Updated_PerilInTheOldCountry_SamHooker_EbookFormatting_Nook

by Peril in the Old Country (retail) (epub)

***

  Sloot decided almost immediately that “fog” would be the wrong word to use to describe the events of the night before. War often borrows the word from meteorology to convey the dearth of information available in the thick of it. Soldiers don’t really know if their side is winning or losing. It’s all bloody gurgling from that fellow who’s just been stabbed through the chest, an arm flying across one’s field of vision, the disappointing realization that it was one’s own arm, etc.

  Sloot’s night of spy training had differed from fog in that he remembered every detail, it just lacked the passage of time. It was as if someone had filmed it, cut each frame out, and stacked them all on top of each other.

  “I knew I could expect great things from you,” said Roman. He was holding his head in his hands, sitting against a wall in the dirtiest alley that Sloot had seen in his life, and trying to make both of his enormous eyes focus on any single thing.

  “My ability to get blackout drunk counts as greatness in Carpathia? My teachers were right, you’re all barbarians.”

  “Easy,” warned Roman. “I didn’t expect you to manage it on your first try, but you’ve surprised me.”

  Sloot desperately wanted to stand up and get out of the stinking muck where he’d awoken, but was hesitant with regard to his legs’ ability to support him.

  “I just don’t know if I can separate all of the bits,” said Sloot. He decided it was better to concentrate on standing before thinking in any depth. Managing both at once was unfathomable in his state.

  “You can do it. It’s the spy training. In order to be perfectly aware of our surroundings, we learn how to ingurgitate. You let everything flood into your mind, and you cram it into a single flash of memory. You remember the color of the door from the third pub we went to last night, for instance.”

  “It was red, but that―”

  “And the name of the barmaid who brought you your eighth pint?”

  “Griselda,” answered Sloot, with a bewildered lilt.

  “And how many people in the fourth pub were taking odds against that fellow stabbing the table between his fingers?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And how much money you won?”

  “Eight silver.”

  “And how much we spent on booze?”

  “Seven silver between six pubs. Six?”

  “Yep. The proof is in your vest pocket.”

  Sloot used one hand to guide the other to his pocket. There was a single silver coin tucked inside it.

  “Ingurgitating,” said Roman with a wink. “I imagine your years in the counting house were a great help with the mathematical bits. Oh, and when they try to get you to talk, just do what you know. Got it?”

  “Got it. Wait, what?”

  It dawned on Sloot a bit late that Roman was looking over his shoulder with a measure of apprehension. As the bag slipped over his head and everything went black, he couldn’t help wondering if there were a point in the spy training when one learned to detect people sneaking up behind you. He considered how nice it would have been to have learned that first.

  Uppance Cometh

  Having a bag thrown over one’s head does not, in the overwhelming majority of cases, end well. For that matter, nothing that happens during the beginning or middle of the experience tends to go very well either.

  After the sheer panic surrounding the business of “expletive redacted, impending doom is upon me!” has settled in, the next sensation that many people experience is nausea. The inability to focus while bouncing along on the shoulder of some brute has parted many a lunch from its respective stomach.

  Sloot had managed not being sick in his head bag, and he deserved a measure of credit for that. He was naturally susceptible to motion sickness, and the rough ride was an unfortunate pairing for his hangover. Had he been given the chance to coordinate his own abduction, he’d have done it quite differently indeed.

  He also could have done without the unceremonious drop from atop his brute onto a cold and wet stone floor, to say nothing of the hour or so he then waited in silence, hands and feet tightly bound, before he heard footsteps coming toward him.

  The footsteps sounded ominous, not that that was unusual. Under the circumstances, just about anything would. The bag was pulled roughly from his head, the stinking burlap chafing his ear on the way past. His eyes adjusted to the dim torchlight of what was evidently some sort of dungeon.

  “We meet again, Mister Peril.” Amusement and malice conspired a leering grin across Mrs. Knife’s face.

