by Peter McLean
“Shit night,” the woman observed as I approached her table, rain dripping from my cloak.
“Aye,” I said. “Two mugs, if you please.”
She drew two wooden tankards of beer for us from the barrel behind her and thumped them down on the table, and I passed her a copper. I wasn’t paying more than that, and she made no argument about it. If anything I had probably overpaid, in a place like this.
Billy took one of the mugs and sipped it, and his face told me all I needed to know about the quality of the beer. He was looking around the room, a slight frown on his smooth young forehead. After a moment he tapped me on the arm.
“The far corner, Uncle Tomas,” he murmured. “See the scrub on that man’s lap? Mark the fellow beside her, with the sick down his shirt. That’s him.”
I just nodded. Billy could sense the cunning in someone, or perhaps he could actually see it somehow, I wouldn’t know. That was how he had known Katrin and Gerta had been genuine and how he had uncovered the frauds we had found too.
“Aye, I mark him,” I said. “Well done, Billy.”
“He needs a piss,” Billy said.
That made me blink, but if Billy could see one thing about a man then I supposed there was no reason he couldn’t see another. The man looked drunk enough to just piss in his britches where he sat, to my mind, but Lady willing I was wrong about that. If he went out the back, then we had a chance.
I took a sip of my beer and wished I hadn’t. It had an oily sheen on the top of it and a taste that told me it was a quarter river water. A minute later the man in the vomit-stained shirt lurched to his feet and staggered away from the bench he had been sitting on, almost knocking the scrub off her customer’s lap. I thought they might actually be fucking, but it was too dark to tell for sure, and I wasn’t sorry about that.
“If he goes out the back to piss we’ll follow him,” I murmured to Billy, and he nodded.
True enough our man stumbled across the room and ducked through the low doorway at the back, into the courtyard behind the sink where the shithouse would be. I put my mug down on the table and followed him, and I could feel Billy at my heels. I heard the fat brute behind me say something, but I couldn’t catch what, and then something that sounded like his sister talking him out of it. That was wise of her.
A moment later we were in the dark, rain-lashed yard where our man was leaning against the side of the wooden shithouse with one hand and holding his cock in the other. He was taking an almighty piss onto the ground as though he had got as far as he could and that would have to do.
“Don’t let him use the cunning,” I whispered to Billy, and reached inside my cloak for the Weeping Women.
“No,” Billy said, and my hand stilled.
I don’t know why, but it did. I could feel the hilt of Remorse against the tips of my fingers, but I didn’t move them. Something held me there, something that I would have bet a gold crown to a clipped copper was Billy’s doing. I wasn’t frozen and I knew I could have moved my hand if I had wanted to, but I no longer wanted to. That was worse, in a way, to think that he was doing something to my mind rather than my body. Being physically stopped by magic was one thing, I supposed, but having it in your head was quite another.
“I should do it,” he said, and he walked toward the pissing man.
He reached under his own cloak, and then he was beside Arndt, pretending to be drunk himself.
“Need to piss,” I heard Billy say.
Arndt swayed and looked at him.
“Fuckin’ say wha’, boy?” he said.
Billy turned and seemed to stroke the inside of the man’s thigh with his hand, in the killing place. Dark blood sprayed across the mud of the yard. Arndt staggered and Billy’s arm came up, and the dim light caught the edge of the blade concealed in his hand. He touched the side of Arndt’s neck, just once, and more blood gushed and Arndt fell, and that was done.
My hand relaxed all at once and I gripped Remorse’s hilt, but I didn’t need her anymore. Billy came walking back to me as Arndt died in the mud and the rain and the piss behind him, and I saw that the lad had a small knife in his hand. He was holding it backward, to my mind, with his thumb against the top of the hilt and the bloody blade flat against the inside of his wrist. I had only ever seen one person hold a knife like that before.
“Who taught you that?” I asked him.
“Cutter,” he said.
That was what I had been afraid of.
SIXTEEN
I awoke from a dream of the war, of the smoke and screams and the endless noise of the cannon. That nightmare was nothing new, but this time I had dreamed of Cutter, too, stalking through the bloody smoke with a dripping knife held backward in each hand. He had Billy the Boy at his side, and the lad’s smile had been red murder. That was when I woke, with my blankets tangled around my legs in a sweaty mess and my heart pounding.
It was almost light outside my window, so I sat up and rubbed my hands through my hair, thinking it was high time I paid another visit to Ernst the barber. Thinking of anything I could, any nonsense that didn’t matter, to take my mind away from the dream and from the memory of the previous night. Down the hall from my room Billy was asleep in his own bed, and I wondered what he dreamed of there.
Cutter was teaching him to kill, that much was obvious now. Why he was doing it was another matter, but it seemed that Billy had learned fast, the same way he had learned the cunning fast at Old Kurt’s house. Billy had killed before, of course, many and more times, but killing an enemy in battle was one thing. Coming up to an innocent man in a tavern yard and opening his veins was something different, and it took different skills and a different way of thinking.
That sort of thing was what Cutter did best.
