“Bureaucratic red tape, paper errors, fumbling in high office,” Blake said, by way of explanation.
“That’s an institution peculiar to your own race,” Galiotor Fils said. “We haven’t ‘red tape’ in our own government.”
“An honest oversight, then.”
“I can’t believe that all fifty of Tesserax’s associates at the Los Angeles embassy could forget me. One, yes, or even a dozen. But certainly not all of them, sir.”
“What else?” Brutus asked.
“Every time I try to make an appointment with the embassy doctor, who was supposed to have treated Tesserax, I get put off. He’s always busy with patients or away or in surgery or something.” Galiotor Fils wiped at his huge eyes with both hands, tentacles wriggling, as if pulling off his weariness. “I attempted to learn something from the maseni supernaturals who come and go at the embassy, but I lost out there as well. They fed me the same line as the embassy officials, as if they’d studied the same script.”
Jessie pulled out his shape-changing chair and sat down behind the desk again, waited until the chair stopped gurgling and was fitted firmly to him, then said, “You think that the maseni and the maseni supernaturals at the embassy are cooperating to hide something about your brood brother’s death?”
“Yes. I know how strange that sounds. Though spirits can learn to live harmoniously with creatures of flesh and blood, and vice versa, they rarely present such a monolithic front on any particular topic.”
“Interesting,” Jessie said. “Conspiracy of a sort between the real and the spirit world.”
“One thing,” Brutus growled.
Galiotor Fils looked at the hound. “Yes?”
“I don’t know much about maseni mythology,” Brutus said. “When one of you dies, what happens to the ‘soul’?”
“Any of a dozen different things,” Galiotor Fils said. “Tesserax might have become a ghost, much like the sort that you people believe in. Or he might have been changed into a Great Tree, assigned to suffer the tortures of the sentient inanimate before recyling—ah, this gets difficult to explain in terms you people would understand.”
“It doesn’t matter just now,” Jessie said. “In short, Tesserax would have returned in some form, and you would have known about it.”
“Exactly,” the alien said. “Immediately upon learning of his death, I paid to have a constant call on the netherworld communications network, so that he would come to me first thing. He hasn’t answered it. He would, if he could. Therefore—”
“Perhaps he isn’t dead,” Jessie suggested.
“In my central heart, I hope that this is true,” Galiotor Fils said, placing a hand across his abdomen to indicate the seat of his emotions. “However, I also fear that something even worse than death has happened to him.”
“Like what?” Brutus asked.
The alien stood, suddenly, towering almost to the ceiling, unfolding out of the easy chair like a paper accordion coming to full length. He leaned over Blake’s desk, his palms flat on the blotter, his twelve tentacles wriggling madly, and he said, “I am afraid, Mr. Blake, that Tesserax was buried without the proper ceremony, and that his soul—his soul has been dissipated.”
The last few words came out in a strangled gasp. Everyone was silent in the wake of this display, until Galiotor Fils could recover. His face had blanched, and his whole body had locked into a twisted, rigid stance.
At last, the alien said, “Forgive me for getting so emotional.”
“That’s okay,” Blake said, not able to meet the creature’s gaze. “Can you go on? Can you explain just what you meant—when you said that Tesserax’s soul may have been dissipated?”
Galiotor Fils grimaced, a horrible sight on that nearly featureless, yellow face. “Yes, of course. You see…. Maseni mythology holds that, unless certain burial procedures are observed, the soul of the departed will simply disintegrate. He will never return in another form, will have no spiritual life. He will be, plainly, dead. Because this has long been a maseni belief, millennia old, it has come to be fact. As you know, the supernatural is at the mercy of human creation, just as humanity is at the mercy of the spirits’ creations. It is a closed circle. God created us, yet we created God, sort of like your riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”