At the root of that savagery, however, was her certainty that she wouldn’t be found, her pride—and those created a big opening that we could exploit.
“Do you think you could use this to lure Carredura out?” Riviere asked, handing the card back to Layla. “Once she’s out in the open, we’ll handle the rest. We’ll do everything in our power to ensure no harm comes to you.”
“I can survive a little harm,” Layla said. She just wanted us to do this, and do it right. She was seething with the rage of someone freshly wronged.
Then we discussed what we would do, the exact means by which we would capture Carredura. The linchpin to our plan was, by necessity, Riviere, who possessed the ability to neutralize her counterpart’s power.
“I’ll face Carredura myself,” she said. “MacMillia and Elaina, if you would be kind enough to act as my support.”
Henri, meanwhile, would mobilize the police force to set the stage for our encounter. They would set up a dragnet so Carredura couldn’t run away, make sure the citizens stayed inside, and generally try to minimize any damage. They would also be responsible for keeping Layla safe, of course.
Once they had laid the trap, it would be our job to do what we could to stop Carredura.
That was Riviere’s plan, in broad outline.
“What, concretely, should Miss Elaina and I do?” I asked.
It showed that I wasn’t exactly a brilliant tactician, but Riviere was kind enough to answer. “You just need to keep her in one place. Then I can break the curse.”
“That’s very…nonspecific,” I said. It didn’t amount to much of a plan—Riviere was basically saying, Just figure something out, please.
Elaina didn’t look much more convinced than I felt. “Okay, so we’re going to fight with Scary Sancta Person, I get that. Do we have any weapons we can use? I don’t think we’re going to be very effective if we go in unarmed.”
Excellent question! I nodded along with this most obvious thing to ask.
Riviere, strangely, just smiled. “How many years do you think I’ve been chasing Carredura?”
“No idea.”
“Well, it’s a very long time now. And I haven’t spent it unprepared.”
She stood up and headed for the back of the store. There was a room there where she kept all the sancta that she had confiscated in cases involving Carredura. Traces of her, left at the scene whenever someone was reduced to grief. Little shards of cruelty that brought us teasingly, tantalizingly close but never actually led us to the culprit herself.
“I deliberately refrained from disenchanting some of these sancta.” Riviere brought out everything that was in the storage room. All of it was weathered and old. She began to explain what the objects did. “These are sheets that kill whoever’s wrapped up in them. At a moment when the country was in turmoil, Carredura sold them to a client while claiming to be the queen.” The buyer shortly fell into an eternal sleep.
“This is sealing wax that grants volition. It can give force of will to your possessions and cause them to move around. Carredura gave it to a young man who had lost his father and begged to get closer to his possessions. I’m sure he was hoping to forge some kind of connection with his father’s personal effects.” The young man was later discovered dead. His father had been a bandit.
“These are handcuffs that eternally bind those connected by them. Long ago, a woman in the throes of love used them so as never to leave her partner alone.”
Eventually, the man stabbed the woman, and she died. He explained later that they hadn’t even been dating; the woman had harbored an entirely unrequited interest in him. Even today, there were records at the police station of when the man had appeared there, dragging along the corpse he was chained to.
“This is the Controlling Lipstick. It causes anything you kiss to belong to you. A greedy woman once used it to take control of one man after another.”
But the lipstick was not capable of controlling people’s hearts. A struggle for hierarchy broke out among the men whom the woman had made her own, until her little empire ate itself from the inside.
That was just a sampling of the sancta Riviere had in that room. Each was something Carredura had sold in some measure for her own amusement—and whose outcome she had mocked when it arrived.
Confronted by all the sancta Riviere pulled out of that storage room, I felt like I had to sit down. “It just goes to show you how many people she’s hurt over the years…”
“That’s right.”
Given that there were other objects Riviere had already disenchanted, not to mention probably some she never got her hands on, the real number of victims almost defied calculation. What was clear was that people were still paying the price for reckless wishes made by a few despairing souls during the dark days after the founding of this country.
But maybe we could put a stop to it. We had to.
So I said, “Let’s do it, Miss Riviere,” and reached for my weapons.
“Your own deeds brought this on you, Carredura.” Riviere began to fire off the story, listing the things Carredura had done as if she could see right through her. Carredura stood there, looking scandalized.
Riviere was so calm, she could have been chatting about bygone days with an old friend—and in fact, she had known “Miss Carredura” for a long time. In a weird way, it almost looked like a reunion.
“Thank you for that very long, very pointless story,” Carredura said. I knew that inside, she was no human. The way she gave a little bow as she answered, she clearly believed she was still in control of this situation. Almost as if she thought that by this point, nothing could go wrong for her.
She might look like an old acquaintance of Riviere’s, but whatever was in there, it wasn’t the Carredura whom Riviere had known. And I assumed this entity felt nothing at all for Riviere.
She gave a mocking smile. “Tell me, what brings you to me, so cavalier? Just here to say hello?”
“If you’ve got any last words, I might consider listening to them. Because today is the day you die.”
“Goodness gracious. You would treat a thing like me as if I were alive? The vaunted immortal antiques dealer really is different from any ordinary human.”
“Not as different as a thing that sells things.”
“I prefer to think of myself as doing the glorious work of producing new brethren and giving them a purpose.”
“Speaking of which, do you recall how many of your ‘brethren’ you’ve sold in your time?”
“I make it a point not to put a number on joyous occasions.”
“And what they did?”
“The same principle applies.”
“Hmm. If you say so.” Riviere nodded, and she looked relieved. Then she looked me right in the eye…where I stood behind Carredura. “Then allow me to reintroduce you.”
Those words were the first signal. I let fly with the whip.
It was a sancta Riviere had given me some time before. All you had to do was think about wanting to capture something within its range, and it would grab that thing. I used the whip in combination with the sheets to pin Carredura’s arms to her sides and wrap her up.
These were the sheets that could put a person into an eternal sleep, of course.
“Aren’t you cute?” she said, turning and glowering at me.
It had been a gamble whether the item would work on Carredura, who was neither a person nor an object—but the gamble had paid off. Everything above the sheets sheared off and fell away. Everything from the waist down slid and tumbled to the ground. The whip returned neatly to my hand, bringing just the torso with it.