Priest of Gallows Read online

  Priest of Gallows

  Peter McLean

  War for the Rose Throne Book III

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Peter McLean

  Dedication

  Map

  Dramatis Personae

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Part Two

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  an imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2021 Peter McLean

  The moral right of Peter McLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 52941 132 4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Peter McLean

  War for the Rose Throne

  Priest of Bones

  Priest of Lies

  For Diane,

  my world.

  ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum.’

  ‘If you would have peace, then prepare for war.’

  – Vegetius

  Dramatis Personae

  The Piety Family

  Tomas Piety: Interim governor of Ellinburg and a Queen’s Man. Formerly a gangster and army priest. Your narrator.

  Ailsa Piety: His estranged wife, and a Queen’s Man.

  Billy Piety: A lad of perhaps fifteen years, strong in the cunning and touched by Our Lady. Their adopted son.

  Jochan Piety: Younger brother to Tomas, and a very disturbed man.

  Hanne Piety: Wife to Jochan and mother of his infant daughter.

  Enaid Piety: Their loving aunt. Grand matriarch of the Pious Men, and Bloody Anne’s second.

  The Pious Men

  Bloody Anne: Head of the Pious Men, and Tomas’ most loyal friend.

  Fat Luka: Head of propaganda, master of listeners, agent of the Queen’s Men.

  Mika: Underboss of the Stink.

  Black Billy: Mika’s second in the Stink.

  Florence Cooper: Underboss of the Wheels, and head of the Flower Girls.

  Jutta: Florence’s second in the Wheels.

  Brak: Aunt Enaid’s man, despite being a third her age.

  Simple Sam: A slow lad but a faithful one.

  Hari: Tavern keeper of the Tanner’s Arms.

  Cutter, also known as Yoseph: A former Sacred Blade of Messia with a grievously scarred face. Lover to Jochan.

  Emil: A veteran, and a hired man.

  Oliver: A hired blade but a trusted one.

  Various other ruffians and hired men whose names are not recorded here.

  Notable People in Ellinburg

  Governor Schulz: A career bureaucrat from Dannsburg. Someone who understands how things work.

  Rosie: Boss of the Chandler’s Narrow girls, and an agent of the Queen’s Men. Bloody Anne’s woman.

  Old Kurt: A cunning man, rouser of rabbles and causer of trouble.

  Mina: A young lass with the cunning. Billy Piety’s woman, young though they are.

  Salo: A steward.

  Notable People in Dannsburg

  Her Majesty the Queen: Ruling monarch of the country.

  The Princess Crown Royal: A girl of twelve years, heir to the throne.

  His Royal Highness Prince Wilhelm, the Prince Consort: Husband to the queen, father of the Princess Crown Royal.

  Lady Lan Delanov: A Lady-in-Waiting.

  Dieter Vogel: The Lord Chief Judiciar, and Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men.

  First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov: Presiding head of the governing council.

  Councillor Hristokov: A member of the governing council with some unpleasant hobbies.

  Councillor Markova: A member of the governing council with connections.

  Councillor Lan Drashkov: A member of the governing council who thinks a lot of himself.

  Mr Grachyev: A gangster, or so he believes.

  Iagin: Mr Grachyev’s second, and a Queen’s Man.

  Ilse: A Queen’s Man of special talents.

  Konrad: A Queen’s Man from Drathburg.

  Sabine: A Queen’s Man from Varnburg.

  Leonov: An underboss, extremely good with a crossbow.

  Brandt: The head of Ailsa’s household guard.

  Mr and Mrs Shapoor: Ailsa’s parents.

  Lady Lan Yetrov: A very rich widow who is greatly in Tomas’ debt.

  Arch High Priest Rantanen: Highest priest of the Grand High Temple of All Gods. The holiest man in the land.

  Major Bakrylov: A war hero, from a certain point of view, with connections to the Queen’s Men.

  Baron Lan Drunov: An unwise and unfortunate man.

  Nikolai Reiter: Archmagus of the house of magicians.

  Doctor Almanov: A physician.

  Edric Nyman: A tutor.

  Sister Galina: A nun.

  Beast: A slave.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  One murder can change the fate of a nation.

  I had been governor of Ellinburg for less than four months when it happened. It was a warm spring evening, and I was relaxing in the private drawing room of the governor’s hall, a glass of brandy in my hand and a book open in my lap. Billy and Mina were sitting under the window together, playing some game of cat’s cradle between them. I watched them over my glass, watched the entwining of the cords between their fingers, and I could see in the looks they shared with each other just how fierce their young love was. I knew how strongly Billy felt for her.

