by Peter McLean
I spent more time at home with Ailsa than I had been used to, and I found that I liked it. She could be very pleasant company when she wanted to be, as I have written, and with fewer pressures of society to worry about she had grown a little less formal. She was a good mother to Billy, too, and the lad clearly adored her. In some ways I felt as though we were coming together as a husband and wife at last, and I liked that, too.
Not in every way we weren’t, I’ll allow, but to my mind emotional closeness between two people is a good deal more important than fucking is. I was rich and powerful and I could lie with a woman any time I wanted to, but I found that I didn’t want to. I wanted to spend my time with Ailsa, not with some courtesan like Lady Reiter back in Dannsburg, who I didn’t know and felt nothing for. I had even got a kiss on the cheek that morning after breakfast, before I went to wait for Fat Luka in my study. A dutiful one for appearances’ sake in front of the servants, perhaps, but a kiss nonetheless. I liked that.
I liked that a great deal.
“Morning, boss,” Luka said when he arrived at my house on Trader’s Row that day. “You look in a good mood.”
“Aye, well perhaps I am,” I said as I showed him into my study.
I was happy with Ailsa, truth be told, and with the family we had made with Billy. With the exception of the Chains, business was good. Taxes from my streets and workshops and factories were coming in on time as they should be, and Chandler’s Narrow was a gold mine. The Badger’s Rest on Convent Street was doing well enough too, under Florence Cooper and her Flower Girls. She had taken it back and she had held it, as she had promised me she would, and I took my quarter for respect and left her to run it as she saw fit.
I sat down behind my desk and waved Luka into a chair across from me.
“What have you got for me?” I asked him. “This is important now, Luka.”
“Aye, I know it is,” he said, “but cunning folk don’t grow on fucking trees. There’s been two in three months, and I think that really is all of them now.”
Billy had tested them both, I knew, with Luka there to put the terms of my deal to them. After what had happened with the assassin who called herself Lisbeth Beck I hadn’t sat down with any more of them in person. I don’t believe in making the same mistake twice.
“Perhaps it is,” I had to allow, “and it’s time I met them, now we’re sure of them. Who are they?”
“A man and a young lass,” Luka said. “Matthias Wolf, he calls himself, but if that’s his real name then I’m a priestess of the Harvest Maiden. He’s an outsider, only been in the city for a couple of months, if that. He thinks a lot of himself, but Billy says he’s genuine, and he took the deal willingly enough. She just goes by Mina, don’t seem to have a family name. Or a family, that I can find, for all that she can’t have more than sixteen years to her. Young Billy’s taken a shine to her and no mistake.”
I smiled at that. It would do him good to find a lass close to his own age, I thought.
“Aye, I dare say he has. You’ve brought them to the Tanner’s, then?”
Luka nodded. We’d had this meeting arranged for the last week or more. It had been planned that I would sit down with the cunning folk today unless Luka found any more of them in the meantime. It seemed that he hadn’t, and that didn’t surprise me. If there were only these two left to be found, then I would take that and be grateful for it. As I had told Ailsa, it’s said only one person in ten thousand has it in them to learn the cunning, if that. I was surprised Luka had turned up as many as he had, truth be told.
“Right, then,” I said, and got to my feet. “Let’s go and see the lay of things.”
We rode to the Tanner’s wrapped in heavy cloaks against the cold rain, with six armed lads around us. We hadn’t had trouble with the Sons since Florence took the Badger’s Rest back, but that was only because we hadn’t given them the opportunity to make any. No one went out alone anymore, and none of my top table rode with less than three bodyguards.
Those were the times we lived in.
* * *
* * *
We left the horses with Cookpot in his stables and went into the Tanner’s Arms through the back way. Billy the Boy was sitting at a table with a tall young lass with long fair hair, him sitting up very straight and talking at her in a way that told me loud and clear that he was boasting about something or other. I just hoped he knew what he could talk about outside the family and what he couldn’t. Mika was sitting at another table, Mika who I knew was a lot cleverer than he looked, and he had a man with him that I didn’t know.
He thinks a lot of himself, Luka had said, and I could see now what he had meant. This fellow had his head shaved bald and shiny, and he wore a great thick black mustache, waxed to make it curl upward at the ends. He was dressed head to toe all in black, with a wide-brimmed black hat on the table beside his mug of beer. He looked something of a fool, but then cunning folk are sometimes strange in more ways than one.
“That’s Wolf, sitting with Mika,” Luka said.
“I guessed,” I said. “Billy looks happy.”
Luka smirked. “Told you.”
“Aye, you did.”
I walked into the room then, and Black Billy gave me a nod from the door while Hari poured brandy for us against the morning chill. I took the offered glass, and me and Fat Luka went through into the back room, where Bloody Anne was already waiting for me in her place at the long table.
“Go and get Billy the Boy,” I told Luka, “and bring this man Wolf in here.”
Luka nodded, and went.
“You sure about this?” Anne asked me. “After last time . . .”
“Aye, I know,” I said. “I’m being careful. Billy’s seen them both already, and he’ll be here with us. If either of them tries anything it’ll go hard on them.”
