[story] cook
author: sam
"I prefer 'occupied,'" the cook said, turning around to pull a sheet pan from the depths of the deck oven. Whatever was on it smelled overpoweringly like anise; I wrinkled my nose, then smoothed out my face before she could turn back around and see. "So do the mages and solicitors. If you say 'haunted,' the place will never sell to the next round of suckers, no matter how good the location is."
"Suckers," I said.
"Suckers," she repeated. "Rubes. Your boss has a good head on his shoulders, don't worry."
She would know. And it wasn't as though the boss could do anything about her even if she did talk shit, because she couldn't be exorcised or banished, because she wasn't dead. Technically. There was a grey area with these kinds of things.
I re-filled my pitcher and put on a fresh pot of coffee. I didn't bother with decaf--a gang of apprentice mages had picked our hole-in-the-wall as their squat for an all-nighter, and as long as they didn't set anything on fire and kept ordering food, I didn't care. At the moment, they'd gone quiet. Totally quiet. There were seven of them, five girls and two boys, and they'd all closed their eyes and folded their hands on the table.
"Weird," I said.
"Group meditation," said the cook, peeking out over the swinging doors to the dining room. I'd never seen her so much as set a foot outside of the kitchen. No one was sure she even could, so far, but, then, The Doorway had only been open for a year and a half. In this incarnation, at least. "They're synchronizing their breathing so they can get into each others' heads and share information faster."
In my six months on the night shift, this was the longest conversation she'd had with me. It was written in cold iron that the restaurant would stay open twenty-four hours, and that she would always be the only cook from midnight to sunrise. Nights were long, this far north. "How do you know that?" I asked.
The cook pulled another sheet pan out of the oven. After the first few times, you got used to seeing her touch hot things with her bare hands. Not dead, but not alive, either. She smiled, winked, and handed me an almond cookie, and then we were back at square one.
She didn't speak to me again--not really--until a full month later.
I told people I'd taken the night shift because it was nearly always slow, and when it was dead, I had time to study. I didn't have the money for schooling, and if I worked from dawn to dusk for the next sixty years I would never have the money for schooling, but I could read, which would have to do. The people who came to the Doorway between midnight and sunup, I'd learned, fell roughly into three camps: broke students from the various schools of the Six Collegia, drunk foreigners who'd taken a wrong turn and needed something greasy to sober up, and mages and scientists who wanted to gawk at the cook.
"Should I tell these ones to piss off?" I asked, pinning their order to the board. Two scarlet-robed mages on exchange from a neighboring country's collegium. They were the second group of prodders we'd had in this week. "They want to observe you. And they want their apps and their main dishes at the same time."
Cook (she was no longer the cook to me) ran a hand through her snow-white hair and sighed. Most of the time, she didn't look much older than me. Her age was in her eyes tonight. It was more unsettling than usual. "I'll tell them to piss off," I said. "They're Southerners, they look like bad tippers, anyway."
"No, let them come back and tell me how they like my food," Cook said, and I shrugged. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to whether she'd let them come in the back.
The only other person in the restaurant was a student slouching over her textbook. I picked my way through the empty tables to bring her a fresh mug of coffee. She took it with shaking hands, avoided eye contact with me, and tried to sink deeper into her booth. The mages watched me with bright eyes, as if they were trying as hard as was legally possible to dissect me with their gazes.
"Cook says you can go back after you eat," I said. "Can I get you more water? Wine? [Genever]?"
"Thank you, and no," the older woman said, taking a fastidious little sip from her glass. "We are content to wait for the occupant." The younger one watched me, stone-faced, while I retreated back to the kitchen.
Southerners were as sour as cat shit. Cook had the plates ready to go, and whatever lost magic this place still had meant the food wasn't going to get cold any time soon. I could make them wait if I wanted, so I did. The kid having the nervous meltdown wasn't going to need anything.
It was three hours past midnight, which meant it was time for Cook to make the bread, and a hunk of raw dough kneaded itself on the counter while she prepared the next batch. "Definitely Southerners. Two full mages," I said, half-heartedly wiping down a countertop.
"One full mage, one apprentice," Cook said. "Bring them two extra plates, they'll want to put all the dishes in the middle of the table and share."
"You always know," I said, "about the mages."
Cook tapped her temple and went back to her bread. The cryptic bullshit stopped seeming like bullshit after a while, if you saw it from her point of view: how many nosy servers could you explain your host of mystical powers to over the course of two hundred fifty years without it getting boring? Either that, or Cook just liked being cagey.
