Updated_PerilInTheOldCountry_SamHooker_EbookFormatting_Nook

by Peril in the Old Country (retail) (epub)

  Suddenly curious to test a theory, Sloot uttered a curse word. One of the bad ones. He listened carefully.

  Roman was right! No goblins in Carpathia. Not so much as a single pop-and-cackle. He might have felt bad if Roman had been wrong, but not terribly. A few goblins would serve them right, the stinking barbarians.

  “Careful,” warned Roman. “We’d do best to steer clear of the watch, you know.”

  They shuffled from shadow to shadow, most of them cast by torchlight in the shape of a gargoyle. They saw and heard no one at all as they wound their way through the narrow streets.

  Salzstadt had some narrow ones, too, closer to the city center. The buildings that lined them had been built over a thousand years prior when people were smaller, and before they had a Domnitor to enforce nutrition standards, long may he reign.

  “Shhh.” Roman put a hand up as he came to the edge of a building, then turned around and beckoned them all to gather in closer.

  “We’re here,” he whispered. A chill ran up Sloot’s back. “This is the city square. The clock is just on the other side, so we’ll have to make our way ’round. Quietly, now.”

  They backtracked a few paces, and Roman led them down an alley that seemed to have been designed for the singular purpose of giving constables a place to discover murder victims.

  They ducked under a low arch, climbed a narrow staircase flanked by snarling stone wolves, walked across a makeshift bridge over a canal, and tiptoed through a little garden between the backs of two tenement buildings.

  “Be quiet through the garden,” Roman had warned them. “Fairies live in nearly all of the gardens in the city, and they can be more dangerous than the goblins in Salzstadt.”

  “Humbug,” said Willie. “I’ll give you odds on your fairies any day! Is there a betting arena where we can settle this?”

  “Now’s not the time for civic pride,” said Greta. “Let’s keep going, I want to see the clock.”

  “Clock? What clock?”

  “The big one in the square,” replied Roman. “The one you wanted to show Greta, remember?”

  Willie wore an expression that clearly showed he remembered no such thing.

  “The reason she agreed to come along in the first place?”

  Still nothing.

  “Such a gesture would go a long way in showing your fiancée the depth of your affection for her,” said Sloot.

  “Oh,” Willie exclaimed, “right! Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s show the lady a clock! Who cares how boring that is if it’s what she wants?”

  Through the garden they went, then came another series of alleys, arches, an access tunnel under a building that seemed to be abandoned, and a tight passage between a hedgerow and the back of some sort of memorial wall that had names etched into the front of it. All of the names were “Vlad.”

  Sloot was impressed with Roman’s knowledge of the city, especially given that he’d spent so much of his life in Salzstadt. He could have a promising career as a tour guide in either city if the intelligence game dried up; or in both, if the Domnitor and Vlad the Invader decided to stop burying the hatchet in each other.

  Through all of it, they encountered not a single person. Between the late hour and having kept off the main streets, it wasn’t that surprising. Sloot wondered if there was some sort of curfew though, as Salzstadt would have provided at least one angry drunk, hard at work, cursing the stars for twinkling too brightly or somesuch. He could only assume that Ulfhaven drunks held themselves to a lesser work ethic.

  And then, as though it had managed to sneak up on them, there it was. The Great Clock Tower of Ulfhaven. Still, dark and quiet, and festooned with more gargoyles than eyes on a fly.

  “It’s gorgeous,” said Greta.

  “I knew you’d think so,” said Willie. “I picked it out especially for you.”

  “What?”

  “He’s just nervous,” said Roman.

  They hurried over to a little door in the side of the tower, where Roman used a key to open the lock.

  “Was that the same key you used at the catacomb gate?” Sloot asked once they were safely inside.

  “Of course,” Roman replied. “It’s my key to the city. You’ll need to be an Intelligencier for another ten years or so, but you can earn one, too, if you play your cards right!”

