It was late when I got back to the Tanner’s Arms. Most of the men were asleep by then, but Simple Sam was on the door and Bloody Anne was inside waiting for me.
“What in the Lady’s name happened?” she asked me.
“It’s all right, Anne,” I said. “I got taken to see Grandfather, that’s all.”
“Taken in,” she said, and I knew someone had explained what that meant, “but they let you go again. Why, and what for?”
I sighed and poured myself a brandy.
“The governor wanted a word,” I said. “You have to understand the way this works, here in Ellinburg. We’re a crew and I’m a boss, and the City Guard are a bigger crew and the governor is a bigger boss. I have to pay him taxes, the same way my people pay me taxes. It’s just business.”
Anne frowned at me. “The governor is corrupt?”
“He’s a businessman,” I said. “We’re all businessmen, Anne.”
Bloody Anne was a soldier, not a criminal. I didn’t know much about her past, where she had lived or what she had done before the war, but she was honest and she was faithful. Those were admirable qualities in a sergeant, but now she was my second in the Pious Men and it was time she learned how things really worked.
“I’m not a fucking idiot, Tomas,” Anne said. “A bribe is a bribe, so call it that.”
“All right, we’ll call it that,” I said. “I bribe the Guard to keep them out of Pious Men business, and so do the bosses of the other crews in the city. Captain Rogan gets a cut of that money, the guardsmen get a pittance, and the governor keeps the rest of it for himself. That’s just how it works.”
I shrugged, making light of it, and looked around the room. Mika and Brak were sitting by the fire playing cards and looking reasonably sober, but everyone else appeared to have turned in for the night.
“Where’s Jochan?” I asked.
Anne was my second, but Jochan still thought that he was, so by rights it should have been him waiting up for me and not her. But it hadn’t been. That said a lot, to my mind.
“Asleep out the back,” she said. “He’s had a drink.”
He’d had a bottle of brandy or more and passed out, was what she meant. I nodded.
“How’s Hari?”
“Better,” Anne said, and now she looked uncomfortable. “Much better.”
“That’s good,” I said.
She looked down at her boots and didn’t say anything for a long time. I knew that look. She had looked like that in Abingon, when she had needed to tell me someone else had died. That was the face Anne got when there was hard news, but if Hari was getting better then I couldn’t see what that news would be. I sipped my brandy and waited, giving her the time she needed to put her words together.
“He’s a lot better,” she said at last. “Doc Cordin had to leave, so Billy the Boy sat with him a while, and then he was sitting up and eating and he seemed to know who he was again. Tomas, this morning he called me Colonel and asked how far it was to Abingon. He was so far gone, so nearly dead from all the blood he’d lost, and now . . . he isn’t.”
“Well, that’s good,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
I gave Anne a look, and she nodded.
“Aye, it’s good,” she said. “I know he’s not part of our crew, but he seems like a good man.”
“He is part of our crew,” I said. “Now, he is. They’re all Pious Men, Anne.”
“Aye,” she said again. “Just like Billy the Boy is.”
I nodded. I could tell that Anne was scared of Billy the Boy, and that didn’t surprise me. I knew that Sir Eland certainly was, and had been ever since that first night in the woods outside Messia. Sometimes I was scared of him too, although I’d have been hard-pressed to put my finger on exactly why.
Touched by the goddess, I thought.
No twelve-year-old child should be a confessor and a seer, but Billy was.
“Is there something you’re not telling me, Bloody Anne?”
“Maybe you ought to see for yourself,” she said.
I followed Anne through to the kitchen, and there was Billy, watching over Hari as she had said. Hari did look better, I had to allow. He was asleep again now, but that awful waxy sheen was gone from his face and he almost had some color back in his cheeks. Billy was sitting cross-legged on the table staring at him, unblinking. He had an intense way about him sometimes, and that was nothing out of the ordinary for him.
“What am I not seeing?” I asked her.
“Tomas,” Anne said slowly, “he’s not touching the table.”
I looked again and realized that she was right. There was a good inch of clear space between Billy’s arse and crossed legs and the top of the table.