  “Mrs. Knife,” said Sloot. “I don’t―”

  Mrs. Knife interrupted Sloot with a slap across the face that had no doubt taken lessons in both speed and power, and graduated at the top of its class.

  “Ow.” Sloot tasted blood.

  “You should thank me for doing you a favor,” said Mrs. Knife.

  “Thank you?”

  “You’re welcome. You seemed dangerously close to pretending at innocence, and I’d have had to punish that by simply slitting your throat and finding a new financier for Willie.”

  The threat was more than simple intimidation. Sloot didn’t need any advanced spy training to know that she was serious. She’d said it as leisurely as she might have asked a stranger if he had the time, but with the subtext of murdering everyone said stranger loved.

  Sloot said nothing. It was a survival tactic he’d picked up for dealing with bullies on the schoolyard, and he’d gotten quite good at it.

  Mrs. Knife smirked. “I’ll get right to the point. Willie’s valet has already told me everything. I just need to hear it from you before I decide the severity of your punishments.”

  Do what you know, Roman had said. Sloot had the distinct impression that there was no time to think, so he relied on his memories of old Mrs. Milchabschreckung, his kindergarten teacher, who’d been given the job due to her tireless suspicion of young people. Sloot had been too great a worrier to risk breaking any rules, but she relentlessly tried to catch him in the act anyway; in fact, Sloot often wondered if he never broke the rules because Mrs. Milchabschreckung was always there. Always watching.

  “I already know everything,” she’d say. “It’ll be easier for you if you come clean now.”

  “I haven’t done anything, Mrs. Milchabschreckung,” he’d always reply, and his face would wear an urgent veneer of terror-stricken sincerity that would occasionally convince her to direct her inquisition elsewhere. For now.

  But that wouldn’t do for Mrs. Knife. He’d have to give her something. In the midst of all the heresy that had ensnared him of late, there was only one actual crime that he’d committed, and he was reasonably sure the punishment would be less than death. Besides, there was little in the house at the moment aside from Willie’s mammoth, and Mrs. Knife was bound to hear about that eventually.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sloot, mustering up every ounce of simpering dread he could, which was quite a lot, and really no trouble. “I didn’t get the permits to leave the city, but we went anyway! It was all my idea, Willie didn’t know!”

  “What else?”

  What else? Sloot thought a swear word. He didn’t have any other crimes to confess, but Mrs. Knife was plainly far from appeased.

  “The mammoth,” he said. “We bought a mammoth from Nordheim, a stuffed one!”

  “What else?”

  “I don’t have a tax stamp for it!”

  “What else?”

  “I may have used an outdated currency exchange rate for the transaction!”

  “What else?”

  “I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting here with the bag on my head, so I recited the Loyalist Oath a hundred times just to be on the safe side, but I’m afraid it wasn’t enough, and I’m terrified of you, and I want to go home, and I don’t have anything else to confess, oh please don’t slit my throat!�
��

  His voice had steadily climbed to a shrill soprano by the end, and then he caught his first lucky break. He’d felt the call of nature, and answered it with gusto. They’d been his favorite trousers, and now they’d never be the same.

  Mrs. Knife wrinkled her nose and took a step back. Her gaze shot daggers at Sloot, which further improved his situation by compelling him into a fit of wheezing sobs.

  Mrs. Knife grinned with delight.

  “I’ll refrain from killing you for now, Mister Peril. Just remember that while Willie may be your employer, you will always answer to me.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Knife.”

  “Willie doesn’t leave the city again. He’ll become an explorer over your dead body. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Knife.”

  “Good. Just a standard beating, boys.”

  ***

  The laws that determine the fundamental truths of the universe are hardly laws at all, but rather loose-knit tribes of guidelines, which are roughly as decisive as married couples stuck in a loop of “I don’t know, what do you want for dinner?”

  That conversation, if not resolved in a reasonable amount of time, tends to resolve in nature’s solution for cleaning out pantries: stew.

