Soul Remains

by Sam Hooker

  “Wha— easily? Two nations’ worth of reality are about to be removed from existence! Wait a minute, are you even still spymaster, given the circumstances?”

  “Of course I am,” said Roman. “If being a demon precluded me from service, I’d never have gotten the job in the first place.”

  “I doubt Vlad knew you were a demon when she assigned you the post.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “No, it isn’t!”

  “This is taking forever,” said Marco. “Can I start razing now?”

  “Hang on,” said Donovan. He snapped his fingers and Vlad and Greta were rolling around on the ground in from of him, blushing and out of breath. Greta was still spraying blood from her artery. Sloot was fairly certain it was the first time he’d seen Vlad blush.

  “What is going on here?” Vlad demanded, jumping to her feet in a protective stance over Greta. Her hand moved to her hip, but found no sword. She simply raised her fists, showing not a shred of doubt that her lack of a weapon would not even remotely hinder her ability to defeat anyone who came at her.

  “It’s a long story,” said Roman.

  “Roman’s a demon,” blurted Sloot. “He’s caused a conundrum that’s going to unmake reality, but I can try and stop it if you release me from service to Carpathian Intelligence.”

  Vlad looked around, seeming to notice the white linen suits on the Coolest for the first time. She shrugged.

  “Fine,” she said. “You are released from service.”

  “Thank you, your Dominance.”

  “You weren’t much of a spy anyway.”

  “Okay, not really necessary.”

  “Do a better job as a reality repairman, or whatever.”

  “Yes, your Dominance.”

  Vlad pulled Greta up into her arms and ran off for the cover of a nearby shrubbery. Sloot marveled at her sure footing in the bloody grass, but reasoned that not slipping in pools of blood was a minor skill for a warrior of her renown.

  “Well, that’s all of your entanglements,” he said. “But I’m not sure you’re cut out to handle this.”

  “I am,” said Lucia.

  “What? How?”

  Lucia rounded on Donovan with an incredulous look. She pointed up at the Dark. “Are you really so eager to deal with this yourself?”

  “I think you mean ‘ourselves.’”

  “Oh, no, I don’t! I want to give the kid a shot. What’s he going to do, destabilize this chunk of reality even more, with an even greater paradox?”

  “He could,” said Donovan. “He’s an oddity, remember?”

  “He was tapped by a causality demon, remember?” Lucia shoved a finger in Donovan’s chest. “If you’re so keen to fix this without any help from me or Marco—don’t say a word, Marco, I’ll find you something to raze—then be my guest. Otherwise, I suggest you make a demon of the oddity and give him enough rope to hang himself.”

  Sloot hoped that Lucia was speaking metaphorically about the rope, but he wasn’t willing to bet on it.

  “I suppose you’re right. Whether we raze this bit of reality now or later, when it’s a bit more ruined, doesn’t really matter. Plus, I haven’t known many causality demons to be wrong.”

  “Many?” asked Sloot, warily.

  “Well, they’re not infallible,” said Lucia, “but they usually know what they’re talking about.”

  “So we’re not going to raze the land,” grumbled Marco.

  “Oh, lighten up,” said Donovan. “There are plenty of dead stars that you can feed to the Horrors from the Void, if you’re bored.”

  New Digs

  Being corporeal again was weirder than Sloot had thought it would be. He’d assumed that it would be like riding a bicycle, only Sloot had never learned. Too risky, in his view.

  He did have prior experience with corporeality, though. After a few weeks of practice, he was sure he’d stop smacking himself in the face with his own hands and tripping over his feet when he walked. Well, maybe only as often as he had when he’d been alive.

  He steeled himself for the paperwork. The intricacies of Central Bureaucracy had taken his breath away once. If that metaphor had been applied proportionally to Infernal Bureaucracy, he’d have been left standing there with his lungs hanging inside-out from his mouth, and that would just have been the line outside the building.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a pair of Blinzwalders right now,” said Sloot. The best shoes in the world for standing in line were handcrafted in Salzstadt, at Blinzwalder’s on Bittestrasse. He’d already decided that once he actually got down to the business of fixing reality, Blinzwalder’s would need to be put back exactly as it had been.

