Priest of crowns, p.36
Priest of Crowns, page 36
By then, it wouldn’t just be flashstones.
The dowager grand duchess was led towards the block, and there Konrad waited beside the headsman. He was attired as a clerk of law, which he may even have been for all I knew, and he looked to the grand duchess as she gracefully removed her eyeglasses.
‘You have been tried before a court of law and found guilty of all charges by the Lord Chief Judiciar himself,’ he said. ‘Do you have any last words?’
Lady Varnburg knelt before the headsman’s block and looked out into the crowd. ‘I have not come here to preach,’ she said. ‘I have come here to die. And die I shall, but I do not think that I die in vain. Even now, you can hear the explosions on the streets. Enough is enough, Lord Vogel. The people are rising, and your time is come.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ Vogel said, and gestured with a dismissive flick of his hand. ‘Headsman, do your work.’
Lady Varnburg held Vogel’s gaze for one defiant moment, then bent forward and laid her neck upon the block. She had too much dignity to allow herself to be forced, and so went willingly to death to save her son’s life.
I had heard the term ‘nobility’ my entire life, but never before did I think I had seen it actually demonstrated.
The headsman’s axe rose and fell, and it was done.
*
The evening was punctuated by the sounds of rioting and distant explosions. Sister Galina’s operation was so disorganised that I didn’t even think the two were connected. She was bombing the great houses of the nobility, as I had suggested, while I thought the riots were in the main a spontaneous reaction to what the news sheets had printed that morning. Lord Vogel was very much out of favour with a general public who by and large had placed their faith in the Ascended Martyr, and at least half of whom now believed in her late mother’s divinity too.
I would have very much liked to have been in the Skanian’s Head that night, to hear the ever-changing narrative of their ultra-nationalist clientele, but sadly, that wasn’t to be. Instead, I sat in the private dining room of the Bountiful Harvest, penning a letter to Lady Lan Yetrova.
My Lady,
I thank you again for the gift of your wonderful discovery. I will accept it with all my thanks, but I feel it will need my personal attention to take forward. I propose meeting your waggons in Dannsmere, and bringing them into the city myself. Midnight tomorrow at the village green would seem a good time.
I await your reply,
Your most respectful servant,
Sir Tomas Piety
As a mere knight I ranked well below her in the social hierarchy, of course, but the phrasing of the letter was about right, as far as I knew. Dannsmere was a village a short distance downriver from Dannsburg itself, and it lay between the Lan Yetrova country estate and the city. It was only about an hour’s ride from Dannsburg, if that, and if we could pick the waggons up there and bring them to the gates around the third hour when the City Guard were only half awake and actually expecting the Queen’s Men to be out doing covert things, then so much the better, and the less likely they were to ask awkward questions. The fact that the most questionable actions of the Queen’s Men happened in broad daylight and involved no showing of the warrant whatsoever was another matter indeed. If I appeared at the gates in the middle of the night with a waggon or two and the Queen’s Warrant in my hand and said ‘let me in’ they would, and no questions asked.
That was just how business worked in Dannsburg, and that was good.
I had Luka give the letter to a messenger to run over to the Lan Yetrova house, and sat back in my chair in the private dining room. Billy was in the room with me, and he had been pulling distractedly at his bottom lip as he watched me work.
‘What’s on your mind, son?’ I asked him once Luka had left us.
‘Something’s not right, Da,’ Billy said. ‘I don’t know what.’
I snorted and took a sip of my brandy. ‘A fucking lot of things aren’t right, son,’ I told him. ‘The world over, I dare say, and in this city in particular.’
‘No, it’s . . . I don’t know,’ Billy said. ‘I don’t know, Da, and that’s part of what’s not right. I should know. I always used to know things, and now I don’t. Not like I used to.’
‘You knew Old Kurt was going to die, and he did,’ I said.
‘Yes, but I didn’t know about the last magician at the governor’s hall, did I? You can ask Cutter about that.’
