Chương 2: 1.1. Accidents Happen

Book 1 - The Fox On the last surviving continent, beneath the shimmering viridian dome of the Deathspell, in a dusty little charter town called Prossimo, there lived—for another hour at least, he hoped—a thief named Seth il Gutierre. Seth scrambled across the roadhouse's roof, willing prey-animal speed into his unsteady legs. The money (stolen) was under his arm, clattering like hail as he lost his footing and found it again on the shingle. The gun (likewise stolen) wove an unsteady bead ahead of him.

His pursuers bayed to one another through the evening air. Tomorrow morning, the goodfolk of Prossimo would have a story to tell and stains to clean. He racked his brain as he climbed and skidded, still halfway in his cups, still struggling to emerge from the good mood the drink had press-ganged him into. Who'd been beating his door down? Who was chasing him? Was this the thing with the Nemethe dynamos, coming back to bite him? Had Rafe squealed? Impossible. The Verdugo got Rafe. Can't squeal without your head.

A CRACK sounded behind him and opened a bright, jagged gouge in the roof beside him. He skidded and dislodged a shingle with the haste of his hairpin turn, lunging for cover in the steep diagonal valley a dormer window formed with the rooftop's main slope. Voices echoed up past the clapboards.

"Circle him! Other side, other side!" Seth knew that voice. That was Polecat. Hundred saints help him. Those were Patre Rohan's boys down there. He slid down the roof slope to the precarious edge and blinked the sweat from his darting eyes. The River of St. Hanimak was silver and obsidian and streaked with shimmering emerald from the last green light of evening. This close to the Sidewinder, it was deep enough to catch him, if he was lucky. Seth il Gutierre was not a lucky man. Jump, the fox on his back whispered.

He jumped and he plummeted. His shoulder-first plunge scattered the reflection into rippling scintilla. His arm sucked into the mire; his shoulder jolted with pain, but after a panicky moment of disorientation he confirmed it was still whole and housed in its socket. He kicked, and rose gasping and thrashing into the stinging early-autumn air. The current was fast from some storm in the north, and the muddy bank slid briskly past him. He battled the yanking current to shore and sloshed onto the mudbank.

Two burning breaths and then he looked up and made eye contact with the boy. Big goofy ears, an Adam's apple still prominent with the gangliness of youth, and for a moment Seth almost believed this was a shocked civilian, just tarrying by the riverbank, but shocked civilians don't carry spiked cudgels, do they? But he looked so young, staring down the mitegun's barrel. Young and fearful. In the nigh-on two decades he'd been a crook, Seth had never killed anyone. Never.

It had been his balm, huddled in holding cells, sleeping rough beneath unattended awnings. Your life is one long slow slide-whistle, il Gutierre, and you're nearly out of breath and all out of friends, and every honest day you've had was an honest mistake. But you've never killed anyone. The barrel quivered upward to the boy's forehead. Seth pulled the trigger. A wet click. The fucking mite had been swept out the chamber. Seth blurted a laugh of despaired disbelief. Of course. The boy tackled him. Stupid Seth.

Stupid, stupid. A scrum formed around him, calling out and piling on. Stupid you for getting the fucking Fox, and stupid fucking Fox for getting you killed. Bodies clambered or were hauled off him. He flopped onto his back, and there was no time to thank the curer of his claustrophobia because a heavy boot connected with his solar plexus.

"Look at the shit we just stepped in, gents," someone said.

"Seth il fucking Gutierre."

"I didn't know." He curled into a ball as the next kick came, and the next, and the next.

"I didn't know it was Rohan. Please, please, please I didn't —""What I think we need to keep in mind," Seth said, tonguing the new chip in his molar, "is that accidents happen."

"Sure thing," said Sure-Thing Brock. His catchphrase had something of an echo to it here, at the business end of a long wood-paneled hallway decorated with chiaroscuro paintings of ancestors, nudes, and nude ancestors.

"And I think if you're a fair person, you recognize that. And make your decisions in recognition of it." Seth fidgeted with his handcuffs. He couldn't see them behind his back, but reckoned them cheap Mossnails by the hexagonal rivets and the pointy edges on the single strand. They could have sprung for a pair of Passkey Standards, at least.

