”We’ve nobody for you,” Karla said.
Karla was not a corregidor. Everyone was agreed on that point. They were here in Shipfarrok, seated at a table in the open air of its sparse, rustic village square, and Shipfarrok didn’t have a corregidor. They had a Karla, though, and Karla had some shockingly good wine. She’d broken out a pair of bottles for the Verdugo, and her son, and her daughter, and her thief.
“Nobody?” Annalise sat back in her chair, which groaned with complaint under the broad, muscular butt perched atop it. Seth il Gutierre knew how that felt; he had never once complained. Little hunk of junk should appreciate the gift it had been given. “Nobody in two years needs a look at their case?”
Karla shook her silver-wire head. “Nope.”
“Or a deferred punishment.”
“Nor that, Madam Verdugo. We keep our own order here.” Karla’s slate eyes slid to Seth’s and slid away again, like his inverted sclera were patches of black ice. “Don’t often have call for your type.”
“My type being Verdugos,” Annalise said.
“As you say, Madam.” Karla worked a parcel of chewing leaf between her teastained teeth and cast a glance to a man idling nearby, scratching his stomach through his rough cotton work shirt. There were a dozen such people lounging around this impromptu tasting, and Seth wouldn’t have been surprised if they were looking at a third or more of Shipfarrok’s denizens.
Human denizens, to be specific. There were, appropriately enough, a fuckton of sheep in Sheepfuck.
They’d followed hard roads to reach the place, winding upward through switchbacks carved into a great limestone bluff until it crested the ridge and deposited its travelers, winded and saddle-sore, onto the rim of a ridged-and-rocky plateau. Its surface housed a tremendous sweep of tawny grass and a silver-black river, and a land dashed through with shelves of pale stone, stacked and striated, the pages of an enormous book laid open, and above it the sky piled itself into a basilica of late-autumn cloud, all gray and cream and alder wood, with the Deathspell’s green shimmer threaded through it at the edges like a manuscript’s illuminated border.
Fuck off, Tiago had murmured, to nobody in particular, and Seth had said What’d I tell you? The overlooks, and Tiago had said fuck off to him as well.
The town itself was quite unremarkable from that height—a scatter of slate roofs in a crook of the river, a mill wheel turning in the current, and the blobby dots of the unending sheep. They’d hoped for another helping of deceptive beauty as they drew nearer, but down amongst its withdrawn people and its bleating industry, Seth could think of no additional remarks.
“Sure look it, Karla. I have no reason to disbelieve you.” Annalise stuck a big blunt thumb through her belt loops. “Place seems orderly, peaceable, outta the way. Tell the truth, I mostly wanted to stop in to introduce me and mine. And yet a woman of my profession, in a town like yours, with a drink and a curtsey like you’ve given me, rather than a neighborly salute and a cheerful country fuck off. I reckon this is the wind-up for something you need.”
Air bubbled glutinously around Karla’s chaw and her sucking teeth.
“No need to creep with me.” Annalise smiled patiently. “Is it a seraph? I’ve got a sullen secretary boy over here whose day you’d make-and-a-half if you had yourself a seraph.”
Karla looked into her time-gnarled hands, then up again.
“What I have I’m not sure,” she said.
Soya il Mandrak, the missing man’s wife, was a narrow-shouldered woman whose sharp face and shaded eyes were predisposed for stoic sorrow, as if she’d lived her life in wary expectation of tragedies to come.
“Corbin rode up after our hand told him we were down one ram.” As she stood by the pasture wall, she wrapped a rag around her wrist and unwound it again, over and over. “That was two days ago. We found his pony cropping grass at the pasture gate, still saddled. All calm.”
“Calm like it’d been tended?” Ofelia asked.
“And watered,” Soya said. “Still damp on the muzzle.”
The pasture was a broad green shelf at the ridge’s shoulder, penned with sturdy drystack limestone walls and a timber gate. Sheep gnawed grass and regarded their arrival with the same cock-eyed, ruminant disregard they lent to their pen’s mysterious new beautification.
