by Peter McLean
It was time to find Cutter’s weakness.
“Speak, in Our Lady’s name,” I said.
FORTY-TWO
Cutter hung his head, and then his shoulders seemed to slump as though under a great weight. Beside me, Jochan cleared his throat again, but he said nothing.
“I’ll say my confession to you,” Cutter said softly. “I never have before, for what fucking priest could ever understand me? But to you I will, for you hold to another god than the ones I know, and you are more devil than priest. We ain’t so very different, you and me.”
The gods of Messia were certainly different to those I knew: cruel gods who demanded cruel sacrifices. They had told us that in the army when we were marching there to lay siege to the city. Messia was an evil place, we were told, where dark things were done in the names of their dark gods. That was what they had told us in the army, simple phrases for simple men. I wondered what the soldiers of Messia had been told about us, and whether it had been any more true.
“Is that so?”
Cutter looked up at me then, and I saw the corner of his mouth turn up in a rare smile under the thickness of his beard.
“Aye, it is,” and there was a weary resignation in his voice now as he spoke. “I was born in Messia, and you’re wondering how it is that I weren’t in their army. I know that. Sooner or later I knew you’d work your way around to that. Your brother knows why, but he ain’t never said.”
“That I haven’t,” Jochan said quietly. “I promised you back then that I never would, and I haven’t.”
“Aye,” Cutter said, and he sighed. “Well, here it is, Father. I doubt you ever saw Messia before the war, did you? Well, it weren’t like it is here, but it weren’t like they told you in the army, neither. We have different gods in Messia and they’re no darker than any others, but the priests ran the city with their own laws and their own justice, and that justice was dark enough for any man. You have to follow the gods in Messia, or you find yourself swinging on the end of a rope. You have to be seen to follow the gods, and for a long time I did, but I ain’t what you might call godly. Not in the way they’d have it, anyway. Do you understand me?”
In Dannsburg, you show respect to the crown. You show your love for the queen publicly and loudly and often.
I remembered Ailsa’s father telling me that, and I wondered if there was so much difference between us after all.
“I worked for the priesthood since I was a lad. It was them that had me trained, them as taught me how to kill. That was what I did. I killed people for the priests. People they said needed killing, and I never questioned them on that. Sacred Blades they called us, those who did that, and I never questioned them. Right up to the day when I had to.
“I weren’t in the army because I was in prison. I was in a special sort of prison, the sort where they don’t dare conscript the inmates on account of we was too dangerous to be trusted with weapons. I was three weeks away from execution when the walls came down, just waiting my turn to hang. When the city fell and your lot was sacking it, your brother’s crew broke open that prison to see what was inside. Well, I was inside, me and the other men they called too mad to be let out even to fight.”
Cutter didn’t seem mad, to my mind. Cold and ruthless, aye, but he was sane enough.
“Why?”
“I was in there for heresy and murder,” he said. “They’d wanted me to kill a man I was close with, a man I maybe even loved, and I said fuck that. I said fuck that and they threatened me so I killed a priest and burned a temple, and in Messia that’s enough to have you called mad and be treated as such before you swing. My man still died, but not by my hand.”
He went quiet then, as though he couldn’t quite find his words, and there was a silence until my brother spoke for him.
“When we got down there, into the deep cells, there was only Cutter,” he said. “Cutter, and corpses. It seemed the guards had unlocked the cells before they ran away, and I don’t know why. Maybe they thought the prisoners would do for us, but Cutter had already seen that that wouldn’t happen. He had a . . . what was it now? I can’t remember.”
“A bit of glass,” Cutter said. “A little bit of glass that I’d been hoarding in my cell against the day that I’d need it. I’d been planning to do myself with it, truth be told, before they could hang me. Never quite got around to it. But when those cell doors opened and I heard the others moving about outside I knew I couldn’t let them be free, and I knew what needed to be done. Here’s where I held it.”
He held out his right hand to me and opened it to show me a thick, ridged scar that ran all the length of his palm.
“Some of the men in those cells had raped children,” he went on, “and some of them had fucking eaten people, and I was supposed to be as mad as them. I done those cunts so they couldn’t hurt no one else, Father, and when your brother came looking I knelt down for him and then I told him what I’d done.”
“And I said good fucking work,” Jochan said. “I said that, and I brought him out of those filthy fucking cells where they put the human animals, because Cutter ain’t no animal. He’d killed folk, aye, but then who hasn’t? Who fucking hasn’t? He’s no baby-eater, Tomas, and he’s no traitor either. I . . . I fucking swear he ain’t.”
My brother was crying, I realized, and then he reached out his hand and Cutter rested his bearded cheek against it.
“I swore to love Jochan forever, for that,” Cutter whispered, “and I meant it. I’m no traitor.”
You can’t tell me you never did, in the tents at least.
Major Bakrylov had said that to me, back in Dannsburg. I never did, but it seemed to me then that perhaps my brother had. That was his business, his and Cutter’s, but it made me think of something else.
“And you never touched Billy?” I asked him.
