Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  Cutter had killed Ma Aditi as far as I knew, and I hadn’t even been there at the time. He had been the one who brought me her head, at least.

  “That’s the word, is it?” I said. “I assure you, I wouldn’t have fucked Ma Aditi if she’d been the last woman in Ellinburg, alive or dead. And you have got somewhere to go, Florence Cooper. Back to your old streets, if you want them, and your crew with you. But those streets belong to the Pious Men now, not you and not the Gutcutters, and you mark me on that. You’ll do your fealty to me from now on. Does that sound fair?”

  Florence shrugged and looked sideways at Bloody Anne.

  Anne gave her a short nod.

  “Take it,” she said. “It’s better than dying.”

  “Aye, suppose it is,” Florence said.

  She turned back to me and set her jaw.

  “Right you are, then,” she said, “but I want my businesses back. My streets always paid their protection to me, and I’m not giving that up. I’ll pay you a fifth for respect, like I used to pay Aditi, but I’m my own woman, not some fucking hired bitch. My whoring days are behind me, and they’re fucking staying there. Does that sound fair, Mr. Piety?”

  “A quarter,” I said, “and if I call the knives your crew fight with mine, under my say-so.”

  Florence sighed, but she didn’t have any choice and I could see that she knew it.

  “Aye,” she said at last. “That sounds like as fair as I’m going to get.”

  She spat in her hand and held it out to me, and I stood up and spat in mine and we shook on it, the old way, and that was done.

  That was how the Flower Girls came to do their fealty to the Pious Men.

  * * *

  * * *

  Nothing happened the next day, but the day after that a runner came to the Tanner’s to say that Desh was dead.

  He’d been found in an alley down in the Wheels, Fat Luka told me, his throat slashed open and his tongue cut out and placed in the wound like it was hanging out of his neck. The Elephant, the Alarian gangs called that, and it was an ugly thing. They had tucked a card with the sign of the Northern Sons into the pocket of his beautiful coat.

  “Fuck,” I said, when Luka brought me the news.

  Desh had waited his whole life to become a Pious Man, and he had done that. He had achieved his dream, and he had lived to enjoy it for a matter of weeks. Pious Men got the finer things in life and they lived well, as I have written before, but not necessarily for very long. He hadn’t even got the glorious death he had no doubt dreamed of. There was no blaze of glory for Desh, and no tales would be told of how he had died. No one sang songs of men ambushed and murdered in alleys.

  I scrubbed a hand over my face and dragged in a breath.

  Desh was dead.

  Desh, who had reminded me so much of myself at his age. Desh, who was moved by status and respect, the same way I was.

  Desh, who was barely eighteen.

  Fuck!

  He shouldn’t have died, not yet and not like that. Not in some piss-sodden alley down in the Wheels with his tongue pulled out of his throat, making him look a mockery of a man. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t justice.

  What the fuck was I going to tell his da?

  “The Headhunters have come over, though,” Luka said. “They’re ours, now.”

  “What are there, six of them?” I barked at him. “I don’t much fucking care, Fat Luka. Where’s Desh, now?”

  Luka swallowed and examined his boots for a moment.

  “We, um, we didn’t think his family would want to see him like that,” he said eventually. “He’s in the river.”

  “Lady’s sake!” I shouted at him. “We can’t even give them a fucking body to bury?”

  I was on my feet then, and I realized my fists were clenched. I was over the fucking table before I knew it and I could feel it happening, could feel the battle shock coming down on me like thunderclouds and cannon and I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t fucking help it.

  Do you understand me?

  I couldn’t fucking help it.

  I hit Fat Luka, and I could hardly see him for the tears in my eyes, and I hit him again and again until he was on the floor. The door opened and Bloody Anne roared at me in her best sergeant’s voice, and then she had me bent backward over the table and her scarred face was right in mine and she bellowed, “Stop it!”

  So I did.

  I don’t know.

  It just left me, as fast as it had come, and then my hand was hurting and my knuckles were bleeding and Fat Luka was crawling out of the room on his hands and knees leaving a trail of blood and snot on the floor behind him, and that was done.

  “Lady’s sake, Tomas,” Anne hissed at me, and she kicked the door shut behind her. “Sit down.”

  I sat, and I started to come back to myself.

  “I . . . I shouldn’t have done that,” I said, after a moment.

  “No,” Anne said. “No, you shouldn’t, but there’s no use telling me that. Tell Luka that, when you can face him again.”

  I sighed, the breath coming out shaky from a dry throat that felt too small for the air I needed.

  “Aye,” I said. “That was ill done of me, I know. Desh . . .”

  “I heard,” Anne said, and there was really nothing more to be said about that.

  I could see the sorrow in her eyes, and of course she had lost people she cared about too. We all had; that was war.

  And so was this.

  “Right,” I said, after a moment, when I had got myself back under control and managed to hide how badly my hands were shaking. “We’ve lost the Alarian Kings to the Sons, then, and perhaps the Blue Bloods too, but we’ve gained the Flower Girls and the Headhunters. The Headhunters are nothing but dockside thieves, but the Flower Girls are well worth having, and you’re our tie to them. I’ve a mind to put you over Florence, to be her area boss. Can you do that for me, Bloody Anne?”

