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

[Mamorien]

Sadly, the title drop in today's Headless Over Heels doesn't happen in the part that hooks me harder.

“Wait. Wait, I hear it.” Lisa’s grimace of concentration broke open and hatched an excited grin. She waggled her dark brows at Seth. “I’ll be damned. There’s the bell.”

Tiago smoothed out a corner of the waterworks map across the carriage’s foldaway table and weighed it down with a tin tobacco box. “What’s the pattern?”

“Four rings between pauses,” Lisa said. “Who’s four rings?”

“That’s…” Seth scanned the roster. “Hannah il Teffik. How loud is it?”

“Faint,” Lisa said. “Getting fainter. Walls or distance.”

“Time is… five past three.” Tiago ran a finger down the map of Fontana’s underground, with a hastily-woven spiderweb of criers’ assigned routes along it. “At a guess, she’s at this green-line junction below the Paostwari House.”

Half the tunnels down there used to be catacombs...

“That would be a stroke of luck.” Ofelia huddled over the map with her brother. “It’s a gray-water part of the system. Fountains and not feces.”

“We’ll meet her at the exit gate on Dulcet street and confirm.” Tiago stretched his gangly legs out of the carriage. “Not to be a cynical little shit, but they might have just flushed the rock, or swept it into a storm drain, and we’re chasing a trash heap.”

“They might have. But it’s worth investigation, anyway.” Lisa reached both broad hands across the table and clasped Ofelia and Seth’s shoulders. “My geniuses.”

“I did absolutely nothing,” Ofelia said. “You’re welcome.”

Seth found his cutlass in the cluttered corner of the carriage he’d begun piling his stuff. Lisa loaded her panoply of bladed weapons onto her body, from baldrick to belt, and retrieved her broad-brimmed roadwarden hat, tsking as she punched a dent out of its thick felt crown. Tiago buckled his wheelgun to his side and shrugged his sheepskin jacket on. Ofelia picked out a book with a torso on it called Claimed by the Cavalier and folded it out to her current page.

Tiago gave it a dismal look. “You need to at least bring a knife, Feeli.”

“I can borrow one of mother’s,” Ofelia said.

Lisa exchanged salutes with the hermandati waiting outside the carriage, filled them in on the discovery, and cheerfully waved off their offers of accompaniment. “My family and I will handle it fine, thank you,” she told them, and Seth wasn’t sure why she hadn’t included him in that statement, or whether, perhaps, she had.

They trooped through Fontana’s streets. The antigravitational repulsion of the al Ydrises cleared a swathe of path before them. Stares followed them. Conversations died and rose again as whispers in their wake. Seth hadn’t ended up with the Hummingbird hexentat across his back, but he needed no sorcery to know what they were talking about. The one lit man in the company of a clutch of undead.

Dulcet street was a tight line of row houses, whose narrow and multicolored progress reminded Seth of a stack of Ofelia’s books. At the end of one gridded block squatted a brickwork bunker with a wrought iron gate set before a staircase down into the earth. “Like a portico to the Panvesian underworld,” Ofelia observed, whatever that meant.

Tiago produced a brass pocket watch and flipped it open. “Half past,” he said. “If they haven’t caught her and slit her throat, she’ll be here any minute.”

“My dour boy.” Lisa bumped him with her hip. “I should’ve brought Anna so the two of you could be broody together.”

“I don’t mind Lisa.” Tiago clacked the pocketwatch’s boxy lid shut. “Enhances the contrast.”

From the staircase came the tromp of heavy boots. A lambent green appeared around a bend in the cavern and attached itself to the bright globe of a mitelamp, held in the leather gauntlet of a stout red-nosed woman. She grinned up at them and rang a bell in her other hand. “Wotcha,” she said. “You must be the Verdugo.”

“I suppose I must.” Lisa smiled and inclined her head, but true to her warning, her posture was stiffer with this grubby little worker bee than Annalise’s would be. “And you’re Hannah il Teffik.”