  He was intuitively aware that no actual time had passed, not in the Narrative, anyway. He’d been fitted with an Infernal clock—and no, they hadn’t meant internal, though that would have been at least partially correct as well—when he’d been made a demon. Infernal time was brutally efficient, packing eons into proverbial blinks of a mortal eye. He’d been standing there for the better part of a week in Infernal time, during which the line hadn’t moved one iota. Thus far, it was colossally difficult to be a demon.

  Demon 100th Class, to be precise. According to the Coolest, if Sloot’s solution to the crisis of reality that Roman’s wager had caused was to be reviewed with any credibility, they couldn’t show him any favoritism. Sloot had also learned—and almost wished he hadn’t—that the classes of demons corresponded to the levels of the Inferno, of which there were 99. There was no doubt that the Coolest were taking the whole “no favoritism” thing entirely seriously.

  Over the course of the week that followed, Sloot was sure that he saw the line move ahead of him. His mind may have played tricks on him once or twice, but there were definitely at least half a dozen times that he saw a single step ripple forward in the distance, but the ripples never seemed to make their way back to him.

  Finally, after about a month, he worked up the gumption to ask the worm-ridden rot demon in front of him what was going on, and learned that demons below 98th class stood in line to stand in line, and that the “lucky” wretch at the front usually held that spot for a decade or so before being invited to stand in the back of the proper line.

  That would have driven most people, demons, or just about anyone else to the depths of utter despair, but not Sloot. Sloot was driven to the depths of despair and madness over the next few centuries by Infernal reckoning, during which he made up his own language and taught it to a race of imaginary figments who worshiped him as a god. They gradually lost confidence in Sloot, and he was overthrown for a democratically elected god who granted wishes and didn’t wring his hands so much.

  Finally, he stepped to the back of the proper line. Fortunately for Sloot, the relative grandeur and mild reduction in the smell of brimstone soothed his nerves just enough to pull him back from the brink, just close enough to sanity to remember who he was and why he was there.

  There was some real queuing happening in the proper line. Never mind that Sloot knew nothing about the Inferno beyond the oppressive red sky, black clouds, and uncomfortable synthetic fabric of the initiate robes they’d given him to wear. He was entirely within his element here. If anyone had been counting, they’d have known that Sloot made it all the way to the front of the line—with only a single detour that ended him at the back again to start all over—in a mere 1700 years, when 1703 was the average. It was still more than enough time to return to his deific delusions by the time he reached the front of the line.

  “Name?” demanded the listless Demon 99th Class at the teller-style window in a bored monotone.

  “I Am He Who Has Always Been,” boomed Sloot, or rather tried to boom, but demonhood hadn’t equipped him with anything more menacing than the tinny squeak box he’d been born with the first time. “Tremble Before My Visage, And—”

  “That’ll be the line talking,” sighed the demon behind the window, with the sort of agitated indifference
of a wedding guest who was allergic to both chicken and fish, but chose one just to move things along. “You’re not a god, you’re a demon. Think on it a moment, I’ll wait.”

  Time unwound. Innumerable planets and constellations of Sloot’s concoction unmade themselves over the course of a few months, allowing him to retrace the enormity of it all to a single explosion at its galactic center. He pressed on through the void before the birth of it all, and found the meek, nascent demon who’d gone just a bit loony while standing in line.

  “Peril,” he said at last. “Sloot Peril.”

  The bureaucracy demon rifled through a stack of papers, pausing occasionally to read a bit.

  “Not in this one,” it said, reaching for another stack. It rifled through that one as well, probably unaware that it was doing so to the silent accompaniment of Sloot’s complete lack of confidence that that would be the right stack either.

  “Not in this one either,” it said, to Sloot’s complete lack of surprise. “Hang on a minute.”

