GARLAND HEIGHTS—NOVEMBER 23rd, 1992 | EARLY MORNING

  ?

  Esme flipped the sign from open to closed.

  She drew the handle open and stepped outside, and went to close the door again.

  Thirty-four-years of age looked back at her in the reflection.

  Her chestnut orange hair settled along her shoulders as it usually did. Her freckles were as freckly as ever, and the slight indents along the sides of her eyes remained a fixture so permanent that they may as well declare themselves as scars. Her dull green button up was tight around her neck, and her rolled up sleeves revealed tattooed arms covered in the occasional cut or patch of grime. It wasn’t what she’d expected she’d look like, nearly halfway to forty, and a ghost of what used to be a wide-eyed twenty something fresh out of the Brinehaven College of the Arts.

  Esme checked the knob three times over.

  She’d locked it, yes, but a locked door was a far cry from a guarantee, and she only had so much money to pay for sigilmasonry, and her budget had, thus far, only allowed for her to get the door to her back room and the door leading to her loft protected. Everything but the front door, then, was primed to thwart intruders. Everything but where her finished products were.

  A foolish but not irreparable error. Garland Heights was the safest of Brinehaven’s boroughs, but not entirely immune to the occasional thief, wannabe gangster, or spontaneously emergent fiend. It was the price one paid for living in the city, and Esme was convinced that no amount of top-grade sigilmasonry would keep any single space safe from the city’s tendrils of depravity and unsavory enterprise. Fortunately, Esme had tasked Tania with keeping an eye on the shop, and stressed that her departure would be brief.

  And brief it had to be.

  Esme couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Allure Artificery unattended for longer than a few hours at most. It was, she had long since determined, a part of her that required tending too and nurturing. A shop made sentient not by any arrangement of components, conditions, or congruency, but by a necessity to engage. To create, at times without a particular outcome in mind other than the process of sorting through it itself.

  Difficult projects were favored. As were commissions that required a level of deftness. Leroy’s gun would be both: a bastard child of a challenge that required a swift hand and an eye for detail, with materials yet to be decided. And the arbiter, lackadaisical as he was, gave her only a few requirements—the end result had to be reliable, simple, clean, and practical. With any luck, Esme could satisfy three out of the four of those requirements.

  All of which was assuming that her usual supplier had anything remotely useful in stock. He—Martin Hart—was a headache, and eccentric to a fault, but he was, without a doubt, far, far more bearable than the woman Esme had dealt with only a day prior. Esme shuffled her hand into her pocket and withdrew a neatly folded piece of paper. She’d forgotten to empty it from her pockets.

  Her face twisted into a scowl.

  ?

  Esme slapped paper onto the woman’s desk. “Read it again, you old crone.”

  On the opposite side of her was a large woman. Fat, if Esme was being truthful. Fat with a self important gaze and a cunning face, in spite of its softness and its poorly hidden wrinkles. Diana Bisschop was about thirty years removed from her prime and still clinging onto a past she wished was the present, adorned in a black blouse tucked into a long pencil skirt that barely fit over her size-forty-something hips. A honey colored ascot was tied around her neck, and pearl earrings hung from her saggy ears. Esme wasn’t fond of her pixie cut, or her gray hair, or her shop.

  Her shop was, in a way, exiting in mirror to her, like a reflection of physicality made up not of further body parts, but odds and ends and baubles. Boxes and crates and barrels were lined between cabinets that practically leaked out collections of jars and vials and metal containers.

  Diana Bisschop called herself a reagent supplier, and her shop, a hole-in-the-wall only a few blocks down from Esme’s own storefront, was her own refurbished living room. Calling her a salesperson, too, was generous at best.

  She was a hoarder who just so happened to have a nearly inexhaustible personal collection that remained the envy of every aspiring alchemist. Her brownstone home, nestled between two high rises, was three floors of storage and maybe a bedroom and a bathroom. If there was a kitchen, Esme had never been able to find it. Every aspect of space felt large yet crammed, like the body she forced into clothes that were about two sizes too small for her.

