Chương 11: 1.10. Me, I'm You

She rode back into town, the Verdugo, in a hex-engine full of dead men. A headless muran in her passenger seat. A butchery in the back. Men hacked apart and opened up.

This was her conveyance, and as it puttered back into Prossimo, past the grand stone edifice within which its owner lived, his surviving servants assembled in the square and atop roofs and in the windows of his manor, with rifles and shotguns and a saints-preserve-us crossbow, all tracking her as she stopped the rolling charnel house at the crest of the Sidewinder lodge, by its stable. She stepped from the car, nudged the passenger side door open with a boot, and Polecat's headless corpse fell out.

Then she stepped from the wheel and out of the stable and strolled down the lodge hill to the square, surveyed the horrified civilians and the steely-eyed killers and said:"Wyred mentioned I might come calling, then?"

"Madame Verdugo." Rohan sent this hail from his balcony, three gaudy colonnaded floors up from the dirt upon which Annalise stood. His guard stuck close by him, rifle hanging off an arm.

"What a relief to see you've come through this complicated day unscathed." She jerked a thumb toward the lodge.

"Brought your car back. Brought your lads, too." Rohan kept it light, though his grin was rictus.

"It appears my overzealous compatriots might have waylaid you. Unwisely." Annalise chuckled without humor.

"Come down here, Patre," she said.

"I would prefer to conduct our conversation from here." Rohan settled his hands on the railing.

"Until we've come to a more equitable footing, figuratively speaking." Around Annalise, men scurried like beetles across the roofs and battlements and the square. Men settled on the scaffold and behind carts and carriages. A dozen or more that the eye could make out. The Prossimo syndicate's log, turned over. All the crawlers crawling out.

"You must understand, Madam Verdugo," their master said.

"This isn't how it might look. I have many friends, you see. And more folks besides, eager to become my friends." A pair of whispering minions hurried into the lodge and found the hex-engine and its ghoulish contents. One dead in the front, four dead in the back. Nothing in the trunk but bloodstains. Seth il Gutierre watched from the mucked-out hay in the corner as they concluded their search and departed. He moved silently with them out into the lodge's lengthening shadow.

He slid along the evening's sharpening edge. All eyes were trained on the gory woman in black; all ears were attuned to the primped Patre's bullshit. He was neither seen nor heard.

"Where is Seth il Gutierre, if I may ask?"

"Everyone who was part of this is being dealt with on an individual basis, patre. I saw to Gutierre. Came back here to talk about you, not him." Down, the Fox whispered, and he flattened himself under the provision house's porch, and to the little bugger's credit the boots he heard over his head would certainly have seen him otherwise. Knees and elbows through the cool underplank earth and out the porch's other side, and he was one final daylit sprint away from the manor.

Rohan was saying some drivel about civic duty; Annalise drew her sword. The spray of claret snagged wandering eyes and riveted them to the square and Seth bowled himself out and through and against the walls of the manor, and now here he was, a tick digging into Prossimo's body politic. Plenty of crannies and columns.

"There really is no call for that kind of violence, Madam Verdugo."

"Drawing a sword's not using a sword, Patre. Just needed your attention." Annalise leaned on the naked blade.

"How about you walk me through what you think happens from here." Seth's picks plucked the servant's door open. The patre's reply was reduced to a genial muffle as he entered the manor. Inside was a thief's gaudy, maximalist dream. Dream to own and dream to case. Every room and every hall had some flourish that would hide him from whoever Rohan hadn't scrambled out into the yard. The tricky bit here was the floors. Not the sound—the carpet was thick—but the unclean trail Seth was trying his best not to leave.

Blood, mud, straw. In a walk-through pantry, he contorted himself into a crockery cabinet for a breathless minute to hide from a plain-tunicked housemaid, and swore to the saints he could see her nose crinkle at the melange he must be coloring the air with. But she was just a maid, and she was being paid a maid's pittance to follow directions, not her nose. He listened to her block heels clack away, then re-emerged. Through another door there was a familiar hallway.