I remembered the previous year, and the army sappers that Ailsa had produced when I had needed them. Sappers are hard men, tunnelers and demolition experts. They had done some of the harshest work, at Abingon. It was men like them who undermined walls and set charges, fighting in the stifling confines of the tunnels. That was the stuff of nightmares. It had been those men who had delivered my wedding present from Ailsa.
Before the bombing of the Wheels I had sent those sappers out to cripple a factory, and I had sent Cutter with them. When they came back, I remembered, the sappers had walked softly around Cutter and kept a respectful distance from him that spoke of a quiet fear. When even sappers fear a man, I had thought at the time, that man is to be feared indeed. I wondered again who Cutter really was, and what he had been doing in Messia before the war, and how he had ended up in Jochan’s crew.
It would keep for now, I told myself. It would keep.
I got up and took a piss into the pot, then got dressed and headed downstairs. It was early, but I could hear activity in the kitchen already. Cook would be baking the day’s bread by then, of course, with Hanne’s help. There might even be some ready if I was lucky.
“Oh, Mr. Piety sir, you did startle me,” Cook said when I opened the door.
She was a sturdy woman with some fifty years to her, with red cheeks and big, strong hands from years of kneading dough and churning butter and turning spits. Hanne looked like a plump child beside her. Very plump indeed, to my mind.
“I woke early, that’s all,” I said. “Is there anything ready?”
Cook sat me down at the kitchen table and put some hot bread and a mug of small beer in front of me with a motherly smile. I barely remembered my own ma, who had died when I’d had only six years to me, but I hoped she had been something like Cook.
“My thanks,” I said, and started to eat.
“I really don’t feel well,” I heard Hanne say a few minutes later, and then she was off and running out the back door into the yard behind the house.
She left the door swinging open behind her, and I could hear the sound of her retching outside. I frowned.
&n
bsp; “Oh dear,” Cook muttered to herself, giving her dough an extra hard thump as though Hanne’s illness was somehow its fault. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
I shrugged and finished my breakfast, then went up to my study and waited for Ailsa to rise.
She was up an hour or so later, and of course took her breakfast in the small dining room the way I was supposed to but usually didn’t. I joined her there, and although I didn’t want anything else to eat I took a bowl of tea to be polite.
“How was last night?” Ailsa asked casually, mindful of the small army of servants that it seemed to be impossible for her to eat without.
“Well enough,” I said. “Wet.”
“Did you get wet?” she asked me, and I took her meaning.
“No,” I said, “but Billy did.”
“It won’t do him any harm,” she said.
I wasn’t sure about that, but this was neither the time or the place for us to have that conversation. It made me wonder, though, if this was why Billy had insisted on doing the work himself the previous night. Perhaps he knew Ailsa’s mind on the matter and had wanted to help me keep my distance. If he had known that, then I wondered if he might know Ailsa’s mind on other things, too, and that was an interesting thought.
That was something Billy and I needed to talk about.
Among other things.
* * *
* * *
That afternoon a messenger came to the house and brought me a note from Fat Luka that put all other concerns out of my mind. I sat behind my desk in the study and scanned it, trying to make sense of Luka’s childish, barely schooled handwriting.
Boss,
Come to Tanner’s if can, I need to stay here.
Shit happening.
New faces in town, need to talk.
Luka
I frowned and crumpled the note in my hand, and tossed it into the fire. Luka wouldn’t summon me like that unless it was important. He had more respect for me than that; I knew he did. He could even be in trouble, I realized, and unable to say what he meant.
Ten minutes later I had my coat and cloak on and was out of the house with the Weeping Women buckled around my waist. At least it was dry today, that was something, although the chill wind told me that autumn was almost done and winter was well on its way to Ellinburg. I had Stefan with me as well as the messenger whose name I didn’t know, and we rode with haste down the road together while heads turned to watch us pass.
Even up there on Trader’s Row most folk knew all too well who I was by then, and I got the feeling that some of them might think I was lowering the tone of the neighborhood by living there. I didn’t care. They were nothing to me, these moneyed fools who thought they were better than everyone else. They could think what they liked, to my mind, so long as there was no open disrespect of me or my family. I knew very well what I thought of them.
We rode down into the Narrows and the Stink, through streets where people huddled into their cloaks against the wind and watched us go by with hooded eyes. There were more people than usual on the streets, and many of them were armed. I wondered why that was.
When we reached the Tanner’s Arms I left my horse with the messenger and walked into the tavern with my cloak open over my swords and Stefan at my side.
Luka was sitting at a table in the middle of the room with Bloody Anne and Jochan around him, and Mika and Black Billy were standing near the bar. Both looked agitated and alert, and Billy was wearing his mail and sword in addition to the doorman’s club that hung at his belt. There were no civilians in there at all, I noticed, and I could only assume someone had taken the decision to close to the public for the rest of the day.
“What is it?” I said, when they turned to look at me.
“There’s news,” Anne said, and Luka beckoned me to their table.
“Seems the Abingon garrison has been dissolved, about two months ago would be my guess,” he said. “They’ve been trickling into the city all morning. They’re all coming home. Everyone.”
I nodded slowly, understanding.
