Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “Where are we going, anyway?” There was something dreadfully familiar about the street they were walking down. Sloot had been there before, he was sure of it. The greasy feel of it stuck to him the way a sock would stick to the bottom of his foot, once it had found the single wet spot on the kitchen floor.

  “To a meeting,” said Roman. “Only we’ve not been invited, so you’ll need to keep quiet.”

  “Oh,” said Sloot. He began to worry. Well, began is the wrong word. Better to say that he added this to an already impressive array of other worries that he was juggling. It was just the sort of thing that would happen to a clown who already had a couple of swords in the air with his pins, and had just actively thought well, at least none of this stuff is on fire.

  Roman ducked into a doorway, waited a moment until he was sure no one was looking, and started working at the lock in the door with a pair of metal hooks.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? Just keep an eye out for danger.”

  “Look out!”

  “What? Where?” Roman stood up abruptly, the tools disappearing into his pockets. He started up a tuneless whistle, the sort that only guilty people perform when they’re trying to look casual.

  “You,” hissed Sloot. “Stop that! That door is locked for a reason!”

  “Oh, come on.” Roman shook his head and got back to work at the lock.

  “This is dangerous,” said Sloot. “What if we’re caught?”

  “They’ll probably kill you,” Roman mumbled. Sloot knew derision when he heard it. He was about to give Roman a few stern words about etiquette when he realized where they were.

  “Wait a minute,” said Sloot.

  “Almost there.”

  “Aren’t we close to the Domnitor’s castle, long may he reign?”

  The door gave a click. Roman turned the handle and it opened.

  “Ludicrously close,” he replied. “Haven’t you ever been inside it?”

  Had this been one of the proper doors that led into the castle, it would have been far too well guarded for Roman to have gotten so close. But what sort of spy needed proper doors? Of course, there would be secret entrances. Some ancestor of the present Domnitor, long ere he reigned, would have wanted to disguise himself and do things that were … undonmitorial. He’d have needed to get out of the castle and back in again without anyone having known, and clever arrangements of doors and tunnels were the traditional means of doing so.

  “I doubt if the present Domnitor even knows about this one,” said Roman. He plodded along the dark and cobwebbed hallway, taking very little care to tread silently. It was apparent that no one had come this way in a very long time.

  “Long may he reign,” added Sloot.

  “If you insist. It’s just us down here, you know.”

  On the one hand, the Ministry of Propaganda had done a bang-up job of convincing Sloot—and all of his countrymen and countrywomen—that Uncle was always listening. He was sure that he was never truly alone. Apart from polite, following the rules was pure self-preservation.

  On the other hand, what was the point of living within shouting distance of another human being if you were going to chuck the rules out the window the second it became convenient? Sloot had no need of the threat of interrogation to convince him that respectful formality needed heeding, even when he thought he could get away with breaching it. Especially then.

  In any case, he decided it was pointless to argue with Roman. Sloot may have been Carpathian on his mother’s side, but Roman was a proper Carpathian. They didn’t show the same deference to Vlad the Invader that the good folk of the Old Country showed to the Domnitor, long may he reign. They were less sophisticated in Carpathia.

  The dusty old hallway wound its way around corners and bends, crossing an old sewer tunnel at one point, until at last they came to a door. Roman gave a complicated knock that sounded a lot like the cadence of poetry that had no respect for words like “pentameter” or “iambic,” traditionally performed by college freshmen who knew everything.

  “It’ll be a minute,” said Roman. He was right. The sound of very heavy furniture moving over a stone floor emanated from beyond the door. Eventually, it opened.

  “What kept you?” asked Greta.

  That's No Damsel

  It was clear that Greta had never seen a ghost before. Or, if she had, it had been a very long time. Or, if it hadn’t, she’d managed to convince herself it hadn’t been what she thought. She’d been born and raised in Salzstadt, so she was very well-versed in the practice of denial. That sort of thing comes in handy when living under the constant scrutiny of a draconian regime.

  “You’re really a ghost!” Greta pointed at Sloot with a rigid and trembling hand, her eyes wide with exaggerated shock.

  Roman rolled his eyes. “Calm yourself. There are no extra points for theatrics.”

  “Sorry,” she said, drawing her outstretched hand back in to fidget with the other. “I just didn’t know that ghosts were real.”

  “As real as you and me,” said Sloot. “Especially me, as it were.”

  Greta had obviously spent a great deal of time in the lavishly appointed apartment. There was paper everywhere, most of it covered with drawings of bits of clockwork. At least Sloot thought it was clockwork. As far as he knew, it might have been nothing more than clever groups of squiggles that were specifically designed to confuse particularly talented accountants.

  “And what is that?” Greta was leering at Roman’s belt the same way that children consider new vegetables, alongside their parents’ insistence that it’s good for them. “It looks like ... Sloot.”

  “That’s because it is Sloot,” said Roman.

  “Well, that’s just—hang on. Before I say something offensive, is hanging the shrunken heads of your friends from your belt a cherished Carpathian custom that just hasn’t made it this far south?”