He was floating in the air.
“By Our Lady’s name,” I whispered.
I swallowed. Billy was touched by the goddess, I knew that. I knew that, but knowing it and seeing it weren’t the same thing.
Billy didn’t look like he knew we were in the room. He just floated there, staring at Hari, and he gave no sign that he could see or hear us. Perhaps he couldn’t. He was in some sort of trance, to my mind, although how and why were anyone’s guess. Was the goddess really working through him, healing Hari? Perhaps. I didn’t discount the idea, but if that was the case then I had no explanation for it. Our Lady didn’t heal men, that I knew of.
“We should send for a priest,” Anne said.
I gave her a look.
“I am a fucking priest,” I said, “and it’s more than I can explain. We’d need a magician to explain this.”
Of course I didn’t know a magician, no more than I knew a real doctor. There was Old Kurt, though, down in the Wheels, who people called a cunning man. He was to a magician what Doc Cordin was to a proper doctor, I supposed. Not book-schooled, maybe, but what he did worked well enough. Most of the time, anyway. Perhaps he could explain it.
Still, if Billy the Boy had done something to Hari, or if Our Lady had done something through Billy, then it didn’t seem to have done anyone any harm. Quite the opposite, to my mind. A man of mine who had been dying wasn’t anymore, and I wasn’t going to argue with that.
“It’s late and I’m tired,” I said. “If Billy wants to float in the air, then I can’t see it’s hurting anyone.”
“You’re just going to let it pass?” Anne asked.
I shrugged. I couldn’t see what else I could do about it, short of getting hold of him and physically dragging him down onto the table. I had a feeling that wouldn’t have been wise.
“It’s witchcraft, Tomas.”
“I’ll pray on it,” I said. “Then I’m going to sleep.”
I left Anne in the kitchen, watching Billy the Boy while he floated above the table and stared down at Hari, never blinking.
I wouldn’t pray on it.
Our Lady didn’t answer prayers, after all, and I had more pressing things to concern me than Billy the Boy. Or so I told myself at the time, anyway.
I made my way up the rickety stairs to the garret room I had claimed as my own, and shut the ill-fitting door behind me. I could hear my aunt snoring in the next room.
Billy the Boy would keep, I told myself, whether it was witchcraft or not, and how the fuck was I supposed to know either way? I was a priest, not a mystic, but the last thing I wanted was Anne worrying about witchcraft in our crew. I took my sword belt and mail off and flexed my shoulders, aching from the weight of the armor. She would have to keep as well; other things wouldn’t keep at all.
There were Queen’s Men in the city, and they wanted me to work for them.
Again.
I woke early the next morning, despite not having laid my head down much before dawn. I needed to piss. I kicked my bedroll open and got up, feeling the cold morning air around my bare shins. I found the pot and stood over it in my smallclothes, thinking while I did my business. There’s nothing like a good piss in the morning to clear the head. That was better than prayer any day, to my mind, and certainly more productive.
The Queen’s Men.
I thought I had seen the last of them, but it seemed like I had been wrong about that.
I have written that I’m a businessman, and I am. I’m a priest as well, and that’s true enough. But perhaps I’m something else too. That gold hidden in the wall of the storeroom downstairs hadn’t come out of thin air, after all. I had earned that gold, and no one knew about that. Not Governor Hauer, not Jochan, not even Aunt Enaid.
No one.
I had earned that gold from the Queen’s Men, before the war. That was what I had been worried that Governor Hauer might have discovered. From what he had said last night it seemed that he hadn’t, and that was good even if nothing else was.
They paid well, the Queen’s Men, I had to give them that. They had paid me very well indeed, to spy on the governor. Oh, he thought he was untouchable, did Hauer, up here in his reeking industrial city where none of the fine lords and ladies of Dannsburg would ever have wanted to set their silken feet.
