by Tom Holt
Cassie Clay picked up the phone, put it to her ear, reached out for the keypad and hesitated. A promise was a promise.
Furthermore - well, furthermore, she was a professional, but she did still have a few conscience-coloured stains in the lining of her soul that wouldn’t come out, not even with the boil-wash. And (more to the point) he’d asked her to, and even though she now had some idea of what was going on and why she was suffering these stupid symptoms, that didn’t stop them having at least some effect. He’d asked; and that was why she was doing it.
Eiven so. Even bloody so.
She dialled in the number. It’s extra-extra-ex-directory, and a hideous fate awaits anybody who discloses it without due authorisation, but here’s a hint: it’s three digits long, and if you called the Fire Brigade while standing on your head
Three rings, then the click; then the voice. This was the bit that Cassie hated.
‘Thank you for calling the Powers of Darkness. Your call may be recorded for security and training purposes. For general moral or ethical enquiries, press 1 on your keypad. To make a reservation, press 2. For details of our special discount packages for lawyers, politicians and Microsoft executives, press 3. For the deep blue sea, press 4. To speak to a sales adviser, please hold.’
She held. They played country and western at her, thereby nailing once and for all the old lie that the Devil has all the best tunes. She waited.
They wouldn’t be interested, of course; they’d laugh in her face. But just suppose they didn’t, just suppose they were prepared to agree. Was she really prepared to make it possible for them to get their claws on an innocent man in place of a scumbag? If she really did still have vestigal traces of a sense of right and wrong
‘Your call is being stored in a queue. Please hold. Your call will be answered shortly, unless, of course, you are already a resident, in which case’ Cassie held the receiver away from her ear so as not to be deafened by the peals of cackling laughter. The implications of that gave a whole new penumbra of meaning to the phrase ‘the torments of the damned’.
The phone sang ‘King of the Road’, ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and ‘Stand By Your Man’. Cassie shuddered, made a resolution to be very, very good from now on, and endured.
‘Enquiries, how can I help you?’
Rumour had it that they, like so many large concerns, had relocated their call centre; being who they were, however, they’d relocated it to Newcastle. ‘Hello,’ Cassie said. ‘My name’s Cassandra Clay, I’m calling from J. W. Wells & Co in London, England. I was wondering if I could speak to your reference S/blb/purchases/45115.’
‘Please hold.’
To help pass the time, she mused on the strengths and limitations of Funkhausen’s Loop. It wasn’t easy, resolving the subtle nuances of temporal metaphysics with ‘Jolene’ thundering through her head like a waterfall, but she considered the final scene of the drama, in the tea shop. The point, surely, was that only in that episode did the pins and needles make sense
‘Putting you through.’
Cassie snapped out of her reverie and took a deep breath. ‘Hello?’
‘Ms Clay?’ It wasn’t the voice she was used to talking to. In itself, that was no bad thing, since the regular voice wasn’t a nice thing to have in your ear; this one, by contrast, was female, quite ordinary, rather bored. ‘How can I help you?’
She cleared her throat. ‘It’s about purchase number 45115,’ Cassie said. ‘I was wondering’
‘Just a moment, I’ll get the file.’
‘Sure. Please don’t turn on the’
Either she was too late or it was deliberate; this time it was Roy Orbison. It seemed to take for ever for whoever it was to find the file.
‘Right,’ the female voice said, eventually. ‘Purchase number 45115, that’d be Mr Hollingshead. Yes, I can confirm, that was all signed up earlier today. In fact,’ the voice added with a faint trace of bewilderment, ‘you witnessed the signatures.’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘I see. Anyway, it’s all done and dusted and we look forward to receiving your bill in due course.’
‘Ah.’ Cassie’s mouth was curiously dry. ‘I was wondering,’ she said. ‘You see, there’s been a, well, sort of a last-minute change of plan.’
‘Oh yes?’
