Priest of Gallows

had once told me, there was no blaming the war for it. I’ve always been that way. There’s a thing people have in their minds, a thing that makes them able to care about people they don’t know.

I haven’t got that bit.

The cold devil my da left me with has no love in its heart, and there’s nothing to be done about it. I am the man that I am. Even so, something in me changed that night. I stood there, in that dark place, and I found that I did care. I cared about those poor, filthy wretches, caked in their own shit and the shame of what they had done to keep from starving.

I didn’t know them, no, but something in my memories of the horror of Abingon made me feel like I understood them. Maybe I saw myself in them, or at least what I could have become. We had eaten rats to survive in the siege lines, and on the other side of the walls men had supposedly eaten children. As I have said, they had certainly been eating corpses, we saw proof enough of that when the city fell. Would I have been any different, if I had been on the other side?

No, of course not.

People are what they are, and the human survival instinct is very strong. When it comes to it, right down to the extreme, there’s nothing you won’t do to survive.

Nothing at all, and you’re fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

No, I didn’t think badly of those men who had murdered each other with their bare hands for a crust of stale bread. I would have done the same thing, in their position.

Anyone would.

These others, though, these rich men and women who had put them in that position for their own entertainment, to watch them fight and debase themselves in their manufactured desperation, those I thought very ill of indeed.

‘You,’ I said, pointing to an older man in the livery of the house. He was the only one there who wasn’t obviously a guest or a footman. He had no tray of drinks or poppy pipes in his hands, so he must be the one in charge of the operation. ‘Come here.’

He swallowed and took a step towards me, the colour draining from his face as he saw the look in my eyes.

‘Tomas,’ Anne said, but I ignored her.

‘Right here,’ I said, pointing to a spot on the ground in front of me.

He took another step, then another, until he was where I wanted him.

‘Keys,’ I said.

He reached into his pouch and produced a pair of heavy iron keys joined on a thick metal ring, and he held them out to me. I just stared at him until Anne reached out and took them.

‘Open the cage,’ I told her.

‘Tomas, are you sure?’

‘Do what I fucking tell you,’ I said quietly, never taking my eyes off the man in front of me.

I heard Anne move away, heard the sound of the key in the lock then the squeal of rusty hinges as she lifted back a section of the cage that covered the slave pit. The slaves roared their hatred, clambering over each other in a futile attempt to reach the surface.

‘Oliver, Emil,’ I said. ‘Take this cunt and throw him in that cage.’

The man before me broke, all at once.

‘No, please!’ he screamed. ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘I am a Queen’s Man,’ I said, my voice taking on the flat tone of murder and justice. ‘I can do anything.’

Oliver and Emil took an arm each and dragged the pleading man away, kicking and thrashing helplessly in their grasp. I watched them drag him all the way to the lip of the open cage, where Bloody Anne stood with an unreadable look on her face. I watched them throw him in, and then I turned away.

The sounds alone were enough to tell me what was happening down there.

‘Arch High Priest Rantanen, come here,’ I said.

The priest lurched up off his couch and tried to run.

‘Anne,’ I said.

She drew and threw with the fluid grace of a hunting cat, and the dagger slammed into the back of his meaty thigh and dropped him to the flagstones with a thud, his hamstring severed. I walked slowly towards him, until I was standing over his prone form.

‘I have a death warrant in your name,’ I said. ‘I want everyone here to understand that. That’s the only reason I’m here, because of you. If it wasn’t for you, you disgusting piece of shit, I wouldn’t be here at all. If it wasn’t for you, all these other disgusting pieces of shit would have continued to get away with it. So, I thank you for that.’

He twisted on the ground and looked up at me through his pain, trying to understand my words.

‘I thank you,’ I said again, ‘and for that I give you Mercy.’

I raised Mercy and rammed her into his crotch, thrust her up into his bowels and twisted the blade savagely as I ripped it free in a spray of dark blood.

He shrieked like a butchered lamb as blood and reeking filth gushed out of him onto the ground. It would take him a long, agonising time to die from a wound like that.

Good.

There were only four of us and still ten patrons and three footmen in there with us, but they were utterly paralysed with terror. The Queen’s Men had come for them at last, and they knew they had nowhere to run to.

I found myself remembering an old childhood rhyme, from when I was very little:

Here comes the boggart to snip off your head,

Here comes a Queen’s Man,

And you’re better off dead.

There was a truth in that, I realised that night.

‘Line them up against the wall,’ I told Oliver.

He and Emil did as I said and they went meekly enough, these rich folk and their complicit servants, and no one gave us any trouble. They simply didn’t dare. They were dead folk