Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  The heralds came first, looking incongruously colourful with the red and white royal arms on the tabards they wore over their mourning black. Behind them walked the assembled nobility, in full-length black mourning cloaks and hoods, and behind them came a procession of magicians with their midnight-blue robes crossed by black sashes. Behind those came more heralds carrying banners showing the royal arms, and then the funeral bier itself with its bearers flanked by martial knights with the scabbards of their heavy war swords wrapped in black silk, and then yet more heralds and knights to bring up the rear.

  The queen had been dead for well over a month, and it seemed that the embalming had failed horribly. The corpse had been packed in a barrel of salt to preserve it, so Iagin had told me the previous day, but some moisture must have got into it somewhere. There had been no way the resulting mess could be seen if we expected anyone to believe the queen had only been dead for a few days, so the casket was closed and a wax effigy of Her Majesty had been fashioned and dressed and laid atop the embroidered purple velvet pall that covered the bier. I had never set eyes on the queen and I had no idea if it was a good likeness, but I hoped not. If it was, our late queen had not been a handsome woman.

  The highest priests in the capital were officiating, and it seemed to me that they competed with one another to see who could give the longest and dullest eulogy possible. The afternoon wore on in grinding tedium as we sweltered in the heat of the lamps, until my patience was worn thin and my arse was numb on the wooden pew.

  Then it happened.

  Arch High Priest Rantanen was finally intoning the closing litany of the gods’ graces in his most solemn and ponderous voice when the Princess Crown Royal finally snapped.

  The entire congregation were kneeling for this last litany, but suddenly the princess was on her feet and shrieking as she hurled hymnals and lamps and anything else she could reach at the wax effigy of her mother.

  The Arch High Priest stammered to a stop as the first thrown lamp crashed onto the stone floor beneath the bier and exploded. I saw the Prince Regent reach up from his kneeling position to try and calm his daughter.

  She punched him in the eye with the viciousness of a street urchin, sending him reeling back into Lord Vogel, then she snatched up another lamp and launched it at the bier with a deranged howl. It trailed a streamer of smoke behind it until it landed on the velvet pall that covered the casket, and broke.

  That velvet was old and dry and dusty, and it began to burn as the flaming lamp oil spread across it. I heard a shocked gasp from those around me, all but drowned out by the princess’ continued screaming. Vogel was on his feet now, pushing the Prince Regent unceremoniously out of his way as he reached for the howling demon the princess had become.

  ‘Oh, my gods,’ Ailsa whispered.

  I turned my eyes from Vogel’s attempts to restrain the princess, and I saw what she meant. The wax effigy of the queen was now blazing like a candle, melting and running as the flames jumped to catch in one of the overhanging banners.

  The heat of the burning effigy combined with the fire already raging on the floor beneath the bier set the coffin alight between them. I could hear someone yelling for water, someone else for sand, but in the Grand High Temple there were neither. Some fool tore down a banner and attempted to smother the fire, which resulted in both the banner and his clothes catching alight as well.

  Lord Vogel had the Princess Crown Royal in his arms now, holding her tight as she kicked and flailed and screamed. Again the Prince Regent tried to intervene, and his daughter kicked him in the face hard enough to bring bright blood from his nose. Behind us people were streaming out of the temple as the flames began to spread with astonishing speed, licking up the altar cloth and threatening to engulf the rest of the heraldry that hung perilously close to the blaze.

  The coffin was fully burning now, and I could smell the rotted meat stench of the queen cooking inside it. The look on Ailsa’s face told me that she could too. Vogel and five of the Palace Guard bundled the princess away from the fire and towards the great doors, the Prince Regent hurrying behind them with a silk pocket square clutched to his bloody nose. At the last moment the princess managed to twist her head away from the smothering hand Vogel had been holding over her mouth.

  ‘Burn!’ she shrieked, loud enough for everyone in the congregation to hear her words. ‘Burn, you witch!’

  There was fucking uproar.

  Shouted protestations, denials, horror. I heard the word witch far more times than could possibly be good.

