Beast got to his feet and looked Anne slowly up and down, and for a moment I thought there might be trouble. Then a great grin split his red-bearded face.
‘I know you,’ he said, and he started to laugh. ‘You’re the Bloody Sergeant! I’ve fucking heard of you! Even in my regiment, we’d heard of you.’
‘Aye, maybe you have,’ Anne said, and there was almost a blush of colour on her cheeks. ‘That’s done with, though. This is what we do now.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’ll do what I’m told, Sarge.’
‘Call me Anne,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s find you some clothes.’
That was how a man called Beast came to work for the Queen’s Men.
Chapter 28
I wanted a fucking word with Iagin.
The Spring of Mercy was owned by Grachyev, and that meant Iagin must know all about it. I had thought better of him, but it seemed perhaps I had been wrong about that. I slept poorly that night, thinking on those things, and on Beast’s story, and what I had seen. Very poorly indeed, twisting in my sweaty blankets in an endless nightmare of the war. Of the war, and of what could have come afterwards.
If things had been different for my brother and me, I knew, it could have been either of us out on those streets. It could have been one of us picked up and lured into that pit by false promises and simple hunger. People may revere the idea of heroic veterans, but they very seldom have the time or the charity for the broken, battle-shocked men and women that are the reality of what war produces. I had seen too many heroes starve and freeze to death in doorways to think otherwise.
I found Iagin at the house of law the next morning. I found him in the mess, and I found him hard.
He was up against a wall with my hand around his throat and the point of Remorse pressed into his stomach before I knew what I was doing. The look on his face told me he could see I wasn’t fucking around.
‘Slaves?’ I hissed in his face. ‘Fucking pit fights at the Spring of Mercy, Iagin? Really?’
‘What the living piss are you talking about?’ he asked, and to his credit there was neither guilt nor fear on his grizzled face. ‘What slaves? The Spring of Mercy is a bath house and a brothel with a gaming room out the back, I told you that.’
‘Aye, you did,’ I said quietly, and a thought struck me. ‘Have you ever seen that gaming room, Iagin?’
He frowned for a moment.
‘No,’ he said at last. ‘Grachyev owns every tavern and inn and whorehouse in the whole fucking city, just about. I’ve not been in every one of them; I haven’t got the fucking time to hold his hand every minute of the day and do this as well. What are you talking about, Tomas?’
I took a moment to think on it, then I let him go.
‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘I know you’d better have a fucking good reason for what you just did,’ he growled at me as he rubbed his neck where I had grabbed him, but there was no mistaking the curiosity on his face. ‘I don’t let just anyone do that to me and get away with it.’
I took a breath, then I sat down and told him what I had found at the Spring of Mercy the night before. Before I was done talking, Iagin had poured brandy for us both and joined me at the table. It was only an hour past dawn, but right then I didn’t care. I took the glass and drank, and I was glad of it.
‘I had absolutely no idea,’ he said when I was done, and I believed him.
‘No,’ I said, and realised that I was fighting tears. ‘No, I never really thought that you did. I . . . I’m sorry. There was this man, a soldier, and he was . . .’
I found I didn’t have the words in me. That was Beast’s story to tell if he chose to, not mine, and I wouldn’t shame him with it even in private.
‘Aye,’ Iagin said, cutting me off to spare me from myself. He was a good man, was Iagin, and I could tell that he understood these things. I would have bet gold that he was a veteran himself. ‘A lot of men came home from the war and found they didn’t have a place in the world any more. If someone has been preying on them, then I want to know who it is.’
‘I already know that,’ I said. ‘It was that excuse of an Arch High Priest, who’s no longer among the living, and it was your fucking friend Grachyev too. He might be only a pretend gangster, Iagin, but he’s been pulling at least one trick behind your back and maybe more. He knew all about that place, he must have done. There’s no way someone could have been running those pits in his business without him knowing about it.’
Iagin slammed a hand down on the table between us, making our glasses of breakfast brandy jump and slosh.
‘Cunt!’ he said.
That about summed it up, to my mind.
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘You up for paying him a visit?’
‘Oh, yes.’
*
Iagin strolled into the Horn of Plenty like he owned the place, which of course he effectively did, and I was right behind him, and Anne and Emil and Beast were right behind me.
Beast looked a lot better for another bath and a shave and some proper clothes that actually fitted him. He’d had a haircut too, and enough food to feed a family for a week, but he still had a hungry, haunted look about him. I thought he probably always would, after what he had been through.
‘Is the boss in?’ Iagin asked the man at the front counter.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but it’s a bit fucking early
