by Peter McLean
I remembered the meeting of the governing council that I had attended, the beleaguered First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov, and the stern Councillor Markova and florid-faced Councillor Lan Drashkov, who were both obviously ours. I remembered how the council had reminded me of that travelling menagerie’s apes flinging their own shit at each other, and I wondered. Oh, how I wondered.
Was this Vogel putting me in a position of power to further the aims of the Queen’s Men, or simply trying to get rid of me?
No, if he wanted to get rid of me he would just have me disappeared, I knew that well enough. Although, could he? Like all the Queen’s Men, I ran my own operation like an independent crew and my security was top drawer. Anyone who wanted to stab me in my sleep would have to get through Beast and Bloody Anne and – most of all – Billy first, and I wasn’t sure even Cutter could have done that unaided.
The Queen’s Men were fucking gangsters and there was no other way to look at it, once you saw the truth of the thing. Our country was basically run by gangsters. That was a thing to understand. The governing council was a thin veneer of constitutional rule, to be sure, but we had no queen, our Prince Regent was also the head of the Queen’s Men, even if no one officially knew that, and the Princess Crown Royal was barking fucking mad.
Those were the times we lived in.
‘Aye,’ I could only say. ‘My thanks, Provost Marshal.’
I stood and offered him a stiff bow of respect that I actually felt, in that moment. Respect for the sheer audacity of getting away with it all, to be sure, but nonetheless respect should be paid where it’s due.
‘Of course, there will be policy decisions to be made, votes to be cast,’ Vogel said. ‘I’ll let you know your opinion when you need to have one. Do try to make an impression on your first day, though, won’t you, Tomas? They don’t have to like you, but they do have to remember you. Be outrageous, if you need to be, but make an impression. The city wall, I think. We owe the guild of masons a favour, and they will reciprocate in kind. The major guilds can be most appreciative of government contracts, after all.’
And there it went. There went the respect, straight out of the fucking door. He’d tell me my opinion, would he? He didn’t know me half as well as he thought he did if he thought that was ever going to happen, and there he lost me. But all the same, and much as I loathed to admit it, he made a good point there. The city walls were in a shocking state, and with war brewing that needed to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
‘Of course, sir,’ I said, and I’m not sure I managed to keep the bitterness out of my voice as much as I probably should have done.
Vogel met my eyes for one long, cold moment, then nodded. With that I was dismissed, and I left his office in the house of law and wandered down to the mess, where I found Ailsa deep in conversation with Konrad. They broke off when they saw me, and Ailsa rose to her feet and smiled in a way that left me feeling deeply confused for the rest of the day.
‘Husband,’ she said. ‘It is good to see you.’
‘My lady wife,’ I returned, and we embraced briefly and, on her side at least I am sure, entirely without passion.
‘I have business,’ Konrad said tactfully, and left us to it.
Alone together, Ailsa looked at me and raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow.
‘I had thought you would be away longer,’ she said.
I thought you were in disgrace, that was what she meant, but her words showed me that perhaps Vogel didn’t tell her everything after all.
‘The Old Man summoned me home,’ I said. ‘I’m on the governing council now, apparently.’
‘Oh, yes, of course, Yanakov’s seat. Yes, I remember Iagin saying something about that. Good luck.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that you’re in for an awful lot of very long, very boring meetings. Watching Markova and Lan Drashkov bite chunks out of each other might keep you entertained for a while, I suppose, but that’s about the only thing that will.’
‘I had rather thought they were both ours,’ I said.
‘Oh, they are,’ Ailsa said, ‘but neither of them know that and they absolutely loathe each other. That was Iagin’s idea, that one. We feed each of them misinformation about the other and stir their hatred to a melting point when it suits us. That is usually enough to prevent the council from getting in our way by ever actually deciding anything we don’t want them to, or gods forbid acting on it if they do.’
I poured myself a brandy from one of the bottles on the cupboard, for all that it wasn’t yet noon.
‘Then why the fuck am I joining the council, if we already own most of them and we don’t want them doing anything anyway?’
‘Well, in part to prevent anyone awkward from winning Yanakov’s seat and spoiling things for us, of course,’ Ailsa said, ‘but beyond that I would have thought it was obvious, Brother Blade. Lord Vogel wants one of them killed, and sitting members of the governing council are notoriously difficult to get close to unless one is also a councillor. We might own the majority of the councillors but only in the sense of bribes and blackmail. None of them carry the warrant, save for you.’
Her use of my secret name within the Knights of the Rose Throne made me wince slightly, I have to allow, and for a moment I didn’t even really know why. Because it reminded me that such names existed, I realised then, and of what hers was.
Sister Deceit.
That was Ailsa, that was the woman I had been forced to marry. Sister Deceit, the mistress of the false face. Could I ever truly trust her? By Our Lady I wanted to, but . . . but. This was Dannsburg, as I have written, and I just didn’t know any more.
*
My first meeting of the governing council was what I suppose you could call an experience. I didn’t know how anything worked, for one thing, but for all that the system was steeped in centuries-old traditions it was soon plain that not everyone respected them. Lan Drashkov certainly didn’t, as I had observed at the council meeting I had watched from the public gallery, and I decided that if he could get away with a bluff, blunt approach to formality then so could I.
