The Silenced Tale

by J. M. Frey

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” the man says, “but I’m looking for Lucy and Syth Piper?”

  “That’s us,” Pip says, eyes narrowed warily.

  “Ah,” he says, and shifts, picking at the side of his trousers with one fingernail, clearly uncomfortable. Clearly about to impart news he’d rather not. “I’m afraid that I need someone to . . . to come down to the morgue with me to identify the body, please.”

  The body. As if the creator of my whole world could be reduced to so pithy and hollow an epithet.

  “I’ll go,” Pip says, rising stiffly from the uncomfortable hospital chair. “You’ve got a broken rib.”

  “No,” I say, putting a hand over hers. “No, please, I . . . I want to do this. For him.”

  “Okay,” Pip says, and tries to pretend she’s not relieved that I’ve volunteered.

  The morgue is in the basement of the hospital, and the room is chilly in a way that has very little to do with the actual temperature. There are far more than three bodies laid out on the gurneys in orderly rows in the room. And while this is the closest hospital to the convention center, it cannot be the only one to which the casualties—both living and not—were ferried.

  The police officer stops me just inside the room and introduces a similarly weary-looking fellow.

  “Detective Khouri,” I say, holding out my hand for him to shake.

  “Mr. Piper,” the detective says. “I apologize that we’re meeting again like this.”

  “Yes,” I say, not liking the feeling of being on the back foot.

  “You know, I tried to look you up, after the hospital,” the detective says, hands in his pockets, emanating a friendly, casual air. It doesn’t fool me—I am too familiar with the spark of curiosity in his eye, see it too often in the mirror, to fall for it.

  “Oh?” I ask, matching him tone for tone, raised eyebrow for raised eyebrow. “And what did you find?”

  “Not very much, I’ll tell you,” Khouri puffs out in a chuckle. “You must be a hell of a spook, for you to be so un-existing.”

  I raise my other eyebrow at his invention.

  “What?” he asks. “That’s a word.”

  “Certainly,” I allow. “If you say so.”

  We both crack a grin at one another, aware that our respective positions and duties will allow this conversation and line of inquiry to go no further. He will never know who I am, not really, and he accepts that. He believes that I do not really know what he’s been investigating all this time, and I will let him continue to believe it. Whether he is aware that I am allowing him this fiction, I do not know, but I don’t feel like pressing the issue.

  “Wanna tell me what actually happened in that hole?” the detective ventures. “Just between you and me? One agency mook to another?”

  I allow my mouth to curl into what Pip calls my “enigmatic Cheshire Cat grin.” Khouri sighs and scrubs his hand through his hair, chuckling and shaking his head.

  “Right, then. On to the grim stuff, then. This way, Mr. Piper.” His cheerful demeanor falls away, solemnity taking its place. “Normally, a detective from Toronto would be walking you through this,” he says as we wind our way to the back corner of the room. “But I wanted to be on hand to close out this case personally. We’re still searching through the deceased to find the, ah, the stalker, but I’m starting to wonder if he got caught in the blast.”

  He looks askance at me, and I offer him nothing.

  “Right, then. I guess I should take that as a sign that I won’t find anything?” he asks, but he’s not really directing the question at me, not now.

  A doctor with a clipboard and a face mask, her hair bound back in a colorful hijab, nods respectfully. “Mr. Piper?”

  “Yes.”

  “We just want you to confirm the identity of this man.” She gestures to the body under the sheet. It bulges upward almost obscenely, and it is clear that it is nude. “You only have to look at his face. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. Just a nod is enough. Are you prepared?”

  Am I prepared? My heart flutters hard against my cracked rib, and I wince and press my palm down hard against it to relieve the ache. Kouhri’s wise dark eyes follow the gesture, and I can tell that he’s cataloged that I am injured. Perhaps this humanizes me in his eyes a little, for his expression softens a fraction.

  “N-n-o,” I husk out, honestly. “Bu-but let-t-t us be-be-gi-i-in all th-th-the sa-me.”

  Thankfully, no one comments on my stutter. The coroner reaches out, and gently, respectfully, folds back the sheet.

