Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  ‘I have no idea,’ Ailsa said, ‘but Lord Vogel does not sign arrest warrants for no reason. At this moment the entire governing council is under suspicion. Someone in Dannsburg must have made common cause with the Skanians, and it is our job to find out who.’

  ‘So down to Ilse she goes, then, is that it?’

  ‘Is there something you’re having difficulty understanding, Tomas?’ Ailsa asked me, her voice turning cold. ‘We are the Queen’s Men. The City Guard may arrest people in public, but when it needs to be done quietly and out of sight, that is our job. When hard questions need to be asked in the dark, that is our job. We are the Secret Guard, if you will. This is what we are for.’

  ‘Aye, I know that,’ I said, and I decided that I had already said more than was wise. ‘I’m not questioning my orders. I’m just worried, that’s all. Maybe it’s the soldier in me, but I can’t get my mind off the Skanian threat. I remember what you told me about them, and about what will happen to us if it comes to war.’

  Ailsa smiled at me then, and I thought perhaps I had rescued the conversation just in time.

  ‘It won’t come to war,’ she reassured me. ‘We just need to root out the collaborators, make it impossible for them to send another assassin.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Aye, that’s good. I worry of a night, that’s all. Bad dreams. Sorry, I . . . I know I shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ailsa said. ‘I know the war left you . . . well, yes. There it is. I’m glad you still feel you can bring your concerns to me, Tomas.’

  Good, that was saved, then. Ailsa would perhaps report that her battle-shocked husband was having nightmares about another war, but no more than that. I thought that had probably been expected anyway. One thing was clear as day to me, though.

  She wasn’t telling me the truth.

  Chapter 19

  Root out the collaborators, my arse, I thought as I walked slowly back towards the Bountiful Harvest. What we were really doing was removing the Prince Regent’s support network, one person at a time. Vogel was working his way through the old guard on the governing council, finding reasons to arrest anyone who still respected the prince. I thought I understood why.

  I couldn’t shake the fear of war from my mind, whatever Ailsa had told me. A country at war needs strong and stable leadership above all else, and if we didn’t have that in the Prince Regent then by Our Lady’s name we had to make it look like we did. A united and loyal governing council would go a long way to achieving that.

  I was met at the end of the road by Fat Luka. He had Oliver and Emil with him, and all three of them were mailed and wearing swords. I stared at them in surprise. Luka was red in the face, and he had obviously been hurrying.

  ‘There you are,’ he said, bending over as he tried to catch his breath. ‘Thank the Lady for that!’

  ‘How the fuck did you know where I was?’

  ‘Brandt sent a runner to the Harvest to tell me,’ Luka said. ‘Lady’s sake, boss, you shouldn’t be out on your own.’

  ‘Why not? I’m a fucking Queen’s Man, Fat Luka. We as good as own this city.’

  ‘Aye, you’re a Queen’s Man,’ Luka said, lowering his voice so the lads wouldn’t hear. ‘You’re a Queen’s Man who disappeared six of the Palace Guard not so long past. You think they didn’t have mates? You think soldiers don’t gossip? You can fight, I know that, but not half a dozen armed off-duty guardsmen, you can’t. No one can, not on their own. What the fuck do you think would have happened if they’d been following you? Your Queen’s Warrant won’t stop a knife in the back and that’s all there is to it.’

  I blinked at him in surprise. Fat Luka was giving me a telling. I wouldn’t normally have let that pass, but this time I had to allow that he was right. I hadn’t even fucking thought about it, and that shamed me. The Queen’s Warrant made me untouchable in law, that was true enough, but perhaps I had got to thinking it made me invulnerable too. That, as Luka so clearly pointed out, was absolutely not the case.

  ‘Aye,’ I said, after a long moment. ‘Aye, you’re right. Thank you, Luka. I’ll be more careful in future.’

  Luka nodded. ‘Good. Look, boss, Anne said . . . well, it ain’t my place, I know, but you and Bloody Anne didn’t ought to be falling out of each other’s favour. Not now, not here of all places. This city might look safe but it fucking ain’t, and we need to stand together.’