  Diana slipped the paper back towards Esme. “Esme, darling. The answer is no.”

  Esme’s inhale was as short and brief as it was noticeable: a nostril-guided announcement that spared nobody’s feelings. Especially not Diana Bisschop’s.

  “I believe I was quite clear,” Esme said.

  “And I’m to believe you, then? Hah! Do you take me for a stupid woman, Esme? Do you?” Diana asked.

  “At the moment, yes,” Esme stated plainly.

  Diana leered at her crankily.

  “A favor is owed to be on behalf of the Civic and Occult Authority, Diana, as a result of me lending them my business and my residence for their clandestine quartering of—”

  “Ach! So many words for what I imagine to be such a simple thing. In English, darling, and not in whatever manner of speaking they crammed down your throat at the college,” Diana said sourly.

  Esme rested a hand on her hip. “To that end, you could’ve said ‘simplify’. One word. Instead, you used many.”

  “Oh, get out!” Diana howled.

  “I am doing their department a favor. They are agreeing to cover certain costs as a result of this. You’ll get your money. I’ll see to it.”

  “Well, anyway, I don’t see why you are here,” Diana said, standoffish. “It is rarer and rarer that I see your face here. I am beginning to believe you may not like me, darling.”

  “I don’t,” Esme admitted. “And I’m here less because there are fewer and fewer things that Martin doesn’t have.”

  “Oh, bah! Don’t you utter that lickspittle’s name here, not in my place of business,” Diana said sourly.

  “Look. Clearly, there are some things he doesn’t have. Hence, I am here,” Esme said softly, as if to alleviate the fact she’d mentioned his name. “Reagents that he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot stick.”

  “And you believe I have this, then? Read it again, girl! These materials are as distasteful as they are difficult to acquire.’

  Diana’s pudgy fingers moved the slip of paper in front of Esme. She stared at the list, which was blessed with Janice’s very neat and very precise handwriting:

  ECTOPLASM, 2g

  MENSTRUAL BLOOD, 3g

  BLACK GOAT’S MILK, 1.5g

  GOLEM DERMIS (x2), 2g

  POWDERED GRANITE (x2), 0.5g

  GRAVESITE CLAY (x2), 0.2g

  OX GALL, 1.5g

  STAG ANTLER SHAVINGS, 0.5g

  SANGUINARIA, 2g

  HENBANE, 0.1g

  HOREHOND, 0.7g

  CINDERED VALERIAN ROOT, 3g

  EYEBRIGHT, 0.2g

  GARGOYLE DUST, 0.6g

  HAWKWEED, 0.3g

  GOAT TALLOW, 1g

  ROWAN ASH, 2g

  POWDERED CHURCH BELL BRONZE, 2g

  TRAPPED BARROW WIGHT BREATH, 0.8g

  KINETICSIST BLOOD, 4g

  “Roseviscous, two vials of Stoneskin, Beastseid, Vigor, Fleetfoot, Breker Tonic,” Diana muttered. “You are no alchemist, Esme O’Doherty, and I fail to see the use in even procuring all of these items for you.”

  “It’s for a friend,” Esme clarified. “And if you’re getting money all the same, what difference does it make?”

  “Hah! Money? I see no money,” Diana said, placing a hand over her brows, squinting, and surveying the room. “Perhaps you have hid it somewhere? A cabinet of mine? Between the couch cushions I rest my ass upon? I see no glint nor gleam, nor even a shred of green.”

  Esme rose her hands to her face and closed her fingers around her nose, exhaling behind her fingers.

  “If that is all, darling, you may leave. No money, no reagents.”

  “Whatever you want, Diana, I’ll make you it,” Esme said, lowering her fingers from her face.

  Diana let out a breathy chortle. “Esme O’Doherty! Darling! You might have saved yourself the trouble of this whole wretched exchange had you simply started with that! Hah!”

  ?

  Esme turned the van off and removed the keys from the ignition.