“I like men, not boys,” Cutter said. “I like . . . I love your brother.”
He swallowed and looked away.
“Don’t speak of that,” Jochan whispered. “It’s enough, Yoseph. He believes you.”
I nodded slowly. I did, at that.
Cutter put his head in Jochan’s lap, and he wept.
I got quietly to my feet and left the room, and walked out into the corridor where Bloody Anne and Fat Luka were waiting for me.
“It wasn’t Cutter,” I said.
* * *
* * *
I put it about that over the next few days I would have every member of the Pious Men and every vassal gang under my control brought before Billy the Boy and myself, and questioned. Even Bloody Anne, even the Headhunters and the Flower Girls and the hired men. Even my aunt.
Everyone.
These were superstitious men and women, simple soldiers in the main, and they all knew what Billy the Boy could do. Or at least they thought they did, and that was good.
Of course Billy didn’t know who the traitor was, any more than I did. He didn’t know, and he wouldn’t unless Our Lady or whatever the fuck it was that spoke to him or through him chose to tell him, but the others didn’t know that.
It was enough.
Bloody Anne went first, to show the others there was nothing to fear in it, and Florence Cooper was right behind her. Those two I knew I could trust, of course, and Sir Eland and Fat Luka and Black Billy who went after them, too. Simple Sam went next, then the Headhunters went one after another, and then Florence’s crew of hard-faced women. After that was Stefan and then Emil, and then it was to be Borys.
When Borys’s turn came he was nowhere to be found, and I knew my trap had worked.
Borys had run rather than face Billy’s questions, and that said he was guilty as loud as if he had been shouting it in the street.
I couldn’t fucking believe it. Steady, faithful Borys. Borys with his reassuring presence and his level head, who could calm even my mad brother. Borys who had been l
ike a father to those women at the Badger’s Rest. Borys had been the one to betray me?
I felt like I’d been punched in the fucking guts.
No one knew where he had gone, but that didn’t worry me any.
I sent Cutter after him.
Hunting men was Cutter’s bread and beer. He had been made to own to painful truths that I thought he would rather have kept buried, because of what Borys had done. Cutter would bring Borys to me wherever he had gone, I had absolutely no doubts about that at all.
“And then what will you do?” Ailsa asked me that evening, after I was done telling her the lay of things.
I poured myself a brandy from the bottle on the side table in our drawing room and turned to face her.
“I’ll make a fucking example of him,” I said. “No one betrays the Pious Men and gets away with it, and I intend to make that very clear indeed. There’s a thing in Ellinburg called the Rite of the Betrayer. It’s an old gang thing, an ugly thing. I’ve never had to do it before, but I know how it’s done.”
Ailsa looked up from her needlework then, and she showed me her razor smile.
“Oh, so do I.”
FORTY-THREE
However angry I was about Borys, there was still work that needed doing. I wanted the Badger’s Rest back, for one thing, that stew up near the docks. We needed to find some more cunning folk too, and I had Fat Luka working on that already, which left me free to think on the other matter. Now that I knew that Borys had been the one to betray me to the magicians, it seemed somewhat suspicious that his had been the only business Anne had lost in the summer, and even more so that he had been the only survivor of the fighting. If Borys had taken a bribe from one man, then to my mind it was likely he’d taken another from someone else, and sold that place back to Bloodhands and the Northern Sons. Faithful Borys, who I had thought was like a father to those women, had sold them back to a man who liked to skin people alive, and he’d had the sheer fucking balls to pretend to be ashamed afterward.
Cunt.
I wasn’t going to let that pass, or leave those poor women at the mercy of Bloodhands and his flaying knife. I knew exactly how to make that right.
“The Sons treat their scrubs like dirt,” I told Florence Cooper that evening, in the common room of the Tanner’s Arms after I’d had a runner go fetch her down from the Wheels. “They ain’t licensed and none of them wear the bawd’s knot there, so they think they’ve nowhere else to go but the street. Might be they’re right about that, but that’s no excuse. I don’t hold with beating whores, but the last man the Sons had running that place very much did. I doubt the new one’s any better.”
I could see the hard anger in Florence’s eyes. She had been a whore once, I knew, her and most of her Flower Girls with her, and I doubted she had ever worn the knot either. She knew all too well what life must be like for those women, and I knew what she thought of that.
Once you learn the levers that move a person, you can make them do anything.
“I’ll run that place for you and I’ll fucking hold it this time, if you let me and my crew take it back,” Florence said.
That was what I had wanted to hear.
“Aye,” I said. “I’ll take a quarter, as before, but if you can take the Badger’s Rest back then it’s yours to run.”
Florence gave me a short nod.
“Oh, I’ll take it back, you mark me, Tomas Piety,” she said, and that was done.
She went on her way after that, and I looked out of the window and saw that it was already dark outside. Simple Sam was looming in front of my table as was his habit, his thick arms crossed in front of him in a way that said I wasn’t to be disturbed. That didn’t apply to Anne, of course, and she came and joined me a moment later with a glass of brandy in each hand.
“What did she say?”
