by Sam Hooker
To Sloot’s horror, he found himself agreeing with that. Vlad was the finest warrior the world had ever seen. If she could be convinced to protect the Domnitor, long may he reign, there could be no safer place for him. Then again, Sloot knew Vlad’s temper. Convincing her to protect the Domnitor, long may he reign, would be a lot easier if Greta was around to keep Vlad’s rage from boiling over.
That was it! A reason to rescue Greta, against her will if necessary! Even Roman would see the sense that.
“Out of the question,” said Roman. Sloot had expected nothing less, of course. He’d have been suspicious had Roman said “good idea, Sloot,” and steered them down the path of some sensible scheme that was sure to end well for everyone.
“Why not?”
Roman leaned back on his bar stool, looked from Sloot to Myrtle, and sighed.
“Look, aside from my complete and unwavering support for Greta making her own choices—regardless of how stupid they may seem to me—we can’t take the risk of going after her now.”
“What risk?” asked Myrtle. “I know exactly where she is! I pop into the dungeon, break the manacles and teleport her away before she has a chance to say anything about it.”
“Oh, there’s solidarity for you.” Roman was being sarcastic. It was obvious enough that even Sloot didn’t have to wonder.
“I’m sorry,” said Myrtle in a disingenuous pout, matching Roman’s sarcasm pound for pound, “I forgot that all women were a sisterhood, and that I should champion her decisions whether I agree with them or not.”
“You did before,” said Roman, “when you rescued Sloot. You said so yourself!”
“Things have changed since then!”
“Right you are!” Roman looked around, suddenly very conscious of the fact that their conversation had risen in volume. They’d become the focus of all eyes in the bar. He scowled and gave the other patrons an agitated wave that said “mind your business, or would you have me in yours as well?”
Roman sat down and repeated himself at a properly conspiratorial volume. “Right you are. Things have changed. We don’t know if Greta is still in the dungeon. Mrs. Knife is bound to have noticed that Sloot has escaped, so she’s probably lain a trap for us, just in case.”
“We have to tell Vlad,” said Sloot.
“We can’t tell Vlad,” Roman hissed. “If she learns the severity of the situation now, she won’t hesitate to storm the gates of Salzstadt again, charge right up to the castle, and all but guarantee that Greta’s head bids her body a bitter farewell before Vlad gets within a hundred feet of rescuing her.
“Well, then she can’t kidnap…” Sloot looked left and right as inconspicuously as possible, which was intensely suspicious, “ … you know who.”
Roman’s face broke into a mocking sneer, and he hummed four quick bursts to the tune of “long may he reign.”
“I can’t possibly have to remind you again that death does not excuse you from your duty to Carpathian Intelligence.”
Sloot sighed. He could think of further arguments, but at the end of the day—which was happening at that very moment, if you wanted to be literal about it—he was going to do his duty. Arguments were uncomfortable business, and he’d just be doing it for sport. Sloot Peril had proven, time and again, that he was no athlete.
Myrtle sighed. “Of course, you’re right. I suppose I’m just mad at myself for not dragging Greta out of there when I had the chance. Even if she was still mad at me about it, she’d be safe.”
Roman nodded. He raised his glass. “To Greta.”
“To Greta.” Myrtle and Roman drank. Sloot made a mental note to pop into Turk’s again, as soon as he had a moment.
Sloot looked around. It was the first time he’d seen the walking dead in a pub in the Narrative, and it was more than a bit disconcerting. It wasn’t that they were crawling with grave beetles, though that did prompt him to wonder how they’d gotten there. Hadn’t the walking dead never been buried? Neither was it that bits would occasionally fall off of them, or that the ones whose jaws had fallen off tended to moan incoherently. It was the fact that they weren’t drinking.
“The bartender still charges them a two-drink minimum,” said Roman. “He told me the goblins don’t like them, so they give the place a wide berth. It’s a win-win situation.”
“You’d think that all of the living folks wouldn’t want to hang around with the undead,” said Myrtle. She was putting away the booze with alarming speed, but it didn’t seem to affect her. Demonic powers, Sloot guessed.