  Anne gave me a short nod.

  “I can do that,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “We’ll need to step up security, now. It’s going to get bad, now that the others are home. The regular army, such as it is, the career soldiers, they’ll rally to the queen and the governor’s law, and they’ll hold to the peace. The rest of them, the gang members and the poor bloody conscripts, they’ll follow whoever will fucking feed them. It’ll get ugly in Ellinburg now, you mark me on that.”

  EIGHTEEN

  I was right about that.

  By the time full winter came, the streets were all but lawless. Violence and petty crimes were the worst I had ever seen them, and there had even been robberies up near Trader’s Row. That would have been unthinkable a year ago, but it seemed that the City Guard was stretched to the breaking point.

  I sent the Pious Men out in force.

  These were my streets, and on my streets I’d have my law and my fucking justice.

  Up by the docks I hanged a rapist, and the Guard said nothing of it.

  Two men were caught trying to rob a shop under my protection, down in the Wheels. I had them dragged the mile and more length of Dock Road behind two galloping horses and then thrown in the river. The water was icy at that time of year, and no one saw them come out again.

  A resin smoker who had mugged an old man in an alley up in the Narrows lost both his feet.

  I caught a man running a whore who had barely nine years to her. Him I strangled with my own hands, while she watched and smiled and wept.

  That was how I dealt justice on my streets.

  My streets, my law.

  The city might be going down the shithouse, but I kept an iron grip on my territory, and my people respected me for it. They paid me for protection and I saw that they got it. That was how this worked, to my mind. I was a prince in Ellinburg, and a prince looks after his people and he
keeps the fucking peace.

  On his own streets he does, anyway.

  Ailsa had thoughts about that, of course, and they didn’t always agree with mine. To her mind I should have been concentrating on the Northern Sons and the Skanians who backed them, but with how things were across the city that winter I reckoned Bloodhands had as much on his plate with his own streets as I had with mine, and there were no more hostilities between us.

  The Flower Girls were doing well down in the Wheels, and after a couple of months I gave Florence Cooper the streets that Desh had been running for me as well. I took a quarter there, too, as we had agreed, while Anne watched over them as area boss.

  I made things right with Fat Luka, too. I apologized for what I had done, and explained why I had done it, and I knew he understood. We spent a night in the Tanner’s together drinking ourselves stupid and telling each other tall tales about our exploits growing up in the city, about places we had robbed and lasses we had fucked.

  We had known each other since we had been in school, for Our Lady’s sake, and we had been soldiers together. We had fought back to back in the choking dust of Abingon, and it took more than a beating to break a bond like that. We had known each other a long time, and if we had never really been friends before, then I think by the end of that night perhaps we were, and that was good.

  I needed all the friends I could get.

  * * *

  * * *

  Anne and Rosie were growing even closer, and Anne’s new status and the income it brought her allowed her to lavish gifts on her woman like never before.

  We were in the back of the Tanner’s Arms one night, just Bloody Anne and me, with bottles of brandy and glasses and lamps on the long table in front of us, and Simple Sam standing guard outside the door to see that we were left alone. She had been giving me the week’s news from the Wheels, which she now practically ran in my name with the Flower Girls under her, but that was done.

  “I’ve other news,” Anne said, and it was hard to tell in the light of the oil lamps but for a moment she almost looked shy. “If you want to hear it, that is. As a friend, I mean. It’s not business.”

  “Of course I do,” I said. “You’re my best friend, Bloody Anne. Probably my only real friend, truth be told.”

  That was right enough. My marriage was a loveless sham. Jochan was my brother, but we had never been close as adults, and although I had made it right with Fat Luka, that friendship couldn’t compare to the bond I had with Anne.

  Anne was all I truly had in the world. Her and Billy, anyway.

  “It’s Rosie,” Anne said, and she couldn’t hide the smile that made her scar twitch along the length of her face. “I suppose it ain’t a big thing, but . . . I’m not paying her no more. She . . . she said I didn’t have to. She said she loved me, Tomas, and that she wanted to be with me of her own choice and not for coin.”

  I looked up and met her eyes, and I saw the shine of tears in them.

  “That’s good,” I said. “I’m pleased for you, Anne.”

  “No one’s ever said that to me, that they loved me, I mean. Not since my Maisy, and we weren’t much more than children, so what did we know? Rosie . . . she’s the one, Tomas. Do you understand me?”

  “Aye,” I said. “I do. I’m happy for you, Bloody Anne. Very happy.”

  She poured us both a glass then, and we drank together, in friendship and comradeship, but there was something I knew about her woman that she didn’t.

  Rosie was a spy and an agent of the crown, in the pay of the Queen’s Men. I thought of my own wife, of Ailsa, and how she had done the things that she had done. A lioness, I had thought of her once, and how no sane man would want to lie down with her. I wondered if Anne’s Rosie was so very different, when all was said and done.