  Her Volkswagon Vanagon, colored a dull green much like the button up she favored to wear, was second only to her shop. Few cars were as square, and fewer still as pleasing to the eyes. She stepped out of the car, closed the door, and stared at the warehouse she was meant to enter.

  Martin Hart’s place of business didn’t have a name.

  It wasn’t registered on any books, and it certainly wasn’t subject to the kind of foot traffic that one would find in Garland Heights. The building was square-shaped, around two stories high, with half rusted metal wall panels. Five wooden steps lead to a small concrete platform, which led to a set of bolted and closed doors framed by steel-barred windows on either side. A wide awning with holes in it fluttered gently just above that.

  She’d taken plenty of trips to Martin’s, and with each trip, she exposed herself to the immutable fact that going there would never be quite so pleasant. His warehouse was on the far east side of Garland Heights, right on the border of where it met Dockside. And around his warehouse were many, many empty ones; each of them boarded up or covered in caution tape or sealed off with notices of demolition dates titled ‘to be determined’ which would never come to pass.

  And save for Martin’s own vehicle, a janky old truck that looked about fifty years out of date, Esme had never seen any other parked cars in his small, isolatory stretch of urbanity. He was deliberate about that; or so he’d told her. One customer at a time, and never more than one accompanying guest, if their presence was absolutely required.

  Not far from them and looming in the distance was the Trevin Lighthouse, which stood out like a verifiable monolith among the sheets and layers of Brinehaven fog, which swelled here, between Garland Heights and Dockside, more than anywhere else in the city. Esme, in all of her years, had failed to go to it even once. Not that she had such an option—entry wasn’t exactly granted to just anybody.

  Esme shook herself free of her stupor, and continued along towards Martin’s warehouse. The closer she stepped, the more obvious the mosaic of sigilmasonry along its exterior became visible. Not a shred of the wall panels was spared. Glyphs and sigils and connective arrays made it not just a storage depot, but a fortress.

  Esme knocked along the metal door.

  She heard shuffling behind it. Panicked and slight steps, that she’d grown all too used to hearing.

  A sliding panel shifted open. A pair of lips surrounded by a brown-haired beard twitched.

  “N-name? Name? What is your name?” a voice asked.

  “Martin, it’s Esme,” she said plainly.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “O-oh. Oh. Esme. Yes. Miss O’Doherty. Yes, yes, yes, let me open the door for you,” Martin said, his voice shrill and crackly.

  Martin’s door was the door of all doors. Heavy, steel-bolted, with levers and cranks and cogs that whirred behind it like some sort of engine. Hums of arcanic energy filled in the gaps of these machinist whispers, verifying what Esme imagined to be at least five to six different locks that required a sigil-marked key to open.

  A grating and punctuated creak prompted Esme to wince as the door was pulled open.

  Martin Hart was a small man, no taller than five-foot-four, adorned in a tie-dyed tee shirt that was worn beneath a very svelte pinstriped vest. He had a stopwatch somewhere in his pockets, attached by means of a rusted label chain. Khaki shorts revealed skinny legs, half of which were covered in very tall socks patterned with rare birds. Sandals covered his feet.

  His brown beard was almost as long as his hair, which extended well beyond his shoulders.Small and beady eyes looked pleased to see Esme, which endowed Martin with a look of pureness that Esme would never tell him about. Not quite childish, but innocent nonetheless, like the man was incapable of doing any harm to anyone for any reason.

  “I-It is good to see you, yes, Miss O’Doherty,” Martin said with a smile. He was missing one of his teeth; his left canine.

  “You too, Martin,” she said, stepping inside.

  He had a labeling gun in his free hand, and a very crowded key ring in the other. He closed the door behind Esme and, with a great deal of practiced efficiency, re-locked each of the six locks with his sigil-marked keys.

  “Can you p-please hold this, just for one moment, Miss O’Doherty?” Martin asked, holding up the labeling gun.

  “Sure, Martin,” she said, taking hold of it.

  “Thank you, Miss O’Doherty,” he said kindly.

