The Scumbags Guide to Enslaving Demon's

Far away, the common ledger began speaking to every keeper who looked at it.

The icebreaker arrived at Grand Meridian beneath a gray sunrise. The city was made up of crumbling buildings with patched-together roofs and smoke rising from the stacks. After traveling through the frozen wastes and the flooded Kiln, the city looked almost too lively. Austin Veyron stood on the deck, looking out at it. The feeling in his wrist had started to feel less like hunger and more like a pull toward home.

The Freehold hotel was still open, just not with its normal crowd. White line markings covered the lobby floor. The tables had been arranged in an open circle. The common ledger sat on the main table, its pages flipping without any wind. No one wanted to get too close to it. The keepers walked around it without ever looking away, talking to each other in low voices about what was happening.

Marcus was there to greet the team. Austin Veyron noticed that he looked a little thinner and had gray in his beard, but his grip was strong when he clasped Austin Veyron’s arm.

”Don’t open it by yourself,” Marcus said. ”That’s what it wants you to do.”

Elena stood next to the route board, with bags under her eyes and chalk on her sleeves. ”It told me that if I stopped waiting for everyone to verify information, I could send the food wagons down the fastest routes. It knew every mistake I’ve been trying to fix.”

Nahlia held a relay crystal in her hands. ”It told me I could filter out any information that might cause conflict. Everyone would agree on one decision.” She said it in a low voice, as though she didn’t like how good it had sounded.

Marcus looked at Austin Veyron. ”What did it tell you?”

Austin Veyron could feel the black mark on his wrist pulling him toward the ledger.

”It hasn’t told me anything.”

The common ledger stopped flipping its pages. The whole lobby seemed to hold its breath.

Black-and-white writing began appearing on the page.

IF YOU COULD SAVE EVERYONE, WHY WOULD YOU ALLOW OTHERS TO MAKE THE DECISION?

Austin Veyron knew what it wanted to hear. If you let others decide, they slow you down. People make mistakes and take longer to act. It’s less stressful when one person can decide everything. He had told himself those same things many times, back when he was picking through buildings by himself. The ledger was offering him the person he used to be.

DEVOUR began to stir.

Veyra stood next to him.

”Tell me what you want.”

”I want the common ledger.”

”What would it become?”

”The only route keeper.”

A bright white light shot out of Sable’s crown shard. ”Then it’s not our target.”

Everyone stood around the common ledger in a circle of witnesses: Marcus, Elena, Nahlia, Veyra, Sable, Nyra, Tessa, Ceryn, Ysara, and the local route keepers. Some people chose to stand at the exits or help write the food counts on the walls. Children ran from wall to wall, bringing chalk to every keeper who needed it. An old woman sat next to the door, keeping track of the numbers on her slate. They weren’t an army. They were people standing together, trying to help each other, and Austin Veyron had never seen anything more powerful.

Ysara looked down at the ledger’s black-and-white page. The people of the Freehold were nervous to see the former queen of the north standing in their lobby with her broken crown wrapped in a rag, but no one told her to leave.

”That’s what it will try to become,” she said. ”It won’t call itself a crown. It will only say it’s making everything faster.”

The common ledger began showing Austin Veyron images of the cities. It showed the lines of people waiting for food in Grand Meridian, people trapped in their homes in Frostmarket, workers buried in debt at Glasswake, and people going without food because of Ashbridge’s broken bridge. Every time he looked at the images, they changed to show Austin Veyron standing in the middle of it all, making every decision to help people. Austin Veyron could feel his heart aching to be the person who could fix everything by himself, and he hated how familiar that lonely figure looked.

”It’s telling you that you already know what to do,” Ysara said.

”No,” Marcus said. ”It’s telling us what we can do as a team.”

The words on the common ledger crawled toward Marcus.

THE STRONGEST KEEPER DECIDES.

Constructs began rising from the floor.

They were made of paper, white line markings, and ink. Each one carried a quill that looked like a spear. Their blank faces turned toward the witnesses. Ink dripped from their hands onto the white line markings, turning them black.

Elena fell to the ground, and Nahlia grabbed her and pulled her toward the wall. Rin shot an arrow from the stairs, hitting the first construct’s quill and shattering it into ink. Orena used her spear to sweep the legs out from under the second construct. Veyra cut through the third construct’s white line markings instead of tearing its paper.

More constructs began rising from the words on the page.

THE STRONGEST KEEPER DECIDES.

Austin Veyron could see the real target. It was the belief that if someone was stronger, they should be allowed to overrule everyone else.

”Target,” he said. ”The strongest-keeper-decides clause. Not the ledger. Not the route facts. Not the route keepers.”

”Witnessed,” Veyra said.

”Witnessed,” Sable said.

Austin Veyron placed the white root chain on the words.

DEVOUR opened. The clause tasted like someone handing you a heavy key you didn’t want.

