by Peter McLean
I sent Emil to speak to the stone-faced man on the door, explain who we really were and set him to send a runner to the house of law for guardsmen and manacles, and for food and clothes and blankets for the slaves. I had only been expecting to arrest the Arch High Priest at a card table, and I was hopelessly unprepared for what I had found instead.
I had fifty men, innocent so far as I was concerned, to be freed and cared for.
And then what?
Turned out onto the streets, where they would be hanged for vagrancy.
Those were the times we lived in.
*
I led them out in the end.
There wasn’t a soul left in the bath house by then, which was no surprise. The place was soon full of guardsmen and shouting, and the filthy slaves were fed and doused one at a time in the pools of the public baths until they were at least half presentable. The water was black by the time it was done.
I left Arch High Priest Rantanen beside the empty slave pit, mewling and dying in his own filth where he belonged. Anne had retrieved her dagger from the back of his leg and I supposed someone would dispose of the body later, but it wouldn’t be me.
Fuck him.
‘M’lord,’ a voice said beside me. ‘Give me a moment?’
I turned to see a naked slave, a huge man even thin as he was, the wasted muscles of his once-massive chest and shoulders looking like dried meat under his pale, greyish skin. He was bearded like they all were, red haired and taller even than Simple Sam was, back in Ellinburg. Before his starvation he must have been truly enormous.
‘What is it?’
He looked at me for a long moment, then he bowed his head and went down on one knee at my feet.
‘I would swear my service to you,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier, and I can see that you are too. You’re the sort of man I could follow. I’m still strong, and that’s because I got to eat most days. You know why.’
He had killed a lot of men with his bare hands, that was what he was telling me. I looked down at him, looking for the sort of madness you might expect to find in a man who had been through that, but I didn’t see it. He was simply telling me what had happened, and trusting that I would understand why he had done what he had.
And I did.
As I have written, I would have done the same thing.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘I had a name once, but here they called me Beast, because I was one. I embraced it, and I became it. I’m just Beast, now.’
‘You’re a soldier,’ I said. ‘How did it come to this?’
‘I came back from Abingon, same as you did,’ he said. ‘I was a stoker, before the war, ever since I were a lad. In one of the big foundries. An honest working man. I shovelled coal into the furnaces all day, and I got big and strong doing it. Then I went off to war, and when I came back I found I didn’t have the stomach for helping to make cannon no more. The war did bad things to my head, I don’t have to tell you about that. It did to us all. I didn’t know how to do nothing else. My wife had taken up with another man while I was off fighting and she’d left the city, and taken our children with her. Our house was gone, so I found myself out on the streets. Three offences and you’ll hang for vagrancy, but not if you get picked up by some priest who says he’ll take you in and feed you. He brought me here, and you know the rest.’
I clenched my teeth, and strained my damaged ears until I could hear the Arch High Priest’s dying screams coming from the back room. Right then I wished I had given him to Ilse instead.
‘Aye,’ I said, after a moment. ‘Might be I could use a strong man who knows his way around a fight. You understand that I’m a Queen’s Man?’
Beast nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I can live with that. The gods know I’ve lived with worse.’
‘Well and good,’ I said, and I beckoned Bloody Anne over.
‘Problem?’ she asked, her hand on the hilt of one of her daggers.
I shook my head. ‘This is Beast,’ I said. ‘He’s just joined our crew. Beast, this is Bloody Anne, and she’s my sergeant and my second. You’ll do what she tells you.’
Beast got to his feet and looked Anne slowly up and down, and for a moment I thought there might be trouble. Then a great grin split his red-bearded face.
‘I know you,’ he said, and he started to laugh. ‘You’re the Bloody Sergeant! I’ve fucking heard of you! Even in my regiment, we’d heard of you.’
‘Aye, maybe you have,’ Anne said, and there was almost a blush of colour on her cheeks. ‘That’s done with, though. This is what we do now.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I’m told, Sarge.’
‘Call me Anne,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s find you some clothes.’
That was how a man called Beast came to work for the Queen’s Men.
Chapter 28
I wanted a fucking word with Iagin.
The Spring of Mercy was owned by Grachyev, and that meant Iagin must know all about it. I had thought better of him, but it seemed perhaps I had been wrong about that. I slept poorly that night, thinking on those things, and on Beast’s story, and what I had seen. Very poorly indeed, twisting in my sweaty blankets in an endless nightmare of the war. Of the war, and of what could have come afterwards.
If things had been different for my brother and me, I knew, it could have been either of us out on those streets. It could have been one of us picked up and lured into that pit by false promises and simple hunger. People may revere the idea of heroic veterans, but they very seldom have the time or the charity for the broken, battle-shocked men and women that are the reality of what war produces. I had seen too many heroes starve and freeze to death in doorways to think otherwise.
I found Iagin at the house of law the next morning. I found him in the mess, and I found him hard.
He was up against a wall with my hand around his throat and the point of Remorse pressed into his stomach before I knew what I was doing. The look on his face told me he could see I wasn’t fucking around.