My own family had been in restaurants for a century; a few generations of absolute devotion to the business in all its forms grew my line some bit of magic. I had just enough magecraft to balance all the plates without dropping them, and to make the kitchen door swing open before I touched it. I knew within a second of looking at the table that the apprentice--and she did look younger than I'd thought at first--had noticed what I'd done, and she pursed her lips as I set my load down.
But she didn't say anything, and why should she? It was just low magic, trade magic. It cleared out shit-clogged privies and made tile floors level.
"Don't be bitter," said Cook. She always knew.
"It wasn't cold iron, it was bad steel. Iron rusts out too fast, bad for sorcerous pacts," Cook said.
The apprentice played with the hem of her robe, her eyes darting around our kitchen; her master, on the other hand, was riveted on Cook's every word. These were not normal prodders: no instruments, no staves of power, no scribes furiously writing down everything Cook said, no cameras. "And when the iron -- the steel rusts through completely?"
"Doesn't matter. I'll still be stuck here."
"Stuck?"
"Bound," Cook said, "by more than a pact. But you try only being corporeal for eight hours in a day, see how much you care about semantics." And there she was, speaking more than she'd spoken to me in weeks. There was an edge to her voice I'd never heard before -- she didn't look nervous. She never looked much like anything.
"Eugenie, wait outside," the mage said.
"Arra," Cook said, "go with her."
I'd never told Cook my name, and she'd never asked. We backed out of the kitchen, and we kept backing, until I found myself standing next to her on the sidewalk outside of the diner.
Eugenie rubbed her temples. "Compulsions give me headaches," she said. "I wish Sister wouldn't use them. Is the story true, about the soldiers?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.
Everyone in the business around here knew someone who knew someone whose cousin had been there when the thing with the soldiers went down at the Doorway, which hadn't been the Doorway at the time, but Cafe Antoine. Or the White Turtle. Or the Metal Horse. Or whatever it was before then. You get the idea.
The story went sort of like: six soldiers and six spies from the South (six is a good round number, and twelve is holy in most faiths) were traveling in a group before they split up and infiltrated the capital, and decided to have a last meal together before they parted ways and went to ground. They picked Cafe Antoine, or the White Turtle, or the Metal Horse, because it was out of the way. Cook, who always knows, knew they were there to do harm, and so they all ate themselves to death. And then everyone else in the restaurant ate themselves to death. The end.
But, me -- I can do them all one better.
My great-grandmother was the Metal Horse's night server, and she did see it happen. The magic fallout (the story doesn't say how many years it took for the sorcerers to clean it up and suppress the story, or that the cracks in the sidewalk Eugenie and I stood on could never be repaired because of it) got into my family's bones. And we keep coming back to this ground.
And Eugenie looked at me from the corner of her eyes. "Your magic smells like this place."
"My mother worked here while she carried me. My grandfather worked here while my grandmother was carrying her. And his mother worked here, too." I shrugged. "There's almost always been one of my family here at night, with Cook."
"Is that in the pact?"
"It just happened," I said.
I'd hoped that would be the end of the matter. No such luck. "What can you do?" Eugenie asked.
"I don't know, what can you do? Anything useful? I never drop a plate, no matter how many I carry at once. If I make a pot of coffee or tea, it lasts for four or five cups longer than you'd think it would. When I fill a water glass, it never gets less than two-thirds full. Did your master send us out here for you to question me?" The look in her eyes said everything, and suddenly, I was furious. "My name is Arra Durand, I am twenty-six years old, and in my restaurant, you have no power."
It was a last resort. Magical troublemakers always wrote off the sudden loss of power as their being too drunk, or too tired, to do magic, but Eugenie knew better. If she could make the connection between my magic and my restaurant, she had to. "Sister just wanted to know -- to research -- your diner is one of seven -- "
"I don't care," I said.
" --why are you so angry?"
"Apprentice Eugenie," I said, "let me ask you a question. If your bloodline was drawn to a place housing an entity capable of killing two dozen people without blinking, would you take kindly to foreign mages doing research?"
"Mages have no nation," Eugenie said.
"Well, then, I'm sorry if I seem skeptical," I said. She'd fallen to her knees. When I did my trick on mages -- which would fade as soon as they were outside the steel boundary markers buried around the diner's grounds" -- they always looked like they'd had a limb cut off, but there was a sick, triumphant light in her eyes.
"I thought you said you had no idea what I was talking about. With the soldiers." She struggled to her feet. "Two dozen people," she said. "Tell me more."