After the war we had left a good-sized garrison at Abingon, and a lot of them had been Ellinburg men. Those officers with wealthy families in Dannsburg and the west had managed to get themselves and their men sent home early, by and large, and it had only been luck and our respective colonels’ connections that had seen us and Ma Aditi’s crew come home when we did.
“Who?” I asked.
“Everyone,” Luka said again. “The Blue Bloods, the Alarian Kings, the Flower Girls, the Headhunters . . . everyone, boss.”
“Right,” I said. “Luka, I need you and your little spies to get on this right now. They’ll be weak at the moment, and some of them did fealty to the Gutcutters before the war. The landscape here has changed while they’ve been down in the south, and we need to jump on them before the Northern Sons do. Most of them will find they’ve no territory to go home to and powerful people standing where they once stood. What I fucking don’t want is any of them doing what I did when that happened to me, do you understand?”
“We don’t need any more enemies,” Anne said.
“Fucking right we don’t,” I said. “Spend gold, make promises, do whatever it takes. I want as many of these fuckers as possible calling me boss by the end of the week, do you understand me?”
“Aye,” Luka said, and Jochan and Anne both nodded.
I’d never get all of them, of course, I knew that and truth be told, I didn’t even really want them, but every minor gang I took was one the Northern Sons didn’t have. A soldier in my camp was one who wasn’t in theirs, and that was good.
“Get Desh back down from the Wheels and put him in front of the Alarian Kings,” I said, pacing the room as I thought out loud. “They’ll be more likely to listen to another brown face, I reckon, especially a richly dressed one. The right man for the right job, always. Anne, I’ll want you to talk to the Flower Girls. It’s the same principle, you understand?”
“They’re women, then?” she asked, and again I had to remind myself that she had never set foot in Ellinburg before the war.
“Fuck, yes,” Jochan said. “Every one of them. They started out as whores before some of them realized they could make more money with their knives than with their cunts. They’re hard as fucking nails, the lot of them.”
“Aye, that they are,” I said, “but they ain’t you, Bloody Anne. They’ll listen to you, I reckon.”
“What about the others?” Luka asked. “The Headhunters are just dock rats and we ought to be able to sweep them up with no bother now Aditi’s gone, but I don’t know what we can do about the Blue Bloods.”
“No, that’s in the shithouse,” I had to admit. “Don’t even try.”
The Blue Bloods had been a medium-sized gang from the west of Ellinburg. Their streets were squarely in the middle of what was now Northern Sons territory and there would be no getting to them, I knew that. The best I could hope for was that they would fight Bloodhands rather than bend the knee and do fealty to him.
“Aye, well,” Jochan said. “If we can take the other three . . . fuck me, Tomas, we’ll be the biggest the Pious Men have ever been.”
I nodded. We would be, I knew that.
If we were going to take down the Skanians, we would fucking need to be.
SEVENTEEN
I spent the next week all but living at the Tanner’s Arms, returning home only to wash and change my clothes, and that only every second or third day. I worked at the head of the long table in the back room of the Tanner’s, where spies and messengers could come and go freely without having to run the gauntlet of servants and neighbors as they would have had to do at the house off Trader’s Row. Ailsa was fully supportive of the situation once I explained to her what had happened, and truth be told, I doubted that she missed me. I needed to take these soldiers before the Sons, and
therefore the Skanians, did, and we both knew it.
On the fourth day Bloody Anne came to me, and she had two of our hired lads and a woman who I didn’t know with her. The woman was whip-thin and hard faced, wearing a soldier’s britches and coat under a cloak that had seen better days. Her hair was long but filthy and scraped back from her face, knotted behind her head with a bit of old rag. I could see she was missing half of her left ear.
“This is Florence Cooper,” Anne told me. “She runs the Flower Girls.”
“Tomas Piety,” Florence said, by way of greeting. “I remember you from before.”
“Aye, I dare say you do,” I said. “How was your war?”
She shrugged and spat on the floor, and never mind that she was right in front of me. This one gave no fucks about anything, that was plain enough. Not at all she didn’t, I could see that much and I could see that she wanted me to know it.
“I’m still here,” she said. “Most of my girls, too. We volunteered and joined up to fight, but they set us to guarding the fucking baggage train and then to the garrison. Like women can’t fucking fight in battles.”
“Anne fought,” I said.
“Aye, I’ll allow that she did,” Florence said. “Even back at the wagons we heard tell of the Bloody Sergeant. We heard how she ate men’s balls with her breakfast beer, and that’s most of the reason why I’m stood here now.”
I gave Anne a look, but I held my peace. Tales can grow tall in the telling, all soldiers know that, and if Anne hadn’t said anything to spoil that story then I couldn’t say that I blamed her.
“But you are here, with the Bloody Sergeant and me,” I said.
Florence spat again and scratched at a scabby patch on the back of her left wrist until it started to weep.
“I am,” she admitted. “My crew did fealty to Ma Aditi and the Gutcutters before the war, you know that, and that made us enemies. Only now there ain’t no Gutcutters, and word is that the devil Tomas Piety himself killed Aditi and fucked her corpse. So now I’ve got no streets and no boss and nowhere else to go but to follow the sergeant.”