  Again, I had to admit he was right. Luka was nobody’s fool, after all.

  ‘I mark you, Luka,’ I said. ‘I mark you, and I’ll make it right with Anne.’

  He nodded, and together we started back towards the Bountiful Harvest.

  I’ll make it right with Anne.

  I wondered exactly how the fuck I was going to do that.

  *

  Brandy was usually a good place to start.

  Luka had gone to eat with Oliver and Emil, but I hadn’t been hungry. I went into the common room to buy a bottle as a peace offering, and there I found Rosie doing the same thing. She gave me a level look as I walked up to stand beside her at the bar.

  ‘Where’s Anne?’ I asked her.

  ‘In our room,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s got the arse with you and no mistake.’

  ‘Aye, I dare say she has,’ I said. ‘She tell you why?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rosie got a hard look about her then that said she wasn’t any happier with me than Anne was.

  ‘Maybe we ought to talk, the three of us,’ I suggested.

  Rosie shrugged. ‘You’re buying, then.’

  That was fair, I supposed. I took two bottles of brandy from the innkeeper on my account and followed Rosie up the wooden stairs to the floor where our rooms were. Her and Anne had a room at the end of the corridor. She pushed the door open and coughed to tell Anne she wasn’t alone.

  ‘Boss is here,’ she said.

  Bloody Anne was lying on the bed with her boots off, her grimy bare feet pointed at me and a sour look on her face. There were spare clothes hanging in the open armoire, Rosie’s kirtles and shifts and some of Anne’s britches, and one of them had stretched a line of freshly washed linens under the window to dry. It seemed Anne even wore men’s smallclothes, which was something I hadn’t ever really given any thought to. I lifted a bottle in my hand and raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Are we still friends?’ I asked her.

  Anne glared at me for a moment, then snorted laughter and sat up. ‘If you stop looking at my fucking knickers, aye,’ she said.

  I kicked the door shut behind me while Rosie went and got some glasses off a tray on the cupboard.

  ‘I’m sorry, Anne,’ I said. I opened a bottle and poured for us all, then lifted a glass to her. ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did. That was ill done of me, and I apologise.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ Anne said. ‘Might be I started it. It’s this fucking city, Tomas. I don’t understand how it works, and I don’t like it.’

  I nodded, and took a drink. ‘I thought I understood it, but perhaps I was wrong about that. Fat Luka had some hard words to say to me earlier too, about things I’d never even thought about.’

  ‘We’re all strangers here,’ Anne agreed.

  ‘I’m not,’ Rosie said. ‘I was born in Dannsburg. South of the river, of course. I’m no noble lady, you ought to know that much, but I know how to get shit done here.’

  I thought of the cart Rosie had arranged to come to the barracks, and the quiet boys she had found to take the wet bundles away with them.

  ‘I noticed that,’ I said.

  ‘Then why ain’t you making more use of me?’ Rosie demanded. She sounded . . . I don’t know. Not angry, exactly. Almost hurt, in truth. ‘I worked for Ailsa before you, and for another man before her. I’ve been an agent of the Queen’s Men since I had thirteen years to me, and I’ve never had a boss didn’t trust me before. Why don’t you?’

  I sighed, and turned to look at her. I was there to make things right between us all, and it seemed that perhaps t
hat meant being honest with her.

  ‘I do trust you, Rosie,’ I said. ‘I trust you to work for the Queen’s Men, but I don’t know you. Not really I don’t, and that makes it hard for me to trust you to work for me. Do you see the difference?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I do,’ Anne said. ‘You run your own crew here, don’t you, Tomas, just like you did back in Ellinburg, and you maybe don’t trust all the other Queen’s Men as much as you’d like. Is that about the lay of things?’

  I nodded. Anne had been in charge of the Pious Men long enough to understand how that sort of business worked, I realised. She trusted Florence Cooper, was even friends with her, but not enough to name her as her second. This was the same thing, to my mind, and it seemed she saw it the same way. She was a shrewd woman, was Bloody Anne. Very shrewd indeed.

