What You Asked For - Chapter Two
Hell sends a bureaucrat to retrieve what was misplaced, but Elspeth isn’t handing Clarence over without a fight. The problem? The paperwork may be wrong—and in this universe, that can be more dangerous than damnation.
The Hearing
A low hum pressed in from the corridor. The books, so recently reshelved and sedate, curled inward on their spines, shuddering in fear.
A vortex bloomed in front of the reference section: black at the center, ringed with a nasty red glow. Loose papers tore from the nearest shelf and spun toward it. The room filled with the scent of burning cloves, old pennies, and a just-cleaned office.
What stepped from the maelstrom was a squat figure with indigo skin and magenta horns curled neatly around his ears. He wore a charcoal suit with red pinstripes that glimmered like magma under cloth.
He surveyed the room, took in Elspeth, Erin, and Clarence, and his expression curdled. “Unbelievable. Private Ashby, your unauthorized departure constitutes a Class Four breach.”
Clarence made a sound that was half-whimper, half-wound. Erin shrank back against a shelf. “I’ve failed my apprenticeship,” she whispered. “I’ve failed the universe.”
“Who the hells are you?” Elspeth said.
“My name is unpronounceable in your tongue, but my administrative designation is Lord Damaeus Voss, Senior Director of Jurisdictional Affairs.” He drew himself up. “The soul in question is scheduled for post-mortal indoctrination. He was assigned to my division for onboarding following intake and must be remanded at once.”
“I’ll tell you now he wasn’t responsible for this,” said Elspeth. “It happened accidentally on our side. I assume you’re here to rectify the breach.”
“Correct.” His eyes flashed, briefly scorching a line across the hardwood. He turned to Clarence. “We return at once.”
Elspeth folded her arms. “He appears to be in no immediate danger to himself or others. Is there a reason for the urgency?”
“Every moment he remains unsupervised risks contamination of the mortal plane. These are not my rules, but I will enforce them.”
Clarence stared at him in blank terror.
Elspeth stepped between them.
Damaeus stopped, recalibrated, and began pacing the room instead. He produced a small black ledger from his inner pocket and flicked through it at impossible speed. “You are, I presume, the responsible party.”
“I am Elspeth Isles, Air Crone of Rowanswood, and owner of this house. This is my apprentice, Erin O’Connell, who is learning about the consequences of system interaction.”
“Violated protocol in at least three categories,” Damaeus muttered.
“Learning,” Elspeth repeated.
Behind her, Erin resumed breathing in four-counts. Clarence, marooned between table and wall, tried and failed to stand at attention.
Damaeus looked between them, then back to Elspeth. “Your participation in this breach constitutes a serious threat. You may be treated more leniently if you assist in reconstructing the sequence of events leading to the summoning, including all relevant magical and technological processes.”
“Actually—” Erin burst out. “I have the system log. Or I can reconstruct it. If you’d like to review it, I can—”
He turned to her with customer-service patience. “Write it, Apprentice O’Connell. Electronic transmission is blocked under containment protocol.”
Erin flushed. “Yes, sir.”
As she began scribbling from memory, Damaeus resumed pacing. “The more pressing matter is containment and repatriation of the anomaly.”
“From my perspective,” Elspeth said, “Clarence has done nothing except exist in a state of confusion. The risk seems theoretical rather than practical.”
Clarence swallowed. “With respect, sir, I’d still like to know what I did wrong. I thought if you died in a righteous cause, you were supposed to go somewhere … well, somewhere not there.”
“That is not my department,” said Damaeus. “My division concerns itself with processing, orientation, and compliance. The factors that determined your initial routing are neither available to me nor within my purview. My task is to correct the error.”
Elspeth tilted her head. “Do you know what he’s done to land him in Hell?”
Damaeus flipped through the ledger again, then frowned. “There appears to be some data missing.”
Elspeth let that hang a moment. “Sounds like there might be a mistake. Odd, isn’t it, that the origin of the error remains unexamined while the consequences continue?”
Damaeus stilled. His finger ran down a page. “Exception handling. Precedent. Corrective measures.”
Then he looked up and said, with absolute bureaucratic conviction, “The system is flawless. Isolated errors are unfortunate but expected.”
Clarence, to his own surprise, snorted. “With all respect, sir, that sounds exactly like what our officers said about trench maps.”
Elspeth nodded. “Then I’d like to request a hearing. Here. In the presence of all involved parties.”
Erin set down her notebook, hands shaking but chin up. “I have the sequence logged, and I can reconstruct my actions, if that would help.”
Damaeus rolled his shoulders with a full-body sigh. “Very well. The hearing will be brief. All parties will provide testimony under observation. No outside counsel permitted.” He sat at the head of the table, dwarfing the chair.
“Should I start?” Erin asked, already flipping to a fresh page.
Elspeth met Damaeus’s gaze. He gestured with two fingers. “Proceed.”
As Erin began, the Whispering Stacks settled into an expectant hush. The books seemed to be listening.
She spoke at speed. “At 10:32 I adjusted the subheading font size, the document reformatted, the cursor jumped to the bottom, inserted a new bullet point, the system froze, and then—” She glanced at Clarence. “—the apparition manifested. Sir.”
Damaeus made a note in his ledger. “Unintentional summoning is typically covered by Clause 78, Subsection D. Did you recite any incantation or trigger any macros from the provided templates?”
