by Peter McLean
I glared at him.
‘I should box your ears for showing off, Billy Piety,’ I told him, but of course I didn’t really mean it. I’d have no more hit my Billy than I would have done my own ma. ‘Don’t ever fucking do that again. Oh, come here, lad.’
I pulled him into an embrace, and held him as he shivered and wept into my shoulder, and across the green the inn burned to the ground.
I’d had fifteen gold crowns with me and I gave them all to the innkeeper to make it right with him. That was far too much, as no one had actually died, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I had failed. I had failed as the father of a truly extraordinary lad, and if that cost me gold then so be it.
I deserved it, and let that be a lesson.
*
Coming back to Dannsburg was depressing. I missed the sea, but most of all I found the oppressive presence of the City Guard almost overwhelming. They were everywhere, and even the Dowager Duchess of Varnburg struggled to get her guardsmen admitted to the city. Grand Duchess she might be, but it was only when I threatened the senior captain of the gate with the authority of the house of law that we were finally allowed through, with much bowing and apologising. That was the power of the Queen’s Men, in Dannsburg at least.
Security in the capital was obviously much tighter than it had been when I left, and it seemed that a great deal could change in two months. I abandoned the duchess to make her own arrangements in the city for her entourage, and reported to the house of law at once. That wasn’t optional, I knew that.
Lord Vogel was not best pleased by her presence, to speak lightly of it.
‘The Grand Duchess?’
He glared at me across his desk, his pale eyes unblinking.
‘There was no way around it, sir,’ I said. ‘Not unless we wanted to send in the army and take Varnburg by force. I made the decision that putting up with the duchess was preferable to civil war.’
‘Only just, I assure you,’ Vogel said. ‘You did the right thing, Tomas, but it’s blasted inconvenient. That woman is a pain in the arse.’
I almost laughed, to hear the great and feared Lord Vogel speak like that, but I managed to restrain myself. I didn’t think laughing at Vogel was what you might call a good idea.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said instead, and changed the subject. ‘If I may, it seems security has been very much tightened while I’ve been away these last two months.’
‘Yes, I need to talk to you about that,’ Vogel said. ‘Something is about to happen, and when it does we will need every one of those extra guardsmen. I have only waited this long because I wanted you back in the city before I act. I’ll speak to you all in the morning, but I suggest you get a good night’s sleep tonight, Tomas. You’re going to be busy for the next few weeks.’
With that I was dismissed, and I left his office and closed the door behind me.
I walked down the corridor and saw Iagin’s office door was open. He was sitting at his desk behind a huge pile of papers, his pen scratching furiously across the sheet before him. I knocked on the open door and waited until his head came up.
‘Tomas, you’re back,’ he said, rather unnecessarily. ‘Good, the Old Man’s been getting impatient. You brought the boy with you, I take it?’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘And his mother, sadly.’
Iagin’s huge moustache twitched as he tried not to laugh.
‘I’d say I’m surprised, but I’m not,’ he said. ‘That bloody woman is almost impossible to gainsay.’
‘I noticed,’ I said. ‘What’s the Old Man up to?’
Iagin shrugged. ‘He doesn’t tell me everything,’ he said. ‘I dare say we’ll find out in the morning.’
I supposed we would, at that.
That done I returned to my rooms at the Bountiful Harvest and had an early supper with Fat Luka and Bloody Anne and the others. Luka was full of tales from the last two months, of how the City Guard had been increasing in numbers almost by the week. There wasn’t quite a curfew, not yet, but hard questions were being asked of anyone out after dark and it seemed that disappearances were at an all-time high.
There was a storm coming, anyone could see that.
I lingered in the private dining room with Bloody Anne once the others had retired for the night, and regarded her over the rim of my brandy glass.
‘What do you think is going on?’ I asked her.
She shrugged.
‘How the fuck do I know? You’re the Queen’s Man, Tomas. You tell me.’
