The journey home had taken more than a month thanks to Willie’s prize, which the horses had to pull the entire way. It was an enormous wooly mammoth, or had been at one time. More accurately, it was a dead and taxidermied mammoth, poised on a plinth in the rampant position, with its two front hooves raised into the air as if having its portrait painted mid-battle. There were wheels on the plinth, which must have been designed to spend great deals of time stuck in ruts of their own construction, because they did just that. The fact that they’d gotten the thing within sight of Salzstadt at all was impressive on its own.
“Dunno,” said Sloot, whose stomach had been tied in knots since the moment they’d left Salzstadt in the first place. “The better question is how we’re going to get the thing into the city. Better still, how are we going to get into the city? We never got permits!”
“Same way we got out,” said Roman. “Winking Bob.”
In the official record—from which all history books in the Old Country are written—there is no such thing as a black market in Salzstadt. The overwhelming majority of history books are purchased by academics, the second poorest profession including panhandlers, who come in twelfth; therefore, a bit of extra fiscal engineering is needed to make them affordable. To that end, most history books in Salzstadt have “fallen off of wagons” and are purchased on the black market.
The title of Poorest Profession in the Old Country is held by the lawyers. They’re not actually poor, of course, but they make sure that they appear that way on paper. The title comes with some hefty tax breaks.
Many salts make an honest living in the sales trade, not a one of whom was Winking Bob. When Sloot had failed to secure permits for their excursion in a timely fashion, Roman had promised to handle it.
Despite Sloot’s largely unblemished record of staunch patriotism and devotion to the Domnitor, long may he reign, he’d heard of Winking Bob before. It was a name whispered in pubs, a phantom capable of delivering anything for a price.
Before this excursion, no temptation could have lured him away from the straight-and-narrow; except for his having joined up with Carpathian Intelligence, which was probably a lot worse than buying foreign sausages and whiskey without a tax stamp. Sloot sighed. He was already a heretic and a traitor, what would some illicit dealings with his fellow criminals add to his sentence if he were caught?
It was supposed to be springtime, but tell that to the snow drifts piled up on the sides of the road. Sloot would have loved to have made it closer to the city before nightfall, but they couldn’t bring Willie’s prize within sight of the gates before the sun went down.
“Soon enough,” said Roman. He swept the snow from a spot on a stone wall, sat, and busied himself with packing tobacco into his pipe. Nan had lit a small fire to heat up Willie’s dinner.
“Should we be doing that?” asked Sloot.
“Doing what?”
“Lighting fires, smoking pipes! Won’t it give away our position or something?”
“I could light a dozen pipes and draw less attention than a thirty-foot mammoth.”
“Fair point.”
Roman looked to make sure that they were out of earshot of Willie, who was singly focused on proving to Nan that he was perfectly capable of cutting up his own meat. It was evident that he was not.
“Your mum really never told you anything about the spy business?”
Sloot sighed. “No. I never knew anything about it until I’d been conscripted.”
“Job well done,” said Roman with a grin.
“What do you mean?”
“Well you’re our secret weapon, aren’t you? Sladia raised you knowing nothing of your true heritage so that you’d blend in. Look at you! There’s as much salt in you as anyone in the city. It’s the perfect cover!”
“It’s not a cover,” said Sloot, “I’m a real salt, through and through! A loyal subject of the Domnitor, long may he reign!”
“No need to lay it on that thick, it’s only us here.”
“I’m not— Oh, forget it.”
They sat there in silence for a while, which is one of the worst things that a person in the midst of an existential crisis can do. A good brain, a loyal one, knows to keep itself distracted; otherwise, it starts to think, and thinking inevitably results in ideas.
Most ideas end up as recipes for soups that don’t work out. Some ideas turn out well, and we get useful things like agriculture, or the metric system, or recipes for soup that do work out. The rest fester and turn into terrible things that people go to war over, like greed, wrath, or the metric system.
“Wait,” said Sloot, “what did you mean, ‘our secret weapon’?”
Roman coughed on his pipe, sending a tiny cloud of smoke slinking uncomfortably away as his enormous eyes focused on something in the distance.
“Well, er … what?”
“That’s what you said. Mum kept me in the dark about my Carpathian heritage, and I’m your secret weapon.”
“I’m sure I didn’t say that,” said Roman.
“What are you two talking about back here?” Willie had wandered into their midst, still wearing his bib.
“Nothing,” Sloot replied. Roman gave an exasperated sigh.
“Oh, go on,” said Willie. He took a seat beside Roman on the stone wall and leaned in so that he could whisper. “I’m just one of the lads out here in the wild. No time for lords and servants with danger around every corner, right? Come on, you have to tell me! I am your lord, you know.”
Sloot and Roman glanced at each other.
“Actually,” said Roman, “we were just discussing your birthday.”
“My birthday! I love my birthday. There will be cake, I imagine.”
Roman nodded. “Probably.”
“What do you mean, ‘probably’? There has to be cake, or it’s not a birthday! I think there’s a law. If not, there should be. I’ll talk to my father, he’ll―”
“That is to say,” Roman began, “that while there will almost certainly be a cake, there are certain rules about keeping secrets.”
