”Diego,” Seth said. “His name was Diego.”
“That son of a bitch?” The bartender of the Tower Wick sucked a disdainful breath through the tooth he was missing as he scraped puddled candlewax from the bar rail. Twins, Seth thought, and poked his tongue through his new gap again. “Yeah, I know him. If you find him, tell him that I’m gonna start charging interest on his fucking tab.”
Seth snuffed the closest candle out with thumb and forefinger. “He’s dead.”
“He’s…” The bartender set aside his bench scraper and lowered his scabby face to Seth’s level. “How?”
“The Verdugo executed him,” Seth said. “For seditious activity. Did he drink here much?”
The bartender waved his arm around the taproom, guttering a couple of the omnipresent candles. “Everyone drinks here.”
True enough: a lively crowd occupied the Tower Wick tonight. No trace of the solemn hush from the afternoon Seth and Ofelia spent cheerfully stealing their brew.
“I need your help,” Seth said. “Was Diego a spiritual man?”
“Not any more than usual. I think his saint was, uh… St. Mannok.”
“Did he ever talk about trips to the scaffwood?”
The bartender shrugged. “Not literally. If you’re talking like an executioner scaffold, you know how the tough-bitten set are. Probably tickle him to know it was a Verdugo who’d kill him.”
It had been the Verdugo’s assistants, in fact, but Seth didn’t want to go into specifics. “What about…” He searched his tankard as if something useful for the al Ydrises lay in its amber contents. “What about a head? Did he ever talk about a head?”
The bartender’s brow furrowed. He held up a finger to an impatient queuer. “A head?”
“Yeah. Like we’ve got the head, what’s going on with the head…” Seth trailed off. “I dunno. Just serve that guy, I guess.”
“Wait.” The bartender made that tooth sucking sound again. “Hold on. Yes.”
Seth’s ears perked up. “Yes?”
“Yeah. He said something about the… shit.” The bartender raised his voice over the cylinder song on the hexophone. “Hey. Argyl. Over here.”
A patron with a checkered engineworker scarf around his head and a doleful pair of baby blues excused himself from the game of Knuckle Nine he was losing and meandered to the bar.
“I been waiting,” the other guy at the bar snapped.
The bartender didn’t even look at him; just grabbed the closest tap, filled a tankard two-thirds with foam, and slid it the complainer’s way. “Fuck off, then.” He tapped a knuckle on the bar and Argyl the engineworker leaned in. “Who was that fucking guy Diego kept talking about?” the bartender asked. “The Fontana guy.”
Argyl shrugged. “Cabota Cazza. Sum’n like that.”
“Something like that, yeah. Cheers, Argyl.” The bartender took his informant’s glass and topped it up. “We were talking about big-timers. Y’know. Your Tamori brothers, your Rohan al Agantes. And Diego starts talking about this tough fucker in Fontana he’d met. This Cabota.”
“Is that a Sektoric name?” Seth asked.
“Yeah. For a real Sektorbrav shieldbiter type, up from the bluff corsairs and the like. Diego was on about they’re expanding to the Plainlands these days. And this is the guy on the Fontana syndicate line to the South. The connect, right?” The bartender scratched the raised skin along his chin scar. “You understand he could be a bullshitter. We don’t really hold much truck with the syndicate types here.”
“Sure. Besides Diego.”
The bartender snorted. “Not even him. Not anymore. But he’s telling us about Cabota and how he’s running all these jobs, these serious jobs. And he said something like… what was it, Argyl? About the head.”
“He said when Cabota Cazza tells you to bring him a woman’s head, you bring it,” Argyl said.
“And I thought that was weird and fucked-up, didn’t I, Argyle.”
“Ye did.”
“Because why specify a woman’s head. So that stuck with me.”
“Where is he?” Argyl asked. “Missing knuckle night.”
“Dead,” the bartender said, before Seth could. Argyl clicked his tongue, and that seemed to be the extent of his commentary. He accepted his drink again and moseyed back to the game.
Seth watched his weaving departure. “Not a hugely popular guy, I guess?”
