Rokkr didn't have weather so much as it had moods. Tonight its mood was miserable. The rain came down in that particular variety unique to this city...not heavy enough to justify an umbrella, too persistent to ignore. A fine, cold drizzle that clung to everything it touched, soaking through collar and conscience alike.
The cobblestones gleamed a slick, oily black under the sputtering gaslamps, and the neon signs of the upper shopfronts bled their colors into the wet stone below...smears of violet and amber that rippled apart with each new drop.
Vincent walked through it without complaint. He had long since stopped having opinions about the rain.
The city rose around him the way it always did, gothic spires and steelframed skyscrapers jostling for space against the overcast sky like rivals at a crowded bar. Rokkr was a city that had never quite decided what it wanted to be, and so it had become all of it at once...wroughtiron streetlamps standing shoulder to shoulder with electric cable lines, cathedral arches carved into the facades of modern office blocks, gargoyles perched above convenience stalls selling smoked meat and tomorrow's broadsheets. The architecture of three different centuries compressed into one unruly skyline.
Vincent paid none of it particular attention. He had grown up here. The grotesque tended to become ordinary, given enough time.
He was tall...lean in the way that suggested not an absence of eating, but a surfeit of being in motion. Gray hair fell past his ears in unruly waves, slightly damp now, catching the light of the nearest gaslamp in a way that made it look, for just a moment, like polished ash.
The trench coat he wore was built for weather like this...heavy black canvas with a high collar he kept turned up, cutting the wind from his jaw. Beneath it: a fitted turtleneck, black trousers, leather gloves that had seen better days but still held their shape at the knuckles.
His boots struck the cobblestones with the unhurried, purposeful rhythm of someone who had somewhere to be and no particular eagerness to get there.
He turned a corner and the Fixer Association came into view. It was hard to miss. The building was white...a kind of deliberate, almost aggressive white, its smooth porcelain facade standing out from the stonegrey surroundings like a tooth in a bruised jaw.
Above the entrance, someone had mounted an iron crest the size of a carriage wheel: a crossed arrangement of swords and spears, seven in total, all radiating from a central point. Beneath it, in letters that had been bolted on individually and had never quite aligned properly: FIXER ASSOCIATION...REGIONAL BRANCH NO. 4.
Vincent climbed the front steps. The oak doors were twice his height and opened without a sound, which he had always found slightly ominous for a building that technically dealt in monsters.
Inside, the Association smelled like damp wool, gun oil, and old paper...the smell of a place where dangerous people waited for permission to do dangerous things.
The entrance hall was broad and highceilinged, its floor tiled in cream stone worn smooth by years of boots that had walked through worse things than rain. Overhead, a chandelier hung from a painted dome...the mural up there depicted some ancient scene of a man locked in combat with what appeared to be a wolf, except the wolf had too many joints in its legs and its mouth opened in the wrong direction. The chandelier's amber light turned the whole scene the color of old honey.
Around him: Fixers. A dozen, maybe more, clustered in small groups or leaning against the walls with the studied casualness of people trained to look relaxed. Most were armed. A woman near the notice board had a shorthafted hatchet hooked to each hip. A man by the far column was cleaning a pistol with the meditative focus of someone at prayer. Spears leaned against walls. A swordhilt jutted from a shoulder scabbard two sizes too big for its owner.
Vincent noted all of it in the peripheral way that had become reflex. He crossed the hall to the clerk's station.
Behind a partition of thick protective glass...the Association had installed it three years ago after an incident no one in the building discussed openly...a man sat beneath a buzzing fluorescent tube with the expression of someone serving a sentence he didn't technically deserve. He had dirty blond hair that had been combed that morning and had since given up entirely. A white buttonup shirt, black tie, the whole ensemble suggesting a relationship with professionalism that was purely formal.
He looked up when Vincent reached the window.
"Ah." A pause that contained more meaning than most people's sentences. "Vincent."
"Harlan."
"Another culling I see." Not a question. Harlan's blue eyes were the particular shade of tired that came from working the intake desk long enough to stop being surprised by anything. "You know, most Fixers at least try to work on their social skills. Take a protection request now and then. Build some client relationships."
"Is there a subjugation request available," Vincent said, "or are you going to offer me life advice for free?"
Harlan made a face. Not offense, exactly...more the expression of a man who had heard this tone from this particular person on enough occasions to have categorized it.
He reached under the desk and tapped a small button. Somewhere above and behind him, a pneumatic chime rang once, and a metal canister descended through a tube in the wall with a soft thunk. He popped it open. Extracted a folder. Leafed through it.
"Okay...yeah." He squinted. "Awakened rank subjugation, outskirts, near the Broken Cathedral." He glanced up. "Client name is Julio."
Vincent nodded.
Harlan slid the request paper through the slot at the bottom of the partition. Vincent picked it up. Scanned it once, twice. He looked back at the clerk.
"Why is the target classification a question mark."
Harlan had the grace to look at least slightly uncomfortable. He rubbed the back of his neck. "Look..."
"A question mark, Harlan."
"I know what it looks like..."
"It looks like no one who filed this report actually saw whatever killed them." Vincent set the paper flat against the partition glass, smoothing it with two fingers as if giving the man across from him the opportunity to notice the enormous blank space where a threat description should have been. "So I'm to travel to the outskirts, in the rain, to hunt something of unknown type, unknown size, unknown abilities, ranked Awakened...which, by the way, is a classification determined how, exactly, if no one saw it long enough to describe it?"
Harlan scratched his jaw. His scruff had reached that undecided length between deliberate and negligent. "Based on the... structural damage at the site. And the bite radius."
A silence.
"The bite radius."
"Yes."
"So for all I know it could be an Abyssal."
"It's probably not..."
"Or a Tide Walker, which would be significantly worse."
Vincent picked the paper back up. Folded it once, precise. Tucked it inside his coat. "If I arrive at that cathedral and lose my head in the first thirty seconds, I want it on record that I raised this exact concern."
"Duly noted," Harlan said, with the tone of a man writing nothing down. He leaned back in his chair. "Look, Vincent. You're good at this. Probably the best we've got walking out of this branch on a given night. If anyone can figure out what it is before it figures out what you are..."
"Double payment."
"What?"
"Tell the client I want double the listed rate." Vincent was already turning away, his coat sweeping a slow arc against the tile. "For the uncertainty. The potential Abyssal risk. The bite radius. All of it."
"He might say no..."
"Then he can find someone else willing to die cheaply." He was halfway to the exit, moving through the scattered clusters of Fixers with the relaxed ease of a man who had done this enough times to stop finding it dramatic. "Send the confirmation when it's agreed."
Harlan watched him go. Shook his head. Called after him: "Good culling, Vincent."
Vincent raised one hand in a gesture that could have meant acknowledged or don't bother me, and pushed through the front doors and back out into the indifferent rain.