by Eric Ugland
“Oi,” I said, “stop it.”
Both prinky and Nikolai looked at me, a little chagrined.
“You enjoyed that,” I snapped at Nikolai.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped right back.
I un-summoned the prinky and dropped into the chair opposite the desk.
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” he asked.
“I want to know more about the assassins,” I said. “And what’s going on with the, uh, you-know.”
“The assassins are dead, very dead. Their bodies provided exceedingly few clues as to their identity or their prior whereabouts.”
“So we know they were professionals.”
“That we can assume with some surety, yes. I have received word from Lord Northwoods that he has counted his group and he is not missing anyone. His brothers confirm his story, as does Duke Ginsburg.”
“Do you believe them?”
“So far. As far as I can tell, Northwoods intends Eliza to wed you so that he can then pressure you to aim for the throne.”
“The Imperial Throne?”
“I doubt he means the one in your bathroom. Unless there is something you’d like to tell me.”
“As much as I enjoy a good shit story, I don’t think I need to devote any time to my poops.”
“As you wish, your grace. Regardless of your stool, I believe he wants you to be Emperor. Perhaps not the next emperor — the man has always played long games. Family games. And while I dislike him, I cannot fault his willingness to keep his family at the forefront of his plans.”
“Marry Eliza, huh?”
“I hope you are considering it.”
“I’m not.”
“You should.”
“Can we focus on the murderous fuckhead lurking around the holding, instead of my romantic life?”
“Your romantic life is not your own, Duke of Coggeshall. Whom you take to bed has long-term implications for all of us who choose to follow you.”
“Can it fucking wait until after the—”
“Yes, it can wait until after. I just want you to—”
“I know. Okay? I know. Now. Fuckhead.”
“Is that to me?”
“I suppose it can be to you and about you know.”
“Well, fuck you too, firstly. And secondly, let us continue our talk of the other fuckhead in the room.”
“Me? Fuck you, Nikolai.”
“I meant whomever sent the assassins.”
“Right. Fuck them.”
“Yes, your grace. It needn’t be someone here, in Coggeshall, who sent the killers. There is just as much a chance someone from outside our walls sent them.”
“Who?”
“Your list of enemies grows longer by the day.”
“Yeah, but how many of them can afford a team of assassins?”
“I can think of quite a few, especially in a town that hates you right now.”
“Osterstadt loves me.”
“While there may be some truth to the ‘common’ folk loving the Hero of Osterstadt, those in charge certainly do not. And your continued existence makes their lives rather difficult.”
“You think it was someone in Osterstadt.”
“I think that is the most likely. But I am bothered by what you said about the Northwoods boy. That requires additional discovery.”
“So what do we do?”
“About the assassins?”
“Yeah.”
“How much more dead would you like them?”
“I meant the broader picture.”
“There is a limit to what we can do in the few hours before we go on lockdown for Fiends’ Night. After that, we can address that particular issue.”
“Fine, table it.”
“Yes, your grace. The only thing I can advise is to be on your guard, and to increase your guard. But we’ve already done that, so there is nothing more to be done.”
“Great, so, the other thing.”
“Yes. The Other thing...” he pulled the placard and paper from his desk, and lit it.
My ears popped.
“I have nothing new,” he said.
“Missing persons?” I asked.
“There are some, yes.”
“That’s new.”
“It is, but I cannot connect any of those persons to The Master.”
“How many people are missing?”
“All told, I cannot definitively account for twenty-two people. Four kobolds, four dwarves, fourteen humans.”
“That seems like a lot.”
“It is not a little.”
“Why doesn’t it concern you?”
“Because most of those individuals have some reason attached to their disappearance — we just can’t confirm those reasons yet. Eight of the humans purportedly returned to Osterstadt. Three went east, supposedly hoping to catch a caravan.”
“Oh. That makes more sense,” I said. But something bothered me, and I leaned my chair back as far as I felt safe.
“Please don’t break that,” Nikolai said.
“I’m not going to—”
Snap.
I hit the ground hard.
It hurt. But more pride than pain.
“Montana,” Nikolai said.
“I know,” I replied from the ground. “I’m sorry. We have a carpenter shortage and now you’re down a chair.”
“You realize I have meetings in here all the time, right?”
“It’s why I hate that you have a bed in here.”
“I need to sleep, Montana!”
“You’ve got a fucking apartment!”
“Not right now I don’t.”
“Will you sleep in your apartment when you have one again?”
“Probably.”
“Can you at least make the bed?” I snapped.
His bed was a mess of blankets, sheets, and something that might have been a pillow once but was now just mush. It wasn’t like Nikolai to stop caring about appearances. Made me worry.
I summoned a set of prinkies and had them strip the bed and take things to the laundry.
