"Mr. Vane. You have wandered onto the wrong stage."
The blind alley was so quiet that Sharlo could hear droplets of fog rolling down the brickwork.
His back pressed to the wall, his mind worked at a speed unfamiliar even to him. The man knew his name. The man had followed him all the way here. The man's eyes held the light of a spotlight.
And above the grey-coated man's head hung two lines of amber writing.
They were far clearer and longer than the line above Thomas, like a complete stage direction:
【He will take two steps forward. The prey will retreat. Fear will seize him, and his legs will weaken.】
【He will pluck away the prey's memories of this day as one plucks a flower past its freshness.】
Sharlo stared at the two lines, his throat dry.
The prey was him.
This "script" had already written everything that would happen next: he would retreat; his knees would fail; then this man would pluck away his memories—everything he had learned today.
Thomas. Grey eyes. The Golden Iris. The skipping song.
"There's no need to be nervous." The grey-coated man spoke first, spreading his hands to show he carried no weapon. His tone was as agreeable as a priest selling scripture door to door.
"We've been watching you for two days. The bill house, the Anchor and Bell, the newspaper archive—in the correct order and by the proper route. Old Vane taught you tolerably well."
"I haven't come to dispose of you tonight. I've come to deliver a message."
"A message."
"Two sentences. First: the faded people signed of their own free will. The government cannot interfere in a voluntary transaction, and neither can you. Go back and tell Miss Hart that everyone keeps their own accounts, and advise her to accept the balance."
The grey-coated man paused, his voice growing gentler.
"The second sentence is free of charge. This afternoon on Tailor Street, you copied down several lines on page fourteen of your black notebook."
Sharlo's blood went cold. Only the two of them stood in the alley, and no one had been on that street when he copied the song.
"If the church catches you with those lines, they hang you. If we see them, we take you. You belong to neither side."
"So the wisest course"—the grey coat made a light gesture, as though flicking dust from his sleeve—"is to forget today. Only one day, beginning with your morning coffee. You'll sleep well, wake tomorrow as usual, and resume worrying about the rent."
"Rent is a good thing, Mr. Vane. Men who worry about rent live the longest."
"And if I refuse?"
"You misunderstand." Genuine apology entered the man's voice. "I am not negotiating. The script is already written."
The grey-coated man took two steps forward.
Exactly as the script had said.
Sharlo's back met brick. Fear came indeed, cold and creeping up from his tailbone.
His legs began to weaken, his knees as if someone had pulled their pins. Everything unfolded according to those two lines, as though they were not a prediction but a fact already decided, and he had merely arrived to play his part after the event.
Just before his knees could buckle, an exquisitely ill-timed voice spoke in Sharlo's head.
It belonged to the president of his old drama club, who never went three sentences without invoking "the rules."
—What is the first rule of improvisation?
—There are no mistakes onstage. Only offers you failed to accept.
What the man had offered him was not death, but a script.
The script said he would retreat.
Sharlo stepped forward.
The grey-coated man stopped.
For the first time, an expression appeared on that eminently forgettable face.
It was very slight: one eyebrow rose half a fraction, like an actor whose partner had delivered the wrong line and who could not decide whether to continue.
The amber writing above his head quivered like a reflection touched by a fingertip.
"You are supposed to step back," the grey-coated man said, with what sounded like honest confusion.
"I know." Sharlo's knees were still weak and his voice unsteady, but he forced himself to continue, and to drive the scene deeper into absurdity.
"But that wall was whitewashed recently. If it rubs off on my coat, it won't come out. This is my only coat."
"If you must pluck out a memory, could you choose a useful one? I recommend last Tuesday. I did nothing all day. Excellent value."
The grey-coated man blinked.
The spotlight-white gleam in his pupils wavered and refocused, like a machine processing an input outside its design.
The words above his head began to shudder violently, every stroke twisting out of shape—
【He will pluck away the prey's memories of this—】
【He will pluck away—】
【He will—】
"What are you doing?" A crack entered the grey coat's voice for the first time.
"Accepting your scene," Sharlo said.
Then he hurled the pocket watch straight at the man's face.
It was not a clever manoeuvre. It was the least clever manoeuvre in the world—and precisely because it was not clever, no script would ever have written it.
The grey coat turned his head to avoid the watch. In that half-second, Sharlo closed the distance and used not a fighting technique but the "stage fall" taught in combat rehearsal—a frightening-looking grapple and roll that borrowed the other actor's momentum.
Together, they crashed into a puddle at the foot of the wall.
Icy mist-water splashed into Sharlo's face. He knew nothing whatever about fighting.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
He merely clung to the man's arm like a drowning sailor clutching a life ring and shouted with all the strength in his body, "Robbery! In broad daylight!"