  There is no recipe for stew. Any cookbook claiming such is describing something else entirely. It nearly always means “soup,” or possibly “casserole.” But then there’s the very rare case of horrifying lunatics plumbing the depths of madness, and actually trying to codify stew. Said lunatics usually end their days strapped to gurneys, or working in municipal governments.

  A proper stew is the amalgamation of small amounts of food that haven’t quite gone bad yet, known to every gran in the world as “perfectly good food.” It is an interesting characteristic of food in general, that it is only ever referred to as “perfectly good” when put to the question of whether it is “still good” or not. It is generally agreed among culinary scholars that stew was invented by spectacularly tightfisted people as a means of pinching pennies, mostly because none of said scholars care enough to seek out evidence to the contrary.

  Culinary scholars have no love for stew.

  Sloot was no culinary scholar, and on most days would give his opinion of stew as “firmly indifferent.” Thriftiness was a virtue according to the Domnitor, long may he reign. After all, there was a cold war on, so a loyal subject should smile on any attempt to save a penny for the war effort.

  The bowl of stew in front of Sloot had a history. It had quite a bit of chowder in it as well, an observation which could be made of most of the people who frequented the docks. It would never have been his first choice for a meal, but given that he had no money in his pockets and felt as though he hadn’t eaten in days, he counted himself lucky for it.

  “That’s when I seen ’im,” said the gnarled old sailor in the raincoat. He held his arms out to his sides. “Massive ’e was! Nearly six feet long, if I’ve a hair on my chin.”

  “Looks about five-and-a-half feet from here,” said another sailor, who had enormous mutton chop sideburns connected via moustache. He squinted at Sloot. “Maybe five seven.”

  “Like I said, nearly six feet! I’d watch that tongue if I were ye.” The first sailor’s fists went to his hips.

  “I ain’t afeared of a kick from your peg leg,” said mutton chops with a laugh.

  “Ah, the leg that I lost to the Kraken, now there was a leg! Thick as a whiskey barrel, would’ve kicked that bleedin’ Kraken to death! Only he was a sneaky bugger.”

  “Don’t get him started about his leg,” said the barkeep. He’d extended a free bowl of stew to Sloot on hearing that he worked for Lord Hapsgalt. Sloot was relieved not to have been asked which one.

  “But I’m an old salt o’ the sea, me! I’d no need o’ that leg to bring in this one here. Half dead he was, lyin’ on the dock.”

  “Which dock?” asked a man sitting on a stool, who was fingering an old concertina but not actually playing it.

  The old sailor leaned in close to his tiny circle of hangers-on. His eyes went wide and his hands went up in front of him, heralding the coup de grace.

  “Dock three west!” he gasped and recoiled, but thunder failed to punctuate the gesture. The weather in the Old Country was not renowned for its participation in the telling of a good fish story.

  “How did I get there?” Sloot wondered aloud.

  “Beats me,” said the sailor. “A good tale don’t go all the way back to the beginning, lad. It starts at the good part, when the handsome hero saves the day.”

  Sloot choked down the rest of his stew, which tasted less like the sum of its parts and more like a warning to anyone zany enough to ask what those parts might have been. He just hoped it stayed down. He offered his thanks to the sailor and the barkeep and slumped toward the door.

  As he limped the long road toward his apartment, his worry gnawed on something that Mrs. Knife had said. “Willie’s valet has already told me everything.” He doubted Roman had spilled his guts about the permits and ruined his trousers, which meant that she’d lied just to get him to talk. Nothing surprising there, she was a sinister figure after all; but what had happened to Roman? Mrs. Knife’s thugs had taken the both of them, hadn’t they? What would it mean if they hadn’t? If Roman didn’t have any bruises when next they met, Sloot would seriously have to consider how best to phrase a request for answers without being too brusque about it.

