Priest of Lies

by Peter McLean

  “Aye,” he said at last. “That’s done.”

  “And the wife’s out of the way?”

  “That I don’t know,” Luka admitted. “She’s been told, but I never got no answer.”

  “Right,” I said. “Well, be that as it may, then. Gentlemen, we have work to do.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Shortly after midnight, we left the inn.

  It was only a short walk to the unlocked front gates of Lan Yetrov’s estate. We stole across the darkened grounds as quietly as we could, until a patrolling guard rounded the corner of the house and saw us. He opened his mouth to raise the hue and cry, but Leonov threw back his cloak and raised a crossbow to his shoulder. The string thumped as he pressed the lever, and a bolt flowered in the man’s throat, dropping him to the grass with a choking gurgle. That was a mighty fine shot, I had to allow, one that I doubted even Bloody Anne could have pulled off in the dark. Again, I wondered exactly who Leonov was.

  Then we were across the front yard and Luka had his hand on the door of the house itself. It was unlocked, as he had hoped, and he eased it open with his other hand held up to tell the rest of us to keep quiet.

  I heard him whisper something, and then the door was open and we were being ushered into the great hall by a nervous-looking footman. One of the two Luka had bought, then.

  “M’lord is abed,” he whispered. “He left m’lady’s chamber perhaps an hour ago.”

  It pained me that she was still there, but that part had always been a gamble. From what I knew of Lan Yetrov, I hadn’t been at all sure that she would have managed to get away from him even for one night. It seemed I had been right about that.

  “Guards?” Luka asked.

  The footman shrugged. “There’s one outside,” he said, although there wasn’t anymore. “Two more in the house, but I don’t know exactly where. Klim’s at the pit, like you told us.”

  The other footman we had bought was out of the house then, like he was supposed to be. I turned to the crew and gave them a nod.

  “This one stays with me,” I said. “Kill anyone else you see except the wife and Lan Yetrov himself. That fucker is mine.”

  I waited in the hall with Fat Luka and the footman as Leonov and his men and mine spread out through the house. I wanted to tear Lan Yetrov out of his bed with my own hands, but that wasn’t how this sort of thing should be done. This was about more than just the threat of what influence he might have with Hauer, I had to admit to myself. This wasn’t even business now; this was personal.

  He had threatened my wife, and I wasn’t letting that pass.

  I wouldn’t lower myself to go after him in person, though, much as I wanted to. No, he would be brought to me.

  He might be a lord, but I needed him to understand that I was a fucking prince.

  I heard the thud of another crossbow from somewhere else in the house, and a brief clash of steel followed by a wet, choking death rattle. Leonov and his boys knew what they were about, and Emil and Oliver were both stout lads. Emil had been at Messia, and this sort of work was his bread and beer.

  I turned to the footman and gave him a look.

  “Take us to the pit,” I said.

  He nodded and led Fat Luka and me down a long corridor and into a room that overlooked the formal gardens behind the house. There was a guard dead on the floor in there, a crossbow bolt sticking out of his chest, but whoever had done it had already moved on. Leonov’s boys knew what they were about, all right. The footman opened a door and we stepped outside onto a neatly raked gravel path between two clipped ornamental hedges.

  The bear pit itself was in the informal garden behind the tortured lines of the formal part. Our footman opened a door for us and handed us off to his fellow, the one he had called Klim.

  “You’ve done well,” I said to him, and gave him another silver mark on top of whatever Luka had already paid him. “Now fuck off, and don’t come back before dawn.”

  He took his coin and fled.

  Klim led Fat Luka and me up the stair to Lan Yetrov’s private box, the best seats in the house. He produced lamps and lit them, and I saw there was even a cupboard stocked with drinks. I sat down to wait with a glass of Lan Yetrov’s brandy in my hand, and Fat Luka looming behind my chair. After a few minutes Klim coughed beside me.

  “The Lady Lan Yetrov, sir,” he announced.