  ‘We should leave,’ Ailsa said, and I found that I couldn’t agree more.

  I had never seen a state funeral before, and I never expected to see another one.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was wrong about that.

  *

  Vogel’s rage was apocalyptic, as might have been expected.

  He stalked the length of the Prince Regent’s drawing room, his hands clasped tightly behind his back and his white hair in uncharacteristic disarray. Ailsa and I were both there, and Iagin and the Prince Regent himself. The Princess Crown Royal had been confined to her rooms and restrained by four burly nuns until her doctor could be summoned to administer enough poppy wine to put her to sleep.

  All pretence of hiding it was over now.

  There was quite obviously something very wrong with the Princess Crown Royal.

  ‘What,’ Vogel snarled through gritted teeth, ‘the fuck am I supposed to do with this?’

  ‘My Lord Judiciar,’ the Prince Regent began, ‘my daughter is prone to . . . outbursts. Fits, you might say. She—’

  ‘I know that!’ Vogel roared at him. ‘She set her own mother’s coffin on fire. She called our beloved queen a witch in the plain hearing of everyone in this city who fucking matters! Why was she there, you cretin? Your one fucking job is to keep her calm and away from stressful situations. First the balcony, and now this? You stupid cunt! You didn’t think her own mother’s funeral might be fucking stressful ?’

  I had never seen Lord Vogel lose his temper before. I wouldn’t have believed him capable of it, in fact, but I suppose everyone has a limit to their patience. Vogel had quite obviously reached his.

  ‘I . . . yes, Lord Vogel,’ the prince whispered.

  This Prince Regent, this man who was king in all but name, was plainly terrified of the Provost Marshal. He knew where the power in the room truly lay, there could be no doubt about that. Vogel took a deep breath and calmed himself.

  ‘Who controls the princess’ medication?’ he demanded.

  ‘Her what?’ the prince said, looking confused.

  ‘Her chief tutor, a Master Edric Nyman,’ Ailsa said.

  Vogel just nodded. ‘Arrest him. I want to know if he is simply incompetent or if someone bribed him to allow this to happen, and if so I want to know who that was. Tell Ilse to find out. Either way, we don’t need to see him again.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ailsa said.

  ‘You’ve been drugging my daughter?’ the prince blustered, and I thought he looked genuinely appalled at the notion.

  ‘Yes, we have been for years,’ Ailsa said. ‘It appears we haven’t been drugging her quite enough.’

  I shook my head and said nothing.

  ‘The princess was overcome with grief for her beloved mother,’ Iagin said, obviously thinking out loud the same way Ailsa did sometimes. ‘She’s young, and has never known loss or hardship in her life. The queen’s sudden and unexpected death hit her hard. Young girls are so fragile at that age, after all. The fire was an accident, an overturned lamp. I’m sure we can find someone to blame for that easily enough. Most of the people who actually saw it will listen when we tell them what really happened, and we can deal with any dissenting voices afterwards. I’ll take care of it.’

  Vogel just nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘There’s Lan Letskov,’ Ailsa said. ‘He won’t let us tell him what he saw, you know he won’t.’

  ‘He won’t talk, t
hough,’ Iagin said.

  ‘Perhaps not, but he will know and he will remember.’

  ‘We can’t remove him, not yet,’ Vogel said. ‘It’s too soon. Subtlety, Ailsa, always.’

  I saw an unmistakable curl of distaste cross her lips before she smoothed her expression.

  ‘You’ll want me to see him,’ she said, and I could hear a note of resignation in her voice.

  ‘You know very well that he thinks he’s in love with you.’

  That startled me, but I forced myself to hold my peace.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Ailsa said, and turned away.

  My weapons are gold and lace, and paints and powders.

  Ailsa had told me that, once, but I didn’t think I’d ever really understood quite what she meant until that moment.

  ‘Give him a chance to accept our side of things,’ Vogel went on. ‘If he won’t, well. There it is.’

  And the dagger, when it’s needed. You can hide a dagger very well indeed, behind enough lace.

