The bracket on the second landing had been working itself loose for a week.
Not dangerously loose. Just the kind of loose that made a small sound when someone gripped the railing going upstairs, a faint complaint that I'd been meaning to address and kept not addressing because the soup and the marjoram and the ceiling fog and Officer Davan had all taken turns being more immediate. I had the tools out now. It was a five-minute job if I didn't get distracted.
I was probably going to get distracted.
Kern and Renner were at table four again. They'd gone home last night, actually slept, and come back this morning with the particular energy of two people who'd talked about something all the way here and then stopped talking about it when they walked through the door. Renner had a full cup this time, which was progress. Kern had the beef stew, which I appreciated. There's a comfort in a man who knows what he wants and orders it regardless of what the previous evening had been like.
"The fog's different this morning," Renner said, to his cup.
"Is it," I said. "Which direction?"
"Up near the stairs now. Yesterday it was all over the ceiling."
"That's actually better. Contained is easier to work with than spread. I had a guest once who traveled with a full weather system. Three days of indoor drizzle. The mop situation was considerable."
Kern ate his stew. Renner drank his cup. The fog sat at the top of the stairs and didn't do anything in particular, which I thought was polite of it.
I got the bracket tightened on the third turn. Personal record.
I was putting the tools away when I heard the north room door open.
The being came down the stairs the way someone comes down stairs when they've had to think about how stairs work and have arrived at an approximation that was technically correct and slightly wrong in a way that was hard to name. One step, then the next, then the next. The mechanics were right. The relationship between the body and gravity seemed like a working theory rather than an established fact.
The fog came with it. Not spreading this time. Pulled close to its edges, moving with it, the way a coat moves. Which should have been less alarming than the fog along the ceiling. It wasn't. Something about a contained thing is worse than a spreading one, once you understand that the thing in question contains more than it looks like it does from the outside.
Kern's spoon stopped.
The light in the room changed. Not dimmed. Not brightened. Changed source. The windows were still in the same walls they'd been in since the building was constructed, but the light coming through them seemed to be arriving from a direction that was slightly different from outside. Renner looked at the east window. He looked at the west wall. He looked back at the east window. He was doing the geometry and the geometry wasn't passing.
"Morning," I said to the being, pleasantly. "Sleep well?"
It looked at me from the bottom of the stairs. "I do not sleep," it said.
"I'll leave that line out of the review requests, then. Tea?"
It considered this. "Yes," it said, which I suspected was less about the tea and more about the fact that it had come downstairs for a reason and needed a moment to arrive at it.
I put the kettle on. Kern and Renner were doing the thing where they were very carefully not looking at the being, which meant they were watching it constantly in their peripheral vision. Renner had both hands flat on the table. He'd put his cup down without apparently deciding to.
The being moved to the counter. It stood across from me with the patience of something that had been waiting long enough that the concept of waiting had stopped being relevant.
I found the tea.
"Keeper," it said. "I would speak with you, if you are willing."
"I'm always willing. Honey?"
"I do not require it."
"I'll put some in anyway. It's a good batch. Local beekeeper two streets over, she overwinters them inside which most people think is unnecessary but the difference in the spring yield is remarkable. You can taste it, actually, there's a warmth to it that the summer harvest doesn't have." I poured. "What's on your mind?"
The air pressure in the room adjusted slightly downward. Not enough to notice unless you'd been in a lot of rooms with a lot of things that had no business being in rooms.
Kern noticed. He pressed his shoulders back against his chair without moving his feet.
"I have been drifting," the being said. "In the Abyss. For a time I cannot accurately measure. The Abyss does not register my presence as distinct from itself any longer. I find the boundaries of what I am are becoming" it paused "imprecise."
I stirred the tea. "Imprecise," I said.
"I am losing the shape of what I was."
I pushed the cup across to it.
"I had a regular," I said, "years back. Traveled the trade roads for eleven years straight. Edren to the coast, coast to the northern passes, passes back down again. Never stayed anywhere longer than a week. Good man. Excellent card player, actually, Renner you'd have liked him. Very systematic about his draws." Renner did not respond to this. "He came in one evening and sat down and ordered dinner and then didn't leave for three days. Not dramatically. Just kept finding reasons to stay another few hours. And at the end of the third day he told me he'd forgotten how to stop moving. Not physically. Just in himself. Kept feeling like wherever he was, he was supposed to be somewhere else already."
The being had both hands around the cup. Its fingers were at the correct number of joints. I didn't mention this.
"What did he do?" it asked.
"I told him to pick one small thing and do it the same way every morning. Not a big thing. Something that takes five minutes. Same time, same order, same way. Didn't matter what it was. The point wasn't the thing. The point was that the day had a beginning that he'd made himself."
The being was very still.
"That was all?" it said.
"That was all. He was back on the road two weeks later. Came back every few months after that. Always looked better."
A pause. The fog around its edges moved once, slowly, like a breath.
"The Keeper prescribes a fixed origin point," it said, in a voice that had gone very precise, the kind of precise that meant it was thinking in a framework several orders of magnitude larger than the conversation. "A self-authored anchor. Repeated at consistent intervals to establish distinction from the surrounding substrate."
"I said do something small every morning," I said. "But sure, that works too."
It picked up the cup. It didn't drink, because it had told me it didn't require the tea, but it held it with both hands and that seemed to be the point.
"I will attempt this," it said.
"Good. Breakfast is at seven if you change your mind about eating."
It turned and went back up the stairs. At the top, without looking back, it said something in a register that I felt in the soles of my feet rather than heard with my ears, two syllables, formal, old.
I filed it under thanks and started on the lunch prep.
Behind me Kern said, slowly, "What were you two talking about?"
"Morning routines."
A long pause.
"Aldous," Renner said, "what is that thing."
I looked up at the ceiling of the north corridor. The fog had settled into a pattern. Small, regular, repeating. Moving back and forth with the precise rhythm of something that had decided to practice.
"A guest," I said. "Working something out."
The system logged just after noon.
[SYSTEM LOG」
Entity Status Update: Abyssal Wanderer, Anchor Formation Initiated
Inn Interaction Record: Keeper Consultation, Logged
Legend Resonance: Fluctuation Increasing
Abyssal Waypoint Classification: Confirmed
I read it twice.
Then I went to check on the bread.