  “Great,” said Sloot. In they went, Willie and Nan following Greta up the little spiral staircase. The bottom floor was bare except for a few crates. One of them was open, and Sloot saw a few gears and levers—replacement parts, probably—packed in straw. There was also a family of mice who’d made their home there. Sloot gave them a wide berth, his innate fear of all things Carpathian warning him that they were as likely to leap for his jugular as make cute little preening gestures with their human-like hands.

  As Sloot climbed the spiral stair with Roman in tow, he heard Greta exploring the inner workings of the clock with delight.

  “I’m not sure what that lever does—no, Willie, don’t touch it—it probably engages the main gear configuration. Oh, look! I’ve never seen a system of counterweights set up like this before! Well, they would be, wouldn’t they? If you stacked your cogs in sequence like that.”

  “She keeps going on about these weird metal things,” said Willie. “They’re boring. You’re not allowed to play with any of them! I don’t see the point.”

  “These are what make the clock work,” Sloot explained.

  “I doubt it,” said Willie. “All a clock needs are a pair of arms and a bunch of numbers. Sometimes there’s a third arm, a little one that gets to run around while the other ones have to stand still.”

  “I see …” Sloot tried to draw Willie away from Greta.

  Roman was missing. Where could he have gone? Of all the people to go missing while they were in dangerous territory, Roman was the one Sloot worried about the most. He shuddered at the thought of leaving anyone behind in this lair of heresy and violence, but without Roman, he’d have no way to find his way back to Salzstadt to spend the rest of his life swallowing the guilt of having left Nan—or whomever—to the wolves.

  Sloot looked up into the darkness of the tower, which was occasionally broken by little shards of moonlight from the diamond-paned windows running up the back wall. It really was a magnificent machine, though Sloot couldn’t begin to fathom why most of the bits were there. Greta, on the other hand, had been fathoming since she’d come up the stairs.

  Fathoming will only take you so far, though, so Greta had moved on. She was now working levers and working big chunks of metal over with a hammer. Sloot admired both her expertise and her courage, and was more than a little bit envious of the forceful way that she could swing a hammer.

  Sloot saw something in the shadows above, a flicker of movement. He hoped that it was just another swinging block, a part of the machine only occasionally called upon to put forth some effort in the clock’s machinations, and not some hellish bat-cousin of the mice below that lusted for his blood.

  Whatever it was, it was descending. It was coming closer! Just before Sloot drew in a breath in preparation for a high-pitched shriek, he realized that it was Roman.

  “What were you doing up there?” Sloot whispered, once Roman had made his way over to them.

  “Getting our payday,” answered Roman. “You remember, the one you agreed to when we had our little chat with Auntie?”

  Sloot had entirely forgotten about the blood star that Winking Bob had given them to hang in the tower.

  “How will she know whether we’ve done it? We could have just thrown it in the box with the devil mice.”

  “With what?”

  “Never mind.”

  “She’ll know,” said Roman. “I told you, those things are bad magic. Better we do our part and not ask any questions, got it?”

  “Got it,” said Sloo
t. “Can we get out of here now?”

  “Give it a minute,” said Roman. “If Greta actually manages to repair the clock, she’ll be a national hero!”

  “She’s a foreigner! Are foreign heroes given medals when they’re hung in the square?”

  “Fine way for an Intelligencier to talk,” said Roman. “Those under our protection have no need to fear … especially not in the heart of our home city. If she can’t manage it, we’ll be back in the catacombs before dawn. We’ve got hours yet. Relax!”

  Greta spent the next couple of hours moving things around, hitting things with hammers, and thoroughly giving the clock what for, if Sloot were any judge of clockmakery, which he wasn’t.

  Willie spent that time feigning interest in clocks, on Roman’s advice. Nan disapproved of everything that was happening. Sloot tried to convince himself that Roman was right, and that they were in no real danger. He spent the last hour or so sitting in a corner, holding his mother’s watch to his ear, trying to find some comfort in the now-immaculate whirring and clicking of its insides.

  Clank.