  Esme watched him continue to put everything into place. Indeed, the back side of the door was retrofitted with all manner of clamps and levers and whirring gears. It was a complicated mess, a machination that even Esme failed to fully comprehend—organized chaos, really, that made no intuitive sense to anybody other than Martin. Once the door was secured, Martin paced over to a desk and work area, which was tucked in the immediate right corner of the building.

  Rows and rows of clunky computers had been set up alongside a set of blackboards, framed by stacks of perfectly aligned papers, manilla envelopes, and sorting bins. Martin placed down his labeling gun into a specific drawer, nodded to himself, and paced back over to Esme.

  He held his arm out for Esme to grab, as if they were preparing to stroll down the streets of Garland Heights on some romantic outing. Martin, however, never quite meant it like that. It was a gesture of good will. He’d always been a gentlemen. He didn’t give the impression that he would smell nice, but he always had some kind of cologne on.

  “Y-You,” Martin began, smiling. “Are looking for something particular, then?”

  Martin’s warehouse was the antithesis of Diana Bisschop’s hoarder’s house of a business. Rows upon rows of shelves made the space claustrophobic, maybe, but everything was organized into either metal boxes, wooden boxes, plastic boxes, or cardboard bins. Every aisle was labeled, every piece of containment and storage accounted for, and every part of the floor was clean in spite of the warehouse’s otherwise unsavory interior.

  “A few things, yes,” Esme said. “First, Martin, I am artificing a gun.”

  “C-Component?” he asked.

  “Something related to or adjacent to the cold,” she stated. “Spirits or fiends of ice, or frost, or winter.”

  “That is r-rather specific, yes,” Martin admitted. “But I believe I may ha-have something. Do you require anything else?”

  Esme grimaced. “Yeah. That old crone Diana Bisschop wants me to make her something.”

  Martin smiled a playful smile. “I-I am almost dismayed to hear you went to her, Miss O’Doherty.”

  “Well, Martin, had I any other choice, I wouldn’t have. Sadly, she does carry some very specific alchemical reagents, which, to my knowledge, isn’t quite your forte,” Esme said.

  Martin nodded. “N-No, you are right. There is too much variance in the storage and containment. Some things must be kept cold, others hot, and fewer still lukewarm. Having been to her establishment, crowded as it m-may be, Miss O’Doherty, she has a system which works for her which I will not attempt t-to understand. At any rate—what do you r-require?”

  “Something related to hunger and consumption,” Esme said. “Or, rather, the absence of it.”

  “Y-yes, I believe I have something,” Martin said. “In closing, t-then, you need both a component related to the cold, and a component empowered by a mesmer. B-Both of these things I can provide you. Please e-excuse me for but a moment. You are welcome to sit at my desk in the meantime,” Martin said.

  He withdrew his arm from hers, briefly placed both of his hands over her right hand, nodded, and began walking through his aisles of storage. Esme, in the meanwhile, treaded towards his desk, but opted not to sit at it. She’d been granted permission, but on principle, she didn’t like the idea of taking over a space that wasn’t hers, and sitting down in front of his manifests and inventory logs wasn’t her place. In fact, the mere notion of another sitting at her work station in Allure Artificery filled her with a very particular kind of anger.

  Martin was quick. Esme had waited all but five minutes, and he’d returned with two boxes. One was a metal box, and another a wooden one, both secured by locks which required Martin to once again remove his extremely crowded key ring. Esme raised a brow. Martin located the keys with an ease of access that bordered on preternatural.

  Inside the metal box were a set of large teeth. Old teeth, perhaps, but not unhealthy teeth, and far from yellow: pale-white and the hue of a snowflake. They were clustered up in a pile that was drawn together by a mass of frost that mirrored plaque. Frost had spread to all corners of the metal box’s interior.

  “Here, I have t-the harvested teeth of a jokulfrosti,” Martin said. “T-These are spirits of—”

  “Spirits of winter, native to Scandinavia. Notable migrations here to North America as early as the 10th century, found a natural home in the Canadian permafrost,” Esme said. “Yeah. That’ll do, Martin. Thanks.”

