Magya squints at the crowd from the kitchen door. Her customers cling to tables like refugees seeking shelter. Their hair curls and coils and glistens in the heat. The brass lamps cast prisms of ochre light on the soaking wood walls. The west windows, which normally look out on a scenic stretch of river, are so fogged over they look like toast with too much cream.
One man at the bar paws his cup limply, blinking owlishly; Magya stops a waiter, nods at the man, says, “Too much,” and sends the boy on his way.
“A good trade, for the hour,” says one of her servers, stopping to mop his brow.
“Too good, in fact,” says Magya. “Everything is full but the second-floor balcony.”
“How is that too good?”
“We shan’t let greed overcome wisdom, my love.” Magya taps her chin, thinking. “No special batches for the next week.”
Her server attempts to control his astonishment. “None?”
“None. I’d prefer not to arouse any suspicion.”
“But what will we say when people complain about the … the quality of the tea?”
“We will say,” Magya answers, “that we have been forced to use a new type of barrel that’s affected the flavor. I don’t know, some Saypuri trade rule. They’ll believe that. And we’ll tell them we shall be rectifying the situation shortly.”
Her server is rudely hailed by a couple at the bar, a middle-aged man with an arm thrown around a very giddy and curvy young woman. In my grandmother’s day, thinks Magya, such a public display would get you flogged. How times have changed. … “Go on,” she says. “Give them something to fill their mouths, and shut them up.”
Her server departs. Magya’s eye, always seeking trouble, finds something concerning on the upper balcony: one of the lights in her lamps has begun to flicker.
She grunts, climbs the steps, and sees she is wrong: the lamp is not flickering, but it is jumping on its chain, hopping up and swishing about like a fish on a line.
“What in the world … ?” Magya looks up the chain to the beam it is attached to.
She watches, awed, as the beam actually buckles up, as if something on the roof is pulling at it. There are even cracks in the plaster of the roof, which spread like fractures in ice bearing too much weight.
Magya’s first instinct is to look to the window, but she remembers that the windows are opaque with condensation. … Yet she sees she is mistaken again: something has partially wiped the condensation away from the outside of the west windows.
But what could do that, thinks Magya, as we’re on the river, thirty feet up?
She goes to the window, wipes away the inside moisture, and peers through the blurry glass.
The first thing she sees is a single yellow light at the river shore below.
The second thing she sees is something large, black, and glistening stuck to the wall of the shop, like a tree root covered in tar, yet it is uncoiling, adhering itself to more and more of the wall.
And the third thing she sees is right in front of her: what appears to be a long, slender black finger rises up on the other side of the window, and the dark claw at its end reaches forward and delicately taps the glass once.
“What … ?” says Magya.
Then a burst of thunder, a rain of plaster dust and wood shards, and the treasured humidity of the Vohskoveney Tea Shop goes ballooning up into the winter night sky in a roiling rush as its ceiling and upper wall are completely torn off.
Magya blinks as the wind assails her. Most of her patrons are too stunned to scream, but some manage to find their throats. The lower wall follows suit, crumbing out onto the frozen river, pulling the second-floor balcony—and Magya Vohskoveney—with it.
As Magya falls, she sees the same fate has befallen many of her customers. We shall be dashed on the ice, she thinks madly, like a handful of eggs. But in those unending seconds as she tumbles over and over, she sees the ice is not there: there is only the yellow light, the churning of many tentacles, and a quivering, many-toothed mouth juddering open.
*
“I said I want every soldier available working to help those fire teams!” bellows Mulaghesh downstairs. “Make sure to stress that as much as you can in the telegram! And let the corporal know that if there is any reluctance on his part to put his soldiers to such work, then there will be dire consequences!”
Shara winces in her office. Mulaghesh has completely taken over the embassy offices downstairs, commandeering every telegraph machine and posting troops at all entrances. Normally she would be doing this from her quarters, but the embassy was much closer. “Contact General Noor at Fort Sagresha,” Mulaghesh shouts. “He needs to be notified of this, and tell him we need all the support he can offer. Interrupt me as soon as you hear, even if I specifically say not to interrupt me!”
Shara rubs her temples. “By the seas,” she mutters, “can the woman speak at any other volume?” Shara is content to let Mulaghesh handle this disaster, and since this is technically Mulaghesh’s jurisdiction, Shara has plenty of reasons to stay out. But privately she wishes Mulaghesh and the rest of them would just leave.
Sigrud sits in the corner of her office and sharpens his black knife. The skritch-skritch seems to grow until Shara’s head echoes with it.