The Verdugo
Through the scaffwood trees and the midplain ferns Anna al Ydris stalked. Petrichor and pine on her nose. Things growing, things dying. The primeval honesty of the taiga wood. Her whiskers shivered. She was no morani, not really. But it touched something in her half-borrowed mind.
Her boy’s pace behind her was accompanied by the metallic rhythm of his machinegun. Clink-clack-clatter. Clink-clack-clatter. Soft as he could make it, she knew without demanding. That was fine. It was an ambush tonight. She loved an ambush.
They found a clearing where the tree roots criss-crossed and gnarled at the edges of a shallow shelf of rock, like a hardened scar on the forest face. Anna’s boot went from a squish to a firm thud atop the stone. She kicked away the mat of leaves and found the hand-chiseled markings beneath it. “Ritual circle,” she said. “This is the spot. Find a spot to set that MG up, boy. Use the stand. No firing from the saintfucking hip.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tiago crouched by the fans of bracken and loaded the drum into his newfangled murder machine. “You haven’t let me practice hipfire enough for that, anyway.”
“And I won’t.” She peered into the dappled dusk as the leaves’ shadows blended with the cooling day’s. “Where is that little twerp? Tying up the horses can’t take that long.”
“So, uh. Mother.”
It was rare that Tiago called her mother when she was Anna. She looked his way warningly. He was sitting cross-legged, the wooden stock of his machinegun propped on his leg. So attentive, her boy. So keen. As Annalise, she felt a pang sometimes, meeting his shadowed gaze, at the wariness in it. A hauntological guilt over the childhood he hadn’t had, of the pretends never played, the frogs un-caught, the moments of panic he used to have in rooms when an adult stood in the way of the only exit.
When she looked at him through Anna’s eyes, she saw a warrior who’d faced the worst of the world young, and would never allow it to inflict itself upon him or his family again. She took a cold pride in it.
“What’s happening there?” he asked. “Talking of the twerp.”
“Worried about the pillowbrains going cozy on him, huh?” That was what she and Tiago called Annalise and Lisa. “They’ll catch up with us.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It would be all right. I mean—I would be all right.”
She raised a silver eyebrow.
“I would,” he insisted. “You’re a grown-up, he’s a grown-up, I’m a grown-up. Appearances aside.”
“What’s happening there is nothing.” She leaned against a tree and adjusted her breastplate’s shoulderstrap. “The guy’s a syndicate castoff. Trash in the gutter-catch.”
“All right,” he said.
“You disagree?”
He shrugged.
“But you waited till I was Anna to ask me,” she said. “Tells me something.”
“I knew if I told that to Annalise, she’d say oh, Sunshine and want to buy me a snack and sit down somewhere to talk about it and my feelings and all that,” Tiago said. “And you’d want to change the subject as quick as possible.”
Anna scoffed and looked past him.
You aren’t used to being looked at how he looks at you. That’s all. You’ll shake him off.
“Where is that twerp,” she murmured again.
“Here he is,” said a voice behind her. A moment of violent motion occurred and arrested itself with her spear’s tip a fingerspan away from Seth il Gutierre’s sternum.
She lowered it to his stomach and paced backward to allow him into the clearing. “Never fucking do that again,” she said. “Never sneak up on me again.”
He stood contrapposto in the jade remnants of the sunset. “I don’t think ten feet away counts as up on. Hey, Tiago.”
Tiago nodded from the underbrush. “Il Gutierre.”
Anna sank the spearhead into the ground. “I want my space kept, thief.”
“All right.” He held his hands up. “Sorry.”
He was using his friendly voice on her. That was not proper. “You say you climb trees?” she demanded.
He nodded. “What should I—”
She pulled her head off. The eerie feeling came to her, the unclenching of something that hadn’t clenched in the first place. Seth’s consternation magnified as she held her head out to him.
“Take me up,” she said.
“What?”
