”So a seraph cult wants my head. It gathers adherents to its circle. Unlights them then and there, and slots a seraph tidily into the spot where the soul once occupied. A seraph sharp enough to pretend to be a human soul, mosey to Fontana, complete the purchase, and—we may hope—stow the goods, or at least give us more breadcrumbs to follow. Then it stumbles its way back to Sondam and pretends to go scarecrow.”
Lisa al Ydris plucked another grape from the table before her, gave it a brief test squeeze, and popped it into her mouth.
“So why?” she asked around it. “Any theories?”
Outside the third-floor window of their borrowed office in Corregidor Soshanna’s mansion, the busy thoroughfare below sent its muffled hubbub floating upward to where the Verdugo sat, her thumb in her ear. Land schooners and carriages and hex engines proceeded in a bright and endless midday parade down the road, their roofs periodically doused by Fontana’s spouting statues.
Seth watched through the window’s diamond panes as a saintspeaker riding atop a temple courser timed his crossing wrong, and was drenched by a water-vomiting gargoyle that soaked his white cloak and spooked his horse. The man sputtered in holy outrage and wrestled for control over his ride. The resultant racket—the sodden oaths, the laughing fishwives, the honking of a hex engine—sounded underwater from up here. That’s why they’d chosen this spot, and sat in it together for two hours now. So that Lisa could listen for her Fox-carved stone, wherever it had ended up.
She’d forced a long list of potential warehouses and smuggler-stowages from Marsten il Molacq, and a corps of a half-dozen bellringers from the nervous Corregidor. Even now they were wandering Fontana’s ways, clanging cowbells and hollering their town crier business out to tenements and derelict arsenals in Fontana’s factory districts. The point wasn’t the message, which was some busywork bullshit about seraph-spotting tower regulations. The point was to listen close for the voice of a crier, and use it to triangulate the cult’s circle.
“It said Ydris.” Seth sat back down across from her; his chair squeaked expensively. A distinction he’d learned, traveling with the Verdugo. Some chairs were uncomfortable because they were cheap, and some were uncomfortable because they were expensive. “It knew you, knew your kids. Maybe it knew your route, too. Once whatever’s steering this cult got what it needed from its scarecrows, they might’ve dumped these things in our way as a trap.”
“A trap is a tidy explanation,” Lisa said, “especially a foiled trap. It’s a very seductive answer. But I think seductive gets a bad reputation.”
“Is it really tidy, though? Why does this thing have a bone to pick with you?”
“Because, my little fox, I am one of the increasingly rare Verdugos who gives a shit about the seraph-hunting part of the job.”
Seth tried to hide his reaction as my little fox drizzled across his heart like honey, and evidently failed, because Lisa grinned, her dusky lids lowering as she examined his face.
“I think you like that nickname,” she murmured.
“If I told you I didn’t, you’d only use it more.” Seth stood from his seat—too close to her, close enough that her leather-and-apricot scent was fumigating his focus—and paced the office. He tilted his head at the dove caged in the corner of Shoshanna’s office; it tilted its downy head right back.
“I’d commit casual homicide if it made your ears turn that cute little shade, Seth il Gutierre,” Lisa said. “For whatever that’s worth, coming from a Verdugo.”
Seth examined Shoshanna’s bookshelves to hide his smile. “I don’t know about a blush, but there’s a few flying heads that might get a round of applause out of me.”
“Say the word, little fox. Auntie Lisa will see them lopped.”
“I’ll write you a list.” Something shone between the pages of a book. Seth fished for it. “The first few entries might already be crossed out.”
He removed a pair of silver-plated reading glasses that had been stuck between the pages. As a bookmark, maybe. The film of dust over the lenses spoke to how long they’d sat here. His hands wanted to slip these into his front pocket, and Lisa wasn’t looking, so he let them.
“What do you reckon it wants with the head, anyway?” he asked.
It may have been Seth’s imagination, but he could have sworn then that Lisa closed her mouth around a readier reply than the noncommittal hum she furnished instead. “Here’s my big question mark,” she said. “If the pitchfork woman wended her way to Fontana for the transaction, what was the man doing? And why the need for the whole song-and-dance if they already had lit catspaws to do their bidding?”
He left the question of the head where it lay. She’d pick it up when she was ready, he hoped. “One mystery at a time, right?”
