1.37. Weird, Sad Life
Seth carefully placed his plate on the ground by the log he’d sat upon. The night drew in; when had it gotten this dark?
“You can’t tell Annalise you learned this from us.” Tiago turned his face from the fire; half of it cast into shadow. “Maybe she’ll reveal it herself, sometime. Maybe she won’t. But this one’s our secret, too, Feeli and me. As far as we’re concerned, it’s time you were made aware of what you’re stepping into. The full context of the weird, sad life this family has led.”
”The story Annalise told you,” Ofelia said. “Of how she went to the Winter War and lost her light. You remember?”
“Her husband and the wine and the stairs,” Seth said. “And she fought on the front instead of an execution. I remember.”
“The wine didn’t push our father down the stairs,” The ghost of a smile haunted the edges of Ofelia’s black lips. “We did.”
The fire snapped and fizzed. Seth’s food had settled pleasantly over his stomach; now it churned. He felt he ought to speak, but five responses crashed into one another on the way out his agape mouth. He should have suspected. Somehow he hadn’t.
“Can I have your onions, Tiago?” Ofelia asked.
“She lied to you, Seth.” Tiago handed his plate to his sister. “Don’t judge her too harshly. She lies to everyone about this, because she wants to protect Ofelia and I.”
“Mother has plenty of monstrous things in her past,” Ofelia picked a browned bit of onion from the puddle of buttery au jus. “Most of them, she’s overcome. Most of them she’ll share with you, and laugh about. But not him.”
“Whenever she threatened him, he’d behave, for a while,” Tiago said. “Stayed out till late, as he always did. Tried not to be near her. This time, she was called away to foal a tricky mare. She was always best at the temperamental mothers. Strong enough to hold them steady and kind enough to calm them. She thought we’d be all right on our own. But the man who called himself our father had gotten himself thrown out of the last taphouse that’d still have him, so he came home early. Early and drunk and angry, and looking to do the sort of things he did.”
It occurred to Seth, as Tiago’s jaw shifted and shadows creased across his cheek, that none of the al Ydrises had ever spoken this man’s name.
“You know something about what it was like, I think.” Ofelia had picked her brother’s plate clean. She set it aside. “Being raised by someone you hate. When a door opens or shuts too quick, you get this expression. Like you grew up with that sound as the herald of doom. And it’s far away, but you never quite shake it. Right?”
Seth nodded.
“He was drunk, yes.” Tiago ticked the truth off on his fingerpad. “And on the top of the stairs, yes. He was bellowing into the basement where Ofelia was hiding from him, calling her a stupid little whore, saying come back upstairs so he could blacken her other eye. Make them match. I thought to myself: wouldn’t it be wonderful to watch him fall? I don't even remember deciding to push him. I just… moved. And I was right.”
He poked another log into the base of the bonfire as it crackled and sparked. He stared at it impassively.
“It was wonderful.”
“He was lying at the bottom of the stairs.” Ofelia took the story over. It was as if they’d practiced it. “Broken and begging. And Tiago was kneeling over him, terrified of what he’d done. And I took hold of him by the shoulders—my brother, I mean—and told him: if he ever stands back up, it will only get worse.”
“So we dragged him back up the stairs,” Tiago said. “The two of us. And he was calling me son. It had only ever been boy. Now it was son. Son, please. Son, I love you. Son, don’t. But I did. Twice.”
The fire danced in the inky pool of Ofelia’s eye. “We did. And then we pushed him a third time, to make sure.”
“And when it was done,” Tiago said, “and he was dead, we wept with relief. And when the Hermandati came to take us away, I was ready. I was ready to say it was me. Ofelia was ready to say it was her. Annalise took the fall.”
The wood crackled. In the distance a mockingbird warbled its amorous song. Neither al Ydris seemed eager to continue.
Nobody ever comes for the hurting people in this world, Annalise had told him. Nobody makes it stop before it goes all the way bad.
“Why are you telling me this?” Seth asked, gently.
“To explain why we’re here,” Tiago said. “What we’re here to do. Annalise is a Verdugo. And as far as her objective matches ours, we help her take heads. But that’s not why we went unlit, and it’s not our primary aim.”
“As much of a taskmaster as Tiago can be sometimes,” Ofelia said.
