‘Is there any chance we could hire a carriage?’ he asked.
I looked at the way he was walking, and I felt a rare moment of pity.
‘Aye, I suppose so,’ I said.
Fat men and riding don’t mix for any length of time, especially not in the wet, and with the size of him I thought his poor horse would be as glad of the rest as he was.
I had the innkeeper arrange a carriage for us, and by that point I was glad to be out of the saddle and the rain myself. We sat in relative comfort as the carriage took us across the city to the forbidding stone bulk of the house of law.
It was still raining, and the huge royal banners hung sodden and lifeless from the heights. I presented myself to the guards on the gate. They were stone-faced, unwelcoming. I thought these ones might at least have a rough idea that something had happened. There must have been a great deal of comings and goings at the house of law over the last few weeks, and if they didn’t know exactly why, then at least they couldn’t have missed that.
The time for subtle and silent was past.
‘My name is Tomas Piety,’ I told them. ‘I’m expected.’
They snapped to attention, and admitted Fat Luka and me into the echoing stone hall. I was still wearing the Weeping Women, I realised, but it seemed that the prohibition against carrying weapons in the house of law didn’t extend to the Queen’s Men themselves.
Of course it didn’t. We were above the law, that was the whole point.
A liveried attendant came hurrying out of an antechamber and led us deeper into the building. I had only been there once before, to a reception Lord Vogel had hosted the previous summer. He’d had a man murdered after dinner, I remembered.
Lord Lan Andronikov, that had been his name. Ailsa had forced his own wife to inform on him, for all that the woman was supposedly her friend. She had locked poor Lady Lan Andronikov in a room and withheld the poppy pipe she was hopelessly dependant on, until her own miserable addiction broke her. It was fair to say that the house of law held no happy memories for me, or in all likelihood for anyone else either.
The attendant led us up a narrow stair and into a long hall lined with doors. Some were open, and as we passed I could see folk bent over desks in what were obviously offices of some sort, their quills scratching against paper as letters were written and entries recorded in ledgers. From the end of the corridor I could hear raised voices.
That door was open too, and I saw that Iagin was in there shouting at three men and a woman who I didn’t know. He was giving them a bollocking that any sergeant would have been proud of, and I don’t think I would have wanted to be on the receiving end of it.
Iagin himself looked much as I remembered him from the sit-down with Grachyev, a man somewhere close to his sixtieth year, with thinning grey hair and a heavy white moustache that all but covered his mouth. The anger was plain to see on his face, and I wasn’t sorry when the attendant kept walking and led us around a corner to a closed door at the end of the corridor.
There he stopped and tapped lightly on the heavy oak. I heard a muffled voice from inside, then the door was open and we were being ushered in.
The office was large but plainly furnished, the desk less impressive than my own had been in the governor’s hall back in Ellinburg. That didn’t matter. The only thing in that room that mattered was the man who sat behind the desk, upright in his chair in a plain black coat. He was tall and lean and white-haired, and at that moment quite possibly the most powerful man in the country.
He was certainly the most feared.
‘Lord Vogel,’ I said, and offered him a stiff bow.
Luka did the same beside me, but said nothing. Vogel regarded us in silence for a moment.
‘Tomas,’ he said. ‘Good. You, close the door.’
Luka did as he was told and Vogel waved us into the two chairs across the desk from him. They were plainly made too, and not designed for comfort. Nothing in that room was.
The silence stretched until I felt the need to fill it.
‘I apologise for the delay, Provost Marshal,’ I said. ‘The weather on the road—’
‘Quite,’ Vogel interrupted. ‘You did well, in Ellinburg. Ailsa was right about you.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.
I’m not one to go grovelling to those who think themselves above me, but this was different. There was something about Lord Vogel, something made of razors and hate that had me feeling cold all the way down to my boots. No sane man would ever cross Dieter Vogel, or show him anything but the greatest of respect. The devil himself, I’d thought him once, and I saw nothing in his soulless eyes to make me change my mind on that now that I worked for him.
‘Tell me what you saw, when you arrived in the city,’ he said.
‘Nothing out of the way,’ I said. ‘I take it the news isn’t widely known.’
‘Indeed not,’ he said. ‘Tell me why not.’
He was always testing, was Vogel, probing with his questions as though he were trying to find the limits of my intellect. I didn’t care for it, but he was my boss so that was just the lay of things and nothing to be done about it.
‘If the people don’t know then it’s because you don’t want them to know,’ I said.
I had given this a great deal of thought while I was in my bath at the Bountiful Harvest, and I thought I had worked my way around to the answer.
‘Obviously. Go on.’
‘You’re worried
