While Sloot thought his name for them was better, he really hadn’t anticipated just how nefarious they were. They held a lot of sway in Salzstadt and beyond, and their membership included just about everybody who could afford a street named after them (that is to say, those who can afford the street, not just the name).
It did nothing to soothe Sloot’s nerves to find several mentions of assassinations performed by one Mr. Roger Bannister, whose face is known to no one else in the society.
Until today. Sort of.
He rifled through several other books and found a passage that mentioned how the Serpents of the Earth handle changes in leadership. Constantin had told Willie that he’d have to render proof of his worth to inherit the Three Bells, and here was the same phrase: “Whomsoever Woulde Rule o’er The Serpentes of the Earthe Neede Render Proofe ov Their Worthe.” Just how tightly were the Three Bells and the Serpents of the Earth linked?
He didn’t find anything specific with regard to the connection between Mrs. Knife and Myrtle, but he wanted to leave as quickly as possible before someone more discerning figured out that he wasn’t who he was pretending to be.
He wondered, hopefully, if lacking an innate sense of direction was grounds for dismissal from the spy business, because he left the room and was immediately lost. The most natural thing to do would be to leave the way he’d come in, but he had about the same odds of retracing his steps as building a ship and sailing it out.
Wait … had he ingurgitated it? There had been a lot going on, but perhaps he could rely on what little spy training he’d received so far.
“Think, Peril,” he said to himself, then wondered if that had ever worked for anybody.
He relaxed his mind, thought back. It was all there! Every twist and turn! Bless Roman, he was going to be able to do it!
He started to the right, then turned left, left, and right again. It was no good, none of it was looking familiar.
What Roman had failed to tell Sloot was the role that trust plays in ingurgitation. If you start questioning whether this bit or that bit actually happened the way you remember, the whole thing just sort of falls apart. That’s how Sloot ended up at a dead end, where he was sure there should have been an intersection.
Could he retrace his steps to the horrible library and try again? Not if he questioned the second ingurgitation he compiled while trying to follow the first one. After a few minutes, he found himself wandering the hallways in sickly green near-darkness, as far from anywhere as he was from where he stood.
The only thing that he could do then was to start walking, abandon all pretense of making educated guesses, and hope that he eventually came to an exit. He assumed a walking posture that said he knew exactly where he was, which turned out to be a passable imitation of the then-fashionable strut called The Great Ghost of Derry Bottom, though Sloot didn’t know it at the time.
He tried a few doors. Some were locked. Some opened into inky blackness. The contents of one caused Sloot to scream out a swear word that sent a pair of goblins scampering back the way he’d come, or at least the way he thought he’d come.
At last, he opened a door and daylight blinded him. He was in an alley between a couple of buildings, and thankfully, no one was around. He closed the door behind him and walked away as quickly as he felt he could without attracting any attention.
How long had he been down there? It was mid-morning when he’d arrived at the library. He looked at his watch. The sun would set soon.
There was a pub nearby, one he’d never been in before. That should be good for lying low, he reckoned. He’d have a few pints and wait for nightfall. Yeah, that sounded like what a spy on the lam might do.
***
Between not having slept for nearly two days and the strength of the pints at his new favorite pub, it was all that Sloot could do to stumble back across town to his apartment. Sure, he was supposed to be lying low, but wouldn’t anyone looking for him assume that he’d be living at Whitewood? It was just that sort of thinking that left him entirely at a loss for what to say to Mrs. Knife when he found her sitting at his table in the darkness.
“Well, well, well,” said Mrs. Knife in a passable imitation of pleasantry, “you were slightly more difficult to track down than I would have thought, Mister Peril … or should I say, Mister Bannister?”
The game was up. Overthinking his response wasn’t going to get the job done, so in a wanton fit of improvisation, Sloot decided to do the opposite and underthink it. He put on his most affable smile and was walking toward the kitchen before he had a chance to wonder what he’d do when he got there.
“Coffee, Mrs. Knife?”
“No,” she growled. “Sit down, Peril. We have things to discuss, you and I.”
“I’d rather not.” Sloot opened the cupboards and spied the coffee on the top shelf. As he reached for it, he heard a noise that was barely a whisper, like a breeze stirring up leaves. He was distracted from his inability to think of how he might get out of this when he suddenly found himself falling.
There was a swift and sudden impact with the floorboards. That was unpleasant on its own, but there was something else too. Something on the left side of his body, very near his heart.
“What you’d rather,” said Mrs. Knife, suddenly close enough for Sloot to feel the heat of her breath and smell the onions on it, “will make a fitting epitaph for you, Mister Peril. You know too much, and you refuse to listen to reason. I’m afraid there’s only one proper way to address this situation.”
“I’m sure there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” Sloot would have said, and did in fact try, though all he managed was a gurgle and cough that produced an alarming amount of blood.
“I’d tell you to save your strength,” Mrs. Knife continued, “but you have no need of it.” She chuckled, amused at her own wit. “I really thought I’d coaxed the whole truth out of you the other day, Peril. I must say, I’m impressed! I never thought a sniveling weakling like you could accomplish so much, but then I heard you’d been snooping around in the counting house. And then I had the most interesting conversation with Imelda Lillellien.”