  We had almost come to blood over it back in the winter, after all.

  After I had
crushed the strike at the factory, Mina had come to me herself to confess what she had done. That was brave of her, I’d had to allow, but it didn’t change the facts of the thing. I remembered how the rebellious workers had known we were coming when they shouldn’t have done, and how Old Kurt hadn’t been there when he should have been. He had known we were coming because someone had told him, and that someone was Mina.

  Mina, who was a cunning woman even Billy looked up to.

  She’s very strong.

  Mina, who couldn’t do magic without spewing obscenities that would have curled the hair of the lowest conscript soldier.

  Mina, who Old Kurt had once taken in when she was a little orphan girl on the unforgiving streets of Ellinburg.

  That was a betrayal, and I took it ill.

  Very ill indeed.

  ‘Don’t kill her, Papa,’ Billy had begged me, in the end. ‘Please, please don’t kill her.’

  ‘She betrayed us,’ I said.

  The cold fury Ailsa had left me with was still upon me in those weeks, and I couldn’t find it in myself to feel understanding or mercy.

  Not for anyone.

  Billy got a hard look about him then, and it came to me through my icy rage that perhaps I recognised that look. Perhaps it wasn’t so very different from how I had looked at my own da, the night I killed him.

  ‘You won’t kill her,’ Billy said, in that way he had when he knew a thing was so. ‘You won’t, because I won’t let you.’

  There was something in his over-bright eyes, something that told me he truly meant it. Billy the Boy was strong in the cunning, if still not quite so strong as Mina herself, and he was either a seer of Our Lady or possessed by some devil out of Hell. No one, neither cunning man nor priest, was really sure which.

  Sometimes he gave me the fear, and I’ve no shame in admitting that. There are few men in this world who I would fear to face with swords, but I fear the cunning. I fear what I can’t see, what I can’t fight – disease, and magic, but not men. And yet that wasn’t what stayed my hand.

  At the time it had been barely four weeks since Ailsa had left us both and returned to Dannsburg. Billy had lost his ma, and I knew that had hit him hard. Was I really going to take his woman away from him too, betrayal or not? Beside that, Mina had saved my life at the sit-down with Bloodhands, her and Jochan. I had told myself then that I wouldn’t forget that, and I hadn’t.

  I spent a long night thinking on it, and perhaps I even prayed on it too. Priest I may be, among other things, but I’ll confess that I don’t pray often. Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows doesn’t answer prayers, after all, but perhaps that night She heard one.

  I spared Mina’s life, and I found it deep inside me to forgive her too. Family is important, after all, and I understood that Old Kurt had been like family to her. By the end of a long, sleepless night I understood why she had done it. I loved Billy as my own son, although he wasn’t, and since Ailsa had deserted me, he was all I really had left. My aunt was distant, my brother mad, and Bloody Anne was so busy running the Pious Men and I the city that we hardly saw each other any more. I wasn’t going to lose my son too, and if forgiving Mina was the price of that, then so be it.

  Watching them now, I was glad I had.

  I’m a harsh man, I know that, but I like to think I’m a fair one.

  ‘I win,’ Mina said, although I couldn’t make head nor tail of their game.

  Billy laughed and leaned forward to kiss her, and I turned back to the book in my hand. I’m no great reader but the governor’s hall contained a library of almost a hundred books, and in Ellinburg that was a treasure indeed. I had resolved to read them all, although I’ll allow that my progress was slow. This one was a treatise on mercantile law, and I understood little of it, but to my mind a city governor should know such things.

  I was working my way painfully through a section on the finer points of the rates and levies of the import duty on tea when Salo entered the room and uttered a polite cough.

  The house I had shared with Ailsa off Trader’s Row was closed up, unneeded and unwanted. Exactly how I had been to her, in the end. I had kept the staff on, though, and brought them with me to my new official residence in the governor’s hall. I’d known I wouldn’t have been able to trust any of Hauer’s former servants, and Salo was a good steward.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, without looking up from my book.

  ‘There’s a messenger, sir,’ he told me. ‘A rider just arrived from Dannsburg. The guard have her in the downstairs office and they assure me she knows the correct words of exchange. She says she has come from the Lord Chief Judiciar with an urgent message for you.’

  I frowned at that. The Lord Chief Judiciar was Dieter Vogel, of course, and he was also secretly the Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men.

  That made him my boss.

  ‘Aye, well,’ I said, and closed my book. ‘I’ll see her in my study, then.’