Deep breath. ‘That’s right. My client, I mean, Mr Hollingshead - well, to cut a long story short, the wrong person titled. What I mean is, the soul you’ve contracted to buy is the wrong one.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Well, quite; so I was thinking, if we can just quietly put that contract to one side, get another one drawn up with the right name on it - I’ll see to all the signing formalities and so forth, free of charge, naturally. And then you can give me back the old contract, the one with the wrong name, and that’ll be that. Like you said, done and dusted.’
Silence. For some reason, Cassie found it rather awkward to breathe.
‘Well,’ said the voice, ‘it’s not actually up to me, I’m just the assistant personal assistant.’
‘Oh.’
‘But I can’t imagine there’d be any problem,’ the voice continued. ‘I mean, mistakes happen, don’t they?’
Relief flooded into Cassie’s mind like the Nile. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I mean, yes, they do. Happens to the best of us. I mean, we’re only human, after all.’
A long silence followed that remark. Oh, Cassie thought; yup, that was a bit tactless.
‘Anyway,’ the voice went on, ‘I’m sure we can sort it all out.’
‘Wonderful.’
‘There will, of course, have to be a nominal administration fee.’
Well indeed, Cassie thought. But never mind. ‘That’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘What?’
‘May I ask, did you draw up the original contract?’
‘That’s right, yes.’
‘In that case,’ the voice went on brightly, ‘in order to cancel the agreement and replace it with the amended version, your life and soul will have to be forfeit to the Evil One. Now I can’t promise to get the paperwork out to you tonight, but I can definitely make sure it goes out tomorrow’
‘Hang on,’ Cassie said. ‘My?’
‘Your life and soul,’ the voice replied promptly. ‘You’ll need to sign our standard-form forfeiture agreement, along with the usual disclaimers and stuff, and there’ll also be an additional registration fee of five US dollars.’
‘My life and soul?’
‘Correct. Since it was your mistake.’
Cassie didn’t shout very often, but she was good at it. ‘No bloody way,’ she yelled.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘That’s not acceptable,’ Cassie said, as firmly as she could. ‘There’s no way I can agree to that.’
‘Oh. You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please hold.’
More Roy Orbison, but Cassie hardly noticed. She was too busy shaking.
‘Hello? Are you there?’
‘What?’ Cassie pulled herself together as best she could. ‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘I’ve just had a word with the principal personal assistant,’ the voice said, ‘and as a gesture of goodwill we are prepared to waive the five-dollar fee, if that’s any’
‘Sorry,’ Cassie said.
‘Oh.’ Nonplussed voice. ‘In that case, I’m afraid I can’t see there’s a whole lot we can do about it. The current agreement will just have to stand, that’s all.’
Well, Cassie said to herself as she replaced the phone, I tried. I really did give it my best shot.
And if it really had been true love, instead of some kind of ditzy trans-temporal fuck-up, maybe I might have
Nah. Not even for true love.
She got up out of her chair, crossed the room and kicked the filing cabinet, really quite hard.
By no stretch of the imagination could Benny Shumway describe Mr Dao, the suave, sad chief cashier of the Bank of
the Dead, as a friend; that went without saying. But, over the years, they’d built up between them a bond of mutual understanding and respect that might possibly be mistaken for friendship, rather as a careless rambler might mistake an adder for a grass snake. Accordingly, Benny asked his favour of Mr Dao, and Mr Dao was pleased to be able to help.
As soon as he was back in his office and the connecting door was safely locked and bolted, Benny lunged for the phone on his desk and called Connie’s extension. But there was no reply, suggesting that she wasn’t in her room. Sod it, Benny thought, but he wasn’t surprised. It was that time in the afternoon when people tended to go walkabout if they didn’t have anything desperately urgent to get finished. Connie could therefore be anywhere: in with young Cassie, or dropping in for a chat with Cas Suslowicz, looking something up on the computer or in the library; generally lurking and making herself difficult to find.
Which was annoying; because what Mr Dao had told Benny corroborated what he’d seen in the imp-reflecting mirror, and the implications of that were both fascinating and obscure. On his own turf, Benny knew his stuff; an account that refused to balance or a manticore nesting in the vaults of the Credit Suisse he could handle easily enough. But this, he readily admitted, wasn’t his sort of thing at all, and he made it a rule not to muck about with complicated, dangerous things that he didn’t understand.
