Chương 6: 1.5. What This Sword Does

Out they were trotted from the jailhouse, by a throng of patchwork irregulars. Six men and women, shivering and thinned by their internment. They assembled atop the scaffold in heavy shackles, forced to their knees, heads bowed in anticipation of the sword. (Passkey Standards on those wrists, Seth noted. So it wasn't all bad.) Krisova was the first prisoner in the line. A ginger-haired slip of a girl. She watched, numb and tearful, as her death approached, crouched, and cocked its head like a massive corvid.

"They're looking ill-fed, Carter," Annalise said.

"My apologies, Madame Verdugo. We, uh—we'll have to look at that."

"Who's this, then?" Annalise asked.

"Krisova il Maikova," Carter said.

"Stole and butchered her neighbor's goat. No dynamo was nearby; the beast's hexis was lost."

"Uhhh huh." Annalise straighened out and whistled.

"Ofelia. Come on up here, if you please." Seth, having relocated as far back into the crowd as he could realistically manage, was close enough to the girl to hear the soft click of her tongue she made at being summoned. She trudged through the parting people and up the scaffold. Annalise stepped aside to make room for her.

"What'd you steal that goat for, then, Krisova?" Annalise asked. Krisova looked up in confusion.

"Mistress?" Annalise raised a brow in invitation.

"Go on."

"I—I, er." Krisova was clearly ill-prepared to speak on this.

"I have three sisters, four brothers. A mother who can't get out of bed. A father who passed two years ago, up north. And I—we, uh—we were hungry, mistress. We were so hungry. And the money hasn't spent this year like it did last year, and I know I shouldn't have. I know. But there wasn't—I didn't want to hear them crying from the hunger as they tried to go to bed anymore." Ofelia listened as Krisova unspooled, marsh fire eyes searching the woman's face. Then she glanced to Annalise, and nodded.

"All right, up you get." Annalise helped the girl to her feet.

"Getting dirt on your pinafore. What's her sentence?" Carter ahem'd.

"Five years' detainment, Madame Verdugo."" Five?" Annalise snorted with ill belief.

"This goat do algebra or something? One year detained and the cost of the beast at market. And let her out on weekly supervision to earn for the family. Sounds as though they need it, yeah?"

"She's a scullery girl, Madame Verdugo," Carter said.

"She can't afford the penalty."

"She'll pay what she can," Annalise said, "and the legion will take care of the difference."

"What about the lost hexis, Madam Verdugo?"

"Sure look, Carter. It's just a bleeding goat." Annalise pointed the pommel of her blade toward Rohan's manor.

"I bet whoever lives in that fancy house up thataways uses more hexis on their motors and light fixtures in a week." She ignored the petrified silence this utterance had cast the crowd into, and stepped past Krisova, whose face was a portrait of confused awe.

"Who's next?" Over the next handful of minutes she listened to each case, meting out punishments:"Eighteen months of garnished wages, the remains to be donated to the victim. And I'll be back next year to hear whether your brother's forgiven you yet. We'll go from there."

"Exile from Prossimo for five years. The charter town I just came from was looking for ranch hands. Reckon the road south'll be fine and clear for solo traveling, if you get a move on."

"Fifteen lashes and seventy braces to the victim." The crowd's consternation increased with every criminal she stepped past and left breathing. The murmurs and jostling. This was not how Verdugos do their jobs. Every Verdugo had a quota. Every Verdugo's sword had to be filled by winter to fuel the deathspell. Why wasn't she executing anyone? She reached the end of the line. The ragged, bearded man who'd been shaking the whole time. Now he shook harder.

"Alfie Orteán," reported Chief Hermandat Carter.

"Mite breeder. Killed his business partner in a drunken dispute."

"Ah." Annalise sucked air in between her teeth.

"Well, now." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. She crouched in front of him. Her thick-gloved hand reached out and brushed his chin, directing his red-ringed eyes upward.

"You can stand up, Alfie. Make this conversation easier." Alfie Orteán rose with calved-deer shakiness to his feet.

"Alfie," she said.

"That's short for Alfonse?"

"Yes, mistress," he said, stripped and scratchy.

"That's a lovely name. Who gave it to you?"

"What?"

"Mom or dad?"

"My mother. It, uh—it was my granddad."

"He still around?"

"No, mistress."

"Right, Alfie." Annalise drummed her fingers on her sword's crossguard.

"Here's the deal. You've taken your grandfather's name, and you've cracked it. Alfonse Orteán the killer. That's how they'll remember you. I reckon you regret that."

"Every moment, mistress." He swallowed his gorge.

"Every moment I have left." Annalise lowered the blade from her shoulder, point to the ground.

"You know what this sword does, Alfie?"

"It—" Alfonse shut his eyes. A tear cut through the dirt on his face. Then another. And his composure cracked.

"It eats souls," he sobbed.

"It'll eat my soul."

"Ahh. Oh, dear." Annalise sighed.

