“How?” I asked.
“We’re hoping to include the heir of the Thorburn estate in our number,” the old man told me.
“You want me to work for you? Did my grandmother take the deal?” I asked.
“Madam Thorburn didn’t, bless her,” the older man said. He smiled, as if he was acknowledging how odd it was for him to say that. “She took a harder road. She needed power, as we said. I can’t say what for, but I’m sure you could figure it out.”
“I probably could,” I said.
She’d needed the power to create my alter ego. To bend the rules enough to let me inherit the estate.
The woman leaned forward. “More to the point, if she had taken the offer, you wouldn’t be here. At least, not in the same capacity.”
My hand was hurting, the hatchet pulsing cold that was reaching through my clothing.
The pain and discomfort might have made my tone a little more pointed than I’d meant it to be. “The world would be swallowed up in a sea of hellfire and brimstone?”
“Nothing of the sort. Before our firm existed, it was an Otherworldly entity that reached out to our forebearers. The deal was simple. Our slates would be cleared, in every respect. We would assume a new role, new names, new responsibilities. Our old lives and every part of those lives would be left behind. Perhaps most importantly, most relevant to this discussion, our debts would be cleared.”
“Karmic debt?” Rose asked, suddenly paying attention, jumping into the conversation.
“Karmic debt,” the older man said. “Have you done your reading?”
Rose said, “I started, but…”
I was already shaking my head.
The old man continued, “I’ll explain, then, so there are no mistaken assumptions. The world seeks balance in all respects. Whenever a practitioner works, they pay a price. Sometimes the price is overt. A soul for someone’s love. An eye for the service of a powerful spirit. The life of a companion to triumph over one’s enemies. Sometimes the price is less of a direct transaction. A favor to be paid later. Conversely, an oath given, with nothing expected.”
“Which raises problems, hm?” the young man said.
The old man met my eyes. “What happens when a debt isn’t paid? If you take, then die before you can give? Or the inverse?”
“You pass it on to your kids?”
“In some cases, yes. But those children might incur more of a debt. Over time, the debt accumulates. Perhaps two generations improve matters, working it off, and then the third undoes their hard work and adds more to the burden.”
“The problem is never resolved?” I asked. “Until some lawyer-practitioners show up and offer a deal, something that wipes all debts clear?”
“That is one option,” the woman said. “But I wouldn’t say the problem is never resolved. The universe rights itself.”
“How?” I asked. Why was the axe acting up? It was almost as bad as it had been outside, now.
The old man answered, “The cogs that operate in the background take to grinding you up instead. Funds, treasured belongings, friendships, love, they are all harder to find and easier to lose. Enemies, danger, chaos, and disruption find you more readily. In looser terms, all Others, spirits and practitioners get the sense, innate or otherwise, that they can and should work against your interests. Things start to fall apart, and the pieces fall down in the least convenient arragements for you.”
“The universe,” the young man said, “conspires against you.”
“Ah, hell,” I said. “That would explain a few things.”
The old man continued with the explanation, “It would cause as many problems as it solve if the universe did it in an obvious manner. It would raise suspicion and disrupt the smooth operation of things if every coin you flipped turned up with the unwanted side, if every corner held an enemy.”
The young man said, “It’s a stopgap measure. Sufficient for the non-practitioners who stumble on ways to give themselves bad karma.”
“But,” the old man said, “In cases where the debt continues to accumulate, or it reaches a size that one person can’t pay off, we sometimes see survivors carry on.”
“Survivors?” Rose asked.
“Some dynasties manage to thrive despite the ill fortunes that are visiting them. There are individuals who are reclusive enough or tenacious enough to carry on. The universe doesn’t like to act overtly, so it might give you the coin flip that serves you the least, until you start counting the number of times the coin turns up head versus the times it turns up tails. In any case, the practitioner can live if they’re attentive and clever, and the debt can keep growing. This is when we start running into problems.”
“Problems being?” I asked.
“Being the dice all turning up snake eyes, or enemies appearing behind every corner. Once or twice, generally, but that’s all things typically need. The universe is elastic. If you push, it bounces back. If you pull, it pulls against you. If you pull too hard, too long, and it snaps, with violent consequence.”
He seemed content to stop there, letting that sink in.
“Okay,” I said. “I might have a general sense of the problem. But what do we do about it?”
“Well,” the woman said. She offered me a smile. “Option one is the simplest, easiest and most obvious.”
“Joining you?” I asked.
“That’s option two. Option one is that you die. Violently,” she said. The smile didn’t even flicker. “The elastic snaps, and you two find yourself in an ugly situation. If you’re lucky, you can find the time and opportunity to call us, and we’d arrange a prompt solution.”
“I’m not lucky, though,” I said. “And Molly wasn’t lucky either… She…”
I trailed off. They waited, apparently content to wait while the gears fit together in my head and started turning.
I finished my sentence, along a different line. “…Eats a bit of the karmic backlash, pays a bit of the price for the universe not getting what it was supposed to, and the baton gets passed to me. If I die, the same thing happens. Each of us absorbs a bit of the brunt of it, until one of us finds our footing and carries on.”
“Very likely to be a factor in her reasoning,” the young male lawyer said. “She was clever. But the danger in this plan is that the backlash you face could wipe out your family altogether. It would be more a backup or a side benefit than a true plan.”
“And,” Rose said, “like you said before, there’s no way she would spend that much power to put me here for that.”
“Right,” I said.
“Karma has very little to do with good and evil,” the blonde woman said. “It has a great deal to do with right and wrong.”
“Can you have a surplus?” I asked.
“You can. It’s equally problematic, in many ways,” the woman said. “Such individuals have good fortune, find life conspires to do them well, all leading up to a moment where an opportunistic Other manages to work around this good fortune and brings about their downfall.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking. “And… if it has to do with right and wrong… then can you get bad mojo for, say, going after a local practitioner’s livelihood?”