Location: Cafe Noria — The Ventiquillist's Stall
Time: Morning — The Plea
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The morning crowd had thinned. Cafe Noria sat at the corner of an alley off Mercer—not a shop, not a building, just a stall with a striped awning and a folding counter and a battered sign that read COFFEE — TEA — PASTRIES — VENTIQUILLIST ENQUIRIES.
Behind the counter, a tall wooden cabinet stood open. It was a thing of brass and glass and old dark wood, its shelves lined with little wooden figures—each one about the height of a hand, each one humanoid, each one slightly different. They were jointed. They were articulated. They were, if you did not look too closely, beautiful.
They were, if you did look closely, wrong.
The little figures were not carved. Not entirely. If you looked at the joints—the wrists, the elbows, the necks—you could see something moving underneath the wood. Something thin. Something pale. Something that coiled.
A man staggered into the alley, and the crowd parted around him without knowing why.
His name was Xhanti. He was Samrajya-born—the dark hair, the deep brown skin, the high cheekbones, the salwar and the faded leather coat—and he was, by any measure, a wreck. His coat was torn at the shoulder. His shirt was stiff with old blood. His left hand was wrapped in a bandage that had not been changed in days, and the fingers it covered were not responding properly when he tried to move them.
The sound of him was the worst part. Everyone in that alley could hear it without quite knowing they could—a humming in the teeth, a thin strained note like a violin string tuned past its pitch and held there by stubbornness alone. Under the hum there was a low, tight, coiled sound—the sound of a man holding himself together with both hands and running out of fingers.
He made it to the stall. He put one hand on the counter. Then his knees went out from under him and he went down.
Chicky came out of the back of the stall.
She was nineteen, in a hoodie two sizes too large and sneakers that had been white once, and she moved like a girl skipping through a schoolyard—one-two, one-two, arms swinging, head tilting side to side as if she were listening to a song no one else could hear. She was smiling. She had been smiling for a very long time.
"Mister Xhanti!" she said. "What are you doing out here? You look awful."
"I need—" Xhanti's voice cracked. "I need to see Timothy. I need to see him now."
The girl's smile did not change. But the air around her did.
It came off her slowly—not pressure, not heat, but a settling, as if the floor of the alley had remembered that it was made of earth and the earth had remembered that it did not care for the thing standing on it. The old women at the far end of the alley stopped talking. A dog that had been sniffing at a bin went quiet and backed away.
Xhanti felt it in his bones. He did not know what it was—he knew only that it was there, and that he had heard rumors of the strange arts the Wycliffe family practiced, of powers that were said to come from somewhere beyond the material plane, of things that were used to occupy vessels and hold them fast. He did not know what the girl in the hoodie was. He only knew that she was not only a girl, and that he would very much like to be somewhere else.
"His cousin is busy," Chicky said. "What could be so important that you'd try to break through here?"
Xhanti swallowed.
"It's about the Pyre Base," he said. "They're—something happened. Something happened to them."
The girl's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"Come in," she said. "He'll see you."
---
The inside of the stall was smaller than the outside, which should not have been possible. There was a table, a lamp, a small square of floor covered with a thin cushion, and on the cushion sat a young man in a dark suit.
Timothy Wycliffe was perhaps twenty-five, and he looked like something out of an old photograph—smooth, precise, immaculate. His hands were folded in his lap. His eyes were the color of old bronze. When he looked at Xhanti, it was like being weighed.
"Kneel," he said.
Xhanti knelt.
Timothy uncrossed his legs, crossed them again, and gestured at the floor with one hand, palm-up.
"The floor is yours," he said. "Speak."
Xhanti spoke.
"It was weeks ago," he said. "More than weeks. I've been—I've been trying to get here. I've been hiding. I've been—"
"From the beginning," Timothy said.
Xhanti nodded. He took a breath. He steadied himself.
"I was at the base," he said. "It was a normal night. We were—we were doing drills. Nothing unusual. And then four of the cadets came back from a field assignment, and they were not themselves."
Timothy's eyes did not move. "Not themselves how."
"They were—they were wrong. Their eyes. Their voices. They walked like—" Xhanti stopped. "I don't know how to say it. In Samrajya we have stories. Old ones. About things that walk into a body and wear it like a coat. I always thought they were stories. I always thought they were for children."
"And these four?"
"I thought—at first—I thought they were sick. The base doctor said the same. But then they started—" He stopped again. His hands were trembling. "They started taking. They didn't fight. Not the way we fight. They just—they put their hands on people. And the people came apart. Not with fire. Not with blades. Just—" He made a gesture that had no meaning. "—apart. Into mist. Into nothing. And the four of them didn't even look like they were exerting themselves."
Timothy leaned forward slightly. "Go on."
"I tried to stop them. I'm a fully realized circuit bound—I've been one for four years—I thought I could at least buy time for the others to escape. I did fight them." His voice cracked. "I put my foot through one of their chests. I took another by the neck and drove his head into the ground. I—"
He stopped. He was looking at the floor.
"I did everything I know how to do. And they—" He looked up. "They just stood back up. Like I hadn't touched them. Like I wasn't worth touching. And then—"
"And then?"
"And then I saw the others. The ones I was supposed to be protecting. They were being harvested. The four of them were going through the base like—like farmers. Pulling the trainees out one by one. Doing that thing with their hands. And the trainees—" He stopped. His voice had gone very small. "They didn't scream. They didn't have time. They just came apart."
Timothy was silent.
"I ran," Xhanti said. "I ran and I hid and I have been running and hiding ever since. I have been recovering—look at me—look at me—I came here because I thought if anyone could explain it, you could. Because you're Wycliffe. Because your family knows things. Because—"
Timothy stood up.
Xhanti stopped talking.
"What happened to the base?" Timothy asked.
"I—I don't know. I've been—"
"What happened to the base?"
"I don't know! I was running! I was hiding! I—"
"Then you can go down with them."
Timothy gestured, and Chicky stepped past him.
The girl was still smiling. She stepped past the kneeling man, and her hand came down on the top of his skull, and her fingers—thin, long, jointed a little more sharply than a human's fingers should have been jointed—spread across his hair.
Xhanti did not scream. Not immediately. He only looked up, and his eyes went wide, and—
The room was silent for a long moment.
Then Chicky stepped back. Her hand came away clean. Her smile did not change.
Xhanti did not move. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. But there was nothing behind them anymore.
Timothy walked to the little window at the back of the stall and looked out at the morning alley.
"If the Erynder clan find out about this," he said, quietly, "and no reasonable explanation is given—" He did not finish. He did not need to.
Behind him, Chicky began, very softly, to hum.