  “No, it’s—”

  “Then it’s horrible! I can’t imagine that Sloot, may he rest in peace, approved of this before you went ahead and did it?”

  “Thanks,” said Sloot, “but you don’t have to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “The ‘rest in peace’ thing.”

  “Oh. I thought I was being polite.”

  “I know you intended it that way but, well … I’m not, am I? Resting, I mean. In peace or otherwise. I’m every bit as busy in the Hereafter as I ever was in life, and that’s without being summoned up by my own head.”

  Roman rolled his eyes and sighed. “It was the best way to talk to you.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend,” said Greta, “I meant for it to come off more like ‘good luck,’ or ‘happy trails’ or something. I imagine you’d like to rest in peace, right?”

  Sloot thought back to the argument with which Arthur had waylaid Hans and Geralt. If he was right, then once Sloot came to the end of his afterlife, that was it. The end, curtain down, nothing but oblivion—which was, in fact, nothing. If that was what awaited him across the metaphor of “resting in peace”—or, rather, didn’t—he wanted nothing to do with it.

  “Let’s worry about that later,” said Roman.

  “Er … okay,” said Greta. Sloot knew that “er.” It was the beginning of a question that was destined to be the first of many but elected to slip away for a nap rather than go to all the trouble.

  “I saw your signal in the window last night,” said Roman. “You got something for me?”

  There was a candle on the windowsill that had burned down to a stub. Probably the signal, Sloot thought, the extent of his deductive powers reached.

  “I do,” said Greta. “It’s big, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  “Sounds juicy,” said Roman. He grinned and rubbed his hands together. “Start by telling me everything you know.”

  “Mrs. Knife is going to—”

  “No, no,” said Roman, “not like that! You’ve built it up too much to bl
urt, but not big enough for the reveal.”

  “What?”

  “Lead us into it,” said Roman. “Give it a bit of theatrics.”

  “Oh, now he’s interested in theatrics.”

  “Yeah, give it some panache!”

  “Ugh, fine,” Greta sighed. She cleared her throat. “There I was, minding my own business, when all of a sudden … uh … Mrs. Knife is going to kidnap the Domnitor.”

  “Long may he reign,” said Sloot. He gasped.

  “You call that panache?”

  Greta pinched the bridge of her nose. “I call it big news! Can we please focus on more important matters than my delivery?”

  “I suppose so,” said Roman with a derisive snort that was incredulous at her indifference. “How’s she going to manage it? The Domnitor’s in exile in Stagralla.”

  “Long may he reign.”

  “You don’t have to do it every time, Sloot.”

  “But I can, right?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Old habits and all,” said Sloot with a shrug.

  “In the name of all the swear words there are, could you two please focus for a moment?” Greta was staring wide-eyed at the floor, fingers at her temples. Sloot’s mother used to do the same, right before shouting at him to stop re-checking his math homework and go play outside. His subsequent requests for the school to remain open on the weekends had done nothing to help his popularity with the other children.

  “Sorry,” said Roman. “You were saying?”

  “I don’t know how she’s going to manage it,” said Greta, “but it’s going to be soon.”

  “Oh, no!” said Sloot. “She’s not going to kill him, is she?”

  “Quite the opposite.”

  “She’s going to … give birth to him?”

  “Not the literal opposite!” She stared wide-eyed at the floor again. “She wants to bring him back here and make everyone think things are back to normal. She means to make a puppet of him.”

  Sloot and Roman exchanged a horrified glance.

  “Not a literal puppet,” said Greta through clenched teeth, with eyes to match. “Look, the economy has been doing very poorly since the fall of Salzstadt. The undead walking the streets, goblins infesting everything, the Domnitor in exile—”

  “Long may he reign.”

  “Sloot!”

  “Sorry.” He said it, but he wasn’t.

  “It makes sense,” said Roman. “Well done, Greta. Did they give you anything else to go on?”

  “She’s meeting later today with someone called ‘the Steward.’ I think it might be related.”

  “Do you know where they’re meeting?”

  “I wrote myself a note yesterday. Hang on.”

  Had Sloot never seen Greta’s shop, he’d have wondered how she could have found anything among the tottering piles of … things. He’d love to have been more specific, but Greta hadn’t grouped her piles in any order that he could discern. He supposed that there could be a world in which dirty laundry, sketches of clocks, and empty bottles of schnapps should be grouped together, but he wouldn’t want to live there.

  “Here it is,” she mumbled, flopping a heap of papers onto a table that was already piled haphazardly with papers, candlesticks, and mouldering dishes. She rifled through the heap and withdrew a page covered in squiggles so agitated that they seemed annoyed to have been written.

  “Mrs. Knife said they were going somewhere called ‘The Cross.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

  “It does,” Roman nodded. “You’re sure that’s what that says?”

  “I should, I wrote it.”

  “Doesn’t look like any sort of writing I’ve ever seen.”

  “It’s a code.” Greta grinned at her own cleverness. “It’s based on the Salzstadt Mechanical Engineers Guild notation for timing gear ratios. My own design.”

  “Why not just write it down properly? Wait, you’ve been talking to Mrs. Knife!”