Incomes were what he said they were, to Hauer’s mind, and taxes were paid accordingly. He never thought anyone in the capital would trouble themselves to question his accounts, but then of course at the time he hadn’t known that there was a war brewing. Wars have to be paid for, in gold as well as blood. Blood might be cheap, but gold had to be wrung out of the provinces, by force if necessary. I’m no politician, but even I knew that.
A man had contacted me maybe a year before the war broke out. He was no one I knew, just a trader from the east offering good terms on tea and silk and poppy resin. We had made some deals, that man and I, and once he had my trust he had shown me the Queen’s Warrant and offered me another deal—work for the Queen’s Men or face the queen’s justice for the dodged tea taxes and the unlicensed poppy trade.
I knew the queen’s justice was even harsher than mine, so of course I had agreed.
I had never thought I’d be a spy for the crown, but then I had never thought I’d be a priest either. Working for the crown had stuck in my throat like a fish bone, though, and it almost choked me. To work for the crown, to be an informer and a spy, that went against everything I believed in and I hated it.
Better that than hang, though, or so I told myself so I could sleep at nights.
I worked for that man for five months, passing him information on everything from the bribes that the Pious Men paid the City Guard to the number of boats that came down the river and how many bales and barrels each unloaded, and what each one had contained.
It had cost me silver to find those things out, of course, but for every silver mark I spent it seemed the Queen’s Man was happy to repay me with a gold crown. I was careful and circumspect, and I made sure that my eyes and ears were no one that we knew. This wasn’t Pious Men business; I had known that from the start. If I had made it Pious Men business, then Jochan would have known about it and got himself involved, and it would all have gone to the whores. Even then, I realized as I finished my piss and buttoned my smallclothes, even before the war I had known I couldn’t trust my brother.
That was over and done, or so I had thought, but it looked like I had been wrong about that. It seemed that the Queen’s Men weren’t done with me yet. I had heard it said that the only way to leave the service of the crown is at the end of a rope, and it seemed that that might just be true after all.
I splashed water from the basin into my unshaven face. I needed to see a barber, I thought. It wouldn’t do to greet a representative of the queen with a rough chin.
I got dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen, buckling my sword belt as I went. I found Hari sitting up in a chair with a bowl of oats in his hands and a mug of small beer on the table in front of him. He was spooning oats into his face like he hadn’t eaten in a month. He was still a bit pale but otherwise his recovery was nothing short of miraculous. I wasn’t sure that I believed in miracles, but I believed what I could see with my own eyes.
“Morning, boss,” Billy the Boy said from beside the fireplace.
I gave him a look, noting how pale and drawn he seemed.
“Morning, Billy,” I said. “Hari, it’s good to see you up and about again.”
“Aye, boss,” Hari said. “I’m feeling a lot better. Just needed some sleep, I reckon. I’ve been awful tired, of late.”
I wondered how much he remembered but decided to let it pass.
“You take it easy,” I said.
I reached into my pouch and gave him four silver marks. He stared at me in open astonishment.
“You missed out on the accounting,” I told him. “It’s three marks a man for joining the Pious Men, and there’s another for you on account of being grievously wounded in my service. I look after my crew, Hari, and I reward loyalty. You remember that.”
“Yes, boss,” he said, making the money disappear swiftly into his sweaty shirt. “Thank you.”
The men would need new clothes, I thought. They were all filthy and ragged, every man of them, and I wasn’t much better myself. Conscripts usually were, of course, but that wouldn’t do anymore. Not now we were home it wouldn’t. The Pious Men had a certain appearance to maintain, after all.
“Billy,” I said, and the lad looked up at me with expressionless eyes.
“Boss?”
I didn’t want to do this, I realized. Not now, anyway. It would keep, as I had told myself the night before.
“Stay out of Bloody Anne’s way today,” I told him. “I’m going out.”
I went back into the common room and found Fat Luka returning from the shithouse in the yard.
“You’re coming into town with me,” I told him.
He just nodded and went to get his weapons. Luka was a good Ellinburg man, and he knew how things worked. Bloody Anne was my second, no mistake about that, but I had known Luka a lot longer and he knew the city. There were some tasks he’d be better suited for.
I knew I could trust him.