Immediately, he thought of Judy, his fourth ex-wife, hereditary Queen of the Fey, currently confined in perpetual suspension under the Glass Mountain for trying to obliterate humanity in order to provide Lebensraum for her own vicious, insubstantial people. Judy, of course, knew this sort of stuff backwards and inside out. She’d take one look at it, figure out what was happening and tell him exactly what to do about it. Judy, however, wasn’t available. Even by dwarf standards, Benny was as brave as a hatter, but nothing would ever induce him to go snooping round the Glass Mountain.
But
He picked up a sheaf of petty-cash reconciliations and put them neatly away in the appropriate box file. But, he reflected, there might be another way. After all, he only wanted to talk to her, ask her a question or two, pick her brains. It might
Nah.
The phone rang: Dennis Tanner, still being tormented by the auditors. Apparently they now wanted the travel-expenses book, the receipted invoices for the 1987 office Christmas party, twenty disposable Bic biros and a laptop Macintosh. Benny said he’d see to it, and put the phone down, before stapling some pink requisition-chit carbons to some yellow designated-deposit slips and filing them in the cabinet. There was a whole world of difference, after all, between brave as a hatter and brave as two short planks. He had more than his fair share of the reckless courage displayed by his ancestors in their relentless wars against the goblins, but he knew better than to pull the electric fire into the bath with him to find out if it worked underwater. The back corridor on the second floor was somewhere he wasn’t prepared to go, not for anybody. Not even for Connie Schwartz-Alberich.
He thought about that as he arranged the telegraphic-transfer dockets in date order. Not even for Connie; but if for anybody, then yes, probably for her. The difference being, Connie wasn’t a wife or a girlfriend, or a potential wife or conquest. Connie was a friend.
There had been a time when Benny would have slaughtered dragons to fetch home golden fleeces for Judy (or Trudy, or Tracy, Sadie, Dominique, Jenny, Monika or Samantha); he’d have stormed heaven for them, and cut a slice out of the moon to make a comb for their hair. That wasn’t particularly demanding, that was just doing stuff, and Benny had always been a man of action. It had taken him many years and a lot of scars to figure out that doing stuff is only a very small part of the deal, and it’s the remainder that’s both difficult and scary.
Nowadays he lived alone, mostly because he’d realised that none of them, not even Dominique or Annie or Jill the traffic warden (what is it, people kept asking him, about dwarves and women in uniform?) had motivated him sufficiently to make a serious effort at coming to terms with the not-doing-stuff side of sentient relationships; things like sitting still and listening. With all of them, it had proved too great an effort, for which even red hair and freckled shoulders were an inadequate inducement. With Connie Schwartz-Alberich, on the other hand, inexplicably enough, it was a pleasure.
Yes, Benny thought, as he tapped the keypad of his calculator, while the fingertips of his left hand caressed a column of figures, but even so. If it meant visiting the back corridor on the second floor, then, regrettably, Connie was on her own
Which makes two of us, he thought. Which is no good. No dwarf, after all, is an island. Besides (he grinned suddenly, like a savage animal baring its teeth) it’d be fun to see Judy again. He missed her; he missed them all, of course, in the way you still occasionally get an itch in a long-since-amputated limb. And anyway, what was the worst that could happen, if he went there and things turned pear-shaped on him? At the very most, he’d be torn apart into his component atoms and suspended for ever, agonisingly conscious, in a dimensionless void outside time and space. A mere trifle, a nanodeal.
The back corridor on the second floor was where the consultants had their offices. It’s quite common in many professions for retiring partners to be kept on as consultants, coming in one or two mornings a week to potter round and do a few bits of business, keeping their hands in, looking after a few old and valued clients. It’s a good system, providing continuity, keeping in touch with the old-timers’ wealth of skill and experience, and giving them something to do with their time. J. W. Wells & Co had always appreciated this; their motto was Once a partner, always a partner and, as far as they were concerned, retirement, disability, senility and indeed death were trivial obstacles, easily overcome with a little ingenuity and a simple, everyday receptacle, such as a bottle, jar or old-fashioned oil lamp.
