“What’s the deal with sleep? You sleep poorly, you need more sleep. You sleep well, and you’re like, ‘Give me more of that good stuff.’ It’s a racket, am I right?”
Pann Grackenheit forced himself to laugh. His job required it. Hampus Bell had taken up a hobby of “standing comedy” and was performing in the middle of the second floor’s open space. The Z-6s and Z-5s—and, possibly, a few of the more immature Z-4s—seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves. (“H’vast Hampus!”)
Pann considered the spectacle repugnant. During these monologues, Hampus Bell wore gray slacks and cordovan shoes, as if the greatest Office in the world had become a mere living room. It would take not much more of this nonsense and people would start showing up to work in elbow patches.
“Cats.” Hampus Bell sat on a three-legged stool. What was the point of this so-called standing comedy if one didn’t even stand? “Am I right? Cats! They sure aren’t dogs.”
The Z-6s near the front guffawed.
Pann’s view was that this “standing comedy” ought never to have left the Vehu ghettos where it had originated. It seemed to be the sort of thing penniless people did to pass time: tell stories that went on and on, complain about insignificant indignities, and argue for the sake of dispute. This sort of thing did not belong in the civilized world.
For those in poverty, the standards of humor were low—anything was funny to those who needed distraction from misery—but none of this “standing comedy” met Pann’s standard. Farts were funny. People falling down stairs, that was funny. Catching a Z-5 beating off in the office, so long as there was a Z-6 around to make clean it up, was funny. Hampus Bell, talking to himself in front of others who had to be there? Not funny, just sad.
Hampus continued. “Cats are like dogs, but they’re weird looking and have no social skills. Their whiskers look like, dare I say it, frappin’ antlers.” He put his gnarled hands on his cheeks. “Neurotic little things. My wife used to say—”
A Z-6 called out: “Back when you had a wife, Hampus!”
“Palpablo,” Hampus said.
Pann shut his office door. Hiero Bell would pretend to take the heckling in good cheer, but Pann would get stuck with the Z-6’s nonexistence paperwork, and he really did not need the distraction right now. It might actually be, he had to admit, that this “standing comedy” was the best way to reach the young, because this new generation of workers, the ones under thirty, had no capacity for attention. They absorbed information only if delivered to them in an amusing way—everything had to be trimmed down and made insultingly clear, because even those who could digest detail had to hide the fact, as “details people” risked non-promotion in favor of dumb, likable people. Even still, Pann thought the Company could use a few more “details people,” being one himself. What had happened to the pride one took, while scanning five hundred pages of death certificates or tariff receipts, in finding a grammar error or booger stain?
The Z-3 decided, the day after that, to swallow his distaste for this new form of comedy and try it out on his own subordinates. He gathered them in his favorite Perf Room, 4-04, to read a monologue from Farisa’s diary.
In the booming voice of a self-important poet, he shouted, “Someone like me discovered music!”
His subordinates looked at each other until he instructed them to laugh. They did.
“Someone with a shade of nerves! Someone who insisted on doing things in threes and fours. Someone whose ear could not tolerate an ill-considered sequence of sounds, whose mind demanded order, she was the first one...” Pann set his papers down. “She!”
Pann’s reports chuckled awkwardly.
“She was the first one to conceive of music.” Pann skipped a section he found boring. “The mind of humanity…” He wagged a finger. “Listen up, we’re talking about the mind of humanity. The mind of humanity never expands but when pressed out, and that pressure comes from people like me—people considered ill, people regarded as defective. In general, we are not valued by the well until after we are gone. They rediscover our insights, ignored in our own time, and claim them as their own.”
Pann’s mentee, Jay or whatever, coughed.
“Profound, isn’t it?”
A Z-4, whose hair had gone gray despite his being only about thirty, scratched his beard. Dandruff fell. “Farisa was a subversive, like her parents.”
“She is,” Pann said. “She is a subversive. She is still out there.”
The notion struck Pann that he and Farisa were, in some sense, not so different. Mages, artists, rebels, and Company men were united in their limitless rage against humanity’s bottom half. Artists worked to prove their cognitive dominance—to say, I think thoughts you cannot. Reformers considered their ideal societies to be superior to the one that existed, and were willing to risk human life (but, often, not their own) to prove it. Mages burned people’s faces off when they felt like it. Here was the problem, though: What good was intellectual or moral excellence, if not validated by material comfort? What value existed in being better than others, if one could not humiliate one’s inferiors with objectively greater financial and social standing? None.
