getting respect. It seemed someone hadn’t respected him enough, but at least he’d had the sense to come to me about it rather than trying to hide what an older man might have seen as an embarrassment.

  “That’s interesting,” I said.

  It was more than interesting. If the Sons were taking notice of the cunning folk too, then we had a problem, one that I needed to talk to Ailsa about. That was nothing Desh needed to hear, though.

  “What do you want me to do, boss?”

  I gave him a level look. He was a Pious Man now, and he needed to learn to think for himself.

  “What do you think you should do?”

  “We can’t be disrespected on our own streets, and we can’t let the Sons take our folk,” Desh said, and he was right about that. “All the same, though, he’s a cunning man. I don’t . . . I don’t know what he might do, if I took some lads up there and we went and kicked his door in.”

  Desh didn’t want to get any more men killed, I knew that. That was something he’d need to harden up over, given time. All the same, though, he had the right of it for now.

  “No, don’t do that,” I said. “You’re right to be cautious around the cunning, and you were right to bring this to me. Well done. Give me this man’s name and I’ll deal with it.”

  Desh nodded, obviously relieved.

  “Arndt, his name is,” he told me. “He’s got a little cooper’s shop, up on Rigger’s Alley like I said.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, that’s good. You’re doing well, Desh. I’m pleased.”

  I opened a drawer in my desk and took out a purse, and gave him five silver marks.

  Desh looked at them in surprise before making them disappear into his pouch with a nod of thanks.

  “Get yourself some more nice clothes,” I said. “You deserve them.”

  Desh smiled at me and nodded.

  He was a Pious Man now, and I knew that was all he had ever wanted in his life.

  FIFTEEN

  I had to tell Ailsa, of course. I’d like to say she took it well, but that would be a lie.

  “This won’t stand, Tomas,” she told me once Desh had left. “My orders were very clear—the cunning folk join us, or they must be removed.”

  �
�Removed,” I repeated. “If you mean killed, then say killed.”

  “Of course I mean killed,” she snapped. “We are not children, Tomas, and this is not a child’s game we play. The Skanian magicians are dangerous enough as it is without them recruiting new talent that rightfully belongs to the crown.”

  I frowned, trying to see how she worked that out.

  “Our streets, our people, you mean?” I said at last.

  “Exactly that, but on a larger scale,” she said. “Subjects of the crown owe their loyalty to their country and to their queen; it’s that simple. Anyone who would choose otherwise is a traitor and will be dealt with as such.”

  “How would this fellow even know?” I asked her. “He’s chosen between one gang and another in the same city, to his mind, that’s all. That might be betraying me, to an extent, but not the crown.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, her voice cold enough to make it clear that was to be an end to the discussion. “Remove him. At once.”

  I sighed. I had thought that would be her answer. The Queen’s Men weren’t renowned for their tolerance of differing opinions, after all.

  “Aye, as you say,” I said. “I’ll need Billy, though. I don’t know how strong this Arndt is, and I haven’t forgotten what that Lisbeth nearly did to me at the Tanner’s Arms.”

  “Quite,” she said. “Billy is a valuable asset. Use him.”

  Billy was my adopted nephew, as far as I was concerned. He was as good as my son, not a fucking asset, but there it was. Ailsa knew what needed to be done and the best way to get it done, as she always did, and I couldn’t argue with her on that.

  “I will,” I said, “but if he’s going, then so am I.”

  Ailsa gave me a look for a moment, then nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “I told you before that I don’t want to trust the matter of the cunning folk to your underlings. You deal with it.”

  I had meant more that I wasn’t sending a lad of barely fourteen off to the north of the Wheels to fight on my behalf without me, but Ailsa didn’t see that. Still, if we ended up at the same answer through different lines of reasoning, then that was well and good, to my mind. The answer was the important thing, not the path to it.

  “Aye,” I said. “I’ll arrange it.”

  “This won’t keep, Tomas,” she said. “He must be removed before the Sons can make use of him. You go tonight.”

  I met her stare for a moment, then nodded. That wasn’t just my wife making my life hard because she could, in the way that wives sometimes do. That was a direct order from the Queen’s Men, and I knew I had to obey it. I was in far too deep now to have any other option. I had taken the crown’s money, dirty money, and that was bad enough. I had accepted their help, too, and there was no coming back from that. There was no coming back from what Ailsa had done on our wedding day. I sighed and went to get it done.

  Billy was actually at home for once that day, and I went up to his room to find him.

  He was sitting in the chair under his bedroom window with his big black book open on his lap and a quill in his hand. He was bent over his work, the pen scratching furiously across the velum as he wrote.

  I knocked on the open door and stepped into the room, and he looked up at me with a blank expression on his face.

  “Uncle Tomas,” he said.

  “Hello, Billy.”

  “I’ll kill a man, tonight,” he said.

  I stared at him.

  He knew. Somehow he already knew, and there was no fear or argument in his eyes. If this man Arndt had to die, then Billy and me would kill him, and I knew he would think nothing of it.

  “Aye,” I said after a moment. “I think we might have to. He’s a cunning man, Billy, an Ellinburg man, but he ain’t on our side. That means—”

  “He has to die,” Billy interrupted me, and there was no trace of emotion in his voice. “I know, Uncle Tomas. He will.”

  “Right,” I said. “Right, well. That’s good, I suppose.”