It was the middle of the night. Broad daylight was nonsense.
But nonsense had a power of its own: a window lit on the third floor.
"Let go." The man's voice brushed Sharlo's ear, suddenly soft and sweet, like warm water mixed with honey.
"Let go. Sleep. You're so tired. You want to let go—"
The voice burrowed into his mind, and Sharlo's eyelids truly did grow heavy.
Windows opened one after another above them, accompanied by irritated curses. The sweet voice continued, and through his crushing weariness Sharlo thought: This is another line. He's feeding me a line and trying to make me play it.
Very well.
Accept it, then twist it.
"I am tired," Sharlo slurred at the top of his lungs. "Ten years of marriage and you come home at midnight every night! Where were you when the child had a fever?"
"I'm holding on to this arm today, and wherever you go, I go—"
A head thrust out of the third-floor window.
"What's all this racket in the middle of the night?"
"Married couple fighting!" Sharlo shouted.
"We are not—" the grey coat began.
"And now he denies it!" Sharlo screamed himself hoarse.
A fourth window lit, then a fifth. Someone threw down half a basin of water, and curses rose along both sides of the alley.
The grey-coated man went rigid—Sharlo distinctly felt the arm in his grip stiffen.
Under so many watching eyes, something on which the man depended had begun to fail.
Amid a chorus of "Take it home if you want to quarrel!" the honeyed enchantment of his voice sounded utterly absurd, like the curtain being torn away halfway through a grand opera to expose every mechanism beneath the stage in full daylight.
"Madman..." The grey coat's voice trembled—not with fear of Sharlo, but fear of something else. "You madman. You scriptless madman—"
He tore himself free with unnatural force and flung Sharlo bodily into the wall.
Darkness flooded Sharlo's vision. By the time he caught his breath, the grey coat had retreated deep into the alley and drawn something from inside his clothes.
A candle.
Grey, short, and thick, with a ring of indistinct markings carved around its body.
Sharlo would never forget what followed.
The grey coat looked at him once. There was no hatred in that gaze, only a bottomless, businesslike fear, as though he dreaded something other than the madman before him far more.
Then he opened his mouth, pushed the whole candle inside, bit through it, and swallowed.
"After the curtain falls," he said through a mouthful of wax, his voice blurred but calm, "there are no actors."
He collapsed like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
Sharlo stood frozen for two seconds, then lunged toward him.
The man was no longer breathing. What leaked from the corners of his mouth was not blood but grey wax, rapidly congealing, with threads of fine gold suspended within it like spent wicks.
That eminently forgettable face was becoming even more forgettable before Sharlo's eyes. Its features remained, but his gaze slipped off them without finding purchase, like trying to remember a patch of fog.
No words remained above the dead man's head.
"Hey." Sharlo heard the tremor in his own voice.
He reached to check the man's breath, but before his hand was halfway there—
"Don't touch him."
A woman's voice came from the mouth of the alley. It was not loud, but every word drove into the air like a nail.
Sharlo turned.
A young woman in a long black coat stood at the alley entrance, backlit by the gas lamp. One hand hung by her side with a brass whistle between its fingers.
In the other, she carried a small lantern with a frosted glass shade, burning cold white.
She came closer.
Sharlo made out a face both young and exhausted, with pale crescents of shadow beneath the eyes. Most unsettling was the way she looked at people.
She did not blink.
Not at all.
"The Vesper Bureau." She flashed the brass badge inside her coat: a bell with a pendulum hanging from it.
"Duskwarden Viola Raven. Everything that has occurred here is, as of this moment, a secret of the Crown. You—name, occupation, and—"
She glanced at the body on the ground, then back at Sharlo.
For the first time, something like confusion showed on her face.
"Explain," she said, "why the final words of a Candle-Swallower were to call you a madman. His kind have infiltrated Kandelburg for three years, and we never once caught so much as his shadow."
"He should not have made a mistake, much less destroyed himself."
"I..." Sharlo opened his mouth.
Then he noticed a faint line of amber writing above Viola Raven's head, like the last trace of warmth in an overburned wick:
【She has not slept in six years.】
Sharlo swallowed what he had been about to say and substituted, "It's a long story. May I pick up my pocket watch first? It was the first weapon I threw, and I've grown attached to it."
Viola studied him for three seconds.
Something flickered in her eyes. Sharlo would later learn that this was how lies appeared in her vision.
What made her frown on this rain-soaked night was that not one word spoken by the mud-covered young man before her flickered. His was an absurd honesty in the most literal sense.
"Pick it up," she said. "Then come with me. You have a great many long stories to tell tonight."
