Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “Not the older models,” said Roman.

  “Oh,” said Lucia, managing to make the word seem more ominous than any Sloot had heard before. “You don’t mean—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Roman testily, “I’m an Unknowable Enigma! Can we please just assume that I mean what you think I mean from now on? It’s becoming tiresome, hearing ‘you don’t mean’ all the time.”

  Back in the days before mortals had started walking upright and thinking less of each other for not wearing more fashionable shoes, the Coolest—whatever it was they’d been called back then—had a number of Unknowable Secrets lying around. This was during their golden age of innovation, and the complete lack of regulations left them free to create whatever they wanted using whatever materials they had at their disposal. There’s considerable disagreement among the Coolest over which of them suggested putting the Unknowable Secrets into demons, as it turned out to be the single most problematic creation in their portfolio.

  Lesser enigma demons are created every time a really good secret is successfully kept until death. Like Unknowable Enigmas, they don’t know what those secrets are. Unknowable Enigmas further don’t know that their essential secrets are Unknowable. As far as they’re concerned, like lesser enigmas, they were powered by someone having witnessed a murder, an affair, or some really horrid dancing-like-no-one’s-watching, then promised never to tell a soul and kept their word.

  The trouble started when an Unknowable Enigma lost a bet and divulged his essential secret. It didn’t just unravel him, it started the entire universe unraveling from that point outward. It took centuries for the Coolest to reverse all of the damage, which largely consisted of wiping out enormous swaths of afflicted reality and starting them over. One region of several million square miles completely wiped out an advanced civilization who had invented, among other things, perpetual energy generators, a cure for cancer, and shoelaces that never untied by accident.

  Much to their chagrin, the Coolest discovered that they couldn’t find a way to destroy the remaining Unknowable Enigmas without a worrisome level of unraveling reality. They tried locking them away in a vault, but that didn’t end well. The rumor mill that they spun up among themselves spread like wildfire, empowering each of them with so many secrets that they neared critical mass. In the end, they had to settle for wiping their memories and dropping them off at very different places in the universe, where they had very little chance of running into each other.

  Through no small amount of subterfuge, a great deal of conniving, and a few trips to his local library, Roman discovered that he was an Unknowable Enigma. He spent centuries quietly looking high and low, following whispers, portends, and rumors, anything that he thought might lead him to learn his own essential secret without having to divulge it.

  “So you’ve been manipulating us from the beginning,” said Sloot, his brow furrowing with the shattered disappointment of a child who’d just been told that Santa Claus wasn’t real. Of course, that’s not factually accurate. It’s just something people say when they feel like being mean to children.

  “Oh, long before that,” said Roman. He gave a sheepish grin that indicated he must have felt a little bit bad about it, but probably not so bad that if he were given a chance to do it all again, he wouldn’t have done it the exact same way. “Now that it’s all coming to its conclusion, I don’t mind telling you that every piece of this has required a great deal of finesse.”

  “Vasily’s financial report,” said Sloot. “I wasn’t supposed to correct it. That was your doing.”

  “Well reckoned.” Roman beamed with pride. “I’ve taught you well! You’ll make a fine intelligence man someday. But that was a small matter. I don’t mind telling you that I managed far more clever plots than that one.”

  “You can say that again,” said Donovan.

  “What’s that you’re reading?” asked Lucia.

  “It’s Roman’s file. Wow, it’s like we were on vacation for the last few centuries! How did we miss all of this? Did you know that he poked a hole in the Dark?”

  Sloot’s blood ran cold, and not in the refreshing way that vampires like it in the summer.

  “The Old Country,” he said, barely above a whisper. Then subsequent realizations elbowed their way in, and he started shouting. “The goblins! That’s how they found their way in!”

  Roman cringed, throwing Sloot a trepidated grin. Sloot knew that look. He’d worn it himself often enough to have exhausted it and need to purchase a new one. He wasn’t accustomed to being on the receiving end of one, though. He imagined that it should have felt empowering. Perhaps if he’d been born someone else.