“Aye, she’ll do it,” I said. “Keen to, by the sounds of her. I thought she might be.”
“It’ll be bloody,” she warned. “Florence has no love for whoremongers, and if any of those women have so much as a bruise on them she’s like to have whoever’s in charge burned alive.”
“Well and good.” I took the offered drink and sipped it while she sat. “He’ll be no one we know, so fuck him.”
“I’m sorry,” Anne said, after a moment. “I just didn’t see it. He seemed so . . . solid, I suppose. Borys was always the reliable one, the calm one, you understand what I mean? When we burned the Stables, he was the one who brought those boys out and saw them safely back here. He was . . . he seemed a good man.”
I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant.
“Aye, he did,” I said. “He wouldn’t have been my guess either, and I wouldn’t have seen it any more than you did. I don’t think ill of you for it, Anne.”
“Appreciate it,” she said, and gave me a short nod.
“I thought I’d stop by the Golden Chains on my way home, see the lay of things,” I said. “Want to come?”
Anne had no love for Sir Eland, I knew that, but to my mind that was something she needed to get past. I wanted real peace between them, not just the uneasy truce they seemed to have brokered over the summer. Besides, as gambling house and poppy den both, the Chains was one of my most profitable businesses. I didn’t care for the poppy trade so I seldom went there, but after being away for so long I knew it wouldn’t hurt to look in and see that all was well.
“Aye, I can do that,” she said after a moment. “Give me a minute to get my good coat.”
She went upstairs to the room above the Tanner’s where she lived, and I sat and finished my brandy while I waited for her to come back. After a moment I reached out and tapped Sam on the arm.
“We’re going to the Chains, me and Anne,” I told him. “You’re coming, you and a couple of the new lads. Go pick some.”
Sam nodded, looking both pleased and surprised to be given a decision to make all by himself. He was a slow lad, but he knew fighting, and he knew who was any good at it and who wasn’t. He’d pick well, I was sure.
Truth be told, I was starting to get low on men. Actual Pious Men, that is; I had more than enough hired lads, but that wasn’t the same thing. The almost constant violence of the last two years had worn my original crew of twenty down to barely half their number, and now I had lost Borys as well and I was no longer sure how much I could count on my brother, either. I wondered whether it might be time to think about making Emil up to the table, but that only got me thinking about Desh and what had happened to him, and I didn’t want that.
Perhaps I should move some lads about, I thought. I still had Black Billy on the door of the Tanner’s, for one thing, and that was a job any number of the hired men could have done. It was Billy’s job, though, and I knew he liked it and took it seriously. I wondered how he’d take being replaced, but I supposed that would depend on what I gave him instead. He was a good man, was Billy, and I couldn’t help but think he was wasted where he was.
I was still turning that over in my head when Bloody Anne came back downstairs wearing a magnificent black brocade coat and her daggers at her belt. Sam had rounded up three men as guards for us by then, and the six of us headed out into the late-autumn night together.
Sam took the point with two of his men flanking Anne and me and the other as rearguard, just like a colonel’s personal bodyguard in the army. It seemed like it came second nature to everyone, and I wondered just how bad the fighting had really been over the summer months. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to discover that Anne had been understating what she had done to hold my streets for me. Bloody Anne wasn’t one to boast, I knew that, and the summer had been hard in Ellinburg.
I didn’t know it then, but the winter to come would be harder still.
* * *
* * *
There were five lads on the door at the Chains, the way it was supposed to be, and all of them wer
e mailed and well armed under their cloaks. We were treated like royalty there, as well we should be. I owned the Golden Chains, and to my mind that meant I owned everyone in it.
Once we were inside I looked around the main gaming room, at the busy tables and the richly dressed customers, at the liveried footmen and the thickness of poppy smoke in the air, and I liked what I saw. There was someone else there too, a lad of maybe seventeen years with longish fair hair and overly tight britches.
Sir Eland liked lads, everyone knew that, but he didn’t seem to like any one lad in particular and he got bored easily. I hadn’t seen this one before, but that didn’t mean much.
“Is he treating you all right?” I heard Anne ask him as I walked past.
The lad shrugged.
“He’s rich,” he said. “Anyway, he’s a knight.”
He’s no fucking knight, I thought, but that wasn’t anything that needed saying out loud.
I left Anne to play cards and went and found Sir Eland. He was lounging at the back of the main gaming hall in a splendid knightly doublet embroidered with his false arms, the three towers and griffin rampant that he claimed were his own.
“Evening, boss,” he said, straightening up when he saw me. “Everything good?”
“Aye,” I said, blinking against the cloying sweetness of poppy smoke. “Just looking in.”
I seldom went to the Chains, and I thought Eland was surprised to see me there. I hadn’t sent word ahead so he hadn’t known I was coming, but all the same I was pleased with how I found the place. It was busy, and the card tables were mostly full even relatively early in the night as it was. Security was in good order, too, and that was the most important thing. Sir Eland might have been a false knight, but he ran a good operation, I had to allow, and he gave the place a bit of fake class.