Not all the world saw this, but the Global Company’s highest executives were artists. too. Like their starving counterparts who dallied in painting and sculpture, they acknowledged the worthlessness of the standard-issue life, but while artists considered mediocrity a toxic influence to be avoided at all costs, the Global Company correctly viewed human inadequacy as yet another resource, no different from timber or iron, that could be exploited for one’s own benefit, and recognized that no dishonor existed in doing so. Kopfismo, the art and science of the counted head—of cattle, of soldiers, of workers—required a great number of heads available to be counted, and it was best that such heads be much duller than those of the men doing the counting. The Global Company had bet its existence on human weakness and moral mediocrity—on self-absorption, on petty division, and on insatiable mindless greed—and found such wagers, at scale, impossible to lose.
Half of these fuckers don’t belong in this room, Pann realized. One of the Z-5’s was getting a beer gut, and didn’t have the rank to have earned it.
The Z-3 knew that Farisa wanted, in the deep electric furrows of her heart, to crush the weak, mundane, redundant humans who worked tirelessly to tear down the great. It was inevitable that someone with the power to kill using her mind alone would grow to like it—would grow addicted to the power. Pann had never seen battle himself, but he had worked with enough former soldats to know that everyone was a potential killer. The first killing sickened and traumatized a person; the second left him uneasy for a night for few; but the Global Company could always make it right—it could remind the killer’s tender soul that his actions, bloody as they had been, had been done in service to the righteous cause of private prosperity. Many must kill, and many must die, and many must suffer, so a few can truly live.
Hatred was the human heart’s deepest truth. Cyril Bell had been born into more wealth than could be spent in ten lifetimes; why, then, had he seen fit to create the Global Company? He, like all great men, hated everything he did not own. Cyril had been Old Hate, with its stolidity and restraint; Smitz, in his love of torture and spectacle, had brought New Hate, which had inspired and excited the young and therefore driven the Company’s expansion. Hampus Bell, however, had been spoiled; he had never become enough of a man to hate anything. Sure, the third Patriarch disliked many things. He disliked profanity. He disliked the sweaty-sock odor of the fifth floor. He disliked numbers that ended in nine. None of that was real hate, though. Mere dislike, the province of women, allowed avoidance; hatred—heroic, masculine hatred—demanded obliteration of the hated object. The Patriarch had been born for work like the breeding of horses; he was not the sort capable of running an economic machine whose purpose was endless, beautiful hate.
A Z-4 pulled Pann out of his thoughts. “So has Farisa made you a convert?”
Pann swallowed. “Has she what?”
“You’re reading her diary like you believe in what she is saying.”
“No. I am not a damn convert. We have to know her mind. We must, shall we say, enter her.”
A Z-5 asked, “Didn’t Hampus say—?”
“Right, he did. That is why we can’t talk about any of this outside this room. He has to feign nonsupport for this Farisa project, in case it fails. Trust me when I say that if we find her, he will appreciate it and make us all very rich.”
“Farisa has already been spotted,” said a Z-4.
“Absurd.”
“It came across the undersea.”
Who had told a Z-4 about the oceanic telegraph lines? “What the—?”
“I’d be shocked if it wasn’t on your desk, Hiero Grackenheit.”
Pann crossed his arms. “If it weren’t on my desk. Present subjunctive.”
“Present, yes, but I’m not sure the subjunctive is called for, because the speaker—that’s me—believes it to be the case that—”
Pann, while the peasants blathered about grammar, hurried to his office. He had been avoiding the place, because summer heat had caused it to smell like a dead rat. Hampus Bell must have put something there a month ago and asked the cleaners not to take it out. Furthermore, he suspected that Kayla had found a way to listen to his conversations in there, because she had been discovering facts he believed only a few people knew.
He opened his door to find his desk overflowing with papers.
“What are the bull’s tits today, huh?” He opened a letter. “Nothing here.” He opened another. “Nice try, but no.” He opened a third to find about twenty pages of typewritten figures—little of real interest here, either—and a small page, no larger than an index card, stapled to the back that looked like it might actually be worth reading.