  “I can explain,” said Roman.

  “It wasn’t the mumbling men with the ginger beards,” said Sloot, “it was you! I mean, their horrendous swearing caused a lot of trouble, but the goblins would never have found their way in if you hadn’t poked a hole in the Dark. My country … our whole way of life … it could have been so much easier if it weren’t for you and your stupid wager!”

  “Well, yes,” said Roman, “but … come on …” He made placating gestures with his hands, as though to say “we can just put centuries of mischief aside and pretend I haven’t been toying with the fates of nations for generations, right?”

  Sloot was aghast. To be clear, he was not a ghast, which is a bestial sort of ghost who looks like it’s spent all its time in an Infernal gymnasium, lifting the heaviest things it can find, like that was the most interesting thing it could have done with its time. Sloot was sure that he’d be laughed out of places like that by the bigger boys, and if invited to one could produce a reasonable excuse with minimal effort.

  “You’re a monster,” said Sloot.

  “Technically, yes. Demons are a subspecies of monster. Ghosts are too, in fact.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. I suppose I should—hey, don’t change the subject! You created a massive upset in the natural order of things! Everything’s all messed up, and now the Coolest are going to … what are you going to do, exactly?”

  Marco lit another cigarette. “We’ll need to take out all of the Old Country and Carpathia, from sky to bedrock, and then pull everything inward to close the gap.”

  Sloot wrestled with the enormity of what he was saying. Try as his now-tenuous grasp on reality might to reject it, he simply couldn’t. Accountants deal in facts, and denial on that scale required the sort of imagination that he lacked entirely.

  “There’s going to be a lot of new oceanfront property in Nordheim,” Roman mused aloud. “I’m just going to nip up there and make some investments, if you don’t mind. I don’t suppose that will count as insider trading?”

  “Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” said Donovan, “and theoretical financial crimes are the least of your worries. We’re going to have to get rid of you as well.”

  Roman grinned. “Good luck with that. I’m an Unknowable Enigma, remember?”

  “Just because we couldn’t unmake you in the old days doesn’t mean it’s not possible now.”

  “Yeah,” said Marco, “we’ve got a lot of new knives that didn’t exist back then.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Yeah, you will.”

  “I will. That’s what I said.”

  “And you will, too.”

  Marco glared at Roman. Roman gave a bored sigh.

  “What about me?” asked Gwen, who was cringing in a way that implied she was afraid to ask, but also featured some of her physical attributes in a very flattering light.

  “You’ll be fine,” said Marco with a wink so greasy it dribbled onto his shoe.

  “No,” said Donovan, “she’ll have to go as well. Everything that had anything to do with this mess could have been the defect that brought it all to this.” He waved blithely up at the Dark.

  “The goblins are going to be the really hard part,” he continued. “They’ve been around for millennia, antagonists in countless sagas. We’ll have to rewr
ite a lot of dwarfish history.”

  “Big deal,” said Marco, a precariously long pillar of ash refusing to drop from the end of his cigarette. “We rewrite a few books.”

  “We have to do more than that,” said Lucia. “What if we get audited? Auditors can go back in time, you know. We’ll have to do the whole thing down to the smallest details.”

  “Your work ethic is boring.”

  “And your lack of one is galling!”

  “Anyway,” said Donovan, loudly enough to end the rapidly-digressing conversation between his colleagues, “it’s all going to have to get done, so we may as well get started. Marco, since you enjoy razing so much, would you like to do the honors?”

  Marco smiled with enough malice that it required an extra couple of rows of teeth. “With pleasure.”

  “Hang on a minute,” said Myrtle, as she descended on leathery wings with Flavia in one hand and a bedraggled wizard in the other.

  “Myrtle!” shouted Sloot. “Wait, how do you know Flavia?”

  “I’m a causality demon. I know lots of stuff.”

  Donovan and Lucia breathed huge sighs of relief. Marco frowned.

  “I knew someone was missing.” Donovan slapped his knee. “A causality demon! Oh, man, I thought we were in it deep! I don’t remember putting a causality demon here, was it one of you?”

