Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “It’s the Domnitor,” Sloot gasped. “Long may he reign!”

  “Long may he—stop that,” said Myrtle. “He’s not ruling much of anything now, is he?”

  “Myrtle!”

  “What? He’s not. Besides, we’re about to throw in with Vlad the Invader against those who hold sway over Salzstadt right now, so perhaps rote recitations of allegiance are less than appropriate at the moment?”

  To Sloot’s horror, he saw Myrtle’s point. He’d never have shouted “blood and honor” if someone mentioned Vlad in his regular pub, the one where you had to put a pint under your stool for every one you had yourself, so the goblins wouldn’t steal said stool from beneath you.

  Sloot missed that place. He missed Salzstadt. He missed slapping himself across the face every morning after reciting the Loyalist Oath toward the tattered paper facsimile of the Old Country’s flag pinned to the door of his tiny apartment. It seemed so long since he’d been comfortably nestled in the trappings of the life he thought he’d lead for the rest of his days, “trap” never seeming like the operative word, and now it was all gone. Salzstadt would never be the same as it was, and he would never be the man that his quarterly projections left little doubt he was meant to be. He was dead. A dead man clinging to an old phrase he’d said so many times he no longer thought about its meaning.

  “It’s hard letting it go,” said Myrtle. “Believe me, I know. But how old do you think the Domnitor is? Don’t say it.”

  Long may he reign, Sloot thought, allowing it to rumble in the back of his throat.

  “Ten,” said Sloot. “Perhaps twelve. Maybe you could ask him? I’m too nervous.”

  “It’s not important,” said Myrtle. “Do you remember a time before we had a … you-know-who?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And when did they announce that the old one had died, or stepped down, and that the new one had taken the throne?”

  “I don’t believe they did.”

  “You were, what, forty when you died? That can’t be the same person who ruled the Old Country when you were a kid.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why place all of your faith and loyalty in someone you’ve never seen before?”

  “I have seen him,” said Sloot. “Twice. Once on the wall before the Fall of Salzstadt, and right now.”

  “True, but you never saw the old one.”

  Sloot said nothing.

  “Or old ones.”

  Sloot said even less. Even if she was right—especially if she was right—if it made no sense to swear fealty to someone you’d never seen, to pledge your loyalty to a position that could have been held by a person or persons who may have never even existed, it meant that the central purpose of Sloot’s life had been a lie. It was pointless! Forget the oath and the slapping, why had he even bothered getting out of bed every morning for forty years?

  Sloot shook his head. There was too much going on. The impending battle, the fact that he wasn’t haunting anything just then, whether he and Myrtle would get to have another go at … you know. He simply didn’t have the strength in that moment to consider whether his entire life had been pointless.

  Myrtle must have seen all of those worries playing out across Sloot’s face, as though it had loaned itself out to a community theater troupe who were interested in nothing more than upstaging one another. She mercifully said nothing more about it.

  “Welcome back,” said Roman. “You should consider your priorities before you allow yourself to be summoned away. We were in the war council, if you hadn’t noticed!”

  “Sorry,” said Sloot. He strongly considered pointing out the irony in that rebuke, and would have had little trouble, given Sloot’s shrunken head swinging morbidly from Roman’s belt. But upon reading the collective mood, he decided that it might not be as important as all that. Not right now, anyway.

  “Humans don’t live that long,” Dandelion was saying to Nicoleta. “I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere.”

  “She’s not entirely human anymore,” Nicoleta replied. “She’s part goblin now.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense! You don’t change into a different race just because you got married.”

  “It didn’t make sense to me either, but that’s fairy tales for you.”

  “That’s ... what, please?”

  “Fairy tales. You know, stories they tell to children, when ... oh.”

  Dandelion’s hands rested firmly on his hips. “So fairy tales are just children’s stories, are they, please?”

  “No, no,” said Nicoleta, her hands raising slowly in a placating gesture. “That’s not what I meant! Please don’t—”

  “Posies!”