A coach waited outside the alley.
It was not a carriage—or rather, technically it was, but the horse had not moved once. It was black as a piece cut from the night.
The coach body was a flat dark grey without insignia, its windows frosted.
Sharlo later learned that Duskwardens called such a vehicle a "curtain coach"—curtain as in final curtain.
Whichever street it visited, that street's events were considered finished for the night.
Before climbing in, Sharlo saw several others in black coats enter the alley. They moved with crisp efficiency.
One nailed a SEWER REPAIRS sign to the wall. Two unfurled a sheet of grey oilcloth.
Another wore not the Vesper Bureau's black but a water-green robe embroidered at the cuff with a silver wave.
This man crouched beside the grey coat's corpse but neither examined nor searched it. He placed a tiny blue-glass lamp on its chest and began chanting softly, his melody rising and falling like a boatman's song.
"The Stillwater Society." Viola followed Sharlo's gaze. "They ferry souls. By law, the Stillwater Society may attend whenever anyone dies. Don't stare. They dislike it."
"What is he reciting?"
"A boat ticket," Viola said. "It's read to the dead, so they know which boat to board."
She paused, then added, "You needn't understand. Get in."
The coach was warmer inside.
Its seats were worn leather; paper, pens, and ink were secured by brass fittings to the small table opposite.
Viola sat across from him, drew a folding board from beneath the seat, opened it, and pushed the clipped form toward him.
A line of type headed the page: Supernatural Incident Witness Statement · Form A.
"Now?" Sharlo looked at his dripping sleeve.
"Memory is most accurate in the first two hours," Viola said. "Begin when you realised you were being followed. Time, place, the subject's appearance and speech, your response."
"Be precise. Write legibly—the women in Transcription have complained too many times."
Sharlo picked up the pen, dipped it in ink, and wrote the first line.
Then he stopped.
"A question. How many people will see what I write?"
"The assigned agent, Archives, and the district director if escalation is necessary." Viola looked at him. "What are you trying to conceal?"
The bluntness made the question easier to answer.
Beneath the coach lamp, Sharlo looked earnestly at the agent who never blinked.
"Tonight I saw things that I don't understand myself. I can write them all down without omitting a word—but on one condition."
"I want to tell them in person to someone empowered to make decisions, without Transcription in between. It isn't that I distrust you, Agent Raven."
"I have a feeling that the fewer people who know what I saw, the better for those who know it."
Viola stared at him.
The coach was very quiet. The wheels rolled evenly and endlessly over wet stone beneath them.
Something adjusted its focus in her pupils—a tiny movement Sharlo would later come to recognise as her way of "looking" at his words.
Then she withdrew her gaze, turned the form to its last page, and pointed to a field.
"Write 'Request Level-One Hearing' under Remarks, then sign," she said. "Regulations grant that right to witnesses. No one has invoked it in ten years. I'd nearly forgotten the form."
"Why does no one invoke it?"
"Because requesting a Level-One Hearing means," Viola said, settling back against the seat, her voice perfectly level, "that you consider what is inside your head important enough to drag the district director out of bed at midnight."
"If your judgment is wrong, the time you waste is converted into time in detention."
Sharlo thought of the grey coat swallowing the candle.
He thought of the invisible words hanging over the heads of an entire city.
He entered the request in the remarks field and signed his name.
Viola folded the board and knocked against the front wall of the coach. The driver answered outside, and their speed increased.
She looked at Sharlo once more, the late-night lamplight stirring in the shadows beneath her eyes.
"Now, while we still have twenty minutes before we reach the Bureau," she said, "tell me everything from the beginning. Not for the record. For me."
"I need to decide whether I testify for you tomorrow morning or collect your corpse."
Sharlo told her.
This time, he recounted every detail from the alley—except the writing. He would save that for "someone empowered to make decisions."
As he finished, the coach passed beneath a bell tower.
Viola remained silent for half a street, then abruptly said:
"Married couple fighting."
"...What?"
"You faced something that could command the human mind with its voice, and you shouted that it was a married couple fighting."
She watched the street through the frosted window, where gas lamps flowed past in two elongated trails.
"Three years. The Bureau convened eleven special conferences about 'Sweet Voice.' We lost an agent. The files stand taller than you."
"And the solution, in the end, was a married couple fighting."
She turned back.
Those eyes that had not closed in six years shone in the dimness, studying Sharlo gravely from head to foot as if assessing an object's value anew.
"Mr. Consultant," she said, "either you are the luckiest amateur I have ever met, or you are one of the most frightening things in this city. I personally hope it is the former."
"Why?"
"Because if it's the latter," Viola said, "I'll be the one who has to collect your body."