The Silenced Tale, стр. 26

“I’ll text you when I’m in,” Elgar says to Juan, and for a moment, he’s struck with a sort of clinging, molasses déjà vu. Elgar has stood in this office a hundred times before, bag in hand, Linux in his assistant’s arms, and said the exact same thing. And then the warm, sweet comfort of the moment’s familiarity freezes and shatters.

Because this isn’t a convention trip.

“Be safe, boss,” Juan says. His arms are full of cat, so he can’t shake Elgar’s hand. And yet, the solemnity of the moment begs for some sort of physical acknowledgment. So Elgar pats Juan’s shoulder and rubs Linux’s ears, and then lets the officers lead him out to their squad car.

“This is sort of like something in your stories,” Riletti says, casually, as Jackson drives. The fannish glint is back in her eyes.

“A little,” Elgar concedes, reminding himself that he’s only in the back of the squad car because he’s being chauffeured, not because he’s under arrest.

“Like something Bootknife would do.”

“Bootknife’s dead,” Elgar blurts, more firmly than he thought he would, and then immediately slaps his palm over his mouth.

Riletti’s eyes grow round. “Is he?” she breathes, turning around in her seat to read his face.

Elgar doesn’t know how to reply. Of course, to a reader, the sadistic half Night Elf with a love of fine blades and creating wood-block carvings in the skin of prisoners’ backs is still alive. He had lived through the final battle that had wiped out so many of the other named characters of The Tales of Kintyre Turn, simply because Elgar had had a vague thought of spinning him into the series’ main protagonist if he was ever asked to write more. He knew that if that were to be the case, he would need to kill the Viceroy to up the stakes, and Bootknife had seemed like the perfect villain to fill the void the Viceroy’s removal would have made.

But Lucy had told him that Forsyth Turn hadn’t only bested Bootknife in a duel, but had decided to offer no quarter. He’d stabbed the rogue through the heart rather than let him live to come back and harm them another day. And, narratively, that made sense. Elgar probably would have come to the conclusion that Bootknife wasn’t strong enough without the Viceroy protecting him, or clever enough without the Viceroy puppeteering him, to be a villain in his own right. He would have developed a new Big Bad. But to know that the decision had been wholly taken from his hands . . .

If he had never met Forsyth and Lucy, would he have ever thought of the Shadow Hand slaying Bootknife outright?

Well, actually, yes, he probably would have made that exact plot choice. Which creeps him out even more. That his characters had acted independently of his writing, but still perfectly within the bounds of what he would have conceived is . . . eerie.

Instead of telling her all that, though, Elgar says: “I mean . . . just, that, you know, he’s not real.”

“Shame,” Riletti says. “I mean, not a shame he’s not real, but a shame that it’s not as easy to solve as that. It would fall into his MO perfectly.”

Elgar feels his stomach sink through the seat. “Why . . . why do you say that?”

“Who else would put fillets of dead pigs and ivy in your pantry, Mr. Reed?” the officer asks.

“Ivy?” Elgar repeats. The dread falls over him so quickly that he actually gets cold. He has to suck on the air to get it into his lungs. “Are you sure it was ivy?”

Jackson and Riletti exchange a look, concern passing between them like a tennis ball.

“I thought you’d be more worried about the dead pigs, honestly,” Riletti says. “Why are you worried about the ivy?”

“The symbolism of it,” Elgar chokes. “The last victim he had, Bootknife carved ivy on her. Not a landscape.”

Riletti frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

“I never wrote it,” Elgar whispers, and the confession falls, hot and molten, from behind his teeth.

The threats, the maggots, the theft, the ivy . . . they aren’t meant to kill him. They’re meant to scare him. And it’s working.

Forsyth

We arrive at the Piper household a little after four o’clock, as planned. Mei Fan barely spares a hello for us as she swoops down to scoop her granddaughter out of the stroller and hie her away toward the kitchen, where, by the sound and smells wafting out into the living room and entryway, wai po is cooking something delicious.

Martin and I shake hands and wrestle the stroller into the front hall, half-obscuring a pile of his other guests’ boots and winter coats. Pip trails after her mother. The four women often congregate in the kitchen, teasing and sniping at each other in a jumbled raucous of Mandarin and English, poking with chopsticks at each other’s work and pausing to buzz Alis with kisses. They cover her hands in cool sauces and sticky jams to encourage her to experiment with solid foods, or put her on the floor with a wooden spoon and as many plastic containers to beat and crash as she likes.

Martin continually expresses his surprise at how clever Alis is growing, and Mei Fan often just beams at him and laughs. “What else is he to expect from our granddaughter?” she teases. “Geniuses beget geniuses.”

Martin has moved wai po’s little family shrine onto a side table in the living room, so the guests don’t have to traipse into her bedroom for the celebration, and it is into this room that I follow him. My father-in-law and I sit together on the sofa, where we have a clear view of the shrine, and the open floor in front of it. Martin said a friend of his is an amateur photographer and will be recording the event, so Pip and I are content to sit back and