All the same there was an innocence in his eyes that I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed. I decided to be honest with him. That had worked the last time we spoke, and in my experience what had worked once would work again.
‘I had a choice,’ I said. ‘I had a choice between coming to speak to you unannounced, or blowing your house up tonight. I thought perhaps we’d talk.’
‘I . . . I am glad you chose to talk,’ he said, going a little pale. ‘Why, may I ask, were you considering blowing up my home? I have children, Sir Tomas. Four of them.’
‘And I have a young son,’ I said, ‘and yet someone bombed my inn this morning.’
‘Not me,’ Archmagus Reiter assured me.
I looked into his eyes, and I believed him.
‘Aye,’ I said, after a long moment. ‘I didn’t truly think so. But someone did, and I think you know who that was.’
Nikolai Reiter sat back in his seat and ran a hand over his face. The maid came back in just then and set a tea tray down on the desk between us, and left without speaking. After a moment I reached forward and took a bowl, and inhaled the vapours while the magician put his answer together in his head.
After a long moment he picked up his own tea and looked at me through the aromatic steam that rose from his bowl.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘but then our houses aren’t really on speaking terms at the moment, are they, Sir Tomas? Why would I tell you even if I did?’
After his mention of four children I didn’t like to press the point, but I knew I had to.
‘I was going to blow your house up,’ I reminded him. ‘I still could.’
‘Could you, knowing there are children living under this roof ?’ he countered, and I had to admit he had me there. ‘I have no doubt that you’re a ruthless man, Sir Tomas, but I don’t think you are an evil one.’
Lord Vogel might want heartless iron tigers but I wasn’t that, at least not where children were concerned. Konrad might well have been but I wasn’t, and it was obvious that Reiter had come to that conclusion by himself. He was a shrewd fellow, and I think that he had, at least to a degree, got the measure of me.
‘Perhaps not,’ I admitted, ‘but you’ll have to leave this house eventually. A crossbow bolt from an alley, a dagger in a crowd. A cunning lad, from absolutely fucking anywhere. There are a lot of ways to die, Reiter.’
‘And there are a lot of ways to live, Piety,’ he countered. ‘There are a lot of ways to not be Dieter Vogel’s lapdog. Will you choose one of them?’
‘Will you give up the bombers?’ I asked him, putting the full force of my blunt Ellinburg accent into the question. ‘Because finding them is my fucking job. Who bombed my inn this morning?’
‘I honestly have no idea,’ Reiter said, and for all that it pained me, I believed him again.
He was innocent, to my mind, and curse it to Our Lady’s name but I couldn’t help but actually like the fellow. Truth be told, I would have far preferred things if he had been my boss instead of Vogel, but that was not the hand Our Lady had dealt me in this life.
Fuck.
*
‘Get your little rats out on the street and turn them loose,’ I told Fat Luka when I returned to the Bountiful Harvest from the archmagus’ house. ‘I want to know who bombed my fucking inn. Grease palms, spend all the money you need to. That’s what it’s fucking for, and the house of law has more than enough of it.’
‘Aye, boss,’ Luka said, ‘but if it wasn’t Reiter I’d lay odds it was one of his fellows.’
‘So would I,’ I said, ‘but I want to know which one. I want to know who, and where they live and what they do outside the house of magicians, and more to the point I want to know who they live with.’
I had been ready to blow up Archmagus Nikolai Reiter’s house, and it had never crossed my mind that he might have children, or even a wife, for that matter. That shamed me, I had to allow, and it wasn’t a mistake I would make again. It’s a thing I have noticed about myself, about powerful people in general. We might see an enemy, and move against them, but we seldom see those around them. Their wives or husbands, their mothers or fathers or children.
No one is ever simply an enemy, a lone faceless thing to be fought and killed. That was what was drilled into us in the army, to be sure, but that didn’t make it true. Every enemy soldier in any conflict has a family back home, people who love them and depend on them, but the army doesn’t want you thinking of the enemy’s family when you ram a spear through his guts. No, just advance, and kill and kill and kill again. They’re enemies, so fuck them. Form the shield wall and push and stab and push and stab, and trample the bloody corpses beneath your boots.
They’re not people, just enemies. Fuck them all, no consequences. There are no weeping widows, no lost, homeless orphans. Just enemies. Push and stab and push and stab as the cannons roar and the skies darken with smoke and blood.
‘Boss? Are you feeling all right?’
Luka’s words came to me through the haze of battle shock, and I realised that my hands were shaking badly where they rested on