  “Yes?” shouted a sing-songy voice from somewhere within the host of armored fairies hovering in mid-air in an impressive formation.

  “Could you come here, please?”

  “I’m really sorry,” said Nicoleta, “do you think that we could just—”

  Dandelion was aghast. “I can’t just circumvent the rules, that wouldn’t be fair!”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” said Posies, who was virtually indistinguishable from all of the other fairies, though Sloot got the distinct impression that it would be contrary to his best interests to lend his voice to that observation.

  “Posies,” Dandelion began, “as my official HFR representative, I would like for you to take down my complaint, please.”

  “HFR?” Sloot wondered aloud.

  “Human-Fairy Resources,” Roman whispered. “Got to have a department when you incorporate.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend anybody,” said Nicoleta, “that’s just what you call them!”

  “That’s what you call them,” Dandelion retorted. “We’d reserve ‘fairy tales’ for our epics, like the Ten-Mile Sojourn of the Fellblossom Twins, or the Year We Weren’t on Speaking Terms with the Bees, or Apple Cobbler Sundays.”

  “Duly noted,” said Posies, who was scratching away at a tiny journal with a long-tailed feather pen. “The matter has been recorded, and will be brought up at the next opportunity to schedule mandatory sensitivity training for all employees.”

  “What’s sensitivity training?” asked Sloot.

  “Touchy-feely stuff,” Roman scoffed. “Nobody’s allowed to offend anybody else, now that we’ve incorporated. We wouldn’t have gone in for this sort of thing in my day, I can tell you that much.”

  “Right,” said Sloot, who secretly liked the idea of sensitivity training. He casually wondered if he could get his mother to attend, and then felt a pang of guilt for not having done more to find out what had happened to her.

  “I want to go home,” said the Domnitor. He was crossing his arms hard enough to cut off his circulation, Sloot was sure of it.

  It is worth pointing out that Vlad said nothing, if only to mark how emphatically she didn’t.

  “I want to go home.” There was a perplexed look on the Domnitor’s face, making it apparent that he was unaccustomed to having to repeat himself.

  “Your home is overrun by the valking dead,” said Bartleby, a bit too gleefully.

  “Then I want to go back to Stagralla.” He made a face that said, in no uncertain terms, that ignoring his demands any further would result in a stomp of his foot, so they’d all just better watch it.

  “You might,” Vlad growled, “if you’re lucky. Here they come.”

  The cackling congress of goblins got down to the business of ruining the view of the otherwise perfectly lovely Old Country landscape. It was like a sea of razor-sharp teeth slowly pouring itself over a hill, the occasional hand rising from the mass in a rude gesture. It was nothing like the orderly ranks of the fairy soldiers, who showed no signs of dread as their enemy gathered in a seemingly endless swarm at the border. If there had been any doubt that Sloot wouldn’t have qualified for enlistment in the fairy army, that would have cleared it up.

  “Good,” said Myrtle.

  “Good?” Sloot had never looked
at Myrtle with that level of incredulity before, but given the circumstances, there simply wasn’t any holding it back. He pointed at the vile congress amassing mere feet before them. “What about any of this could possibly be misconstrued as good?”

  Myrtle shook her head. “Nothing individually, but everything is going according to plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “I told you I’d free you from all of your entanglements. I never said it would be easy. Anyway, I’ve got to go.”

  “What? Go? Go where? There’s a war on!”

  Myrtle took Sloot’s face in her hands and kissed him. “I can’t explain. I wish I could, but it would reveal too much. The future must unveil itself in due course, or everything that we’re going to work for will fall apart.”

  “I don’t understand,” who might have done if he’d stopped to think about it for a moment. In truth, he just didn’t want Myrtle to leave; however, coming to grips with that would have meant introspection, and they don’t teach you that at the University of Salzstadt.

  “You will. Soon enough.” Myrtle opened her mouth to say something else, but looking around at everything that was about to happen somehow convinced her to let it go.

