1.47. August
The curtains burned merrily, roiling the ceiling with a thick choking blanket of smoke. Seth tumbled sideways to the floor, staring wildly about for his stuff.
His stuff was the pyre. In the corner of the room. It was all burning, his money, his supplies, his gear, his boots, his—
The stiletto. It was the fucking stiletto. It was white-hot in the heart of the fire. It had melted through the leather that contained it. It shone like a blazing star.
Seth scrambled for the door key, and scalded his fingers on the blistering lock as he opened it. He sprinted for the stairs, halfway fell down them, rolled at the bottom into the empty bar. Empty. The fire’s crackle was rising to a storm-sound above him.
“Hey,” he roared. “Fire! Hey! Where is everyone?”
No time to worry for anyone else. He shouldered himself out the door of the Sirloin and fell forward into the dust, and the burning roadhouse illuminated the grasses like the fur of a vast amber alien behemoth, and it illuminated the men who were waiting for him. Some afoot, some on horseback. Seth tried to stand and a boot slammed firmly into his stomach and sprawled him onto his back.
“That him?”
“That’s him,” a woman said. “The Verdugo’s errand boy.” Something familiar in her R sound. Seth craned his neck and saw the murani woman atop a snorting gray courser. The one from Laramme, whose stiletto had just burned his life down.
A leering face, lit in fiery orange, placed itself between him and his frowning accuser.
“Look here, fellows,” the man said. “Caught ourselves a fox.”
Seth hung by his wrists from the barn’s central beam. He’d stopped trying to shift his shoulders into some way that didn’t hurt. It all hurt.
The murani woman hadn’t come in with the rest of them. She’d rode off into the dark, probably to retrieve her stiletto from the smoldering roadhouse.
It had kept coming back to him. No matter where he’d left it. He’d thought it was some wonderful enchantment, and it was. But as his captors were so smugly eager to tell him, the wonder hadn’t been for him.
“Followed you the whole time,” said the biggest of them, a guy with a Sektoric mustache and height and brawn rivalling Annalise. “Had a twin blade, y’see. Pointing us right to you.”
“It’s a real object lesson, isn’t it,” mused the man who’d kicked the air out of him. He was familiar, too, though Seth was sure they hadn’t met. One of those faces, perhaps. “The cutpurse who gets a little too good a little too quick, and loops back ‘round to a gutterflied corpse.”
“I’m Seth, by the way,” Seth said.
“I know,” the man said.
“You got me at—” Seth spat blood onto the floor. “A bit of a disadvantage, then.”
“We do indeed, Seth.”
“It’d feel good to tell me, though, huh,” Seth said. “So I can know who got me. Right?”
“See, I thought it might feel good to punch you in the stomach again,” the man said. “Let’s try both, shall we?”
“Y—” Seth began, and then a fist buried itself in his gut, and another, and he rolled his head back and gasped for air.
A voice filtered to him through the pale haze of pain. “I’m August il Agante. And you’re my newest little project.”
“Ahhh,” Seth mumbled. “Okay. Yeah.”
“You really thought you could just fucking kill a patre of the Syndicate and gallop off into the sunset, il Guiterre?”
“Well,” Seth said. “I managed a couple sunsets, at least.”
“My uncle mentioned you were a wiseass,” August said. “He liked you. He did. But he said your problem is you talk too much.”
“He mentioned me?” Seth grinned a drippy red grin and blinked until the two swimming Augusts in front of him became one again. “Weird. He never mentioned you.”
Another punch. Another. A third. If they thought these were going to shut him up, they hadn’t met him. He’d faced down seraphs.
“Enjoy it,” he wheezed. “Enjoy me while you got me, August. She’ll find you. You’re fucked.”
“By she I presume you mean the new Central Plain Corridor Verdugo.” August il Agante accepted a cloth from one of his minions and wiped spat-up blood from his knuckles. “I understand you’re coming off a stint in her retinue.”
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“I juh,” Seth said, and spat more blood up. “I just called her Annalise.”
“Made a friend, then?”
“A few.”
“And that, Seth, is why I won’t kill you quite yet.”
Seth was slowly turning like a trussed-up rotisserie chicken. The beam above him creaked. “Cause I’m friendly?”
“Get him facing me again,” August said, and rough hands stilled Seth and centered him. “I am going to keep you alive for a while,” he said, “while we come to terms with our new Verdugo. I appear to have something she wants. Something she wants very much, to hear the story from the other patrons.”
“Buncha bean-spillers,” Seth said, and August punched him in the face.
I’ve lost a tooth, he thought, as the darkness roosting at the edge of his vision receded again. He’s knocked my fucking tooth—wait, no. He’d already lost that. With Anna.
“Happily for me,” August said, “and for the memory of my uncle, alive is actually quite a wide net. You can be alive in all kinds of ways. And with all kinds of pieces missing.” He held out a hand, and a cleaver was placed into it. “And I think, Seth, to inaugurate the many weeks we will spend together, reducing you, we might send your big spooky girlfriend a greeting gift.”