“And there was the statue,” Soya said.
The group’s attention turned once more to the statue, which was in two halves. The bit that had snapped off from the wider base, at its hip, showed it to be of a life-sized woman, her face a tranquil mask. Her gown flowing marble plated with nephrite, her hair so finely chiseled as to seem soft until the touching of it. Her right tit out, but in the artsy way, not the taphouse mascot way where drunken hands had polished it shiny.
“Uh huh.” Annalise paced slowly around the statue. “And I suppose this goes without saying, but you had not seen this statue before.”
“No,” Soya said.
“And it’s not of him,” Ofelia said.
“No,” Soya said.
“Unlucky,” Ofelia murmured, quiet enough Seth heard and Soya didn’t, or didn’t care to react.
“You find any trace of the ram?” Annalise asked. Her hand settled on Seth’s lower back with easy possessiveness.
“None,” Soya said. “Two more gone, though. And the herding dog.”
“No struggle that I can see.” Tiago strolled toward them along the wall’s perimeter. “No clambering over or carrying off. No churning in the dirt, and just the one set of hoofprints.”
Soya nodded. “Saw the same thing when I brought the horse in.”
Annalise crouched at the statue’s base and tugged. Her biceps stood out under their pale tattooed skin. The base rocked and tipped; she halted and set it back down.
“How in fuck,” she said, mildly, “did they get this up here? And who in fuck are they?”
Seth knelt at the gate. The paddock lock was open. Scrapes on its shackle, but that was just wear and tear. “Someone with a key unlocked this,” he said. “And didn’t lock it again.”
Soya frowned. “Not like him.”
Annalise shook her arms out. “What’s he like, your aul man?”
“He was a man,” Soya said, without emotion. “Not a laughing man. Not merry. But he did what was expected of him, and he made a life enough for sharing, and he didn’t fall into any habit, and you’d look for him and he was there. Till now.”
“You needn’t talk about was or did just yet, madam,” Ofelia said.
Soya shrugged and looked past them.
“All this pasture is yours?” Annalise’s voice was calculatedly casual.
“Yep,” Soya said. “Here to the cliff edge.”
Tiago’s whistle carried on the swirling wind. “You have some money, then?”
“Nah.” Soya tapped the ash of her cigarette over the cliff’s edge. “Land is cheap in these parts. His land’s cheaper.”
“I can see why. The terrain here must give you a life of policing.” Annalise caught Seth around the waist and steered him with cheerful relentlessness into an embrace from behind, her brawny arms crossing his chest like the claws of a bearskin cloak. “Dumbshite sheep getting through the fences and falling to their dumbshite deaths. Second row follows the first. Seen a dozen wasted that way.”
Seth looked quizzically up at the woman holding him, catching a fine view of her imposingly sized nostrils. “You were a shepherd?”
Annalise nudged him snug against her and rested her chin atop his head. Still so miraculous how well they fit together. Like he was a piece designed to be slotted into this spot. “My cousin was. Pretty poor work, if I’m being honest. He inherited the biggest flock in the village and lost half by the time I ended up in the nick.”
“Only gotten worse lately,” Soya said. “These last few years, autumn’s brought a fiend of a windy season with it. When the gales roll in, it gets fierce enough to pull a wether off the hill or topple a barricade. That’s what we’d figured happened with the ram. Corbin was seeing if we had a hole to patch in the cliffside fence.”
“Saints,” Seth said.
Tiago was very still, his lips pressed tightly together.
“Never cordial, this place. Never easy.” Soya stood at the lip of the ridge and pointed into its depths. “Way down there, when the fog’s not so high, you can see the Eastern Deadwater. Back when there was outshore sailing, you had a port down there. That’s where the name comes from. Shipfarrok. Farrok means blessed in Tuthimi, see, and you needed a blessed ship to land here. The rocks tore you to pieces otherwise.”
She stared down at the aforementioned rocks. The slope and stone protruded from the curling mist like broken teeth.