7/1/94: Orc spies confirm: Farisa on Mt Road, curr. N of Obbela.
He rubbed his sweaty palms into his pants, leaving stains.
Kayla had said something to this effect, some time ago, but he had hoped against its truth, because she was Kayla. Still, further reading of his correspondence suggested that, indeed, Farisa had taken the Mountain Road.
Orcs had long been considered untrainable, due to their absence of language. Their vocalizations had been studied and found to have ten phonemes that all sounded like a geriatric dog coughing up phlegm. Still, orcs did not lack cunning. They could be taught to read Ettasi and, although they lacked the patience to write it well, they could be trained to operate telegraphs as well as an average child.
“Huh.” Pann forgot all about the group he’d left in 4-04—in fact, they would linger there, having never been dismissed from their meeting, beyond midnight—as he paced his own office, muttering. “There is something here. There is most certainly something here.”
#
It was July 7, the hottest day yet; the ceiling fans offered little relief. Pann marched into the Patriarch’s office. “I need twelve of our best men for the Mountain Road.”
Hampus Bell looked over his reading glasses. “The Mountain Road?”
Pann couldn’t disclose his true interest. In fact, he was confident that his hedge spy, the so-called Wet Man, would capture Farisa, though he would need support on the return voyage. But he couldn’t mention the prize mage’s name to his boss, so he said, “There’s been a lot of illegal gaming on Bezelia. Ehrgeiz, poker, craps.”
“Illegal gambling?” Hampus draped his arms on the back of his chair. “You’re coming to me about illegal gambling?”
“Where there’s gambling, there’s moonwater.”
“Bootleg alcohol, five thousand miles away. Who cares?”
“We think they’re also growing opium poppies... and altitude leaves... in the hills around Muster.”
“You're advising me to send Company forces halfway around the world over card games and illegal plants?”
“Ettasi civilization is at risk, Hiero Bell. There’s bad stuff coming in from Grunwind—bad stuff we aren’t even taxing, let alone selling.”
Hampus sighed. “I’ll give you four men. A Z-9 lance corporal will lead them.”
Pann’s neck tightened. A Z-9, for this mission? A typical Z-9 couldn’t even find his own asshole in a lineup, let alone assist a hedge spy transporting the most powerful known mage. Still, four men were seven hundred pounds of meat, and that was seven hundred more than zero. This was a start. This was permission to do the job. “Thank you, Hiero Bell.”
“Actually, make it six. Four is all the mission deserves, but I realized I missed your birthday—May tenth, was it?”
“Close enough.”
“I didn’t even get you a present. So, take two more men. I hope that covers my deficit.”
“It does, Hiero Bell. Six is a start.”
He left the Patriarch’s office and ambled back to his own.
“Osha, Pann!” he heard Kayla say.
Kayla was the anti-Farisa. It was one of those skull-cunting ironies that, despite all his efforts, a dark-skinned and apparently socially awkward woman had eluded him, while the presence of this comely posh blonde could not be escaped. He was starting to truly hate her, not only for her usage of “osha” and “sha-sha,” but for the favoritism that had led to her rapid promotion. Mere mortals had to trudge through swamps to get ahead, but she floated through the air on vagina petals.
A Z-4 had come to his office door.
“Speak,” Pann said.
“I have two pieces of news.”
Pann put a hand on the Z-4’s back. “Good news, I hope.”
“Of course. From Grunwind, I have that ‘Dryad’ arrives in three days, quarry intact.”
“Excellent,” Pann said. “The Dry Man, but these are excellent tidings. What else?”
“You might want to close your door first.”
“Of course.” Pann got up and did so.
“What I have pertains to the Fiduciary Address.”
“That’s in two months, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
Every year on Global Company Day, September 4, the Patriarch delivered a speech on the financial status of the Company called the Fiduciary Address. It had, in fact, nothing to do at all with fiduciaries—it had been named thusly because so many barbaric idiots had taken a habit of treating the word “fiduciary” as if it were an upscale substitute for “financial,” which it was not, not at all, as they were entirely different words, and only an imbecile would conflate them. This Address was a boring formality, but could not be skipped, as the Charter required it to exist and be given every year.
Pann crossed his arms. “So if it’s in two months, why are we talking about it now?”
