by Sam Hooker
“You’re missing citations,” said Sloot.
“Which ones?”
“All of them,” said Sloot. “Any of them! This doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would I be required to contract with a bard?”
“Hard to have songs and poems written about your exploits of you don’t,” Igor shrugged. “Look, I don’t make the rules. They assigned me as your bard, and you’re supposed to sign the contract.”
“Who’s ‘they?’”
“Who isn’t?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t go in for rhetoric.”
“I don’t know the names of every stinking demon who had a hand in the legislative process! I’m just a lowly denizen of the system like yourself. Now, I’m sure I’ve got a pen here somewhere.”
Igor went rummaging in a filthy sack that looks like it may once have been made from burlap, but that had been eaten away by an accumulation of filth so tenacious that it should have evaporated ages ago. Sloot surmised that it was only being held together by the filth’s refusal to go silently into the night.
“You’re lying,” said Sloot. He held the contract out for Igor to take it.
“I assure you, I’m not.”
Sloot sighed. “You’ve written notes to yourself in the margins. This says, ‘See if the mark will go in for letting me have the top bunk, if we find ourselves staying somewhere that has bunk beds. Also convince him that the government—or whoever—requires the mark to feed his bard food without rocks in it, as my teeth are killing me.’”
Igor flashed a sheepish grin like a shattered window. “Oh, come on, everyone’s going to want to be your bard once they find out what you’re about! You’re working for the Coolest, right? Secret mission, and that?”
“How did you—”
“Never mind,” said Igor. “Look, I’ll do a good job with the barding and all. I’ll strike the bit about feeding me rocks, if you want. I don’t mind them that much, honest!”
Sloot searched his mind for a way to brush Igor off, but he came up empty. He didn’t want to be rude, and none of his limited social tools seemed capable of getting him out of this otherwise.
“I suppose I could give you a tryout or something,” Sloot relented. “What instruments do you play?”
That wasn’t the sort of question that Sloot imagined would send a bard into fits of nervous stammering, yet there they were. A nervous stammerer himself, Sloot recognized it when it happened.
“You don’t play any instruments, do you?”
“What?” croaked Igor, a bit more emphatically than would have been believable. “That’s just ... oh, you’re lucky I’m not easily offended!”
Sloot blinked. Anything else might have distracted from his frown of incredulity, which he felt he might have been pulling off for the first time.
“I’ve got...” Igor dug furiously into his filth bag, eventually drawing out a length of wire. “This?”
“That’s not an instrument.”
“Oh, a music critic, are you? Seen every musical instrument in the universe already?”
Doubt sidled up to him again, purring and eager for another go. Sloot blushed.
“All right then,” he said, his voice cracking once. “Play it.”
Another frightened stare from Igor. Sloot still wasn’t sure what to do with those, rarely ever having been on the receiving end.
In a fit of unrehearsed brilliance—if one were to remove all meaning from the word—Igor gripped the ends of the wire with both hands and pulled in a rhythmic sort of way that lacked any rhythm at all. The result was the sort of twangy fumbling that Sloot might expect to hear from a barn in the deep woods of Carpathia during the world’s most awkward family reunion.
“Oh, come off it,” said Sloot, no longer able to wear the facade of patient humor. “You’re not a bard at all! This certainly isn’t a valid contract. I’m going now, and I’d strongly prefer if you didn’t follow me, please and thank you! I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but—”
“All right,” moaned Igor, “I’m sorry! I didn’t want to do it like this, but do you have any idea how hard it is for a gremlin to break into barding?”
“A gremlin?”
“We break things,” he explained with a caustic little grin, and a palms-up gesture of appeasement. “I mean, I’m good at it and all, but I’m tired of it. I’ve always wanted to be a bard, and the only way I get to do that is if I land a gig. Please, can I be your bard?”
Sloot vacillated, as he was wont to do. On the one hand, he didn’t believe that anyone should be forced into any occupation that they didn’t want to do, with the obvious exception of tax evaders being assigned to sewer-scrubbing details. On the other hand, a gremlin bard—gremlish bard?—just sounded like it had “disaster” written all over it, especially given that this particular one didn’t even know how to play the non-instrument that it had, or rather, didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, “I just don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Igor sighed. His dejected look quickly turned angry. “What if I threaten you?”
“What?”
“You know, promise to do you harm.”
“I know what threats are,” said Sloot, who was all too familiar, “I was trying to express shock.”
“Oh, right. Look, if I’m not a bard I’m just a gremlin, and I’m honor-bound to continue doing my job. Big task like the one you’ve got ahead of you? A lot of things that could go wrong there, I imagine. It would be a shame if you had a gremlin mucking about in it.”
“It would,” admitted Sloot. “There’s a contract for that sort of thing though, right? Wouldn’t I have to sign off on that?”
“No such luck,” Igor grinned, clearly pleased with this turn of sentiment in the conversation. “We gremlins are old-school. No unions, no contract negotiations, just an instinct for mischief and nothing to lose.”
Sloot felt defeated. At least he knew where he stood with defeat.