"Sure thing," said Brock. The long-eared muran with the knife—Polecat, Rohan's right hand—said nothing. Just took another slice off his apple, speared it on the end of his gravity knife, and shoved it in his frowning mouth. His whiskers twitched.

"Rohan told me once he was a fair person," Seth said. The key was on Polecat's belt; a shame. Both these men were bigger and broader than him—many men were—but Sure-Thing Brock, you could swindle or sweet-talk. Polecat was a killer. One of those murani with a chip on the shoulder about humanity.

"It was when he broke my hand, couple years back. You were there, Sure-Thing Brock. Right?"

"Sure thing," said Brock. Polecat shifted from foot to foot on the onyx carpet.

"Can you shut him the fuck up, please?"

"Sure thing," said Brock, and introduced his hamhock fist to Seth's midsection.

"I'm only," Seth managed, when his lungs were once again on speaking terms with speaking.

"I'm only saying I never would have taken the money if I'd known it was Rohan's. I respect the man." This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

"He'll be happy to hear that," Polecat said.

"Maybe we could—""Maybe you could saw his hand off early, Sure-Thing Brock."

"Sure thing."

"All right. All right, man. Can't blame a guy for trying."

"You know what your problem is, Seth?" Polecat stood and adjusted his belt, from which a popmite pepperbox hung in a stamped leather holster.

"You talk too goddamn much." Talking too goddamn much was not Seth's problem, if you asked Seth. His problem was waiting behind the wood-paneled door in front of the three men, its glass smoked, its mullions and rails carved fine with images of carnivorous seraphim crawling ashore before the proud and pennant-waving Sorcerer's Legion.

The door, so appointed in the trappings of dire apocalypse, was designed to be as foreboding as possible when slowly and menacingly opened, and Polecat was well-practiced at the motion. The office was lit in flickering celadon by a pair of mitelamps. At its opposite end, between a pair of bookshelves and behind a table as narrow and dark as Seth's future, there waited a squat, manicured man.

"Il Gutierre, my lad." A ring-laden hand indicated a seat with a desultory wave.

"Take a load off, why don't you." Seth eased himself into the spindly seat before Rohan's plush swivel chair.

"Patre Rohan. Thank you so much for inviting me into your home."

"The pleasure is mine." The patre leaned forward on his elbows.

"Though you're dripping on my tile."

"I'm thinking dry thoughts."

"Now, Seth. You've gotten along with me. Historically." Rohan smiled. Bright teeth below darkly dyed lips. Hexentatted, to hear the rumors, with a ward against poison. Must've hurt.

"I have," Seth said.

"I mean, I get along with everybody."

"Sure you do."

"But I especially love getting along with you. A learned man."

"Mmhmm."

"A merciful man is what I always say. When asked."

"People ask you about me, then."

"All the time," Seth said.

"They ask where'd you learn how to haggle so well, or whose image do you aspire to, or they ask how do you make that clicky noise with your thumb, Seth, it's so loud, and I tell them that's where Patre Rohan il Agante broke my hand that one time. Mercifully."

"Mercifully, yes. The usual penalty for thievery being a hand's removal."

"Exactly my point, patre."

"First-time thievery, I should add," Rohan said. The light by his side flickered low, casting his heavy brow in shadow.

"And this, Seth, is not your first time."

"What I think we need to keep in mind," Seth said, "is that accidents happen." Polecat the muran peeled another piece off his apple.

"Keeps saying that."

"And I have every intention of paying you back," Seth said.

"Pay me back." Rohan's rings clattered together as he tapped his finger on his lacquered desk.

"Now, that's interesting. Pay me with what, Seth? Spent most of what you own on getting a hexentat over in Sondam, I heard." With a clack the mitelamp by Rohan's shoulder swung its trap, crushing the crawlers in its chamber and reigniting its corpselight filaments with their tiny deaths.

"How is that treating you?" Rohan's teeth gleamed emerald in the newly flared corpselight.

"Still a bit sting-y?"

"Getting there." A solid slap on his back from Polecat spread tingling flame across Seth's skin.

"Good to hear, il Gutierre." Considerate murani trimmed their claws on the regular when they dwelt with humans. Polecat was not considerate. Rohan's black-cherry smile grew under his curled beard.