“Hiero Bell intends to Call the Company.”
“Of course he does. Every year, he says he’s going to—wait, did you say—?”
“Hiero Bell intends to Call the Company.”
Pann yelled in his boss’s direction. “Very funny, cork-soaker! Very funny!” He shook his head. “I swear, this place is turning into a nuthouse like that shithole in Exmore. Who put you up to this?”
“No one.” Z-4 handed over a typewritten announcement with Hampus Bell’s signature on it. “See, it’s true.”
“Well, I’ll be a bitch in a barrel.”
“This is good news?”
“Fuck yes, it’s good news.” Pann withdrew his wallet, opened it, and handed the Z-4 a hundred-grot banknote. “Go buy yourself a coffee.”
#
The future didn’t know it yet, but the most important literary work of Pann’s lifetime was being written by Pann himself. Its title was, The Rise of the Global Company, 9800–10000. The tractate’s early chapters covered the role played by a small but elite private security firm, Alcazar Detectives, in the Eastern Cleansing. The middle third focused on Cyril Bell, the man who had turned Alcazar into today’s Great Global Company. Pann’s favorite chapter, about seventy pages from the end, was the one he was writing now, “The Dip in the Road,” pertaining to a transient lapse in the Company’s greatness, prior to a glorious revival.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
Both as a writer and as a future Z-2, Pann took nothing but joy in the Patriarch’s recent decision to Call the Company. Had he not done so, the upcoming Fiduciary Address would end up passing like any other, with only the locally situated executives in attendance and no one important paying attention. The Calling, however, would bring together five continents’ worth of the world’s best people. Such an event might end up meriting its own book.
Hampus’s decision made no strategic sense, as far as Pann could tell. The Z-4s on Wyo and Terosha would not enjoy the disruption to their summers caused by mandatory travel. There also existed a theoretical possibility of enough shareholders condensing for someone to form syr Konklava, the only threat to a Patriarch’s position. No one would do so, of course, as it would be career (and, quite likely, literal) suicide, but Pann could see no reason for Hampus Bell, with the most secure job in the Known World, to invite the risk.
“What could that goofy man be up to?” Pann asked himself as he slid a piece of paper into his typewriter.
Hiero Bell’s Calling of the Company did make sense in the context of the Bell family’s talent for showmanship. Cyril, from time to time, would equip the finest soldats with ancient bronze weaponry and make them fight to the death. Smitz had often brought political prisoners into the office to be tortured, taking suggestions from the workers as to methods. This Calling was Hampus Bell’s way of showing he wasn’t afraid to rule, wasn’t afraid to bring powerful men together and speak in front of all of them. If successful, it would invigorate the young, the Z-5s and Z-6s who did all the work.
Still, what Hampus Bell did not know was that Rychard Bell, currently in the Dry Man’s possession, would soon be in Pann’s. The Z-3 would surely have Farisa by then, too. This would be a perfect humiliation. He would have found Farisa with one hedge spy—the Wet Man—and a skeleton crew, despite Kayla’s million-grot failure; he would have captured the most important family’s most embarrassing son.
Pann, giddy as a girl who’d been gifted a pony, typed.
Hampus I, the son of Smitz Bell, was the third and final Patriarch of his family—the Bell End, one could say. No one had expected him to take the role, as his brother Pyotr had been the intended heir. Unfortunately, Pyotr preceded his father in death, never receiving official coronation by syr Konklava.
He stopped for a moment, pulled back the typewriter’s carriage, bashed out some characters with X’s, and retyped:
…the Syr Konklava.
He paused again, and changed it back.
…syr Konklava.
He wasn’t sure what the rules were for syr Konklava. Did the article, a made-up one existing in no language, have to be capitalized? Before issuing the next edition of the Global Company Style Guide, he would have to decide that.
Oliver, the middle child, would have been second in line for the position, but his career stalled at the Z-4 level due to the casualties—and, worse, the expenses—incurred during the Mbayangsa Campaign. His resignation and suicide surprised no one. This led to a three-year period in which the Global Company had no Patriarch, and although this was the Global Company’s most prosperous time, sufficient nostalgia existed for Smitz’s reign that it came to be seen that the Company should have one again. Hampus Bell was coronated on December 2, 9986.