Aye, I was the Queen’s Man but Anne was shrewder than perhaps she knew herself, and I valued her opinion.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but there’s something. Vogel said a thing was about to happen, and that we’d need every one of those guardsmen. He can’t be expecting a Skanian attack or there’d be soldiers on the streets and cannon on the walls, so it’s not that. What, then?’
‘You want my honest opinion?’ Anne asked, and poured herself another glass from the bottle on the table between us. ‘Unofficially, I mean. I don’t want to disappear.’
‘Everything between us is unofficial, Anne, you know that,’ I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, and I wondered if she truly did still know that. There was a thought to make a man uncomfortable at night. Queen’s Man I might be but she was my best friend and I very much hoped she never lost sight of that.
I prayed that I didn’t.
‘Aye, well,’ she said. ‘The way I see it is this: he knows a thing will happen but he hasn’t told any of you what that thing is going to be. That sounds to me like it’s going to be a thing of his own making.’
I nodded slowly. She had a fucking good point there, I had to allow. If Vogel had intelligence on an external threat we would all be working round the clock already, but we weren’t. All those extra guardsmen he knew would be needed had to be there for a reason, and as Anne said, the only thing that made sense was that it was a reason he had planned himself.
There was a storm coming all right.
I just wished I knew what the fuck it was.
Chapter 32
The storm broke the next day.
Vogel called a staff meeting that morning as he had told me he planned to, and there he gave his strangest orders yet.
We were in the mess in the house of law, where the Old Man seldom went. We all had steaming bowls of tea in our hands, save for Iagin, who was already on the brandy, and Vogel himself, who took nothing.
‘Have it put about,’ Vogel said to Iagin, ‘that new evidence has come to light. I want the people to know that we now believe that Her Majesty our late queen’s death was not natural, but an assassination by result of foul witchcraft. State that the queen’s death was caused by magic. Say that publicly and loudly and in the name of the house of law. Somewhat more quietly, say that the Skanians have strong magicians and are not our allies, but specify no further than that. Even quieter than that, you might remind the people that the house of magicians is also hostile to the house of law and therefore to the throne.’
Iagin and me looked at each other, but we held our peace. Ailsa didn’t so much as blink.
‘Yes, sir,’ Iagin said after a moment.
We were all there, all the Queen’s Men save Sabine. She hadn’t joined us, I noticed.
‘Iagin, Konrad, Tomas,’ Vogel went on, ‘prepare yourselves and your street-level operations. Ilse, you may need to hire assistants. This time there will be unrest. A great deal of it. It must be . . . managed.’
Not suppressed this time, I noticed. Managed. What the fuck did that mean?
Holding my peace went to the whores in one long rush. This would cause fucking chaos on those streets outside the house of law, and the Old Man knew it.
‘But we said she died of an attack of the heart, we can’t change that now,’ I protested.
Ailsa hissed a warning to keep quiet, but Vogel and I both ignored her.
‘Of course we can,’ Vogel said. ‘We said Her Majesty
had died. Now we are reminding people how she died, and by whose hand. You have to understand, Tomas, that those most prone to misinformation are those most inclined to want to believe it. They want someone to blame. Nobody likes accidents, or illnesses. There’s no revenge to be taken for an accident, for a sickness. Give them this much . . .’
‘And they’ll come to believe it,’ Iagin finished for him. ‘If they hear it enough times in enough places from enough people, everyone will come to believe it. Trust me, Tomas, I know how to do this shit.’
I nodded slowly. I thought that he did, at that. Lies upon lies upon lies, until the common man came to doubt his own recollection of what he had heard and what he thought he knew had happened. I could see how this would play out.
The queen had been murdered. The queen had always been murdered, they knew that. They weren’t fools, not them. They had never trusted those pale northern Skanian bastards and their allies in the house of magicians. Oh, no, not them, they hadn’t been taken in, they were cleverer that that. Cleverer than their fellows, who had been fooled by the evil foreigners.