  Sloot watched as the bureaucracy demon slid off its chair and ambled down a long hallway behind it. He took a moment to appreciate the acuity of demonic vision. Even at his pathetically low level, he could make out every boil and pustule on the bureaucracy demon’s hairy back, and had plenty of time to wonder whether this acuity was a blessing or a curse. The demon opened a door at the end of the very long hallway, and Sloot saw an impossibly vast room beyond it. There were enormous bookcases overflowing with papers. The demon picked up a slender stack like the two it had reviewed already and made the long trek back to its seat.

  “Now then,” it said, taking a very long moment to re-situate itself in the chair, “let’s have a look at this one.”

  Sloot sighed as it rifled through the stack of papers and, finding nothing pertinent, got up and started walking back toward the hallway.

  Sloot threw himself against the barred window. “Er, please, there’s a good chance I’m not on any of the lists! I’ve got an extenuating circumstance!”

  A hush fell over the room, allowing Sloot to notice for the first time the buzz of black flies that served as an undertone to everything else. It seemed as though the entirety of Infernal Bureaucracy had taken the opportunity to pause, which wasn’t as rare an occurrence as one might assume.

  “An extenuating circumstance, eh?” The demon licked its lips with a warty tongue. “Do tell.”

  “Well, the Dark sort of ruptured into a big chunk of reality,” said Sloot. “The Coolest got involved, and they made me a demon so I could sort it out.”

  “Uh huh,” said the bureaucracy demon, in a way that one does to acknowledge that someone had begun to tell a story. Unfortunately for Sloot, he’d already finished.

  “They said I was an oddity,” he struggled to continue. “A man named Elroy had a list. I wasn’t on that one either.”

  The bureaucracy demon—and everyone else within earshot, which was a lot of demons, thanks to the acuity of demonic hearing—stared at him blankly for a very, very long time. When he failed to continue, everyone went back to what they’d been doing before.

  “I don’t know any Elroy,” said the demon, and back he went to the room at the end of the long hallway, returning eventually with another slender stack of papers. This continued over the course of the next several years, which Sloot declined to count. He reasoned that if Infernal Bureaucracy bore even a passing resemblance to Salzstadt’s Central Bureaucracy, pitching a fit would lead him nowhere but the end of the line; and in his case, “the end of the line” most likely meant the end of the line to get into the line.

  No, thank you. Sloot had come this far. In life, he’d prided himself on his ability to navigate Central Bureaucracy, and he fully intended to pride himself on the same sort of thing in his ... well, post-afterlife would have to do for now.

  Once the bureaucracy demon had rifled through every stack of papers and determined that Sloot wasn’t to be found in any of them, it took the better part of an ice age putting all of the stacks of paper away in the enormous room at the end of the long hall.

  “That’s that then,” it said, after working its way into the perfect position on its chair. It picked up the form that was blank with the exception of Sloot’s name, and checked the “No” box next to the word “Listed.”

  Sloot did everything in his power to avoid descending once again into madness. He was fairly sure he’d succeeded, but reasoned that he probably wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t.

  “Now then, what can I do for you, Sloot Peril?”

  That took Sloot aback. Donovan had snapped his fingers, and Sloot was suddenly a demon 100th class standing in a pre-line.

  “Er, the usual,” said Sloot.

  “What?”

  “The usual?” he repeated, turning it into not so much a question as a plea. “Sorry, but I’m not entirely sure how this works.”

  “This is the requests counter,” said the bureaucracy demon, his voice a frigid expanse of failing patience, every inch of which rested against the edge of ranting. “You wait in the line, you make a request, and we start processing the form.”

  “Oh,” said Sloot. “What sort of things can I request?”

  “Just about anything. Your chances of having the request rejected are the same as your demonic class, which is...?”

  Sloot sighed. “100th.”

  The demon tsked. “I wouldn’t have wasted my time in the line, if I were you. Still, you may as well make a request, since you’re here.”

