‘Everything between us is unofficial, Anne, you know that,’ I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, and I wondered if she truly did still know that. There was a thought to make a man uncomfortable at night. Queen’s Man I might be but she was my best friend and I very much hoped she never lost sight of that.
I prayed that I didn’t.
‘Aye, well,’ she said. ‘The way I see it is this: he knows a thing will happen but he hasn’t told any of you what that thing is going to be. That sounds to me like it’s going to be a thing of his own making.’
I nodded slowly. She had a fucking good point there, I had to allow. If Vogel had intelligence on an external threat we would all be working round the clock already, but we weren’t. All those extra guardsmen he knew would be needed had to be there for a reason, and as Anne said, the only thing that made sense was that it was a reason he had planned himself.
There was a storm coming all right.
I just wished I knew what the fuck it was.
Chapter 32
The storm broke the next day.
Vogel called a staff meeting that morning as he had told me he planned to, and there he gave his strangest orders yet.
We were in the mess in the house of law, where the Old Man seldom went. We all had steaming bowls of tea in our hands, save for Iagin, who was already on the brandy, and Vogel himself, who took nothing.
‘Have it put about,’ Vogel said to Iagin, ‘that new evidence has come to light. I want the people to know that we now believe that Her Majesty our late queen’s death was not natural, but an assassination by result of foul witchcraft. State that the queen’s death was caused by magic. Say that publicly and loudly and in the name of the house of law. Somewhat more quietly, say that the Skanians have strong magicians and are not our allies, but specify no further than that. Even quieter than that, you might remind the people that the house of magicians is also hostile to the house of law and therefore to the throne.’
Iagin and me looked at each other, but we held our peace. Ailsa didn’t so much as blink.
‘Yes, sir,’ Iagin said after a moment.
We were all there, all the Queen’s Men save Sabine. She hadn’t joined us, I noticed.
‘Iagin, Konrad, Tomas,’ Vogel went on, ‘prepare yourselves and your street-level operations. Ilse, you may need to hire assistants. This time there will be unrest. A great deal of it. It must be . . . managed.’
Not suppressed this time, I noticed. Managed. What the fuck did that mean?
Holding my peace went to the whores in one long rush. This would cause fucking chaos on those streets outside the house of law, and the Old Man knew it.
‘But we said she died of an attack of the heart, we can’t change that now,’ I protested.
Ailsa hissed a warning to keep quiet, but Vogel and I both ignored her.
‘Of course we can,’ Vogel said. ‘We said Her Majesty had died. Now we are reminding people how she died, and by whose hand. You have to understand, Tomas, that those most prone to misinformation are those most inclined to want to believe it. They want someone to blame. Nobody likes accidents, or illnesses. There’s no revenge to be taken for an accident, for a sickness. Give them this much . . .’
‘And they’ll come to believe it,’ Iagin finished for him. ‘If they hear it enough times in enough places from enough people, everyone will come to believe it. Trust me, Tomas, I know how to do this shit.’
I nodded slowly. I thought that he did, at that. Lies upon lies upon lies, until the common man came to doubt his own recollection of what he had heard and what he thought he knew had happened. I could see how this would play out.
The queen had been murdered. The queen had always been murdered, they knew that. They weren’t fools, not them. They had never trusted those pale northern Skanian bastards and their allies in the house of magicians. Oh, no, not them, they hadn’t been taken in, they were cleverer that that. Cleverer than their fellows, who had been fooled by the evil foreigners.
This was, when you boiled it right down to its bones, exactly how Fat Luka had spread the word I wanted heard around the streets of the Stink. That was something to think on, but another time.
‘And if anyone questions it?’ I asked. ‘If anyone is foolish enough to remember different?’
‘Ah,’ Lord Vogel said, and he showed us his razorblade smile. ‘You might mention that the Prince Regent has been trying to suppress this information. It could be suggested that in order to protect the reputations of those in charge of palace security, many of whom have recently disappeared thanks to the rigour of the house of law, not to mention his friends in the house of magicians, a false rumour had been circulated that the queen’s death was natural. Which it absolutely was not.’
That was how it was done, I knew that. That was how history was changed, just like it was back in the Stink.
It was just a matter of scale, that was all.
*
It didn’t take long. I had never for a moment thought that it would, in a city like Dannsburg.
I was abroad in the city that afternoon, walking the streets with Oliver and Emil and Beast as a bodyguard, watching and listening as Lord Vogel had told me to. Already I could see the signs. A Skanian merchant’s shop had a window boarded up where someone had obviously smashed it. Another had ‘Queenkiller’ daubed across his closed and