  They say corpses look like they’re just asleep. But when I reach out and lay my free palm respectfully on Elgar’s forehead, the spark of not right-ness that had accompanied every other touch we’ve shared is absent.

  Elgar is not sleeping. He is dead.

  “Mr. Piper?” the detective asks, tugging my attention back in his direction. I blink hard, and realize that I am weeping, silently, gently. “Is this Elgar Erasmus Reed?”

  I clear my throat once, twice, and finally croak, “Yes. Yes, he was.”

  “Thank you,” the coroner says, and waits for me to step back before she replaces the sheet. She hands me the clipboard, and I sign an attestation to Elgar’s identity, and then my own.

  “How long is this paperwork gonna stay in the system?” Khouri asks me, once we are back by the doors and within the realm of levity again.

  “L-l-ong en-enough for it to mat-ter,” I tell him, truthfully. “Af-af-after th-th-at . . .” I shrug, wiping my face clean.

  Khouri nods, understanding. “Appreciate that. And who should we inform?”

  “Hmm?” I ask, puzzled.

  “Who should we call regarding, ah, arrangements?”

  “Oh,” I say, realizing what he means. “L-et me ju-just . . .” I fumble my phone out of my pocket. “His PA Hua-Juan will be th-the best-t-t. I c-c-can—”

  “No, we’ll call Juan. I have his info already, so I can start there. I’m sure his agent had something in place, right?”

  I nod, not trusting my tongue. I have no idea what sort of arrangements Elgar had made. We were never close enough for him to tell me that sort of thing, and I am struck with the sensation of a pit opening in my chest, hollow and unfillable. So many things that I never knew about him, that we never had the time to discuss, or share, or learn. And now, I will never know them. I will never be able to share them.

  “One last thing,” Khouri says, waving me to stay by the door as he steps over to the coroner’s desk nearby. He retrieves a big, plastic ziplock bag and tumbles a length of fabric out into his hands. “We retrieved this with him. It’s beautiful, clearly handmade, and I wondered if . . . I’ve had it released from evidence, if you’d like to keep it.” He shakes out my Turn-russet sash, the golden thread glimmering in the low fluorescent light of the morgue. As far as I can see, there is no blood on it, no stains.

  All the same, I say: “My mother made it.”

  Khouri holds it out to me wordlessly. I fold my hands behind my back.

  “No,” I say. “Ask Juan to bury him with it. He’d appreciate that.”

  “What about Ahbni?” Pip asks me later that day, when Bevel has fallen asleep with his head pillowed on Kintyre’s arm. We are sitting squashed together in one of the narrow hospital chairs with the lights off, as reluctant to be parted from one another as Bevel and Kintyre.

  “She was . . . collected with the other victims,” I say, tilting the screen of my smartphone so she can see that I am following the progress of those who had survived through the legal and medical system. And if I am giving some of them nudges to give them better care or quicker processing time, then what of it? We have all suffered, and it is within my power to make their suffering come to an end more quickly.

  I owe them all that, if nothing else.

  “It seems . . . cheap,” Pip says.

  “Cheap?”

  “Or maybe just . . . really stereotypical? The villain disposing of
the traitor once they’re done using them.” Pip is quiet for a long moment, picking at her cuticles. “But she still died. She was a person, and this isn’t a book—people aren’t all bad, or all good. She could have . . . I could have—”

  “Pip,” I interrupt gently. “Bao bei. You cannot hold yourself accountable for every evil of the world.”

  “But was it my fault?” Pip asks quietly, voice barely audible above the hush broken only by Kintyre’s monitoring machines. “I mean, no intelligent, rational, passionate human being stabs someone whose values she disagreed with. And just a few hours before that, I was praising her for her passion and dedication to the cause, and . . . all right, so I’m a bit of a fool, a bit old-fashioned! So I’m not a perfect feminist; I’m not a perfect person. But I listen, don’t I? I listen, and I learn, and I try. I let others teach me!” she hisses. “So why couldn’t she . . . ?”

