Chương 31: 1.30. Scarecrows

"There." Harri—that was the man's name, and his ratty scarf and fingerless gloves marked him as a manual laborer, not a waitstaff type—pointed past the fence and the low stone wall to a squat wooden lean-to in the bungalow's yard.

"In the shed. It's his husband and someone I don't know. Family friend, maybe."

"In the shed. Couldn't have been so friendly, eh?" Ofelia put her hands on her hips.

"Thank you for your cooperation, sir. We will take it from here." She led Seth to the shed and opened it to a room full of gardening tools, the scent of pine shavings, and two gaunt, desaturated wraiths in upper-crust garments that were now far more crust than upper. A man and a woman, both of middle age, standing vacant, the only sign of life on them the shallow rise and fall of their emaciated chests. Ofelia sucked air through her teeth.

"Scarecrows." Seth lingered at the threshold.

"Should we get Annalise?"

"They're harmless enough," Ofelia said.

"Just meat, now. Meat and bones and unfortunate ascots. Might as well get a look at them." She strolled into the shed and slow-paced around them. Neither moved, not even to track her with their eyes. These desaturated people were so stark and gruesome without the spark that animated the al Ydrises.

"So the difference between you and them is that your soul is still around and theirs went back to the wheel, right?" Seth asked.

"The difference between me and them is a regimen of oral hygiene and a sense of fashion in-step with the current century." Ofelia pinched the man's lacy collar.

"And that, too, yes. Such is the fate of an unfortunate who snuffs out when there is no psychelith to catch the departing soul. It's why Tiago and I didn't go unlit until we'd followed Mother to the Necropolis. Otherwise, we'd have ended up just the same." She stepped to the closest shallow-breathing zombie and delivered a sharp slap to his cheek. He remained still.

"You see? Nobody's home."

"I guess not."

"The second emergence was when all this guff began. The unlighting. A seraph plague, everyone supposes. Back then, these empty vessels were perfect vessels for a disembodied seraph. They'd force their way into the shell and go hunting elsewhere for more kindred to infect."

"That's where the unlit get their reputation, huh?"

"Partially." Ofelia perused the wall. She found a rope and uncoiled it.

"These days, of course, the deathspell prevents most seraphs from working their havoc on the continent. And certainly any that were so weak as to require a vessel, rather than make their own. And so the unlit just stand, spent and still. Like scarecrows. Hence their nickname, you see? Fortunately for us, they retain some base function." She prodded the man in his black eye. It flickered shut.

"Blinking, for example. And if you leash them…" She tied the rope around his waist.

"You can lead them." She gave a demonstrative tug and he took a slow step toward the shed door.

"That's about the limit. It is otherwise an empty vessel. Perhaps there's a way to stuff a new soul inside, but the sorcerers haven't found one. Only possessor-seraphs have ever managed it, and any seraph that'd need a physical vessel wouldn't make it through the deathspell's barrier."

"What is it that decides which seraphs can get through the deathspell, anyway?" Seth asked.

"Is it just how strong they are?"

"Not entirely," Ofelia said.

"There's any number of—" Tackle her, the Fox said. Seth plunged into Ofelia, sending her staggering to one side. The pitchfork that would have pierced her heart sank into her midsection instead. The scarecrow to whom they hadn't been paying attention ground her pitchfork further into the al Ydris daughter's midsection. The unlit woman's face was slack, her head drooping to one side like an inexpertly piloted marionette. No rage on her face. Nothing at all.

"YDRIS," she howled. Ofelia stumbled backward into Seth, her mouth ajar with shock and pain. He caught her; her blood coated his palms. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. The scarecrow woman charged. Seth attempted a sort of heroic placing-behind of Ofelia—in practice it was more like he dropped her. He yanked his cutlass from the scabbard and okay, actually he yanked the scabbard off his belt entirely, because it was a mismatched scabbard and the fucking thing didn't pull right.

It rose to its occasion regardless, slamming between two ichor-soaked prongs of the pitchfork and halting the murderous woman in her tracks. That broken wail again: "YDRIS!" The scarecrow man staggered toward Seth's flank, snatching a cane knife from its peg on the shed wall as he came. Ofelia's legs scissored around his calf and swung him to the ground.

She hissed in pain as she rolled atop him and pulled her dirk from its place on her hip, and then Seth's attention was arrested by the woman wrenching the pitchfork to one side, binding his cutlass in its barbs. Well, fine. Stabbing was new to him; he was well acquainted with kicking. His foot connected with her sternum and sent her sprawling back. The scabbard went with her and now Seth's blade was bare and ready for its grim work.