  She definitely could. I knew that from personal experience.

  ‘What about the magicians who were there in the procession?’ I asked. ‘They won’t swallow your horseshit, and you can’t make them disappear, however much you might want to.’

  Vogel turned to look at me then, and his smile made me feel cold.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I have a job for you, Tomas.’

  Chapter 15

  The next afternoon found me paying a call on the house of magicians. Me, and Billy. We had Bloody Anne with us, of course, and Oliver and Emil and a couple of Iagin’s strong-arm men as well, but it was Billy who was the important one. Billy, who the previous year had torn the learned magus Absolom Greuv inside out with the power of his cunning.

  There were two of the Guard of the Magi on the door, wearing full armour and closed great helms. Blue surcoats hung over their armour, embroidered with the white seven-pointed star of the house of magicians, and they had heavy war swords at their belts and halberds in their hands. The Guard of the Magi were the private army of the house of magicians, and I knew their numbers and their very existence worried the Queen’s Men a great deal. There was no love lost between the house of law and the house of magicians, and I suspected there never had been.

  Fat Luka had sent a messenger that morning, so at least I was expected. The two guards snapped to attention when I climbed down from my carriage with Anne and Billy behind me. The other men stayed ahorse, their hands never very far from the hilts of their weapons.

  ‘I’m Father Tomas Piety,’ I told the armoured men. ‘I’m expected.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ one said, his voice muffled by his helmet. ‘The boy will have to wait out here.’

  The magi had no magic, we had proved that the previous year, but they had soldiers and I had no idea what else inside their house and I wasn’t taking any chances.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

  They didn’t like it but they knew who I was and where I had come from, and so had no choice in the face of what amounted to a royal command. They let Billy and Anne in with me, where we were met in the high-ceilinged and galleried marble hall by an attendant in the blue and white velvet livery of the house. The white sigil of the house of magicians was embroidered over his heart.

  He blinked at the sight of Billy and Anne but he said nothing about it, and that was wise of him.

  ‘Archmagus Nikolai Reiter will see you now,’ he said.

  He showed us into an anteroom, where the archmagus was waiting for us behind a wide desk. I supposed I was honoured, to be received by one of his elevated status. He was a handsome man with perhaps fifty or so years to him, pale and clean-shaven and with his hair beginning to grey at the temples. He wore the midnight-blue robes of his order.

  He stood as we entered, and extended his hand to me across the table. That surprised me, I had to allow. I shook it, and gave him a nod of respect.

  ‘Father Tomas,’ he said. ‘I understand you come from our colleagues at the house of law.’

  ‘Aye, I do,’ I said. ‘These are Bloody Anne and my son, Billy.’

  He nodded to Anne, and waved us into chairs as he resumed his seat behind the desk. He gave the lad a long look.

  ‘Billy, yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of you.’

  I bet you have, I thought.

  ‘Archmagus Reiter, you say,’ I said. ‘I met a Lady Reiter once, at a social function last year. Any relation?’

  His eyes narrowed slightly as though he was trying to work out if I was making fun of him. The Lady Reiter I had met was a courtesan, apparently, which Ailsa had explained to me was another way of saying ‘very expensive whore’.

  ‘My cousin,’ he said. ‘We have as little as possible to do with one another.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ I said. ‘Family can be difficult sometimes, I know that.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said.

  He fell silent as the liveried attendant returned and served us tea in shallow bowls, then withdrew with a bow. The archmagus lifted his tea and inhaled the scent of the leaves for a moment, regarding me over the rim of the bowl.

  ‘Your “family” in particular, Tomas, have been extremely difficult since Dieter Vogel became Provost Marshal,’ he said.

  ‘Before my time,’ I said. ‘I assume you were at the queen’s funeral?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and pushed a hand back through his hair with a sigh. ‘I am the presiding head of the house of magicians, after all. I suppose you’re here to tell me what we really saw.’

  This man Nikolai Reiter struck me as a reasonable enough fellow, greatly unlike the late and unlamented magus Absolom Greuv, who had been a complete arse. I wasn’t going to insult his intelligence by trying to dress this up as anything other than what it was.