Hampus had two children, Senna (born March 4, ’57) and Rychard (born August 10, ’58). Senna, at the age of twenty, formally estranged herself from the family, abdicating all rights to the Global Company and its wealth. This would have made Rychard the obvious heir, but in addition to being widely disliked, he was publicly maimed and sterilized on August 7, ’75, by a child mage named Farisa La’ewind, rendering him ineligible.
Pann removed his completed sheet from the typewriter and checked it for errors. He slid a new page into the typewriter and resumed typing.
Shortly after the Battle of Loran, then Z-3 Hampus announced that Farisa had been tried and executed for witchcraft. Nevertheless, rumors of her survival persisted, and were later discovered to have been true. In the summer of 9994, the young woman was captured alive on northern Bezelia by a bounty hunter. Hampus Bell’s failure to find this dangerous mage—along with the unexpected reappearance of his son and rumors of betrayal by his protege, Kayla Demeter—led to a disastrous Fiduciary Address on September 4 of that year.
He stared at the white wall and muttered. “Am I going to go for it?” He paused. “Go for it, Pann. Go for it.”
A Rescission of Confidence was issued by syr Konklava shortly thereafter. The Patriarch stepped down on _____, 9994. He was succeeded by _____, the fourth Patriarch, universally considered the best in the Company’s history, though historians attribute his success to the skills and wisdom of his preeminent right-hand man, Z-2 Panniculus Grackenheit.
Pann paused again. He had never loved his last name. Could he change it, or would doing so assign credit to a fictional person? What were the rules? How did such a thing work? This was the problem with the game of history; all those who had played it well—all those who had achieved the feat of being remembered for centuries after they had lived—were still just as dead as everyone else, so one couldn’t just ask them for advice. He tapped his pen on his desk.
Who would Hampus Bell’s successor be? Who was the best choice, from Pann’s perspective? Once he had made that choice, how would he convince those pompous codgers sitting on syr Konklava—and should it be “the” syr Konklava? could they be compelled to make a choice?—that his ideas were their own? This, he had to figure out, and quickly. Letters from the Wet Man were promising—Claes’s group had no idea what a trap they were ambling into—and good fortune was coming Pann’s way at remarkable speed.
Michael Poor, perhaps, could be trained into the top job. Hiero Poor had been born into the second-richest family in the world, one that owned nearly two percent of the Company, but he was a soft-spoken man with bland features, quietly competent, seemingly designed from birth to allow others to see what they wanted to see. All of the Z-2s had come from prominent families, and very few had done anything to earn their positions or salaries, but Hiero Poor was an exception. He had demanded, on his hiring, that he start from “the bottom” (Z-6) and that he be placed in the Company’s most irrelevant department: Research. There, he performed so well he convinced Hampus Bell to turn it into a sub-company, “Global Electric”, on a similar path to autonomy as that enjoyed by Geshna, the Company’s Wyovian division. Global Electric would soon enough need its own slate of Z-2s and Z-3s, and one of those Z-2s would be, in function if not in name, patriarch of Global Electric. Pann’s ideal play, he reasoned, would be to put Hiero Poor in the Mahogany Chair, so he could get the Electric Chair.
A knock, interrupting Pann’s fantasy, came at his office door.
A Z-5 said, “Whatever a Dry Man is, he’s here.”
#
The Global Company had seven perfectly good concrete pyramids downtown, but the Dry Man had insisted on delivering Rychard Bell to Headquarters, a building Pann considered unsuitable to store such cargo as a Patriarch’s son, as it lacked the necessary security features. The only truly soundproof rooms were on its ninth floor, which, for all the stair-climbing involved, might as well have been the Antipodes.
The Dry Man had shown, at least, the good sense to make delivery at night.
“He’s in here,” the bounty hunter said as he dragged a carpet.
Pann looked inside, confirming that the young man, awake but drugged, had been wrapped up. “I won’t get in your way,” he said.
“I was hoping you’d help me carry him. You said he’s going to the ninth floor?”
Pann crossed his arms. “Do I look like I’m built for physical labor?”
The Dry Man, strong as he was, proved unable to do the job on his own, and had to stop and catch his breath on a landing between the fourth and fifth floors.