  It wasn’t perfect, nor necessarily what Esme had in mind, but her mind was already alight with the possibilities. It would be a challenge, and it would require her to consider all manner of possibilities; how the component would lend into the conditions, and more importantly, how congruent it would all be.

  “Y-Yes, of course,” Martin said, closing the metal box. “Now o-onto the other.”

  In the opposite box, the wooden one, was a briquette that had patches of soot-covered fur growing out from it. Esme raised an eyebrow, immediately intrigued. Components were as varied as they were strange, and she’d be lying to herself if she claimed to have such a vastness of knowledge that she could identify something after only a mere glance. She needed a name.

  “What is this, Martin?”

  “A coal, once b-belonging to a domovoy,” Martin said.

  Esme drew a blank. “A domovoy. What is it?”

  “They are h-household spirits, Miss O’Doherty, who maintain warmth and fire within the home. They are native, usually, to Eastern Europe,” Martin explained.

  Esme leaned in to take a closer look at it. “Yeah. That’ll do.”

  Martin raised a brow. “I-I see You’re certain, Miss O’Doherty?”

  “Fire, warmth, energy. This coal, Martin, is just that. A component embodying these qualities. All that it needs is runes to express how energy ought to be burned, and in my client’s case, she wants fat to be burned. A lot of it. Slowly, steadily, to avoid excess skin,” Esme said, her voice matter-of-fact and interested, as if she’d enthralled herself with her own ideas.

  She had to stop herself from continuing. Martin wouldn’t mind, but Esme had already spent half of the day negotiating with her suppliers, and pleasant as he was compared to that old crone Diana, there was work to be done.

  “Martin,” she continued, “I am in a bit of a dilemma, at the moment, regarding funding.”

  Martin slowly nodded. “Perhaps a p-payment plan, then?”

  Esme’s lips curled into a smile. He was always reasonable when it came to things like this. “End of the month?”

  Martin nodded. “Yes. D-December 1st. N-No interest this time, but you will be expected to have payment for b-both components.”

  “Business is slow, right now,” Esme admitted. “Unforeseen complications will likely mean that it will stay slow, too, for quite a bit. How does three months sound?”

  Martin nodded. “That is a-acceptable.”

  Esme closed both boxes shut, and placed them onto Martin’s work desk behind her. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “You always were quite the gentlemen. Thanks, Martin.”

  Martin’s face flushed red. “Yes. O-Of course, Miss O’Doherty. Allow me to open the door for you.”

  ?

  Esme’s goggles clung to her face.

  Her back room was completely quiet and both doors—the one leading to it and the one leading to her loft—had been closed shut, their locks secured by sigil-marked keys that would prevent anyone from disturbing her. Not that she anticipated any customers.

  The sign at Allure Artificery’s entrance read CLOSED, and by now, Janice was hard at work upstairs, mixing together the care package of ingredients that Esme had secured for her from Diana. Tania, if she was doing anything at all, was likely clearing out what remained of Esme’s pantry and kicking her feet up onto a coffee table that had grown tired of her boots.

  Where her front desk was for more specific detailing, armed with the necessary carving tools and styluses for the precise runework that demanded a change of space, Esme’s back room was reserved for the sweat and elbow grease of labor and the trial and error of design.

  Indeed, it was half a forge and half a workshop, where she did the bulk of her artificery, and the home of many unfinished projects that were virtually useless until the finishing touches were added onto them.

  It was armed with all of the necessities; a perpetually heated brazier beneath, a small crucible furnace fitted into the wall like an oven, tongs, tweezers, heat-resistant gloves, a quench bucket, a drain built into the concrete flooring. On the opposite end of the room was a slanted drafting table, and attached to it was an articulated magnifying lamp with seven lenses worth of zoom.

  Along the wall shelving just behind it were further tools—pencils, pens, rulers, caliphers, bezels, a jeweler’s loupe.

