Chương 5: 1.4. Madam Verdugo

Seth shouldered the carved door open into the flickering office. Polecat was halfway out of his seat before he was a step inside; Rohan's outstretched hand was all that kept him from lunging at Seth. Rohan gave Seth one of his stop right there smiles, and pointed to the box beneath his arm.

"Is that for me, il Gutierre?" Seth stormed to the desk.

"Was this a test, Rohan?"

"Why?" Rohan leaned back into the velvet comfort of his seat.

"Did you fail?"

"If you didn't want me to look in the box, you should have said don't look in the box." Seth clacked it onto the desk.

"You never said that." Rohan's smile emerged undamaged.

"What do I care what's in the box, il Gutierre?"" You didn't know?"

"I have a buyer." Rohan folded his arms.

"I am not nosy."

"You have a buyer? Oh, okay." Seth smiled big and phony against the acrid burn in the back of his throat.

"Great. I guess it's all right, then."

"You didn't remove anything from it, did you? It's all still there?"

"It's all still there," Seth said.

"All one of it."

"All right." Rohan's smooth affect hit a bumpy patch and flaked its paintjob.

"What's in the box?" Seth braced himself again.

"You said you didn't care."

"I didn't." Rohan's finger flicked upward. Behind Seth, Polecat stood.

"But you talk too much, and now you're unnerving me." Seth cleared his throat, flipped the latch, and raised the lid.

"You have a buyer," he said, "for this." And he lifted the head out of the box by its limp yellow hair.

"That's uh," Polecat said, and then stopped, like he'd forgotten the words for a dead woman's severed head. Seth helped: "That's a dead woman's severed head." Rohan's tattooed lips hung open. His expression was remarkably like the head's, in fact.

"Put it back," he said.

"Patre—" Rohan lunged forward, overtaxed belt buckle clacking against his desk.

"Put it back in the box and close the fucking box." Seth dropped the head in the box and shut it. The three men stared at the gruesome prize the thief brought back.

"But you have a buyer," Seth said.

"Shut the fuck up," Rohan murmured, monotone, "while I think." He folded his hands over his stomach.

"I do have a buyer," he decided.

"I do, indeed. And whatever my buyer wants with this is not my business. My business is acquisitions and transactions. So here's what we'll do. You, Polecat, will reconvene our gentlemen's gentlemen, bring them back here, and send word to our client that plans have changed. He is to meet us here."

"And what do I do?" Seth asked.

"You, Seth." Rohan chewed his mustache.

"You, Seth, can get the fuck out and go to bed." Seth stood, and then stayed, fidgeting.

"I actually—so, beds." Rohan's eyes lidded.

"What does that mean?"

"I actually am somewhat lacking in that department at the moment." Seth fought to keep the color out of his cheeks.

"I was staying with the widow Nuncia, but that was contingent on removing myself from the life. And she took unkindly to my going back on that."

"So why the red fuck did you rob me?"

"I, uh—" Seth rubbed his healed knuckle.

"I was going to pay her back, and then leave town. That was to be my last score. Is how the theory went." Rohan exhaled through his nose.

"You are such a fuckup, il Gutierre."

"I'm off my stride for sure, patre."

"Get out of here and find a spot in the Sidewinder stable. If they catch you, tell 'em Rohan il Agante is paying for it." Seth stepped from the office and left Rohan and Polecat to their muttering machinations. He took one last look, as the door shut behind him, at the box on the table. Who was that pale woman? Why did she have that, why did he take it, who's buying it, who was Annalise? Something in the dark pit of his mind told him that he was bound to find out.

That voice was joined by another: the Fox, cackling its tattooed tail off. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Seth." Just one more minute. Please. Let him escape from this for one more minute. Hay tickling his nose. Hard slats under his spine.

"Wake the fuck up, Seth." The light slashed its unwelcome advance across Seth's bleary eyes. The mouth of the stable, framed by its gate and Grigori's silhouette.

"I'm waking." Seth clambered onto his elbows.

"I'm upping."

"Verdugo's here," Grigori said. Seth halted his ascent.

"What?"

"The fucking Verdugo is here." Grigori pointed out into the seasick-green dawn.

"A month early at least." Demetrius the behemoth glared balefully as Grigori delivered the news.

"You know what that means, him coming so early?" Grigori shook with nervous energy. Seth tried the pullcord on his brain again.

"What's it mean?"

"Means he's been coming in from the coast and there's been no heads for the soultaker. Means he's behind on his goddamn quota. Means Krisova is fucked."

"Ah, hell," Seth said.

"Poor girl." He'd worked with Krisova in the kitchens. The whole town had quietly hoped that perhaps Verdugo Erheis would arrive flush with hexis and in as good a mood as Erheis could be in, and spare the girl. But there were years their Verdugo came to town nice and late and ahead of quota, and then there were bad years.

"I'm going out there." Grigori paced toward the daylight.

"Clear out." Seth was standing now, picking the straw from his hair.

"I was going. Ease up." He followed Grigori out to the morning, and he'd been forewarned, but his stomach still dropped to see the crowd that had gathered in the scaffold square. The law of witnesses was clear—all who were able must witness the Verdugo do his work. Rising from the midst of them, isolated as though in an impact crater, was the great bulk of the Verdugo's carriage.

