1.40. Knight of the Body

”So a seraph cult wants my head. It gathers adherents to its circle. Unlights them then and there, and slots a seraph tidily into the spot the soul once occupied. A seraph sharp enough to pretend to be a human soul, mosey to Fontana, complete the purchase, and—we may hope—stow the goods, or at least give us more breadcrumbs to follow. Then it stumbles its way back to Sondam and pretends to go scarecrow.”

Lisa al Ydris plucked another grape from the table before her, gave it a brief test squeeze, and popped it into her mouth.

“So why?” she asked around it. “Any theories?”

Outside the third-floor window of their borrowed office in Corregidor Shoshanna’s mansion, the busy thoroughfare below sent its muffled hubbub floating upward to where the Verdugo sat, her thumb in her ear. Land schooners and carriages and hex engines proceeded in a bright and endless midday parade down the road, their roofs periodically doused by Fontana’s spouting statues.

Through the window’s diamond panes, Seth watched a saintspeaker riding atop a temple courser time his crossing wrong. A water-vomiting gargoyle soaked the thin-boned preacher’s white cloak and spooked his horse. He sputtered in holy outrage and wrestled for control over his ride. The resultant racket—the sodden oaths, the laughing fishwives, the honking of a hex engine—sounded underwater from up here. That’s why they’d chosen this spot, and sat in it together for two hours now. So that Lisa could listen for her Fox-carved stone, wherever it had ended up.

She’d forced a long list of potential warehouses and smuggler-stowages from Marston il Molacq, and pried a corps of a half-dozen bellringers from the nervous Corregidor. Even now they were wandering Fontana’s ways, clanging cowbells and hollering their town crier business out to tenements and derelict arsenals in Fontana’s factory districts. The point wasn’t the message, which was some busywork bullshit about seraph-spotting tower regulations. The point was to listen close for the voice of a crier, and use it to triangulate the cult’s circle.

“The unlit said Ydris.” Seth sat across from her; his chair squeaked expensively. A distinction he’d learned, traveling with the Verdugo. Some chairs were uncomfortable because they were cheap, and some were uncomfortable because they were expensive. “It knew you, knew your kids. Maybe it knew your route, too. Once whatever’s steering this cult got what it needed from its scarecrows, they might’ve dumped these things in our way as a trap.”

“A trap is a tidy explanation,” Lisa said, “especially a foiled trap. It’s a very seductive answer. But I think seductive gets a bad reputation.”

“Is it really tidy, though? Why does this thing have a bone to pick with you?”

“Because, my little fox, I am one of the increasingly rare Verdugos who gives a shit about the seraph-hunting part of the job.”

Seth tried to hide his reaction as my little fox drizzled across his heart like honey, and evidently failed, because Lisa grinned, her dusky lids lowering as she examined his face.

“I think you like that nickname,” she murmured.

“If I told you I didn’t, you’d only use it more.” Seth stood from his seat—too close to her, close enough that her leather-and-apricot scent was fumigating his focus—and paced the office. He tilted his head at the dove caged in the corner of Shoshanna’s office; it tilted its downy head right back.

“I’d commit casual homicide if it made your ears turn that cute shade of pink, Seth il Gutierre,” Lisa said. “For whatever that’s worth, coming from a Verdugo.”

Seth examined Shoshanna’s bookshelves to hide his smile. “I don’t know about a blush, but there’s a few flying heads that might get a round of applause out of me.”

“Say the word, little fox. Auntie Lisa will see them lopped.”

“I’ll write you a list.” Something shone between the pages of a book. Seth fished for it. “The first few entries might already be crossed out.”

He removed a pair of silver-plated reading glasses that had been stuck between the pages. As a bookmark, maybe. The film of dust over the lenses spoke to how long they’d sat here. His hands wanted to slip these into his front pocket, and Lisa wasn’t looking, so he let them.

“What do you reckon it wants with the head, anyway?” he asked.

