Featured in The Copper Press, 11 March, 2157 A.M.

In Gibson, the fog never fades. It squats in the alleys like an unpaid debt, swallowing shardlight and promises with equal appetite. I was nursing a lukewarm tonic in my office on Fellman's Row when the knock came: three raps, deliberate as a judge’s gavel.

Clients don’t call at midnight unless somebody’s dead…

…or about to be.

I thumbed back the hammer on my derringer. Old habits. I opened the door.

She drifted in on a cloud of lilac perfume and rain-clung silk, veiled to the nose, wide hat brim shadowing eyes that caught the lantern-glow like polished emerald. Everything about her said money. I could tell she was trying to look modest but she was failing by half.

“Mr. Caldwell Bitter?”
“Depends who’s asking.”
“Someone who pays in gold and on time, provided you find my brother before the constables do.”

She produced a crushed-velvet purse that clinked like wedding bells. I hired myself on the spot.

Her name was Miss Odette Duvall, and her missing brother, Elias, was an under-researcher at the Royal Mercenary Academy. Bright kid who’d recently quit his post, broken into the academy stores, and vanished with a crate of refined Shardisite ingots worth more than the Crown’s winter budget.

Odette believed he wasn’t a thief; he was framed. The Civic Guard believed otherwise, and they carried carbines that didn’t fret about nuance.

I pried for particulars:

“Last known address?”
“Boarding-house near Mosman Wharf.”
“Companions?”
“Kept to himself, save a pen-pal named 'Grinjack.'”
“Vices?”
“Cheap wine, shitty novels, and…” she swallowed, “…dabbling with dusted inks.” Outlawed formulas that let a scribe trap raw emotion on paper. Intense stuff. Too touchy-feely for my blood.

She slid fifty gold across my desk. More than I make in a month chasing unfaithful spouses. Another fifty on delivery she said. I told her to keep the veil on; Gibson fog and the eyes it hides are hungry for faces.

Mosman wharf sits on the River Swan where barges belch steam and unemployed mercs huddle round firebarrels, waiting for work or for a miracle. Elias’s boarding-house leaned like a drunk against two soot-black warehouses. The landlord, a bony man with tar-stained teeth, unlocked the attic for a silver and a promise to testify he never saw me.

The room stank of ozone and burnt sage. Sigils charred onto the rafters pulsed wanly. Hastily drawn containment runes cracked by over-pressure. On the desk lay a stack of pulpy novella back issues, each margin scribbled with manic notes: “EMOTION = ENERGY,” “ink + dust → resonance,” “A choir rings in my head!”

There was blood on the floorboards. Fark, old, pooled where someone had carved a rune of silence to muffle the horrors of what happened here. But the real showstopper was a torn envelope addressed to Elias Duvall, c/o Grinjack, from the Kings Park Gardens. Inside, a single playing card: the Two of Spades, sprayed with dried green ink that shimmered when the lantern passed. A scent of joy, pure, bright, addictive, floated off the card before the air quenched it.

Dusted ink, all right. Elias had bottled happiness, and somebody didn’t like the competition.

The Kings Park Gardens aren’t gardens at all, just a sprawl of gambling dens and pleasure parlors beneath the eastern viaduct, lit by deteriorating green shard-lanterns that can't decide if they want to illuminate what goes on down there. Grinjack ran a soirée club called The Soft Grin, where bards coaxed spirits from brass to haunt the melodies.

I found the man himself at a roulette table rigged with rotating spell-circles. He was human, or mostly human at least. Exposure to the arcane had burnished his pupils silver and laced his veins with faint jade glow. His grin was too wide, as if sliced and restitched by an artist allergic to symmetry.

“Detective Bitter!” he crooned, palm skimming the brim of his cobalt fedora. “I wondered if our paths might ever cross. Your reputation precedes you.”
“I want Elias Duvall,” I said. “Preferably breathing.”

Jack sighed. “Genius boy he is. Tragic appetites really. He came here chasing “his feelings” as he called 'em. Mister Bitter, he was seeking pure, untaxed feelings. Hard to keep hold of sense when you’ve swallowed a page of laughter.”

I could hear the game as if he were pointing to the rules. He wouldn’t sell out Elias for free. But cheaters hate competition, and Jack read in my eyes the promise of broken fingers.

“The boy’s hiding in Freemantle, South Ward,” he relented. “But he’s not alone. The Black Court took an interest in the lad.”

That name iced my blood. The Court were a loose cabal of world-class assassins who sold suicide stories like they were cheap fiction. I made the connection immediately. One shard-laced stroke of pure despair will have a man jumping from a clock-tower before dawn.

Freemantle slithers between the Arctican Consulate dockyard and the Swan, its cobbles slick with years of spilt diesel and sewage runoff. I arrived near sunset; Gibson fog licking my knees like a lonely dog, glowing faintly where it poured out of exposed sewer vents. A single lamp burned outside a shuttered shanty. Inside, I could just make out the sound of typebars clattering away though no print order was posted.