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
"I'm not telling you anything," I said. And I repeated, for good measure, just in case: "You have no power."
Before Eugenie could say any more, the mage walked out and stood between us. "It's just an ordinary ghost, Eugenie," the mage said.
"Adrienne -- "
The mage held up a hand. "Nothing but an incarnate spirit, nothing special. Let's go."
Cook stepped out of the restaurant behind the mage Adrienne (she could, she could leave the building, I thought) and put one pale brown hand to Eugenie's head. Eugenie's face relaxed. She took a deep breath, and turned to her sister as though Cook wasn't touching her, as though Cook and I weren't even there.
"Boring. At least the food here is better than it was at the last three," Eugenie said. "Couldn't you have picked something more exciting than magic cooks?"
"There was a war, and I was a mage," Cook said, once I was back in the kitchen. There was color in her cheeks, and the suggestion of pupils in her blank eyes; whatever magic she'd used had made her more human.
I tried to pour myself a glass of water, but I didn't have the strength to turn the knob on the faucet. I dropped the glass in the sink, and it broke. Whatever magic she'd used, she'd taken it out of me. Out of my life. I couldn't be angry, it was not in me to be angry. Cook went on: "I needed to feed a hundred people. More than a hundred, out of this kitchen. They kept coming to me for help. I had to protect them, too. So I made a bargain, and the food never ran out. And neither did I."
A bargain with what or whom, I didn't ask. "You gave your substance to feed them." I managed to make it to one of the stools along the wall and sit with my back braced against the wall.
"I could ask you to take my place and free me to die," Cook said. "Your kind always makes the offer. If I worked on you long enough, I could make you make the offer. But Arra was your great-grandmother's name."
"You always know," I said. She would have taken -- whatever she took -- out of my great-grandmother, too. It would have been wise of me to ask if she'd done it on purpose, or if she'd taken it by accident. Instinct. But, I decided, I didn't want to know.
"You and yours, your kind, you keep coming back to me. Of course I knew you. Right away." And now the color drained slowly from her face. Her eyes were white again. She stood straight and tall, and she retied her apron strings, and went back to her bread. "Peel potatoes until you can walk again," she said, jabbing her thumb at a sack in the corner. "You may as well make yourself useful."
the end
"I prefer 'occupied,'" the cook said, turning around to pull a sheet pan from the depths of the deck oven. Whatever was on it smelled overpoweringly like anise; I wrinkled my nose, then smoothed out my face before she could turn back around and see. "So do the mages and solicitors. If you say 'haunted,' the place will never sell to the next round of suckers, no matter how good the location is."
"Suckers," I said.
"Suckers," she repeated. "Rubes. Your boss has a good head on his shoulders, don't worry."
She would know. And it wasn't as though the boss could do anything about her even if she did talk shit, because she couldn't be exorcised or banished, because she wasn't dead. Technically. There was a grey area with these kinds of things.
I re-filled my pitcher and put on a fresh pot of coffee. I didn't bother with decaf--a gang of apprentice mages had picked our hole-in-the-wall as their squat for an all-nighter, and as long as they didn't set anything on fire and kept ordering food, I didn't care. At the moment, they'd gone quiet. Totally quiet. There were seven of them, five girls and two boys, and they'd all closed their eyes and folded their hands on the table.
"Weird," I said.
"Group meditation," said the cook, peeking out over the swinging doors to the dining room. I'd never seen her so much as set a foot outside of the kitchen. No one was sure she even could, so far, but, then, The Doorway had only been open for a year and a half. In this incarnation, at least. "They're synchronizing their breathing so they can get into each others' heads and share information faster."
In my six months on the night shift, this was the longest conversation she'd had with me. It was written in cold iron that the restaurant would stay open twenty-four hours, and that she would always be the only cook from midnight to sunrise. Nights were long, this far north. "How do you know that?" I asked.
The cook pulled another sheet pan out of the oven. After the first few times, you got used to seeing her touch hot things with her bare hands. Not dead, but not alive, either. She smiled, winked, and handed me an almond cookie, and then we were back at square one.
She didn't speak to me again--not really--until a full month later.
I told people I'd taken the night shift because it was nearly always slow, and when it was dead, I had time to study. I didn't have the money for schooling, and if I worked from dawn to dusk for the next sixty years I would never have the money for schooling, but I could read, which would have to do. The people who came to the Doorway between midnight and sunup, I'd learned, fell roughly into three camps: broke students from the various schools of the Six Collegia, drunk foreigners who'd taken a wrong turn and needed something greasy to sober up, and mages and scientists who wanted to gawk at the cook.