“I’m off,” she said, abruptly. “Less you need me.”
Annalise took a polite step to one side, good-naturedly tugging Seth with her like a rag doll, and Soya strode through the gate and away.
“Maybe he up and roamed off,” Seth said, from between his girlfriend’s biceps.
Annalise’s voice sent vibrations through her chest and into his spine. “Just left this life behind?”
“Men have been known to, with the right motivation.” Seth gave her hip a playful tap and was rewarded with another rumbling laugh. “Maybe he thought he had something better, somewhere. Took the sheep as a tide-me-over for the trip.”
“Or as lovers,” Ofelia said.
“Whist,” Annalise said.
“Why not the horse, then?” Tiago tapped the pommel of his saber with his forefinger. “And why the dog? Did he like the dog?”
“Everyone likes dogs,” Ofelia said.
“Not me,” Tiago said, which surprised Seth not at all.
“Maybe he wanted his family to keep it, the horse,” he said. “Not a cheap animal, especially around these parts, you’d reckon.”
“Maybe so.” Tiago squinted into the overcast horizon. “Or maybe where he went off to no horse could take him.”
Seth looked to the ragged edge of the land. “You think he went down?”
Tiago shook his head and tucked a lock of his shaggy raven hair behind his ear. “I think he went up.”
Seth plonked the thick iron tureen down on its ring stand and lifted its lid. So uncovered, the mutton stew billowed a pale aromatic cloud into the air. Annalise inhaled deep and sighed gratefully. Her hand found his waist and stilled him before he could cross to his seat.
“That smells deadly, il Gutierre,” she said, and pulled him into her lap.
“I gotta get the plates,” he protested.
“My man can cook,” she said. “He’s got a tight little arse and he can cook.”
She kissed him, and he barely recognized himself in the noise he made when she nipped his lower lip. He eased away from her as the kiss entered its fifth second. “I really gotta—”
She hummed her lack of care and curled her fist into the collar of his shirt to keep him still.
He laughed and shifted his face, but that just made her kisses start raining down on his nose and jaw. “The kids are coming.”
“Let ‘em,” she murmured against his skin, but she released him. Seth made his narrow escape; Annalise’s hand landed a solid slap on his ass as he left her lap. He sat next to her, and swatted lightly back at her, and his butt tingled in an unfamiliar but lovely way.
The kids are coming. There was a sentence he’d never have thought he’d say.
Tiago and Ofelia approached from the nearby carriage, lugging the folding table between them. “Tiago says Sheepfuck is the staging ground for a Sarkanian cloud pirate.” Ofelia kicked the legs into place and set the table down. “Do I have that right?”
“We’re on a ragged edge of dome here.” Tiago dug into his pack and removed a rolled-up cloth map. He unfurled it across the table, keeping it halfway off the side to avoid the drippings as the al Ydris ladies served themselves. “You have yourself a stormship, you skirt out on the Eastern Deadwater. They’re made to sail on the water as well as the sky. So you let the wind carry you south—call that a solid three weeks over sea.”
Ofelia carefully avoided the meat, and dolloped a scoopful of broth and caramelized onion into her bowl. “Long trip.”
“Uh huh. Sort of thing that needs full larders. Might help explain our missing sheep.” As if this tangent had reminded him of his slowly cooling dinner, Tiago took up his spoon. “So you sail down the Deadwater, hugging the shore, mostly—”
He took a distracted bite of Seth’s stew and paused.
“What’s this?”
“Mutton,” Seth said.
“Mutton doesn’t taste this good.”
“Low and slow, my friend,” Seth said. “And a lot of onions, and acid. Some of that red wine Feeli forgot to cork last week.”
“Thus doth time gild the mystic’s mistake,” Ofelia said. “And solecism is made sacred.”
Annalise chuckled around her fork. “Who wrote that, love?”
“Inathi il Sarpai’s Second Apologetics, I think.” Ofelia went back into the tureen for a meatier portion. “I’d check, but I shredded it for kindling last month.”