“I know that,” said Willie. “I’m very good at keeping secrets.”
“But not from yourself … and it’s your birthday we’re discussing, after all.”
Willie’s face wore an expression that insinuated offense, then faded to perplexity, and finally to realization.
“You’re planning me a surprise birthday party!”
“That’s a possibility,” said Roman. “And assuming that were true, we couldn’t give you any of the details, could we?”
Willie’s expression returned to perplexity.
“Because then it wouldn’t be a surprise,” said Sloot.
“Obviously,” said Willie. “That was a test. Well done, the pair of you. Just one thing, though.”
“Yes?”
Willie hesitated. “Well. I’ve made my feelings about cake very clear, haven’t I?”
“Perfectly clear,” answered Roman with a wink.
“All right.” Willie gave a satisfied nod. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He stood, smiled, turned, and wandered back in Nan’s direction.
“Nothing!” Roman hissed at Sloot. “Really? Have you learned nothing at all about being a spy?”
“No,” said Sloot, “I haven’t! What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”
“That’s what you said when Willie asked what we were talking about! Everyone knows that when someone asks ‘what were you talking about,’ saying ‘nothing’ can only mean ‘definitely something, but we don’t like you enough to include you in it’!”
“Fine, what should I have said?”
“Just get him talking about something he likes. Works on just about anybody.”
“Clever,” said Sloot. “But don’t think I’ve forgotten about that whole ‘secret weapon’ business. You owe me
an explanation.”
“And you shall have one. But first, tell me about Myrtle! How are things going between the two of you?”
The cloudy grey afternoon wore into a darker grey evening, then ended up greying itself so thoroughly as to end up inky black. Roman passed the time by giving Sloot a master class in evading difficult questions, whether he realized it or not. Then, under cover of night, the four horses, their riders, and one enormous taxidermied mammoth made their way through one of the bigger supply gates in the wall surrounding Salzstadt.
Bribery made Sloot uncomfortable. Neatly kept books meant that not a penny went unaccounted, squarely notated in perpetuity. Sure, he could quite easily pad another line item or make up some clever code. He could file it under “poultry research.” But what happens when an auditor’s brother is a chicken farmer, and she wants to wax philosophical about feather fungus?
The bright side was that Sloot had these thoughts to keep him occupied on the way through the wall, down the streets, and into Whitewood. He’d just let Roman do all of the talking.
It worked! Merely being an accessory to Felonious Excursions and Importation of Questionable Art had been far simpler than carrying them out himself. Sloot had made it past panic and was well on his way back down to his base level of worry when he did his nerves the disservice of walking inside the house.
“Oh, Mister Peril! It was simply awful!”
Sloot struggled to remain conscious in the face of so many conflicting demands on his composure. In addition to the panic he was already nursing, he was startled by Myrtle’s sudden rush toward him, concerned for her trembling as she threw her arms around him, pleasantly wobbly in the knees for the same, and utterly perplexed to see not a stick of furniture in the living room.
“His Lordship’s been burgled!” exclaimed Roman.
“Burgled?” asked Willie, with his usual degree of latent bewilderment. “Doesn’t that mean I’ve won an award?”
“Oh, my sweet Willikins! Don’t look!” Nan pressed Willie’s head ferociously against her bosom. “It’s going to be all right! Mister Roman, go and wake up all of the shopkeepers! Willie’s going to need new things until we can hunt down the culprit!”
“New things?” Willie’s voice was muffled. He struggled to extract himself from Nan’s comforting embrace. “That sounds like fun! The stuff I had was weeks old. What colors go with my trophy? It is a trophy, isn’t it? Redecorating for a plaque seems … I dunno, excessive.”
Sloot reluctantly pulled away from Myrtle so that he could meet her gaze.
“What happened?” he asked.
“It was this morning,” said Myrtle. “I awoke to the sound of Mister Dirtsmith shouting in the garden.”
“He does that a lot,” remarked Sloot.
“Yes, but this was beyond his usual threats to the weeds. His flowers had been trodden upon, and he was furious! When I left my room to calm him down, that’s when I saw. They’d taken everything!”
“Good thing,” said Willie. “Though I’m surprised that none of it matched the trophy.”
“None of the servants’ quarters were burgled,” said Myrtle. “Probably the Burglars’ Union. It’s in their rules, servants are out of bounds.”
“Willie gets cranky when he’s tired,” said Nan. “I’ll just go put him down in your bed, Mister Peril. You’ll not be needing it, as I’m sure you’ll not rest until this injustice has been settled?”
“Of course,” said Sloot, who hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since inheriting his mother’s spying duties. He and Roman walked through the house with Myrtle and confirmed that whoever had done this had been incredibly thorough.
They’d taken the curtains. They’d taken the rods upon which the curtains had hung. They’d taken the little sashes that the maids used to tie back the curtains in the morning to let the light in.
“That’s not the most disturbing part,” said Roman. He and Sloot had found the bottom of Roman’s flask, and took no time in deliberating whether they should relocate their commiseration to the pub.
