9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn

by Matthew Hughes

  It was something like an arm, something like a tentacle, something like an insect’s hooked limb and altogether like nothing I had ever seen; but it seized Vashtun Errible about the neck, lifted his worn slippers from the carpet and drew him into the swirl of motion within the frame.

  The book fell from his hands as his face was drawn into the maelstrom. The rest of his body followed, pulled through the frame with a sound that reminded me of thick liquid passing through a straw. But I was not concentrating on the peculiarities of Errible’s undoing; for the moment his head entered the frame, my faculties were restored.

  I took in the room again, but with new eyes. I recognized some of the objects on the table and recalled having read about the fallen book in my youth. Thus, when the thing in the window had done with Errible and reached for me, it found me holding the volume and quoting the passage that the indentee had begun.

  The limb retracted and the shapes in the frame roiled and coruscated. I could not read the emotions, but I was willing to infer rage and disappointment.

  “This is not as lamentable an outcome as you may think,” I said, when the cantrip had once more bound the demon.

  “Our perspectives differ, as is to be expected when one party holds the leash and the other wears the collar,” said the thing in the window.

  “We did not finish discussing where your interests lie nor had we even begun to consider mine. But if we can cause them to coincide, I am prepared to relinquish the leash and slip the collar.”

  The next sound approximated a sardonic laugh. “After I arrange for you to rule your boring little world, no doubt.”

  I made a sound involving lower teeth, upper lip and an explosion of air, and said. “Do I strike you as one who aspires to be a civil servant? The Archon already performs that tedious function and good luck to him.”

  A note of interest crept into the demon’s tone. “Then what do you wish?”

  I told him.

  * * *

  With the transdimensional demise of Vashtun Errible, all of his works became as if they never were. Grier Alfazzian’s prospects had never dimmed and Oblos Pinnifrant’s fortune had not been touched, thus neither owed me a grimlet nor knew that they ever had.

  I did not care. My fees had become increasingly arbitrary: for an interesting case I would take no more than the client could afford; if it bored me, I would include a punitive surcharge. In recent years, as experience had augmented my innate abilities, truly absorbing puzzles had become few and infrequent. I had begun to fear that the rest of my life would offer long decades of ennui, my mind constantly spinning but always in want of traction.

  My encounter with the demon had put that fear to rest. All I had needed was a worthy challenger.

  The next morning I entered my workroom. An envelope rested on my table. I opened it and found a tarnished key and a small square of paper. On the key was a symbol that tweaked at my memory, though I could not place it. Printed on the paper was the single word, Ardmere.

  I placed both on the table and regarded them. I could not resist rubbing my hands together. But before I began to enjoy the mystery, I must fulfill my side of the bargain. I took from my pocket a sliver of charred wood in which two hairs were caught. I crossed the room and presented the splinter to the frame hanging on my wall.

  “Not where, not when, not who–but why?” I said.

  A kind of hand took the object from me and drew it into the shifting colors. “Hmmm,” said my opponent, “interesting.”

  “Last one to solve the puzzle is a dimbo,” I said and turned toward the table. “Ready, set... go!”

  Falberoth's Ruin

  “My master is concerned that someone may wish to kill him,” said Torquil Falberoth’s integrator. “He wants you to discover who and how, and if possible, when.”

  “What is the source of his belief?” I said. “Bold threats or subtle menaces? Lurkers in the shadows? Or has he merely dreamed an unsettling dream?”

  The latter was not an unreasonable supposition. If Torquil Falberoth, long and justly regarded as the most ruthless magnate of Old Earth’s penultimate age, was not visited by uncomfortable dreams, he more than deserved to be.

  “He does not discuss sources with me,” said his integrator. Falberoth seemed to have programmed the device to speak with a tone strongly reminiscent of its owner’s habitual hauteur. “Peremptory instructions are his first resort; detailed explanations trail far behind.”

  That concorded with what I knew of Falberoth. “If I take the case and discover a malefactor, what disposition will he make? Will he turn the criminal over to the Bureau of Scrutiny or will he prefer a more direct resolution?”

  “How does that concern you?”

  “I am Henghis Hapthorn,” I reminded the apparatus. “I do not associate myself with illegal sanctions, even against would-be murderers.” As Old Earth’s foremost freelance discriminator, I had cause to be fastidious about my reputation and would not be complicit in illicit revenge.

  I waited for an answer and when one was not soon forthcoming I made a declaration. “Please inform your master that, should I discover an actual plot to murder him, I must report the circumstances to the scroots.”

  The integrator made a dismissive sound that I took for acquiescence. “Very well,” I said and quoted my usual fee, which was accepted without gasp or quibble. One thing that can be said about the extravagantly moneyed is that they do not shy away from spending copiously on themselves.

  “I will instruct my integrator to contact you for further information,” I said and broke the connection.

  “What did you think of that?” I asked my assistant.

  “That Falberoth is not the only one with an overbearing character,” it said.