She nodded. “And with any luck, we’ll have this one polished off shortly. Two days from now is when the executions are scheduled. I’ll have to be Annalise for that. She’s the only one I wear to the scaffold.”
“Why is that, anyway?”
“She has a way with the condemned.” Lisa took another grape. “If you ask me, she has some sort of shine for crooks.”
He affected a gasp. “Scandalous.”
Lisa tittered. “I know.” Her new selection didn’t pass the test squeeze; she placed it on Seth’s plate. “Anyway, she can’t keep the spell going, so I’d love to get things figured out before then. And then we can have a lovely week of rest and relaxation. Hold on.” She pulled her thumb from her ear and shook her head. The slash of silver through her bangs fanned out like a firework; she tutted and swiped it back into place with her palm.
“You get anything?” Seth asked.
She shook her head. “I just need a break. I’m not used to my eardrums being in two places at once. It makes me a bit woozy.”
“I sorta hunker when I’m doing it. Like this.” Seth squatted on the hardwood floor. “If I sit, it makes it hard to get my balance back.”
“Oh, seraphs.” She grimaced. “I wish I’d known that before.”
“Need a hand?”
“No, no. I’ll just…” She placed her palms on the table, rose a few inches, and thought better of it. “I’ll sit it off.”
“I always found salt beef helped me after,” he said. “Something about the chewiness. You want me to get you some from the carriage?”
“Suppose so.” Lisa fanned herself with a hand. “Thank you, Seth. Someone ought to check on the children, anyway. Make sure they haven’t eaten one another.”
Seth departed the office and descended the echoing marble staircase at the manor’s center. A suited man coming up the other way—someone’s vicer, maybe, or a minor oficinista—gave Seth an inquisitive look that took in the workaday black and the roadwear on Seth’s boots, and melted into an unkind disregard. The familiar look from the top of a pulled-up ladder.
Seth continued past the man, and rubbed the stolen glasses in his pocket with his thumb. When I’m unlit, they’ll be afraid of me, he thought, and wondered if that might be an improvement.
Out into the glaring sunlight—it was the last hot day of the year, by Seth’s reckoning, and the goodfolk of Fontana’s garden district seemed to agree. Silken shirtsleeves were rolled up. Parasols and picnic canopies sprouted across the corner parks. Children chased one another across the granite bowls of the Centre Square fountains.
The carriage sat before the Corregidor’s manor like a black twist of iron stuck in a clear pool. The swanners and sightseers crowded together as they passed to give it as wide a berth as they could.
Tiago was leaned against the carriage, gnawing an apple. Ofelia sat in her habitual spot on its roof, under a black awning she’d erected like a bat’s wing. She guided a silver needle, bound in black thread, through the hole in a pair of her mother’s riding pants.
“Any luck, Mr. il Gutierre?” she called.
“Nothing yet.” Seth approached to lean on the carriage; as he settled his weight on it, Tiago detached from the other side of its ornate passenger door as if see-sawed.
He looked past Seth’s shoulder, eyes not quite meeting his. “Be right back.” He tossed his apple aside halfway to the core and stalked onto the cobblestone footpath. A man with a wheelbarrow full of peonies halted his course and turned up a side street to avoid traveling the same way.
With a nod of his head, Seth indicated Ofelia’s retreating brother. “Is he all right?”
“Tiago?” Ofelia produced a pair of sturdy carbon-steel fabric shears. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Feels like he’s beating a retreat every time I come by,” Seth said.
“Getting more mites.” Tiago’s reply wended round a statue-guarded corner. “Back soon. I’m fine.”
“He’s fine,” Ofelia said. “And we do need a refill on the popmites after he chewed through half of them with that automatic of his. It’s just awkward for him now that you’ve started getting intimate with our mother.”
“We’re—”
“He’ll get used to it.” Ofelia snipped a strip of cloth down to size and set it as a patch onto the pants. “We’ve agreed on a nonconfrontational stance for now while we see where it leads. He’s happy for you both. He’s just being Tiago about it.”
“We’re not—we haven’t.”
“Okay. It’s just that she came back as Lisa, and then she snuck into your tent. And we figured, well. That seals it.”
“I’m lit. See?”
She didn’t look up from her stitchwork. “Sure.”
“What’s sure? I’m lit. You see any buckets of skin paint around?”
“I don’t think painted-on skin would blush like that, anyway.”