“We’re here because we have a responsibility.” Tiago turned his intense gaze from the darkened sky to Seth’s face. “To fix the woman we broke. I will never mourn for the man who called himself my father, but I mourn for her. We put her up in the Winter War. We are why she went into that hole and came out unlit. We can never give her back what she used to be. But what we can do, we will do. We ruined her life. Now, somehow, we need to un-ruin it.”
Seth felt like he was being advanced upon with a broom again. He placed his feet carefully. Make space. “What does that mean about me? And her?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” Ofelia turned her fork in place on its edge. “Tiago and I have been wondering, too. Whether you might be a partner for this endeavor, or a problem. We’ve gone back and forth.”
“Can I ask something else? If it’s a night for secrets?”
Tiago sucked the rest of the meat from the drumstick in his mouth and licked the juice from his fingerpads. “Don’t ask to ask, il Gutierre. Just ask.”
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“When she fixed you,” Seth said. “I thought… I mean, blood magic, right? That’s what that was. Sacrificed kindred souls.”
“Sacrificed kindred hexis,” Ofelia put in.
“Right, whatever,” Seth said. “But that’s illegal, right?”
Tiago dropped the bones on his plate. “Outrageously illegal, yeah.”
“But she told that guy in Sondam what she did,” Seth said. “She didn’t hide it. Was she counting on him not understanding? Because I saw it, and I’m a dumb yokel.”
“You’re not dumb,” Ofelia said, and left yokel where it had landed.
“Mom has certain exceptions in place,” Tiago said. “Beyond the usual Verdugo privileges, which are extensive. If the Jerky King back there squeals on us, there’ll be a functionary there, to take a serious and sober report, and it’ll move along to the Legion Spire at the Necropolis, and it will be filed into a special folder with Annalise al Ydris written on it, and that folder will never be opened again.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s Annalise,” Tiago said. “She’s the best fucking Verdugo in the Territories, and Charles il Nekropoli knows it, and he’s not about to let regulations stop her from doing her job.”
“She called him Charlie,” Seth remembered. “She said she’d killed a Verdugo before. She said she was owed favors by the Sorcerer General.”
“Whatever she said.” The fire’s reflection in Tiago’s black sclera looked like a second set of pupils. “We’re not the ones to say more.”
“And if I’m a problem I might fall down some stairs?”
Ofelia chuckled. “We only felt you should know our history, and our position. We can’t very well threaten the fellow who saved our lives.”
“And it wouldn’t be stairs, anyway,” Tiago added. “If someone needs killing these days, I have a sword.”
“Tiago,” Ofelia said.
“Ofelia,” Tiago said.
“Chiiildreeeen,” called a musical voice, from outside the bonfire’s glow.
The three of them turned toward it. A corpse lantern was bobbing down the road toward the carriage, held in the raised hand of a solitary rider. Lisa al Ydris beamed at them through the final dregs of day.
“Changed my mind,” she said. “You were right, Feeli. I really ought to just get that circle sorted myself.”
She slid from Demetrius and swayed into the firelight.
“Pass me a plate of whatever ambrosia our wonderful little thief has prepared.” She located Seth where he sat nailed to his log. She winked at him. “I do believe it’s going to be a long night.”
”Diego,” Seth said. “His name was Diego.”
“That son of a bitch?” The bartender of the Tower Wick sucked a disdainful breath through the tooth he was missing as he scraped puddled candle wax from the bar rail. Twins, Seth thought, and poked his tongue through his new gap again. “Yeah, I know him. If you find him, tell him I’m gonna start charging interest on his fucking tab.”
Seth snuffed the closest candle out with thumb and forefinger. “He’s dead.”
“He’s…” The bartender set aside his bench scraper and lowered his scabby face to Seth’s level. “How?”
“The Verdugo executed him,” Seth said. “For seditious activity. Did he drink here much?”
The bartender waved his arm around the taproom, guttering several of the omnipresent candles. “Everyone drinks here.”
True enough: a lively crowd occupied the Tower Wick tonight. No trace of the solemn hush from the afternoon Seth and Ofelia spent cheerfully stealing their brew. The al Ydrises and their hired help had split up—Lisa investigating the circle, the rest of them back to Sondam for leads.
“I need your help,” Seth said. “Was Diego a spiritual man?”
“Not any more than usual. I think his saint was, uh… St. Mannok.”
“Did he ever talk about trips to the scaffwood?”
