1.38. A Bonus
Lisa al Ydris crouched by the stonecut circle, daubing at the day-old blood with a washcloth. “Cabota Cazza. Hmmm.”
It wasn’t much to go on, but the other al Ydrises had returned similarly low on leads. Tiago had reported the dead men’s families were either distraught, uncooperative, or both, and requested permission to arrest a few; Lisa had refused. Ofelia had sought knowledge on the sorcerer and learned he’d spent his days as an unremarkable farmhand.
“Cabota Cazza,” Seth echoed, as he stripped the blade of a dry leaf away from its spindly veins. “Is it ringing any bells?”
“Not really. Sounds Sektoric, sure enough. This circle’s still our main lead, I think, but we’ll keep the name on our tongues.” Lisa tossed her hair over her shoulder to keep the evening wind from blowing it into her face. “I imagine that’s our last evening in Sondam for a while. We have what we need from the place, now, and I’m so looking forward to Fontana again. The showers, et cetera.”
“The nice beds,” Seth said, and slapped himself on the wrist—go easy. But it was hard to be anything but pleased with the knowing grin Lisa gave in reply. “Have you figured out what this circle is?”
“This, my dear thief, is a communing circle. A hole punched in reality and folded on itself and its fellows. This middle ring here?” She poked the toe of her boot onto it. “You can send messages and small items through it. And these outer rings and runes are its directions, and the coordinate pointers to its interlinked circles.”
“So there’s more of them.”
“Correct. A circle grows in the complexity and the initial amount of hexis required to set it up for every additional circle it attunes to. If it’s a one-to-one connection, it’s a devil to work out, but it’s possible. If it’s three or more, it becomes quite maddening.”
“Is this a one-to-one?”
Lisa laced her hands over her knees and stood to her full, towering height. “This one has six.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s… a problem, then. Right?”
“It takes power to set this sort of thing up,” Lisa murmured, halfway to herself. “And knowledge. Esoteric and deeply concerning knowledge. Beyond anything a rural fireball-flinger could do.” She refocused on him and readopted her breezy mien. “Not to worry, Seth. This isn’t really the sort of thing we take on directly. It’s something we must investigate, understand, and report to the Necropolis, for whatever sized guns they care to bring in. What you said the other night—about how linked all this must be. I really do think you’re right.”
“So what’ll we do about it?”
Lisa tsked. “What, indeed. What does one do with a magic rock?”
She pulled a dark shape from her pocket.
“This, Mr. il Gutierre, is another, smaller magic rock.” She flicked it into the air and caught it again. “And a wonderful idea you gave me.”
“I did?”
“Mmhmm.” She gestured to the center ring. “A quantity of debris sweeps through this portal whenever it’s open. Leaves, twigs. Pebbles. Here in the center is where the material folds itself through the membrane of the world, out into the phlogiston where dwell the disembodied seraphs and the turning wheel itself, and then back to the kindred realms.”
“Seems dangerous.”
“Indeed it is,” Lisa said. “I suspected we were dealing with a circle of this nature when those scarecrows animated. A possessor seraph has precious few inroads to the kindred realms. A wormy little hole like this is one of them. Going unlit here would be the ideal spot to provide embodiment to a hostile spirit.”
“So they did it on purpose.”
“Quite possibly. I’d say probably, even.”
“As a trap?”
“That is a straightforward answer. I like straightforward. If that was the intent it was foiled, thanks to you and that lovely little Fox of yours. Which brings me back to that idea I mentioned.” She turned the rock over in her hand. “I thought about asking you to do this, but it’d be days of holding the hex. You’d lose out on your Fox’s voice, and you’d have that invocation-tickle in your head, and if it went on too long you might get hexis bite. And I want your mind sharp and your lovely skin unmarred. So…”
She raised the rock to show him. On its flat side sat a carving of the Fox.
“While you and the children were asking around, I paid a visit to that scriber of yours. She was upset, but I threw more work her way. This is a scribe-stone.” She held it forward. “You want to see?”