  Salo gave me a short bow and left the room, and I got to my feet with a sigh. Any urgent message from the house of law was unlikely to be a good thing. I refilled my glass from a bottle on the side table and took it with me, leaving Billy and Mina to each other’s arms. I don’t think they even noticed me leave.

  *

  The woman was thin and dirty and she looked tired half to death, and those things told me she had seen hard riding on the road.

  She was grimy of face and her clothes were nondescript, a stained cloak over a coat and britches that any rider might have worn. The Queen’s Men have no uniform, no insignia or badges of rank. We are invisible and officially non-existent, and those who work for us could be anyone – bakers or soldiers or chandlers, farriers or fishwives or whores.

  Only a very few carry the Queen’s Warrant, people like Ailsa and Iagin.

  People like me.

  I wondered if this one even knew who she truly worked for. Many of those who serve us don’t even realise it, after all.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked her, once the guardsman who had shown her into the room had closed the door behind her.

  I was sitting behind the huge desk in my study, the same study where Governor Hauer had received me before I had him arrested and dragged screaming to Dannsburg.

  The messenger stood stiffly upright in front of me, her posture alone enough to tell me that she had been a soldier once.

  ‘A letter, my lord Governor,’ she said. ‘Most urgent.’

  She passed me the folded paper then returned to her rigid stance.

  I turned the letter over in my hand and glanced at the seal. It bore the arms of the house of law, not the mark of the royal warrant. I broke the stiff red wax and scanned the words on the page.

  Nephew,

  I have hard news.

  Mother is dead, by the hand unloved.

  Tell only those who know and serve the family, and no other. You will be relieved of your position within weeks, sooner if the roads are kind, and then you must ride. Bring those of your people closest to the family and return home with all haste.

  Your uncle,

  V.

  I blinked at the letter and read it again, taking a moment to sift the meaning from the carefully phrased words. For one heart-stopping moment I thought he was talking about Ailsa.

  Letters such as this were never written in plain, in case they fell into the wrong hands on the road. ‘The family’ meant the Queen’s Men, of course, and by those closest he meant my chiefs of staff. But he called himself uncle and me his nephew, so Mother was . . .

  In Our Lady’s name, he means the queen!

  The queen was dead, and by assassination. Of all the things the letter might have said, that had been the one I was least expecting.

  I took a drink to cover my shock, then looked up at the messenger.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.

  ‘Caelyn, my lord Governor.’

  ‘And do you know what this letter says, Caelyn?’

  ‘No, m’lord,’ she said. ‘Only that it
comes with great haste from the Lord Chief Judiciar himself.’

  No, it fucking doesn’t, I thought. This came straight from the Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men, and for all that they were one and the same man, they wore very different faces indeed.

  I sighed and held the letter to the flame of my desk lamp, thinking as I watched the paper slowly blacken and curl between my fingers. I wondered how many versions of that letter had been written, and where else they had been sent. To Drathburg in the west I was sure, perhaps as far as Varnburg or even away across the sea. Who knew how far the reach of the Queen’s Men extended? Nobody, I suspected, except Vogel himself.

  The more the news sank in the less it surprised me.

  Lady’s sake, I’d as good as known this was going to happen. I remembered my visit to the Royal Palace of Dannsburg, and how I’d thought then that the place was ridiculous and would be impossible to defend.

  I put that thought aside for the time being, and offered the messenger a seat and a drink. She was all but swaying on her heels, and I wondered how long it had been since she last slept or ate.

  Vogel’s letter had been dated not four days ago, and Dannsburg was a good week’s ride at a sane pace. When news was desperate it wasn’t unknown for a messenger to set out with four or more horses and simply ride them to destruction one after another, changing mounts and acquiring more along the road when each lamed or dropped dead beneath her.

  Caelyn sank into the offered seat with a grateful sigh, and I poured brandy for her from the decanter on the side table.

  ‘I’ll pen a reply for the morning but you’re to spend the night here before you ride back,’ I told her. ‘The response is not half so urgent as the news was.’

  ‘Thank you, m’lord,’ she said, and the relief on her face was plain to see.

  I wasn’t sure she could have made it back to Dannsburg again at the same pace, however many horses she took with her, but if I had ordered it I knew she would have tried.

  She was a soldier, after all, and I thought that we would be needing those soon.

  All of them we could fucking get.

  Chapter 2

  I rang the bell on my desk to summon a footman, and told him to put Caelyn in a guest room for the night and see to it that she got a bath and a hot meal, and a good breakfast in the morning. Once he had led her out of the study I sat back in my chair and looked at the charred ashes of Vogel’s letter where they lay strewn across the polished wood of the desk.