  ‘Aye, that’s about the lay of it,’ I said. ‘There was an accident, you see. A novice priest upset a lamp and it started a fire, and the poor princess was overcome with grief that the dignity of her beloved mother’s funeral was so disrupted. She’s a young girl, and she became quite distraught. Very unfortunate, to be sure, but quite understandable. It’s nothing that needs mentioning ever again. Do I make myself clear, Archmagus?’

  ‘Oh, it’s perfectly clear, thank you, Father Tomas,’ he said. ‘It’s just Vogel suppressing information again, the same way he seeks to suppress knowledge and learning in every place he can find it. The same way he would like to suppress us, if he thought he could get away with it.’

  I sipped my tea and thought about that for a moment.

  I oppose anything that the magicians want, Vogel had said to me the previous year. In truth I wish someone would rid me of them, and that cursed university too.

  Perhaps the archmagus spoke the truth, but that was none of my affair.

  ‘I’m not here to discuss house politics, Archmagus,’ I said. ‘Just so long as you and your learned colleagues all remember what you saw. I wouldn’t like for Billy and me to have to come back and remind anyone.’

  ‘Spare me your threats,’ he said, and I could hear the bitterness in his voice. ‘I heard you. Accident, young girl distraught with grief, so on and so forth. It makes no difference, does it? The public will have already heard your story, and there’s no advantage to anyone trying to gainsay it.’

  ‘Exactly that,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we understand each other, Archmagus.’

  ‘Oh, I understand you, Tomas,’ he said. ‘Whether you understand the manner of man you’re working for is another matter.’

  ‘I serve the crown,’ I said.

  ‘And how does it serve the crown to seek to prevent learning?’ the archmagus shot back at me. ‘How would it serve the crown to abolish the house of magicians?’

  ‘It wouldn’t,’ I said honestly, and thought perhaps it might be time to smooth the waters between us. ‘No one is looking to do that, Archmagus. Without the alchemy of your magicians to make blasting powder, where would we be if it were ever to come to war again?’

  He blinked a
t me, and I thought perhaps I had surprised him there.

  ‘I . . . hadn’t realised you grasped that,’ he said.

  I had only had a short time as governor of Ellinburg and in the end I hadn’t managed to read many of the books in the governor’s library, but I had made sure that the treatise on the house of magicians was one of the first I took down from the dusty shelves. No magicians, no blasting powder. I grasped that well enough.

  ‘I read it,’ I said. ‘In a book. I serve who I serve, Archmagus, but I am not an ignorant thug, whatever you may think.’

  ‘I see that you are not,’ Reiter said.

  I understood that, so obviously Vogel must have done too. No, he wasn’t looking to do away with the magicians entirely but I would have bet gold he was looking to control them, as he did everything else. They had far too much power and autonomy for Vogel’s liking, and that displeased him, and displeasing Lord Vogel was very, very unhealthy.

  I wondered if the archmagus grasped that?

  *

  Iagin was waiting for me when we got back to the Bountiful Harvest.

  ‘How did it go with our learned friends?’ he asked me.

  I shrugged. ‘They’ll do what they’re told.’

  He gave Billy a sidelong glance, and nodded.

  ‘I’m sure they will.’

  Don’t bring your insane pet magician to any more meetings, Iagin had told me once. I thought Billy gave him the fear, and that was good. I liked Iagin well enough, but I still wasn’t sure how much I could trust him. I thought on the words Archmagus Nikolai Reiter had said to me, and decided to keep them to myself.

  I thought I understood what sort of man Vogel was, but perhaps I was wrong. The devil himself in the service of the crown, I had thought him. He had shown me nothing to change my mind about that, but perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps there was something I was missing, but I knew Iagin wasn’t the right person to have that conversation with.

  I didn’t think anyone was.

  Sometimes a leader has to keep his own counsel and no other. The captain had taught me that, back in the war, and he had been right then and he was right now.