The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

In Headless Over Heels, after watching Lisa listen to the spy stone she sent through the seraph cult's transport circle, Seth goes back to the carriage to fetch her some refreshments. There he gets needled by Ofelia over his relationship(s) with Annalise, Lisa, and maybe Anna some time.

“What is it with this family and trying to make me blush.”

“We’re jealous of your color, I suppose.” She set aside the pants and went rooting through the pile again. “What was she doing in your tent the other night, then, out of curiosity? If she wasn’t canoodling.”

“Talking,” Seth said. “Just talking.”

Ofelia unfolded a tunic. “Ooh, look at this.” She poked a finger through the torn cloth. “Punctured.”

Seth squinted against the beating-down sun. “Is that what you were wearing when you were stabbed?”

“This is what Tiago was wearing last time he was stabbed.” She flattened the tunic in front of her and got to work. “Hard to keep track, I know. All we wear is black.”

“Is that regulation? I know the Verdugo is supposed to be in all black, but I remember Erheis’s servants wearing whatever they liked.”

“Mmhmm. So do Tiago and I. We like black.”

“How do you tell whose stuff is whose?”

“The feel, mostly. I care about materials and being comfortable, and he cares about how broad it makes his shoulders look.”

Seth had lost most of his patience for teenagers once he’d left the age behind, but he liked Ofelia’s company. Maybe it helped that she wasn’t actually one. “Was he stabbed in some kind of shoulder-off?”

Ofelia’s silvery giggle was becoming an increasingly common sound. Seth was proud of that. “Fellow who was angry about his brother’s execution,” she said. “The ironic thing is it was Erheis who swung that sword. I suppose this mourning man had spent all year hyping himself up, then a different Verdugo showed up.”

“Why didn’t he stab Annalise?”

“You’ve seen Annalise.” She bit through the end of her thread. “What about?”

“What about what?”

“What were you talking about?”

“Leads,” Seth said. “There’s this guy Cabota Cazza I’ve been looking for. Nobody’s heard of him. Which is kind of odd, because I was told he was a big deal.”

Oh my saints, Cabota Cazza IS Pepe Silvia!

“Cabota Cazza.” Ofelia paused mid-stitch. “Who told you?”

“Secondhand from some fellas at the Tower Wick,” Seth said. “That dead cultist was spreading it around.”

Ofelia shuffled her clothes pile aside and began hurriedly digging through her stacks of books.

Seth shaded his eyes. “What are you looking for up there?”

“I believe those gentlemen mistook the man’s honorific for his name.” Ofelia’s search sent a stack of books cascading from the carriage roof; she gave no sign of noticing. “And Diego was under the employ of a Cabo ta Cazya.” She pronounced the syllables with crisp separation.

“That… shoot. That is probably correct.” Seth picked up one of Ofelia’s discarded books—a Tuthimi bodice-ripper, to judge from the cover, all verdant valleys and crystal waterfalls and bosoms heaving out from brocaded service dresses. He tossed it back into the carriage. “What’s a Cabo ta Cazya?”

“It’s Sektoric for Knight of the Body. A title granted to the old physikers of the Sektoric Empire, back before the Territories.” She hung upside down from the roof, making a curtain of her long black hair, and peered through the carriage window. “I think it’s under that battle axe there.”

Seth scooted the aforementioned weapon out of the way. Beneath it was a box of pieces for an unfamiliar game and a yellowing paperback entitled Heterodoxies of Preseraphic Sektorbrav. He passed it into Ofelia’s reaching hand.

“They were an order tasked with serving the Emperor and his court.” She riffled through the pages. “Bloodletters, bonesetters, bathhouse keepers. They were honored even as they shoveled the shit.” She halted and turned the book around, displaying an intaglio image in antique cross-hatch. A lantern-jawed man, the top half of his face encased in a slit-eyed mask, standing at the stony lip of a flowing reservoir.

“Huh. The Cabo ta Cazya.” Seth sat on the carriage stoop and stared past his knees at the street.

At the drain set into it, where fountain water flowed into the darkness.

“The Sektorics were, and remain, a people quite obsessed with cleanliness,” Ofelia said. “At the height of the Interemergence their emperors used to hold their imperial court in great heated pools. Swimming with steam. Headsmen in hot tubs, imagine that. I suppose it beats a carriage for smell.”

“And these Cabos. They maintained it?”

Ofelia traced Seth’s intense stare. Understanding kindled on her face. “They did indeed,” she murmured.

Seth stood up and stepped to the drain, and listened to the fall of his feet.

“What if,” he said, “our bells are ringing on the wrong side of the ground?”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...f-the-body
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