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Rosie, you worked for Ailsa before me and now you work for me, but Ailsa’s still here. The one before her got himself killed, I know that, so she never had to worry on this, but I do. If it came to it, where does your loyalty lie? Who do you stand with, me or Ailsa? Or is it Vogel?’

  Rosie looked at me for a long moment, and her face set into a hard mask that either meant she was back to having the arse with me or she was trying not to cry, and right then I wasn’t sure which it was.

  ‘Ailsa was all right to me,’ she said, ‘but I only worked for her a couple of years. The one before her, as you call him, his name was Heinrich. He pulled me out of a whorehouse south of the river when I only had eleven years to me, and he took me in and he taught me my letters and how to figure accounts. He taught me how to read and how to write and how to understand things, and he fed me and clothed me and he never laid a hand on me, not in that way he didn’t. He was a good man. He was . . . he was the closest thing to a da I’ve ever had.

  ‘When my thirteenth year came and he started finding me little jobs to do – people to follow and people to listen to – I did them and I was glad to do it because everyone has to work and it was better than sucking cocks. It took me a while, but I worked my way to it in the end – who he must be, and who he must work for. When he got sent to Ellinburg I went with him willingly, and I did what he wanted when we got there. All I’ve ever known is whoring and spying, and I know which one I prefer. Vogel I’ve never even fucking met, and I never expect to. The likes of him don’t talk to whores, do they?’

  ‘You’re not a whore,’ Anne said quietly, and she reached out and put her arms around Rosie.

  I turned away and poured myself another brandy, and I could hear Rosie crying into Anne’s shoulder, crying for her stolen childhood and the man she had thought of as her da.

  There we had something in common, I thought.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Rosie said, after a moment, and she choked back snot to say that she meant it. ‘I know Heinrich’s gone, and I’ve made my peace with that as best I can. But you listen to me, Mr Piety, and you understand how this works in my head: I’m Anne’s woman now, and I stand with her. As long as she stands with you, then so do I.’

  I couldn’t ask for more than that, I supposed.

  Chapter 20

  A coach came in from Varnburg a few days later, and it brought a woman to the house of law. Her name was Sabine, and she must have had almost seventy years to her if she had a day. She was still striking for all that, tall and lean with long iron-grey hair that she wore pinned back from her sharp face with a pair of black combs.

  We were introduced by Iagin in what I had come to think of as the mess.

  ‘Tomas, what a pleasure,’ she said.

  Her voice was like a whip, and the hand she extended to me was thin and pale, with the long nails lacquered the same glossy black as her combs. The effect was something like the talons of a bird of prey. Her black mourning gown was very tightly laced around her narrow waist, and looked extremely uncomfortable. In truth I thought she looked how Ilse should have done, and didn’t.

  ‘Good to meet you,’ I said.

  I didn’t know if I was supposed to kiss her hand or not, so I opted for giving it a brusque shake instead. She wore several ornate silver and black rings on that hand, and at least one of them dug sharply into my finger as I did so.

  ‘A soldier’s handshake,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I can feel the swordsman’s calluses on your palm. Iagin, dear, might I trouble you for some wine? I’ve had a very long journey.’

  And a very slow one, I thought. Varnburg was a long way, aye, but it wasn’t that fucking far. This Sabine certainly hadn’t troubled herself to hurry at Vogel’s summons. That was interesting in itself.

  Iagin poured dark wine for her into a tall goblet, and I noticed the way her fingers lingered on his hand as she took it from him. He cleared his throat and turned away to busy himself with the brandy bottle, quite obviously feeling uncomfortable in her presence.

  ‘Did you have a good journey?’ I asked her, feeling like I should say something to fill the silence.

  ‘I don’t recognise your accent,’ she said, completely ignoring my question. ‘Where are you from, Tomas?’

  ‘Ellinburg,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, how very intriguing.’

  She sipped her wine, her grey eyes holding my gaze over the glass. In her hand, the wine looked like blood.

  ‘Here,’ Iagin grunted, and passed me a brandy.