Paintings and poshness and a forbidding frosted-glass door. Back into Rohan's office for the last time, Seth hoped. He scooted Rohan's overstuffed chair aside and acquainted himself with the other side of the fine man's fine desk. He rifled through Rohan's possessions; switchknives, wrapped hard candies, a tin of some goop that seemed cosmetic and smelled like copper. Papers and folios and decks of cards. He tugged what looked useful onto the scarred desktop.

A black leatherbound address book he'd seen atop Rohan's desk the night of the head. His checks, his notes. Saints, please let some of this stuff be useful. A battered attaché sat in a sconce by the lower right hand pedestal drawer. Seth opened it; a popmite six-shooter and a carved catchbox full of cigars. He removed both, paused, and put the cigar box back in.

To these he added the address book, the notebook, a checkbook, a sheaf of papers, and whatever else he could find as he yanked the drawers from their casters. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! His eyes wandered to the last untouched compartment, sitting in the shadow of the desk's overhang. The safe. A third-ring infusion on it. He could get this open, he knew he could. The Fox yipped: Don't waste time. Fuck you, Fox. But he didn't.

He left Rohan's office door ajar, stuffed attaché in one hand and revolver in the other. He had never been past the first floor but he knew where the stairs were. He climbed their stony spiral, hugging the edge and loading munition-mite bullets into his stolen pistol as silently as he knew how. Damn macho guns and their damn macho clanky clacky sounds. As he stepped from the stairwell to the airy rococo glass of the third floor Rohan's words sharpened into legibility once more.

"—without fuss," Rohan was saying. Seth watched the man gesticulate through the sliding glass window, his gun-toting sentry a couple of steps behind. Two beguiled backs.

"And whenever the Legion cares to send its auditors, we'd be happy to—" The mad bird of anxiety in Seth's chest resolved its fluttering into three words at dinner-conversation volume.

"Pardon me, patre." Rohan turned and the smile on his face drooped.

"You remember what I told you?" Seth slid the glass panel further open with his foot.

"While you were grinning about how bad you were gonna fuck my life?" He took a step onto the balcony and stopped, out of sight of Rohan's shooters on the ground.

"I told you I was gonna pay you back," he said. Rohan leaned away from him, hands palpating for the bannister that separated him from the void.

"Now, Seth," he said.

"Now, Rohan," Seth echoed.

"How about you slide that gun to me, Fits." The man with the rifle was il Fitsman. Seth had worked with him a couple of summers ago at the mite silos, dragging feed into hoppers teeming with larvae. Fits sang a lot, and never in tune.

"All right, Seth," he said, and lowered the rifle to the floor. Seth feigned letting his attention return to Rohan and Fits went for the little piece stuck in his belt, and Seth shot him twice, first in the chest and then the recoil climbed the next one to his face. The gun dropped from his slackening grip and his draw came up as just a twitching finger, like some wordless accusation, and then he died open-mouthed, with a black star studding his cheek. The first drop of red oozed from it like a tear.

So there was the second man Seth had killed today. But you could say that the guy killed himself by acting like an idiot, and Seth decided that was his conclusion.

"Stop," Rohan roared, into the nascent hue and cry that those two pops had summoned.

"Everyone stop. Freeze. He's got a gun on me, for saints' sake." He wasn't looking down at the square, where he'd just smothered a battle in its birth, or at the new corpse by his feet. He was looking right at Seth, with the kind of expression Seth had longed to see on his darkly lined face. And all it had taken was a gun trained right between those two suddenly respectful eyes.

"Seth. My lad." Rohan smiled a familiar smile. Like a mirror to the sickly grin Seth had given him last night. He took a step forward.

"Let's—""Let's not." Seth stepped back and pushed the balcony door further ajar.

"Inside." Rohan exuded mindfulness and control over every monitored step. Even as the right heel of his white captoe tracked Fits' blood into his manor.