  “That’s it!” Greta was covered in sweat and grease, beaming up with an ear-to-ear smile—which, frankly, was a bit too liberal with its use of teeth—at the machinery of the clock, as it started to move on its own.

  Clank. Clank.

  “It’s working! Someone had tried to balance the main crankshaft, but it’s clearly an unbalanced design! Once I’d figured that out, the rest was easy!”

  “We should go,” said Roman. “The sun will come up soon. We need to stay ahead of the dawn patrols.”

  “No, no,” said Greta in a monotone voice that probably had a knife in its pocket, “don’t waste so much time congratulating me. All I’ve done is unravel the mystery of this bizarre machinery in a couple of hours, no big deal really.”

  “Sorry, Greta,” said Roman. “Bang up work you’ve done there, the people of Ulfhaven owe you a debt.”

  “There was a reward for fixing the clock?” Willie’s eyes went wide. “What’s my share?”

  Sloot was already down the stairs. He plumbed the depths of his own psyche, hoping to find some magic lurking there that he could use to compel a greater sense of urgency from the rest of them, but found little more than the perfect environment in which one might foster a malignant heart condition.

  “Right,” said Roman, his hand on the door. “Across the alley, down the steps, and we’ll work our way back around to the drainage grate. Ready? Behind me now, last one out closes the door!”

  Roman eased the door open and stepped out onto the street. He made it a few steps before stopping dead in his tracks, turning to the left, and throwing his hands into the air.

  “No trouble here! Just fixing the clock, all by myself. You’re welcome!”

  “Hey!” exclaimed Greta.

  “That? That was just the hey spring,” said Roman in a fit of improvisational brilliance. “It may do that a few more times until the spindle gets warmed up. All’s well, no need to look inside!”

  “Hide!” Sloot hissed at the rest of them. They all ran up the stairs and found places to conceal themselves within the workings of the clock. Sloot ran for the network of ladders that Roman had used to hang the blood star high among the rafters, and made it up several of them before his fear of heights prevented him from climbing any further.

  “Wait a minute,” said Willie from below. “Why should we be hiding? This is an expedition!”

  “Willie, don’t!” Sloot scurried down one of the ladders a bit. “It’s not―”

  “No need to be afraid,” Willie shouted. “We’re from the Old Country, just exploring your primitive culture! We mean no harm, you bloodthirsty savages!”

  The jig was up. Figuring there was nothing to be gained by staying up his ladder, aside from the possibility of being lassoed and pulled down, Sloot made his way to the floor. If there was one thing he’d learned from the bullies at school, if you didn’t put up a fight, they tended to go easier on you. The guards came in brandishing pikes, the “guards” in this case being a bunch of very old people who moved surprisingly swiftly. One of them grabbed Willie with an utter lack of tenderness and shoved him against a wall.

  “You take your hands off him!” Perhaps Nan hadn’t been bullied in school. She obviously didn’t know about getting bullies to go easy, as she relieved an old man of his helmet with a sudden upstroke of her broom.

  “Kill that one!” shouted a woman armed with a whistle, who had what looked like sergeant’s stripes on her sleeve.

  “Stop!” came a commanding shout from somewhere near Willie. No one moved. “Do you know who I am?” the voice shouted again. It took Sloot a moment to realize that it had come from Willie himself. He couldn’t help but pay it heed. Probably an inherent trait of the ridiculously rich, the ability to insinuate the size of one’s piles of money with one’s voice.

  “Er, no,” said the guard who’d managed to force Willie’s arm into a textbook pincher hold.

  “He’s my cousin,” said Roman, from his pinned-to-the-cobbles-with-a-boot-on-his-neck vantage.

  “You’d be so lucky,” said Willie. “I am Lord―”

  “―ing your thick, luscious hair over all of us,” said Greta, “I know! It’s lovely, but―”

  “No!” boomed Willie, doing the thing again. “I am Lord Wilhelm Hapsgalt of Salzstadt, and I insist that you release me at once!”