Reflections off the torches in the corner of the barn studded the surface of the cleaver like stars. Its tip descended to rest between his eyes.
“Now normally you take a hand from a thief, but you happen to be hanging from them,” August said. “And for a guy like you, losing a hand is quite the depreciation in value. So we’ll save them for the first month or so, to give her some hope that there’ll be some Seth left in the thing we make out of you.”
The cleaver slid down the bridge of his nose.
August smiled big. Gold caps on sharp teeth. “I think it might be fun to start with the face, gents. What do we think?”
“I think,” Annalise said, “that if you’re looking for the nose of your uncle’s killer, mine’s hard to miss.”
She stood in the open door of the barn, her longcoat flowing in the autumn wind, her roadwarden hat dancing the shadow of its brim across her face.
“Evening, gents,” she said. “What’s the craic.”
“Madame Verdugo.” August’s voice alloyed itself in formality. “How auspicious that our first meeting is so early in our new partnership.”
She shook her head. “You have my man,” she said. “And I’m here to take him back.”
“We can discuss the return of your thief,” August said. “We don’t even need to go with the installment plan. Your predecessor had a fruitful relationship with my people. You’ve had a troublesome start, I admit, but I’d hate to—”
“He’s mine,” Annalise said, and though she didn’t say it loud, it shut August up anyway. “Anyone who hurts him dies by my hand. Starting tonight. Starting… now.” Her palm turned upward as if resetting an invisible hourglass. “One offer, no negotiations. Cut him down and give him to me, and get on your horses, and go.”
A rumble of laughter from the assembly. Annalise’s black lips and ivory teeth shone in the fire as she joined in.
“No?” she said. “Right, then.”
She took a step into the barn. All around the fading edges of Seth’s vision, men moved in the subtle first steps of a violent dance to come. Forward, or back, or to the side to stand between her and him. Swords and knives and axes and wheelguns creaking and whispering from their leather lairs.
“Seth,” Annalise said gently. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he croaked.
“I love you too.” She was barely audible over the crackling torches. “Of course I do, fool that I am. And I’m so, so sorry it took me this long to stop being a fucking spanner and say it back.”
“Timing—” He blinked blood from a cut on his forehead. “Timing could be worse, I guess.” He wheezed a weak laugh. “Came in by a nose.”
“You offered me everything, and I was too bleeding cowardly to take it. You’ve been so brave, love. Now it’s my turn.”
August put his hand on his chest. “That’s plain beautiful, Madame Verdugo. That does tug on the heartstrings.”
Annalise didn’t give August so much as a blink of her unlit eyes. “Your man here is interrupting my grovel, Seth. May I kill him?”
Seth was slowly orbiting out of true center again. “Go right ahead.”
Annalise shrugged out of her longcoat. Her sleeveless tunic beneath was bare of its baldric and its executioner scabbard. The glistening sweat of a desperate ride shone on her colossal arms.
August lowered his hand. A smudge of Seth’s blood stained his silk shirt over the heart. “I’m afraid you’ve got far more than just the one gentleman ready to interrupt you, Madam Verdugo.”
“No, you’re not,” Annalise said.
“Hmm?”
“You’re not afraid,” she said. “Not yet.”
“By Saint Bjulf, that’s a good line.” August laughed like he was facing the Verdugo across a dinner party, not a bloodstained barn. “I’ll have to remember that line.”
“Now, August.” Annalise put her hands on her hips. The only weapons on her were her side sword and one dagger at her belt. “I’ve killed north of a quarter-thousand people.”
“How many of those were on the scaffold?”
She inclined her head. “Not my point, sir, but fair enough. What I’m getting to is that everyone wants a good death. But most people, when they die, they shit themselves. All those touching sacrifices and bedside boo-hoos. Death’s mercy is they’re already gone back to the Wheel when it happens, so they’ll never know it.” She rubbed her chin. “But your uncle Rohan, well. Funny thing. He shit himself first. And then I killed him.”
August’s eye twitched.
“Where’s your sword, Verdugo?” a voice from beyond Seth’s sight rumbled.
“Brought the spare,” Annalise said. “If that’s all right.”
“I must admit to some offense.” August paced slowly behind the ragged line of his men, speaking from a gap between two thick-necked enforcers. “Do we not rate the souldrinker?”
“Well, lads, I won’t lie.” Annalise counted on her fingers. “There’s… nine of youse. And nine’s my highest number this year. And despite the reputation, I fight better without the executioner sword. Bit disappointing, I know. I figured I ought to leave the big fecker at home, so I could be sure I’d kill each and every one of you.”
“Oh, you’re sure?”
“Yes.” She took one huge arm in the crook of the other and stretched her shoulder out. “But the reason in the main, boys, is I don’t need your hinky fucking hexis. I am not a Verdugo tonight. I didn’t bring the souldrinker, because I’m not here for your souls.”
Slowly and deliberately she crossed her arms over each other and settled one hand on each pommel. The night and its soldiers drew close and looming. Her side sword clicked from its scabbard and caught the torchlight glow like a baton striking up a band.
“I’m here for his,” she said.