Luka came back then with Billy and Matthias Wolf, and he closed the door behind them to leave us alone. I looked up at the man in black with his curling mustache and his shiny head and gave him a nod.
“My name is Tomas Piety,” I said. “This here is my second, Bloody Anne, and you’ve met Billy. I understand Luka has already explained the lay of things to you.”
“That he has,” Wolf said, and he sat down at the table without waiting to be asked. He placed his ridiculous hat in front of him, and he grinned at me. “I am a cunning man, and you’re recruiting cunning men. This is good for us both.”
His accent spoke of the south somewhere, but I couldn’t quite place where. Near the east coast, perhaps.
“What did you do before you came to Ellinburg?” I asked him.
“I was an entertainer with a traveling menagerie,” he said. “I performed conjuring tricks on a stage, and we called it magic. What better place to hide the cunning than in plain sight, where all will assume it merely clever mummery?”
I had to allow he had a point there, and it wasn’t something that had ever crossed my mind before. The next time a menagerie came to Ellinburg it would be worth looking at, I thought.
“You understand I’m recruiting cunning folk to fight other magicians, not to hide rabbits and do fucking card tricks?”
“No man fights like Matthias Wolf,” he said, and flashed me his grin again. “You will find that I can do that.”
I had already found him deeply irritating, truth be told, but I wasn’t in a position to be choosy.
“I hope you can,” I said.
I looked at Billy, and he nodded.
“He can, Papa. He can call fires, at least. I saw him do it.”
“That’s good,” Bloody Anne said.
It was.
“Aye, that’s good,” I said at last, if somewhat reluctantly, and I took three marks out of my pouch and tossed them across the table to him. “Welcome to the crew. You can room for free at Slaughterhouse Narrow, but you’ll stay out of Cutter’s way if you�
�re wise.”
The man grinned again and swept the coins smoothly into his hand and out of sight. He rose then, and flourished a bow that involved waving his hat about like a fool. I’ve never cared for performing folk, I have to admit.
He left then, and Bloody Anne snorted laughter.
“Prancing idiot,” she muttered, and there we were of one mind.
A few minutes later Luka showed the girl in, and again he closed the door behind her. Billy sat up straighter at once, I noticed, and I thought he might be feeling conscious that she was an inch or so taller than him.
“Papa, this is Mina,” he said, as though that wasn’t obvious. “She’s very strong.”
“Aye,” I said, as the girl stood there with her hands clasped in front of her woolen kirtle. “Take a seat, Mina. I see you and Billy have already been talking, and that’s good. I’m his da.”
Mina nodded and looked at Anne.
“And are you his ma?”
Billy sniggered at that. “Anne’s no one’s ma,” he said.
“Watch your manners,” I snapped at him.
I knew he was only showing off for the lass, but I didn’t care for his tone and I wasn’t having it. I was his da now, and that meant something to me.
“Sorry,” he muttered, sounding sullen in the way that only a lad in his teen years can.
“This is Bloody Anne,” I told Mina. “She’s a soldier, and my second in the Pious Men.”
“And I’m joining the Pious Men, am I?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “That’s a special thing, like a family. Most of the men in that tavern aren’t actually Pious Men, but they work for me like you’ve agreed to. You’ll work for the Pious Men, but you won’t be one, at least not any time soon. Do you understand that, Mina?”
She nodded, and looked up at me through the long blond hair that had fallen over her eyes.
“Billy’s a Pious Man, though, isn’t he?”
“Aye, he is,” I had to say, although he wasn’t really. Not exactly, anyway, but I wouldn’t show the lad up like that when he had obviously told her different. Bloody Anne kicked me under the table, but I ignored her. “Are you ready to work for me, Mina?”
She nodded, and I paid her the same as I had paid Wolf and I sent her on her way. When the door was closed behind her I gave Billy a hard look, and at least he had the grace to blush.
“Sorry, Papa, I just . . . I like her, you understand?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “I was a lad once, too, and not so long ago as you might think. I know how it is, but you mind what you say in front of her. We don’t know her and she’s not family, so you boast all you feel you need to but only about certain things. And don’t you cheek Anne again or you’ll be sorry.”
“Yes, Papa,” he said. “Sorry, Anne.”
Her scar twitched as she smirked to say she couldn’t care less.
“Forget it,” she said.
That was how Matthias Wolf and a girl called Mina came to work for the Pious Men, and that was more important than I knew at the time.
FORTY-SIX
The weeks wore by, and if it had been bad last winter, then now it was worse. There just wasn’t enough food in the city, it was as simple as that, and hungry people can be turned to violence very easily. We ate well enough, but the shortages had pushed prices out of the reach of the poorest workers, and then there was trouble. I did what I could to see that my streets were fed and no one went hungry, but I couldn’t work miracles.
“It’s getting ugly down in the Wheels,” Bloody Anne told me, one afternoon at the Tanner’s Arms. “Someone’s stirring up trouble, telling factory folk how there’s no point working at all if they still can’t hardly afford to eat. Saying how there’s no point paying their taxes, neither.”