The bartender shrugged. “Not literally. If you’re talking like an executioner scaffold, you know how the tough-bitten set are. Probably tickle him to know it was a Verdugo who’d kill him.”
It had been the Verdugo’s assistants, in fact, but Seth didn’t want to go into specifics. “What about…” He searched his tankard as if something useful for the al Ydrises lay in its amber contents. “What about a head? Did he ever talk about a head?”
The bartender’s brow furrowed. He held up a finger to an impatient queuer. “A head?”
“Yeah. Like we’ve got the head, what’s going on with the head…” Seth trailed off. “I dunno. Just serve that guy, I guess.”
“Wait.” The bartender made that tooth sucking sound again. “Hold on. Yes.”
Seth’s ears perked up. “Yes?”
“Yeah. He said something about the… shit.” The bartender raised his voice over the cylinder song on the hexophone. “Hey. Argyl. Over here.”
A patron with a checkered engineworker scarf around his head and a doleful pair of baby blues excused himself from the game of Knuckle Nine he was losing and meandered to the bar.
“I been waiting,” the other guy at the bar snapped.
The bartender didn’t even look at him; just grabbed the closest tap, filled a tankard two-thirds with foam, and slid it the complainer’s way. “Fuck off, then.” He tapped a knuckle on the bar and Argyl the engineworker leaned in. “Who was that fucking guy Diego kept talking about?” the bartender asked. “The Fontana guy.”
Argyl shrugged. “Cabota Cazza. Sum’n like that.”
“Something like that, yeah. Cheers, Argyl.” The bartender took his informant’s glass and topped it up. “We were talking about big-timers. Y’know. Your Tamori brothers, your Rohan al Agantes. And Diego starts talking about this tough fucker in Fontana he’d met. This Cabota.”
“Is that a Sektoric name?” Seth asked.
“Yeah. For a real Sektorbrav shieldbiter type, up from the bluff corsairs and the like. Diego was on about they’re expanding to the Plainlands these days. And this is the guy on the Fontana syndicate line to the South. The connect, right?” The bartender scratched the raised skin along his chin scar. “You understand he could be a bullshitter. We don’t really hold much truck with the syndicate types here.”
“Sure. Besides Diego.”
The bartender snorted. “Not even him. Not anymore. But he’s telling us about Cabota and how he’s running all these jobs, these serious jobs. And he said something like… what was it, Argyl? About the head.”
“He said when Cabota Cazza tells you to bring him a woman’s head, you bring it,” Argyl said.
“And I thought that was weird and fucked-up, didn’t I, Argyle.”
“Ye did.”
“Because why specify a woman’s head. So that stuck with me.”
“Where is he?” Argyl asked. “Missing knuckle night.”
“Dead,” the bartender said, before Seth could. Argyl clicked his tongue, and that seemed to be the extent of his commentary. He accepted his drink again and moseyed back to the game.
Seth watched his weaving departure. “Not a hugely popular guy, I guess?”
“He wasn’t a good patron.” The bartender wore a look of ingrown reflectiveness as he fetched his rag and cleaned the tankard rings from the bartop. “Or a good friend, or much of a good man, I suppose. But some people you just… exist near. Long enough that it clings, and one day you say, well, I suppose I knew him. You know?
Seth nodded. That perfectly described just about everyone in his Prossimo pre-incarnation. “Thank you, sir.” He stood from his barstool and pushed it in, tracking its leg past a puddle of wax on the floor. “I think this’ll be useful.”
He clacked a brace and a solitar on the bar. The bartender cleaned around them. “Those sollies for a drink?”
“Not looking for a tankard of anything.” Seth pointed to a high shelf where, out of the candle light, the nicer liquors and vintages crowded in the dust. “But if you have a gift you’d like to give the Verdugo…”
The bartender swished his rag off his hand with a presentational flourish. Beneath, his finger was flashing Seth the cursehook. “Fuck off,” he said chummily.
“Fair enough,” Seth said, equally chummily. He walked from the Wick with purpose, and the conviction within himself that he’d return to Lisa, and report what he’d learned, and if he was the first back and it was just him and her there, in the circle, under the moonlight, that would be fine, and normal, and they would retain their professionalism and respect the rules they’d laid out with one another.
And the next time he came to a set of stairs, he would take them very slowly and deliberately.