Roman said a swear word, one that Sloot knew this time. It compared a person to the skin that grows on mayonnaise if it’s left in the sun too long.
“What?”
“Vampires,” said Roman. “Don’t look, maybe they won’t come—hello, boys, what can I do for you?”
“Ve vant to drink your blood!” said the tall, pale one with the widow’s peak and the high collar.
“I’m sure you do,” said Myrtle, “but you won’t. Trust me.”
Sloot was momentarily impressed with Myrtle’s bravado, then realized she’d probably just seen no futures in which that came to pass. It was still more bravado than he’d ever shown, but that wasn’t a very high bar.
“How dare you speak to us like that!” The other tall, pale one with the widow’s peak and the high collar made his cape do a billowing flourish maneuver. It was undoubtedly intended to impress, but failed miserably. Sloot didn’t need Willie to tell him that it was a churlish maneuver, one that certainly wouldn’t be making the scene this season, or any other for that matter.
“I’m just stating facts,” said Myrtle. “You’re going to think it over for a minute, then come up with a thinly veiled attempt to salvage your pride before you bolt for the door. Go on, we’ll wait.”
“Foolish mortal! You would threaten the princes of the night, the spawn of blackness, the—”
The first tall, pale one with the widow’s peak and the high collar whispered something to the second. His eyes went wide with alarm. He was looking at Roman and Myrtle with the panicked suspicion that the elderly cast on anything less than thirty years old.
“Really? Vhich one?”
The first vampire shrugged.
“One of you is a demon?”
Roman grinned. Myrtle maintained the uncomfortably severe sort of eye contact that tradesmen think will get them somewhere with the ladies.
“Ve, er,” the vampires exchanged nervous glances. “Ve really prefer virgins.”
“So, you’ll be drinking each others’ blood tonight, then?” Roman’s grin changed keys.
“Ve’re going to let you off vith a varning this time,” said the first vampire as they backed toward the door.
“There’s a good lad,” said Roman.
“Demon powers are fun,” said Myrtle, once they’d bolted through the door and into the night. “Vampires. Pfft. Honestly, what does Bartleby see in them?”
“No idea,” said Sloot.
“How’d you become a demon, anyway?” asked Roman.
“No idea. I thought I was just dead, like everyone else. Maybe something to do with Arthur? A body dies, one ghost comes out? Maybe when two souls came out of me, they didn’t know what to do with the second one.”
“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” said Roman. He took a sip of his drink. “All right, let’s make a plan. I want to inform Vlad about the Domnitor thing as soon as possible.”
“Long may he reign,” said Sloot, limply observing tradition in lieu of defending the Old Country against his best friends, the heretics.
“Sloot has to do it,” said Myrtle.
“What? Why me?”
“Sorry, darling, not sure why yet, but I’ve foreseen that it’s the best move.”
Myrtle batted her eyelashes in a way that Sloot found at once adorable and frightening. Par for the course, he supposed, if you’re dating a demon. As dearly as he’d love to have resisted, he knew it would only be a matter of time before h
e relented and agreed to float all the way to Carpathia on his own. He may as well get started.
Castle on the Border
Ulfhaven, the capital of Carpathia, was a long walk from Salzstadt. Sloot had made the trip on horseback a couple of times, and it hadn’t been his idea then, either. At least he’d had company on those occasions. And a horse. And a body.
At the moment, there were scarcely any signs of life at all, not that he brought anything to the table in that regard. It was the middle of the night. There was only about half the moon showing, and it kept disappearing behind the clouds.
“Fine!” Sloot shouted at it. “I don’t need your help to see where I’m going anyway!” It wasn’t just the passive aggression talking. Ghosts can see just fine in perfect darkness, one of the few perks. The more interesting point there was that Sloot, in his frustration, had managed to engage in a bit of aggression. Sure, it was the passive variety. Yes, it was directed at the moon. We all have to crawl before we walk.
“Hey, wossat?”
