《Nori and MIO's Other Worlds — Lord Ranker Arc》Episode 5: The Devil in the Margin

Nori and MIO's Other Worlds — Lord Ranker Arc

Episode 5: The Devil in the Margin

After the night of the twenty gazes, Lord Ranker stopped sleeping well. This was inconvenient, because he now had to make the one visit that required a clear head.

At the succession, along with the banks and the foundations and the armies with polite names, each head of the House received a sealed letter. It was short. It had been copied by hand, head to head, for a thousand years.

If the House ever faces something it cannot price: go down to the paper room. Set the chair. Pour two glasses. Do not haggle. Do not lie. And do not ask his name.

Lord Ranker had read it once, filed it, and never expected to use it. He was a modern man. He did not believe in the family ghost stories.

He believed in them now.

At midnight he went down alone, past the deep room, into the archive with no electricity, where the old ledger slept. He set the empty chair at the table. He poured two glasses of a wine older than most countries. Then he sat, and waited, feeling — for the first time in a long career — slightly ridiculous.

"You kept my chair for a thousand years," said a voice, pleasantly. "I thought it would be polite to finally sit in it."

The chair was no longer empty.

The man in it was tall and thin, in a black coat of no particular century, with a line of deep wine-red at the collar. He looked like a gentleman out of an old novel. He had already picked up his glass. His own face gave no age at all — and Lord Ranker, who was himself a man of uncertain age, recognized the workmanship.

He had many names in the ledger downstairs of the world. The oldest of them was Mephistopheles.

"You are the buyer," said Lord Ranker. "From the old entries. The prices that were not money."

"I am the market," said the devil comfortably. "Your ancestor liked to boast that your family built the market where souls could be sold. Charming man. Terrible bookkeeping. I built the market. Your family merely opened... a branch office." He drank. "The best one, I will admit. I have always liked doing business with your House. You never pray afterward. It keeps things tidy."

"Then let us do business. You know what has entered the world."

"Ah." The devil set down his glass. For a moment, the pleasantness went out of him, and something very old looked across the table. "The white mother. Yes. I know her better than anyone alive, because she is the first thing in a very long time that has genuinely inconvenienced me."

"She threatens you?"

"She starves me." The devil's voice was soft. "Understand my trade, Lord Ranker. I deal in desire. In wanting, and the price of wanting. Every contract I have ever signed began with a human being who wanted something more than they wanted to be safe." He turned the glass slowly. "Now look at her white field. No hunger. No fear. No loss. No wanting. Do you know what that place is, to me? Famine. A whole world with nothing to sell." He smiled thinly. "I cannot even enter it. My kind needs a handhold — a desire, a bargain, a lie a man tells himself. In her field there is nothing to hold. She has built the one fortress I cannot walk into: a world where no one wants anything at all."

"And yet you have taken souls for centuries," said Lord Ranker. "How is her harvest different from yours?"

"Because I ask," said the devil, and for the first time his voice had an edge. "Every soul in my ledger chose. Foolishly, greedily, drunkenly — but chose. I have taken many things from men, Lord Ranker. Never once the choosing. It is the one law I keep, and I keep it better than Heaven keeps its own." He leaned back. "She takes only the choosing. Nothing else. And she calls it a gift. In a very long career, I have never seen anything so obscene."

Lord Ranker studied him. Then, deliberately, he laid two items on the table: the printout with the zero signature, and the cropped photograph — the girl by the river, and the absence beside her.

"The daughter," he said. "And her companion."

The devil looked at the photograph for a long moment. Then he began to smile — not his business smile. Something warmer, and far more alarming. He looked at the cut edge, at the empty half, the way a man looks at an old friend glimpsed across a crowded street.

"And you cut this half away," he said.

"It was irrelevant."

The devil laughed. He laughed for quite a long time, and the sound went into the dark shelves and came back wrong.

"Oh, I do love your family," he said at last, wiping one eye. "A thousand years of perfect judgment, and you always, always shred the only page worth reading."

"Then sell me the page. What is the man?"

"No."

"Everything is for sale."

"No," said Mephistopheles, gently. "That is your family's religion. It has never been the law of the world. Some things are not for sale because no one owns them — least of all themselves." He slid the photograph back across the table. "That knowledge you will have to earn the slow way, like everyone else. Consider it professional courtesy that I tell you it exists."

"Then what do I owe you," said Lord Ranker, "for tonight?"

"Ah." The devil's eyes gleamed. "The consultation fee. It is an old fixed price, for heads of your House. One question, answered honestly. That is all."

"Ask."

The devil looked at him — through him — down forty years, straight into a locked drawer.

"The face you keep downstairs in the dark," he said quietly. "When you lost her — did you grieve because she was gone? Or because she was taken from your collection?"

The paper room was very silent. The wine sat untouched. Lord Ranker, who had not been asked a real question by another living being in decades, discovered that his hands were perfectly still and his mind was not.

He could have lied. The letter said do not lie, but he had built a life on the difference between a lie and a well-chosen truth.

"I no longer know," he said at last.

It was the truest sentence he had spoken in a very long time, and it cost him exactly what it should.

"Paid in full," said Mephistopheles softly, and stood, and straightened his coat. "A word of advice, then, since you have been an honest client. You will go to her. Men like you always walk into the white — you cannot leave a locked room unopened, it is your whole nature. And when you are there, she will offer to take everything heavy from you, and she will mean it kindly, and it will be the most dangerous moment of your long life." He paused at the edge of the lamplight. "When it comes, hold on to the sentence you paid me tonight. I no longer know. In the white place, where everything is certain, an honest doubt may be the only thing that is still yours."

"And if it is not enough?"

"Then," said the devil, "let us hope someone says something unplanned."

The lamplight dipped, once. The chair was empty. Both glasses were dry.

On the open ledger, in the margin, in fresh ink, a new entry had appeared, in a hand no one living could identify:

Received: one honest answer. Fair price. — M.

And far away, in the ordinary city by the sea, an ordinary man dreamed — for no reason he could ever name — of an old traveling companion in a black coat, and smiled in his sleep.