“He wasn’t a good patron.” The bartender wore a look of ingrown reflectiveness as he fetched his rag and cleaned the tankard rings from the bartop. “Or a good friend, or much of a good man, I suppose. But some people you just… exist near. Long enough that it clings, and one day you say, well, I suppose I knew him. You know?
Seth nodded. That perfectly described just about everyone in his Prossimo pre-incarnation. “Thank you, sir.” He stood from his barstool and pushed it in, tracking its leg past a puddle of wax on the floor. “I think this’ll be useful.”
He clacked a brace and a solitar on the bar. The bartender cleaned around them. “Those sollies for a drink?”
“Not looking for a tankard of anything.” Seth pointed to a high shelf where, out of the candle light, the nicer liquors and vintages crowded in the dust. “But if you have a gift you’d like to give the Verdugo…”
The bartender swished his rag off his hand with a presentational flourish. Beneath, his finger was flashing Seth the cursehook. “Fuck off,” he said chummily.
Lisa al Ydris crouched by the stonecut circle, daubing at the day-old blood with a washcloth. “Cabota Cazza. Hmmm.”
“Is it ringing any bells?” Seth asked, as he stripped the blade of a dry leaf away from its spindly veins.
“Not really. Sounds Sektoric, sure enough. This circle’s still our main lead, I think, but we’ll keep the name on our tongues.” Lisa tossed her hair over her shoulder to keep the evening wind from blowing it into her face and stood. “I imagine that’s our last evening in Sondam for a while. We have what we need from the place, now, and I’m so looking forward to Fontana again. The showers, et cetera.”
“The nice beds,” Seth added, and wondered if he was reading too far into the smile Lisa gave that in reply. “Have you figured out what this circle is?”
“This, my dear thief, is a communing circle. A little hole punched in reality and folded on itself and its fellows. This middle ring here?” She poked the toe of her boot onto it. “You can send messages and small items through it. And these outer rings and runes are its directions, and the coordinate pointers to its interlinked circles.”
“So there’s more of them.”
She nodded. “A circle grows in the complexity and the initial amount of hexis required to set it up for every additional circle it attunes to. If it’s a one-to-one connection, it’s a devil to work out, but it’s possible. If it’s three or more, it becomes rather maddening.”
“Is this a one-to-one?”
Lisa laced her hands over her knees and stood to her full, towering height. “This one has six.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s… a problem, then. Right?”
“It takes power to set this sort of thing up,” Lisa murmured, halfway to herself. “Great and deeply concerning power.” She refocused on him and readopted her breezy mien. “Not to worry, Seth. This isn’t really the sort of thing we take on directly. It’s something we must investigate, understand, and report to the Necropolis, for whatever sized guns they care to bring in. What you said the other night—about how linked all this must be. I really do think you’re right.”
“So what’ll we do about it?”
Lisa tsked. “What, indeed. What does one do with a magic rock?”
She pulled a dark shape from her pocket.
Seth craned his neck. “What’s that you’ve got there?”
“This, Mr. il Gutierre, is another magic rock.” She flicked it into the air and caught it again. “And a wonderful idea you gave me.”
“I did?”
“Mmhmm.” She gestured to the center ring. “A quantity of debris sweeps through this portal whenever it’s open. Here in the center is where the material folds itself through the membrane of the world, out into the phlogiston where dwell the disembodied seraphs and the turning wheel itself, and then back to the kindred realms.”
“Seems dangerous.”
“Indeed it is,” Lisa said. “I suspected we were dealing with a circle of this nature when those scarecrows animated. A possessor seraph has precious few inroads to the kindred realms. A wormy little hole like this is one of them. Going unlit here would be the ideal spot to give embodiment to a hostile spirit.”
“So they did it on purpose.”
“Quite possibly. I’d say probably, even.”
“As a trap?”
“That is a straightforward answer. I like straightforward. If that was the intent it was foiled, thanks to you and that lovely little Fox of yours. Which brings me back to that idea I mentioned.” She turned the rock over in her hand. “I thought about asking you to do this, but then you’d have that invoke-tickle in your head for days and days. And I want you sharp. So…”
She raised the rock to show him. On its flat side sat a carving of the Fox.
