by Peter McLean
I remembered the battle of the Stink, and how that had ended once I had the massed population behind me.
Aye, the common folk had power through their sheer weight of numbers, but only if they had someone to lead them. When I became the governor of Ellinburg I had shown them the other side of that coin and no fucking mistake. I oppressed them with an iron boot because the crown had told me to, and they had no one left to stand up and tell me ‘no’. That was how business worked.
This was no different, I realised. In Dannsburg the Queen’s Men had the biggest iron boot anyone had ever seen, and they had it pressed to the throat of the general population until any and everyone bowed down at the mere sight of the Queen’s Warrant. Without credible leaders, the working classes were easy pickings for the insidious power of the Queen’s Men.
The key to every door in Dannsburg.
It was that, all right. There was no one in Dannsburg who would refuse the authority of the Queen’s Warrant. No one save for traitors, anyway, and traitors could be killed on sight.
That was a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Obey, or die.
That was the power of a god indeed.
Vogel was removing those potential leaders one by one, and he wasn’t finished yet. By then I was prepared to go along with anything, absolutely anything to unite the country and stop the coming war.
Fucking, fucking fool.
*
The place was called the Spring of Mercy, and it was a public baths.
I had Bloody Anne and Oliver and Emil with me that night, and we were dressed in our best finery but we wore our weapons out in plain sight. The Spring of Mercy was owned by Grachyev, because of course it fucking was. I had cleared this with Iagin in advance, and we were expected.
That was good.
The place was in a rich part of the city, facing onto a grand square with fountains and a stone plinth that held a great bronze statue of some cavalry general on a rearing horse. I had no idea who he was, or had been, but the thing was impressive, nonetheless. The bath house itself was no less impressive, with a wide façade faced with columns that supported a heavy portico over the double doors of the entrance.
There were two men on those doors, ushers or attendants or whatever you were supposed to call them in polite society, but guards are guards and they were quite plainly that. They were Grachyev’s men, though, or more likely Iagin’s, and we were waved inside without a second thought.
We walked in like gangsters, like we owned the fucking place, all swagger and weapons and attitude. In business as well as in battle, an approach always has to be tailored to the terrain, to the place and the time, the job or the mission at hand.
This was the right approach for the right time.
There were hostesses here too, pretty ones and lots of them, and boys that I supposed you’d call hosts. Footmen holding trays of drinks sweated through their fancy livery in the steaming humidity.
The Spring of Mercy was frequented by the very rich and the very nervous, and, looking back on it after what we found in there, I realised that these were people who knew they were doing awful wrong and yet who still tittered to each other about it behind their towels and their wine glasses.
They were cunts, the lot of them.
The bath house itself was a small part of the business, I discovered, but even so there were people there who really didn’t want to be seen. Although we strode past the steaming green marble pools with their cavorting naked bodies without a glance, I knew there were folk in there who would be begging their political contacts for clemency and anonymity the next morning.
The Queen’s Men don’t officially exist, no, but everyone who matters in Dannsburg knows one when they see one. In Dannsburg the Queen’s Men are the big bad wolf that will fucking eat you up, and there’s no joking about that.
Heads turned to watch us as we marched through the bathing rooms. I heard sudden hushed and urgent conversations, but I let it pass. The baths and the whores and who was fucking who weren’t important. It was the gaming rooms I was interested in, and they were at the back of the building. There was a huge, stone-faced man on the door between the baths and the back room, and perhaps he hadn’t got the note about what was happening that night.
Not that he could read anyway, I was sure.
‘Let us in,’ I said.
‘Who the fuck are you?’
‘My name is Tomas Piety,’ I said.
‘So what?’ he said.
He looked like he was going to make something of it, of me and my cadre of heavily armed thugs wanting to come through his door, but if he truly didn’t recognise us then he was only doing his job and I could respect that. He had the look of a veteran about him, and I would have hated to have to kill him over something that wasn’t his fault.
Of course, I didn’t have to.
‘Perhaps someone failed to give you our descriptions,’ I said. ‘I am Tomas Piety, from Ellinburg, and this is my second, Bloody Anne. We’re those friends of Iagin’s you were told to expect, and told to welcome. I don’t feel welcome.’
‘Iagin’s . . . oh, shit. Sorry, boss,’ the man said, as realisation dawned on him who we were.
He stepped smartly aside and held the door open for us.
Connections, power, influence. Those open doors too, and with a lot less alarm being caused than waving the warrant about when it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Me and Bloody Anne and Emil and Oliver walked in there with all the authority of Mr Grachyev’s name, and that underwritten by the power of what I carried in my pouch.
Perhaps I had been feeling slow that night, I don’t know, but I didn’t see it coming.