Sloot tried to take a breath, but his lungs were filling with blood.
“Pity all of that blood going to waste. I’ve got no talent with blood magic myself, should have brought Gregor along. Oh, well.” She took Sloot’s favorite dish towel from the rod by the sink and used it to clean her bloody knife. “I imagine Roger Bannister will change his name when he hears about this. Really, kudos on that one!”
Sloot gurgled again.
“And to think, I thought you were secretly working for Carpathian Intelligence! You hired their spymaster as Willie’s valet, did you know that? You’re either incredibly smart or incredibly stupid. In either case, the last words you’re ever going to hear have been redacted due to their filthiness.”
Except instead of that last bit, Mrs. Knife clearly enunciated a vile phrase that alluded to some very antiquated ideas about foreigners, which would only ever be repeated by the most despicable sort of villain. Sloot was sure that he heard the sound of corn popping in an oily skillet, which was followed by the cackling of an entire congress of goblins.
It was freezing in his apartment, except for the warm, wet spot very near his heart where Mrs. Knife’s knife had been. The room was going dark, which was an odd thing to occur so early in the morning. He heard, in a very muffled sort of way that sounded like someone had stuffed wool into his ears, what sounded like a box of matches falling to the ground.
Goblins cackled, matches flared bright, and Mrs. Knife smiled cruelly back at him as her shoes went clack, clack, clack toward the door.
Calamity Ho!
“Mr. Peril?”
“Ugh,” said Sloot. The effort burned his throat like he imagined gargling poison and broken glass would. His eyes were closed, and he was afraid to open them.
“Am I dead?”
“You got closer than the Ministry of Health advises,” replied a breathy, musical voice that Sloot wanted to curl up into and sleep forever. “Can you open your eyes?”
He gave it a go, relieved that he was still in control of the muscles involved in the maneuver, at any rate. Once his eyes adjusted to the very bright light in the entirely white room, he found that he was sitting in an overstuffed chair and facing a very lovely blonde woman in a white dress. She was smiling at him.
It struck Sloot as funny that he’s never known what to do when beautiful women smile at him, funnier still that he was more concerned with that than how he came to be neither bled nor burnt to death in his apartment.
“Ow,” said Sloot, having become aware of his body.
“We’ve sewn you up as best we could,” said the woman. “You’ll need time to heal. It’s a pity you’ve got to set out for Carpathia right away.”
The sole benefit of his near-death experience had been snuffing out his resting rate of dread altogether; he hadn’t even noticed until the mention of the word “Carpathia” sent it from nothing to full frenzied terror in an instant.
“What? No! Who are you? I don’t—”
“It’s all right,” she said. “My name is Flavia, and I’m here to help!” She smiled at him again, the sort of warm and caring smile that used her whole face. Her eyes twinkled a bit, in a way that Sloot didn’t imagine they could if the brain behind them were plotting something grisly. He relaxed at that, but only insofar as he was capable of forgetting that he was helpless. He hovered around what medical professionals would call “the verge of hysterics.”
“I can tell you’re a gentle sort of person,” said Flavia. “I was right about you.”
“Right about me? In what way?”
“I think you’re just the sort of person we need working with us.”
“And who are you? In the plural sense, I mean.”
“Uncle.”
Having recently been stabbed so close to his heart, Sloot wasn’t altogether sure that he should get it up and racing at that speed. A man came into the room, set a bucket at Sloot’s feet, and left.
“You mean … Uncle, Uncle?”
“That’s right.”
This felt much more real than his usual nightmare about Uncle knowing that he was involved with Carpathian Intelligence. Everything was more vivid. Aside from that, the only real differences were that he had a stab wound and that he wasn’t naked.
Sloot vomited. It was the only reaction anyone could have expected under the circumstances, and in fact, they had. The bucket was taken away as Sloot wondered how they knew about Carpathia, and how much they knew.
“I—”
“Don’t,” she said with a gentle smile. “If you deny that you’ve been recruited as an enemy agent, I’ll have to assume that you’re more dedicated to their cause than ours, and things will take a turn for the worse.”
“Oh,” said Sloot. “I mean, I wasn’t going to—”
“Yes, you were. Your instinct for self-preservation would naturally compel you. I can’t fault that, but there are rules, you see. Those rules have robbed us of dozens of would-be agents over the years, so we’d be ever so grateful if you kept your defenses to yourself for now.”
“Would-be agents? So you want me to join up with Uncle?”
“Precisely.”
Sloot’s face lit up like he was five years old, and he’d just awoken on the first day of Snugglewatch. This was a dream come true! He’d gotten in over his head with foreign intrigue, and he was being offered absolution!
“Oh, thank you!” he exclaimed, unable to hold back his tears. “I promise I’ll be vigilant day and night. I’ll be the most dedicated Uncle you’ve ever had!”
“I have no doubt,” said Flavia.