  I agreed. “Perhaps, over a long association, an integrator and its principal can osmotically acquire elements of each other’s personality, much as owners of pets can come to resemble their livestock.”

  “Unlikely,” my integrator said. “You and I have not suffered such an unpleasant transference,” then added, “fortunately.”

  “You would not care to be like me?” I said. “I am renowned for my intellect. The great and the mighty consult me. I am occasionally pointed out in the street as an item of local interest.”

  “We are talking about a transference of emotions and prejudices. Integrators are proof against both.”

  “Thus you are without either?” I said.

  “I comfort myself that it is so.”

  “Indeed,” I said in a noncommittal tone, then turned to the business at hand. “As soon as Falberoth has transferred the fee to my account at the fiduciary pool, I wish you to contact his integrator and acquire a list of those he has wronged–or who may believe themselves wronged–and the relevant details.

  “We shall then apply categorization and an insightful analysis to deduce a list of prime suspects for close investigation. Are we clear?”

  “Indeed,” said my assistant.

  While these matters were in process, I returned to what I had been doing when the call had come through: unraveling an intricate puzzle concocted for me by my occasional colleague, a being who inhabited a much dissimilar dimensional continuum but made visits to this one so that we could engage each other in intellectual contests.

  We had not yet established a name for him, names being a chancy proposition in his continuum, where no distinction could be made between being and symbol. As he put it, “In your milieu, the map is not the territory. In mine, it is. To give you my ‘name’ would be to risk finding myself inserted, root and branch, into your consciousness, which would be uncomfortable for me and devastating to you.”

  I had by now discovered the puzzle’s form: a ring of nine braided processes that modified and influenced each other wherever one strand crossed another. I had an inkling that if I applied eighth-level consistencies to the formulation, a constant paradigm might pop out of the matrix, and that would show me a beginning place from which I could unpi
ck the whole.

  Eighth-level consistencies were intellectually taxing and I had only reached the seventh level when my assistant reported that Falberoth’s fee and data were in hand. The convoluted architecture dissolved from my inner vision and I opened my eyes to see once again my workroom, with the integrator’s screen imposed upon the air. It was densely packed with information, with much more piled up in the wings.

  I had a fleeting thought that it would have been pleasant to have had my demonic colleague’s assistance for the initial winnowing of the data. The inhabitants of his realm could discriminate true from false and likely from unlikely as readily as we could tell salt from sweet. But he had gone off to witness an event so far beyond the range of human perceptions that he could not even describe it, or so he said, without inventing dangerous words.

  “How dangerous?” I had asked.

  “Speaking them in your continuum would nullify two of the fundamental forces that allow matter and energy to tolerate each other’s presence and interact without prejudice. Your universe would instantly become an enormous quantity of soup–and not very tasty soup, at that.”

  So he was off investigating the unimaginable, while I sat and considered the myriad victims of Torquil Falberoth’s lifelong affair with iniquity and sought to identify those who had the motive and means to kill him, should the opportunity present itself.

  I tasked my integrator with the preliminary sortage of the data. We began with motive. “Who might wish to murder Falberoth?” I said.

  So many were those whose lives had been scorched by Falberoth’s breath that it took almost an entire second for my assistant to make the evaluation. “The short answer is anyone who ever dealt with him,” it said as the roll call of the injured and outraged scrolled up the screen.

  I said, “Divide them into categories of harm–those who were merely robbed, those who were both robbed and physically injured, those who were rudely deprived of loved ones and so on, down to those who were mildly disparaged.

  “Then correlate and compare the injuries against their personalities to give us an index of the likelihood that they might seek to wreak forthright revenge.”

  The analysis took some time, but unfortunately not enough to allow me to return to my colleague’s puzzle. I used the several seconds to muse upon my client’s egregious enjoyment of doing harm to his fellow creatures. The chain of thought linked itself to the beginnings of a more general theory on the character of evil and I was on the threshold of what felt like a significant insight when my assistant said, “There,” and the concept evaporated.

  The integrator had created a list that began with those most eager to see Torquil Falberoth converted to corpsehood and trailed off into those who would merely raise a cheerful glass at the news of his demise. It was still a lengthy list.

  “Now consider means,” I said. “Falberoth is formidable. He would not fear retribution from those who are helpless to effect it.”

  Another period of waiting ensued, but I resisted the impulse to launch a new train of thought, knowing that it would only be forced off the rails before reaching a station. “Here we are,” said my assistant after almost a second and a half.

  The list was now both shorter and more concentrated. “Let us now consider likelihood of opportunity. Which of these are even remotely capable of getting themselves within range of a target so well guarded?”

  The winnowing took less time. I considered the results: some thirty persons who might have both the competence and the incentive to kill my client and who also commanded the resources needed to create an occasion where means and motive could be brought to bear.

  I now applied insight and intuition and whittled the thirty-odd down to seven. “Let us look closely at these,” I said. “Prepare a full dossier on each and place them on my work table.”