“I’ll get help,” Pann said. Even after midnight, one could trust that there’d be a few Z-6s lingering in the office, pointlessly productive, eager to impress their superiors. After a lap around the fifth floor, Pann found one in the bathroom and assigned him to help the Dry Man.
“This thing’s heavy,” said the Z-6. “What’s inside the carpet?”
“An artwork installation,” Pann said. “You think it’s bad to carry it, but I’ll have to do the assembly.”
The job seemed to take forever; it was four in the morning when they finished. Still drugged, Rychard mumbled and his head rolled as the Dry Man shackled him to a hardwood desk in Room 9-28.
The Dry Man said, “Is this desk heavy enough?”
“It’ll do,” Pann said.
“So, I guess it’s time for the....”
Pann handed the bounty hunter his payment.
“I should add thirty percent for hauling him up here.” The Dry Man looked at Rychard, who had gained enough awareness to recoil at his glance. “Well, I don’t know what you intend to do with him, but good luck.”
The next day, Pann’s eyelids were heavy and he struggled to stay awake. Supervising that kind of manual work was exhausting.
Given summer’s heat, the office already smelled like rancid butter and body odor by nine in the morning; by midday, the old bank building across the street had raised five flags to full height, and a sixth to the one-quarter mark. Five-and-a-quarter flags: also known as, as hot as a whorehouse in a volcano. Even Pann’s beloved 4-04, sunless and tucked into the building’s center, had become too warm for comfort—the rashes in his armpits were beginning to sting—so he had a Z-6 bring up a pail of cool water from the ice room, twice every hour, and soaked his feet.
A knock came at the door.
“I don’t need you for another twenty minutes,” Pann yelled. Did this Z-6 not know not to get between a man and his Perf Room?
“It’s me,” said Hiero Bell. “I thought I might find you here. Could I talk to you for a second?”
#
Pann braced himself. Hampus Bell had insisted they have this discussion, whatever its matter was, on the second floor, in the Patriarch’s own office. Pann’s mind raced. Had his boss discovered evidence—stray papers pertaining to the ongoing search for Farisa; his own son, drugged and restrained in 9-28—of Pann’s furtive doings? Had the Dry Man sold him out?
“Sit.”
Pann did so.
The Patriarch, still standing, gathered papers from his desk, opened a desk drawer, and put the papers inside.
Pann started. “So..."
Hampus settled in the Mahogany Chair. “I’m sure you know that performance reviews are coming up.”
Pann forced a smile. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Miss it for the world,” Hampus muttered. “It’s funny to put it like that, when we work in a place where the trade of the whole world can be seriously discussed.”
“We do. And I thank you for giving me a job—for continuing to give me a job—here.”
“Right,” Bell said. “Right, right, of course. So...”
“So...”
“I am drawing up plans for ’95. I’ve been asking each of my subordinates one question. What do you think this place needs, more than anything?
That was all? The boss had posed such an easy question; Pann had known the answer for years. “More Z-2s.”
“Really?” Hampus swiveled in his chair, then opened another desk drawer, looked inside, and then closed it slowly with two fingers. “More Z-2s? I’m not sure where we’d find the salary.”
“I've looked at the numbers. We only have thirty of them and, if I may be honest, they get far less done around here than I do.”
“I agree.” The Patriarch chuckled. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? I have thirty Z-2’s and, except for Michael Poor, not one of them does a hundredth of the work it would take to justify what I pay them. Given that, why would I want more?”
Pann leaned forward a little bit. “We need to freshen the Z-2 level by promoting some younger people—men in their forties, maybe early fifties. I can drop up a list. We have plenty of strong candidates.” Like the man you’re looking at, idiot. “Right now, the lack of strong Z-2s is causing...” Pann drew a breath before summoning into discussion the bugbear every executive invoked when he had no stronger case to justify what he wanted. “Well, it’s causing... communication issues.”
“Communication issues?” Hampus looked at his hands. “I’ll make a note of it.”
“Good.”
“Thanks for the suggestion. You can go. Leave the door open.”
#
Summer continued to fester. The young had somehow decided it was acceptable to secretly remove their shoes under their desks, so the whole building smelled like male feet. Steam pipes were being refitted on the fourth floor, so Pann couldn’t work in his beloved Perf Room. He looked out his office window—a stifling haze, thick enough to discolor the sky, but insufficient to block the hot-steel sun, stretched to Moyenne’s horizon.
