Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  ‘Oh, didn’t you just,’ Vogel said, and his cold eyes flickered towards Billy and me as he said it. ‘We adapt and move on, Ailsa, it’s what we do. As for what His Highness thought he was doing bringing the princess out there, I have no idea. He was very clearly told that this evening was about him, not his royal daughter. The child is not yet of age, after all, and of a delicate disposition, as you well know.’

  I wondered what he meant by that, but right then didn’t seem like a good time to ask.

  ‘If I may, sir,’ I ventured, ‘I’m not sure why I’m here. What do you need from me?’

  ‘I want you to go and see the Prince Regent,’ Vogel said. ‘Talk to him, man to man. I would do it myself but he seems somewhat . . . reticent, shall we say, in my company. He needs some spine putting in him, Tomas, if he’s to be any sort of regent at all. You were a soldier, and a priest, you should know the right sort of thing to say. The boy can stay here with Ailsa and myself while you’re about it.’

  That was that, then. I wasn’t happy about it, but Ailsa caught my eye and gave me a tiny nod to say that it was all right, or at least that I didn’t have a choice. Vogel’s orders weren’t to be questioned, I knew that much by now, and certainly not to his face.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ I had to say, and that was done.

  *

  A footman led me down another corridor to a door I recognised as the one that led to the Prince Regent’s private drawing room. Two guardsmen were stationed outside that door, and from inside the room I could hear someone sobbing.

  The man was grieving for his dead wife, I reminded myself, but in truth it had been a month and more since the queen’s death. Surely, I thought then, the prince had had nothing to do but grieve while he was under house arrest during that time. It seemed to my mind that he should at least be beginning to get over it by then, but of course at that point in my life I hadn’t lost anyone I had truly loved since my ma died, and I had been very young then. Looking back on it, perhaps I was wrong. No, fuck it. I was wrong, and I will admit that now. I didn’t know it at the time, but grief can take years to work its way out. I didn’t know that then, but I would come to learn it through the pain and sorrow of the years that followed.

  Anyway, once again I was struck with the thought that something within the palace wasn’t right. The footman knocked sharply on the door then opened it without waiting for an answer, and ushered me inside.

  The Prince Regent was alone apart from four of the Palace Guard, the men standing like statues against the wall while he wept. He was sitting slumped in a chair with the jacket of his magnificent crimson dress uniform open over his undershirt, his medals hanging sad and dishevelled from his drooping lapels.

  I cleared my throat, and he looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes.

  ‘Your Highness,’ I said. ‘My deepest sympathies for your loss.’

  ‘My loss,’ he repeated, his snot-choked voice sounding hollow. ‘Yes. Thank you, Father Tomas. Will you join me?’

  He waved a limp hand at the silver tray on the table beside him that held three brandy bottles, each half empty, and a number of glasses.

  ‘Aye, my thanks,’ I said.

  I walked towards the chair opposite him and stopped for a moment to regard the four guardsmen.

  ‘You know who I am?’ I asked them.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ their sergeant said.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘You’re dismissed. I wish to speak to the Prince Regent in private.’

  ‘Sir, we have our orders.’

  I looked at him then, the way I might have looked at a business owner in the Stink who didn’t want to pay his taxes. That wasn’t the look of a Queen’s Man. That was the look of the devil Tomas Piety, and I knew it brooked no argument.

  ‘I’m giving you new orders,’ I said, and my voice dropped into the flat tone that promised harsh justice to come if it wasn’t obeyed. ‘Fuck off, the lot of you.’

  They went, and that was wise of them.

  ‘What do you want, Tomas?’ the prince asked once we were finally alone.

  ‘Vogel sent me,’ I admitted, seeing no reason to lie to him about it. ‘You’re worried about the regency, aren’t you?’

  ‘The regency?’ His head lifted then and he looked at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to laugh. ‘Oh yes, Tomas, I’m terrified of sitting on a throne and being told what to do and say by your lady wife while living the most privileged life in the realm. How absolutely bloody awful !’