He kept the cutlass tip pointed at the dirty boot print he'd left on her chest and gave up a silent prayer to St. Silas that he'd hold up his end of the partnership. The woman hunkered back from his blade, circling with a wariness at odds with her inanimate, empty face. Her pitchfork's tines glistened with Ofelia's steel-colored blood. It's a broomstick. It's not a pitchfork, it's a broomstick. Remember Tiago's training. The feet, the shoulders. The loading of the muscle, and then— The woman lunged.

Seth bolted backward, blade up and out, and the center of her gravity shifted and the impact went all along his arm to the shoulder, and he didn't so much stab her as hold his cutlass in the right spot for her to stab herself. The edge raked across her chest and bit into her collarbone, and St. Silas help him, he'd never forget how that felt, blade biting into living bone. He scrambled out of the way. She half-fell forward, the pitchfork thunking into the wall with enough force to stick in the warped wood.

Her left arm, the one beneath her slashed-open shoulder, spasmed and lost its grip on the pitchfork haft. With her right she snatched a machete from the wall and spun back around, and then suddenly the edge of a cleaver had buried itself an inch thick into her face, splitting the lip and popping the eye. Ofelia was on her hands and knees over the unlit man's corpse, whose sawn-through neck stained his shirtfront and slack jaw.

She pointed at a pair of shears, sliced her finger through the air, and they rocketed from the wall into the woman's chest. Had to be one of her hexentats.

"No," she gasped at Seth, blood bubbling out between her lips, and Seth didn't realize what she'd meant until the woman came lurching back at him, gurgling murder and sprouting blade hafts like a gruesome textbook's wound diagram come to life.

Seth took hold of the shear handles that stayed stuck in her chest and heaved; the skewered woman twisted to the ground and he was upon her, the cutlass biting into her arm where she raised it not to defend herself but to reach for Seth's throat, and the cutlass stuck in her, and now she was bucking upward to bite him, the mad thing, how was he supposed to make this monster stop moving? How'd you do the last monster you fought? His pulse leapt. There it was again in his boot, his beautiful little firestarter.

Out it came, a thin whisper of steel, and in it went to the woman's stomach. The woman did the predictable thing and erupted into a flailing pyre. His tremulous fingers scurried across the wood, found his cutlass—for all the good this fucker'd done him—and with a crossguard chak he slammed it back into its scabbard.

"Ofelia." He crouched next to her where she slumped against the wall.

"We gotta move. Shed's burning down. Can you get up?"

"Your knife," Ofelia slurred, as Seth threw her arm around his shoulder and hauled her to her feet.

"Seth, your—""Don't worry about it." Seth dragged her to the door. Smoke was already hanging above their heads.

"Your stomach. How bad?"

"I'm okay," she mumbled, though it was patently untrue by the look of her.

"My tortoise hexentat, it toughens my skin. I'm—" She coughed a streak of black blood onto Seth's shirt.

"Fuck," she noted.

"What should I do? Should I get Annalise?"

"No. No, I can stand. Just—help me get to the carriage. Please." The stricken girl leaned on Seth. He helped her limp from the shack as the smoke thickened. By the yard gate, Harri gawked at them with horror.

"What happened? Saints and fucking seraphs, what happened?" Seth tore the scarf from Harri's neck; he grabbed for it on an overwhelmed delay and then meekly allowed Seth to use it as an impromptu bandage around Ofelia's leaking middle.

"Get the fucking fireguard." Seth jerked his thumb at a wheelbarrow sitting idle by the stone wall.

"And I'm commandeering this."

"The fireguard—" The man noticed the smoke rising from the shed.

"Oh, saints." Down the street Seth charged, wheelbarrow squeaking as it carted the dazed unlit girl. Ofelia's blackout eyes drooped. Her hands knit over her punctured belly, as if the wheelbarrow were a funeral bier.

"You're okay," Seth panted, with what breath he could spare.

"You're okay, Ofelia."

"I'm okay," she repeated. Her voice was so small and strained.

"This is classic fun uncle, weird niece shenanigans. You'll be all right." Her brief laugh terminated in a groan of pain. Seth rolled into Sondam's square, wild-eyed.

"The Verdugo," he cried, to nobody in particular.

"Where's the Verdugo?" The munition-plated hermandati officer atop the scaffold nearly dropped his bill at the sight of them. He bobbled it in his gauntlets, caught it, and pointed it toward the coaching inn abutting the square.

"At the Halted Hart, goodman. What in St. Luize's mercy happened to her?" Seth ignored the man and carted Ofelia closer to the building. The dark goliath shapes of Draco and Draka loomed in the stables." Annalise," he bellowed.

"Ofelia's hurt! She's hurt really bad!" The inn's coach house entrance slammed open. Annalise filled its doorway. Her eyes went round as moons at the carnage, her face a portrait of fear and rage.

"Tiago!" She spun back round to the coach house and her unseen son.

"Get me the circle and get me my sword, now!"