I could hear the bitterness in Billy’s voice, and I noticed that when he mentioned Cutter’s name he took one of the wicked little knives the Messian assassin had given him from its sheath at his belt and started playing with it, flipping it from a forward to a reverse grip and back again. He did it over and over again, without looking, like he wasn’t even really aware of the action.
He’s drilled that thousands of times, until it’s become second nature, I thought, and not for the first time I wondered exactly what Cutter had been teaching Billy in the house on Slaughterhouse Narrow.
‘Well, knowing things like that isn’t normal, lad, you understand that. Maybe it’s no bad thing.’
‘It’s normal for me,’ Billy protested. ‘I could always do it and now I can’t, and I don’t know why.’
I looked at him, at his gaunt face and thinning hair and over-bright eyes, and I thought that perhaps I did.
Feast.
Billy’s second sight had only started to fail him since the first time Mina showed him how to steal another magician’s strength, and that had been when their health had begun to deteriorate too. It didn’t take a cunning man to see that the two things were probably connected. I had fucking known no good could come of that, and I was worried that I had been right. The lad was trembling as though he was feverish, and a bead of sweat was making its slow way down his forehead.
‘Billy, lad,’ I said, ‘when a boy grows into becoming a man, his body changes, you know that well enough. Perhaps for the cunning folk, their minds do too. I wouldn’t know, but I would try not to worry about it.’
‘Aye, perhaps,’ Billy said, and flipped his knife once more before he slipped it deftly back into its sheath. ‘But I don’t like it, Da. I don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen.’
‘No, son,’ I said. ‘None of us do.’
Chapter 45
The Lady Lan Yetrova sent her agreement the next morning, so the following night I found myself in Dannsmere with Anne and Beast and Sam and Black Billy. The place was a small, pleasant village on the north bank of the river. The water was already beginning to widen here as it made its way towards the sea, and I could hear gentle waves lapping against the bank in the darkness.
It was past the eleventh hour when we arrived, and fully dark by then. Anne held a shuttered lantern that let us find our way to the village green, and there we sat and waited. Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes later, the waggons arrived. We heard them before we saw them, the creak of harness and poorly greased axles, the slow clop of the hooves of the heavy draft horses. There were two waggons, as the lady’s letter had told me to expect, and two men on the box of each one and a few men riding alongside to guard them; I assumed they were members of the Lady Lan Yetrova’s household militia in plain clothes.
The lady herself hadn’t come, of course, but I had never expected her to.
‘Good evening,’ I said quietly as their lead rider reined up next to me.
They had four spare horses with them, I saw in the dim glow of their own shuttered lanterns, so it was obvious that this was as far as the drovers were going.
‘You’re Sir Tomas, then,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ I said.
‘Well, her Ladyship sends her regards and wishes you the favour of the gods,’ he said. ‘With this stuff, you’re going to need it.’
I could tell from the look on his face that he had the utmost respect for his cargo. There was sweat on his brow despite the evening cool, and I wondered again just how unstable the magicians’ candles might be.
‘Please return my thanks and fondest regards,’ I said, and he dipped his head and turned his horse away without another word.
His drovers dismounted from their waggons and hauled themselves up onto the spare mounts, and with that, it was done. I could hear the sound of the horses leaving into the darkness at a sedate walk.
‘Beast, Billy,’ I said. Both of them could drive a waggon, and that was why they were there. Sam and Anne were with me purely as enforcers, should they be needed, but given the lateness of the hour and the prosperous sleepiness of Dannsmere, I didn’t expect they would be – that was why I had chosen the place, after all.
‘Come on, girls,’ I heard Black Billy murmur as he flicked his reins, and a moment later the waggons were rolling on their way towards the city.
Sam and Anne led the boys’ horses behind their own, and I rode at the head of our little convoy. It took us a couple of hours or so to make the return journey, and it was, as I had predicted, roughly the third hour of the morning by then. The city was quiet, the riots having died down, and the gate guards looks exhausted.