  I looked around in surprise.

  She was standing at the entrance to the private box, a thickly embroidered velvet cloak wrapped around her over a silk and lace nightdress that must have cost more money than a working man saw in a month. She wore no paint or powder at that time of the night, and I saw that she had a split lip and a long yellow bruise on the side of her face below her fading black eye.

  “My Lady Lan Yetrov,” I said. “I hadn’t thought to find you here tonight. You were supposed to be elsewhere.”

  “I tried,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, and as she stepped into the light of the lamps I saw the livid red marks around her throat where he had obviously been choking her while he took his pleasure. “I said I needed to visit my sick mother, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He told me my place is with him, always, bought and paid for. So tonight my place is with him. Bought, and paid for.”

  I looked at her, at the broken, vengeful hatred in her eyes, and I nodded.

  “As you will,” I said. “Will you sit with me?”

  “I don’t think I can,” she said, and a small sob escaped her lips.

  My hands curled into fists at my sides. If I had had any doubts about this, any thoughts at all that perhaps I had overreacted to Lan Yetrov’s threats against Ailsa, then now they were gone. Fuck what he may or may not be able to make Hauer do; that was long since past being the point. Lan Yetrov was the sort of man I hate, pure and simple. I didn’t know his wife and I didn’t owe her anything, but that wasn’t the point anymore.

  He had hurt her, and now he wanted to hurt Ailsa.

  I remembered Grieg, from my old crew, Grieg who had liked to hit whores. I remembered how I had made it right with Grieg, after he said his confession to me, and how my crew had made it right with him with their boots. You didn’t hit women, not unless they were armed and they were trying to kill you. You didn’t hit whores, and you most definitely didn’t hit your own fucking wife. Anyone who needed that explained to him wasn’t someone I knew how to talk to in a civil fashion.

  Vengeance is mine, sayeth Our Lady, and I am Her priest.

  “I see,” I said.

  We waited, Lady Lan Yetrov and Fat Luka and me, with Klim the footman watching the door. It didn’t take long. Perhaps five minutes later one of the gates to the pit was hauled open and Leonov strode in. He was dragging Lord Lan Yetrov behind him, in his nightshirt and stumbling along on the end of a length of rope tied around his neck.

  It was somewhere around the second hour of the morning by then. The moon was bright in a cloudless sky, but Leonov’s men had brought more lanterns anyway. A great deal of lanterns. By the time they were done it was almost as bright as day in the circle of the pit. Leonov forced Lan Yetrov down onto his knees in front of me.

  He stared up at me, squinting in the light and obviously trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

  “Piety? Is that you?” he said. “Leonora? Leonora, what the fuck is going on?”

  Lady Lan Yetrov took a breath as though to speak, then swallowed and said nothing.

  I sat there in Lan Yetrov’s own chair with a glass of his brandy in my hand, and I looked down at him, on his knees in the bear pit.

  “Piety?” he asked again, and I could hear the mounting terror in his voice. “You’re supposed to be a priest, man! What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m putting the fear of the gods back into religion,” I said. “Do you fear the gods, Lan Yetrov? Do you fear Our Lady?”<
br />
  “This is a fucking outrage!” he blustered, lurching back to his feet as anger overtook him. “You filthy oik! I’ll bury you! I’ll—”

  Leonov hit him in the back of the head with the hilt of a shortsword to shut him up. He sagged to his knees again, swaying with the force of the blow.

  “No,” I said, “you won’t. Is the pitmaster ready?”

  Leonov nodded and waved at one of his lads, and a moment later a fellow in a leather apron came out of another gate. He had a big wooden bucket in his hand. He approached Lan Yetrov, and he dumped the contents of that bucket over his head, soaking him with it. I could smell it even from where I sat, a vile mixture of blood and fish and honey.

  “No!” Lan Yetrov pleaded. “No, Piety, for the love of the gods, man!”