I had thought it passing strange, I’ll admit, that there should be a gaming room hidden behind a public baths in a city where gambling houses were perfectly legal. There was a reason for that, of course, but it wasn’t anything I had expected. I hadn’t expected it because I hadn’t really given it any thought, and that was a failure on my part. I promised myself then that I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Up until that moment I had just assumed that Arch High Priest Rantanen liked to bet on cards like the other rich folk did, but it seemed I was wrong about that. There was a reason this place was secret. Gambling houses might be perfectly legal in Dannsburg, but slavery very much wasn’t.
It was horrendous.
Slave pits, that was what confronted me in the back room of the Spring of Mercy.
If ever a place was misnamed, this was it. There was no mercy here. The smell was foul but still there were twelve richly dressed patrons in there, lounging on couches with drinks or poppy pipes in their hands as they watched two poor, naked, filth-caked wretches beat each other to death with their bare hands in the circle of Hell below them.
I’d never seen the like before but I’d heard tell of it, during the war. I’d heard it in the sort of tall stories that soldiers tell each other, when they’re trying to drown out the horrors of the day with tales of even worse things that someone they said they knew had seen once, somewhere they had never been.
All those old soldiers’ stories came back to me then, and I realised that some of them were true after all. I knew how this worked.
The pit-fighters fought to the death, and the winner got to eat.
It was as fucking simple as that.
These poor bastards were starved to the point of madness and then offered food, if they would just kill each other for it.
Hunger can drive people to obscene extremes. I had seen that in the war. I had seen it in Messia, and I had seen it again when we finally broke the siege of Abingon and saw the horrors that had been going on within the walls of the city. They were eating their own dead in Abingon before the end, and we had heard tales of children being killed for meat by the starving soldiers. Tall tales, perhaps, but you never could know for sure. After what we had seen in Abingon, I could honestly have believed it.
Here in the Spring of Mercy those hellish conditi
ons were being recreated, on purpose, for the entertainment of the sort of people I wanted to stamp on until my boots were wet.
They had bloodthirsty smiles on their faces, those rich men and women, and sometimes someone called out a new bet or perhaps a word of encouragement to the fighter they had backed. It reminded me in a way of Lord Lan Yetrov’s bear pit, but for all his faults Lan Yetrov had at least seemed to care for his prize bear, if not for his own wife. The slaves here obviously weren’t treated half so well as that bear had been. It reminded me of the bear pit, and of Messia, and of the burning rubble of Abingon.
I didn’t want to remember any of those things.
Something happened to me then, happened in my mind, and I don’t know what it was. I’m no doctor, and I’m no philosopher either, but I know something happened even if I can’t put words to what it was.
The fighting pit was open at the top and the couches were arranged around its upper edge, but beyond it I saw the caged top of the other pit, where the slaves . . . no. No, I can’t bring myself to write ‘lived’, because they didn’t, not really. Where they clung to existence, perhaps, in conditions worse than any I had seen even at Abingon.
There were fifty men at least crammed into a space not twenty feet across, sitting in a reeking mud of their own shit and piss. No one seemed to have noticed us come in, so intent were they on their vile sport, so I took a moment to survey the faces of the patrons.
After a moment, I saw him.
There he was, the Arch High Priest Rantanen, the holiest man in the land.
He was masturbating under his robes with a glass of wine in his free hand as he watched one of the men in the pit drive his thumbs into the other’s eyes so hard that one of them burst in a squirt of jelly and clear fluid.
‘Oh, jolly good show!’ shouted a tall fellow with perhaps twenty-five years to him, with long oiled ringlets of hair sticking to the sides of his sweaty neck. ‘Blind the dirty bastard, and I’ll throw you half a loaf!’
I think I wasn’t quite of sound mind, right then. I walked straight up behind the tall man’s couch, and I found that I had Mercy in my hand. That seemed appropriate to me, given the name of the place we were in, so I stabbed the cunt through the neck.
That got their fucking attention all right; had them off their couches and shouting in moments.
‘Sit down!’ Bloody Anne roared in her best sergeant’s voice, and that stilled them where they were.
Even the men in the pit stopped fighting for a moment, to see what the commotion was.
I held up the Queen’s Warrant in my hand, Mercy still dripping red in the other. The man I had stabbed slumped sideways off his couch and hit the floor like a sack of wet shit.
‘My name is Tomas Piety,’ I said, ‘and you’re under arrest. The fucking lot of you.’
Chapter 27
I’m not made quite right in the head, I know I’m not.
I never have been, and as my aunt had once told me, there was no blaming the war for it. I’ve always been that way. There’s a thing people have in their minds, a thing that makes them able to care about people they don’t know.
I haven’t got that bit.
The cold devil my da left me with has no love in its heart, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I am the man that I am. Even so, something in me changed that night. I stood there, in that dark place, and I found that I did care. I cared about those poor, filthy wretches, caked in their own shit and the shame of what they had done to keep from starving.
I didn’t know them, no, but something in my memories of the horror of Abingon made me feel like I understood them. Maybe I saw myself in them, or at least what I could have become. We had eaten rats to survive in the siege lines, and on the other side of the walls men had supposedly eaten children. As I have said, they had certainly been eating corpses, we saw proof enough of that when the city fell. Would I have been any different, if I had been on the other side?