“I’m not signing that contract,” he said.
“Please?”
Sloot shook his head. He was awash with fear for the potential consequences of having anything to do with Igor, but nothing could have convinced him to sign such a poorly written document.
“Look, you get yourself a proper instrument and learn to play it, and I’ll consider drawing up a proper contract to make you my bard, all right?”
“Agreed!” Igor smiled broadly, showing Sloot the horrible things that slithered among what appeared to be coral reefs growing on his back teeth. “So, where are we off to?”
“No, no,” said Sloot. “You come and find me once you’ve worked out the instrument thing. Don’t come following me!”
“It’ll be easier to find you if I just come along now.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t.”
“I’m a gremlin. You’d be surprised how often I hear that.”
Coming Home
Erstwhile bard at his heels, Sloot teleported for the very first time back to the site of the battle, where the Coolest had made him a demon. Another of the perks of being a demon was his innate sense of time, which told him that the few millennia he’d spent in Infernal Bureaucracy had amounted to little more than a moment in the Narrative. He’d expected to see everyone still milling about, but there was no one and nothing.
“This is where it all happened,” mused Igor. “The Coolest were right here! Wow.”
“Just the sort of thing a bard would sing about,” said Sloot.
Igor put a finger to his chin thoughtfully, then shrugged. “I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
Igor nodded. Sloot thought about pointing out that gods—or something approximating gods—standing around in the Narrative, casually discussing the fates of entire nations’ worth of reality was exactly the sort of thing that proper bards would kill to have at the ready, but he didn’t want to be mistaken for encouraging Igor.
“That’s that, then.” Sloot folded his arms and looked out ove
r the empty plain that gave the Old Country-Carpathian border a place to be. The Dark roiled overhead, a turbulent shadow held at bay by some unseen force from devouring everything around it. It was his to sort out, but more than that, it was his only job. No other obligations, just the work in front of him.
Freedom! Horrible freedom.
Sloot couldn’t remember ever having been left to his own devices to this degree, and the enormity of it made it impossible to catch his breath. Breath! He’d gotten used to not having to do that anymore. Why would they make it so demons had to breathe? Whoever “they” were. The Coolest, probably.
“You should try to breathe,” offered Igor.
“That’s all I’m doing!”
“Oh. Good job, then.”
Sloot’s sense of panic threatened to force him back to the resting rate of anxiety that had been a constant for most of his life. The first one, that is. There had to be more, something other than a single job that would place some constraints on his life.
Well, there was Myrtle, for starters. She was still alive, wasn’t she? Working in the lowest level of the Inferno had to be simply awful. He needed to rescue her! That was something. He avoided thinking about the sheer enormity of that task, denial being a powerful weapon in his arsenal. One panic at a time.
He had his friends to think of, too. He didn’t know where any of them were at the moment, though they’d certainly turn up in the course of fixing the whole “Dark threatening to plunge both the Old Country and Carpathia into eternal night if he were to fail at his task” thing.
Sloot started hyperventilating. He’d come full circle! There had to be something else. His mother had always been good at talking him out of his worry, what would she—
Of course, thought Sloot, that’s it! He hadn’t seen his mother since long before the Fall of Salzstadt, when she’d revealed that she was a Carpathian spy and he’d agreed to take her place. He’d done his best to avoid thinking that she’d died during the time between then and now, which was fairly easy to do. His mother was old, but when he’d seen her last she’d been stronger than most people half her age. Stronger than Sloot, for sure. He wouldn’t have wanted to fight her, mostly because she was his mother, partly because he was a coward, and at least a bit because he’d heard on the streets that she was a biter.
“Hang on a minute,” said Sloot. There was something happening in his mind. It was like a new sense was opening up. All of a sudden, there was no doubt in his mind that she was alive and kicking, the latter in a very literal sense that very moment. He could sense precisely where she was, on a big stony field outside a little Carpathian town called Kadaverstraag.
“About time you came to see your poor old mother,” said Sladia Peril, leaning back in her rocking chair and holding a jack-booted foot up in Sloot’s direction. “Help us off with this, will you?”
“I only just learned where you were,” said Sloot, squinting against the feeble light in her little cottage as he fumbled with the laces, but not because he had trouble seeing. His demon eyes were sharp enough to have shown him all he needed to see in perfect darkness. He surmised that he must have been squinting out of habit.
“How?” Sladia demanded. “Who talked? I’ll gut them like a rat on goulash day!”
“Nobody,” said Sloot, while silently swearing off goulash for the rest of his life. “It just sort of … came to me.” He sighed. “Mother, there’s something that I need to tell you.”
“You’re a demon?”
“How did you know?”
“It makes sense,” said Sladia, far less fearlessly than Sloot imagined she should have. “I heard you’d died in the Fall of Salzstadt. If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“You thought I lacked the capacity to die?”
“To die for your country,” Sladia corrected him. “I thought I’d done too good a job, raising you to be a true salt, lacking any trace of a killer instinct. If I were a betting woman—which I am, but not on the fates of my kin—I’d have wagered you’d live a long and boring life, never to be called upon by Roman at all.”