  He shouted that last at me, then grabbed up one of the brandy bottles from the table and gulped from its neck like a madman. Like my brother would have done.

  I waited a moment until he started to choke and go red in the face, then I took the bottle from his hand and put it back on the table. I poured myself a glass from one of the other bottles, and sipped from it while I waited for him to get himself back under control.

  ‘What, then?’ I asked, once he had wiped the tears from his eyes. ‘There’s obviously something.’

  ‘You’ve absolutely no idea, have you? Gods, you must be new here.’

  ‘I’m not from Dannsburg,’ I said. ‘Until recently I was the lord governor of Ellinburg, away to the east. Before that I was a soldier, and I was a priest. Whatever you’re not telling me, I’d lay odds I heard worse during the war.’

  ‘The war,’ the prince said, and he shook his head as he lifted up the sides of his loose jacket to display his medals. ‘Look at this lot, Tomas. Look at all this shit. You think I was ever in a war?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Highness,’ I said.

  ‘Of course I bloody wasn’t,’ he sneered. ‘Wars were for my father, and my brother, and they both died there. It’s all for show. It’s all just cheap gilding on a brass candlestick like everything else. That’s all this regency is too, I know that. My dear late wife was a queen, but I’ll never be a king.’

  ‘You don’t have to be, sir,’ I said, trying to reassure him. It seemed to me that the Prince Regent was a deeply insecure man without his regal wife beside him. ‘You just have to look like one. We will do the rest. A year, maybe two, then your daughter can take the throne in her own right, and—’

  Apparently that was exactly the wrong thing to say.

  The Prince Regent lurched to his feet with a bellow of rage and snatched up his bottle again. He swayed there for a moment, one side of his great waxed moustache drooping where he’d rubbed it, then he turned and hurled the bottle across the room and into the fireplace. The glass shattered and blue flames leaped in the grate as the brandy caught, filling the room with the stink of burning spirits.

  ‘My fucking daughter!’ he screamed at me, then his knees buckled and he sagged back into his chair like a broken man.

  ‘Highness,’ I reminded him quietly, ‘I am a priest. If there’s something you wish to confess in confidence before the gods, Our Lady will hear your words.’

  The prince looked at me for a long moment, then he slumped off his chair and onto his knees in front of me, and he bowed his head.

  He began to talk, and I to listen.

  Chapter 13

  It was late by the time I left the Prince Regent’s chambers. A liveried aide informed me that Ailsa had taken Billy back to the Bountiful Harvest some time ago, and that I had a visitor waiting downstairs for me. I just nodded at her and let her lead me down to a ground-floor antechamber. I didn’t know where Vogel was, and in all truth I was glad of that. I had no desire to see him again that night. The prince’s words were still turning around and around in my head, and I was struggling to think about anything else.

  ‘Tomas,’ Anne said as she got up from her chair in the small room they had put her in. ‘Is everything all right?’

  I wondered how the fuck she had got into the palace, until I remembered what I had said to Fat Luka about Leonov knowing how to reach me if need be. She had obviously got worried when Ailsa had brought Billy back without me, and decided to come and find me for herself, whatever Ailsa must have said
about it. I wondered how hard she’d had to lean on Luka and he in turn on Leonov to make that happen, but it didn’t matter. She was there, and that was the main thing.

  Bloody Anne was the best second a man could want. She would never leave me behind enemy walls, I knew that. Even then, for all that I worked for them at the time, I think that my instincts were telling me that the grand institutions of Dannsburg, the palace and the house of law, consisted mostly of enemy walls.

  ‘Aye, all’s well, Anne,’ I said after a moment, although it absolutely wasn’t. ‘Thank you for coming. I appreciate it.’

  She gave me a short nod, and held her peace.

  I turned to the aide, who was still waiting at my elbow. ‘Perhaps you could show us out,’ I said, having no clear idea where in the vast palace we were by then.

  She led us down a long corridor to a door that let out onto the wide space of the now empty parade ground, and all the way there Anne kept quiet as she marched at my side. She could tell something was wrong, I knew she could, but Anne always had known when to keep her mouth shut.