I kicked the door. The scene froze like a macabre tableau: Elias, gaunt and wild-eyed, shackled to a compositor’s chair; three Black Court emissaries hovered over him, hairless heads tattooed with moving glyphs. One held a raven-quill dripping green dread toward Elias’s heart.

“Step aside,” I growled, derringer out. The lead emissary smiled, eyes empty as erased chalk. “Calm yourself detective, we only collect from him what he owes.”

Things went sideways fast. One emissary flicked a quill across mid-air; the smear of pure *regret* hung like a curtain. Memories pummeled me: lost loves, wrong turns, my time in the war. My knees buckled.

Elias screamed, throwing himself against chains. The crate of stolen ingots sat open beside him, humming their own tune.

Pain cleared my head. I fired at an overhead pulley; sparks showered, setting the arcane ink ablaze with viridian flame. Emissaries shrieked, shadows writhing across their skin. I bull-rushed through the burning haze, cracked the derringer across a bald skull, grabbed Elias’s chair, and shoved for the exit.

Outside, fog quenched the flames but stank of burnt sorrow. We limped down-alley as bells clanged. Consulate guards roused by chaos.

Elias wheezed, words tumbling. The Court coerced him: they wanted a master sigil. He croaked about emotion so potent it could overwrite a miser’s will. Pure shardisite was the ink, his empathic formulae the catalyst. They’d start the test run tonight beneath The Cathedral of Amandine’s clock-tower during the Lovers’ Masquerade; one stroke of Envy would turn celebration into massacre.

Clock-tower. Midnight. Three hours to stop a city from eating itself.

The Cathedral of Amandine rises over Gibson’s Old Square, gothic spires stitched with brass veins that pump steam to the quarter-hour gargoyle whistles. Masquerade revelers swirled beneath, masks of swan, wolf, and cherub glittering in shardlight. Music box orchestras cranked waltzes while vendors hawked sugar-glass roses.

We moved through the crush. A detective in an oil-stained trench coat and a battered alchemist cloaked in a borrowed curtain. Toward the maintenance stair at the tower’s flank. Above, the clock’s argent face glared in judgement like the fickle Divine.

Inside, gears louder than steam engines rattled the church's bones. Candle stubs marked a trail upward. Halfway, we found the Court’s supply: vials of color, slick ink labelled *Jealousy, Fear, Delight.* Each glyph marking the vial writhed in eager anticipation.

On the top platform were five Court emissaries, arranging mirrors and sigil frames around the bell. Their leader, a tall woman whose eyes wept black, guided a runed quill across canvas stretched before the bell’s mouth. With each stroke the moonlight darkened on the granite below.

I signaled Elias. He lifted the stolen crate lid. A credible threat. Refined shardisite amplifies everything, including explosions.

I stepped out, repeater leveled. “Brushes down, boys. Class is dismissed.”

They turned, robes rippling like wet pages. The leader hissed: “This ink is truth, meddler. Let Gibson read itself.” She lunged. I loosed a quarrel; it shattered a vial of Delight at her hip. Emerald mist burst out, and for a blink she laughed. Joy-drunk—before Elias hurled a crystal that cracked at her feet.

Untamed arcana met empathic ink: thunder without lightning. The blast buckled joists; gears seized; bells shrieked. Emissaries stumbled, dusted-ink splattering unreadable across the cold stone floor.

I grabbed Elias, sprinted down-slope passage as the bell dropped a foot in its cradle, ringing a funeral peal that rattled the stained-glass.

We reached an aperture looking west over the river. Simple fireworks began to let out their report in the air below us.

“Jump,” I barked.
“We’re six stories up!” Elias protested.
“Better than six seconds from a clock-tower collapse.”

We leapt into a maintenance net strung for gargoyle wash crews, bounced, tore through, landed in a flower cart that forgave us with a bouquet of posies and shattered timbers.

Behind us, Amandine’s bell jammed at one minute to midnight. The kind of omen poets will dine on for years.

Dawn spilled amber across the perpetual smog of Gibson. Elias sat on the river wall, ankles cuffed but alive, constables cataloguing the crate of ingots behind him. I lingered by Odette’s carriage; she dabbed tears with lace but wore a smile wide enough to put shame to Grinjack.

“He’ll face charges,” I warned.
“He’ll face them with counsel, Mister Bitter—and gratitude.” She pressed the purse of gold into my coat.

The Civic Guard thanked me with a nod. Rare currency around these parts. Kings Park Gardens slipped back to vice; the Black Court vanished like bad dreams at breakfast.

I walked Fellman's Row. My pockets heavier than my conscience, shoes damp with river fog. I took the narrow stair to my office, poured a stiff tonic, and stared out at the city through leaded glass.

Gibson was still breathing. Crooked, wheezing, but alive. My clock tolled eight o'clock. Somewhere out there a newsstand unrolled fresh newspapers:

Mystery Blast atop Amandine’s
Terror Plot Foiled?

They’d spell my name wrong; they always do. I locked the money in my desk, cracked an old case file, and waited for the next midnight knock.