Pann didn’t much care for weather; it was one of those stupid things the Company hadn’t yet found a way to control. He had opened his office door, not because he wanted company, but solely in need of airflow, but Kayla evidently mistook his open door as license to poke her stupid blonde head in.
“You gave me bad information,” she said.
“I’m sorry; I did what?”
Kayla closed the door. “Farisa. You kept saying Farisa was in southern Ettaso.”
“Because she is in southern Ettaso, Kayla.”
“I’ve spent three million and found nothing.”
Pann smiled; he pictured the reaction on Hampus’s stupid face upon finding out his sugar-cunt had lost three million grot in a fruitless chase after his greatest failure. “Only three? Make it six. Ettaso’s a big place.”
“I know where she is, Pann.”
“That’s Hiero Grackenheit.”
“She arrived in Portal on the first of August.”
Pann’s eyes bounced. They rolled. They nutated. Kayla was surely right—the group of travelers had been making respectable southward time on Bezelia for about two months; they would have reached it by now—but how had she figured it out? Was she bluffing? Probing? “That’s absurd,” Pann insisted. “Mages aren’t known for robust health, and Portal is hotter than a dragon’s asshole.”
Kayla handed Pann a letter. Some insignificant Z-5 had received a letter from Portal, written by the Wet Man himself, about the massive reward he’d get for the Bezelian mission. The treacherous fucker hadn’t mentioned Farisa by name, but he had made the topic of his discussion obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.
“Well, I’ll be tits in a truckload,” Pann said.
“Hampus doesn’t like swearing.”
“Well, he’s not here now, is he, tits?”
Kayla lowered her head and pouted.
“I’m only going to tell you this once.” Pann’s heart quickened; the Wet Man’s indiscretion aside, this discovery was lovely. He wondered if he could get a telegram to Bezelia before the end of the day. “I hired someone off the books, a real idiot.” The Wet Man was many things, but an idiot he was not. “He’s made some basic mistakes, and there’s no way he’s got the real Farisa. You can keep looking the same places you were. You’ll find her, I promise.”
“Who’s Mazie?” Kayla asked.
“No one. This Wet Man has his eye on the wrong group—if he’s not making the whole thing up. If you find another one of these, please bring it to my attention, but disregard its content. Unfortunately, my job requires me to keep abreast of these sorts of wild rumors. Share none of this, but tell me everything.”
“Thank you.” Kayla walked to Pann’s door, where she stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Oh, I forgot to ask.”
“Ask? Ask what?” Pann put his hands in his pockets. "I mean, please do.”
“Why do you have Hampus Bell’s son on the ninth floor?”
“Why do I... what? I don’t. Where’d you hear that one from?”
Kayla smiled. “People. Places.”
“Kayla, please tell me who made up the rumor that—”
“If the man in 9-28 isn’t his son, then who is he? Someone important?”
“Not at all.” Pann’s forearms were tight. Where had the leak come from? “Well, he’s somewhat important. He’s a witness in a witch trial. He takes the stand in September, and I can’t have him dying before then, so that’s... well, that’s why I have a Z-5—soon to be a Z-6, for spreading these sorts of rumors—bringing food to him.”
“I understand.” Kayla left Pann’s office. “Sha-sha, then.”
“Sha-sha.” Pann looked at his sweating palms. He stared at his desk for a solid five minutes, then arranged three fountain pens in an equilateral triangle to ward off evil, because something with a million ears and eyes was stalking him. Where had he made a mistake? Who had given Kayla, of all people, intelligence on the cargo delivered to 9-28? Not the Dry Man; the Wet Man was a leaky load, everyone knew that, but the Dry Man was loyal as earwax.
Kayla. Fucking Kayla, with her “osha” in the morning and her “sha-sha” in the evening and her stupid blonde ponytail—how was she learning these things? Who was she sleeping with? She was not smart; she was not cunning, but she had a knack, it seemed, for pulling information from the blue sky.
#
Pann's paranoia grew. He decided that no one else could be trusted—he made a list of people who could have been sources of Kayla’s knowledge and never-existed all of them, but he had lost a number of good people and could not afford further attrition. He took it upon himself to feed Rychard Bell. Every day, he climbed those stairs; by the time he was up there, he had lost half a pound in sweat.