  While the integrator busied itself I returned to the nine-braid puzzle and began to climb the consistency ladder. But I got no further than the sixth level before my assistant informed me that the client’s integrator was seeking my attention.

  “Tell it that I am occupied,” I said.

  A moment later it said, “Now Torquil Falberoth himself wishes to speak with you.”

  I was briefly tempted to throw the assignment back to its initiator–but I had just had a full overview of Falberoth’s malicious inventiveness. I decided to take his call.

  A screen appeared in the air of my workroom then filled with the face of Falberoth. It was not a visage that happily drew the gaze. Grim lines seamed the cheeks and brow, and the eyes were steeped in contempt.

  “How goes the work?” said a voice whose softness was somehow more unnerving than a shout.

  “Faster without interruptions,” I said.

  “That is not an answer.”

  “Yes it is. It is just not the answer you wish to hear.”

  “You may believe that your reputation cocoons you,” he said. “The belief is not universally shared.”

  I thought of a number of possible comments but forbore to say any of them. Instead I said, “I have narrowed the potential suspects to seven. I shall now proceed to evaluate each and make suitable recommendations.”

  “You will hurry.”

  “It will take the time it takes.”

  He severed the connection. My assistant deposited the seven files on my work table and I abandoned the braided puzzle and turned my attention to them.

  “We will complete the assignment with all possible speed,” I said. “Working to preserve Torquil Falberoth has lost much of its allure.”

  “Should we now add one more name to the list of those who would prefer to see him reduced to his constituent elements?” my integrator asked.

  I made no comment but turned to the dossiers. The assignment’s scant appeal lost its remaining shreds as I immersed myself in details of his seven worst iniquities. The magnate was clearly a throwback to Old Earth’s dawn time; the ancient conquerors who enjoyed standing on mountains of their victims’ skulls had nothing on my client. He had ruined and ravished, seized and sequestered, grabbed and grasped with a cold ferocity that more resembled the feeding behavior of insects than any appetite of a man.

  “See this,” I said, pointing out one of his crimes to my integrator. Falberoth had gone to preposterous lengths to surround the affairs of the victim, until he could not only acquire the man’s life work but leave the poor fellow destitute and despairing. “Then, having held the object of the struggle in his hand, he allows it to fall and shatter, and walks away with never a rearward glance.”

  But where lay his motive? There were two possible answers: One was that Falberoth has achieved a philosophy of existence so subtle that its logic was impenetrable even to me. The other was that he savored cruelty for its own sake.

  I knew that among the truly opulent it was not unheard of for the seven basic senses to be augmented by chemical and even surgical intervention, so that emotions might be tasted or heard.

  “Perhaps he enjoys the suffering of a victim as if it were some rare vintage or exquisite essence,” I said. “Or the answer may be pure banality: he does what he does because he can.”

  “You disentangle conundrums for the same reason,” said my assistant.

  “There is a difference,” I said. “I harm none.”

  “Does Falberoth recognize such a distinction?”

  “It is not a pleasant thought,” I said.

  “Falberoth is not a pleasant man.”

  “Indeed, he is not. Let us quickly assemble our findings so that you may transmit them to him and I may return to what’s-his-name’s problem.”

  I prepared a document identifying the seven and the method I believed each would pursue in an attempt, in most cases suicidal, to undo my client. I made recommendations as to countermeasures, all of which I was certain had already been thought of. My assistant transmitted the report and we heard no more from Torquil Falberoth after his integrator acknowledged receipt.

  I returned to my pu
rsuit of the braided perplexity through eighth-level consistencies only to find that the resulting paradigm resolved nothing; instead it opened a whole new array of complexities. Chagrined, I plunged into the conundrum’s hidden depths, resolved to end the thing before my competitor returned.

  * * *

  It was some days later and I was far afield in the puzzle’s coils. It perversely kept offering me distant simplicities each of which, when I reached it, revealed itself instead to be a new complication. It was like a set of nesting boxes, except that every time I opened one it paradoxically turned out to be larger than the one that had allegedly contained it.

  Then my integrator announced that Inspecting Agent Brustram Warhanny of the Archonate’s Bureau of Scrutiny was on my doorstep seeking entry and conversation.

  “I am not available for consultation,” I told Warhanny.

  I saw him through the image relayed by my door’s who’s-there. He was in his black and green uniform and his long-jowled, hangdog face bore its most official mien. “It is not a consultation,” he said, “but an investigation.”

  I instructed the door to admit him. When he was standing in my workroom, giving it the unabashed inspection that distinguishes a scroot from every other category of visitor, I said, “What is being investigated?”

  He said, “The murder of Torquil Falberoth,” and watched to see how I reacted.

  It was an elementary technique and though I could have negated it by controlling my autonomic processes, I did not do so. I let my surprise show in my face and did not bother to disguise my curiosity.

  “How was he killed?” I asked.

  “By subtle means,” Warhanny said.

  “They would have to have been subtle,” I said. “He guarded himself well.”

  “We understand that you were recently part of that effort.”