‘Slaves?’ I hissed in his face. ‘Fucking pit fights at the Spring of Mercy, Iagin? Really?’
‘What the living piss are you talking about?’ he asked, and to his credit there was neither guilt nor fear on his grizzled face. ‘What slaves? The Spring of Mercy is a bath house and a brothel with a gaming room out the back, I told you that.’
‘Aye, you did,’ I said quietly, and a thought struck me. ‘Have you ever seen that gaming room, Iagin?’
He frowned for a moment.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Grachyev owns every tavern and inn and whorehouse in the whole fucking city, just about. I’ve not been in every one of them; I haven’t got the fucking time to hold his hand every minute of the day and do this as well. What are you talking about, Tomas?’
I took a moment to think on it, then I let him go.
‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘I know you’d better have a fucking good reason for what you just did,’ he growled at me as he rubbed his neck where I had grabbed him, but there was no mistaking the curiosity on his face. ‘I don’t let just anyone do that to me and get away with it.’
I took a breath, then I sat down and told him what I had found at the Spring of Mercy the night before. Before I was done talking, Iagin had poured brandy for us both and joined me at the table. It was only an hour past dawn, but right then I didn’t care. I took the glass and drank, and I was glad of it.
‘I had absolutely no idea,’ he said when I was done, and I believed him.
‘No,’ I said, and realised that I was fighting tears. ‘No, I never really thought that you did. I . . . I’m sorry. There was this man, a soldier, and he was . . .’
I found I didn’t have the words in me. That was Beast’s story to tell if he chose to, not mine, and I wouldn’t shame him with it even in private.
‘Aye,’ Iagin said, cutting me off to spare me from myself. He was a
good man, was Iagin, and I could tell that he understood these things. I would have bet gold that he was a veteran himself. ‘A lot of men came home from the war and found they didn’t have a place in the world any more. If someone has been preying on them, then I want to know who it is.’
‘I already know that,’ I said. ‘It was that excuse of an Arch High Priest, who’s no longer among the living, and it was your fucking friend Grachyev too. He might be only a pretend gangster, Iagin, but he’s been pulling at least one trick behind your back and maybe more. He knew all about that place, he must have done. There’s no way someone could have been running those pits in his business without him knowing about it.’
Iagin slammed a hand down on the table between us, making our glasses of breakfast brandy jump and slosh.
‘Cunt!’ he said.
That about summed it up, to my mind.
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘You up for paying him a visit?’
‘Oh, yes.’
*
Iagin strolled into the Horn of Plenty like he owned the place, which of course he effectively did, and I was right behind him, and Anne and Emil and Beast were right behind me.
Beast looked a lot better for another bath and a shave and some proper clothes that actually fitted him. He’d had a haircut too, and enough food to feed a family for a week, but he still had a hungry, haunted look about him. I thought he probably always would, after what he had been through.
‘Is the boss in?’ Iagin asked the man at the front counter.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but it’s a bit fucking early for him. I’ll tell him you came by, once he surfaces.’
‘No,’ Iagin said, and his tone gave the man pause. ‘You won’t. You’ll point me to his room and then you’ll keep your fucking mouth shut.’
‘Top of the stairs,’ the man said, and he swallowed. The look on Iagin’s face told him all he needed to know about which way the wind was blowing that morning. ‘The royal suite. It’ll be locked, but here’s a key.’
Iagin nodded and took it, and up we went behind him. Anne directed Emil to stay there with the man on the desk, to make sure he kept his mouth shut.
We went up two flights of wooden steps, past the hostesses’ rooms, and up to another landing where the royal suite apparently took up most of the top floor. There was little enough there for royalty, I was sure, but it was certainly fancier than any other whorehouse I had ever been inside. The door was fine carved oak, secured with a big iron lock. Iagin slotted the key and it turned with a click, and he threw the door open.
A massive bed dominated the room, canopied and curtained and wide enough to sleep eight with comfort. The curtains were drawn back and I could see there were only three in there, white and brown and black bodies entwined in the morning sun that streamed through gaps in the closed shutters.
The white was Grachyev, naked and pale like a slug. The other two were obviously hostesses. All of them were sound asleep and snoring, passed out on wine or brandy or poppy resin. I didn’t know which, and I really didn’t much care.
‘Get the women out of here,’ I said, and Anne stepped forward without hesitation and gave each of them a hard slap across the face.
‘Fuck off,’ she told them, as their eyes opened in groggy indignation. ‘Right now. I fucking mean it.’
They fled, naked and uncaring. Anyone waking up to see that much fury on Anne’s scarred face above them would have done the same.
That just left Grachyev, then. He rolled over into the warm place left by one of the fleeing whores and let out a slow fart.
‘Wake him up, Beast,’ I said.
Beast walked over to the massive bed and stood there for a moment looking down at Grachyev. I had explained to him on the way there who this man was, and what he had done. Beast took a long breath, then he punched Grachyev in the balls, as hard as he could.
Grachyev woke with a strangled gasp, sat bolt upright in the bed and vomited explosively all over his bare chest and stomach. He rolled over onto his side with both hands clamped to his crotch, sobbing pathetically.
