‘You’ve three choices,’ I said. ‘The house of law, the pit, or my blade. Choose.’
A stunned silence fell.
‘There’s thirteen of us, you fools!’ a richly dressed and clearly panicked woman cried. ‘Rush them!’
Anne stepped forward and hammered a dagger into the woman’s throat without a moment’s hesitation.
She dropped to the floor at Anne’s feet, and there was no more talk of rushing us.
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ an older man blustered, his face red with wine and fury and fear.
‘Aye, I do,’ I said, although I didn’t have the faintest idea, ‘and I don’t give a fuck.’
‘I have influence within the palace! I demand a fair trial!’
‘House of law, then,’ I said. ‘That’s your choice. What about you?’
The man next to him quailed, perhaps wiser than his fellow, and shook his head. I gave him Mercy through the chest.
‘How about you?’
No one chose the pit, and that was wise of them. Six of them in all requested the house of law, seeking to misplace their faith in the courts. The others I killed where they stood. That was how I did justice that night, and I didn’t think it unfair.
I sent Emil to speak to the stone-faced man on the door, explain who we really were and set him to send a runner to the house of law for guardsmen and manacles, and for food and clothes and blankets for the slaves. I had only been expecting to arrest the Arch High Priest at a card table, and I was hopelessly unprepared for what I had found instead.
I had fifty men, innocent so far as I was concerned, to be freed and cared for.
And then what?
Turned out onto the streets, where they would be hanged for vagrancy.
Those were the times we lived in.
*
I led them out in the end.
There wasn’t a soul left in the bath house by then, which was no surprise. The place was soon full of guardsmen and shouting, and the filthy slaves were fed and doused one at a time in the pools of the public baths until they were at least half presentable. The water was black by the time it was done.
I left Arch High Priest Rantanen beside the empty slave pit, mewling and dying in his own filth where he belonged. Anne had retrieved her dagger from the back of his leg and I supposed someone would dispose of the body later, but it wouldn’t be me.
Fuck him.
‘M’lord,’ a voice said beside me. ‘Give me a moment?’
I turned to see a naked slave, a huge man even thin as he was, the wasted muscles of his once-massive chest and shoulders looking like dried meat under his pale, greyish skin. He was bearded like they all were, red haired and taller even than Simple Sam was, back in Ellinburg. Before his starvation he must have been truly enormous.
‘What is it?’
He looked at me for a long moment, then he bowed his head and went down on one knee at my feet.
‘I would swear my service to you,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier, and I can see that you are too. You’re the sort of man I could follow. I’m still strong, and that’s because I got to eat most days. You know why.’
He had killed a lot of men with his bare hands, that was what he was telling me. I looked down at him, looking for the sort of madness you might expect to find in a man who had been through that, but I didn’t see it. He was simply telling me what had happened, and trusting that I would understand why he had done what he had.
And I did.
As I have written, I would have done the same thing.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.
He shrugged. ‘Don’t matter,’ he said. ‘I had a name once, but here they called me Beast, because I was one. I embraced it, and I became it. I’m just Beast, now.’
‘You’re a soldier,’ I said. ‘How did it come to this?’
‘I came back from Abingon, same as you did,’ he said. ‘I was a stoker, before the war, ever since I were a lad. In one of the big foundries. An honest working man. I shovelled coal into the furnaces all day, and I got big and strong doing it. Then I went off to war, and when I came back I found I didn’t have the stomach for helping to make cannon no more. The war did bad things to my head, I don’t have to tell you about that. It did to us all. I didn’t know how to do nothing else. My wife had taken up with another man while I was off fighting and she’d left the city, and taken our children with her. Our house was gone, so I found myself out on the streets. Three offences and you’ll hang for vagrancy, but not if you get picked up by some priest who says he’ll take you in and feed you. He brought me here, and you know the rest.’
I clenched my teeth, and strained my damaged ears until I could hear the Arch High Priest’s dying screams coming from the back room. Right then I wished I had given him to Ilse instead.
‘Aye,’ I said, after a moment. ‘Might be I could use a strong man who knows his way around a fight. You understand that I’m a Queen’s Man?’
Beast nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I can live with that. The gods know I’ve lived with worse.’
‘Well and good,’ I said, and I beckoned Bloody Anne over.
‘Problem?’ she asked, her hand on the hilt of one of her daggers.
I shook my head. ‘This is Beast,’ I said. ‘He’s just joined our crew. Beast, this is Bloody Anne, and she’s my sergeant and