  Greta made an “I’m actively suppressing a swear word” face.

  “I haven’t had time to read him in on things,” said Roman.

  “Apparently not. I’m Mrs. Knife’s hostage,” she said to a spot of air where Sloot may or may not have been standing.

  “What? That’s awful! Roman, we should rescue her!”

  “Sloot, don’t—”

  “Ugh, here we go again!” Greta threw her hands up in disgust, sending stacks of paper to their new careers as carpet liners. “Even in death, men always think that women need rescuing! Just a helpless damsel in distress, am I?”

  “Er, sorry,” said Sloot. He’d have shuffled his feet if they were touching the floor. “It’s just—I only—you just said you were Mrs. Knife’s hostage!”

  “And there’s no way that I could rescue myself, is there?”

  “Well, technically, that would be escaping, but you haven’t—”

  “Sloot, please—” Roman started.

  “There’s a tunnel to freedom behind my armoire! You just walked through it, or rode in your shrunken head, or whatever. Do you think the presence of bosoms upon my person precludes my capacity to reach obvious conclusions?”

  Sloot said nothing. A woman had just said “bosoms” in his presence! He quietly performed the spiritual equivalent of hyperventilation, which he found vastly more unnerving than the real thing.

  “Greta is remaining in custody of her own accord,” said Roman. “She’s been able to do a great deal of snooping to provide me with critical information.”

  Greta’s mouth-agape stare at Roman overflowed with disbelief. Her head shook once.

  “Unbelievable,” she said. “Do you need me here for this conversation, or shall I go cross-stitch a pillow? I know, I could gaze out the window and pine for Vlad.”

  “Sorry,” said Roman.

  “So sorry,” said Sloot.

  “Never mind,” said Greta. “The meeting is this evening. Also, there’s something else, and it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Do tell,” said Roman.

  “I overheard Gregor talking about the ransom demands they’re sending north to Vlad. They want to exchange me for directions to Carpathia.”

  “You’re right,” said Sloot. “That doesn’t make sense. ‘Go north.’ That’s your directions. Er, direction.”

  “Especially not for Gregor,” Roman added. “He’s from Carpathia. Well, he’s from the land where Carpathia now stands.”

  At the fall of Salzstadt, Gregor revealed that he had long ago been the wizard Ashkar, who’d laid a curse on the Carpathian army over a hundred years before. If he wasn’t lying, as wizards are famous for doing, he was over a thousand years old. He’d have been born before the nation of Carpathia had been formed, when it was all roving bands of cannibals up there. If you read the official Old Country textbooks that were approved by the Ministry of Propaganda, you knew that everyone beyond the borders of the Old Country practiced some degree of cannibalism. That’s foreigners for you.

  “So, what’s really going on?”

  “I don’t know,” said Roman. “We’d better go, Sloot. Got to find an entrance to the Cross, and that could take hours.”

  “Greta should come with us. I know, and I’m sorry, but you can’t possibly think you’re safe here! What if they move you to another room, or things change and they decide you’re better off dead?”

  “That’s a risk worth taking,” said Greta.

  That was a phrase that Sloot had heard a few times in his life. It hadn’t made sense when he’d been alive, and dying hadn’t shed any light on it.

  “Does Vlad know?”

  “Of course not,” said Greta. “If she knew, she’d insist that I escape so she could attack the city again.”

  “Oh.” Sloot had been there when Vlad attacked Salzstadt the last time. He’d seen firsthand the devastation that had resulted. He’d been a part of it, in fact. According to Roman, his head had popped off.

  “None of us like it,” said Roman, “b
ut there’s nothing to be done about it now. The best thing we can do is get to the Cross and listen in on Mrs. Knife’s secret meeting.”

  With that, Roman walked back into the tunnel. Sloot was compelled to follow him, thanks perhaps to some instinctual urge to keep up with his head. It didn’t make any sense, really. What did he need with his head? His apparition still had the semblance of one, was that not good enough?

  They took pains to make sure no one saw them emerging from the door at the other end, and then made haste away from it. It was more likely they were making haste toward somewhere else, but Sloot didn’t know where that might be, so he made do with what he had.

  The subject of the walking dead in the city was emphatically never remarked upon by polite society, though it hadn’t been overlooked entirely. Here and there, a few subtle and forward-thinking entrepreneurs were providing services that catered to the city’s newest demographic. There were all manner of adhesive applicationists peddling everything from glues to splints to giant staples. Bits falling off the walking dead is an inevitability, and quite often the “bits” should really have been referred to using words more befitting their size and importance. An arm on the cobbles, for example, is rather more serious an occurrence than the phrase “you’ve lost a bit” is equipped to manage.

  Then there were the cosmetics. Some of the shambling abominations were in less advanced stages of decay and were far from coming to grips with their own conditions. This had given rise to all manner of tonics, preservatives, lipsticks, powders, and even a few re-purposed salves intended for use in animal husbandry becoming available from carts and wagons on every street.

  They had trouble selling to the real rotters, though. The modern parlance of the times had been given phrases like “there’s only so much lipstick you can put on a corpse” and “there’s no comb-over for a missing head.”