  “Why bother? It’s got a 100 percent chance of rejection!”

  “You said yourself, you’re an oddity.”

  Perhaps more than anything else, that was the thing that worried Sloot the most. Predictability and order had been the only things that had ever provided him any real comfort. Being told by a divine being in a linen suit that his essential nature was the very opposite of those things was the stuff of existential crises.

  Think, Peril, he demanded silently of himself. The way he saw it, there were two options. The first was to resist, which every impulse within him was screaming for him to do. There were still caves in the world, weren’t there? Giant rocks under which he might fling himself, withdraw from the world and count himself the king of neatly ordered rows of smaller rocks, arranged by size and/or color? There was order to be found in everything, he was sure of it!

  The other option was to lean in. It almost seemed reasonable, given that going along with his instincts had never actually worked out. He wasn’t entirely sure he even had any instincts, for that matter.

  No, wait! That wasn’t true. He had one.

  One.

  He’d said it himself, just now, when he was on the precipice of a chasm of self-pity, about to resign himself to it and throw himself a party. Myrtle must have seen it too. Why else would she have gone to such lengths to place him here, in the center of all this chaos and uncertainty?

  Sloot Peril had an instinct for order. He could find it anywhere, in anything. If he could make a sensible ledger for Willie’s lifetime footwear purchases based on rumors and innuendos about cobblers who’d long since gone into hiding, unraveling a paradoxical conundrum crafted by an ancient demon over thousands of years should be ... well, quite difficult. Still, if anyone could do it, why not Sloot?

  That was it, then. Sloot had two options, and he was going to take them both. He’d resist the mounting chaos by embracing it, and ask it nicely to stand in orderly lines.

  Sloot drew up all of the resolve that he could muster and said, “I’d like to be a better dancer.”

  Squinting, the bureaucracy demon raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s it?”

  Doubt, overly-familiar harlot that she was, nestled herself seductively against Sloot and nibbled his earlobe. It took all of his resolve to rebuff her, but rebuff he did. That was what Myrtle had said, wasn’t it? You’re a better dancer than you think? Sloot knew far too much about probability to believe that such a cryptic statement was just gibberish, es
pecially from someone who could see into the future.

  “Please and thank you,” said Sloot with more certainty than he knew was within him. His voice nearly dropped into an upper baritone register there. It felt good, but in a terrifying sort of way.

  Enter the Bard

  Sloot had seen dwarves in the history books, though there was no telling whether those sketches were even remotely accurate. Given the goblin problem in the Old Country and the fact that the dwarves had defeated them before, Sloot didn’t imagine that the Domnitor, long may he—he really did need to stop doing that now, didn’t he?—that the government would have any reason to encourage dwarfish discrimination or anything.

  In point of fact, if they’d made any attempt to vilify the dwarves, they’d done a horrible job. Dwarves were always portrayed as cheerful fellows with rosy cheeks, long beards, and strong work ethics to be admired by all salts.

  Igor was not a dwarf, and looked nothing like the rosy-cheeked, industrious sketches that Sloot had seen in his youth. He was closer to that than anything else though, so it was a good enough place for Sloot to begin his comparison.

  Igor’s cheeks were not rosy. They were as grey as the rest of him. Neither was his beard long, but rather patchy, filthy, and mysteriously singed in a few places. He seemed hunched over with the effort of lugging the crooked scowl on his face, and his serpentine yellow eyes were nearly as threatening as the stench rising off him.

  “Everything’s in order,” Igor croaked, “you just need to sign.”

  Sloot was unsuited to demonhood in a multitude of ways, from his fear of demons to his unwillingness to indulge in anything remotely craven. Still, he wasn’t about to sign anything without reading it thoroughly, in part because he’d connected with his internal desire to con other beings into signing up for unfavorable conditions of his own. He was wrestling idly with his feelings about that compulsion as he read the contract that Igor had handed him, and resolved to give that train of thought his full attention when the opportunity presented itself.