I nodded at that. Fat Luka had said much the same thing the day before, and I had set him to finding out where this trouble was coming from. My money was on the Northern Sons, on Bloodhands and his Skanian backers. Getting control of the city’s workforce had always been the Skanians’ main aim, and it seemed that having failed to do it through the underworld they were now trying to do it through simply raising an angry mob. That made sense—it was what I would have done, in Bloodhands’s place.
“Aye,” I said. “Luka’s working on it.”
“Best he works quick,” Anne said. “Two of Florence’s girls got hurt down in the Wheels last night, making their collections.”
“What?”
I hadn’t known that, I had to allow.
“Florence made it right, and she got the taxes,” Anne said, and I knew that meant there had been harsh justice done.
That was good. I would have order on my streets whatever it took, and I knew me and Florence Cooper were of one mind about that. I nodded.
“Bloodhands is behind this, you mark me,” I said. “I’d lay coin there’s no workers’ unrest on his streets.”
Anne just shrugged.
“Not that I’ve heard tell of, no, but that doesn’t mean much. Since Gerta . . . well, you know. These days we’ve little enough information coming from the west of the city.”
I rubbed a hand over my face and said nothing. I didn’t want to think about Gerta, especially not after what Fat Luka had told me the previous day. He hadn’t been able to be sure, not yet, but he’d thought the chief rabble-rouser down in the Wheels might have been Gerta’s widowed husband.
The man had no cause to love me, I knew, but his wife had worked for me, and to my mind if he had sold himself to the Northern Sons then that was a betrayal of both of us. Gerta would never have wanted that, I was sure.
Of course, Gerta had died screaming in some cell beneath the house of magicians, and that had been my fault, so I had to allow that perhaps she would after all. I was still thinking on that with some degree of discomfort when a runner barged into the common room of the Tanner’s, breathless and with melting snow on the shoulders of his torn cloak.
“There’s rioting up on Dock Road!” he panted.
“Fuck,” Anne growled. “Florence’s girls are on their own up there.”
She stormed upstairs to get her mail and weapons, and I sent the runner back out to rouse some of the hired lads. Once he was on his way again I turned to Black Billy.
“You’re coming,” I said. “Mika and Hari can mind the Tanner’s between them. Go and get mailed up.”
“Yes, boss,” Billy said.
Half an hour later I was heading north out of the Stink with Bloody Anne and Black Billy and ten armed men at my back.
If those Wheelers wanted a riot, I would fucking give them one.
* * *
* * *
Wheelers and Stink folk don’t get on; they never have done and that hadn’t changed just because they were all my streets now. Deep down even I had to admit I didn’t much care for Wheelers, and when we were about halfway up Dock Road I was reminded why.
We could hear the shouting before we saw anything, hear the crash of breaking glass and see the flickering glow of flames around the next turn. Two of the Flower Girls came backing toward us with their blades up, both of them sooty and running with blood, with eight or so angry men giving chase. One of those men hurled a cobble obviously torn up from the road, and it went sailing past the two women and almost hit me.
Black Billy took off like the shot from a cannon, charging them and bellowing with fury as he went. His club rose and fell with a ruthless efficiency, smashing arms and shoulders and heads in its wake. My ten lads were with him, and the two Flower Girls rallied then. It seemed that they had run very short of mercy that day.
“How bad is it?” I asked, when the killing was done.
“Bad, Mr. Piety,” one of them said. Jutta, I thought her name was, but I couldn’t be sure. “They’re breaking everything they can get at, and they’ve taken one of the factory
owners hostage. Some bastard’s shouting them on, but they’re all around him and we’ve no bows so there’s nothing to be done. Florence is still up there somewhere. We got separated in the fighting, and nothing we could do about that either.”
“Aye, riots are ugly things,” I said, and nodded to the other woman. She was nursing an obviously broken arm. “Watch over her; we’ve got this now.”
“I can watch over myself,” the woman growled. “Go and rally to Flo, Jutta. She needs us all, now.”
“Aye, as you will,” I said. “Come with us, then.”
Jutta nodded and joined us, taking up position on Anne’s left flank like it was the most natural thing in the world. She led us back the way she had come, up past the ruins of the Stables toward Old Kurt’s alley, and I saw what she meant.
There must have been sixty or seventy of them in the streets at least, men and women who should have been working but were instead smashing windows and trying to set fires in the wet, snowy streets. Two of the Flower Girls were dead on the ground, that I could see. The remaining six had made a ring around Florence Cooper, backed against the wall of a warehouse with blades in their hands but little they could do against so many but defend themselves.
The factory owner had been hanged from a lantern hook.
Her body was turning slowly on the end of the rope, her face purple and the snow beneath her stained dark where she had voided herself in death. All the same, I recognized her. Madame Rainer, her name was. She had come to dinner at my house, once, I remembered.
Destroying your own neighborhood seemed like the work of animals, to my mind, not rational men, but murdering an innocent woman whose only crime had been to give them work wasn’t something I even knew how to describe.
Even Wheelers didn’t do that sort of thing, but by then I didn’t think it had been entirely their own idea. A man was standing on an upturned crate outside the factory they were ransacking, shouting encouragement over the din. It seemed that Fat Luka had been right.