  Lucia shook her head. “It wasn’t Marco, either.”

  “You don’t know,” said Marco, lighting another cigarette. “It could have been me.”

  “It could have been,” admitted Lucia, “but was it?”

  Marco paused, took a long drag off his cigarette, and coughed. “No.”

  “I thought not.”

  “We can review the files later,” said Donovan. “Myrtle, was it?”

  Myrtle nodded. Flavia and the wizard cowered in her grip, their feet not quite touching the ground.

  “Myrtle,” Donovan cooed, his mouth turned up in a toothy grin, “I’ll bet if I delegate this to you, you can sort it all out, can’t you?”

  “No.”

  “No?” Donovan made a confused face that Sloot had seen before, mostly on Willie. He obviously wasn’t used to being told “no” either.

  “I can’t,” said Myrtle. She set her charges down and pointed to Sloot. “He can.”

  “What? Me?”

  “Yes, you,” said Myrtle. “I have foreseen it. It shall come to pass.”

  “No need to be so dramatic,” said Lucia.

  “Says the lady in the white linen uniform.”

  “Watch it.”

  “Sorry,” said Myrtle. She nodded to Roman. “I see I’ve missed your big reveal.”

  Roman gave a little quasi-formal bow, like he’d just finished his first round of juggling and it was time to set the pins on fire.

  Sloot’s gawking meandered from Roman to Myrtle and back again several times. “I don’t … where did you … how long have you … I don’t know where to begin!”

  “Out of the question,” said Donovan.

  Myrtle’s face rearranged itself in a stunned expression. She’d obviously expected that to go another way.

  “What? Why not?”

  Donovan arranged his hands on his hips in a way that suggested a “because I said so” was on its way, but then he paused as though he’d remembered something.

  “Well, he’s just a ghost, for starters.”

  “That can be remedied,” said Myrtle. “It is foretold.”

  Donovan sighed. “Stupid causality. Allistair?”

  Allistair handed Donovan a file. “The file on the oddity, m’lord.”

  “Allistair, you are a treasure. What would I do without you?”

  “Make another imp exactly like me, I imagine.” He disappeared in a puff of black smoke.

  “So literal, these imps,” said Donovan, rifling through the papers in Sloot’s file. “All right, yes, we can clear up the whole ‘ghost’ thing, but what about all of his entanglements? According to this, he’s on everyone’s side! It would be quicker to come up with a list of everyone who didn’t have their hooks in the boy!”

  “That was true not long ago,” said Myrtle, “but we’ve closed out most of them. The only ones that remain now are the Old Country and Carpathian Intelligence services, and we can clear those up right now.”

  There were two puffs of black smoke, between which Allistair took the file from Donovan’s hand and replaced it with a new one. Donovan perused the new file.

  “Ah, there are updates,” said Donovan. “We’ve really got to upgrade our personal timelines to include those … things … you know, everyone in the Grimmest Future’s always staring at them? Fits in their pockets?”

  “I wish,” said Lucia, “but we’d never get this one to put it down.” She jerked a thumb in Marco’s direction, but he didn’t notice. He was too busy fiddling with a spring-loaded knife he’d produced from his pocket.

  Myrtle nudged Flavia with her foot. “It’s time.”

  “W-what?”

  “Go on, get on with it.”

  “No,” said Flavia flatly. “It’s some sort of trick. You’re going to pull my head off at the last second or something!”

  “I promise you, I won’t.”

  “You’re a demon! You can’t be trusted.”

  “Demons can’t break promises,” said Roman. “I mean, we can effectively break promises, but it’s really hard. Got to find the long way around, if you know what I mean.”

  “You’re not helping,” said Myrtle. “Look, for all of us to go on ever having existed, you have to do the thing that Winking Bob asked you to do with my blood.”

  “Cryptic much?” asked Lucia.

  “Causality demon.” Myrtle shrugged.

  “Hold on a minute,” said Sloot.

