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.

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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.”