THE STRONGEST KEEPER DECIDES.

He consumed decides.

The constructs began to topple.

Their bodies turned into sheets of route facts that scattered across the room, drifting down over the keepers like falling leaves. The images on the ledger stopped putting Austin Veyron at the center. Now they showed people working together to make decisions about the routes.

The echo spoke to Elena.

”You could take care of everything faster.”

”Yes,” Elena said. ”But not by myself.”

The route keepers began writing on the walls about what they wanted the routes to be.

NORTH WAGONS: TWO SAFE ROUTES, ONE FASTER, ONE WARMER.

FROSTMARKET: GRAIN COUNT CONFIRMED BY THREE ROUTE KEEPERS.

GLASSWAKE: DOCKS KEEPING THE COUNT OPEN ON EVERY SHIFT.

The white line markings glowed brighter, and the ink the constructs had dripped began to fade from the floor.

But the echo still wasn’t defeated. It began targeting the individual route keepers who stood in the circle of witnesses. A black-and-white line rose from the page and started to wrap around Nahlia’s relay crystal.

”You could keep rumors from spreading by only relaying information you know is true.”

Nahlia held on to the relay crystal tighter. ”I could. But then no one would know what I don’t.”

She placed the crystal on the table so that Marcus, Elena, and two other volunteers could see everything it was receiving.

The black-and-white line broke away from the crystal.

Nahlia let out a deep breath and slumped against the table, her hands still shaking. Elena put an arm around her and gave her a squeeze.

The echo turned to Marcus, showing him his lobby on the day the Hunger Emperor broke through the routes. The people hadn’t known what to do, and he’d had no way to tell them, because he hadn’t known either.

”If you had told them what to do, you could have helped them sooner.”

”Perhaps,” Marcus said. ”But I also would have told them to do things that could have gotten them hurt. Just because I’m leading doesn’t mean I should hide my flaws from them.”

He wrote on the wall about the decision the southern road was struggling with. Two groups of route keepers volunteered to go check it out. The echo’s line faded once more. Marcus watched the two groups leave the lobby, his jaw tight. He knew it would have been easier to just tell them what to do, but he let them go anyway.

Elena was the last one the echo targeted. It showed her a perfect route map, one where no mistakes would ever be made, as long as she allowed herself to change the route facts whenever she wanted.

Elena’s hand reached for the page but stopped just short of touching it, her fingers trembling in the air above the perfect lines. Everyone who had been writing on the walls stopped to watch her. Austin Veyron could feel his own hunger wanting the same thing.

Veyra didn’t touch her. ”What do you want?”

”I want things to stop being so painful.”

”Will that route map give you that?” Austin Veyron asked.

”No,” Elena said. ”It will just make me the one to blame.”

She picked up a piece of chalk from the wall and wrote beneath the food counts.

NO ONE PERSON CAN CHANGE ROUTE FACTS WITHOUT AT LEAST ONE OTHER KEEPER AND A REASON.

Everyone in the room repeated the words she had written on the wall. Some said it as quietly as a whisper, but everyone said it together.

The white line markings glowed brighter than before.

Nyra held the pale splinter and the debt chime in their blue-black boundaries. ”It’s starting to lose what it wants. The routes won’t let it make the common ledger its crown.”

The ledger began to shake.

A black line appeared beneath the table.

”I can see it moving,” Tessa said.

Austin Veyron tried to grab the black line, but it slithered away from him and disappeared through a crack in the floor. The common ledger went dormant, and a mirror record rose from beneath the table. The mirror record was so black that it couldn’t reflect anyone standing around it.

Elena pulled out a map of the Freehold hotel. ”There’s a basement below us. They used it for storage after the Hunger Emperor’s roads were broken.”

The keepers closest to the common ledger stepped back, and someone by the door whispered a prayer. On the mirror record, a route line was traveling away from Grand Meridian.

East, toward the Hollow Crown ruins.

Sable looked frightened. She looked older than Austin Veyron had ever seen her. ”That’s where the First Feast took place.”

No one spoke, not even the children standing by the walls. The sovereign echo had learned what it needed from the common ledger. It didn’t need to stay at the Freehold anymore. It knew how to reach the place where hunger had once tried to create an emperor.

”What does it want there?” Marcus asked.

Nyra’s heart shard pulsed toward the east, and the debt chime and the pale splinter strained in the same direction.

”A body,” Nyra said. ”The old ruins can help it create a body.”

The mirror record shattered, revealing a route line that led to the Hollow Crown.

Austin Veyron’s mark burned hot on his wrist, pointing east.

The echo was trying to become the crown that hunger had once created.

Austin Veyron looked around at all the route keepers writing on the walls. At Marcus, Elena, and Nahlia. And at every member of his team, standing around him, ready to take on the sovereign echo.

Then he looked east, toward the distant ruins of the Hollow Crown.

He wasn’t going to go alone this time.