Two massive black team horses lashed to a massive black iron carriage, its curtains drawn, its spokes and fasteners decorated with death's-heads. The green-and-black banner of the Legion fluttered from its top rail. The coachman wasn't Erheis's usual old stiff. It was a young man, this time, a boy, really, thin and in the middle of a growth spurt by how gangly his limbs were. As if cued by Seth's appearance he stood from the driver's box and called out. Familiar words from an unfamiliar mouth.

"Praise the Sorcerer General," he cried.

"Praise the Deathspell beneath which he shelters us! Praise the Verdugo and make way!" The whispered terror within the crowd flowed faster, reached its crest. Now was when the carriage door was to swing open, and the Verdugo was to emerge, his terrible thirsty blade in his hands. That wasn't what happened. What happened was: The door on the other side of the square opened. The door to the Sidewinder Lounge.

The blood in Seth's veins halted and beat a hasty retreat back into his hammering heart, making useless stones of his limbs. Annalise stepped into the sun. Without the hat on, in the bright of day, her skin was not pale, but completely colorless. The gray-white of an overcast day. Her sunglasses were not on. The eyes beneath them were inverted. Black all throughout, with a pair of white will-o-wisp pupils scanning across the gasping, fearful crowd. Everyone knew what those eyes meant. She was unlit.

Her soul separated from her body, stuck in the sword at her side. The soul-drinking sword of the frowning Verdugo. Only it wasn't at her side, and she wasn't frowning.

"Morning, everyone." She smiled her gap-toothed grin.

"What's the craic?" Silence but for birdsong. Finally, someone spoke.

"Uh. Gracious Madame Verdugo." From atop his manor's balcony, overlooking the square, Rohan il Agante cleared his throat.

"You are not who we expected."

"Ah. Right. So." Annalise strode into the square. The crowd flowed open around her.

"There ought've been a bill coming through ahead of me letting you all know that I was on the way, but seems it didn't reach you. I suppose the messenger might've been eaten by a seraph or something." One of Annalise's big tattooed mitts closed around a scaffold bar and swung her up atop it, bypassing the stairs, her longcoat snapping back like the wings of a great raven.

"Verdugo Erheis is dead." Her words echoed across the assembly and stilled their whispering.

"Bought it on the north beach this past winter war. So. Condolences, folks, if he was a friend. Unlikely as that is." She chuckled to herself and seemed halfway put off when nobody joined in.

"Anyway," she continued, "this bit of his route has been folded into mine. Annalise al Ydris is the name. That's Draco and Draka at the bits. And those are the kids." She pointed out the macabre young man, now dismounted and standing next to the carriage. He'd been joined by a teenaged girl, shoulders stooped and drawn in that way youths have when attention is on them.

"That's my daughter Ofelia, there." Annalise smiled her dimpled smile as she said it.

"And my son Tiago you've met already. Say hello, Tiago."

"Hello," said Tiago. And now that Seth was looking at him, the resemblance was clear in the brow and the prow of the nose. And in the eyes, as ink-black as his mother's. Ofelia, too. Both of them, pale as paper. Many Verdugos were unlit. If they didn't start that way, it was how they quickly ended up. But Seth had never seen unlits as young as these two.

"Sword, Tiago," Annalise said.

"if you please." Tiago stepped up to the front boot and boosted himself back to the driver's box. He returned from it with the sword. The Verdugo was different, but every Verdugo had the same sword. A hundred pairs of eyes or more tracked its passage from coach to wielder, drank its details in. The pommel studded with a crescent skull, the grip unwrapped, blackened metal. The scabbard massive and studded with silver. As huge and dark and laden with dread as the woman who now took it in hand.

Annalise hefted the blade up to the scaffold.

"Might want to step back from the splash zone, folks." The close-watchers scrambled back. Tiago stayed rooted, looking somberly up at his mother. Annalise closed a fist around the grip and pulled the sword from its scabbard. With it came the blood. First as rivulets, then as a flow, then as a fountain as Annalise tugged the last cubit of steel free. Same thing every year, but the dismayed gasps still accompanied the display. A second of gushing gore from the mouth of the scabbard, and then the geyser stilled.

The blade was out, now, and it glistened in the sun from its crossguard to the weighted head at its tip. At the base of the blade, a hollowed rectangular opening climbed two handspans up the steel. An abacus sat within the hollow. Fingernail-sized emeralds gleamed from its bars. Annalise, the right half of her body now coated in crimson, whistled at her dispassionate son.

"Really spattered you that time, Sunshine." Tiago wiped his face with his sleeve.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you aimed at me." Annalise chuckled and shrugged from her sodden coat. The tunic beneath was sleeveless, and the sight of her arms and shoulders—the brutal muscles shifting under chalk-white, thoroughly tattooed skin—provoked another round of whispered conversation. The Verdugo settled the blade on her shoulder and cocked her hip.

"You got something like a Corregidor in this town, folks? Corregidors, administrators, anything?" She squinted into the crowd.

"Don't be shy now." The unspoken truth of the matter was that Patre Rohan il Agante ran Prossimo in every way that mattered. This was a syndicate town, and had been for years. But they had a dusty old functionary with a tarnished hermandati breastplate and a more tarnished hermandati title they trotted out for these occasions. Here he came now, to the front of the crowd, doffing his plumed cap.

"Chief Hermandat Carter, Madame Verdugo."

"Chief Hermandat. That'll do." Annalise gave the guy a wave with the hand that wasn't full of sharpened blackbar steel.

"Let's have the convicts, Carter. See if any heads need to come off."