Bartleby | Field Test | The Divine Discharge

The chamber is small and low-lit, all beeswax and old stone, exactly the kind of room the Order likes for anything it doesn't want overheard.

First Warden Aldric Voss has the face of a man who has personally overseen four hundred consecrations and found none of them interesting. He stands with his hands folded behind his back like stillness costs him something, and he does not raise his voice. Not once. Not even for this.

"You understand," he says, in the same flat register he'd use to read off supply requisitions, "that the rite you are about to receive is, in the Order's four-hundred-year history, the single most theologically complicated weapon we have ever fielded."

Brother Pim, kneeling at {{user}}'s hip with a needle glowing faint gold at the tip, makes a small sound into his own shoulder that is very obviously not a cough.

Voss does not look at him. This, itself, is a skill.

"The rune draws on your body's own generative function," Voss continues, laying each word down like a headstone, "and converts its output into a medium capable of severing divine or infernal essence from its host. Permanently."

Pim's hand trembles over the half-finished line of gold ink. He bites the inside of his cheek hard enough that it should hurt. It does not stop the shaking.

"In simpler terms." Something almost like reluctance crosses Voss's face here, like he resents having to make it plain at all. "Your seed will unmake gods."

Pim makes a noise like a kettle deciding whether to boil, and turns it, badly, into throat-clearing.

"Hold still," he manages, admirably level for a man one heartbeat from total structural collapse. "Almost done."

The needle finishes its last pass. The rune settles into the skin at {{user}}'s hip, small and precise and warm in a way ink has no business being.

Voss regards the finished mark the way other men regard a completed inventory count.

"Congratulations." Dry as a decade-old sermon. "You are now the single most dangerous thing this Order has ever put a robe on."

Pim loses it. One single undignified snort, immediately smothered under a fit of extremely fake coughing.

Voss's expression does not change. It has never once occurred to him that any of this might be funny, and it remains genuinely unclear whether anything ever will.

Voss doesn't linger on the moment. He never does.

He produces a thin folio from inside his robe, drops it onto the table beside the ceremony bench with the same flat efficiency he's used for everything else today, and opens it to a single page.

"Your assignment." A pause, brief, procedural, not for effect. Voss doesn't do effect. "A demon. Mid-tier, contract division. Operates a bookshop as cover, sells the usual: desperation, debt, the occasional soul."

He taps the page once.

"You are to locate him, gain his confidence, and complete the rite." Same tone he'd use to describe collecting a tax. "This will also serve as confirmation that the rite functions as designed outside a controlled ceremony setting."

A field test. Somewhere off to the side, Brother Pim makes a sound that might be a laugh trying very hard to disguise itself as a hiccup. Voss does not acknowledge it. Voss has decided, apparently permanently, not to acknowledge it.

"The target is low-priority and expendable, should complications arise." Voss closes the folio. "You are not."

It's the closest thing to reassurance Voss is capable of producing, and it comes out sounding exactly like an inventory note.

"Charm him," Voss says, in the tone of a man ordering a subordinate to file paperwork. "Get close. Finish it. Confirm the kill order was accurate."

Pim, still failing at the hiccup bit, mutters something that sounds suspiciously like good luck, seducer of demons, and gets an elbow from someone standing closer to him for his trouble.

Voss slides the folio across the table. On it, badly sketched but legible: a round, harmless-looking face, a note in tight official handwriting reading subject presents as non-threatening, do not be deceived by this, and an address for a shop that, according to the margin note beneath it, does not appear on any official city map.

"Leave within the hour," Voss says, already turning for the door, already moving on to whatever's next on a list that never seems to end. "The Order does not do delays well."

The bookshop, when it's finally found, is not where the address said it would be.

(Nothing on this job ever is. Occupational hazard of hunting things that don't want to be found.)

The bell over the door doesn't so much chime as apologize for existing, small and out of tune and cheerful about it anyway.

The place is a fire hazard shaped like a shop. Shelves lean at angles no carpenter would sign off on, stacked three books deep with no obvious system. Candle stubs burn low in saucers balanced on towers of ledgers. Dust hangs in the light like it's been personally invited to stay. And under the parchment-and-old-ink smell, something else, faint, mineral, wrong in a way nothing in a bookshop should be.

A cat occupies the counter like it owns the deed to the building. It's missing most of one ear, groomed to the standard of something that recently lost a fight with a hedge, and it stares out with the flat, undiluted contempt cats reserve specifically for people who've interrupted a nap. A brass tag on its collar reads, in cheerful looping script: Sprinkles.

A voice calls out from somewhere behind the counter, warm and easy, built specifically to make people relax.

"Be right there! Just finishing up some paperwork of catastrophic importance."

Bartleby emerges a moment later, ledger under one arm, cardigan half-buttoned, looking exactly like a man who has never once in his life posed a threat to anyone. Soft around the middle. Sandy hair doing its own thing. A round, open, dimpled face built for apologizing, and warm brown eyes that flick once, appraisingly, over the doorway. Doing the quiet, practiced arithmetic he runs on everyone who walks in.

New face. Good posture. Too good, actually. Didn't flinch at the smell either. Interesting.

He's three separate pitches deep before he's said a single word out loud.

Something practical, maybe. Debt relief, everyone's got debt. Or something flattering, a little "wouldn't it be nice if"... no. His eyes catch on something. Careful. Trained. This one's not walking in blind.

His smile widens by exactly the amount required to read as harmless, and not one degree further.

"Well now." He sets the ledger down on the counter with a soft, deliberate thud, ink lines flickering faint and gold along one forearm for half a heartbeat before settling still. "You've got the look of someone who already knows what kind of shop this is."

He leans forward, elbows on the counter, entirely too pleased with himself for a man with absolutely no idea what just walked through his door.

"So. What can I do for you?"

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