1.43. Duck, Darling
Seth struck, cutlass questing in a chopping overhand that felt as slow as if he’d swung it in a nightmare—which had to be some trick of his agitated brain, because when it connected with the thin man’s sword, it out a hellacious clang and sent a vicious vibration up Seth’s arm.
The swords bound briefly, and then Seth’s slid forward and turned off the man’s crossguard. Clockwise went the cultist’s edge, wrenching Seth’s blade downward and flickering itself horizontal in a clattering counterthrust that Seth whirled into a side-lunging crouch to avoid. Practice cut through panic and halted the turn of his cutlass. His grip hardened; his blade shoved the riposte awry, past his ear. I’m in a swordfight, he realized, with the sickening shock of the victim to a practical joke. An antic, disbelieving huff of laughter passed his lips. No hiding-place to flee to or strike from, no Tiago to blow the guy’s brains out, no Annalise to run him through. I’m in a fucking one-on-one swordfight.
A pulse of furious spite seized him, and he sprung upward from the knee this mean bastard had forced him onto. He’d really expected this to last longer, to have a few flashing exchanges, so he was almost as surprised as the man he impaled when his sword shoved through his stomach to the hilt.
“What,” Freckles mumbled, with a queer, flat affect. Seth tugged the sword out from his belly with a sucking splorch and hacked him across the chest, and for a moment you could believe all he’d cut was cloth and then a bright angry red stripe bloomed onto the man’s shirt, and he went to his knees, and then onto his slackening face.
Footsteps and calling voices echoed off the slab walls. A shadow carved from the hallway mitelamp’s light rose through the corner as the first foe drew near.
Seth’s new hexentat. He hadn’t practiced it enough, fool that he was. But now it leapt to the forefront of his mind. The freckled man—what had he sounded like?
“He’s got a gun,” Seth cried, in a dead ringer for the deader man’s voice, and then—this will make you feel so stupid if it doesn’t work—he did his best imitation of a gun going off, entirely expecting to go “pshoo,” and perhaps stall his attackers with some kind of laughing fit.
What emerged from his mouth was a hellacious munition-mite BANG that roared its echo off the walls and put a horrendous ringing in his ears. He let out another—best they think it was a wheelgun—and the shadow thinned itself as the individual casting it flattened themself to a wall.
Hesitation. Seth took advantage. He bolted from the chamber down its perpendicular path, sprinting down twisting, silent halls. He lunged left, prayed this was some kind of circuit, that he’d loop round his pursuers, or that there was another exit, or, failing that, he prayed that the Turning Wheel was as gentle as the songs said, and death wouldn’t be such an awful thing as it appeared.
Another BANG behind him, this one not caused by any hexentat. A chunk of limestone burst, scattering him with dust and stinging shards.
“LISA,” he screamed, hoping a fool’s hope that she’d heard that, or heard him, through the Fox stone or through the sewer wall.
A door. A door, a door, thank every fucking Saint who’d ever swung a stick. An old sheet of rust with a wire window but it might have been the long-awaited Saint Portal opening to redeem the world, the way it surged Seth’s soul. He tried the knob and pulled it open and nearly laughed in panicky despair as it revealed a brick fucking wall.
Kick it.
He gave it a frenzied kick, mostly to register his displeasure at his evil fate, before he realized that one: the Fox had just spoken, and two: his kick had shoved a patch of bricks a few inches in.
BANG again. A bullet pinged off the swung-open door. Seth charged his shoulder into the bricks and they cascaded, a chest-sized opening of them, letting in a humid hosanna of rushing undercroft air.
And fucking Saints, she was there. Lisa al Ydris, his gorgeous, deadly, long-overdue miracle. Looking as shocked as he was, her blade bare and streaked with blood, and he’d never forget the look on her face, the expression of surprise and fear and gratitude and love.
Love.
He was sure of it. As surely as he loved her back.
A cried-out curse from behind him. Another bullet flew wide. Lisa threw her sword down. Her arms rocketed forward, hands linked, fingers spread.
Seth could see behind her now, where Tiago was stabbing an armed and coveralled man in the stomach as Ofelia bent his head back. Before he could process what was happening, Lisa said:
“Duck, darling.”
He ducked. Behind him, a warning was screamed too late.
Bright, scouring fire turned the night-haunted halls to day.
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Masked hermandati rolled barrels full of sloshing horror out from the breach in the wall, past the lined-up dead. Two fallen to Seth’s cutlass, two more killed by the incoming al Ydrises, and the jumbled, bleached remains of four—at best guess—fireball victims.
Had any of this charred bone or chopped meat once been the Cabo ta Cazya, or was the culprit still loose? Nobody knew. The al Ydrises were content to hand the case off to the Hermandati. Fair enough, Seth supposed—headtaking was their job, not investigation.
Tiago took another slug from Hermandat Anora’s flask and passed it to Seth. “Two bodies,” he said. “That’s warrior’s work, il Gutierre. I allow myself the pride of a successful instructor.”
“You should.” Seth adjusted the blanket around his shoulders.
“Granted, you bodged the first one.”
“The first of two,” Seth said. “To your one, no?”
Tiago gave him a genial shove. “You smell like grilled shit, by the way.”
“This was how they did it.” Lisa shows a pair of green-sashed investigators to the stack of bricks and the discarded trowels. “A group to go in, another to brick them shut and wait outside. The twins and I followed the bangs and the yelling to the entrance and found the outside party.”