  “I love you, Sloot,” she said instead. “You’re a better dancer than you give yourself credit for.”

  “What?”

  “Remember our arrangement,” she said to Roman.

  Roman nodded.

  What? thought Sloot, unable to force the word out of his mouth for all the confusion in the way. Since when did Myrtle and Roman have an arrangement? What is this arrangement, exactly? Does it exist for the sole purpose of keeping Sloot in the dark? Perhaps a scientific experiment to determine whether ghosts can get ulcers from worry?

  “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you.”

  Myrtle smiled, then disappeared in a puff of smoke.

  “Where has she gone?” asked Nicoleta, who appeared to be understandably nervous at the departure of the second-highest-scoring goblin dispatcher from the last time they’d faced a congressional pile-up.

  Vlad’s head tilted to one side, her neck making the sound of a tree falling in the woods. “No doubt, she has her reasons.”

  “I wish I had her confidence,” Nicoleta murmured to Sloot. “Then again, Vlad’s always like this before a battle.”

  “Trusting?”

  “Focused. There’s nothing but the enemy before her.”

  Sloot nodded. He knew the feeling. Well, sort of. The closer it drew to taxes being due, the less he was concerned with anything but his ledgers. It was a different sort of carnage, red ink in lieu of blood, but the nightmares never ended. Tax season … never changes.

  The swarming congress of goblins lurched to a halt not far from the border. They parted like a bad haircut and three figures emerged.

  First was Greta, her hands bound at her back—which was doing wonders for her posture, if one were searching for a silver lining—and gagged with a filthy rag. She looked as though she’d seen neither the sun nor a washtub in a month.

  Next, by less than an inch, was Mrs. Knife. She was using Greta as a shield, her blade held to her hostage’s throat, her eyes darting in all directions with the sort of crazed paranoia that a joint venture of caffeine and insomnia must have taken months to perfect.

  Finally came a goblin wearing black tatters, who could only have been Gregor. He looked much like the rest of the goblins, but thinner, paler, and wearing his trademark sneer in favor of the standard goblin crazed leer. His blood star floated above his clawed left hand, which was upturned in a gesture that Sloot didn’t specifically recognize, but he was sure it was offensive enough to start a fight at a boulderchuck match. Then again, very little offense was required to start fights at boulderchuck matches.

  They stood there, a dozen yards from the border, the vast congress of goblins writhing behind them.

  “Come forth, Invader!” The pitch of Mrs. Knife’s voice had risen considerably, both in pitch and in fury. “I’m thin on patience, and your girlfriend is running out of life!”

  Vlad’s jaw clenched. Sloot thought he heard a tooth crack.

  “Shall we go, then?” asked Roman.

  “Not yet,” Vlad choked. It was the first time Sloot heard an emotion other than anger had made it past her steely facade, and Sloot had trouble identifying it right away. At first, he was fairly certain that it was some new expression of anger that he’d have known all about, had he grown up in Carpathia; however, as the moment drew itself out into a particularly tense eternity, he recognized it for the intensely complicated tincture that it was.

  It was passion, for sure, but there was far more to it. There was the longing for the love that she’d been worrying over for so long. Sloot was a practiced hand at worry, and recognized it when he saw it. There was also trepidation, not for herself, but for Greta. Hope and despair were wrestling for the single chair remaining after the music had stopped.

  Lurking behind all of that was rage. Not anger, anger was too simple. This was calculated, bottomless.

  Vlad nodded once with practiced authority. Her deliberations were finished. She strode forth, and her retinue followed.

  Mrs. Knife’s eyes were already wide with a confluence of manic glee and jittery panic, but upon seeing Vlad, they managed to go just a bit wider. She licked her lips and bared her teeth in a way that reminded Sloot of the old grans at the farmer’s market, when the farmers would bring out their most pungent onions. They’d look at each other the way that Mrs. Knife was looking at Vlad: like she’d find out how salty the Invader’s blood was, if she got too close.