“Those are my blankets!” Nikolai snapped. He tried to get up and around his desk before the prinkies left the room, but I’d summoned enough prinkies to block his way.
He hauled back and kicked one of the prinkies. Hard. It disappeared in a cloud of glitter.
“I dislike those things,” Nikolai said as the rest of the prinkies disappeared.
“I know,” I said. “But they’re useful.”
He harrumphed and dropped back into his chair.
I thought, just for a moment, about pushing it out from under him. But Nikolai seemed like he was in enough pain without me getting involved in childish pranks. But that thing in the back of my mind reemerged as I lay there in the ruins of what had been a chair.
“Doesn’t that seem odd to you?” I asked.
“You thinking prinkies are useful? No, you have plenty of strange opinions on things.”
“Not that — I’m back to the missing people.”
“Ah, well, you understand my confusion. What is odd?”
“That all twenty-three—”
“Twenty-two.”
“Sure, that all of them had reasons. You’d expect some people missing to be mysteriously missing.”
“Maybe?”
“If I told you I could get twenty people to go on a trip, you don’t think one of those twenty would slip off unnoticed? Even accidentally? I don’t believe it.”
I heard a pencil tapping on Nikolai’s desk. He was thinking.
“I am afraid I do not agree with you on this matter, your grace,” he finally said. “It seems fine to me.”
I sighed, letting the wind flow out of my sails.
“Thought I might have something there,” I said.
“I can ask someone to look into it,” Nikolai replied.
“Nah,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’m just grasping at straws.”
“Yes, your grace.�
�
“I’m going to get lunch.”
“We have about two hours until the Homing.”
“I got it,” I said at the door.
“Just be on time, your grace.”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
“You pay me to worry.”
“I pay you?” I asked as I left.
I heard his sigh through the door.
53
I didn’t get food. Instead, I went outside and threw snowballs at the wall. It was therapeutic to watch them explode. Destruction without destroying things.
There was a lot to think about. But it dawned on me that I didn’t have the toolset built for thinking. I needed to figure out how to reason in this new world. I hadn’t bothered to do that, well, ever. But now I had to actually do that from time to time. I had lied, a little, when I said that I was going to drop the whole twenty-two people who went missing but had twenty-two alibis. That made no sense to me. It was too many people. There had to have been someone who slipped by unnoticed.
I sent another few snowballs down range.
There was always the chance that someone could have gone missing with no one noticing, thereby creating a hole in my theory and making the whole thing innocuous again. But one, when had I learned the word innocuous? And two, how would that person have gone missing without being noticed?
We were a pretty small town, all things considered, and we lived, for the most part, on top of each other. Some people had their own kitchens, but as far as I’d seen and knew, nearly everyone ate every meal at one of the cantinas. Someone would notice if an apartment was empty, especially with space at such a premium. Even if they weren’t willing to snag someone’s apartment, I damn well knew they’d steal a bed. Or blankets. And there were really only a few possible exits. Most people would leave via the gates, which means the guards would see them. And hopefully stop them. Unless, of course, one of the gate guards was already controlled by The Master. If he had people in the guard, then he could get around most of the protocols we put in place to stop him. Which might explain how he’d existed unnoticed so far.
Had we hired new people into the guard since being kicked out of Osterstadt?
A question for Nathalie. I needed a notebook. Instead, I drew my sword, and I scribbled my thoughts in the snow near me.
Snownotes.
Of course, it was also possible The Master had gotten people in place prior to his own arrival. It certainly seemed like he’d had access to Coggeshall from its inception. Which kind of made asking Nathalie about new guards pointless, because it made a lot more sense for The Master to put a guard in place early on, not when it was easy to discover, like a newcomer.
I scratched out my note in the snow.
No snownotes.
This was getting complicated.
I packed together some huge snowballs and threw them extra hard at the wall. They exploded magnificently, which got me a few dirty looks from the soldiers up top. They didn’t seem to enjoy snow exploding on them from below.
“Sorry,” I said, giving them a wave.
I walked farther from the main opening of Coggeshall to where there was a little space for me to be angry and frustrated. I built a snowman, and then I cut it down with my sword.
Made me feel a little better.
“Something vexes you, my lord?” came a familiar voice.
I turned to see Mister Paul in his customary dark suit, stepping out from behind a tree. Or from a tree. Hard to tell.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“It came to my attention,” he said, “that I had forgotten to give you something.”
“You forgot something?”
“We gods are fallible beings, are we not?”
“I mean, that’s certainly not what I was taught.”
“I would think something of that nature would make a man like you feel better about your place in the world. You would prefer we gods were perfect?”
“No, you’re right on that account.”
“Besides, how would so many perfect beings manage to work together on anything?”
“I’d imagine they’d work together... perfectly.”
“Honestly, Montana. I should find someone to teach you better jokes.”
“I thought that was a fine joke.”