  “I need you to trust me, Sloot.” Myrtle walked over to Sloot and embraced him. “Don’t worry. It’ll take a long time, but this will all work out in the end.”

  The wizard opened the envelope and produced a piece of paper with a red spot in the middle.

  “That was what Bob was holding,” said Sloot. “That’s your blood!”

  Myrtle nodded. “She took it when I first started thieving for her, a long time ago. I didn’t know why she wanted it at the time, but now I can see where it fits in with everything. Everything will make sense in time, I promise.”

  Sloot didn’t know what to say, so he nodded and said nothing.

  “Get on with it,” Myrtle said to Flavia.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Ugh,” Myrtle groaned, balling her fists in frustration. “Fine. I don’t like threatening people, but either you get on with it or I’ll pull one of your arms off and watch you bleed to death.”

  “This just got interesting,” said Marco.

  “Oh,” said Flavia, “okay. Walter?”

  “It’s Walter the Undying,” said the wizard in an obviously false baritone that he had trouble maintaining. Sloot knew from experience that tenors have trouble sounding tough and/or mysterious.

  “Not now, Walter,” Flavia hissed.

  “Oh, come on,” groaned Walter the Undying, “if not now, when? It appears we’re either going to be pulled apart by demons or erased from existence in a minute.”

  “Fine, Walter the Undying. Get on with it.”

  “Beseech me.”

  “What?”

  “Look, my contract guarantees me certain perks due to my wizarding credentials! If you can’t be bothered to properly beseech me by my full credentials in the final moments of existence, then what is any of it for? I may as well put my feet up and welcome the impending oblivion in peace.”

  Flavia sighed and drew in a breath. “I do humbly beseech you, Walter the Undying, master of the arcane and keeper of eldritch knowledge, employ thy art to this essence of blood, and consign this demon to the lowest circle of the Inferno for eternity!”

  “There,” said Walter the Undying, “was that so hard?”

  “What?” Sloot gasped. �
�No!”

  “It’s all right, Sloot,” said Myrtle. “Just trust me, okay?”

  Trust her? He wanted to, but how? Consignment to the lowest circles of the Inferno for eternity didn’t sound like the sort of thing that minor setbacks were made of. That sounded like a severe impediment to their relationship, to say the very least. Unless the lowest circles of the Inferno had accommodations for couples, but even then …

  Sloot fretted fervently as Walter the Undying made a series of bent-finger gestures over the bloody paper. Even if he were brave enough to try and stop whatever Walter the Undying was up to, he didn’t have the sort of corporeality that would lend itself to heroics.

  All he could do was look at Myrtle one last time. Her eyes locked on his, and she smiled.

  “Promise you’ll take me dancing?” she said. Before Sloot had a chance to answer, Walter the Undying finished his finger waggling, and Myrtle was gone.

  Sloot moaned. It was a properly ghostly sound, one that started in the dark of some ethereal pit of eternal sadness, and rattled his psyche like a nice pair of chains.

  Everyone was silent. Flavia and Walter the Undying looked around at Sloot, Roman, and the Coolest, waiting for some metaphorical axe to drop.

  “Well,” said Donovan, “I’m not sure what that was meant to accomplish.”

  “Um, yes,” said Flavia, attempting a bright smile but letting too much sick desperation put it together. “Would it be all right if Walter—the Undying—and I were off, then?”

  Donovan shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

  “Wait,” said Sloot. “Myrtle wanted to free me from my entanglements! I don’t suppose you’d release me from my service to Uncle now, would you?”

  “Well, it’s not really up to me,” said Flavia, “but it’s already done.”

  “What?”

  “Well, our leverage to keep you working for us was that we’d hurt Myrtle if you didn’t,” said Flavia. “I think consignment to the lowest circles of the Inferno covers that. We’ve made good on our threat, so it stands to reason that you no longer work for us.”

  “Oh,” said Sloot. He looked to Roman.

  “Sorry,” said Roman. “You’re not getting out of Carpathian Intelligence that easily.”