Hannah bit the finger on her glove and yanked it off with her teeth. “That’s me, your honor. Or whatever I call you.” She stuck her stubby hand out. Lisa gamely took it. “I guess you’re here on account of the dings.”

“That’s right. You’re the lucky one whose bell came through.” Seth held up a bundle in waxed paper, grease stains on its underside. “Hungry, Miss il Teffik?”

“You bring that for me?” Hannah shucked her other glove. “Bless you. Just about starved, I am. Lot of walking you had us get up to.” She plopped to the road, eased her back onto the waterstained edge of the gate behind her, and unwrapped the package. “Least I didn’t need to shout anything. Oh, bless you.” She uncovered the roasted chicken Seth had brought and commenced to tear it to pieces.

“We have to move fast,” Tiago said, over the sound of Hannah’s mastication. “There’s the risk they had people down there and heard the clanging. It’s not exactly a predictable move, what we’re doing, but it’ll put them on guard.”

“I know you only just surfaced, Hannah.” Lisa crouched to the woman’s level. “But would you mind terribly guiding us back down?”

“Let me finish this excellent fucking chicken here and I’m all yours, Madam Verdugo.” Hannah gave an affirmative wag of her drumstick. “You got a map there, young fella?”

Tiago nodded and unfolded the parchment. “It was around three we heard you. I had you placed right here.” He pointed to a four-way junction shaded in evening-sky green.

“Yep. Looks about right.” Hannah licked grease from her pointer finger and traced her route. “That’d be the green-line right here.” She diverted from the tunnel to a square room off its junction. “On the fork I didn’t take there’s a waystation you might look at. And then right here… hmm.” She tapped an amorphous lozenge on the other side, like a topographical marking. “That’s one of the old crypts.”

Tiago squinted at the shape, which now had a fleck of seasoning spice clinging to it. “Crypts?”

“Yessir,” Hannah said. “Half the tunnels down there used to be catacombs, y’know. They went and repurposed them for plumbing during the great big build-out that made Fontana Fontana.”

“What’d they do with the bodies?” Seth asked.

Hannah crooked her eyebrow. “The bodies moved themselves, young fella. You don’t know the tale? During the second emergence, this place was ground zero for a white feather. Rosh-Antakesi, the puppeteer. You heard about her, surely.”

Seth had. Graveyards turned to tidal waves of bone and rotten flesh, weeping victims flensed and filleted by their own ancestors, brought back up as corpse soldiers to shred their neighbors. “Yeah,” he said. The appetite he’d been building off Hannah’s chicken fell into the ravine of his turning stomach.

“Well, we here in Fontana were her first victims.” Hannah jerked a thumb into the darkness behind her. “The catacombs emptied themselves. Half the city was slaughtered. The survivors got very into cremation.”

“I, uh… I guess I can understand why that would be,” Seth said.

“So after the second E, we had all this underground room, and made the best of it.” Hannah wiped her face and tossed her crumpled paper serviette into the pile of bones she was making. “I say we like this wasn’t two centuries ago. The larger crypts like this one either went undisturbed or were made into waystations and quarters for the builders and maintainers. Once the construction project wound down, y’know, they didn’t need all the space. They held onto a few of ‘em, and others they collapsed or filled with rubble and dross from the building project. And then here or there you get derelict spots like this one that they just sealed and left alone. Too big or load-bearing or they just ran out of money and time.” Her finger circled the crypt and prodded at its red-inked entrances. “See these crosses through the tunnels around it? Those have been sealed.”

“So…” Seth turned his head to see the map from Hannah’s perspective. There’s no tunnel left in. No entrance.”

Hannah scratched a mole on her chin. “None of the personnel ones, no. Might be a choke tunnel you could fit through, though. Skinny sprat like you. Those ain’t marked on here.”

“You want me to go into something called a choke tunnel.”

“It’s a Kari-Kine loanword. Had a bunch of them on the digging crews back in the wayback. Chok means… something. Crawl, I think? Anyway, you won’t choke, probably.” Hannah set the remains of her meal aside and grunted back to her feet. “But you’re gonna have to crawl.”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...little-fox