Al had arrived to work late the previous day. A stubborn mule had overturned a cart on Lark, spilling several crates of fruit across the road. Instead of helping the poor merchant pick up the wares, several residents of the neighborhood took advantage of the chaos to steal as much as they could. More people showed up, drawn in by the commotion to watch as the crowd shifted from merely disarrayed to tumultuous.

Al had been boxed in, unable to move outside the onlookers or beyond the thieves. “Excuse me!” he said, trying to get around several people. “Excuse me!”

His hand brushed against a woman who turned around and slapped his chest. “I’m sorry! I’m just trying to leave!” he said over the noise. Al dug his hands into the pockets of his breeches and tried shouldering his way back and to a side street.

He arrived with his thick, black hair edged in sweat, especially around his collar. “Sorry. There was a commotion in the street and I couldn’t get around the crowd,” he said as he stood in front of Peni and Taritha. “It won’t happen again. Hopefully.”

He glanced over to his office door and noticed there was no sheet hanging there. “Al, I thought today was your day off,” Peni said.

“What? But…I’m still in the middle of my week on. I won’t have my break until next Tuesday.”

“I thought it was strange you weren’t working today,” Taritha said.

Peni turned to her co-worker. “I guess there was just a scheduling issue.” She shrugged and dismissed the conversation by returning to whatever clerical work she had been doing. A woman approached the desk and inquired about a wizard-made piece of sculpture and their attention turned solely to her.

Al had stood in the front entrance, gaping until he realized there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He opened his office and sat, trying to think of what to do next. He could go home, pick up Marnie from his sister-in-law’s and spend the day with her. It had been a promising morning, warm but breezy enough not to overheat a person. It was a good day for a walk or picking fruit from tree branches instead of off cobblestones. It would be nice to take an unexpected day off.

He needed the money, though. Al decided to add himself to the books and hope for a walk-in or two. While he waited, he spent his time trying to get ready for a potential appointment by lighting the candles in his office, placing pillows on the adjustable chair, and trying to get himself into the Calm.

If he’d had a client, Al would implemented several techniques to drain all the stress from himself. Wizards called it “the Calm”. Entering that state allowed a wizard to access softer forms of magic, usually creating forms of art like the paintings that hung in the gallery in the front of the building.

Al had never been very talented in writing, dancing, or painting. He’d hoped that by the time he’d graduated from Amandorlam, some latent talent would have materialized, but nothing ever did. He was exceptional when it came to memorization, which was mainly good for schoolwork and not anything magical. He was also good at oration, which would have made him a great actor save for the stage fright that turned him into a stammering idiot. The few times he had overcome his fears of public speaking were during debate sessions in class, when he was able to erase all his fears during the drive to prove himself right.

Since magic wasn’t allowed in courtrooms, he had eventually settled on Touch wizardry, something pretty much any wizard could do. The Calm was transferable to those non-magical laymen who couldn’t reach it on their own. Those who were well-off enough paid for sessions where Al would strip away their burdens. It wasn’t glamorous, nor did it make Al a lot of money, but he enjoyed it well enough. It beat having a job that forced him to constantly use the Unease, like his friend, Aggie.

Al sat reading a new Arvonne alley novel for the better part of the morning before Aggie came into the break room for lunch. He dog-eared the page and put it away as his friend slid a chair up to the table. “How’s work today?”

“Same as it always is, Al. I move heavy things and people pay me for it. How’s your day going?”

“Not good, Aggie. Not good.” Al proceeded to tell Aggie all about his morning, working himself into an agitated state. He stopped mid-sentence when he realized Aggie had finished his leg of lamb and was staring at the table in front of him. Normally when Aggie daydreamed, he let him. He was quite a lady’s man and, although married with three kids, he had no compunctions when it came to carrying out affairs. Al didn’t agree with it, but he also didn’t judge him. Unease-using wizards had it tough enough with the high stress and damage from repetitive use.

That day, though, Al wanted his friend’s undivided attention. When some imagined tart took it away, Al began to think poorly about the woman and his friend. He stewed for a few minutes, then realized Aggie was usually a good friend. He gave him one more chance. “Want to meet up for drinks tonight?”

Aggie snapped out of his trance and turned his gaze back to Al, slowly and with furrowed brows. It was as if he had forgotten he was there. “No, Al, sorry. Can’t. I’m, um, doing something with Essa and the boys.”

Al nodded and said nothing, not even to say goodbye when he left a few minutes later. He didn’t feel like going back to his office, so he ventured over to the other half of the building where Jindahl and Stohr was located.

If one walked farther down Lark and took their first left, they’d find themselves in an alley with businesses of a shady or unclean nature. Butchers, tanners, millinery shops, and undertakers nestled on that lane. The cobblestones were stained with dyes and old blood. It smelled putrid on a windy day, the odor its own deterrent for keeping away those who had no purpose being on that street. The business fronts were haphazard, but clearly marked as to what each purveyed in or sold.

Except for Milxner’s. It was a solid door halfway down on the left that only had the name in chipped, black paint. There were no picture signs hanging above it nor were there further descriptions below the name. Anyone who needed the services provided at Milxner’s would have heard by word-of-mouth. Anyone who didn’t need those services didn’t need to know.

What Al did in the front of the building, in Jindahl and Stohr proper, was the friendly face of wizardry. It was called soft or light work, the upright, ethical, and decent jobs that most people thought of when defining wizardry. The general public was fairly ignorant of what a wizard could do when people needed things that were less then legal. That’s where Milxner’s came in. Those employed there still worked for Jindahl and Stohr on paper, but answered directly to .rd Ember Sierra, a wizard whose taste for fine clothing and a lavish lifestyle outweighed any pesky morals she had. They did the harder stuff, the muscle work involving unsafe work conditions, like Aggie, or the jobs that slaked more sensual thirsts, like what Cascade and Orchid did.

Al traveled the labyrinth of corridors between the two halves of the building until he reached Milxner’s. It was a cold warehouse of poured concrete with a few rooms here and there. The main area was open for several stories up and all the way back to the heavy door that led to the alleyway. There were a few stacked crates with hurricane lamps and some paint around some of the rooms to give the illusion of comfort, but it was mostly damp, cold, and dreary.

He liked that. It gave him plenty of space to pace up and down while he tried to calm down. Al broke for lunch, but other than that time he spent most of the afternoon thinking about things. He thought about the day, about Aggie, about his wife and Marnie.

Ah, his wife. It was Ap Jorsen’s Day, his wedding anniversary. Perhaps that’s why he had been in low spirits that morning. Burdet and he had been married for six years, some of those even happily. “Five is clothing, and six is pets…” was how the rhyme went. He wondered what he could get her, settling on a bird before he remembered they hadn’t bought each other gifts in three years.

Al paced. It was his marriage. It was his job. It was Aggie, being rude and selfish. And it was all those other little things that he brushed off all the time. It made him angry, furious actually. Once he was that far gone, he clicked into the Unease. Once he was in the Unease, he stopped thinking and looked for a release. For Al, that meant punching the nearest wall with a yell clenched in his throat.

The whole of Milxner’s shook and maybe even the whole building. Several hurricane lamps teetered. There was a moment of stillness when Al realized what he had done and all his anger drained as he held his breath.

One lamp on a crate way across the room fell, smashing on the floor. The flame on the wick survived the fall and caught the pool of oil on the floor on fire. It was too dark to see what was near it, but Al could definitely tell it was on fire.

He had no idea what to do. He had never been a man to call on in an emergency. When that cart had overturned that morning, he had just stood there and stared with a blank look on his face. That’s what he looked like in that moment, right before he backed out of the room and took off for home.