The atmosphere on the streets was hostile, there was no other word for it. I was richly dressed and I had three big men behind me and I was obviously not foreign, and even I felt it. Anyone with fair hair was drawing looks that promised violence, I noticed. So quickly had Vogel’s artificial prejudices taken root among the general population. It came to me after a while that I could hear shouting from a street or so away, the sounds of the sort of civil disturbance that was almost unheard of in Dannsburg.
Here we fucking go, I thought. Here come the riots.
The commotion was coming from the grand square at the end of the next street. I led my crew down a connecting road into the broad open space, and there it was happening. There was a carriage, its wood lacquered in dark blue with gold accents on the coachwork, and it was surrounded. The carriage bore the white seven-pointed star crest of the house of magicians on its doors, a crest that a week ago, a day ago, would have accorded it respect and space in the crowded streets. Today it had been waylaid by an angry mob.
‘Bastards!’ a grey-haired woman shouted, and she hurled a cobble which smashed into the ornate coachwork and broke off a section of gilded moulding.
‘Queenkillers!’ a man called out, and the chant was taken up by the angry mob.
‘Queenkiller!’
‘Fuck, should we do something?’ Oliver murmured beside me.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘This is a matter for the City Guard.’
‘Queenkiller!’
‘What fucking City Guard?’ Emil said.
‘Hold your peace, the pair of you,’ I snapped.
‘Queenkiller! Queenkiller!’ the mob roared, and cobbles and rotten fruit and vegetables rained down on the carriage.
I oppose anything the magicians want, I remembered Vogel saying to me the previous year. In truth I wish someone would rid me of them.
I could see what he was doing, and by Our Lady’s name it was already working. Dieter Vogel was, I knew, a very, very dangerous man, but all the same I was impressed. The City Guard seemed to be absent from that one square, for all that they thronged the streets in the rest of the northern reaches of the city. I watched in horrified fascination as the mob overran the magician’s valiantly battling coachman and footmen, bearing them to the ground and kicking them senseless until there was blood on the cobbles. Eventually someone tore open the door of the carriage.
A moment later a pale older man in the flowing blue robes of his order was dragged out and manhandled through the crowd to their ringleader, the woman who had cast the first stone. She must have had almost seventy years to her, with long, filthy iron-grey hair hanging loose and wild around her thin face. She was dressed in the plain worn woollen kirtle of a common goodwife, but she commanded the mob like a general presiding over a battlefield.
Whoever the magus was, I imagined he greatly regretted setting forth on his business that day without a cadre of the heavily armed and armoured Guard of the Magi around him. Magicians didn’t usually travel under guard, of course, having no need to do so as respected members of society. How quickly things can change, in a city like Dannsburg. In a city suddenly convinced that their queen had been murdered by magic, things can change very quickly indeed for a magician, and not for the better.
‘Bring me rope!’ the woman screamed, and from somewhere in the crowd rope was swiftly brought.
There was a great bronze statue in the centre of that square, as there are in so many of the grand squares of Dannsburg. This one was of a noble warrior in an old-fashioned army uniform standing with a spear in his hands, the shaft thrust out to ward off the queen’s enemies. Someone hurled an end of the rope over that spear, and a moment later the other end was around the magician’s neck.
‘Where the fuck are the Guard?’ Emil asked. ‘Boss, are you sure we shouldn’t—’
‘Completely sure,’ I said. ‘Hold, Emil.’
I could tell he didn’t like it either and nor did Oliver, but they did as they were told. Beast was impassive beside me, just watching with an unreadable expression on his face. After everything he had been through, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would take to trouble Beast’s conscience. If he still had one at all, of course. I honestly wouldn’t have blamed him if he hadn’t. I felt I understood Beast, in a way. After Abingon, and Messia, and what I had done when I’d had only twelve years to me, I felt he was something of a kindred spirit.
But then I had murdered my own father, after all. Perhaps we belonged in the Queen’s Men, Beast and me. Where else would have had us?
I gritted my teeth as two men in the crowd tightened the noose around the magician’s neck. Then the mob were hauling on the rope and cheering as he was dragged choking into the air. A lynching on the streets, and barely three hours after the word had been spread. That was what the Queen’s Men and the mob’s fury could do, when Lord Vogel crooked his finger.
The magician kicked and flailed, and the mob jeered. More hands took the rope and hoisted him higher, until his head was knocking against the statue’s spear some twenty feet and more above the cobbles. He was purple in the face now, hands clutched impotently to the hemp closing off his throat. Lynching is a slow death, not like a hanging with its sharp drop which is an almost instant transition to the grey lands.
Lynching is akin to torture, and it’s an ugly thing.
‘Do some fucking magic!’ someone called, and the crowd laughed.
‘Good enough to kill the queen, good enough to save yourself,’ someone else jeered.
‘Useless cunt, can’t even do that!’
‘Queenkiller! Queenkiller!’
The obvious contradiction was completely lost on