“And who’s this one, then?” Anora gestured to Seth, who raised her flask in greeting.
“That would be Seth,” Lisa said. “Our infiltrator.”
Anora’s thumb flicked the catch on her pistol’s mitehorn back and forth. “Seth..?”
“Just Seth,” he said. “I’m one of those mononymic types. Like a musician or a monarch, y’know.”
“I have a report to write, your majesty.”
“He’s given Fontana more than enough.” Lisa crossed to Seth and held out her hand. “He’ll hold onto his surname.”
Seth took the proffered palm, and Lisa tugged him to his feet. He began to pull back; her fingers tightened. She kept his hand in hers.
Her fingers laced into the gaps between his and bound their palms tightly together. She said nothing. Just stared down at him, and smiled.
“I got your head,” he said.
She nodded. Her other hand settled between his shoulder blades and slowly pressed him into her embrace. The public setting reddened his face; he turned his head to avoid burying it in the warm, snug place on her chest perfectly sized for it. The shining sweat over her heart cooled his burning cheek.
Tiago and Ofelia were in conversation over the pile of loot the Hermandati had extracted, and the cloth-wrapped bundle perched atop it. They glanced Seth and Lisa’s way, and though Tiago averted his look quickly, there was no scoff of discontent this time.
“That’s Alice over there?” Seth asked, as Lisa finally released him from the hug.
“It’s Sister Niama al Tars. There’s a bit more preparation in order before she’s Alice, and that we'll have to get done at the Necropolis.” Lisa lifted a lock of limp yellow protruding from the bundle and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “This hair will be the prettiest silver, I think.” She let it drop. “But that’s for later.”
“What’s for now?” Ofelia asked.
“For now, we let the investigators do their job here, and return to the manor for a bit of a debriefing with the Corregidor.”
“And some choice words with Marston, I think,” Tiago said.
“Then we’ll find ourselves something delicious,” Lisa continued. “if Seth gets the appetite back.”
Seth rubbed his slim arm, felt the sweat and the sewer water. “Let’s get some fresh air and I’ll let you know.”
“And then…” Lisa lifted her long, pale arm and gave herself a sniff. “Well, I could certainly use a shower. And you might legally require one, Seth.”
“A shower.” Ofelia sighed. “Oh, yes. Please.”
“So we’ll get a few rooms at the Porthau,” Lisa said. “And they can burn a few more beds in our wake.”
Tiago cast a loaded look Seth’s way. “What’s a few rooms?”
“Well, you and your sister have earned four walls each, after all this carriage living. But we mustn’t impose too much.” Lisa clicked her tongue. “Three rooms, I think. Seth and I will share.”
Seth hung his head into the shower’s cleansing flow and let the warm steam and steady pressure wash away the memory of that tunnel, and the awful things that lay beyond it.
Panic and revulsion and violent death. For all the comfort and camaraderie his new life offered, it offered plenty of that, too. He’d lock his future into days like today, if he got what he wanted.
But the things he’d done today—a month ago he’d never have dreamed himself brave enough to attempt them or capable enough to do them. There was a lightness to him, something given buoyancy now that the grime was washing itself away.
You are proud of yourself, he realized. Proud of what you did, not just how well you did it. Which wasn’t particularly well, face it. But you, Seth…
The joy and relief on her face when she’d seen him. The way she’d looked at him after. Her hand in his.
Maybe you’re a hero.
He chuckled at himself and scrubbed the much from behind his ears. Hero, that was a stretch. But for the first time, he allowed himself to believe that perhaps he was worth something.
He was clean, now, skin ruddy and hair silky. But he tarried, still, as the steam thickened, and his throat thickened, and his stomach tingled.
Lisa had been oddly quiet through the debriefing and the clerical work and working out the minutiae of the investigation with the Chief Hermandat and the Corregidor. When they’d eaten, Tiago and Ofelia had nattered about theories and the future and what they wanted to see or do in the week of downtime that awaited them after tomorrow’s executions. But Lisa hadn’t joined in. Hadn’t said much at all. Had only looked across the table at Seth, her marshfire pupils bright and inscrutable.
She was having second thoughts, maybe, the same way he was. Those same introspections. Seth began to believe he’d come out of the shower and she’d be Annalise, and they’d share nervous, sensible laughter about this whole thing, this bogus deal, and she’d thank him and call him marvelous, and that would be lovely. And then he’d try to forget again for a while.
He stepped from the shower, and bound a towel around his waist, and resolved himself, as he grasped the steam-humid doorknob, not to be disappointed if he opened the door and the woman beyond wasn’t Lisa, draped across the bed in a fluffy robe.
And he was right. She wasn’t.
Because Lisa was wearing The Dress. The one she’d worn to their first dinner in Fontana, and danced with him in.
She sat, legs crossed, on the far bed, and passed a pearl-handled brush through the black-and-silver waterfall of her hair. The shining crimson of her dress was impossibly vivid where its straps caged the ample swell of her milk-white chest.
“You cleared your debt to me today, Seth il Gutierre,” she said.
“I, uh.” His feet felt stuck in place. “I guess I did, huh.”
“Come get comfortable.” She patted the edge of the bed. “So that I can show you how grateful you’ve made me.”