He even managed the replacement and cleaning of Rychard’s waste buckets.
August 10 was when the young man first spoke to Pann. “My father is the Patriarch.”
“The Patriarch? Of what?”
“The Global Company.”
Pann rolled his eyes. “Do I look like an idiot to you?”
“My father’ll give you a million grot. That’s more than I’m worth for anything else.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“I do not.”
Pann chuckled. “Then you don’t know who I am either, do you?
“No.”
“Well, I know exactly who you are. You're a Teroshi goatherd. Light-skinned, sure. Your father or grandfather was one of those Ettasi filibusters.” Pann opened the door and spoke from the other side before shutting it. It was the middle of the night, so he had no concerns about being overheard. “That was your story when you were captured. It’s too late to change it now.”
“Two million! Five! He’ll give you five mi—”
“You really don’t know who I am,” Pann said as he shut the door and walked away. “I don’t need the money.”
The days after that, Rychard was sullen and speechless, until about a week later, when Pann walked into the room to find him in tears, rocking back and forth. The son asked, “What do you want from me?”
“Does it matter?”
“I know you don’t believe me, but my father is Hampus Bell and he will find you.”
“That’s enough,” Pann said.
“He’ll do things even Smitz wouldn’t.”
Pann was in no mood to take threats. He slapped the young man’s face. “You know what, this place is too nice for you. I hope you enjoyed having a window, but I’m taking it away.”
A few minutes later, Pann jabbed Rychard's arm with a syringe and moved the princeling to a numberless closet on the seventh floor where he would sit in the dark until Pann decided what next to do with him. The job was a drag—a literal drag, because Pann lacked the upper body strength to actually carry him.
Rychard behaved himself after that.
#
Conditions improved. The fourth-floor renovations were finished. The outdoor heat lessened in the second half of August. Pann’s captive was no longer ornery, but barely spoke. The Z-3 was busy, as always, and he was happy again, not least because Perfing season was coming up.
He was finishing a review in 4-04—he loved devising cryptic language that left his subordinates unsure of where they stood or what had actually been said about them—when Hampus Bell opened his door without knocking and stepped inside.
“Good afternoon, Hiero.”
“Having fun Perfing?”
Pann smiled. “It meets expectations.”
“I’ve given it a lot of thought.” Hampus Bell tapped a pen on Pann’s desk. “What you said about our lack of Z-2s, that’s absolutely right.”
Pann nodded, hiding his giddiness. No one at the Z-3 level worked as hard as he did; if even one new Z-2 was made, it would be him.
“Our ranking system truly is a shingle show.”
“I agree. It is. It’s outdated and it’s too—”
“Consider the Z-6 level. What’s a Z-6? He could be an Easthorn blueblood straight out of City Private, or he could be a research scientist who’s been with us his whole career. The Old Families hate me for putting their boys at the same level as those frappin’ eggheads, and they’re right to be upset.”
Pann puckered his lips. “It’s abhorrent.”
“No one knows who’s in charge.”
“You’re in charge, Hiero Bell.”
“Oh, come off that squirrel. You know what I mean. Z-3 through Z-6 are too broad. I’m splitting them. There’ll be an upper, middle, and lower division for each.”
“Makes sense,” Pann said. “More levels means more promotions, which means happier people. You’ve got my vote.”
“I would never put personnel matters to a frappin’ vote, Pann.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Right. Anyway, that’s all. Thought I’d bounce the notion off you.”
“I’m always up for a bounce,” Pann said.
Hampus walked out the door.
“So,” Pann started.
The Patriarch turned around. “What?”
“I...”
“Of course.” Hampus lightly smacked his forehead. “I forgot. There is the matter of your promotion.”
Warmth spread through Pann’s body. Was it happening? Was it truly happening? It was, it was! Z-2—officially Z-2. He’d done the work of the rank for some time; he had finally earned the title. On his upgraded salary, he’d be able to buy mansions and wives and gorillas and tigers and maybe more wives to take care of the animals. ‘Panniculus Grackenheit, Z-2.’ Say it, you magnificent man, and I will love you forever, I will never betray you, I will do whatever you ask. Say it, say it, say it. The backs of Pann’s hands tingled.
“You are hereby promoted to Z-3, Middle Division.”