I reined up in front of their sergeant.
‘The fuck?’ he mumbled as he looked up at me, his unshaven chin jutting from beneath the rim of his helmet, and I realised that he was not only half asleep but drunk as well.
‘Passage into the city, if it please you, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘Myself, and two waggons with outriders.’
He blinked and looked at me again. It was dark, lamp oil still being prohibitively expensive in Dannsburg, and the burning torch his corporal held gave off more smoke than light.
‘And who are you, then? It’s late for a merchant to be rolling up to the city gates.’
Fuck it.
You should use it sparingly, Tomas, but it is there to be used when necessary. Ailsa had told me that when she had first given me the Queen’s Warrant, and it was late and I was tired and honestly, a man like this would actually expect the Queen’s Men to be up to no good in the small hours of the morning. I took it out of my pouch and showed it to him, reasonably confident that he couldn’t really see my face in the piss-poor light anyway.
‘This is who I am,’ I said.
He coughed like he was about to swallow his tongue. ‘Right you are, sir,’ he managed after a moment, and signalled his crew to open the gates.
I gave him a nod, and no more needed to be said, not about him being drunk on duty, or about me bringing waggons full of he had no idea what into the city at the third hour of the morning.
As I have written, that was just how it worked in Dannsburg at that time, and it worked in my favour, so honestly, I didn’t give a fuck. With the gate passed, we drove the waggons south to the nearest bridge and into the dockland area. I found my sasura’s warehouse with little trouble. There was a single night watchman on duty, a jowly fellow in a thick leather jerkin with a shortsword on one hip and a club on the other, and the look of a veteran about him.
He squinted up at us in a way that told me his eyesight wasn’t all it might have been.
‘I’m Sir Tomas,’ I said, by way of introduction.
‘Aye, boss said you’d be along,’ he said. ‘Come on then.’
He whistled softly, and two lads emerged from the shadows to open the warehouse doors. They both had crossbows and shortswords, I noticed, and neither of them looked short-sighted at all. Sasura’s business was clearly very much still in operation, and again, I felt my admiration for that old pirate increasing. He might be retired so far as his wife and daughter were concerned, but he was obviously still trading in some capacity or other, even if he no longer sailed the seas himself. I wondered exactly what came up the river in the barges to his warehouses, and decided it was probably better if I didn’t know.
Beast and Billy drove their waggons into the otherwise empty warehouse and stepped down from their boxes.
‘We’ll see to your draft horses,’ the watchman said, and I noticed a slight slur in his voice that I didn’t think was down to drink. ‘There’s a stable out the back. Don’t you worry about that. They’ll be well, lovely beasts that they are.’
‘See that you look after them well indeed,’ I said. ‘They’re not actually mine.’
The watchman half-shrugged a shoulder. ‘I love horses,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t never not look after one left in my care.’
‘Aye, well,’ I could only reply, and I was struck by just how much he reminded me of Cookpot, back in Ellinburg. ‘That’s good. My thanks.’
He nodded at me again, and wandered back off to his post. It seemed to me that the man had the battle shock very badly indeed, but of course, that was none of my business. He was old to have fought in my war, but much too young to have been in the one before that. I thought it must have been the hardest for the very youngest and very oldest to be conscripted. The gods only knew it had been bad enough for me, but the young were too naïve and inexperienced to understand what was happening to them, the old too tired and physically worn down by twenty and more years of labour to be able to cope with it.
The legacy that war left would last them the rest of their lives, and that was Our Lady’s own truth.
‘Right,’ I said to the crew. ‘It’s stashed, so that’s done. I dare say her Ladyship will send someone for her horses in due course.’
‘Can we go to bed now?’ Anne asked, and made a point of rubbing her eyes as she said it. ‘I know you don’t ever seem to need to fucking sleep, Tomas, but I do.’
Truth be told, I was dead on my feet, but it would have shown weakness to admit it.
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I reckon we can, at that.’