“What is it with this family and trying to make me blush.”
“We’re jealous of your color, I suppose.” She set aside the pants and went rooting through the pile again. “What was she doing in your tent the other night, then, out of curiosity? If she wasn’t canoodling.”
“Talking,” Seth said. “Just talking.”
Ofelia unfolded a tunic. “Ooh, look at this.” She poked a finger through the torn cloth. “Punctured.”
Seth squinted against the beating-down sun. “Is that what you were wearing when you were stabbed?”
“This is what Tiago was wearing last time he was stabbed.” She flattened the tunic in front of her and got to work. “Hard to keep track, I know. All we wear is black.”
“Is that regulation? I know the Verdugo is supposed to be in all black, but I remember Erheis’s servants wearing whatever they liked.”
“Mmhmm. So do Tiago and I. We like black.”
“How do you tell whose stuff is whose?”
“The feel, mostly. I care about materials and being comfortable, and he cares about how broad it makes his shoulders look.”
Seth grinned. He’d lost most of his patience for teenagers once he’d left the age behind, but he liked Ofelia’s company. Maybe it helped that she wasn’t actually one. “Was he stabbed in some kind of shoulder-off?”
Ofelia’s silvery giggle was becoming an increasingly common sound. Seth was proud of that. “Fellow who was angry about his brother’s execution,” she said. “The ironic thing is it was Erheis who swung that sword. I suppose this mourning man had spent all year hyping himself up, then a different Verdugo showed up.”
“Why didn’t he stab Annalise?”
“You’ve seen Annalise.” She bit through the end of her thread. “What about?”
“What about what?”
“What were you talking about?”
“Just leads,” Seth said. “There’s this guy Cabota Cazza I’ve been looking for. Nobody’s heard of him. Which is kind of odd, because I was told he was a big deal.”
“Cabota Cazza.” Ofelia paused mid-stitch. “Who told you?”
“Secondhand at the Tower Wick,” Seth said. “That dead cultist was spreading it around.”
Ofelia shuffled her clothes pile aside and began hurriedly digging through her stacks of books.
Seth visored his hand over his eyes. “What are you looking for up there?”
“I believe those gentlemen mistook the man’s honorific for his name.” Ofelia’s search sent a stack of books cascading from the carriage roof; she gave no sign of notice. “And Diego was under the employ of a Cabo ta Cazya.” She pronounced the syllables with crisp separation.
“That… shoot. That is probably correct.” Seth picked up one of Ofelia’s discarded books—a Tuthimi bodice-ripper, it seemed from the cover, all verdant valleys and crystal waterfalls and bosoms heaving out from brocaded service dresses. He tossed it back into the carriage. “What’s a Cabo ta Cazya?”
“It’s Sektoric for Knight of the Body. A title granted to the old physikers of the Sektoric Empire, back before the Territories.” She hung upside down from the roof, making a curtain of her long black hair, and peered through the carriage window. “I think it’s under that battle axe there.”
Seth scooted the aforementioned weapon out of the way. Beneath it was a box of pieces for an unfamiliar game and a yellowing paperback entitled Heterodoxies of Preseraphic Sektorbrav. He passed it into Ofelia’s reaching hand.
“They were an order tasked with serving the Emperor and his court.” She riffled through the pages. “Bloodletters, bonesetters, bathhouse keepers. They were honored even as they shoveled the shit.” She halted and turned the book around, displaying an intaglio image in antique cross-hatch. A lantern-jawed man, the top half of his face encased in a slit-eyed mask, standing at the stony lip of a flowing reservoir.
“Huh. The Cabo ta Cazya.” Seth sat on the carriage stoop and stared past his knees at the street.
At the drain set into it, where fountain water flowed into the darkness.
“The Sektorics were, and remain, a people quite obsessed with cleanliness,” Ofelia said. “At the height of the Interemergence their emperors used to hold their imperial court in great heated pools. Swimming with steam. Headsmen in hot tubs, imagine that. I suppose it beats a carriage for smell.”
“And these Cabos. They maintained it?”
Ofelia traced Seth’s intense stare. Understanding kindled on her face as she zeroed in on the same drain.
“They did indeed,” she murmured.
Seth stood up and stepped to the drain, and listened to the fall of his feet.
“What if,” he said, “our bells are ringing on the wrong side of the ground?”