“I know,” said Sloot, placing one of his two beers under his chair. “They absolutely cleaned out the vault. Every copper. Gone.”
“Well of course they did,” Roman replied with an agitated wave. “They’re burglars, aren’t they? The money’s always the first thing to go.”
“At least it will be easy to fit into the ledger. A single line: burgled.”
“They took the garbage,” said Roman.
“The what?”
“The garbage,” Roman repeated, “the rubbish from the bins in the kitchens. They took it. The bins, too.”
“Why would they do that?”
“It’s a message,” said Roman. “Smash-and-grabs don’t go in for curtains, no matter how nice they are, and they certainly don’t see a bin full of table scraps and go for it. No, someone wanted to send Willie a message.”
“Why? What was the message?”
Roman said a phrase involving a swear word that implied that Willie, being the target, was the sort of pig who ate his acorns twice. It was a swear word so vile that three goblins popped in under the table, cackling like mad.
“Careful,” exclaimed Sloot, “goblins!”
“It’s only the Old Country,” said Roman with a shrug. “Horrible place is full of them anyway.”
Sloot restrained the impulse to call for the guards like one is supposed to do at the first sign of heresy. He wondered if he’d been a heretic long enough for the interrogators to be able to tell just by looking at him.
“Well, what do we do now?” Sloot was wringing his hands with a precision that would distract other worriers. This was why he was no longer welcome at their regular meetings.
“I’ll ask around,” said Roman. “Whitewood getting cleaned out while we were away, while the servants slept, and even the trash being taken? Too many coincidences. I don’t like it.”
“But who would want to send Willie a message? And who would benefit from that message being ‘I have all of your things’?”
“Exactly,” said Roman. “If that were the message, it would be a regular burglary, and they’d have left the garbage.”
“And the curtains.”
Roman said another swear word. Pop, cackle. “Forget about the curtains, will you? This is serious!”
“I know it’s serious!” Sloot had half a mind to say a swear word, too; perhaps the culinary one whose noun and verb forms contradict each other. “Were you not listening when I said that the vault is completely empty?”
“Why should that matter? The insanely wealthy don’t keep all of their money in their vault, Sloot.”
“They don’t?”
“Of course not! It’s a sizeable chunk, sure, but they spread it around just in case— Wait, what do you mean, ‘they don’t’?”
“It’s a common phrase,” said Sloot.
“I know what it means! Are you trying to tell me that all of Willie’s money was in the vault?”
“Well, I hadn’t had a chance to spread it around yet! We’d only just moved into Whitewood before the trip to Nordheim, and―”
Roman exploded into a string of profanity that got the two of them expelled from the pub. They wandered the streets aimlessly for a while, neither of them speaking.
“Willie gets an allowance,” said Sloot after a while, when they paused atop a footbridge over the river that ran through the city. “It’s not enough to do much more than pay the servants, but at least there’s that.”
“That’s good,” Roman grumbled. “We’ve got to fix this. If Willie’s poor, then the whole plan just sort of turns to―” He looked over his shoulder and, seeing no one, swore another phrase aloud that applied literally to what people do in canoes during rainstorms, but was figuratively taken to mean that everything was doomed to fail.
Pop, spla
sh! Pop, splash! There was a coalition in the city who opposed goblin cruelty, and they’d have had a lot to say if they’d known that Roman was conjuring them over the river bridge. Said people also had rough words for bathing, which they seemed to take as an affront to artistic license. Fortunately, they were too poor to afford a commune in this part of the city.
“So the secret plan hinges on Willie’s money?”
“Probably,” said Roman. “I haven’t figured out that much yet, but why else would he be important?”
“No idea.”
Roman shrugged. “Me either. That’s why we’ve got to fix it.”
“You’re asking me to take a lot on faith, you know.”
“That’s the spy business. We don’t often have much more to go on than that. It’s hunches and gut feelings most of the time.”
“But there’s got to be something! I’ve spent my whole life dealing with facts. The only thing worse than committing heresy by simply continuing to breathe is having nothing to confess at my eventual torturing!”
“Plausible deniability.” Roman pressed one finger on the side of his nose. “It’s part of what makes you the perfect spy, Peril! Don’t you see? Even under pain of death, you’ll give ’em nothing! Blood and honor! That’s sticking it to ’em.”
“No it isn’t,” groaned Sloot. It didn’t matter, he was tired of arguing. Moreover, he was simply tired. “Forget it, let’s go sleep it off at my place.”
“I’ve a better idea,” said Roman. “Let’s start your spy training.”
“Really? Now?” Sloot was still terribly worried over the whole heresy thing, but he was just curious enough to want to know what spy training entailed.
“Now. A spy must be ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice! He doesn’t always have the luxury of a good night’s sleep and the chance to digest his breakfast before intrigue throws herself at him, like the tramp she is.”
“All right,” said Sloot. “I’m already exhausted and still a bit drunk. Where do we start?”
“Another pub,” said Roman. “Follow me.”
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