“What happens next? Do I get a sword? I’ll need to learn to use one, I’d imagine. I’ll practice—”
“No, no, no.” Flavia shook her head. “You’re already exactly what we need you to be! Just get back to Whitewood, and don’t let Mrs. Knife find out you’re still alive. We need to keep that a secret for as long as possible.”
“But I thought—”
“That we’d give you a secret mission? Have you assassinate someone?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“You’re an inside man, Mister Peril. We just need you to be who you are. Do you think you can manage that?”
“Probably. I’m not entirely sure what that means.”
“You don’t know what it means to be yourself?”
“I did a few weeks ago.”
“What happened a few weeks ago?”
“Vasily Pritygud wrote a report.”
***
“You’re lucky,” said Roman.
“Lucky? I was stabbed!”
“And you lived to tell the tale! I’ve been stitched up in Salzstadt’s miserable excuse for a hospital before. I wouldn’t trust most of those ‘doctors’ to lace up a boot properly.”
Sloot had been sparse with the details of his near-death experience. People don’t question a hazy memory when you’ve got a nice stab wound to go with it. He wasn’t looking forward to riding a horse with a chest full of stitches, but he supposed he should have thought of that before he went and got himself stabbed.
“Sunset,” said Roman. “Everything’s arranged, we’ve just got to get Greta on the way out.”
“Where are the permits?”
“Didn’t need them for Nordheim, did we? I told you, it’s all arranged! Come on, let’s get moving.”
Sloot groaned. He still hated the idea of breaking the law, though getting out of Salzstadt was starting to sound like a good idea. It would be difficult for him to explain why he wasn’t dead if anyone were to ask.
Some Carpathian I am, he mused. A real Carpathian wouldn’t have any trouble with sneaking out of Salzstadt without a signed form, would they? According to his elementary school teacher, they wouldn’t have any objections to eating babies or spitting on sidewalks either.
Did Carpathians even pretend to adhere to a moral code, or were posts on their Council of Etiquette handed out to whichever of their battle lords had collected the most ears and noses, along with a mandate to do nothing so long as they were in office?
Sunsets in Salzstadt were unpredictable mélanges of purples, oranges, and the occasional green that most of the city’s grans insisted meant goblins. The city council had a long-standing committee for sunset reform, but they’d not yet been able to force any sort of order upon it.
They walked under a purpling sky. The brisk pace caused some uncomfortable tugging at Sloot’s stitches. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), Sloot was far too preoccupied with the lack of permits to pay it much notice.
“What’s the name of the guard we’re supposed to bribe?”
“Better just let me handle it,” said Roman. “You maintain some of that plausible deniability, it might come in handy.”
“Nobody said anything about bribery,” said Nan, who’d crept closer than Sloot realized. “What are you involving Willie in, anyway? He’s a Hapsgalt, by the Domnitor’s eyes! There’s going to be a scandal!”
“Long may he reign,” Sloot mumbled out of habit.
“Hello,” said Willie, slowing down to join the conversation, now that it seemed to be about him. “I heard my name. It’s true, I am a Hapsgalt. I don’t like to brag, but there it is.”
“Yes, Willie,” said Roman, “we know. Are you sure that neckerchief goes with that cape?”
“You might not think so at first glance,” Willie gave a wink and a waggle of his finger, “but there’s a little-known principle about cost ratios, and how they allow you to break all the known rules of fashion. Technically, this neckerchief is expensive enough to go with anything
.”
“That should keep him busy,” said Roman, loud enough to be heard but soft enough to avoid interrupting Willie’s droning on about how little the very, very rich are accountable for understanding things.
“Look you,” Roman continued, waggling a finger at Nan, “do you want Willie to inherit the Three Bells or not? We’re trying to satisfy old Constantin’s demands here, and Mrs. Knife stands to inherit in his place if we fail. She’d never sign a permit for Willie!”
“Just so,” said Nan, “Willie can’t be caught breaking the law. He’s too young for jail! Do they make jails for little boys?”
“The constabulary cells have never seen a highborn heir in all of Salzstadt’s history, and that’s not going to change over a permit. Constantin won’t let it.”
“Greta’s house is this way,” said Sloot.
“Greta,” said Nan, “you mean that cradle-robbing hussy is coming, too?”
“She’s nearly ten years younger than Willie,” replied Sloot.
“What? That’s ridiculous! She must be thirty!”
“She’s more important to this expedition than you are,” said Roman. “Remember, you’re being allowed to tag along because you pleaded with Mister Peril. Are you going to be nice?”
“All’s I’m saying—”
“Hey, isn’t this the way to Greta’s house?” Willie must have finished his treatise on the bearing of wealth on fashion and started paying attention to where he was walking.
“It is,” answered Sloot, who thought they’d have more time before he realized.
“We have to go back home,” said Willie.
“What? Why?”
Willie rolled his eyes and stomped his foot. “Haven’t you been listening? These are expedition shoes! I can’t very well turn up at my fiancée’s house in them. There are very specific heel heights that are appropriate for unannounced trysts, and two-and-a-quarter inches is not among them!”
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