"Should I tell these ones to piss off?" I asked, pinning their order to the board. Two scarlet-robed mages on exchange from a neighboring country's collegium. They were the second group of prodders we'd had in this week. "They want to observe you. And they want their apps and their main dishes at the same time."
Cook (she was no longer the cook to me) ran a hand through her snow-white hair and sighed. Most of the time, she didn't look much older than me. Her age was in her eyes tonight. It was more unsettling than usual. "I'll tell them to piss off," I said. "They're Southerners, they look like bad tippers, anyway."
"No, let them come back and tell me how they like my food," Cook said, and I shrugged. There wasn't any rhyme or reason to whether she'd let them come in the back.
The only other person in the restaurant was a student slouching over her textbook. I picked my way through the empty tables to bring her a fresh mug of coffee. She took it with shaking hands, avoided eye contact with me, and tried to sink deeper into her booth. The mages watched me with bright eyes, as if they were trying as hard as was legally possible to dissect me with their gazes.
"Cook says you can go back after you eat," I said. "Can I get you more water? Wine? [Genever]?"
"Thank you, and no," the older woman said, taking a fastidious little sip from her glass. "We are content to wait for the occupant." The younger one watched me, stone-faced, while I retreated back to the kitchen.
Southerners were as sour as cat shit. Cook had the plates ready to go, and whatever lost magic this place still had meant the food wasn't going to get cold any time soon. I could make them wait if I wanted, so I did. The kid having the nervous meltdown wasn't going to need anything.
It was three hours past midnight, which meant it was time for Cook to make the bread, and a hunk of raw dough kneaded itself on the counter while she prepared the next batch. "Definitely Southerners. Two full mages," I said, half-heartedly wiping down a countertop.
"One full mage, one apprentice," Cook said. "Bring them two extra plates, they'll want to put all the dishes in the middle of the table and share."
"You always know," I said, "about the mages."
Cook tapped her temple and went back to her bread. The cryptic bullshit stopped seeming like bullshit after a while, if you saw it from her point of view: how many nosy servers could you explain your host of mystical powers to over the course of two hundred fifty years without it getting boring? Either that, or Cook just liked being cagey.
My own family had been in restaurants for a century; a few generations of absolute devotion to the business in all its forms grew my line some bit of magic. I had just enough magecraft to balance all the plates without dropping them, and to make the kitchen door swing open before I touched it. I knew within a second of looking at the table that the apprentice--and she did look younger than I'd thought at first--had noticed what I'd done, and she pursed her lips as I set my load down.
But she didn't say anything, and why should she? It was just low magic, trade magic. It cleared out shit-clogged privies and made tile floors level.
"Don't be bitter," said Cook. She always knew.
"It wasn't cold iron, it was bad steel. Iron rusts out too fast, bad for sorcerous pacts," Cook said.
The apprentice played with the hem of her robe, her eyes darting around our kitchen; her master, on the other hand, was riveted on Cook's every word. These were not normal prodders: no instruments, no staves of power, no scribes furiously writing down everything Cook said, no cameras. "And when the iron -- the steel rusts through completely?"
"Doesn't matter. I'll still be stuck here."
"Stuck?"
"Bound," Cook said, "by more than a pact. But you try only being corporeal for eight hours in a day, see how much you care about semantics." And there she was, speaking more than she'd spoken to me in weeks. There was an edge to her voice I'd never heard before -- she didn't look nervous. She never looked much like anything.
"Eugenie, wait outside," the mage said.
"Arra," Cook said, "go with her."
I'd never told Cook my name, and she'd never asked. We backed out of the kitchen, and we kept backing, until I found myself standing next to her on the sidewalk outside of the diner.
Eugenie rubbed her temples. "Compulsions give me headaches," she said. "I wish Sister wouldn't use them. Is the story true, about the soldiers?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.
Everyone in the business around here knew someone who knew someone whose cousin had been there when the thing with the soldiers went down at the Doorway, which hadn't been the Doorway at the time, but Cafe Antoine. Or the White Turtle. Or the Metal Horse. Or whatever it was before then. You get the idea.
The story went sort of like: six soldiers and six spies from the South (six is a good round number, and twelve is holy in most faiths) were traveling in a group before they split up and infiltrated the capital, and decided to have a last meal together before they parted ways and went to ground. They picked Cafe Antoine, or the White Turtle, or the Metal Horse, because it was out of the way. Cook, who always knows, knew they were there to do harm, and so they all ate themselves to death. And then everyone else in the restaurant ate themselves to death. The end.