Dressed in my most formal clothes, I took my seat on the padded benches of green leather that lined the official chamber of the public council hall and waited for First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov to call the meeting to order. I saw Councillor Markova looking at me, and I inclined my head to her as a colleague. She gave me a nod of respect in return that told me she had a fair idea of who I was, and I wondered exactly how much Vogel had told her. She was one of his, I remembered, on his direct payroll, not like most of the rest of them, who were on Iagin’s general one. I thought that out of her and Lan Drashkov, she was almost certainly the more dangerous. Of the others I had no idea who was on our payroll and who wasn’t, and I supposed that was probably for the best. This had to look convincing, and the less we knew of each other the better.
I could see the wisdom in that, but still I felt adrift on strange waters.
Lan Letskov appeared on the First Councillor’s dais at last, and rapped a gavel on the podium before him to cease the muttering between those assembled in the grand council chamber.
‘Come to order,’ he said. ‘This meeting of the governing council is now in session. Our first item of business is the maintenance of the East Gate. The current estimate from the guild of masons is a sum of . . .’
I stopped listening to him, having no interest in how much maintaining the East Gate was likely to cost the crown. There was a fucking war brewing, for Our Lady’s sake. It would be approved and done, however much it cost; there wasn’t even a decision to be made there, to my mind. I let my eyes wander, scanning the public gallery. I was, it had to be said, extremely surprised to see Bloody Anne up there, watching me with Rosie seated beside her. Anne was wearing a man’s coat and doublet, as was her way, and Rosie looked a fine lady beside her in a green gown that I hadn’t seen before. It went well with her red hair, and I could only assume it had been
a gift from Anne. I didn’t pay her that much, for all that I could draw coin from the coffers of the house of law as I pleased.
I had told Anne of my appointment when I got back from my meeting with Vogel the previous day. Of course I had – it might have been horseshit but I was still proud of it, in a way, much as I had been of my knighthood. Of course I had wanted to tell her. If I couldn’t tell my ma about this then I wanted to tell my best friend instead. I wanted someone to be proud of me, and I make no apology for that. I am only human, after all. We had toasted my supposed elevation last night with a bottle of brandy that I was beginning to regret as I sat there in the stuffy, dusty confines of the council hall, but I had never expected her to come and watch.
‘It’s too much,’ I heard someone protest. ‘The masons must think we are fools.’
‘Outrageous,’ someone else complained. ‘For that money we could—’
‘But since our late queen’s assassination by the Skanians, security must surely—’
‘The magicians killed the queen, not the Skanians.’
‘No, they didn’t!’
‘Yes, they did!’
‘Idiot!’
‘Collaborator!’
In Our Lady’s name, this was even worse than I had been expecting it to be. I didn’t know how much of the dissent was orchestrated by the house of law and how much was simply human stupidity, but I saw my opportunity right there.
Try to make an impression on your first day, Vogel had said. They don’t have to like you, but they do have to remember you. The city wall, I think.
Oh, I would make them remember me all right. I rose to my feet and cleared my throat.
‘The governing council recognises Sir Tomas Piety, councillor for the North Ward,’ First Councillor Lan Letskov announced.
‘First fucking day and he’s got to make a speech,’ Lan Drashkov scoffed, deliberately loud enough to be heard, but I ignored him.
I could only assume he had seen Markova and me exchange nods and had immediately taken me for her ally, and therefore his enemy. Oh, what fun this role was going to be.
‘My ladies, my lords, my fellow councillors,’ I said, taking hold of the lapels of my coat as I had seen important people do when making a speech. I have no idea why, it just seemed to be something that folk did. ‘It seems to me that maintenance of the East Gate is the least of our concerns in these troubled times we live in.’
I paused a moment to wait for the ‘hear hears’ of those opposed to the work and the boos of those in favour of it to finish echoing around the chamber, then I continued.
‘Indeed, it is such an obvious requirement that I am surprised we feel the need to even discuss it. Masons are master craftsmen and must be paid their due. There’s no debate to be had here.’
Again I paused, to allow the two sides of buffoons to reverse their previous opinions of me. I was having fun already, and I was only just starting.
‘War,’ I said, and I paused again to let the word hang ominously in the air. ‘I am a soldier. I have seen war. I was at Messia, and I was at Abingon, and I rode home to tell the tales of it. I have seen city walls, walls far mightier than ours, crumble into dust before the relentless onslaught of the cannon.’
They knew I was a knight, of course, and with those words now they thought me the martial sort that they supposed led cavalry charges. That lent me gravitas when speaking of matters of war, and more to the point it deflected any suspicions that I might have been the other sort of knight, the sort who made up the Queen’s Men. Also, for many of them the only cannon they had ever seen fired was probably that monstrosity the Princess Crown Royal had unleashed atop Cannon Hill, the day she had vaporised the Baron Lan Drunov. They feared cannon well enough after that, and with good reason. I spoke, and they believed me to be noble born and a war hero both, although I was neither of those things.