"Saints, no wonder yous all so pallid around here. Your last Verdugo must've been one of those brimstone-type fellas." She directed her voice from the weeping prisoner out to the crowd.

"You can't eat a soul, folks. Common misconception about how hexcraft works. Souls are indestructible. Not even a seraph can eat a soul." She pointed to the cutout by the blade's fuller, to the row of emeralds along their abacus grooves.

"What this sword does is take all the hexis a soul fires off when it takes its leave. That's all. Like a man-sized mitelamp. And put it in one of these cells here. Your soul's going back to the turning wheel, Alfie. To bathe itself clean and return to its next chance. You hear me?" Alfie Orteán took a snotnosed inhale, and nodded.

"Dedicate the hexis you leave as a gift to the Sorcerer General." Annalise turned back to the condemned man.

"As power for the deathspell. And I'll deliver it for you. And in his eyes—in everyone's eyes—you will be redeemed. Give it freely and bravely, and I'll shepherd you on into your next life as gentle as I can. No pain, Alfie. I promise." She held her hand out. Her voice went quieter, gentler, and the square strained to hear it.

"The first death you caused didn't mean a thing. Just a sad mistake. Let's change that for the second. Let your sacrifice push back the dark another year. Will you do that for me?" He stared for a few beats of his condemned heart; then he took it. She shook his hand and then rested it on his shoulder.

"Kneel, Alfonse."

"I'm," he said.

"I can't mm—my legs aren't—" She leaned forward. He shrank back, stumbled; her hand caught him and held him still. Her black lips hovered next to his ear. The front rank by the scaffold craned their necks, but if they heard what she said to the doomed man, Seth surely didn't. As she whispered, her hand went from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head, and gave a gentle but insistent push. Slowly, he sank to the wood, first one knee, then the other. Her hand cupped his cheek for a moment.

Then it strayed back, and settled with its twin on the jet handle of her sword. She took a step back, boots creaking the scaffold beneath her warrior weight.

"Do you love your people, Alfonse Orteán?"

"Yes." She mantled the blade back to her shoulder.

"Do you repent your crime against them?"

"I do," he sobbed. His head lowered, tucked to his chest.

"God, I do."

"Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?"

"I do."

"Well done, Alfonse. Very well done." She looked to Ofelia. The girl cleared her throat.

"Excuse me, Mr. Alfonse?" The man looked up and over his shoulder, to the sound of his name. His throat extended. The sword came singing through the air, faster than the eye could track. Its inkstroke arc carried Alfonse's head from his shoulders. A collective OH! from the crowd as the head dropped, leaving the rest of the body to tip forward. Seth caught a look at it, turning in the air.

Alfonse's expression was one of curious hope, as if there'd been some kind of salvation to be found in the voice at his shoulder. Maybe there was. Annalise's massive arm shot out and caught the falling body as its lifeblood pumped bright and terrible from the wound; she laid it gently to the boards. The Verdugo lifted the severed head. The blood on its cheek from where it lay in its body's foaming gore.

"Thank you, Alfonse," she said, and closed his eyes. Then she stood and leaned on her massive, bleeding blade. It pulsed viridian as the hexis siphoned into it. One of the emeralds in the clutch at the base of the sword slotted with a click from one row to the next. Annalise eyed the movement with evident satisfaction, then held a hand out toward her daughter.

"My pipe, Ofelia, if you'd be so kind." Ofelia stuck her hand in her satchel and came out with a long-stemmed briar wood pipe and a book of matches.

"Thanks, kiddo." Annalise struck a match against her sword's textured pommel.

"Right. Any final takers? Trim, anyone?" Silence.

"Pardon my joke, folks." Annalise touched the match to her pipe and took a slow, indulgent inhale.

"We're nearly through. Just one more order of business." She glanced upward, at Rohan's balcony. The man was stock-still. Hadn't moved since he'd last spoken up.

"Last night, a spot of burgling happened in my room up at the lodge." Annalise jerked a thumb behind her to the Sidewinder.

"Now it'd be a lie to say I wasn't medium-well pissed when I found out, but I figure perhaps if the thief were to come forward right now, all humble and recalcitrant and professing they didn't know whose goods they were stealing—because surely they didn't, I further figure—I'd be obliged to approach their case with a big heaping spoonful of mercy." Alfonse's blood was dripping through the scaffold boards. The square was quiet enough you could hear it. Plop, plop.

"So let's get the word out on that, thank you kindly, and since I've a schedule to keep, let's call it an hour. And if the thief isn't identified by then…" She blithely shrugged her massive shoulders.

"Well, we don't know each other yet, so whatever I say, you can't be sure I'll do. So I won't waste my breath or your time carrying on about stringing folks up or setting your lovely town on fire. But I'll have to stick around until it's found, and I'll have to play my part in looking for it." She swept her midnight eyes across her subjects. It skipped past Seth, and then doubled back and pinned him to the spot. She winked. Then her gaze detached.

"And it won't be pleasant, I fear," she said.

"For any of us."