But, me -- I can do them all one better.
My great-grandmother was the Metal Horse's night server, and she did see it happen. The magic fallout (the story doesn't say how many years it took for the sorcerers to clean it up and suppress the story, or that the cracks in the sidewalk Eugenie and I stood on could never be repaired because of it) got into my family's bones. And we keep coming back to this ground.
And Eugenie looked at me from the corner of her eyes. "Your magic smells like this place."
"My mother worked here while she carried me. My grandfather worked here while my grandmother was carrying her. And his mother worked here, too." I shrugged. "There's almost always been one of my family here at night, with Cook."
"Is that in the pact?"
"It just happened," I said.
I'd hoped that would be the end of the matter. No such luck. "What can you do?" Eugenie asked.
"I don't know, what can you do? Anything useful? I never drop a plate, no matter how many I carry at once. If I make a pot of coffee or tea, it lasts for four or five cups longer than you'd think it would. When I fill a water glass, it never gets less than two-thirds full. Did your master send us out here for you to question me?" The look in her eyes said everything, and suddenly, I was furious. "My name is Arra Durand, I am twenty-six years old, and in my restaurant, you have no power."
It was a last resort. Magical troublemakers always wrote off the sudden loss of power as their being too drunk, or too tired, to do magic, but Eugenie knew better. If she could make the connection between my magic and my restaurant, she had to. "Sister just wanted to know -- to research -- your diner is one of seven -- "
"I don't care," I said.
" --why are you so angry?"
"Apprentice Eugenie," I said, "let me ask you a question. If your bloodline was drawn to a place housing an entity capable of killing two dozen people without blinking, would you take kindly to foreign mages doing research?"
"Mages have no nation," Eugenie said.
"Well, then, I'm sorry if I seem skeptical," I said. She'd fallen to her knees. When I did my trick on mages -- which would fade as soon as they were outside the steel boundary markers buried around the diner's grounds" -- they always looked like they'd had a limb cut off, but there was a sick, triumphant light in her eyes.
"I thought you said you had no idea what I was talking about. With the soldiers." She struggled to her feet. "Two dozen people," she said. "Tell me more."
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
"I'm not telling you anything," I said. And I repeated, for good measure, just in case: "You have no power."
Before Eugenie could say any more, the mage walked out and stood between us. "It's just an ordinary ghost, Eugenie," the mage said.
"Adrienne -- "
The mage held up a hand. "Nothing but an incarnate spirit, nothing special. Let's go."
Cook stepped out of the restaurant behind the mage Adrienne (she could, she could leave the building, I thought) and put one pale brown hand to Eugenie's head. Eugenie's face relaxed. She took a deep breath, and turned to her sister as though Cook wasn't touching her, as though Cook and I weren't even there.
"Boring. At least the food here is better than it was at the last three," Eugenie said. "Couldn't you have picked something more exciting than magic cooks?"
"There was a war, and I was a mage," Cook said, once I was back in the kitchen. There was color in her cheeks, and the suggestion of pupils in her blank eyes; whatever magic she'd used had made her more human.
I tried to pour myself a glass of water, but I didn't have the strength to turn the knob on the faucet. I dropped the glass in the sink, and it broke. Whatever magic she'd used, she'd taken it out of me. Out of my life. I couldn't be angry, it was not in me to be angry. Cook went on: "I needed to feed a hundred people. More than a hundred, out of this kitchen. They kept coming to me for help. I had to protect them, too. So I made a bargain, and the food never ran out. And neither did I."
A bargain with what or whom, I didn't ask. "You gave your substance to feed them." I managed to make it to one of the stools along the wall and sit with my back braced against the wall.
"I could ask you to take my place and free me to die," Cook said. "Your kind always makes the offer. If I worked on you long enough, I could make you make the offer. But Arra was your great-grandmother's name."
"You always know," I said. She would have taken -- whatever she took -- out of my great-grandmother, too. It would have been wise of me to ask if she'd done it on purpose, or if she'd taken it by accident. Instinct. But, I decided, I didn't want to know.
"You and yours, your kind, you keep coming back to me. Of course I knew you. Right away." And now the color drained slowly from her face. Her eyes were white again. She stood straight and tall, and she retied her apron strings, and went back to her bread. "Peel potatoes until you can walk again," she said, jabbing her thumb at a sack in the corner. "You may as well make yourself useful."
the end