  Eventually we were ushered out into the cool night air, and we crossed the parade ground together in silence until we reached the gates. A pair of uniformed sentries let us out onto the street.

  ‘I want a drink,’ I said. ‘Right now.’

  Anne just nodded in understanding and together we walked away from the palace, heading south towards the river. No one of quality went south of the river in Dannsburg, Ailsa had told me once, and that was good. That was exactly what I wanted that night. Not the Bountiful Harvest, not Ailsa or Luka or even Billy. I wanted to find the sort of filthy sink tavern that felt like home and get drunk with my best friend Bloody Anne, like old times, like when we had been in the army together. Like back in the war, when I’d still understood the world and how it worked. I know it comes to something when wartime makes more sense than peace does, but we had understood the world then. Now, perhaps, I was living in a different world to the one we had known under the cannon’s roar.

  We crossed the bridge together, and once we were on the far side in the dark squalor of the bad part of town, Anne finally spoke.

  ‘What the fuck happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s get a bottle,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you.’

  We found a tavern, not one Leonov frequented, and went inside. It was still crowded despite the late hour and we were too richly dressed for that side of the river, but I had the Weeping Women at my hips and Anne had her daggers, and the looks on our faces brooked no argument that night. This wasn’t the Stink, no, and we weren’t known here, but hard folk recognise their own kind anywhere. We were left alone, and I bought us a bottle of cheap brandy and carried it and a couple of chipped glasses over to an empty table in the corner of the room, away from the fire, where it was less crowded. I poured for us both, then looked at Anne over the rim of my glass.

  ‘The Prince Regent said a confession to me tonight,’ I told her, keeping my voice low.

  ‘Oh?’ Anne said. ‘What was that, then?’

  A priest wouldn’t normally speak of a man’s confession, of course, but the prince was no one I knew and I thought this was important. This was business.

  ‘He’s terrified of his own daughter,’ I said, and waited while Anne took that in.

  ‘The princess?’

  ‘Aye. Well, not of her as such, I suppose, but certainly of her becoming queen. She’s mad as a shithouse rat, according to him. Her maids have a lot of accidents. Burns, mostly. Bad ones. One of them had to have her arm taken off at the elbow by the palace surgeon recently, and no adequate explanation for it. Apparently it’s becoming hard to hide, and understandably so. He’s scared of what she might do, with the power of a queen. But then the Old Man doesn’t seem to trust him at all, so Lady only knows if it’s true or not.’

  ‘That’s not good,’ Anne said, knowing I meant Vogel.

  ‘No, it fucking ain’t. If the Old Man doesn’t trust the regent then we’ve got a fucking problem brewing. He’s got the arse with Ailsa for marrying me too, that much was clear enough.’

  ‘Do you think she’s mad?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know, Bloody Anne? I’ve never been within so much as a hundred feet of her, never mind spoken to her. Ailsa doesn’t have any love for the girl, that’s plain enough.’

  Anne grunted and swallowed her brandy, and I remembered how little love she had for Ailsa. Ailsa’s opinion wasn’t one that Anne would value, I knew that much.

  ‘You’re still supposed to be getting knighted at some point, aren’t you?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, I suppose so,’ I said. ‘When someone can be bothered to get around to it, anyway.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be meeting the princess then, won’t you?’

  I must admit I hadn’t thought of that. At least then I could form my own opinion on the matter.

  ‘I suppose I will,’ I said. ‘There’s something to look forward to.’

  Anne refilled our glasses, a thoughtful look on her face.

  ‘Are they really mad, do you think?’ she asked after a moment.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shithouse rats.’

  I snorted laughter and drained my glass. This was what I needed, a night of drinking and talking horseshit with my best friend, as far away from the Queen’s Men as I could get.

  *

  Of course, in Dannsburg that was never very far at all.

  Leonov and a couple of his boys came and scraped us out of the tavern sometime before dawn, and we were driven back to the Bountiful Harvest in the back of a dray cart. I have to confess I don’t remember much of the journey. We had been halfway through our third bottle by the time he arrived.

