The Silenced Tale, стр. 34

“Why didn’t he tell us?” Pip asks.

“That is something I am looking forward to asking him,” I mutter. “Please excuse me.”

“Yeah, none of us are getting any sleep now, are we, kiddo?” Pip asks Alis as she slides them both out of bed. “Might as well put on some coffee.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’d appreciate that very much.”

Pip leans up to kiss my cheek. “Who says I’m making it for you?”

“Tease,” I say to her, smacking her own arse lightly as she walks by.

“Always. Come on, baby girl. Breakfast.”

“Bah bah Mama bu,” Alis comments.

“Bah-rec-fast,” I encourage, and Alis scowls at me over her mother’s shoulder as they descend the stairs. “Oh, very well, I give up. Speak like a backwater Bynnebakker blacksmith for the rest of your life, see if I care, my sweeting.”

I return to my office and set about the task of discovering who is threatening Elgar, and why, and what has happened to make the authorities believe he is safer in protective custody than in his own home. A secondary problem begins to tickle at the back of my mind as I delve into the deep dark recesses of the Internet, bypassing the security barriers surrounding sensitive information, and it is this: how do I confront Elgar for failing to confide in me?

The very first person he should have told he was being threatened is me, and I—

Oh.

Oh, foolish Forsyth. Sometimes you really are abysmally slow.

Elgar had, in his way, already told me. “Were you the only ones who came through?” he had asked, and in my overconfidence, I assumed he was being paranoid. But Pip’s strange fits had already begun, even then, and I should have pieced this clue in amid the others his call offered.

Instead, I had rebuffed him.

As our familiarity grows, Elgar has begun to treat me more like a human being and less like an exotic creature to interrogate and study, and I have begun to see him as less a fickle, cruel god and more as the desperately lonely man he is. All the same, it would please us all if his next work was less . . . well, less.

Though, Pip and I are unconvinced that Elgar actually is working on something new. He completed the first drafts of his debut science fiction trilogy well before he met me. But since shaking my hand that first time, Elgar seems, well . . . terrified to put pen to paper. Or fingers to keys, as the case may be. A small, vicious, vindictive part of myself is pleased to hear it. I would not wish the backstory-building pain that seems to be a requirement for fictional characters in the Overrealm to be visited upon anyone else, no matter if they are aware of it or not.

However, there’s also no evidence to suggest that any of the other fictional characters Elgar has created—for he wrote a goodly amount of short fiction before his career ignited with The Tales of Kintyre Turn—are alive and aware in the way that I, and those from my realm, are. As best as we can guess, magic exists in my realm only because Elgar Reed accidentally and completely unknowingly wrote a system of magic into being that was so perfect, so literary, that it began to exist. No other author’s works deals in Words and Deal-Makers, and that, it seems, has made the difference between awareness and simply remaining fiction for my fellow creations.

I am unique in the universe.

And if I am not, I have found no evidence that any other characters have slipped their pages to live amongst their creators in the Overrealm. As much as it is a popular narrative trope, especially in children’s literature, it simply is not true. So, if the problem is not magical, then it must be mundane. It must be a person.

And a person, I can track.

Several frustrating hours, and two trips downstairs for coffee later, I must admit to myself that what I thought was my first real lead was in fact nothing at all. Finnar reports too many instances to comb through when I leave the parameters broad, and too few when I make them more specific. Finnar, it seems, has found nothing. I begin to think that this is less because there is nothing to find, however, and more because whoever has done it has found a way to do so completely unseen. Not for the first time do I wish Elgar had let me install security cameras inside his home, as I have done in ours.

The problem, of course, with being a hacker is that if a thing does not exist in the realm of the digital, then I cannot access it. I cannot overhear conversations that happen in rooms that are not bugged, or where a laptop is not already open with the web-camera exposed.

I can turn on the camera and microphone without anyone knowing, but Elgar has, it seems, elected to keep his laptop shut and off for now. Elgar has a habit of leaving his smartphone in his pocket, prefers not to use it at all if he can help it, and like many men of his generation in the Overrealm, he simply does not turn it on if he doesn’t intend to use it. Which means I cannot use its camera to track what is happening around him, only its GPS.

And his assistant Juan does not seem to be doing anything untoward, from what I’ve observed of his digital life. He has no photos of roommates or romantic partners on his phone, no one who could easily access his files or technology, and nothing telling in any of his chat and text logs. His texts speak briefly of a new boyfriend, but nothing more than that. No spats, no overheard vengeful plots. If he is facilitating this stalker, it is not on any of the devices I know to be his. The most questionable of his activities is an absurd amount of