‘That’s what makes it all so painful.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure someone appreciates my humor.”
“Let us hope so,” he said. “A minor slip of the mind. Being that it is Fiends’ Night, one of your, erm, followers, has requested that I give you a celestial weapon.”
“I was going to say thank the gods, but I guess I can just say thank you, right?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He pulled a spoon from his inside jacket pocket and held it up for me.
“A spoon?”
“A celestial spoon,” he said, using his other hand to Vanna White the cutlery.
“But why a spoon?”
“I’ve been told because it will hurt more.”
“Maybe,” I said, looking at the spoon. “Kinda depends on what you’re doing with it.”
“Walk with me a moment,” Mister Paul said, and put his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t think his arms were long enough to reach around me, but somehow, they were. He guided me toward the wall, but on a rather circuitous route. “This is a rather challenging situation we find you in, and I daresay you are not exactly playing to your strongest suits here.”
“What do you mean? How closely are you following things?”
“Right now? Very closely. Why, many of us are following incredibly closely! It’s a fantastic moment of high tension, and no one can see a path to your victory — only your doom! Of course we are all on the edges of our seats, hence why me being here is a little gauche, but I swear it is merely because of a minor forgetiation on my part. I am not trying to alter a damn thing. Although, as your patron, I believe I may give you some mild advice here and there.”
“What’s the mild advice?”
“Trust no one.”
“I mean, if that’s the case, shouldn’t I disregard that because I can’t trust you?”
“I suppose there is a caveat: trust no one except the one entity with skin in the game on your side.”
“You’ve got skin in the game?”
“Yes, but not what you think, so try not to think about it, because it will not be something you can remember even if you do figure it out while we’re chatting here.”
“Okay, if I can’t remember everything you say to me, why not tell me exactly what I need to know, and then I’ll forget?”
“How do you know I haven’t?”
I stopped in my tracks. I tried to recall every conversation I’d had with Mister Paul, and while there was some fuzziness, I felt confident I had a good idea of everything that had passed between us. Though it is possible I—
“Also,” Mister Paul interrupted, “because there are others who might remember and let me know that what I had just done was against the rules, and woe be any of us fools who decide to break the game, because if we break the rules, we don’t get to play. And then what will we do with ourselves?”
The way he was talking made me think he wasn’t actually speaking to me during that mini monologue.
“The key,” he continued, “my dear duke, is for you to succeed without me. That is the way the game is meant to be played, and I would imagine that my involvement is already under enough scrutiny that we dare not invite more. I know you can succeed. You just need to alter your style ever so much.”
“You mean not just kill everything?”
“That might be effective, I suppose. Really depends on what your end goal is. But you would doubtless be seen as quite the villain after an escapade like that, and I don’t think either one of us would like you to be a villain. You already tried that route, eh?”
“Yeah, I guess. Although I did get more time for myself and for fishing
back in those days.”
“True, but you also had to worry about the police, sleep in filth, and drink yourself to sleep six days out of seven. So, even Steven?”
“No, you’re right. Very right. I’m just feeling—”
“A momentary weakness, Montana of Coggeshall. Now, return to your heroic deeds and put on a good show.”
“Huh?”
“Forget that last bit. Except about the heroic deeds. Keep that in mind.”
We were on top of the wall, looking north toward the snow-covered woods.
“It is quite beautiful here,” he said.
“I like it,” I replied. “More mountains than back home, but otherwise, pretty nice.”
“Do you remember a poem about footprints in the sand?” Mister Paul asked wistfully.
“Vaguely? Something like there were two sets of footprints, then one, and being carried?”
“Yes, well, forget everything else, and think on our footprints,” he said, looking back over the Coggeshall grounds. “Blast.”
“What?”
“Seems I may have forgotten a word. Still, all I’ve done all I can and I am on the verge of being late for a very important thing. Not a date. Best of luck, Montana.”
Mister Paul opened a door which had definitely not been there before, and stepped into a room that hadn’t existed. He disappeared, and the door vanished along with him as it closed.
I looked back over the footprints, expecting to see a message.
Instead, I saw a single word.
“Thing.”
“Thing?” I said out loud. “That has to be the worst fucking clue!”
No response. Typical god behavior.
54
I stood there on the wall looking at the writing in the snow.
Thing.
What the fuck did ‘thing’ mean?
Was Mister Paul referencing The Master? Fiends’ Night? The Assassins? The empty throne? The centaurs? Something else I hadn’t even come to? There were dozens of ’things’ I was dealing with, but the message was so fucking vague it could mean nearly any of them.
Fuck.
I came down from the wall, and, using all the snow from that area, I made a very large snowman.
My hand went to my sword as I thought hard about slicing the snowman apart. What if some fiend figured out a way to bring the snow to life? Would a snow golem attack Coggeshall because I made one?