Down one flight of stairs, therefore, turn left at the landing and down the back corridor. Seventh door along, a little brass plate on the door: The Contessa Judith de Castel’ Bianco (ret’d). There was no point in knocking, but Benny did so anyway. Judy always was fussy about being taken by surprise.
He opened the door. A small room, no chairs, just a plain cheap desk on which rested a plain pottery oil lamp, the sort whose design has remained basically unchanged since Ancient Egypt. Benny paused on the threshold and frowned. It had never been satisfactorily established which part of a deceased partner remained behind when the rest went to its eternal reward; it was a matter of academic interest only, so long as the work got done and the bills were sent out on time. All that was known for certain was that the residue trapped in the container was sentient, replete with all the ex-partner’s memories and character traits, and held there painfully and against its will.
‘Hi, Jude,’ Benny said.
He took a step forward, then stopped. There was no denying that Judy could be scary sometimes - most of the time, in fact - but he was still convinced that deep down, at some level neither of them had ever been able to explain coherently, he’d always been the special one for her. Even the last time, when he’d turned against her and betrayed her to her unspeakable fate, there’d been a spark of the old magic left. He advanced another step, reached out with the tip of his forefinger, and gently tickled the side of the lump. Memories of touch are always immediate and vivid, no matter how long it’s been. He closed his eyes for a moment.
‘Judy?’ he said.
The lamp moved very slightly. For a split second, Benny froze; he couldn’t remember what he was meant to do, or what was going to happen next. The only thought in his mind was, I’m going to see her again.
He snapped out of it a quarter of a second before it was too late, but dwarves are blessed with superb reflexes. He jumped backwards with both feet as a jet of pink steam blossomed out of the lamp’s spout and hung in the air, like mist backlit by a street lamp.
‘Hiya, kid,’ he said softly. ‘How’s things?’
The steam billowed, heaved and co
nvulsed, like an animal caught in a net; curdled and thickened, filled out a head and shoulders, a face, as yet without eyes or mouth The hiss was like snakes, and there was a sour smell of sweat.
‘Benny,’ said a voice, very far away. ‘That you?’
‘Judy,’ Benny replied.
‘Get me out of here, Benny. Please.’
‘Sorry, Jude.’ The eyes were being moulded; the thin line of the pressed-together eyelids formed, deepened and split. Lashes sprouted as the eyes opened and looked at him.
‘What do you mean, “sorry”, you jerk?’ Pause, filled with desperation and disappointment. ‘You’re here to rescue me, right?’
‘Wrong.’ As he said the word, Benny considered it. Come to think of it, now that he was here, why not? Life would be so much more fun with Judy around again.
(And then he remembered. It was entirely possible for a consultant to leave his office, go back into the outside world and take on a whole new lease of life, just so long as someone took his place. That was all.)
‘Oh.’ She’d got her colour back, not that she’d ever had very much of it. But that had never mattered very much. By her very nature as one of the Fey, Judy existed almost entirely in the eye of the beholder. As far as Benny was concerned, she’d always been, quite simply, perfect; but ask him to describe her or draw a picture of her and he wouldn’t have known where to start. ‘I see, fine,’ she said bitterly. ‘So, to what do I owe the pleasure?’
Benny pulled a sad face. ‘Work,’ he said. ‘I need your help with something.’
She shimmered a little, like smoke stirred by a breeze, then settled until she was practically solid; sitting in her office chair, her hands on the arms, her head slightly on one side. ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘You realise that you’re the first mortal I’ve seen in six months?’
He could feel her eyes tugging at his face. ‘That long? Too bad. What’s it like where you are, anyhow?’
‘Horrible,’ Judy said. ‘You?’
Benny shrugged. ‘Could be better,’ he said. ‘You know about the takeover, of course?’
For maybe half a second she went out of focus. ‘What d’you mean, takeover?’