I told them no lies, but as Our Lady is my witness, I’m good at this shit, if I say so myself.
I deliberately didn’t speak to them of siege. Those who have not fought, as most of these almost certainly hadn’t, always assume that cities are taken through frontal assault. They thought the reality was the thunder of cannon and the charge of armoured lances, a day or two of heroic violence that they could romanticise and admire from a safe distance. They didn’t want to hear about the weapons of starvation and disease. They didn’t want to hear about the grinding months of attrition and tedium and slow suffering, of hunger and the bloody flux, for all that nine times out of ten those are the true takers of cities.
‘Sir Tomas, I—’ someone protested, but I cut him down with a soldier’s glare.
Be outrageous, if you need to be, but make an impression.
Oh, I could be outrageous when I wanted to be.
‘Our walls are shit!’ I proclaimed, earning a startled raising of eyebrows from First Councillor Lan Letskov. ‘If the Skanians come in force, as they may well do in the wake of the assassination of our noble queen, our walls will fall and we will die. I propose a requisition of one million gold crowns from the treasury, to be paid to the guild of masons to expand our fortifications, strengthen our walls, and make our country great again!’
I had to shout those last words over the increasing uproar, but one thing was for certain: they would fucking well remember me now, all right.
Chapter 44
‘A million gold crowns?’ Anne laughed, when we were back in the Bountiful Harvest that afternoon with brandies in our hands. ‘Does the treasury even have a million gold crowns?’
‘How the fuck would I know?’ I said, and clinked my glass against hers. ‘Make them remember you, the Old Man said, and I reckon I did that this morning.’
‘Aye, I should think you did, and then some,’ Anne said. ‘They’ll remember you as the madman who wants to beggar the realm on his first day in office, to build walls against a threat half of them don’t even believe exists.’
‘Aye, well, more fool them,’ I said.
I knew the story that the magicians had killed the queen was utter horseshit, and I knew Vogel had only come up with it to seize an opportunity to hurt his political rivals in the house of magicians and deflect attention away from how woefully unprepared for another war we really were.
I remembered the Skanians that the Pious Men had fought in Ellinburg, and Bloodhands and his attempt to infiltrate my city. More than anything I remembered their magicians, who very much did know magic even if ours apparently didn’t. If the Skanians invaded with our defences in their current state we were just fucked and there was no other way to look at it. If I was truly a councillor now, if there was any way in Our Lady’s name I could get that funding, I realised I would do it. I had been making it up as I went along in the council chamber, simply wanting to say something outrageous enough to make sure they remembered me, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew I was right. If I had the power to make this happen now, then I fucking well would.
We needed to be funding the military, building defences, recruiting troops. If Skania came at us now it would be Abingon all over again. Ailsa had told me that shortly after I first met her, and she had been right then and she was right now. It would be Abingon again but this time we would be on the losing side, and I wouldn’t see that happen. Not on my watch, I wouldn’t.
I couldn’t see that happen, not again.
For Our Lady’s sake, not again. Never again.
My hand shook hard enough that I spilled brandy on the table, and Anne looked at me with sudden concern.
‘Tomas?’ she said, gently putting her hard, callused hand over mine. ‘It’s all right, Tomas. I’m here.’
‘Aye,’ I said, and took a shaky breath. ‘Aye, I know you are, Anne, and I thank you for it. I had a . . . a bad moment, that’s all. They come and go.’
‘I know,’ she said, and she reached for the bottle and topped up my spilled drink. ‘It’s been a big day. Your first day as a member of the governing council, and you gave a speech I don�
��t think anyone will forget in a hurry.’
‘I hope they won’t,’ I said, and I meant it.
I didn’t want this job, none of it. The Queen’s Men or the governing fucking council or any of it, but if I was stuck with it, then I was going to try my hardest to do some good with it. I wanted . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what it was, what had changed, but I felt in that moment that if a man is given power at a national level then he should use it to save lives, not take them. I very, very much doubted Lord Vogel would have agreed with me, but that was just another item to chalk up on the increasingly long list of points on which we differed.
While we fought a common enemy in the Skanians I supposed that was just something I had to accept.
*
I had an unexpected visitor that evening, a man I had almost forgotten about.
Major Bakrylov of the Queen’s Own Fifth was a young fellow with maybe twenty-seven or so years to him, and he wore a dark-red coat cut in the military style and the customary bristling side whiskers of a cavalry officer. He had tried to seduce me at a dinner Lord Vogel had thrown, the dinner where Lord Lan Andronikov had disappeared, but he was a decent enough fellow for all that. He liked to gamble, I remembered, and he could lose a bet and laugh about it afterwards, which was more than most men could. I had taken a gold crown off him at Lan Yetrov’s bear bait, and he had thought nothing of it. He was also, I was reasonably certain, on the payroll of the Queen’s Men.
‘Major, a pleasure to see you,’ I said, when Rosie showed him into my office in the private dining room of the Bountiful Harvest, and I found I actually meant it.
I liked the man, for all that I knew what he had done in the war.
‘Sir Tomas,’ he said. ‘My congratulations on your recent considerable social elevation.’