“While you were asking around at that taphouse, I paid a visit to that scriber of yours. She was rather upset, but I threw more work her way. This is a scribe-stone.” She held it forward. “You want to see?”
Seth turned the rock over in his hands. It was still warm from Lisa’s touch. “I thought magic needed to be on living flesh to work.”
“It almost always does, yes,” Lisa said. “But there are ways. There are principles and techniques few are able to use. My donor was one of the few.”
“What’s so hard about it?”
It’s not quite hard so much as it’s illegal.” She pulled a broad knife from her baldric. “I cut her head off over it, which makes me quite the hypocrite, I suppose. But Charlie uses it, too, to keep the deathspell up. So we’re both hypocrites.”
Seth gingerly returned the stone. “You’re talking blood magic.”
She hummed affirmatively and laid her executioner sword across the circle. “Fortunately, I have a ready supply of human hexis right here. And this application will barely dim a bead. All I need’s a little bit of that, and a little bit of this…”
She sliced the pad of her thumb open and smeared it across the Fox on the stone. Seth winced.
Lisa dipped her thumb to the stone and drew a connecting line between two runes in her blood. “And then we open the circle, and point it to its Fontana brother…”
The wind picked up. A pressure muffled into Seth’s ears. His neck hairs stood on end.
“Aaaand…” Lisa underhand tossed the fox stone into the center of the circle. It blinked out of existence. “Finished.”
The tightness in Seth’s head loosened itself. “So that rock’s ended up at wherever the Fontana circle is?”
“That’s right. And when I invoke it, I can hear through its little foxy ears.” Lisa stuck her bloody thumb in her ear. “Nothing yet. But I’ll check regularly, and once we revisit Fontana, I have some designs on how exactly we can triangulate our stone by sound. With luck, the circle’s caretakers will let the thing lie or sweep it to the side with the rest of the forest flotsam that blows in.”
“Clever, Madame Verdugo.” Seth tapped his fingers on the back of his opposite hand in genteel applause.
Lisa chuckled and curtseyed. “I have my moments. They would have to execute me if someone mentioned I’d used the sword’s hexis on this, dear. So mum’s the word.”
The thief and the Verdugo returned to camp around the carriage. It was past midnight, but the moon was round and heavy in the sky and the ride was easy. Seth rode Draka; Lisa hadn’t complained or commented when he brought his own horse.
Tiago and Ofelia were already holed up in the carriage; the corpselamps had been put out. Seth unlaced his boots and placed them with the rest of his effects by his tent. He paused at the open flap and looked around for Lisa to say good night to. Where had she gone?
“Night,” he called, to the ambient dark, and crawled into his bedroll. Life on the road had mostly cured the insomniac spells he’d once struggled with; but something told him he’d find sleep elusive tonight. There was a hyperawareness to him; some part of the day left dog-eared and unlived.
A silhouette, framed in the silvery absinthe moonlight, resolved itself on the other side of the canvas. Obvious who it was—nobody else in camp was so tall or broad in the shoulders and the hips. Nobody else had the muscular hourglass that Seth could trace with his eyes shut. Lisa clicked her tongue along with her knuckles as they brushed the tent flap to approximate the sound of a knocking door. “Seth.” The smile in her voice threaded through the whispered syllable like the graceful prow of a longship. “Can I come in?”
Seth sat up. Not in surprise—something about this had felt inevitable. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes,” she said. “I will be chaste as St. Paima. Promise.”
He gathered up the quilt and the patched sheet the al Ydrises had given him and retreated into the corner of the tent, his back to a structural pole. “Okay. Come on in.”
The heavy zipper on the tent flap jingled. The canvas crackled aside to allow Lisa al Ydris passage. She was still wearing her tunic, untucked and wrinkled where her belts and baldrics had sat on it, and a pair of linen drawstring pants which would be baggy on almost anyone else, but which rounded out on her as they hugged her heavy, shapely thighs. He could see indistinct tattoos through the cloth. There was that dragon he’d admired on her right leg, its snout nudging her kneecap. On her left, a sun with a tranquil face looked over a minaret-crowned tower.