  Something about Sabine was clearly putting him on edge. I was starting to feel the same way, although I couldn’t have said exactly why.

  ‘I suppose I should present myself upstairs,’ Sabine said after a moment. She put her barely touched wine down on a table and smiled. ‘I’ll be seeing you both, I’m sure. Until then.’

  She turned and stalked out of the room, the tall heels of her glossy black shoes clicking on the wooden floor as though they were tipped with steel. Perhaps they were, at that.

  ‘Fuck,’ Iagin muttered, once the door was closed behind her. ‘I’d been starting to hope she wasn’t coming.’

  ‘Striking lady,’ I said, for want of anything better.

  He snorted and drained his brandy. ‘Aye, well, she’ll try to seduce you, that’s for sure,’ he said. ‘She always does. I don’t know how your tastes run, Tomas, but don’t even fucking think about it. She’s untouchable.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about it,’ I said. ‘But why’s that, then?’

  ‘You don’t know? Actually, I suppose you wouldn’t – I don’t think Ailsa does either, come to that. It was before her time.’

  I shook my head. ‘Know what?’

  He met my eyes.

  ‘She’s the Old Man’s wife.’

  I remembered the dinner Vogel had thrown the previous summer, and the empty place where the hostess should have been seated. He always hosts alone, Ailsa had told me. His table is always an odd number with a vacant place setting laid at the foot. I don’t know precisely why.

  Perhaps she didn’t know, at that. Even Ailsa didn’t know everything, and I took some comfort from that thought.

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Iagin said. ‘Sabine was Provost Marshal once, twenty years and more ago. It was her who swore me into the service, not the Old Man.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He shrugged and poured himself another brandy.

  ‘Buggered if I know. They were already married back then, and he was one of her Queen’s Men. She left him, I know that much, put him in charge and fucked off to Varnburg to run the operation on the coast. I don’t think he ever really made his peace with that. You’ve seen how he hosts dinner?’

  ‘Aye,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there it is. Watch yourself around her, that’s all I’m saying, and watch the Old Man’s mood too. Seeing her again isn’t likely to put him in a good humour.’

  I supposed it wouldn’t, at that.

  *

  I managed to avoid Vogel and everyone else for the next two days, until a messenger came to the Bountiful Harvest and brought a summons with
her.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I told Anne and Luka, after I’d sent the messenger on her way. ‘I’m being sworn in. Properly, I mean, not like that bollocks with the knighthood.’

  ‘Do you want us there?’ Anne asked.

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, I do, but I can’t have you, apparently. This is a family thing. Strictly only Queen’s Men, which is why we had to wait for Sabine. There have to be enough witnesses, so Ailsa told me.’

  Anne nodded. ‘Like when we swore Desh into the Pious Men.’

  ‘Aye, something like that, I expect,’ I said.

  I wished she hadn’t reminded me of that. I had made Desh up to the table the previous year, in a traditional Ellinburg gang ritual. He’d been found dead in an alley a matter of weeks later. No, I didn’t want to think about Desh right then.

  Not ever.

  That put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day, and I slept poorly that night. I had no idea what the morning would bring beyond what little Ailsa had told me, so I hadn’t dared drink too much the evening before. Trying to sleep when you’re sober and have things on your mind is never easy, and I spent a restless night dreaming about solemn rituals and blood oaths and the way that Desh had died.

  The next morning was overcast and grey, and the sky matched my mood. I shaved and got dressed, then ate a sullen breakfast that I didn’t want, alone in the private dining room of the inn.

  Ailsa came to collect me herself, in her carriage with Brandt and three of her household guard around her. I was pleased to see her, in truth, and that morning I think I felt a little of what Desh must have felt on the day we swore him into the Pious Men. I was nervous, I realised, foolish as that may sound. A gang initiation was one thing, but what did formally joining the Queen’s Men entail?

  I still had no idea.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ailsa said quietly, once the carriage was underway. ‘It’s just an oath you have to swear, dressed up with some ritual and mummery in the name of tradition. I can’t tell you what, exactly, but there’s nothing to truly fear in it.’