  “Bring me the boy,” said Vlad, her eyes locked on Mrs. Knife’s. Roman guided the Domnitor gently to stand next to Vlad, about two feet away. Vlad’s hand rested on the hilt of her sword, but it stayed in its sheath. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the immediate danger to the Domnitor was no less than what Greta faced in that moment, with the tip of Mrs. Knife’s blade poking gently against her throat.

  “Our quarrel isn’t with you, Invader,” Mrs. Knife sneered. “We want out of this place. We want revenge against the dwarves. We must go north through Carpathia, and you must invite us.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Vlad growled. “When you pointed that knife at my beloved, you put war with me before all else. I offer you one chance at terms.”

  Gregor drew a noisy breath in through his razor-sharp teeth.

  “Not yet,” Mrs. Knife hissed toward him. She turned back to Vlad. “Here are the only terms I will offer. Invite us in. Show us Carpathia, and you will have her back.”

  “You will never enter Carpathia,” said Vlad. She gestured toward the Domnitor. “The only terms that I will offer are—”

  “Just a moment, please,” said Lilacs who, up until now, had politely been waiting for an opportunity to get a word in edgewise. “I hate to interrupt, but we agreed to do the negotiations together, Vlad.”

  “He’s right, you know,” said Dandelion. “As managing partners in the United Coalition of Carpathian Monarchies Incorporated, we’ve got just as much say in the terms we offer as you do, Vlad.”

  Vlad’s eyes closed tightly, and her jaw clenched.

  “That’s an improvement,” Roman whispered to Sloot. “The HFR department has been on Vlad for her temper. She’s one incident away from sensitivity training.”

  “Fine,” barked Vlad. “What terms should we offer, then, and why couldn’t you have brought this up before we were standing in front of the enemy?”

  “Point of order,” said Lilacs, his index finger aloft, “they are not yet the enemy, and may not officially become so until after the negotiations have concluded. Periwinkle, would you kindly strike that reference from the official record, please?”

  “We’ll have to hold a vote later,” said Periwinkle, referring to a little book that she produced from her pocket. “Amending the minutes requires a simple majority vote by senior management, and a quorum m
ust be present.”

  “We have a quorum now,” said Dandelion. “All in favor, please?”

  Lilacs and Dandelion raised their hands. Vlad glowered at Mrs. Knife.

  “Two to one for,” said Periwinkle, her tone indicating a small measure of disapproval for the haphazardness of the vote. “So redacted.”

  “Good,” said Lilacs with a nod. “Now then, Mrs. Knife, would you be so kind as to give us a moment to confer with regard to the terms we are willing to extend, please?”

  “You’ve heard the terms,” said Mrs. Knife.

  “You can have the Domnitor,” said Vlad.

  “What?”

  “This boy is all you need to secure your control over the Old Country,” said Vlad. “For Greta, I will give you the Domnitor, and I will … ” she paused, as though trying to remember how to pronounce a word in a foreign language that she barely spoke, “ … forgive you for taking her hostage.”

  “Vlad, please,” said Dandelion, “this is entirely—”

  Sloot had never heard Mrs. Knife laugh before, and would have sacrificed every penny of his retirement fund to go back to a time when that had still been the case. It was the very definition of shrill, the auditory experience of being stabbed in the stomach, in slow motion, forever.

  “Your forgiveness means nothing,” Mrs. Knife howled. “The boy means nothing! I already rule the Old Country! You will invite us into Carpathia, and then you will take us to the dwarves.”

  “Never,” said Vlad. She gave Greta a forlorn look, which Greta returned with stoic silence. Sloot never saw what they had in common before, but he saw it now. “My duty is to my country. You will never be welcome in Carpathia.”

  “There she goes again,” Dandelion said to Lilacs. “Vlad, you’re getting very close to an official censure. Would you consult with us before making any further official decisions, please?”