“Find a scaffwood,” she said. “A tall one. Get me an overlook. Unless you can’t climb a tree one-handed?”
“I didn’t say that.” He reached for her.
She drew herself back. “Not by the hair,” she said. “I’m not a turnip sack.”
He rolled his eyes. “I hadn’t planned on it. You want up or not?”
“You want up. Like I’m a fuckin’ toddler.” She handed herself to the thief. Her vision jostled and swung as he tucked her under his arm and planted his foot against a thickly gnarled root. Great. Now she had to deal with il Gutierre’s body odor.
“Stay frosty, Tiago,” Seth said, and with feline grace and silence he was climbing. He showed no real hesitation or discomfort with an occupied hand. He leaned a bit more, perhaps, kept his body closer to the rough-hewn bark. But still he moved with birthright familiarity.
Here was something he could do excellently that Anna could not. She didn’t like that.
There was a callus on his index finger, on the edge. How’d he get that, she wondered. His hand smelled like lavender. And oakmoss, maybe? It must have been the shaving cream he’d used on that weaselly little face of his. The smell intermingled with the peppery scent of his underarm. She took another inhale of it before she remembered that she was annoyed and disgusted. She breathed through her mouth instead.
“This is normally something a thief tries to avoid,” Seth said, as they ascended. “Climbing the scaffwood. That’s a syndicate phrase for—”
“For what a Verdugo does to them,” Anna said. “I know. Focus on your work.”
“This only halfway counts, really.” His boots scraped against the bark as he mantled onto a broad branch. “Mostly I’ve climbed trees when I’m running away from people. Or dogs. It’s nice to slow down and enjoy it. Oughta do this more often.”
“Find something that’ll support our weight,” she said. “Shouldn’t be hard with your twiggy ass.”
“I don’t know. Your head is heavier than I thought it’d be.”
“Weak.”
He sat cross-legged at the base of a thick bough about twenty-five feet above the forest floor, and placed Anna in his lap. Looking up at him from this angle, up his little weasel nose, she had to bite back more invective. He was doing this on purpose, she decided. To belittle her.
“You know,” he said. “First I was surprised that a Verdugo was one of the kindest people I’d met, and then I was surprised at how such a kind person could have such a mean side. I didn’t get it. But you know what I think?”
“I know you’ll insist on telling me.”
“Now that I’ve gotten to know the rest of you better, it’s kind of cute.”
“It’s not cute,” she snapped.
“It is.” He dug into his satchel and pulled a pair of dented binoculars out. A loaner from one of the pillowbrains. “And your whiskers are cute, too, by the way.”
“This is never happening, do you understand? Never. Annalise is too cowardly and Lisa is too horny. But I’m here and I’m telling you for all of me that you need to give up.”
Seth did not reply. The birdsong was fading around them as the light waned.
“You are thinking with your cock and not your head,” Anna said. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re asking for, and I refuse to be responsible for the rest of your unlife. You think you want me to unlight you because you’re an overgrown teenager with dumb, raging hormones. And if I give you what you think you want, and you realize the sun does not rise with my smile and my cunt doesn’t grant three wishes when you rub it, I’ll watch you slowly lose all this pent-up lust for me, and it’ll turn into resentment and hatred as you realize your stupid, irreversible mistake. And I know how it’ll be all your damn fool fault, but the naïve idiot rest of me will be fucking miserable with the guilt of it. So I have to be the one with the big girl pants and tell you it is not happening, and if it’s the reason you’re staying, you can climb down this tree right now and fuck off back to civilization.”
Seth gave this tirade an absent “Mmhmm,” from behind the binoculars.
“Do you have anything to say to that?”
“Nope.”
“You told me if I said that, you’d give up,” she said.
“I told Annalise that, and I stand by it. Your other heads I’m taking with a grain of salt.”
“So you’re just going to ignore me? That’s your strategy?”
“Not ignoring you,” he said. “I’m listening. You’re scared.”
“Scared?”