  “Blood and honor, there he is!” Roman was sitting on one of the chairs at the little table in Sloot’s apartment, not a scratch on him. “You look awful, my boy. Your first interrogation, yeah?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Sloot. He winced as he started slowly pulling off the torn remnants of his clothing.

  “Sorry, Sloot, I need to know what you told them. Who was it that got you?”

  “Mrs. Knife,” said Sloot. “They left you alone, I see.”

  “Left me alone!” Roman’s eyes went wider than usual, and he clutched his heart with both hands. “If only that were true! They stuck a knife in my face, said I’d keep quiet if I knew what was good for me!”

  There it was. Sloot had always suspected that there was a darkness lurking within him somewhere, and it was starting to rear its ugly head. Never in his life had he been so tempted to resort to sarcasm, nor could he recall ever having been given a more fitting occasion.

  Oh, the barbs he could have quipped! But he didn’t. He took a deep breath, thought of the Domnitor, long may he reign, and made a mental note to tell Roman one day how close he’d come to getting a real earful just then.

  “What’d you tell her?”

  Sloot sighed. “The permits. I told her we’d left the city without them.”

  “What else?”

  “The mammoth.”

  “No great harm there,” said Roman. “I imagine I’d have given up a few things if they’d roughed me up half as bad as you.”

  “That was before,” said Sloot.

  “Before?”

  “Before the roughing up. They didn’t lay a hand on me until after I’d spilled my guts.”

  “Oh.” Roman made his card-playing face. It might have passed for stony and unreadable if he’d been alone in a dark room; but even if Sloot had never seen Roman try to bluff before, he’d know the “oh” of disappointment anywhere. He’d heard it often enough—many times, in fact, since the one and only time his mother had asked him to move her armoire.

  “Well that’s all right,” said Roman. “Was there anything else?”

  “No.” Sloot washed his face gingerly in the basin on the dresser. “I just started crying about how afraid I was. Some spy I am.”

  “Oh, now don’t talk like that. You didn’t say anything about our operation, did you?”

  “Of course not,” said Sloot. “You think I want to hang for treas
on?”

  “Well, there you go! Not exactly courage, but you kept it together when it counted! That’s a start. I told you, I’m an excellent judge of character. We’ll make a proper spy of you yet.”

  Sloot sighed. It wasn’t exactly the encouragement that he wanted to hear, but it was something.

  “Well that’s a shame,” said Roman.

  “What?” Sloot followed Roman’s gaze to the floor beside his foot, and there was his mother’s watch. It hadn’t been in peak condition for many years, but it certainly didn’t look this bad before the beating. The plate that covers the face was only just hanging on by the mangled hinge. The glass was shattered, and the clank, clank was more labored than ever. It seemed ready to give out altogether at any moment.

  “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” cried Sloot. He snatched it up and wound it with whatever passed for athleticism in that regard.

  “Take a deep breath,” said Roman. “I know just the thing for it.”

  The Gift of Clarity

  The front of the clockmaker’s shop looked very much like all of the other street-level storefronts in the city, which was as it should be. Despite his involvement in enemy intelligence, Sloot had a healthy appreciation for things that resisted the dissident urge to stand out. Individuality is a statement, a worrisome one that says “being one of us isn’t good enough for me. For now, having this enormous feather in my cap might be good enough, but at some point, I might feel the need to be one of them.”

  So it was that Sloot felt very much at peace as he walked into the shop, secure in the knowledge that, unlike Roman and himself, nothing about the place was embroiled in intrigue or divergence.

  “You’re an over-winder,” said the woman sitting behind the counter. She didn’t look up from what appeared to be a surgical procedure on a well-illuminated pocket watch in an advanced state of disassembly. She was surrounded by lenses, some large ones on stands, a few strapped to her head by a brown leather band, and several lined up in front of her eyes.

  “I assure you I’m not,” said Sloot. He gave it an extra twist for good measure here and there, but anything in excess ends in hedonism on a long enough scale. That includes brushing one’s teeth, salting one’s breakfast, and even winding one’s watch.