2.1. Sheepf*ck
”We’ve nobody for you,” Karla said.
Karla was not a corregidor. Everyone was agreed on that point. They were here in Shipfarrok, seated at a table in the open air of its sparse, rustic village square, and Shipfarrok didn’t have a corregidor. They had a Karla, though, and Karla had some shockingly good wine. She’d broken out a pair of bottles for the Verdugo, and her son, and her daughter, and her thief.
“Nobody?” Annalise sat back in her chair, which groaned with complaint under the broad, muscular butt perched atop it. Seth il Gutierre knew how that felt; he had never once complained. Little hunk of junk should appreciate the gift it had been given. “Nobody in two years needs a look at their case?”
Karla shook her silver-wire head. “Nope.”
“Or a deferred punishment.”
“Nor that, Madam Verdugo. We keep our own order here.” Karla’s slate eyes slid to Seth’s and slid away again, like his inverted sclera were patches of black ice. “Don’t often have call for your type.”
“My type being Verdugos,” Annalise said.
“As you say, Madam.” Karla worked a parcel of chewing leaf between her teastained teeth and cast a glance to a man idling nearby, scratching his stomach through his rough cotton work shirt. There were a dozen such people lounging around this impromptu tasting, and Seth wouldn’t have been surprised if they were looking at a third or more of Shipfarrok’s denizens.
Human denizens, to be specific. There were, appropriately enough, a fuckton of sheep in Sheepfuck.
They’d followed hard roads to reach the place, winding upward through switchbacks carved into a great limestone bluff until it crested the ridge and deposited its travelers, winded and saddle-sore, onto the rim of a ridged-and-rocky plateau. Its surface housed a tremendous sweep of tawny grass and a silver-black river, and a land dashed through with shelves of pale stone, stacked and striated, the pages of an enormous book laid open, and above it the sky piled itself into a basilica of late-autumn cloud, all gray and cream and alder wood, with the Deathspell’s green shimmer threaded through it at the edges like a manuscript’s illuminated border.
Fuck off, Tiago had murmured, to nobody in particular, and Seth had said What’d I tell you? The overlooks, and Tiago had said fuck off to him as well.
The town itself was quite unremarkable from that height—a scatter of slate roofs in a crook of the river, a mill wheel turning in the current, and the blobby dots of the unending sheep. They’d hoped for another helping of deceptive beauty as they drew nearer, but down amongst its withdrawn people and its bleating industry, Seth could think of no additional remarks.
“Sure look it, Karla. I have no reason to disbelieve you.” Annalise stuck a big blunt thumb through her belt loop. “Place seems orderly, peaceable, outta the way. Tell the truth, I mostly wanted to stop in to introduce me and mine. And yet a woman of my profession, in a town like yours, with a drink and a curtsey like you’ve given me, rather than a neighborly salute and a cheerful country fuck off. I reckon this is the wind-up for something you need.”
Air bubbled glutinously around Karla’s chaw and her sucking teeth.
“No need to creep with me.” Annalise smiled patiently. “Is it a seraph? I’ve got a sullen secretary boy over here whose day you’d make-and-a-half if you had yourself a seraph.”
Karla looked into her time-gnarled hands, then up again.
“What I have I’m not sure,” she said.
Soya il Mandrak, the missing man’s wife, was a narrow-shouldered woman whose sharp face and shaded eyes were predisposed for stoic sorrow, as if she’d lived her life in wary expectation of tragedies to come.
“Corbin rode up after our hand told him we were down one ram.” As she stood by the pasture wall, she wrapped a rag around her wrist and unwound it again, over and over. “That was two days ago. We found his pony cropping grass at the pasture gate, still saddled. All calm.”
“Calm like it’d been tended?” Ofelia asked.
“And watered,” Soya said. “Still damp on the muzzle.”
The pasture was a broad green shelf at the ridge’s shoulder, penned with sturdy drystack limestone walls and a timber gate. Sheep gnawed grass and regarded their arrival with the same cock-eyed, ruminant disregard they lent to their pen’s mysterious new beautification.
“And there was the statue,” Soya said.
The group’s attention turned once more to the statue, which was in two halves. The bit that had snapped off from the wider base, at its hip, showed it to be of a life-sized woman, her face a tranquil mask. Her gown flowing marble plated with nephrite, her hair so finely chiseled as to seem soft until the touching of it. Her right tit out, but in the artsy way, not the taphouse mascot way where drunken hands had polished it shiny.
“Uh huh.” Annalise paced slowly around the statue. “And I suppose this goes without saying, but you had not seen this statue before.”
“No,” Soya said.
“And it’s not of him,” Ofelia said.