“You sail south,” Tiago insisted, around another mouthful of mutton. “You fill your envelope past the Plainland with one of the outlaw reefs. or an onboard magician if you’ve got one. And now you’re latched right into the sky artery coming up from the Kanjir floodplain and the Sarkanian lands. Right on time for the Summer season.” His black-nailed finger re-enacted the fanciful voyage in a wide loop-de-loop along the map. “You suck the legion’s blood all along the mountain belts, all through the summer, then you catch a tributary wind back up the western corridor, and cut back across overland.”
Ofelia tilted her head owlishly. “You’d be seen, surely.”
“Not if you took yourself up through the craglands. And what’s one of the last cragland spots before you’re too far north, and you’re spotted by Legion air scouts with their eyes peeled for advancing seraphs?” Tiago stabbed a finger triumphantly into the map. “Sheepfuck.”
Askance silence followed this pronouncement, as they digested their mutton and misapprehension.
“I mean…” Annalise scratched her pointed nose. “The geography makes sense. Give you that. And the statue.”
“Ballast,” Tiago said. “Permissible loot to loosen, and you might need to if you’re bringing on a man and three head of sheep.”
“And a dog,” Ofelia said.
“I’d throw the dog off a cliff, if I was a pirate,” Tiago said.
“You are a nasty little person,” Ofelia said.
“Anyway, I’m looking for another explanation about the statue,” Tiago said. “But how else would you carry that cracked-in-half broad up a mountainside?”
“A broad like me could manage it,” Annalise said.
“There is no such thing as a broad like you,” Tiago said.
“Is there no more straightforward explanation?” Seth leaned on his elbows. “Soya mentioned those gales. Are we sure one didn’t just tug him and a few wooly friends off the mountainside?”
Tiago snapped his fingers. They made a thwap against his leather glovelettes. “That’s the thing. Gales getting worse these past few years. That’s what convinced me. A Sarkani stormship, you fill it once at the beginning of the season, and it lives in the air for months and months.” He took hold of his fork and lifted it above the table. “It can only sink, see. Can’t rise. Not without landing all the way and recasting, which our fugitives won’t do.”
He set his fork along its journey in a slowly descending arc across his place setting.
“Now the Artery airships, they know exactly how long the trip’ll be,” he said. “The breath magicians calibrate the envelopes carefully, to send their vessel forth and back in one long parabolic gust. But sky piracy, that’s an inexact business with amateur magicians.” He restarted the fork’s path, higher and jerkier. “You just push as much storm into your envelope as’ll fit. Once you slink back to your hideout, you have to vent what you didn’t use. And there’s only really the one way to do it, which is violently.”
“Gales that can pluck a man off a mountain.” Annalise pulled her pipe from its loop in her bag and stuck its well-chewed stem between her teeth. “How about that. I may just have to cosign this cockamamie story of yours, boyo.” She reached across the table and ruffled Tiago’s hair.
He begrudgingly allowed the motion for a bare second, then muttered “Okay now,” and jerked away from her hand.
“So these pirates came down,” Seth said. “They picked Corbin and his animals up—why? What does he offer besides his sheep?”
“Maybe nothing,” Annalise said. “Maybe he is dead, after all. Somewhere on the rocks. Maybe it’s a murder, maybe it’s a kidnapping, maybe Seth’s right and he leapt at something worth leaping for.”
Seth thought of Soya, looking into the mist.
“We can ask the man when we see him,” Tiago said. “Cause if I’m right, there’s an illegal stormship around here with a pack of guilty hexis-headed freebooters aboard.”
“And we can’t just send a letter and wash our hands of it,” Ofelia said. “By the time the legion tasks a team, they’ll have sailed away.”
“Okay,” Seth said. “So we’ve maybe got ourselves a flying machine to find. How?”
“How else would you find a flyer that runs on ensorcelled wind?” Tiago plucked a wildflower from the ground and flicked it upward. Its petals scattered into the pallid sky. “Follow the wind.”