  “Zealots are zealots, no matter their gender or creed,” I remind my wife. “And when someone twists and manipulates their values to spur them into violence, you cannot blame yourself for sharing those same values. The values are not the issue—the issue is how psychopathic narcissists weaponize them. The Viceroy was good at manipulating people. It is what he did. He did it his whole life. He worked his way up to the Viceroy of the King by it. Carvel Tarvers is not a bad man. He was duped. Everyone was duped. And we cannot blame the victims of a manipulator for being his victims.”

  Pip sniffs and buries her face against my neck. “I liked her,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. For what else is there to add?

  In the end, it is Juan who handles all the funeral arrangements, on behalf of the family—well, us—if only because he is in Seattle already to sell his condominium. Elgar’s agent has requested that he lay in state long enough for his legions of fans to be able to pay their respects, and the funeral parlor agrees. The length of time is just enough, we hope, for Kintyre to wake and for us to attend the funeral. The doctors agreed that my brother should be kept in a medically induced coma for a few weeks at least, to allow the trauma in his abdomen to heal enough that the regular work of sitting, eating, and, ah, digesting would be no strain upon him.

  Bevel remains faithfully stalwart, walking to the hospital every morning for the start of visiting hours, and only leaving when the pitying nurses send him back to the hotel. He passes the time with children’s primers, learning to read and write this new alphabet, regaling the sleeping Kintyre with increasingly confident stories as his skills improve. He learns how to navigate a computer tablet, revels in the discovery of electric razors, delights in pizza, and pretends that he is not having vicious, horrible nightmares that keep him up half the night.

  Martin and Mei Fan fly in a few days after what Pip has dubbed the “Fucking Trilogy Wrap-up,” bringing Alis with them. My daughter is, at least, a healthy distraction for my brother-in-law as he frets.

  At the end of the second week, Juan flies to Toronto to finalize some paperwork that, unfortunately, requires my actual signature. He brings Gil with him—a handsome, older man with all the slick charm of a Hollywood denizen—and introduces him to Pip and I when we fetch them from the airport as both his boyfriend and the executive producer of The Tales of Kintyre Turn television series.

  Blast and drat. I had forgotten about that bothersome thing.

  “A what?” Bevel asks. We are in the hotel room when I tell him that Juan and Gil have arrived, and are settling into their room, and that they would like to discuss some things about our creator’s estate with us. “A television series? Based on our books?”

  Bevel knows what a television series is by now, but I had not told him that Elgar’s series was in the process of being adapted.

  “Yes. And I think you should be there,” I explain. “Have a say.”

  Bevel scowls. “They’ll have to come to the hospital, then.”

  “I’m certain Kintyre will be fine sleeping alone for a few hours.”

  “No,” Bevel says, and lifts his chin, mulish. “In Kin’s room, or no meeting.”

  “There’s a park nearby,” Pip offers as a compromise, sticking her head out of our bedroom. Alis slips away from where Pip had been dressing her, delighted to run into the middle of the room in only her nappy and a dimpling grin.

  “Come here, sweet girl!” Bevel says.

  He hefts Alis into his arms to plant raspberries on her bare tummy as she kicks and squeals, “Bev, Bev, Bev!”

  “Yeah, so not helping to get her geared up for a day at the zoo with her grandparents,” Pip scolds him fondly. “If you’re gonna get her all riled up, then you dress her.”

  “Yah, sure,” Bevel says, standing from where he’d been moping on the suite’s sofa.

  “Yah, yah, yah!” Alis echoes.

  “Wr-Writer grant me patience,” I say fondly, only stumbling a little over the oath. Bevel pretends not to notice. It is the least he can do, when I have been similarly ignoring his own emotional difficulties with his usual cussing. “Now my daughter really will grow up speaking like a Bynnebakker blacksmith.”

  “Best kind,” Bevel says, deliberately thickening his rural accent. “Yah, girl?”

  “Yah!” Alis obediently agrees.

  “Traitor,” I grumble at her, then lean forward to kiss the tip of her nose. “Off you go, then, you rotten turncoat. Let your Uncle Bevel dress you while I let Juan know where to meet us.”

  Gil cannot stop staring at Kintyre, which is very slowly putting Bevel into a state. Juan is at least more subtle. His eyes cut back and forth between both men, but his face stays carefully blank.

