“Okay then.”
“We have a chance to talk. Can I offer you food or drink?”
“Can I refuse politely?”
“You can.”
She nodded slowly.
“Power,” he said.
“Power,” she replied.
“Power comes with costs. It’s hard for me to step away.”
“Your familiar is a gatekeeper. It can go virtually anywhere, virtually instantly, including some places with locked doors, or did I hear wrong?”
“You heard right.”
“I’d ask how you pulled that off, but you wouldn’t give me a straight answer. There are a lot of things I really want to ask. Need to ask, even.”
She fidgeted with the end of her scarf in her hands. She had nothing to bargain with.
“I might give you a straight answer,” he said. “I did promise to help you out where I could.”
She arched an eyebrow.
“I’ll give you three answers if you give me three. But we can each retain a veto, to be fair.”
“Is this a trap? This sounds like a trap.”
“Not a trap,” Johannes said. “Ask your questions first. I’ll match mine to yours in a way that’s fair.”
“Yeah? Okay, then I’ll bite. How did you get all this?”
“Very broad. Are you sure you want me to answer?”
“It would count against my question count if I said no, I’m pretty sure.”
“It wouldn’t.”
“Then I’ll be clearer. How did you get this demesne?”
“Going right for my veto. No comment.”
She arched an eyebrow. Johannes smiled.
“Alright, then. How did you get something like that as a familiar?”
“Like all of the best friendships, we started out as enemies. The inverse is possible, too. It’s all about the strength of the connection.”
She arched an eyebrow, but was careful not to ask a question to get further details.
“I suppose that doesn’t answer the question. We began as enemies. When you mess with the natural order of creation or go well outside your way to bend the rules, you can expect the universe to send something like him after you. I should have gotten the attention of a entity of the third choir, who oversee structure, but I suppose they weren’t absolutely sure. They sent one of the little ones after me.”
“Little.”
“Yes. Equipped to deal with the problem if it decided it had to. I made an argument, he threatened me. We even skirmished, very briefly on at least nine occasions, and he drew closer and closer to me. Even came close to annihilating me. Forced me to play my hand sooner than I’d hoped, but I played my hand all the same. Once I’d started the ritual-”
“I take it you’re talking about the Demesne ritual.”
Awkward, to be in the position of being forced to give up a question or make a statement and risk lying. She opted for the latter. Carefully.
“Yes, I’m talking about the Demense ritual.”
“You vetoed my attempt to ask about the Demesne thing about a minute ago.”
“I did. If I’d answered, I’d have had to tell you how. Here, I can tell you about it. About, meaning movement in a particular area. I have room to maneuver in this case. Did you want me to continue?”
“Please.”
“Well, once I started the ritual, he couldn’t interfere. It’s not in his makeup, and quite frankly, I should have been destroyed as it stood. We talked between rounds-”
“When you do the ritual, you invite locals to challenge your claim. You’re talking about talking between individual challenges.”
“Something like that. Yes.”
He paused, very deliberately, giving her a look.
“Go ahead. Sorry.”
“Well, at one point he asked why I hadn’t tried using my pipes.”
“He was a dog then, I take it.”
“He was a great many things. You could argue there was a little bit of everything in him. The pipes could have worked.”
“But…”
“But I have a sense of how things work. I might have won the battle, but I would have lost the war. As it stood, I talked him into it. Made a very convincing argument about the way things should be. The deciding point to sway him, apparently, was that I hadn’t tried to use the pipes. I claimed my Demesne and my familiar within seconds of one another.”
“So… that suggests the universe didn’t need him for its errands.”
“The universe did need him. This is something of a vacation.”
“Ah.”
“Your second question?”
“Where’d you get the pipes?”
“I bought them from a man who had no idea they were an instrument. He thought they were art. I’ve been led to believe they’ve been wandering. Escaping, I’d venture to say. I did my research, trying to find out what path they’ve traveled, and all I can tell is that they were once in the hands of men and women who most definitely should not have the ability to beguile children. Perhaps a long succession of those men and women. I don’t know if they’re the originals or if a very bad person decided to make them, but they serve.”
The girl in the checkered scarf shivered. Very bad people.
“Then my third question,” she said, “Would be why?”
“Very broad. I’d warn you-”
“I know. Broad question, broad answer. It’s cool.”
“Did you know, against all odds, we’re actually winning?”
“Who’re we?”
“Men, women, children. Humanity. We’re beating back the Others. We’ve got twenty-and-thirty-somethings in a prolonged adolescence, compared to a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, when most teenagers could be expected to be working, growing up fast. Even people of retirement age are enduring under delusions, blithely striding forward into ruin, with crippling debt and no savings. We’re reveling in a culture of relative innocence, and longstanding agreements put in place centuries ago protect people. Society is changing with a startling speed, and the Others can’t keep up. They fix themselves to ideas and methods and then fall by the wayside when we abandon our radios or our lanterns in favor of televisions and electricity.”
“We’re winning?”
“We’re swelling in number, and where there used to be only points of light in the midst of the night-time, small candle flames and hearthfires, our nights are bright now. They have less shadows to lurk in. We’ve grown to a population of billions, and the rules put in place by one brilliant man with an eye to the future have made it so that they can’t really stop us. They kill hundreds, but we grow in terms of thousands in that same span of time, and then we send our practitioners to deal with the most problematic ones. They have less fertile ground to grow from, as we put superstition and fear behind us and move on with blind, stupid confidence.”
The look he gave her as he said that last part made her feel like she’d almost been insulted, but it wasn’t quite so direct that she could call him on it.