She sat cross-legged at the bottom of his bedroll. Her toes had the same chipped black polish as her fingers, he saw. Another discovery, another little feminine flourish. He remembered the sound of that foot dislocating a cultist’s jaw last night.
“I want to talk about what we’re doing once we reach Fontana,” she said. “A bit of an itinerary.”
“Sure.” He sat up. “Why haven’t you changed back to Annalise?”
“Lisa is better for cities and the upper-crust twits. Annalise is far better at relating to the lovely little towns and the good, rustic, hardworking stock therein.”
“The hicks,” Seth suggested, and made her laugh again.
“So,” she said. “Would you like to hear it? My to-do list?”
He nodded.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “You and I will make it clear to our little head thief that the jig is up, that we have all the proof we require with this circle and these strange seraph events and this Cabota Cazza customer. And his only hope is collaboration, or his head is mine. Which will be entirely the truth.”
“Right.”
“Then you and Tiago and Ofelia and I will find this Fontana chapter of the Dead Fuckwits Club, and finally retrieve my long-lost head. And we’ll find out who they are, and what they wanted with it, and take it back.”
“Simplicity itself.”
Her lips were clear in the gloom, dark as they were against her stark white skin. “With you at my hip, Seth il Gutierre, I am sure it will be. For all the ways you have complicated Annalise’s life, you have a delightful way of simplifying mine.”
“I, uh. I do my best.”
“I know you do. And with the head found, and your last indiscretion against me cured, the last little debt in your column will be gone. And I think any reasonable person, Seth, would look at this ledger between us and conclude that I owe you big.”
She shifted her weight, from a cross-legged sit to lounging on her side. The front of her tunic was laced low tonight, and her motion conspired with the ripe roundness of her chest to steal Seth’s attention toward it. The plump semicircle of her cleavage, where gravity pressed one heavy piece of heaven against the next. The mole, right where he remembered it. And a raised circle against the dark fabric of her tunic. She was not wearing a bra.
His hands flexed into distressed fists at the imagining of how it would be to hold them. They were too large for his palms; he could see that. They’d spill over his fingers.
Stop. You were in the middle of a conversation, you hound dog. What had she said? I owe you big.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied, belatedly.
She propped her elbow on the ground and cocked her head into her palm. The printed skin stretched taut over the girth of her amazonian arm. “When you signed on for this new career, I told you I wouldn’t put you in situations with seraphs. And yet those situations continually find you. And you keep being such a gentleman, taking these things on with nary so much as a well-deserved dirty look. Not to mention how you saved my kid.” She laughed. “Both my kids.”
“We, uh—” He was temporarily arrested by her tongue, poking out to wet her lower lip. Now it shone in the moonlight. “We all saved each other, I guess.”
“Where’s that daytime cockiness, Seth?” Her pearlescent teeth shone through the nighttime softness of her lips. “Do you know what I think? I think you are wildly overdue a reward.”
“What kind of reward?”
“Well.” She folded one leg up. A crease in her linen. The fabric stretched tighter and he could see the shadow of her underclothes. “That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m asking. What would you like, in exchange for returning the head you stole?”
A thong. She’s wearing a thong. A little black thong, with an ass like hers. Probably looks from the back like she’s wearing nothing at all.
“Are you offering me a bonus?” he halfway squeaked.
She smiled. “I’m already offering you a bonus. I could make it a bigger bonus, if you’d like. Is that what you’d like? More money? That would be fine.”
“Do you, uh… have another proposal?”
“Yes.” She placed her palms on the ground and rose to her knees. “I do.” Her hips canted to one side, and then the next, as she crawled across the tent. Until she was right in front of him, looming so large above him that her shadow covered the moon. Until he was caged beneath the massive beauty of her thighs and arms on all sides of him. Her barely contained chest hung so close to his face he could feel the warmth radiating from her pumping heart.
She leaned her head down, past his shoulder. Her hair draped across his chest. The scent of it, of her, rammed against the ramparts of his brain. The full dark currants of her lips hovered right by his ear. Her throaty, alto whisper:
“Would you like me to suck your cock, Seth?”