"How about you show us?" Seth unsnapped the tarnished buttons on his work overalls and shrugged the straps. He lifted the stained cotton work shirt (stained with his blood, to be clear, and recently—Seth was a fastidious guy) and turned to display the map of bewitched ink carved into his back. Rohan gave an appreciative whistle.

"Excellent work. Very traditional. Crisp." Seth glanced over his shoulder.

"Thank you, patre."

"Just one hex? And three rings?"

"Leave yourself room to expand, the scriber said."

"I'm sure he did." Rohan's chuckle carried all the warmth of a branding iron.

"Y'see this, fellas? Three big base rings to fill with magic, and one lonely little hex to live on them. Got the Fox, huh?"

"I wanted a voice I could trust," Seth said.

"Scriber said that as long as you jump when the Fox says jump, it'll look out for you. Said all the other hexes were just gimmicks in comparison."

"And how has that worked out so far?" Seth turned back to Rohan's pearly grin and lowered his shirt.

"If it's any consolation, patre, I'm wondering if I got robbed too."

"It's a beautiful illustration, Seth il Gutierre. But I'm afraid it's my money you spent on it." Rohan scooted his seat forward.

"That makes it mine. I might need to repossess it. I might need to find a leatherworker to preserve it and a spot on my wall to hold it. I already have the knife to cut it out. Don't I, Polecat?" Polecat's gravity knife came flickering down, thudding into the wood of the table in the narrow space between Seth's pointer and middle. Seth jerked his hand back and nearly fell out of his cheap seat. Goddamn murani and their goddamn reflexes. Polecat grinned his leonine grin.

"Yes, patre."

"Fucking hell, Polecat." Rohan's smile sank off his face like a concrete-shoed corpse.

"Get your shit out of my table." Polecat looked up from his handiwork, abashed.

"I—""He's already pissing himself. You carving your fucking initials? By St. Procas." Rohan put his face close to his desk, eyes squinting.

"You're paying to get that filled in and varnished," he decided. Polecat's long ears turned pink at their points.

"Yes, patre." He closed his fist around the knife and tugged. Then he put his elbow on the table and apologetically tugged again, and finally it came loose. There's only so long a man can sit in a puddle of fearful sweat before he grows impatient to be either released or tortured to death. Seth wondered how much terrified scraping he'd have to do to satisfy Rohan's appetite for it.

"I could do a hand," he said.

"I could. If it was between the hide and the hand, I could do a hand, and we could call my skin loaned to me on an installment plan."

"Here is my offer, Seth," Rohan said.

"My offer is: no lost hand, no lost hide, no rigmarole."

"Thank you, pater. Thank—""You get your life, and for the next half-year, I get your life, too."

"Okay—""You do what I say when I say it. You steal what I tell you to steal, you rob who I tell you to rob. You eat when I tell you, you sleep when I tell you, you raise your hand and ask before you go to the damn outhouse. From now until the next winter war is done, you, Seth, are mine."

"I see," Seth said, hands folded in his lap. Little phantom pains from his previous dance with Rohan's syndicate. The echo of the sound his knuckle made when it popped from its housing.

"And then we're square?"

"Then we're square on the outstanding interest. And we talk about your principal."

"Uhhh huh." Seth chewed the inside of his cheek. Okay, so this the gnaw-your-leg-off kinda trap. You can do that. You've got teeth.

"Well, one thing at a time."

"Indeed." Rohan nodded amicably.

"So here's the first thing. Your new, jointly owned life starts tonight. A little introductory job to prove I'm not making a bum investment. What do you think, boys? You ready for an unpaid junior associate?"

"Sure thing," said Sure-Thing Brock. Seth blinked.

"Tonight?"

"Has to be tonight." The beads in Rohan's braid clicked an accompaniment to his continuing nod.

"Our client is only in town tonight."

"I'll see if I can squeeze it into the schedule," Seth said.

"Joking. Joking, Polecat. Leave my neck alone, please." Polecat's blade departed Seth's throat. His golden pupils slowly dilated back out of their hunter's slit.

"Need to get that thorn out of your tail if I'm gonna be your unpaid junior associate, man." Seth sighed and rubbed his jaw.

"What do you need me for, patre?"

"What else are you good for, Seth il Gutierre?" Rohan smiled like a fun uncle and patted Seth's healed hand.

"You're going thieving."