“He’s a demon too, you know.”
“That makes sense, too. He was always one step ahead of everybody. Once is lucky, twice is well-prepared, but he got us out of dozens of impossible situations over the years.”
“When you say us …”
Sladia winced. “You were there for a couple of them.”
“Mother!”
“What? You didn’t die, did you? You were perfectly fine. I always took excellent care of you.”
As much as he wanted to argue, he simply couldn’t find an adequate retort. Moreover, he found himself thinking that perhaps he didn’t want to argue after all. Sure, Sladia hadn’t been the perfect parent, but she’d loved him. He had no doubt about that. In the end, wasn’t that all that really mattered?
“I love you, Mother.”
Sladia’s eyes narrowed. “What have you done?”
“Nothing! I just wanted to tell you I love you, that’s all.”
She watched him for a long moment. “All right then. Back at you. But don’t think that means your gremlin friend can come into my house! I’ll garrote him with that bit of wire he keeps plucking.”
Sloot looked out the window and saw Igor sitting there. He was looking out over the little town, plucking at his sad excuse for an instrument.
“He’s not my friend.”
“Workplace associates,” Igor said over his shoulder.
“Not that either!”
“Now that’s hurtful,” said Igor. “Just because I tried to con you into signing an eternal contract for services I’m presently incapable of adequately rendering?”
“Yes. That’s exactly why.”
“You’ve got a lot to learn about being a demon,” Igor scoffed. “Honestly, if you can’t con people into signing fraudulent contracts, you’re not going to get very far with this whole ‘repairing reality’ thing.”
“Does that have anything to do with the Dark looming over everything?” asked Sladia.
“It does,” said Sloot. “How do you know about the Dark?”
“I was in the intelligence game for decades,” said Sladia, who then went very still, as though realizing she’d given away too much. “Or was I?”
“You told me as much before,” said Sloot. “That was the last time I saw you before … well, everything. What happened to you?”
“Retirement,” said Sladia. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to see Carpathia again, so I snuck out of Salzstadt the first chance I got. I was born here in Kadaverstraag, so I came here first. As luck would have it, the Corpse Grinders had just lost their coach in a freak boulder accident.”
Sladia was talking about the Kadaverstraag Corpse Grinders, of course. They were her hometown’s boulderchuck team. Boulderchuck, the official national sport of Carpathia, was nearly elegant in its simplicity. The rules were really no more complicated than the name of the game.
“Can being crushed to death by a boulder at a boulderchuck match really be called a ‘freak accident?’”
“No, but it wasn’t at a match. Happened in his kitchen.”
“That’s unexpected.”
Sladia shrugged. “You know what they say: you play with boulders, you’ll inevitably be crushed by one. Anyway, they needed a coach, and I wasn’t about to be one of those people who retires and doesn’t have a job.”
“That’s what retirement is.”
Sladia shook her head. “Like I said, I did too well in raising you like a salt.”
They sat there in silence for a while, broken occasionally by the pathetic twanging of Igor’s bit of wire.
“How are you going to do it?” asked Sladia.
“Do what?”
“Fix everything. The Dark and all.”
“I have no idea.” Sloot didn’t even know what ‘fixed’ meant in this sense. Did he just have to repair the Dark, tuck it back away into the ether? Doub
tful. Well, he probably did have to do that, but there was also the matter of the paradox that Roman had opened up. The consequences of an Unknowable Secret being revealed were supposed to be catastrophic.
The question that really chilled him wasn’t how he was going to fix it, but whether he should. If he were to calculate the odds, which was the one task he was qualified to undertake, he had little doubt that the safe bet for the larger part of reality would be to simply do away with Carpathia and the Old Country before any more damage could be done.
But how could he? His mother was sitting right there in front of him! And what about Myrtle? She’d gone to an awful lot of trouble to earn him this chance at setting everything to rights. He couldn’t very well just say “no thanks,” and “tra la la la la” as he skipped off into some carefree delusion in which everything would simply “be all right.”
“Good,” said Sladia, who was studying Sloot’s face with the same intensity that a dog stares at a hamburger in a child’s flailing hand. “It looks like you’ve worked out your resolve. That was always the hardest part for you, wasn’t it?”
Sloot nodded idly, then thought about what she’d said, and realized that she was right. He’d always been loath to make tough decisions, even when he knew the right thing to do. Of course, he was going to try and sort it out. He wasn’t going to let his mother be swept up in the wholesale annihilation of targeted swaths of reality, he wasn’t going to let Myrtle spend eternity doing whatever ghastly chores the lowest circle of Inferno had in store for her, and he certainly wasn’t going to listen to that wretched twanging for one more minute.
“Igor!” shouted Sloot.
“Yeah, boss?”
“Stop playing that wire, would you please? And I’m not your boss.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Sloot sighed. At least the twanging had stopped.
He walked out into the yard, looking south toward the looming cloud of the Dark against the pink and orange sunset.
“There you are,” he said to the Dark. “And here I am.”