This was, when you boiled it right down to its bones, exactly how Fat Luka had spread the word I wanted heard around the streets of the Stink. That was something to think on, but another time.
‘And if anyone questions it?’ I asked. ‘If anyone is foolish enough to remember different?’
‘Ah,’ Lord Vogel said, and he showed us his razorblade smile. ‘You might mention that the Prince Regent has been trying to suppress this information. It could be suggested that in order to protect the reputations of those in charge of palace security, many of whom have recently disappeared thanks to the rigour of the house of law, not to mention his friends in the house of magicians, a false rumour had been circulated that the queen’s death was natural. Which it absolutely was not.’
That was how it was done, I knew that. That was how history was changed, just like it was back in the Stink.
It was just a matter of scale, that was all.
*
It didn’t take long. I had never for a moment thought that it would, in a city like Dannsburg.
I was abroad in the city that afternoon, walking the streets with Oliver and Emil and Beast as a bodyguard, watching and listening as Lord Vogel had told me to. Already I could see the signs. A Skanian merchant’s shop had a window boarded up where someone had obviously smashed it. Another had ‘Queenkiller’ daubed across his closed and bolted door in cheap white paint.
The atmosphere on the streets was hostile, there was no other word for it. I was richly dressed and I had three big men behind me and I was obviously not foreign, and even I felt it. Anyone with fair hair was drawing looks that promised violence, I noticed. So quickly had Vogel’s artificial prejudices taken root among the general population. It came to me after a while that I could hear shouting from a street or so away, the sounds of the sort of civil disturbance that was almost unheard of in Dannsburg.
Here we fucking go, I thought. Here come the riots.
The commotion was coming from the grand square at the end of the next street. I led my crew down a connecting road into the broad open space, and there it was happening. There was a carriage, its wood lacquered in dark blue with gold accents on the coachwork, and it was surrounded. The carriage bore the white seven-pointed star crest of the house of magicians on its doors, a crest that a week ago, a day ago, would have accorded it respect and space in the crowded streets. Today it had been waylaid by an angry mob.
‘Bastards!’ a grey-haired woman shouted, and she hurled a cobble which smashed into the ornate coachwork and broke off a section of gilded moulding.
‘Queenkillers!’ a man called out, and the chant was taken up by the angry mob.
‘Queenkiller!’
‘Fuck, should we do something?’ Oliver murmured beside me.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘This is a matter for the City Guard.’
‘Queenkiller!’
‘What fucking City Guard?’ Emil said.
‘Hold your peace, the pair of you,’ I snapped.
‘Queenkiller! Queenkiller!’ the mob roared, and cobbles and rotten fruit and vegetables rained down on the carriage.
I oppose anything the magicians want, I remembered Vogel saying to me the previous year. In truth I wish someone would rid me of them.
I could see what he was doing, and by Our Lady’s name it was already working. Dieter Vogel was, I knew, a very, very dangerous man, but all the same I was impressed. The City Guard seemed to be absent from that one square, for all that they thronged the streets in the rest of the northern reaches of the city. I watched in horrified fascination as the mob overran the magician’s valiantly battling coachman and footmen, bearing them to the ground and kicking them senseless until there was blood on the cobbles. Eventually someone tore open the door of the carriage.
A moment later a pale older man in the flowing blue robes of his order was dragged out and manhandled through the crowd to their ringleader, the woman who had cast the first stone. She must have had almost seventy years to her, with long, filthy iron-grey hair hanging loose and wild around her thin face. She was dressed in the plain worn woollen kirtle of a common goodwife, but she commanded the mob like a general presiding over a battlefield.
Whoever the magus was, I imagined he greatly regretted setting forth on his business that day without a cadre of the heavily armed and armoured Guard of the Magi around him. Magicians didn’t usually travel under guard, of course, having no need to do so as respected members of society. How quickly things can change, in a city like Dannsburg. In a city suddenly convinced that their queen had been murdered by magic, things can change very quickly indeed for a magician, and not for the better.