“No, sir. Only standard keyboard shortcuts. The macros are locked out of student access.”
At that, a slim Moravian volume on magical contracts slid quietly toward Elspeth’s elbow. She palmed it open to cross-realm jurisdiction and scanned while Damaeus turned to Clarence. “Private Ashby, do you acknowledge that you were conscripted post-mortem into the Infernal Sorting Division?”
Clarence swallowed. “I remember signing something. Or agreeing. It’s hazy.”
“Not uncommon,” said Damaeus. “Your onboarding was incomplete. Once repatriated, your existential orientation will be corrected.”
Elspeth raised a brow. “What about informed consent?”
“Consent is immaterial. Assignment is by lottery and caseload. His record was properly countersigned.”
“And the system never errs in those assignments?”
Damaeus riffled the ledger a touch too hard. “Any system may exhibit minimal anticipated error. Such errors are corrected immediately. This anomaly is already being remediated.”
Elspeth tapped the Moravian text. “And if the correction is itself recursive? If every attempt to fix the error creates a larger contradiction?”
His jaw flexed. “Such things do not occur in practice. The process is self-stabilizing.”
She smiled. “Then perhaps you can explain the sequence that led Clarence from the front lines to your custody, and from there to ours. The record should be unbroken.”
Damaeus bristled, but began. “Deceased in the field, body unaccounted for, record generated by initial sorting, assignment entered into registry—” He stopped. The ledger vibrated in his grip.
Elspeth waited. “Is there a problem?”
He wet his lips. “There is a contradiction. Two routing numbers for a single soul. One assigned to Division Eleven, one pending review for special exemption.” His voice tightened. “This is statistically impossible.”
For a moment, he looked less like a demon lord than a doctoral candidate discovering a fatal citation error.
Elspeth didn’t waste it. “So the problem is not a wayward apprentice or a confused Private. It’s the system.”
Damaeus rounded on her. “Do you have any idea how many layers of compliance and review this process passes through? Every entry is checked by three separate divisions. The likelihood of a simultaneous duplicate—”
“Yet here we are,” Elspeth interrupted.
The books stirred. A battered volume of interdimensional case law nudged itself within reach. Elspeth opened it to a ribbon-marked page and read aloud:
“In the event of recursive contradiction, the affected soul is to be classified as a jurisdictional anomaly pending review by a cross-departmental panel.” She looked up. “Which would require a halt to immediate repatriation.”
Damaeus checked his ledger, made a sound perilously close to a dignified whine, and said nothing.
Clarence blinked. “Begging your pardon, sir—does that mean I’m not going back?”
Damaeus’s face passed through several emotions before settling on bureaucracy. “It means your case is under review. For the moment.”
Elspeth watched the color dull in his pinstripes. “If you need to file paperwork, we have pens and a typewriter.”
Ignoring the jibe, Damaeus produced a slender metallic pen and signed the forms the ledger generated. “You have a temporary stay,” he said, not quite meeting Clarence’s eye. “But I must report this up the chain. Expect further contact.”
Erin, gathering the scattered notes, straightened a stack with visible satisfaction. “I can copy these for your review, sir, if that would help.”
“That will not be necessary.”
He rose, collected his ledger, and turned for the door. There he paused. “You realize you’ve merely delayed the inevitable.”
Elspeth folded her hands. “Delay is often the most powerful tool in the system.”
He grunted and vanished in a puff of sulfurous vapor.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then the Moravian book drifted open another page. Elspeth glanced down and read, “Any soul neither properly damned nor clearly exempt shall, upon sufficient evidence, be classified as a jurisdictional anomaly. Prior processing is to be suspended.”
Clarence exhaled like a man surfacing. “Is that … good?”
“It’s not the worst,” Elspeth said. “It’s limbo with a file number.”
Erin smiled. “And it’s not eternal paperwork sorting.”
“Not yet,” said Elspeth. She closed the book and slid it toward her apprentice. “For now, Clarence, you’re under my custody. House rules.”
Clarence managed a shaky salute. “Thank you, ma’am. If there’s anything I can do—”
“You can start by not signing anything for the next twenty-four hours.”
The temperature in the library dropped.
Damaeus reappeared, composed now, his pinstripes darkened back to authority. “Protocol requires that I inform you of the next step. Per the revised assessment, Private Ashby will be remanded to a bureaucratic holding area for further review. You may accompany him as legal counsel, if desired.”
Erin stared. “You’re taking him?”
“That is what further review means.”
Elspeth looked at Clarence and saw the same stunned obedience systems always produced. Turn him over now, and he would become one more clerical inevitability. “We’ll come prepared,” she said.
Damaeus nodded once. “You have until sundown tomorrow. The portal will open here at sixteen hundred. Do not be late.” He offered a business card blank on both sides. Then he vanished again, leaving the room to warm behind him.
Clarence looked from the card to Elspeth. “What now?”
Elspeth glanced at Erin, at the waiting books, at the case already assembling itself around them.
“Now,” she said, “we prepare for an appeal.”
Erin stacked the papers into a single formidable file. “I’ll put on the kettle. If we’re going to take on Hell, we’ll need tea.”
At once, the Whispering Stacks rolled a battered samovar from the shelves.
Elspeth sighed. “Remind me to thank the library. It’s been unusually helpful today.”