Seth took the rock. It was still warm from Lisa’s touch. “I thought magic needed to be on living flesh to work.”
“It almost always does, yes,” Lisa said. “But there are ways. There are principles and techniques few are able to use. My donor was one of the few.”
“What’s so hard about it?”
“It’s not quite hard so much as it’s illegal.” She pulled a broad knife from her baldrick. “I cut her head off over it, which makes me quite the hypocrite, I suppose. But Charlie uses it, too, to keep the deathspell up. So we’re both hypocrites.”
Seth gingerly returned the stone. “Blood magic.”
“Mmhmm.” She laid her executioner sword across the circle. “Fortunately, I have a ready supply of human hexis right here. And this application will barely dim a bead. All I need’s a bit of that, and a bit of this…”
She sliced the pad of her thumb open and smeared it across the Fox on the stone. Seth winced.
Lisa dipped her thumb to the stone and drew a connecting line between two runes in her blood. “And then we open the circle, and point it to its Fontana brother…”
The wind picked up. A pressure muffled into Seth’s ears. His neck hairs stood on end.
“Aaaand…” Lisa underhand tossed the fox stone into the center of the circle. It blinked out of existence. “Finished.”
The tightness in Seth’s head loosened itself. “So that rock’s ended up at wherever the Fontana circle is?”
“That’s right. And when I invoke it, I can hear through its little foxy ears.” Lisa stuck her bloody thumb in her ear. “Nothing yet. But I’ll check regularly, and once we revisit Fontana, I have some designs on how exactly we can triangulate our stone by sound. With luck, the circle’s caretakers will let the thing lie or sweep it to the side with the rest of the forest flotsam that blows in.”
“Clever, Madam Verdugo.” Seth tapped his fingers on the back of his opposite hand in genteel applause.
Lisa chuckled and curtseyed. “I have my moments. They would have to execute me if someone mentioned I’d used the sword’s hexis on this, dear. So mum’s the word.”
The thief and the Verdugo returned to camp around the carriage. It was past midnight, but the moon was round and heavy in the sky and the ride was easy. Seth rode Draka; Lisa hadn’t complained or commented when he brought his own horse.
Tiago and Ofelia were already holed up in the carriage; the corpselamps had been put out. Seth unlaced his boots and placed them with the rest of his effects by his tent. He paused at the open flap and looked around for Lisa to say good night to. Where had she gone?
“Night,” he called, to the ambient dark, and crawled into his bedroll. Life on the road had mostly cured the insomniac spells he’d once struggled with; but something told him he’d find sleep elusive tonight. There was a hyperawareness to him; some part of the day left dog-eared and unlived.
A silhouette, framed in the silvery absinthe moonlight, resolved itself on the other side of the canvas. Obvious who it was—nobody else in camp was so tall or broad in the shoulders and the hips. Lisa clicked her tongue to the rhythm of her knuckles as they brushed the tent flap, to approximate the sound of a knocking door. “Seth.” The smile in her voice threaded through the whispered syllable like the graceful prow of a longship. “Can I come in?”
Seth sat up. Not in surprise—something about this had felt inevitable. “Are you sure you want to?”
“I will be chaste as St. Paima. Promise.”
He gathered up the quilt and the patched sheet the al Ydrises had given him and retreated into the corner of the tent, his back to a structural pole. “Okay. Come on in.”
The heavy zipper on the tent flap jingled. The canvas crackled aside to allow Lisa al Ydris passage. She was still wearing her tunic, untucked and wrinkled where her belts and baldricks had sat on it, and a pair of linen drawstring pants which would be baggy on almost anyone else, but which rounded out on her as they hugged her heavy, shapely thighs. The cloth was thin enough to show the bold blackwork of her tattoos. There was that dragon he’d admired on her right leg, its snout nudging her kneecap. On her left, a sun with a tranquil face looked over a minaret-crowned tower.
She sat cross-legged at the bottom of his bedroll. Her toes had the same chipped black polish as her fingers. Another discovery, another feminine flourish. He remembered the sound of that foot dislocating a cultist’s jaw last night.