  No, Billy didn’t need a reason or an explanation. Our Lady had told him what he would do, or at least something had, and he would do it.

  The boy’s fucking possessed.

  I nodded again and left him to it. Sometimes Billy gave me the fear, as I have written, and I’ve no shame in admitting that this was one of those times.

  I closed his bedroom door behind me and went back downstairs, and sent one of the housemen off into the rain to find Fat Luka and bring him to me. That done, I sat down in my study and poured myself a brandy, and for the first time in a long while I said a prayer. Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows doesn’t answer prayers, I knew that much, but just that once I hoped perhaps She might at least listen to one.

  By the time Luka arrived it was midafternoon and I was watching the sheeting rain through my study window. I told Luka what Desh had told me and that he was to set some of his spies to watching this Arndt’s shop. If the man went out before we got there, then I wanted to know where he went and who he spoke to. It was only going to be Billy and me that night, and I didn’t want to risk running into half a dozen of the Northern Sons creeping around down there in the Wheels with steel in their hands.

  The Wheels were mine, yes, but the closer to the docks you went, the closer you got to Northern Sons territory on the west, and some of the borders were still a bit unclear. In the Stink the Sons could never have got an armed band near me, but down there it wasn’t impossible.

  No, it wasn’t impossible at all.

  * * *

  * * *

  We waited until well after dark, and then me and Billy the Boy headed out wearing nondescript clothes and patched old cloaks. It felt like old times then, like on the road from Messia, when we had been ahead of the main march of the army and had caught up with the enemy’s baggage train. It had been raining then, too, and outnumbered as we had been, we’d raided under the cover of darkness and melted away into the night afterward like ghosts. Tonight would be like that, I knew.

  At least, I hoped so. I’d have liked to have a couple of the other men with us just in case, but Ailsa insisted that anything to do with the cunning folk was crown business and was to be kept away from the Pious Men as much as possible.

  “Are you all right, Billy?” I asked him as we slipped out of the alley we had been following through the Wheels and onto the top of Dock Road, beyond the blackened ruin of a tavern called the Stables. That filthy place would never be rebuilt, not while I was boss it wouldn’t. Running whores was one thing, but the Stables had run children. Boys as young as six had been whored out of the Stables, until Billy and I had put a stop to it with fire and sword. Never again, not on my fucking streets.

  He nodded.

  “Yes, Uncle Tomas,” he said.

  I led him across the road and into another alley, our sodden hoods pulled up and the rain dripping from them as it lashed against the cobblestones and made puddles around our boots. I found Rigger’s Alley at last, with only the light of a single lantern hanging from a rusty iron bracket on a street corner to guide us. I didn’t know the north of the Wheels as well as I should, I had to admit, and in the dark and this weather it was hard to keep my bearings.

  At last I spotted Luka’s man, a scrawny type who was huddled in a doorway under a threadbare blanket with an old tin cup in front of him, pretending to be a beggar. Good that he was only pretending; his cup was half full of rainwater, but there were no coins in it.

  “Pious, in Our Lady’s name,” I murmured to him as Billy and me joined him in his scant shelter.

  “Mr. Piety,” he whispered. “He’s gone out, sir. Not far, just down the way to a sink called the Barrel o’ Tar. Gone drinking like, I reckon. We’ve another man there, watching the door.”

  I nodded and dropped a silver mark into the man’s cup, where it landed with a splash.

  That wasn’t what I had wan
ted to hear. I had wanted to find this Arndt at home, alone and well away from prying eyes, where Billy could keep his cunning under control and I could do what needed to be done in peace.

  If he was out drinking, probably spending the coin the Northern Sons had given him, then he could be out half the night or more. If he went out the back with some street scrub and then down an alley and into Sons territory we might never see him again, and I could just imagine what Ailsa would have to say about that.

  No, that wouldn’t do at all. She had told me it wouldn’t keep and that meant we were doing it tonight, wherever he was.

  “We’re going for a drink,” I told Billy, and the lad just nodded.

  Luka’s man told us the way, and sure enough after a couple of turns there was the Barrel o’ Tar. It was nothing but a door in a windowless wall, with a lantern and a faded sign over it and another beggar slumped in a doorway opposite. He had his head down and his hood pulled forward to keep the rain out of his face.

  He looked up as we approached, and coughed.

  “Pious,” he muttered. “Pious, in Our Lady’s name.”

  I stopped and pretended to take a piss in the next doorway, close enough to hear him over the rain.

  “Well?”

  “He’s still in there, boss,” the beggar said. “Might be he’s with friends and might be not, I can’t rightly say.”

  I grunted and tossed him a coin as well, then led young Billy across the street and through the low doorway into the Barrel o’ Tar.

  The smell of the sink tavern was vinegar and sweat and bad eggs, tallow smoke and vomit. If this was the best place he could afford to drink, then either our man Arndt had very simple tastes or the Sons hadn’t paid him as much as I would have expected. The ceiling was low and the air thick with smoke from the fire and the candles and a few illicit resin pipes that burned in the shadows. There was no bar as such, just a trestle table set up in front of three barrels standing against the back wall and a fat, ugly woman standing behind it in a stained shift. The man lurking at the end of the table was fatter and uglier and had the look of her brother about him. He had a big wooden club at his belt with rusty nails hammered through it.