Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

This put Davy on his lonesome next to the stranger, who leaned on the bar and glanced at him sideways with an expression of amusement. Davy’s forehead wrinkled as he stared in the direction of Katie the barwoman, who was just now coming back up the cellar steps with an empty coal powder cartridge in one hand. “My round?” asked the stranger, raising an eyebrow.

“Aye. Mine’s a Deuchars if yer buyin’…” Davy, while not always quick on the uptake, was never slow on the barrel: if this underdressed southerner could afford a heated taxi, he could certainly afford to buy Davy some beer. Katie nodded and rinsed her hands under the sink-however well-sealed they left the factory, coal cartridges always leaked like printer toner had once done-and picked up two glasses.

“New roond aboot here?” Davy asked after a moment.

The stranger smiled: “Just passing through-I visit Edinburgh every few years.”

“Aye.” Davy could relate to that.

“And yourself?”

“Ah’m frae Pilton.” Which was true enough; that was where he’d bought the house with Morag all those years ago, back when folks actually wanted to buy houses in Edinburgh. Back before the pack ice closed the Firth for six months in every year, back before the rising sea level drowned Leith and Ingliston, and turned Arthur’s Seat into a frigid coastal headland looming grey and stark above the permafrost. “Whereaboots d’ye come frae?”

The stranger’s smile widened as Katie parked a half-litre on the bar top before him and bent down to pull the next: “I think you know where I’m from, my friend.”

Davy snorted. “Aye, so ye’re a man of wealth an’ taste, is that right?”

“Just so.” A moment later, Katie planted the second glass in front of Davy, gave him a brittle smile, and retreated to the opposite end of the bar without pausing to extract credit from the stranger, who nodded and raised his jar: “To your good fortune.”

“Heh.” Davy chugged back a third of his glass. It was unusually bitter, with a slight sulphurous edge to it: “That’s a new barrel.”

“Only the best for my friends.”

Davy sneaked an irritated glance at the stranger. “Right. Ah ken ye want tae talk, ye dinnae need tae take the pish.”

“I’m sorry.” The stranger held his gaze, looking slightly perplexed. “It’s just that I’ve spent too long in America recently. Most of them believe in me. A bit of good old-fashioned scepticism is refreshing once in a while.”

Davy snorted. “Dae Ah look like a god-botherer tae ye? Yer amang civilized folk here, nae free-kirk numpties’d show their noses in a pub.”

“So I see.” The stranger relaxed slightly. “Seen Morag and the boys lately, have you?”

Now a strange thing happened, because as the cold fury took him, and a monstrous roaring filled his ears, and he reached for the stranger’s throat, he seemed to hear Morag’s voice shouting, Davy, don’t! And to his surprise, a moment of timely sanity came crashing down on him, a sense that Devil or no, if he laid hands on this fucker he really would be damned, somehow. It might just have been the hypothalamic implant that the sheriff had added to the list of his parole requirements working its arcane magic on his brain chemistry, but it certainly felt like a drenching, cold-sweat sense of immanence, and not in a good way. So as the raging impulse to glass the cunt died away, Davy found himself contemplating his own raised fists in perplexity, the crude blue tattoos of LOVE and HATE standing out on his knuckles like doorposts framing the prison gateway of his life.

“Who telt ye aboot them,” he demanded hoarsely.

“Cigarette?” The stranger, who had sat perfectly still while Davy wound up to punch his ticket, raised the chiselled eyebrow again.

“Ya bas.” But Davy’s hand went to his pocket automatically, and he found himself passing a filter-tip to the stranger rather than ramming a red-hot ember in his eye.

“Thank you.” The stranger took the unlit cigarette, put it straight between his lips, and inhaled deeply. “Nobody needed to tell me about them,” he continued, slowly dribbling smoke from both nostrils.

Davy slumped defensively on his bar stool. “When ye wis askin’ aboot Morag and the bairns, Ah figured ye wis fuckin’ wi’ ma heid.” But knowing that there was a perfectly reasonable supernatural explanation somehow made it all right. Ye cannae blame Auld Nick for pushin’ yer buttons. Davy reached out for his glass again: “’Scuse me. Ah didnae think ye existed.”

“Feel free to take your time.” The stranger smiled faintly. “I find atheists refreshing, but it does take a little longer than usual to get down to business.”

“Aye, weel, concedin’ for the moment that ye are the deil, Ah dinnae ken whit ye want wi’ the likes o’ me.” Davy cradled his beer protectively.

“Ah’m naebody.” He shivered in the sudden draught as one of the students-leaving-pushed through the curtain, admitting a flurry of late-May snowflakes.

“So? You may be nobody, but your lucky number just came up.” The stranger smiled devilishly. “Did you never think you’d win the Lottery?”

“Aye, weel, if hauf the stories they tell about ye are true, Ah’d rather it wis the ticket, ye ken? Or are ye gonnae say ye’ve been stitched up by the kirk?”

“Something like that.” The Devil nodded sagely. “Look, you’re not stupid, so I’m not going to bullshit you. What it is, is I’m not the only one of me working this circuit. I’ve got a quota to meet, but there aren’t enough politicians and captains of industry to go around, and anyway, they’re boring. All they ever want is money, power, or good, hot, kinky sex without any comebacks from their constituents. Poor folks are so much more creative in their desperation, don’t you think? And so much more likely to believe in the Rules, too.”

“The Rules?” Davy found himself staring at his companion in perplexity. “Nae the Law, right?”

“Do as thou wilt shall be all of the Law,” quoth the Devil, then he paused as if he’d tasted something unpleasant.

“Ye wis sayin’?”

“Love is the Law, Love under Will,” the Devil added dyspeptically.

“That’s a’?” Davy stared at him.

“My employer requires me to quote chapter and verse when challenged.” As he said “employer”, the expression on the Devil’s face made Davy shudder. “And she monitors these conversations for compliance.”

“But whit aboot the rest o’ it, aye? If ye’re the deil, whit aboot the Ten Commandments?”

“Oh, those are just Rules,” said the Devil, smiling. “I’m really proud of them.”

“Ye made them a’ up?” Davy said accusingly. “Just tae fuck wi’ us?”

“Well, yes, of course I did! And all the other Rules. They work really well, don’t you think?”

Davy made a fist and stared at the back of it. LOVE. “Ye cunt. Ah still dinnae believe in ye.”

The Devil shrugged. “Nobody’s asking you to believe in me. You don’t, and I’m still here, aren’t I? If it makes things easier, think of me as the garbage collection subroutine of the strong anthropic principle. And they”-he stabbed a finger in the direction of the overhead LEDs-“work by magic, for all you know.”

Davy picked up his glass and drained it philosophically. The hell of it was, the Devil was right: now he thought about it, he had no idea how the lights worked, except that electricity had something to do with it. “Ah’ll have anither. Ye’re buyin’.”

“No I’m not.” The Devil snapped his fingers and two full glasses appeared on the bar, steaming slightly. Davy picked up the nearest one. It was hot to the touch, even though the beer inside it was at cellar temperature, and it smelled slightly sulphurous. “Anyway, I owe you.”