“No,” Soya said.
“Unlucky,” Ofelia murmured, quiet enough Seth heard and Soya didn’t, or didn’t care to react.
“You find any trace of the ram?” Annalise asked. Her hand settled on Seth’s lower back with easy possessiveness.
“None,” Soya said. “Two more gone, though. And the herding dog.”
“No struggle that I can see.” Tiago strolled toward them along the wall’s perimeter. “No clambering over or carrying off. No churning in the dirt, and just the one set of hoofprints.”
Soya nodded. “Saw the same thing when I brought the horse in.”
Annalise crouched at the statue’s base and tugged. Her biceps stood out under their pale tattooed skin. The base rocked and tipped; she halted and set it back down.
“How in the bloody fuck,” she said, mildly, “did they get this up here? And who in the bloody fuck are they?”
Seth kneeled at the gate. The paddock lock was open. Scrapes on its shackle, but that was just wear and tear. “Someone with a key unlocked this,” he said. “And didn’t lock it again.”
Soya frowned. “Not like him.”
Annalise shook her arms out. “What’s he like, your aul man?”
“He was a man,” Soya said, without emotion. “Not a laughing man. Not merry. But he did what was expected of him, and he made a life enough for sharing, and he didn’t fall into any habit, and you’d look for him and he was there. Till now.”
“You needn’t talk about was or did quite yet, madam,” Ofelia said.
Soya shrugged and looked past them.
“All this pasture is yours?” Annalise’s voice was calculatedly casual.
“Yep,” Soya said. “Here to the cliff edge.”
Tiago’s whistle carried on the swirling wind. “You have some money, then?”
“Nah.” Soya tapped the ash of her cigarette over the cliff’s edge. “Land is cheap in these parts. His land’s cheaper.”
“I can see why. The terrain here must give you a life of policing.” Annalise caught Seth around the waist and steered him with cheerful relentlessness into an embrace from behind, her brawny arms crossing his chest like the claws of a bearskin cloak. “Dumbshite sheep getting through the fences and falling to their dumbshite deaths. Second row follows the first. Seen a dozen wasted that way.”
Seth looked quizzically up at the woman holding him, catching a fine view of her imposingly sized nostrils. “You were a shepherd?”
Annalise nudged him snug against her and rested her chin atop his head. Still so miraculous how well they fit together. Like he was a piece designed to be slotted into this spot. “My cousin was. Pretty poor work, if I’m being honest. He inherited the biggest flock in the village and lost half by the time I ended up in the nick.”
“Only gotten worse lately,” Soya said. “These last few years, autumn’s brought a fiend of a windy season with it. When the gales roll in, it gets fierce enough to pull a wether off the hill or topple a barricade. That’s what we’d figured happened with the ram. Corbin was seeing if we had a hole to patch in the cliffside fence.”
“Saints,” Seth said.
Tiago was very still, his lips pressed tightly together.
“Never cordial, this place. Never easy.” Soya stood at the lip of the ridge and pointed into its depths. “Way down there, when the fog’s not so high, you can see the Eastern Deadwater. Back when there was outshore sailing, you had a port down there. That’s where the name comes from. Shipfarrok. Farrok means blessed in Tuthimi, see, and you needed a blessed ship to land here. The rocks tore you to pieces otherwise.”
She stared down at the aforementioned rocks. The slope and stone protruded from the curling mist like broken teeth.
“I’m off,” she said, abruptly. “Less you need me.”
Annalise took a polite step to one side, good-naturedly tugging Seth with her like a rag doll, and Soya strode through the gate and away.
“Maybe he up and roamed off,” Seth said, from between his girlfriend’s biceps.
Annalise’s voice sent vibrations through her chest and into his spine. “Just left this life behind?”
“Men have been known to, with the right motivation.” Seth gave her hip a playful tap and was rewarded with another rumbling laugh. “Maybe he thought he had something better, somewhere. Took the sheep as a tide-me-over for the trip.”
“Or as lovers,” Ofelia said.
“Whist,” Annalise said.
“Why not the horse, then?” Tiago tapped the pommel of his saber with his forefinger. “And why the dog? Did he like the dog?”
“Everyone likes dogs,” Ofelia said.
“Not me,” Tiago said, which surprised Seth not at all.
“Maybe he wanted his family to keep it, the horse,” he said. “Not a cheap animal, especially around these parts, you’d reckon.”
“Maybe so.” Tiago squinted into the overcast horizon. “Or maybe where he went off to no horse could take him.”
Seth looked to the ragged edge of the land. “You think he went down?”
Tiago shook his head and tucked a lock of his shaggy raven hair behind his ear. “I think he went up.”