It may have been Seth’s imagination, but he could have sworn then that Lisa closed her mouth around a readier reply than the noncommittal hum she furnished. “Here’s my big question mark,” she said. “If the pitchfork woman wended her way to Fontana for the transaction, what was the man doing? And why the need for the whole song-and-dance if they already had lit catspaws to do their bidding?”

He left the question of the head where it lay. She’d pick it up when she was ready, he hoped. “One mystery at a time, right?”

“And with any luck, we’ll have this one polished off shortly.” She flicked a grape toward the dove and sank it neatly between the bars into the bird’s enclosure. “Can doves eat those, do you know?”

“I guess it’s two mysteries at a time.”

Lisa gave the dove an encouraging coo noise as it feasted on the fruit. “He seems happy enough.”

“Most of the things that make us happiest aren’t good for us,” Seth said. The laugh she gave him was only half-real, born from something more cautious than mirth; he was getting better at discerning the difference.

“Two days from now is when the executions are scheduled,” she said. “I’ll have to be Annalise for that. She’s the only one I wear to the scaffold.”

“Why is that, anyway?”

“She has a way with the condemned.” Lisa took another grape. “If you ask me, she has some sort of shine for crooks.”

He affected a gasp. “Scandalous.”

This laugh was genuine. “I know.” Her new selection didn’t pass the test squeeze; she placed it on Seth’s plate. “Anyway, she can’t keep the Fox spell going, so I’d love to get things figured out before then. And then we can have a lovely week of rest and relaxation. Hold on.” She pulled her thumb from her ear and shook the feeling out. The slash of silver through her bangs fanned out like a firework; she tutted and swiped it back into place with her palm.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You get anything?” Seth asked.

“I need a break. I’m not used to my eardrums being in two places at once. It makes me a bit woozy.”

“I sorta hunker when I’m doing it. Like this.” Seth squatted on the hardwood floor. “If I sit, it makes it hard to get my balance back.”

“Oh, seraphs.” She grimaced. “I wish I’d known that before.”

“Need a hand?”

“No, no. I’ll just…” She placed her palms on the table, rose a few inches, and thought better of it. “I’ll sit it off.”

“I always found salt beef helped me after,” he said. “Something about the chewiness. You want me to get you some from the carriage?”

“Suppose so.” Lisa fanned herself with a silk napkin. “Thank you, Seth. Someone ought to check on the children, anyway. Make sure they haven’t eaten one another.”

Seth departed the office and descended the echoing marble staircase at the manor’s center. A suited man coming up the other way—someone’s vicer, maybe, or a minor oficinista—gave Seth an inquisitive look that took in the workaday black and the roadwear on Seth’s boots, and melted into an unkind disregard. The familiar glare from the top of a pulled-up ladder.

Seth continued past the man, and rubbed the stolen glasses in his pocket with his thumb. When I’m unlit, they’ll be afraid of me, he thought, and wondered if that might be an improvement.

Out into the glaring sunlight—it was the last hot day of the year, by Seth’s reckoning, and the goodfolk of Fontana’s garden district seemed to agree. Silken shirtsleeves were rolled up. Parasols and picnic canopies sprouted across the corner parks. Children chased one another across the granite bowls of the Centre Square fountains.

The carriage sat before the Corregidor’s manor like a black twist of iron stuck in a clear pool. The swanners and sightseers crowded together as they passed to give it as wide a berth as they could.

Tiago was leaning against the carriage, gnawing an apple. Ofelia sat in her habitual spot on its roof, under a black awning she’d erected like a bat’s wing. She guided a silver needle, bound in black thread, through the hole in a pair of her mother’s riding pants.

“Any luck, Mr. il Gutierre?” she called.

“Nothing yet.” Seth approached to lean on the carriage; as he settled his weight on it, Tiago detached from the other side of its ornate passenger door as if see-sawed. “Be right back.” He tossed his apple aside halfway to the core and stalked onto the cobblestone footpath. A man with a wheelbarrow full of peonies halted his course and turned up a side street to avoid traveling the same path.

“Is he all right?” Seth asked.