No, of course not.
People are what they are, and the human survival instinct is very strong. When it comes to it, right down to the extreme, there’s nothing you won’t do to survive.
Nothing at all, and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.
No, I didn’t think badly of those men who had murdered each other with their bare hands for a crust of stale bread. I would have done the same thing, in their position.
Anyone would.
These others, though, these rich men and women who had put them in that position for their own entertainment, to watch them fight and debase themselves in their manufactured desperation, those I thought very ill of indeed.
‘You,’ I said, pointing to an older man in the livery of the house. He was the only one there who wasn’t obviously a guest or a footman. He had no tray of drinks or poppy pipes in his hands, so he must be the one in charge of the operation. ‘Come here.’
He swallowed and took a step towards me, the colour draining from his face as he saw the look in my eyes.
‘Tomas,’ Anne said, but I ignored her.
‘Right here,’ I said, pointing to a spot on the ground in front of me.
He took another step, then another, until he was where I wanted him.
‘Keys,’ I said.
He reached into his pouch and produced a pair of heavy iron keys joined on a thick metal ring, and he held them out to me. I just stared at him until Anne reached out and took them.
‘Open the cage,’ I told her.
‘Tomas, are you sure?’
‘Do what I fucking tell you,’ I said quietly, never taking my eyes off the man in front of me.
I heard Anne move away, heard the sound of the key in the lock then the squeal of rusty hinges as she lifted back a section of the cage that covered the slave pit. The slaves roared their hatred, clambering over each other in a futile attempt to reach the surface.
‘Oliver, Emil,’ I said. ‘Take this cunt and throw him in that cage.’
The man before me broke, all at once.
‘No, please!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘I am a Queen’s Man,’ I said, my voice taking on the flat tone of murder and justice. ‘I can do anything.’
Oliver and Emil took an arm each and dragged the pleading man away, kicking and thrashing helplessly in their grasp. I watched them drag him all the way to the lip of the open cage, where Bloody Anne stood with an unreadable look on her face. I watched them throw him in, and then I turned away.
The sounds alone were enough to tell me what was happening down there.
‘Arch High Priest Rantanen, come here,’ I said.
The priest lurched up off his couch and tried to run.
‘Anne,’ I said.
She drew and threw with the fluid grace of a hunting cat, and the dagger slammed into the back of his meaty thigh and dropped him to the flagstones with a thud, his hamstring severed. I walked slowly towards him, until I was standing over his prone form.
‘I have a death warrant in your name,’ I said. ‘I want everyone here to understand that. That’s the only reason I’m here, because of you. If it wasn’t for you, you disgusting piece of shit, I wouldn’t be here at all. If it wasn’t for you, all these other disgusting pieces of shit would have continued to get away with it. So, I thank you for that.’
He twisted on the ground and looked up at me through his pain, trying to understand my words.
‘I thank you,’ I said again, ‘and for that I give you Mercy.’
I raised Mercy and rammed her into his crotch, thrust her up into his bowels and twisted the blade savagely as I ripped it free in a spray of dark blood.
He shrieked like a butchered lamb as blood and reeking filth gushed out of him onto the ground. It would take him a long, agonising time to die from a wound like that.
Good.
There were only four of us and still ten patrons and three footmen in there with us, but they were utterly paralysed with terror. The Queen’s Men had come for them at last, and they k
new they had nowhere to run to.
I found myself remembering an old childhood rhyme, from when I was very little:
Here comes the boggart to snip off your head,
Here comes a Queen’s Man,
And you’re better off dead.
There was a truth in that, I realised that night.
‘Line them up against the wall,’ I told Oliver.
He and Emil did as I said and they went meekly enough, these rich folk and their complicit servants, and no one gave us any trouble. They simply didn’t dare. They were dead folk walking, all of them, and I could see that they knew that. The only thing still in their power to affect was how painful the manner of their dying would be, and I thought that they understood that too.
‘You’ve three choices,’ I said. ‘The house of law, the pit, or my blade. Choose.’
A stunned silence fell.
‘There’s thirteen of us, you fools!’ a richly dressed and clearly panicked woman cried. ‘Rush them!’
Anne stepped forward and hammered a dagger into the woman’s throat without a moment’s hesitation.
She dropped to the floor at Anne’s feet, and there was no more talk of rushing us.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ an older man blustered, his face red with wine and fury and fear.
‘Aye, I do,’ I said, although I didn’t have the faintest idea, ‘and I don’t give a fuck.’
‘I have influence within the palace! I demand a fair trial!’
‘House of law, then,’ I said. ‘That’s your choice. What about you?’
The man next to him quailed, perhaps wiser than his fellow, and shook his head. I gave him Mercy through the chest.
‘How about you?’
No one chose the pit, and that was wise of them. Six of them in all requested the house of law, seeking to misplace their faith in the courts. The others I killed where they stood. That was how I did justice that night, and I didn’t think it unfair.