1.9. Crud

“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” Seth said, as the Verdugo patted Polecat’s headless trunk down. “But I didn’t take you for someone who’d bother looting corpses.”

Annalise’s carved rhomboids bunched gracefully as she shrugged. “A brace is a brace. And this is a nicely balanced cutlass.” She held up Polecat’s chopper. “Good starter blade. You want?”

“Not really.”

“Take it anyway. Sell it, maybe.” Annalise sheathed the weapon with a silky shik and held it out by its cupped handle. “Trade you for those cuffs.”

Seth hesitated, then took the blade. No blood on it, at least.

Annalise clipped her cuffs to her belt. “You really fucked these quick.”

“You should get some double locks,” he said. “Can’t shim a double lock.”

“Double-lock cuffs? Too bulky.”

“Not Passkey Standards,” Seth said. “Now those are some cuffs.”

“Those are some expensive cuffs.”

“Pick a few more dead men’s pockets and splurge.”

Annalise chuckled. “I don’t suppose this fella’s…” She knelt in front of Prichard and the chopped meat of his chest. “Well, four’ll do, I suppose.”

“Sorry, Madame Verdugo.”

“Ah, no worries. You’re the reason I got a crack at them, anyway.” She stood and wiped the grime from her knee. “Couldn’t expect you to swing the headtaker around in a pinch. Only reason I do it is so it can harvest hexis, and I’m stingy about letting the stuff go to waste. If it’s not the Verdugo sword it doesn’t count, y’see. Otherwise, I’d keep the fuckin’ thing in the carriage. Or an attic.”

“It does seem cumbersome.”

“Now this little beauty.” She plucked her side sword from the ground. “This is a sword. Got it forged custom in—hmm.” She took it by the blade and squinted at its handle. “That a tooth, you think?”

Seth squinted. “Maybe a piece of one.”

Annalise flicked one of her knives from her baldrick and set about prying the sliver from her sidesword’s handle. “I talked with Charlie about reforging the two-hander into something less stupid a few times. I mean, wouldn’t a nice hand-and-a-half suit better than a fuckoff bluntheaded fucker? Takes a head just as clean if you know what you’re doing.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Anyway he said awh well ya know Annalise ‘tis a relic from a Promethean age of yadda yadda. And they’re afraid to touch it. We don’t know how to make hexis dynamos this tiny anymore, I suppose.” Annalise replaced her dagger and dug the splinter the rest of the way out with two fingers. “Definitely a tooth.”

“Charlie?”

She buckled her sidesword back on. “Charles il Nekropoli, Fifth Sorcerer-General of the United Legion Territories.”

“You call the Sorcerer General Charlie?”

“When I wanna impress muddy little cutpurses, I do.” Annalise wrapped a sinewy arm around Polecat’s middle. “Anyway, you did just fine, discounting that little runner you tried for. Now help me get ‘em out to the road, if you please.”

Seth searched for a good grip on Prichard. “We’re not just leaving them here?”

“Corpses in the rain in the woods’ll get nasty quick. The kind of nasty that can lure unearthly things out to the Prossimo perimeter and then give ‘em a taste for people.” She flipped Polecat up onto her shoulder. “Might as well return the poor feckers to people who’ll care about them.”

She lay the dead muran across Demetrius’ back. Living murani did not get along with horses; Demetrius was just as unenthused by a dead one. Annalise glanced over at Seth while she strapped the corpse in. “Need help with that one?”

“I can handle him.” Seth gave Prichard’s ankles a yank to tug the corpse over a half-buried root; its gnarled topography lifted the shredded shirt as the dead man skidded. The rain was already washing the blood away and the wounds were dark crescents in the pale flesh.

A tinge of quiet concern colored Annalise’s musical brogue. “That your first body, Seth?”

“Yeah,” he said, and added, off her face: “I’m alright, though.”

“You sure?”

“He called me a—” Seth tried to recall it. “A fucking nothing fucking rat man. Something like that.”

“He did? Not neighborly.” Annalise gave Prichard a disapproving nudge with her boot. “But I more meant is that your first time dragging a body.”

“Oh.” Seth felt his ears color. “Yeah.”

“Try the armpits,” Annalise said. “Gets the most meat off the ground.”

“Like this?”

“Straighten your back out and square your shoulders.”

“How’s this?”

“Ace as a brace.” With a grunt, Annalise mantled Nikolas onto her shoulder. “Get him by the road.”

They carried the dead goons to the roadside. Demetrius took two, his rider took two, and Seth, to his vague shame, dragged one.

Annalise dropped the dead men with a sodden thump and whistled appreciatively at the ride they’d been delivered in. A real landcruiser in gleaming chrome, with two rows of plush rum cherry leather seats. “Whoa, now. This is flash. Might have to replace you, Meaty.”

Demetrius huffed an unamused snort.

“Right.” The Verdugo wiped Nikolas’ blood from her deltoid. “Help me pop the dead bastards in the boot.”

They both bent for the first body at once. His hand brushed against her forearm and he snatched it back like it had touched a stove. Bare skin contact with an unlit. That never happened to people this far from the Necropolis, not outside of sweating stress-dreams. He examined his knuckle. Was it a little discolored? A little pale?

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He looked back up at Annalise, and for a brief sliver of a second, her face had the saddest, loneliest expression he had ever seen.

Then she was grinning again and he wondered whether he’d imagined it.

“Sorry for the scare there.” She retrieved her coat from Demetrius’s saddlebag and stuck her arms through its sleeves. “Takes a lot more than a little prod to even start unlighting you, y’know. We could hold hands for an hour and you wouldn’t even get a discolored big toe. But safety first, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, and, because his gut was twisting into an apologetic knot, for some reason, over this huge black-clad killer, “Sorry.”

She blew a tuckered-out raspberry between loose lips. Sounded a bit like Demetrius. “It’s all right.”

“No, I—that was ignorant of me.”

She chuckled and shook her head. “Ease up, Sethy. No harm, no foul. Let’s get yer one here shifted.” She took the dead man up again. “I’ll grab the heavy end. You get the legs.”

She helped him fold the corpse into the trunk. Nikolas joined Prichard in its tight confines. Neither man complained.

Annalise dusted her hands off. “We’ll put the rest in the backseat, and then you’ll—you know how to drive?”

“Yep.”

“You’ll drive, then, and follow me on Meaty. Who can outrace that thing even when it isn’t loaded with corpses, if you catch my drift.”

“I’m done trying to run after that,” he said. “Promise.”

“Good lad.” She gave him a friendly shove to the driver’s seat and set to loading back onto Demetrius.

He settled behind the wheel. The only hex-engines he’d ever been on were big lumpy flatbeds and farm haulers with top speeds in the neighborhood of a brisk jog. This, in comparison, was a muscular, beautiful monster. But he’d already met one of those today, and so far his head was still on his shoulders.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“First we’re gonna go get my kids, let them know I’m not dead, and we’ll have us some lunch because I’m famished, and Ofelia’s conked out. And we’ll have a chat about what to do.”

“About Rohan?”

“Yeah.” She sucked air through her teeth. “The Rohan fella. He’s the one who put you up to thieving from me. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, Seth, I do reckon I’ll execute him for that.”

“I do reckon you should,” he said.

“Sounds like it’s settled.”

“If we are going back to Prossimo,” he said. “Can I ask for a loan? I don’t think I can stick around after and I have someone to pay off.”