“And I can’t make you un-scared by talking. Not while you’re Anna, anyway.”
“Fuck off, thief. I’m scared? I obliterated a seraph in its cave in front of you while you cried and shit your pants, and I’m scared. You don’t know shit about me. My other heads are too fucking nice—”
“Shhh.”
“Don’t you fucking shush me—”
Seth was full of hushed urgency. He craned his neck forward and down. “I see something.”
Her tuft-tipped ears quivered. “What?”
“Group of guys with corpselamps.” He frowned. “Thought we were looking for a seraph. What are these guys doing here?”
“Show me,” Anna said. Seth held the binoculars to her eyes. She peered through and blinked them away. “I can’t turn my neck, thief. Hold me straight, for fuck’s sake.”
“I’m trying.” Seth changed his grip on her. His hand slid below and held her there, like a penny-dreadful actor soliloquizing at a skull.
“Fuck’s sake,” she ground out, through the mouth he was holding partway closed.
“Don’t jostle. It’s a long way down.” His thumb laid along the line of her jaw, sinking into her cheek and pooching her lips forward. Thank St. Silas that her jugular was on her body down below so he couldn’t feel her pulse pick up. Of course it did. That’s what happens when someone has their hand near your neck.
It wasn’t oakmoss, the smell on his hands. Tobacco leaf, maybe. Focus, moron.
Four men whose dark clothes blended with the colors the gathering evening and oncoming autumn. They were trying to look hard for one another, to seem unbothered by the strange and dire business that had drawn them here. The man most successful was in front, a hooded lantern held in his hairy-backed hand. The subtle hitch in his stride told her here was a veteran of violence, and she wondered from where. She could scarcely imagine a fellow baptized in the carnage of the Winter War could return and worship the butcher-birds.
“Seraph cult,” she said. “They’re coming here to meet their master.”
He drew a sharp inhale. “Saints, really?”
“What else’d they be? This is what Tiago and I pieced together in Sondam. What that scarecrow got mixed up in. How’d you think we knew where to look?”
“I never… I guess I knew they existed, I just thought they were out on the edges of the world. Like in Sektorbrav, or…”
She sneered at his hesitation. “Or Orwiny?”
“Yeah.”
“They’re here, too. More and more inland, more and more often. Nihilists, madmen, worshippers of some Antisaint or another. These fuckers, though.” She shook her head, and then remembered her head was on the forest floor, shaking its severed neck. “Turning on your own people for a gray feather is fucking low-rent. Find the seraph. Should be coming in from the southwest, along that switchback.”
Seth returned her to his lap and peered back through the binoculars. A probing minute and then his body stiffened. “Saints preserve. There it is.”
“Show,” she commanded, and she was in the air again, staring down the binoculars at a shambolic thing that looked halfway direwolf and halfway vulture, with a scabby, bulbous head perched on a body so cruelly striated with animal muscle it looked as though it were a wound winch, a quivering tensile knot of quadrupedal muscle that’d snap and whirl apart if it weren’t lashed to bones the size of staves.
“That thing looks more like a big dumb beast than a deity,” Seth said.
Anna blew a lock of silver hair out of the way. “Those yokels are dumber.”
“But if this guy was part of it, what made him turn unlit? Is there something more going on, maybe?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged (and remembered he couldn’t see it, but who cared about what he could see?) “Maybe he wanted out, or he broke some bylaw, or he talked too much and pissed his boss off. I don’t care. They’ve got enough soul for the sword.”
“We gonna try taking one alive? Make him talk?”
“Stop acting like you know what you’re doing, il Gutierre,” she said. “There’s four of them plus a seraph, and three of us. We don’t focus on taking them alive. We focus on coming out of this, and if one of them lives long enough to spout his horseshit at us, it’s a pleasant bonus before we lop his head off. Understand?”
“I focus?” He slow-blinked. His eyelashes were long, for a man. Long and dark. “You want me in this?”