  “It’s only sport,” I said. “You told me that yourself, once. It doesn’t hurt anyone, does it? Do you remember telling me that, Lan Yetrov?”

  “Please, I’m begging you!”

  “I tell you what,” I said, “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll give you a chance, how does that sound?”

  “Anything!”

  Leonov had left the pit now, the gate safely shut behind him, and the pitmaster was about his business.

  “We’ll ask your wife,” I said, and it seemed to me that the fool actually looked relieved.

  Could one man truly be so fucking stupid, so blind? I turned to her, standing beside me because she was too torn and bloodied and in pain to be able to sit.

  “Lady Lan Yetrov,” I said to her, “your husband has insulted me and he has insulted my wife and threatened grievous and indecent harm to her person, but those things are nothing to what he has done to you. The judgment is yours.”

  Lady Lan Yetrov looked down at her husband, and a smile spread across her bruised face until her split lip opened up again and a trickle of blood ran over her teeth.

  “Release the bear,” she said.

  “Leonora, no!” Lan Yetrov screamed.

  The pitmaster hauled a rope and a gate rumbled open, and then the bear was in the pit with Lan Yetrov. It shambled forward on all fours, its head lifting as it took the scent.

  “Don’t you care for sport?” I asked him

  “I take it back! I apologize, for everything!”

  “It’s far too late for that,” I said, echoing his own words regarding the debtor Salan Anishin. “I want to make it very clear what happens to those who cross the Pious Men.”

  If he recognized his own words thrown back at him he gave no sign of it. He was too far gone to terror by then, I think.

  “Piety, please!” he begged. “For the love of the gods, man!”

  The bear snarled and charged, slaver running from its jaws.

  “I only hold to one god, and Our Lady has no love,” I said.

  I turned away then, but I heard the wet splatter of blood hitting the wall of the pit.

  Beside me, the Lady Leonora Lan Yetrov was smiling.

  PART THREE

  FORTY

  I was standing on Cobbler’s Row, looking at Katrin’s shop while the keen autumn wind whipped my cloak around my legs. It had rained that morning, hard and bitter.

  “Board it up,” I said at last. “She won’t be coming back.”

  “Yes, Mr. Piety,” the carpenter muttered.

  He was keeping his head down and staying out of my way, and that was wise of him.

  “I’m sorry, Tomas,” Anne said.

  “Aye,” I said. “So am I.”

  I turned away and spat into the gutter in disgust. This was where trusting orders from the Queen’s Men had got me. Two innocent women had died, and in ways I didn’t even want to think about. I remembered Katrin’s face and how she had smiled with joy the first time she had stepped into her new little shop. She had been living and plying her trade of herbalist out of a single damp room in the west of the city when Fat Luka’s spies had found her, barely scraping a living for herself. She had been overjoyed to take my coin when it was offered and move over to the Stink, but I dare say she hadn’t wanted to die screaming for it.

  Lady take the house of magicians, they’d get no one else from me and I didn’t care who ordered it. Vogel could go fuck himself if he thought that was ever happening again.

  Anne put her hand on my shoulder for a moment and I turned and looked at her. She seemed older somehow, weary in a way that she hadn’t since the war. I had been away a third of the year and more, and all that time Anne had been boss of the Pious Men in my place. She had done well, I had to allow. Very well indeed, in fact, but she was a soldier at heart, not a businesswoman. All the same, the time she had spent running the Wheels for me had trained her well in how this was done. She had two of the Flower Girls with her now, flanking her like bodyguards.

  Coming back to Ellinburg had been strange. After Dannsburg, the city seemed smaller than I remembered it, and I had almost forgotten how bad it smelled. It had been good to see Anne again, though, and Mika and Black Billy and Borys and Simple Sam and the others.

  I had seen Jochan too, and I still wasn’t quite sure how that had been.