  I woke in the early afternoon. When I dragged my sore head out of bed and looked at the pile of discarded clothes on the floor, I saw there was sick down the sleeve of my coat. I wasn’t even sure if it was mine or Anne’s.

  At least I had plenty of other clothes now, having kept a local tailor busy day and night since our arrival. I had a piss into the pot and a wash at the basin, then got dressed and headed downstairs. I found Fat Luka waiting for me.

  ‘You’re in the shit with your wife,’ he said by way of greeting.

  ‘I dare say I am, and not for the first time,’ I said. ‘Is she still here?’

  ‘No, boss.’

  I nodded, glad of that if little enough else.

  ‘Aye, well, that’s good. What else?’

  Luka shrugged. ‘Billy’s sulking that Ailsa went away again, but she promised she’d see him again when she could. Anne was puking in the stable yard, last I saw her. Oh, and the state funeral for the queen has been announced for three days’ time. We’ll have to go, I suppose.’

  ‘We will. How’s the mood on the streets?’

  ‘Well enough, from what I hear,’ he said. ‘The prince gave quite the stirring speech last night, apparently. Everyone seems to love him.’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  I had thought they might, once Iagin’s whisperers got their story spread around. That was how government was done in Dannsburg.

  ‘Well, I say everyone,’ Luka went on, ‘but perhaps not quite. Word is the house of magicians has been stirring up trouble with the governing council, but quite what sort of trouble I haven’t been able to find out. Sounds like they aren’t best happy about something, anyway.’

  ‘They usually aren’t,’ I said. ‘Tell me, Fat Luka, what do people think of the Princess Crown Royal?’

  He blinked at me. ‘Well, she’s going to be queen in a couple of years, isn’t she? She’s . . . I don’t know, actually. It’s like she’s some sort of goddess, real but like she’s not real, if you see what I mean. You don’t hear folk talk about her, as such.’

  ‘Maybe you might encourage a few people to start talking about her,’ I said. ‘I want to get a feel for opinions.’

  ‘You won’t get an honest opinion in this city, boss,’ he said. ‘Whatever they
might think of her, no one’s going to dare speak ill of their future queen, are they?’

  I sighed. I supposed they wouldn’t, at that. Not in Dannsburg they wouldn’t.

  I had to admit I couldn’t really blame them.

  Chapter 14

  I had never seen a state funeral before.

  Half the city was draped in black for the occasion, and even the lowest commoner seemed to have found enough dark cloth to fashion a mourning armband at the very least. Even the route the funeral procession would take through the city had been hung with black banners. I was dressed all in black myself, and so was Ailsa beside me. As Queen’s Men we were among the most honoured mourners, already seated within the echoing vastness of the Grand High Temple of All Gods. It dwarfed Ellinburg’s Great Temple, looming on the far side of the castle hill near the north wall of the city. Iagin and Ilse were there as well, although seated apart from us so as not to draw attention to our group. As man and wife it was only natural for Ailsa and me to sit together, and I found that I was glad of that.

  Lamps burned everywhere, in long lines along the top of each row of pews. When I married Ailsa in the Great Temple in Ellinburg the place had been full of candles, but that was for weddings. For the flame of love. Funerals meant lamps, to light the deceased’s way into the grey lands, and it seemed a queen’s funeral meant a very great number of lamps indeed.

  Lord Vogel was there, of course, in the front row of pews beside the Prince Regent and the Princess Crown Royal. On his other side was the older man who had been with Ailsa at the trial of Lady Lan Delanov, and again I wondered who he was. I leaned close to Ailsa to murmur in her ear.

  ‘Who’s that beside the Old Man?’ I asked her.

  ‘First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov,’ she whispered back. ‘He’s the presiding head of the governing council.’

  ‘Is he with the family?’

  ‘No, absolutely not.’

  ‘I saw you with him, at the trial.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We like to keep him close, where we can see him.’

  She turned away to make an end to the conversation, and I sighed and sat back to wait until the drummers took up their slow beat.