‘Bring me rope!’ the woman screamed, and from somewhere in the crowd rope was swiftly brought.
There was a great bronze statue in the centre of that square, as there are in so many of the grand squares of Dannsburg. This one was of a noble warrior in an old-fashioned army uniform standing with a spear in his hands, the shaft thrust out to ward off the queen’s enemies. Someone hurled an end of the rope over that spear, and a moment later the other end was around the magician’s neck.
‘Where the fuck are the Guard?’ Emil asked. ‘Boss, are you sure we shouldn’t—’
‘Completely sure,’ I said. ‘Hold, Emil.’
I could tell he didn’t like it either and nor did Oliver, but they did as they were told. Beast was impassive beside me, just watching with an unreadable expression on his face. After everything he had been through, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would take to trouble Beast’s conscience. If he still had one at all, of course. I honestly wouldn’t have blamed him if he hadn’t. I felt I understood Beast, in a way. After Abingon, and Messia, and what I had done when I’d had only twelve years to me, I felt he was something of a kindred spirit.
But then I had murdered my own father, after all. Perhaps we belonged in the Queen’s Men, Beast and me. Where else would have had us?
I gritted my teeth as two men in the crowd tightened the noose around the magician’s neck. Then the mob were hauling on the rope and cheering as he was dragged choking into the air. A lynching on the streets, and barely three hours after the word had been spread. That was what the Queen’s Men and the mob’s fury could do, when Lord Vogel crooked his finger.
The magician kicked and flailed, and the mob jeered. More hands took the rope and hoisted him higher, until his head was knocking against the statue’s spear some twenty feet and more above the cobbles. He was purple in the face now, hands clutched impotently to the hemp closing off his throat. Lynching is a slow death, not like a hanging with its sharp drop which is an almost instant transition to the grey lands.
Lynching is akin to torture, and it’s an ugly thing.
‘Do some fucking magic!’ someone called, and the crowd laughed.
‘Good enough to kill the queen, good enough to save yourself,’ someone else jeered.
>
‘Useless cunt, can’t even do that!’
‘Queenkiller! Queenkiller!’
The obvious contradiction was completely lost on them, I noticed. Mob mentality is a strange thing, as I believe I have written of before. The notion of a magic strong enough to assassinate a queen but not to save a man from his own lynching was plainly ridiculous, but that didn’t matter to them.
None of it did. The narrative had been given to them, by Iagin and his network of voices. By Brother Truth. That was the truth they had heard, and they ate it up like fresh bread. Logic, reason, those are things a mob cannot, will not, hear.
‘Queenkiller!’
The magician voided himself, shit falling from under his robes to splatter onto the baying crowd below. I knew then that he was dying, but the mob’s fury was not.
‘Dirty bastard!’
‘Queenkiller!’
‘Hoist him!’
‘Fucking Queenkiller!’
The magus gave a last kick and hung lifeless from the rope, his body twisting in the wind. It was done, and over. And just beginning.
That was when the City Guard finally appeared. The mob began to scatter as guardsmen waded into them with clubs in their hands, knocking people down indiscriminately around them.
The grey-haired woman stood among them, and she paused for a moment to meet my eyes.
I gave Sabine a nod before she vanished into the crowd.
Chapter 33
After Sabine kindled that first spark, the wildfire took hold. Dannsburg was like a barrel of powder, as Ailsa’s father had told me the previous year, just waiting for a spark to set it off. Well, now that spark had been struck and no mistake.
Even Vogel’s newly expanded City Guard were hard pressed to keep the queen’s peace on the streets, but he seemed well enough pleased despite that.
‘There was a riot outside the house of magicians today,’ Iagin told me, three nights later in the mess at the house of law. ‘Two of the Guard of the Magi were killed. The Old Man’s rubbing his hands together, I can tell you.’