Sloot froze. He was too far from both Salzstadt and Ulfhaven to reasonably flee in panic to either, so the phrase “middle of nowhere” came to mind.
“It’s a ghost,” said a voice employing a nonchalance that implied Sloot wasn’t the first ghost the speaker had seen. He looked around and saw a few heads poking out from behind a suspicious-looking pile of boulders. He couldn’t quite place what it was about them that looked so suspicious, but they did. It was undeniable.
“Er, hello,” said Sloot.
“State your business!” said one of the heads.
“Just—nothing. Thank you.” Sloot had been on the verge of reflexively telling the truth. The truth was one of his favorite things, after all, along with hospital corners on his bed sheets, perfectly balanced ledgers, and mystery novels approved by the Ministry of Propaganda. (There were two. The Domnitor—long may he reign—was the protagonist in both, and he rooted out heresy with the help of his talking dog, Justice.)
Sloot decided to keep his mouth shut. The truth, in this case, was that he was going to Carpathia to conspire with Vlad the Invader about kidnapping the Domnitor—long may he reign—from his summer-villa-in-exile in Stagralla. He’d have to see what was beneath those heads to have a chance at guessing how they’d react to that information. It wasn’t as though they could kill him or anything, but conflict avoidance was among Sloot’s favorite things.
“So, you just thought you’d stroll out to the border on a lark? Nothing better to do? Hang on a minute. Come on, Gus.”
Two of the heads moved out from behind the pile of rocks and shambled in Sloot’s direction. They were dead, or at least did an excellent job of imitating the telltale shamble.
“Now then,” said the rotting husk of what had recently been a person, “who were you shouting at?”
“Oh,” said Sloot, “no one. Forget it.”
“Hey, you’re on our land! I’ll decide who forgets what around here, ain’t that right, Gus?”
Gus nodded. He was dead as well, and in an advanced state of decay that had mostly skeletonized him from the neck up.
“Gus agrees.”
“I gathered that from the nod.”
“Don’t be clever.” He shoved a finger in Sloot’s face. “Gus lost his vocal cords to a pack of dogs before he woke up and realized they were at him. He’s understandably sensitive about it, and doesn’t appreciate you being glib about his personal tragedy.”
Gus shook his head.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Sloot. “I haven’t been dead that long myself, it’s all a bit bewildering.”
“You got that right. Now, no more stalling. Who were you yelling at, and what are you doing out here?”
“I was yelling at … it’s embarrassing.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I don’t want to!” Sloot stamped his foot in defiance. The maneuver qualified at once as both cowardly and brave. It was the sort of paradox that had always made him uncomfortable.
“Look, you may think that being a ghost means we can’t hurt you, but you don’t know that for sure. Am I right?”
Gus cracked his knuckles for emphasis, leaving one of his pinky fingers hanging at a weird angle. Sloot guessed that if Gus hadn’t been wearing gloves, that pinky would be on the ground at his feet. Regardless, Sloot had to admit that he didn’t, in fact, know for sure that he was beyond harm. Plus, he really was very fond of telling the truth.
Sloot sighed. “I was yelling at the moon.”
Silence. The two rotting corpses looked at each other for a moment, and then back at Sloot.
“You’re right, that is embarrassing.”
Sloot shrugged.
“Well, it’s not a crime, anyway. Now, what are you doing here?”
“Out for a walk,” said Sloot. It was the truth, just not all of it.
“That just seems coincidental.”
Had the phrase “it’s a free country” not been explicitly censored in the strongest possible terms by the Ministry of Etiquette and Guillotines, Sloot certainly would have employed it as a non-sequitur just then. Of course, it would have been doubly bad had he done, given the Ministry’s strict ban on the use of non-sequiturs without a license.
“Look, I’ve got to get going.”
“What’s the matter? Your leisurely stroll going to get cold?”
“No, it’s just—”
“I knew it. You’re thinking of haunting our castle.”
“What?”
“Don’t bother denying it! There’s not another castle for at least fifty miles. What else would a ghost be doing out here, shouting at the moon?”