  I wished I could tell her, but of course that was out of the question. Sometimes, when you lead, there are hard truths you have to hold to yourself. I wondered what the captain had known, back in Abingon, and not been able to tell us. I wondered what burdens our colonel had borne, and told no one.

  That was what it was, to be a boss.

  All the same, I envied what Anne had. If she could be happy with her lioness, then couldn’t I with mine?

  I remembered what had happened in the Wheels, the destruction and the charred bodies that had been pulled out of it. Ailsa could be harsh and ruthless, yes, but then was I any different? Perhaps I had just drunk too much brandy that night, but when I thought back on the justice I had dealt over the last couple of months I decided that no, I probably wasn’t.

  It was just a matter of scale, that was all.

  * * *

  * * *

  I had made my way back home to Trader’s Row in the early hours, but the next morning I was up with the dawn as was my habit. I took my breakfast in the kitchen where it was warm and there was less fuss and ceremony attached to it than there would have been in the small dining room.

  By then there was no hiding that Hanne was with child.

  The girl had always been plump, but now her belly was heavy and pressing through her apron in a way that could only mean one thing. I thought she was perhaps five or six months along, not that I really knew much about that sort of thing.

  It was Jochan’s, obviously. I knew she was besotted with my little brother, and she wasn’t likely to have lain with anyone else. I thought on that as I watched her kneading the dough for the day’s bread, and I wondered what he would think of it. We would have to see, I supposed.

  After my breakfast I found Ailsa, and we took tea together in the drawing room. I looked at her sitting there in her chair by the fire like a Dannsburg lady, in her fine woolen kirtle with her embroidery beside her.

  My wife.

  Yes, that was a sham, but I wondered if it truly had to be. I had taken ill against her over what had happened in the Wheels, aye, but I thought now that perhaps that had been wrong of me. I had played as much a part in that as she had, truth be told. It had been me who had demanded blasting weapons in the first place, for Our Lady’s sake, and perhaps I had forgotten that. It’s a thing that I do, sometimes, when I don’t want to face a hard truth about myself. Some truths are best buried, pushed into the strongbox in the back of my mind until they can be forgotten. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

  I sat there and I looked at her, and I wondered if perhaps there might be a life to be made for us. If Anne and Rosie had made a go of it, then why shouldn’t we?

  I would have to make an effort, I knew, but I could do that and I intended to.

  “Hanne’s pregnant,” I said, by way of conversation, and Ailsa nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “Unmarried, too. It’s not seemly.”

  “Aye, well,” I said. “I’d bet good money that my brother is the father.”

  Ailsa looked up at me then, and I could see that was something that she hadn’t known. Perhaps she did miss things, sometimes, if not often. It was good to be reassured that she was still human after all.

  “I see,” she said. “Does he know?”

  “I doubt it; he’s not been here for months,” I said. “I’ll tell him.”

  “What do you think he’ll do about it?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I have to admit that I don’t know my brother as well as I might. We weren’t together in the war, and the fighting changed him. It did all of us, I know, but him more than most. Whatever he chooses to do, I’ll see that Hanne and the child are well provided for.”

  Ailsa nodded and showed me the ghost of a smile.

  “You’re a decent man, Tomas,” she said. “Deep down you are.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how she meant that, but I would take it. One step at a time, that was how it was done.

  That was how you built a trust in business, and it might be that was how you built a love, too.

  NINETEEN
/>   Jochan did the last thing I expected. He married her.

  It wasn’t a grand ceremony like Ailsa had arranged for us, just a quiet affair in the temple of the Harvest Maiden who Hanne held to. I was Jochan’s Closest Man, and Cook stood with Hanne and her father, in her mother’s place. Her ma was dead, apparently, and her da didn’t look far off it himself. Perhaps it was just shock on his part, to see which family his daughter was marrying into. The poor fellow was gray of face and sweating in his cheap coat throughout the saying of the words. When it was done, Jochan took his now heavily pregnant bride in his arms and kissed her in front of everyone, and I led the cheer while Ailsa stood at my side, her arm in mine.

  That was two months ago, and now Ellinburg was in the grip of a fierce winter cold. Hanne was confined to her bed with the pregnancy, in the house Jochan had bought for them in the Stink. I had long since hired another girl to replace her in the kitchens.

  I was in the Tanner’s Arms that night, drinking with Jochan and Bloody Anne and Fat Luka in the busy common room where the fire blazed and kept the chill of the snowy streets away. Simple Sam was standing with his back to us, watching the room and keeping unwanted folk away from my table like he was supposed to.

  All seemed well, until a beggar came calling at the door.

  The man had both legs off at the knee and horrible burns on his hands and face. He was sitting propped up in a wheeled handbarrow and being pushed by a skinny child who was obviously struggling with the weight of the thing. I saw Black Billy having words with the man at the door, his brow furrowed. After a moment he turned and beckoned to Sam, who went over to see the lay of things.

  “The fuck is this?” Jochan muttered, his voice thick with drink.