“The fuck do you think? You said you’d live the life, this is the life. Four is more than I thought. I need hands.”
“Okay. But promise—”
“Not promising anything.”
“Stop,” he hissed, and to her surprise, she did. “Promise you’ll use me how I should be.”
“And how’s that?”
“You’re the one who kills people,” he said. “You decide, and I’ll trust you. But promise.”
She sighed and felt the wind whistle through the hexis-limned hole in her neck. “I promise,” she said. “Fuck you.”
He smiled that dimply smile. “Thank you.”
“Whatever.” She turned her eyes from him. “Throw me down.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I can catch myself.”
“What if I miss?”
“Don’t miss.”
“I’m gonna climb you down.”
“No. Hey, no. Seraphs dammit, no, just don’t be a coward. Seth, stop, we have no time, it’ll be too much noise—”
“I’m quiet,” he whispered. “I’m fast. But I need both hands.”
He carefully placed her in his satchel and half-zipped it, up to her quivering nose.
“You are such a fucking pussy, Seth il Gutierre,” she whispered.
Seth put a finger to his lips. “Wink.” He swung himself down from the branch. She glared furiously at the sky as the forest canopy occluded it.
A humiliating half-minute and they were back on the ground. She snatched herself from him without a thanks. The magnetic twang of the Darkness interlocking her back to her body was as satisfying as a last puzzle piece clicked into place.
“Take this.” She unbuckled her holstered wheelgun and handed it to Seth by its blackwood stock. “Go off Tiago and see if there’s a potshot you can take.”
“Where is he?”
“Deeper into the woods. You’ll know when he shoots. It sounds like the world ending.”
He fastened the gun to his side. His hips were so much narrower than hers that the gunbelt’s prong stuck through the furthest hole in the strap.
She let out an unkind scoff of air through her nose. Skinny little slip of a man. You could fit two sets of his hips in the span of hers. You could fit both his wrists in her fist. If she rode this boy as hard as he clearly wanted her to, she’d snap him in half. Or if she wrapped him in her thighs and squeezed hard enough. He’d probably thank her for it, the little pervert. Probably scream her na—
“Anna?” he whispered, with the air of a man repeating himself.
“What?”
“You listening?”
“Yeah,” she said. “What’d you say?”
“Who do I aim at?”
She shook the last of that little digression out of her mind. “Whoever you can hit. Just try to make yourself useful, and if Tiago yells you an order you follow it.” She pointed at the tree. “Move.”
He mounted the tree and scampered up it. Without a head to cart around he was fast. Had to give him that.
She tracked the flattened grass and rustled ferns to Tiago’s perch and hunkered next to him. “Counted four,” she muttered. “Plus the gray feather coming the opposite way.”
He didn’t look up from the ironsight tunnel he’d zeroed into the clearing, fifty paces south. “Do we wait for them to come together?”
She shook her head. “That fucker’s big enough to give them cover, and fast enough we want the extra distance between you. It’ll be coming from thataway.” She pointed past the cultists and to the right. “Soon as the cultists hit the clearing, you fire.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Tiago slid the bar down on his ladder sight. “He give you trouble?”
“He always gives me trouble.” She pointed toward the distant, bobbing lights. “You send one full drum downrange, then move in to take the survivors and help me with the gray feather. It’s gonna come up from the other way. I break right, around il Gutierre’s tree, and when it charges I’m there to meet it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They were close enough now to hear the crackling of underbrush as the beast approached.
“Low in the brush,” she whispered. “Nothing above the midsection. I want them all for the sword, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She thumped him on the shoulder. “Aim true, boy.”
They watched the lights bob through the wood toward the circle. They listened to the unquiet crunch and crash of the seraph on the other side. The men emerged around their stone circle, talking low and peering into the forest. Waiting for their monster.
“Three. Two.” Tiago flexed his finger and rested it on the trigger. “One.”
A sound like the world ending. The forest lit up bright as day.