  As Anne had told me in her letter, Jochan had taken up religion. That was well and good in itself, I supposed, but Jochan had taken up religion in the way that Lady Lan Andronikov had taken up the poppy. He clung to it like a desperate man. From what I heard he spent most of his waking hours in the Great Temple now, and for all that Hanne was pleased that he had been allowed to see her and the baby, I had been able to tell from my brief visit to her that she was worried about him.

  I turned my back as the hammering started, the carpenter and his lad boarding up the window and door of Katrin’s deserted shop. The sign would come down later, and it would be like she had never been there. Like she had never lived at all.

  I didn’t need to see that.

  She had been a spinster, with her parents dead and both her brothers lost in the war. There was no one left to mourn for Katrin, save for me.

  Gerta the midwife had had a family, a husband and two young children of her own, and that was worse. I had been to see her man the day before, braving Sons territory under heavy guard to offer my condolences and enough silver to go some small way toward an apology for what had happened.

  There had been an accident on the road, I had told him, an overturned wagon and nothing anyone could have done. It had been quick, I said, and she didn’t suffer. I didn’t think he had believed me, but it was better than him hearing the truth. All the same, silver couldn’t return his wife to him nor give those children their mother back. This is harsh work we do, as I have written, and most of those who join us understand that. I thought that Gerta had understood it too, when she first took Fat Luka’s coin and started passing him secrets from those streets, but that didn’t mean that her family had.

  “Lady’s sake,” I sighed, lifting my face into the wind to dry the tears in my eyes.

  “Want a drink?” Anne asked me, and I nodded.

  We walked back to the Tanner’s Arms together, with Simple Sam and Borys and Anne’s two hard-faced women around us. Going out without guards was impossible now, after the summer Bloody Anne had been through.

  Black Billy gave me a nod as he held the door open for us, and I clapped him on the shoulder as I passed. He had a long scar on one cheek that hadn’t been there before. The summer had been bloody indeed, from what I heard, and everyone had done their part.

  Those were the times we lived in.

  “How bad was it, truly?” I asked Anne, once we were alone in the back room of the Tanner’s.

  “Bad enough,” she said. “We lost the Badger’s Rest again, that stew we took off Convent Street. Borys did his best but it was just too far into Sons territory for us to hold it. Three of the hired lads died that night, but, thank the Lady, Borys made it out safe. He’s took it hard, though. Hasn’t real
ly been himself since then. He’s worried what happened to his girls, I reckon. Perhaps you might speak to him, when you get the chance.”

  I nodded and poured us both another brandy from the bottle on the long table that filled most of the room. Borys was a good man, older than most of the others, a big, thoughtful fellow who said little but who knew what he was doing. He had been good for the girls at the Rest too, I knew that much, fatherly and kind in a way that I thought none of them had ever experienced before. I would have been grieved by his death. That stew hadn’t been important really, not compared to everything else, but a loss was a loss all the same.

  “What else is gone?”

  “I held the rest of it,” Anne said, and I could hear a note of pride in her voice as she spoke. “We had hard fighting up in the docks but the Headhunters rallied when I called the knives, and Florence Cooper and her Flower Girls fought like devils to hold their streets. Your brother took the war back to the Northern Sons, and we gave as good as we fucking got on the western flank. He’s a mad bugger, Tomas, but fuck can he fight. I wouldn’t want to go against him, and I don’t say that lightly of any man. He’s had the battle shock bad, because of it, but Borys is good with him. Helps keep him calm, you understand what I mean? I put Sir Eland back in charge of the Golden Chains, too, and he’s done well up there. Held it like a fortress, he has, like a real fucking knight would have done. After he repelled the first attack and left fifteen of the enemy dead, the Sons haven’t dared even come near the place again. I might not be an officer, but you give me a position to hold and I’ll fucking hold it, you can mark me on that.”

  I was impressed, truly.

  “Well done,” I said. “I mean it, Anne.”

  That pride in her voice was well earned, to my mind. She nodded her thanks and picked up her glass.