"We'll figure this out, us two. Two Syndicate men. Men of expertise. The Verdugo out there, she's a hard nut. But all we need is a moment." He paused at the top of the stairs.

"We do for her, and her little assistants, and then I'm in your debt for a change, how's that? And I have some friends who can ensure the story is whatever it needs to be." Seth shook his head.

"It's gone beyond that, Rohan. Prossimo's watching."

"That woman out there has killed half a dozen of Prossimo's sons. Means to kill more. A little bit of lingering in the right doorways, a few braces spread around. And the replacement is someone who respects the peace we work for and maintain. And all we need is a moment."

"All you need is a moment, Rohan." Seth indicated the stairs with the barrel of the gun.

"And if you try for it, I'll shoot you."

"You wouldn't shoot me, Seth. I couldn't bear to shoot you and I'm a flinty bastard. Had to get someone to do it for me, just like you are."

"You saw what I did to Fits?" Seth's fingers flexed on the wheelgun's knurled handle.

"I killed Prichard, too."

"Prichard was an asshole and Fits was an idiot," Rohan said.

"Me, I'm you. You're me, son. Looking out through time." And he was right. Seth saw it in him. Sudden and gut-wrenching. The same beady desperation, the same preoccupation with corners and contingencies. Rohan was the same sick, feral animal Seth was, and the revulsion stuck a stone in his throat. Being a patre of the syndicates, that was the dream of every cutpurse. This was the best that Seth could hope for. The same exact rotten thing he'd been doing all his miserable life, with a nicer chair.

Rohan stumbled with a curse as they rounded the second floor landing, and fell to one side. Seth took a hasty step forward out of pure reflex, and Rohan spun round with a gleaming knife and a rabid leer on his face. Seth jerked backward away from the blade. It flicked past his face by a scant centimeter. He shot Rohan in the stomach. Rohan fell backward and tumbled down the final few stairs. The gun's loud report ricocheted through the stone hallway and resolved into a chaos of voices outside.

"What was that?"

"He's shot him. He's goddamn shot him."

"Saints and Seraphs, what's—""Out of the way. Out of the fucking way." That was Annalise, loud and unyielding.

"Everyone out." Seth rushed after the fallen patre to where he'd crumpled at the base of the stairs, keeping his aim on Rohan's pallid, shocked face.

"You." The tendons in Rohan's neck quivered.

"You fucking rat."

"I have had it," Seth said, "with you people calling me rat." He spun the wheelgun's cylinder out with a chunky clack and fed a bullet into its topmost chamber.

"Oh God." Rohan's blood bubbled between his fingers. One of his eyes was swelling up where he'd knocked his head on the steps.

"God—Seraphs—Saints—you fucking rat. Oh God —" The stairs really must have knocked him loopy. Seth was hardly religious, but nobody cried that name out anymore. Better to beseech the Hundred Saints. At least they were still listening. Footsteps pounding toward the candelabra'd corner. Seth swung the gun around and into Annalise's face as she came round the bend.

"Annalise." He laid a hand on his chest and felt his own galloping heart.

"How'd you get in?"

"Help," Rohan wailed." Help, I've been shot."

"Sure look, that's how. When a gunshot happens, everyone responds a lot better to a bossy tart like me." Annalise knelt next to the moaning patre.

"Saints, Sethy. Save some of these shitehawks for the rest of us, huh?"

"It was the stomach," Seth said.

"He won't die from that." She snorted.

"So definitive. Mister Battlefield Surgeon suddenly."

"Well, he won't die from that, I mean."

"True." She lifted her blade out to one side, like an hour hand striking the retreat of day into night.

"Rohan il Agante," she said.

"For criminal behavior including racketeering, coercion, murder, and the engagement of contract killing, and by the apposite wrath and merciful name of the Sorcerer General, I sentence you to death."

"Neither of you are getting out of this alive." Rohan had found some clarity. His teeth were bared and bloody.

"First step you take outside, my men—" Annalise struck his head from his shoulders.