The ghost of a smile touched Vogel’s thin lips.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘The whole royal household is, as you say, very much under suspicion. I have a good number of them here now, being questioned. Not the prince, of course, that would be going too far. For the moment, anyway.’
‘He must know his own wife is dead,’ I said.
‘Of course he does. He, the princess and their immediate body servants are sequestered within the palace. The queen is officially indisposed with illness, as are her family. Court functions continue to run surprisingly well without them, thanks to your lady wife. She’s very good at this sort of thing, you know.’
‘Aye, that she is,’ I said.
So the late queen’s husband and the heir to the throne were effectively under house arrest, then, while Ailsa ran court society for them. Most of their servants were being tortured right now somewhere in the depths of this very building, that was what he was telling me.
Vogel was in a cold fury, I realised, and anyone and everyone was under suspicion.
I was back in Dannsburg and no mistake.
*
Thanks be to Our Lady, my interview with Lord Vogel didn’t last long. He’d said his piece, it seemed, and a few moments later Iagin entered the room and took me and Luka away with him.
Iagin and me hadn’t exactly got on the last time we’d met, but that had been mostly down to brandy and us not really trusting each other. Now that we could both be sure we were on the same side I found him genial enough.
‘The Old Man’s chewing the fucking walls,’ he told me as he led Luka and me down a back stair. ‘The whole fucking house of law has been in uproar for weeks. I’m glad you’re here, Tomas. Ailsa’s busy holding society together at the palace, but there’s only so long we can pretend the queen’s got the shits or whatever bollocks it’s supposed to be. I’ve been running the whole fucking circus for weeks and I could use some help. That tit Grachyev’s starting to wonder where I am.’
I snorted laughter. This was a whole new side of Iagin that I hadn’t seen before. Far from the snake in man’s clothes that I remembered from last year, he sounded like a comrade now, honest and blunt in the way of soldiers. I thought that was a good thing. This was Dannsburg, where no one trusted anyone, and I needed all the friends I could get.
‘There must be more than fucking three of us,’ I said.
‘Aye, there are, but the road from Drathburg is flooded with the rains, and Varnburg’s a fucking long way away,’ he said. ‘It might be a while before the others come in.’
‘There’s no one else operating in the capital?’
‘Just Ailsa and me and Ilse, and she’s busy. Come on, I’ll introduce you.’
‘Is she one of us?’ I asked him.
‘She carries the warrant, if that’s what you mean, but she seldom leaves the house of law,’ he said. ‘Ilse has . . . particular talents, you might say, the sort that are best put to use at home. Down in the dark, where no one can hear.’
‘I see,’ I said, a cold feeling of unease starting to build in my gut.
We reached the bottom of the stair and he pushed open a door and led us down a corridor, then through another door onto a second stair that took us below ground level. The air was stale with the smoke of lamps, and I could smell something that reminded me of the surgeons’ tents back at Abingon. A wooden step creaked under Luka’s heavy tread, but other than that all was silence.
At the next landing there were two bored-looking guards sitting at a table playing dice by lamplight. They stood up sharp enough when they saw Iagin, though.
‘As you were,’ he growled. ‘This is Tomas and Luka. They’re with the family.’
‘Sir,’ one of the guards said, and they gave us respectful nods.
The Queen’s Men weren’t like the army, I had to remind myself. They seemed very informal, to me, all first-name terms, and they didn’t go in for saluting any more than they did for uniforms or ranks.
‘We’re going below,’ Iagin said. ‘Give me the pot.’
The other guard reached up to a wooden shelf and handed Iagin a small glass jar filled with something white and waxy-looking. He dipped a finger into the stuff and smeared it liberally into his thick moustache, then held it out to me.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Rub some of this under your nose, both of you.’
I lifted the pot and felt my eyes stinging at the smell that came off it, harsh and acrid.
‘The fuck is this?’
‘Lamp oil and wax with mineral salts or some shit in it, I don’t know,’ Iagin said. ‘Trust me, you’ll be glad of it.’
‘I was at Abingon,’ I said. ‘I’ve smelled suffering before.’
He fixed me with a look.
‘Not like this, you fucking haven’t.’
Chapter 5
I had to allow that Iagin was right about that.
The next level down was horrific, even with the ointment burning under my nose to mask the worst of the smell. The narrow stone corridor was lit by lamps and lined with cells, their iron bars letting us see well enough what each contained.
There were folk with missing limbs, with weeping burns or crushed feet, and maggots swarming over the holes in their rotting bodies. I heard Fat Luka gag behind me. Something wrapped in seeping grey rags, and I honestly couldn’t have said whether it had been a man or a woman before it had been dragged down there,