  “Juan?” Pip prompts gently, bringing his attention back around to those of us who are awake.

  “I . . . uh . . . there was a will,” Juan says. “Syth Piper and family are the main beneficiaries.” He hands a document to Pip. Her eyes flick over the contents, and then her mouth drops open.

  “Holy Tallulah,” Pip says, eyes wide. “This is an absurd amount of money.”

  Gil snorts, shoving his hands in his pockets and finally tearing his eyes off my brother, only to have them latch on to me. He squints, brow furrowing, eyes darting over my frame, my thinning ginger hair, then back to Kintyre, and, ah, yes. There it is: the moment he understands what he’s looking at. To be fair, the only version of Forsyth he knows at the moment is a bratty eleven-year-old. “And there’ll be more once the TV series is out,” he says, clearly avoiding the topic he’d really like to discuss. “Royalties from the show, plus a cut of the merchandising, plus the surge in book sales from people who want to read it before they watch it.”

  “Bao bei?” Pip asks me, and I am pleased that I had anticipated this, at least.

  “I have already set them up with bank accounts,” I answer her unvoiced question. “It will be very easy to ensure the royalty payments are funneled into my brother’s reserves instead of our own. And of course, I shall set aside enough of it to ensure Alis’s education is paid for, and her life a comfortable one.”

  I have only a tiny twinge of guilt as I recall that I had once rebuffed Elgar this very offer in person. Had I not, would our relationship have been different? Would we have been closer before the Viceroy had begun to terrorize him? Would he have felt safer coming to me? Could we have stopped the Viceroy sooner, before he . . . ah, but down that path of speculation lies self-recrimination and madness. What happened has happened, and even if magic still existed in the Overrealm, I still could not have brought the dead back to life. There are no Words strong enough for that.

  “And there’s the matter of the . . . the house,” Juan adds. “The estate is yours, Mr. Piper, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to . . . there are a few mementos I’d . . . if that’s okay, I mean. And you’ll need to hire someone to clean it—the police have been through it for . . . for evidence. I can give you Elg—Mr. Reed’s . . . uh . . . the weekly cleaning service’s number,” he finishes shakily, his voice damp. “Though I don’t think I could . . . help you sell it. I couldn�
��t stand it.”

  “We shan’t be selling it, I don’t think,” I say, with a meaningful look at Bevel. “I find myself in need of two houses, suddenly.”

  “Is your manor not large enough to accommodate just two more?” Bevel asks, and I realize that we haven’t yet given my brother-in-law an accurate impression of what my station is, and what dwellings are really like in the Overrealm. How ridiculously inflated the housing market is in urban British Columbia.

  Pip snorts. “‘Manor,’ my arse, Bev. No one has manors. It’s too expensive to keep staff. Our whole place could fit inside the Great Hall, with room to spare.”

  “Ah,” Bevel says, looking baffled, but not adding anything else.

  When it seems that no one else has anything to add, I thank Juan and Gil for coming all this way to hand-deliver this news, and promise to meet with them to finalize the handovers with the lawyer tomorrow afternoon.

  Juan shakes our hands, and goes. But Gil lingers beside Bevel, looking as if he’s just discovered religion.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “But I can’t . . . I just . . . listen, you are uncanny. Elgar never said that he based his characters on real people, and you and . . . this guy”—he waves at Kintyre—“you’re just perfect. Your accent. Your bearing. You even have that damned little scar under your eye.” He points to it, and Bevel jerks back, away from him. Less because Gil was coming at his face with a pointed finger, and more because Bevel is still horrifically self-conscious about that scar. “Right, sorry. I just . . . look, here’s my card. Come to set, okay? I’d love to have both of you on set when he’s on his feet again. Just . . . come consult, or something?”

  “Consult?” Bevel turns to Pip for explanation, the way he does whenever he is confronted with something particularly Overrealm-ish.

  “You’re familiar with the Kintyre Turn books?”

  Bevel grins and snorts. “Intimately.”

  “Then come to set. Please. See how TV magic is made.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” Bevel snaps, and it is churlish, mutinous. He is still angry about that.