I rode back over the river to the Bountiful Harvest with Sam and Beast, while Anne and Billy headed to the Dripping Bucket and the constant vigil held over Crown Prince Marcus. Quite how he was coping, living in squalor with orphans after growing up in the Sea Keep of Varnburg, I didn’t know, but it was definitely better than the alternative. The alternative would have been a mysterious disappearance and Konrad’s knife, after all.
*
The next morning I was back in the warehouse to inspect the waggons. I had Cutter with me – my quiet man was the closest thing to a sapper I had, and he had worked with Captain Larn’s army sappers before when we had bombed the Wheels. He knew the work, how it was done.
‘What is this stuff?’ Cutter asked, gingerly lifting the lid of one of the crates and looking at the cylinders inside.
‘Something new,’ I said. ‘I don’t think it has a name, but I’ve come to think of them as magicians’ candles.’
‘And they explode, do they?’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘One of those candles is a barrel of powder at least, perhaps more.’
Cutter gave me a very dubious look. ‘I don’t see how,’ he said.
‘No, nor do I,’ I admitted, ‘but then, we’re neither of us magicians. I’ve seen them demonstrated and it’s true, believe me. Unlike powder, though, apparently they’re a bit prone to going off by themselves, so whatever you do don’t drop one, or drop anything on top of one. That’s why there’s fuck all else in this warehouse.’
Cutter snorted. ‘Boss, there must be a couple of hundred of your candles on these two waggons – there not being anything else in this warehouse is neither here nor there. If one blew and set the others off, which I think it would, there wouldn’t be much of anything left in any of the warehouses.’
He had a point there, I allowed. ‘Aye, right you are,’ I said, and I imagined I had probably gone a bit pale in the face as I said it. ‘Best we do this soon, then.’
‘And what is it exactly that we’re going to do?’
‘Well now,’ I said. ‘We’re going to blow up the house of law.’
Cutter met my gaze with his single eye, and slowly shook his head. ‘No, I’m afraid you ain’t,’ he said. ‘It don’t work like that, not on such a strong building. To blow up the house of law, these things would have to be inside it, preferably underneath it, and I don’t see how you can make that happen. You’re hardly going to be smuggling them in a couple at a time down your britches, are you? No, you won’t bring the building down letting explosives off outside it. The blast goes the easiest way, and outside, that’s anywhere except through the walls. You’d fuck the place up and no mistake, but you wouldn’t bring it down.’
I sucked my teeth for a moment. I had to admit that was something I hadn’t known. I thought of Ilse for a moment, and wondered if Iagin really had brought her to our side. If I could get the candles into her dungeons, directly beneath the house of law . . .
I opened my mouth to speak, but Cutter held up a finger to stop me.
‘Even if you could get them into an undercroft,’ he said, ‘whoever had to light the fuses would never get out alive. There just wouldn’t be time, not in a building that size. It would be a suicide mission.’
‘No, fuck that,’ I said at once, and scratched my chin as I stared at the open crate of magicians’ candles. ‘What do you suggest?’
Cutter puffed his cheeks out in thought. ‘Your best bet is a breaching charge and an assault,’ he said. ‘A waggon full of this stuff pressed up against an outside wall won’t bring the building down, but it would still blow a good-sized hole in the side. Then we’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. I’m assuming it’s not specifically the building you want to kill, but someone in it?’
‘Aye, it is,’ I said.
‘Right you are then,’ Cutter said. ‘You find a way to get one of these waggons up nice and snug to the house of law without anyone thinking it too strange, and have the crew waiting. Light the charges and run like fuck, and when it blows, we storm the breach and find who wants killing – bit like we did at Abingon when we took the keep, only this time we’ve no engineers and no sappers. I’ll do my best, but I could use some experienced help setting it up.’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I reckon Major Bakrylov can find me someone who knows his way around explosives. How dangerous is it going to be? Lighting the fuses, I mean?’
‘Very,’ Cutter said, and gave me a long look. ‘I’ll do it.’