  “Good one,” said Roman, “and I’m the king of Niflheim! Don’t mind him, officers, we’re just having a laugh!”

  “What y’ think, Sarge?” asked one of the guards.

  “Dunno,” said the woman with the whistle. “He sounds important, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” said another woman with impressively thick spectacles. “Probably is a lord, but not from around here.”

  “I demand to speak to your superior officer!” shouted Willie. “When my dad finds out what you’ve done―”

  “Yep, he’s a lord, all right. Let’s bring ’em all in.”

  ***

  Sloot awoke sometime later, on the damp stone floor in the dungeons under Castle Ulfhaven. There wasn’t a sign or anything, but the piles of skulls in the corners meant that it hardly could have been anywhere else.

  “What happened?”

  “You fainted,” said Roman, “when the watch handed us over to the Lebendervlad.”

  “Who?”

  “The ghosts wearing suits of armor. Don’t you remember?”

  Sloot realized that he was actively trying to suppress that particular memory. They’d been marched through a gargoyle-infested courtyard to an old gate. The gate opened, and a pair of ghostly horrors descended upon them. Then everything went black. Why did ghosts need suits of armor?

  They were all sitting with their backs to the wall. Sloot was in the middle, with Roman next to him, then Greta on the end. Willie was on the other end, huddled up in Nan’s lap.

  Willie, as it turns out, was an ugly crier. His face rolled through a series of contortions, each more pitiful than the last, as though he were making a run at some sort of record for homeliest man-child. He never seemed to pause his high-pitched wail of despair to take a breath.

  “That’s an impressive performance,” said Roman. “He must be breathing through his ears!”

  “Leave him alone,” commanded Nan in her sternest tone. “He’s only a little boy! You’d be crying too if you were only six years old.”

  “What?” Greta’s look of incredulity could moonlight as a reaction to having seen a pig ask for bacon.

  “Leave him alone!”

  “Are you mad? He’s easily forty!”

  “Lying to yourself to justify your cradle robbing? Oh, that’s low!”

  “Cradle robbing? I don’t— You just— What?”

  “She’s under some sort of spell,” sa
id Roman. “Best just leave it.”

  Willie did a sort of choke-and-sniffle thing that interrupted his wailing for one blessed second, but was back at the helm of the SS Annoyance without delay.

  “I’ve already had quite enough advice from you two,” snapped Greta, her forefinger venting its agitation at Roman and Sloot. “Come to Carpathia, you said! There’s a neat old clock! It’ll only cost you your freedom!”

  “This is a temporary setback,” said Roman. “I’m sure―”

  “You were sure that we’d be perfectly safe! You were sure that I’d grow fond of Willie if I gave him a chance!”

  “And did you?” asked Willie, pausing his wailing in the blink of an eye.

  “No!”

  The wailing resumed.

  They’d relieved Sloot of his mother’s watch when they arrested him, along with everything else that they’d been carrying, so Sloot had no idea how much time had passed. He’d gotten a bit of sleep though, one of very few benefits extended to those prone to fainting. There was only a bit of torchlight in the dungeons, and no windows.

  “Impressive,” said Roman, with a nod in Willie’s direction. “I mean, I could go the rest of my life without hearing that racket, but you’ve got to acknowledge talent, haven’t you?”

  “Leave me alone,” said Sloot.

  “Oh, come on.” Roman. inched over into whispering range. “Relax, would you? This is all going according to plan!”

  “You got us thrown in here on purpose?” Sloot hissed.

  “Calm down,” said Roman, oblivious to the fact that that phrase is universally guaranteed not to work. “I’ve planned all of this down to the letter. Just play along, and we’ll all be out of here in a jiffy.”

  Sloot groaned. He couldn’t tell if that made him feel any better or not. They were both in the Carpathian Intelligence game, but that fact didn’t place them any less in a damp and musty dungeon full of skull piles. He was sure he could also hear something enormous and terrible growling beneath the floor.