‘Good one,’ Anne said, with a nod of approval.
We waited a moment for Grachyev to get himself under some semblance of control.
‘Morning, boss,’ Iagin said, his voice flat and emotionless.
Grachyev threw up some more, then crawled to a dry bit of the bed and attempted to cover himself with one of the many quilts that were strewn across it.
‘What . . . what is this?’ he wheezed. ‘Iagin? Piety? I . . . I have no quarrel with Ellinburg!’
‘Perhaps not,’ I said, ‘but I have a fucking quarrel with you, Mr Grachyev. My friend Beast here has a bigger one.’
Grachyev blinked at Beast, and it was clear that he had absolutely no idea who he was.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said, his voice coming out in a pitiful whine that made me want to stab him right there and then. ‘We . . . we are all businessmen, here.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re not. You think you’re a businessman, but you ain’t one. Iagin and me, we’re Queen’s Men.’
I gave him a moment to take that in, watched the storm of emotions that crossed his face as he thought on what I had just said.
Disbelief, fear, denial, anger.
Terror.
‘You . . . you can’t be.’
‘I’ve been taking you for a cunt for a very long time,’ Iagin explained, and his tone was almost kindly. ‘But it seems you tried to do the same thing to me. I’m not having that, you see.’
‘The Spring of Mercy,’ I explained. ‘I went there, last night. I didn’t like what I found out the back. I didn’t like it one fucking little bit.’
‘It . . . it serves a need,’ Grachyev said. ‘A gap in the market. There are people, important people, who—’
‘I know there were,’ I said. ‘I killed most of them last night, and by now the rest of them are in the house of law and are probably fucking wishing that I had.’
‘You’re a fucking puppet, Grachyev,’ Iagin said. ‘You always have been. If you had just danced on your strings like you were supposed to, you could have kept being a big man for the rest of your life, rich and protected. You fucking idiot. Now I’ve got to start all over again with some other prick.’
‘We can negotiate,’ Grachyev said. ‘Let’s do business. Let us find our way to a mutually beneficial arrangement. I can be quiet. I understand how business is done.’
I shook my head slowly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You really don’t.’
This pointless arsehole had no fucking idea how business was done. He might be able to trot out the right words when it suited him, but he was no more of a gangster than Hanne was.
‘Iagin, please.’
‘No,’ Iagin said. ‘You’re done.’
‘Beast,’ I said.
That was all he needed to hear.
Beast was a long way from recovered to his former strength but he was still the man who had got to eat more days than not, back in the pits. He was the man who had survived, through sheer determination and bloody ruthlessness. Beast had beaten Lady only knew how many men to death with his bare hands, and now he took the three steps he needed towards Grachyev’s bed, and he started.
He started his road to recovery right there, at the bedside of the man who had sent him to Hell. I honestly thought I could see Our Lady smiling down on him, in that moment.
He was one of Hers, and no mistake.
He was one of us.
The first blow smashed Grachyev’s jaw, stunning him. The second fractured his eye socket. The third shattered it, forcing bone fragments into his eyeball. The fourth pulped it beyond saving. The eye fell out of the ruin of his skull, dangling from a twisted rope of gristle. Beast punched again and again until his head was black and unrecognisable. Grachyev flopped feebly on the bed, and blood ran from his ears as he mewled like a newborn.
Anne turned away, and she threw open the shutters and stood staring out of the window int
o the yard behind the inn while Beast worked. She was my conscience, because Lady only knew I didn’t have one of my own any more. I watched Beast work, and beside me Iagin did the same without flinching. We were cut from the same cloth, Iagin and me, I realised. I wondered where he had been in his war, and what he had seen there, and what he had done. I knew he would never, ever tell me.
Beast started on Grachyev’s body, caving ribs into organs until his breath came in bursts of bloody, dying froth.
He didn’t stop until his fists were red and dripping, and it was over.
That was how justice was done, in those times we lived in.
Chapter 29
In the house of law, it is hard to tell whether a person is crying and screaming with fear, or pain, or madness. Sometimes it’s all three at once. The first of the men I had arrested at the Spring of Mercy, the one who had been so sure that I must know who he was, had apparently been a member of the governing council and the closest political ally of the First Councillor.
He wasn’t any more, not since the night a week ago at the Spring of Mercy when he had disappeared.
Lord Vogel was well pleased with that.
‘Councillor Hristokov has been most informative,’ Vogel said to me in his office that evening. ‘He has given us a great deal of names, under Ilse’s questioning.’
I was sure he had. Under Ilse’s questioning he had probably given us the names of everyone he had ever fucking met, just to make her stop.
‘Aye,’ I said, for want of anything better to say.
‘Oh, I know, Tomas,’ Vogel said, and he smiled in a way that I couldn’t find it in me to trust. ‘You’re bored, aren’t you? Constant arrest warrants are a waste of your skills. Don’t worry, I’ll give them to Konrad. He likes nothing better than sending people down to the cells, and he likes it all the more when they are people he knows.’
Brother Betrayal, I thought.