  It didn’t end there. All along the wall were further tools of the trade: chasing hammers, nylon mallets, and soldering picks to name a few. A wall rack of tiny and mid-sized drawers held metal ingots, scrap jewelry purchased in bulk from pawn shops, and unused components that had yet to be fitted into anything. It was her pride and joy. Her safe space, her sanctuary, her world within a world. And it had taken her years to build up into something respectable.

  Esme lingered in front of her drafting table.

  Two schematics were laid out in front of her; one for Old Man Winter, Leroy’s artificed LAR Grizzly handgun, and another for Girdleburn, a belt buckle meant for Diana Bisschop. She adjusted the black bandana on her head, tightened it, and ensured that her singular chestnut-orange braid was set behind her back.

  ?

  Three empty cups of coffee crowded her work desk in the front of her shop. They reeked of stale creamer, and all of them were only half finished. Esme wiped the sweat from her brow and lifted the goggles from her face, and only barely noticed the dredges of sunlight leaking in through the front windows. The last time she pulled an all-nighter was in her third year at the Brinehaven College of the Arts.

  In front of her, Leroy’s LAR Grizzly had been transformed into Old Man Winter.

  The process had taken far longer than she expected, and involved a great deal of delicacy. The jokulfrosti teeth were a hassle to deal with; she knew better than to touch them with her bare hands, and relied on a variety of tweezers and tongs to move them around.

  Remaking the front-top of the slide was equally as frustrating; before she could even insert the jokulfrosti teeth, she had to etch runes along the inside of it to ensure that the permafrost plaque wouldn’t destroy the gun upon assembly, or, when real bullets were fired prior to the effects being activated. Boring holes through the lined-up teeth was equally as daunting, and she’d gone through a box’s worth of sandpaper trying to shave off portions of the teeth dimensions for the fitting process.

  The rune-etching itself was, strangely, the easiest part. Once the assembly was completed, it was simply a matter of using the gunmetal as a canvas to express the conditions of what it would actually do. Esme didn’t even question the congruency. The congruence of her artificery was, and had always been, foolproof; so much so that she never once thought to even test the gun out.

  The finished product, then, was a LAR Grizzly with jokulfrosti teeth fitted into a modified front-top slide. Esme reviewed her schematics, and the statement of intent she’d written in the margins of the grid paper, as she often did with all of her projects:

  OLD MAN WINTER:

  JOKULFROSTI TEETH ALONG SLIDE. EXPRESSED RUNES WILL ALLOW FOR USER TO, AT THEIR LEISURE, SHOOT A SINGLE BULLET THAT WILL FORM A JOKULFROSTI SMILE ON THEIR TARGET. FOR AS LONG AS THE PERSON REMAINS COLD, PERMAFROST PLAQUE WILL SPREAD ALONG THEIR BODY AND FREEZE THEM OVER TIME.

  NOTES:

  - TEETH ALONG THE GUN WILL CHITTER OUTSIDE OF USE. HUSHING THEM RESOLVES THIS.

  - STRENGTH OF THIS ARTIFIED ITEM WILL LIKELY RESULT IN SIGNIFICANT TIME LAPSES BETWEEN USE. COOLDOWN UNSPECIFIED—INFORM LEROY.

  - ACTIVATION OF EFFECT REQUIRES USER TO PULL BACK THE SLIDE AND HOLD IT.

  On the opposite end of the table was a belt buckle that would be used as the base for Diana Bisschop’s commission, alongside the domovoy coal that had yet to be removed from its container. Esme had no problem making that hag wait a little bit longer for her weight loss shortcut, and saw no reason to worry herself over it. She had, after all, already given Esme every item on Janice’s list.

  Esme reached for one of her half-drunken cups of stale coffee, took a sip, and went to stand up. She paused, glanced at Old Man Winter, and towards a small carving stylus next to it.

  “Annnd…”

  She reached out to grab it, turned the gun upside down, and haphazardly carved her initials on the underside of the gun handle.

  “Done.”

  Cast your ballets! Mwahah!

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  RITUAL: ?????

  SUMMONING RITUAL (3)