“I want to talk about what we’re doing once we reach Fontana,” she said. “A bit of an itinerary.”
“Sure,” he said. “Why haven’t you changed back to Annalise?”
“Lisa is suitable for cities and the upper-crust twits. Annalise is far better at relating to the lovely little towns and the good, rustic, hardworking stock therein.”
“The hicks,” Seth suggested, and made her laugh again.
“So,” she said. “Would you like to hear it? My to-do list?”
He nodded.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “You and I will make it clear to our head thief that the jig is up, that we have all the proof we require with this circle and these strange seraph events and this Cabota Cazza customer. And his only hope is collaboration, or his head is mine. Which will be entirely the truth.”
“Right.”
“Then you and Tiago and Ofelia and I will find this Fontana chapter of the Dead Fuckwits Club, and finally retrieve my long-lost head. And we’ll find out who they are, and what they wanted with it, and take it back.”
“Simplicity itself.”
Her lips were clear in the gloom, dark as they were against her stark white skin. “With you at my hip, Seth il Gutierre, I am sure it will be. For all the ways you have complicated Annalise’s life, you have a delightful way of simplifying mine.”
“I, uh. I do my best.”
“I know you do. And with the head found, and your last indiscretion against me cured, the last debt in your column will be gone. And I think any reasonable person, Seth, would look at this ledger between us and conclude that your grateful Verdugo owes you big.”
She shifted her weight, from a cross-legged sit to lounging on her side. The front of her tunic was laced low tonight, and her motion conspired with the ripe roundness of her chest to steal Seth’s attention toward it. The plump semicircle of her cleavage, where gravity pressed one heavy piece of heaven against the next. The mole, right where he remembered it. And a raised circle against the dark fabric of her tunic. She was not wearing a bra.
His hands flexed into distressed fists at the imagining of how it would be to hold them. They were too large for his palms. They’d spill over his fingers.
Stop. You were in the middle of a conversation, you hound dog. What had she said? I owe you big.
“I don’t know about that,” he replied, belatedly.
She propped her elbow on the ground and cocked her head into her palm. The printed skin stretched taut over the girth of her amazonian arm. “When you signed on for this new career, I told you I wouldn’t put you in situations with seraphs. And yet those situations continually find you. And you keep being such a gentleman, taking these things on with nary so much as a well-deserved dirty look. Not to mention how you saved my kid.” She laughed. “Both my kids.”
“We, uh—” He was temporarily arrested by her tongue, poking out to wet her lower lip. Now it shone in the moonlight. “We all saved each other, I guess.”
“Where’s that daytime cockiness, Seth?” Her pearlescent teeth shone through the nighttime softness of her lips. “Do you know what I think? I think that once our Fontana business is done, you are wildly overdue a reward.”
“What kind of reward?”
“Well.” She folded one leg up. A crease in her linen. The fabric stretched tighter and he could see the shadow of her underclothes. “That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m asking. What would you like, in exchange for returning the head you stole?”
A thong. She’s wearing a thong. A little black thong, with an ass like hers. Probably looks from the back like she’s wearing nothing at all.
He cleared his throat. “Are you offering me a bonus?”
She smiled. “I’m already offering you a bonus. I could make it a bigger bonus, if you’d like. Is that what you’d like? More money? That would be fine.”
“Do you, uh… have another proposal?”
“Yes.” She placed her palms on the ground and rose to her knees. “I do.” Her hips canted to one side, and then the next, as she crawled across the tent. Until she was right in front of him, looming so large above him that her shadow covered the moon. Until he was caged beneath the massive beauty of her thighs and arms on all sides of him. Her barely contained chest hung so close to his face he could feel the warmth radiating from her pumping heart.
She leaned her head down, past his shoulder. Her hair draped across his chest. The scent of it, of her, rammed against the ramparts of his brain. The full dark currants of her lips hovered right by his ear. Her throaty, alto whisper:
“Would you like me to suck your cock, Seth?”