“I can’t think of a single thing,” said Sloot, “but—”
“Look, all I can do is ask you not to. We’ve just got it set up the way we like it, and if you start haunting it now, all that work will have gone to waste.”
“What castle?”
The two corpses looked at each other, and then sagged with relief.
“You’re a good sport. What castle? Ha!”
Gus nodded, presumably in approval.
“Er, thanks,” said Sloot.
“I’m Barry, by the way. This is Gus.”
Gus waved, his pinky flapping haphazardly about.
“Peril,” said Sloot. “Sloot Peril. At least I was, before the Fall of Salzstadt.”
“I think we get to keep our names,” Barry whispered, adding a conspiratorial wink.
“Oh, okay,” said Sloot. He made a mental note to refrain from metaphor for the remainder of the conversation.
There were about a dozen corpses milling about the pile of boulders. It had been hard to see from his vantage, but when Sloot accepted their invitation into the castle—contingent upon his promise not to haunt it—he could see that that was exactly what it was: a pile of boulders. It lacked the grandeur of other castles Sloot had seen, but he couldn’t remember any specific statutes mandating levels of grandeur as a prerequisite for use of the term castle. Plus, Barry and the other corpses liked it fine, so who was Sloot to argue?
Behind the castle was a very large, perfectly circular ring of stones. There was a single stone in the center that was roughly square. It lacked the haphazardly-piled charm of the castle—such as it was—and was far too symmetrical in Sloot’s opinion to be up to any good.
Barry had been personally disemboweled by Vlad at the siege that preceded the fall of Salzstadt, and was all too eager to show Sloot the seeping wounds beneath his tunic. What was left of his guts was being held in place by a series of cleverly employed belts, a couple of which were leather. Sloot momentarily considered them with envy before coming to his senses.
It was a good thing that Sloot hadn’t mentioned he was heading to Carpathia, since Barry’s company was there on Mrs. Knife’s orders. The castle was their outpost, and they were there to secure the border against invasions by foreign hordes.
“Done a fine job so far,” said Barry. “Not a single cannibal has made
it past us.”
“Well done,” said Sloot.
“Peril,” said Barry, listening to himself carefully recite Sloot’s surname. “What sort of name is that? It sounds Carpathian.”
“I get that a lot.”
“You don’t have papers, I presume?”
“Nor a hand with which I might pass them to you.”
“Right,” said Barry. He shrugged. “I guess you’re all right, as long as you promise you’re not here to haunt the castle.”
“I promise.”
“Fine. Off you go, then. You headed east? West? South?”
“Er, north, actually. Thought I’d see what the cannibals look like, now that I’m no longer an entree.”
“Good luck with that,” said Barry. “There is no more north.”
“There’s—what?”
“You saw yourself, didn’t you?”
Sloot was confused, though that was nothing new. Little had entirely made sense since his head popped off.
“Maybe ghosts don’t see as well as we do,” Barry said to Gus. Gus shrugged. “There’s nothing beyond the border anymore.”
“Not until you get to Ulfhaven,” said Sloot. “I’d imagine,” he hastened to add.
“No, not nothing, nothing. At all.”
“What?”
They walked back to the road, Sloot and Barry and Gus, and all the rest of their comrades as well. Not much passed for entertainment on the frontier, it seemed, not even among the recently deceased. Sloot peered north into Carpathia as intently as possible. To be sure, there was little more than dirt and scraggly brush, but it was more than nothing.
“You see?” asked Barry.
“I do,” said Sloot, but without conviction. What was he missing?
“That’s what I mean,” said Barry. “Nothing.”
“I just … well, I’d … look, if there were nothing—nothing—there, then I wouldn’t be able to do this, would I?”
Sloot took a few steps forward, then turned to look at the shambling horde under Barry’s able command. All of them were staring at him in shocked silence.
“What?” asked Sloot, becoming very nervous. Well, more nervous. “It’s not dangerous, is it? Walk over, you’ll see—”