The Ghostly Piper's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

The Ghostly Piper played his clockwork panpipes and knew, without proof, that his killer had stood in this very room. He was a teal spirit in Regency dress, bound to The Whistling Whiskey since the night he died. He did not remember the murder. He only knew the truth waited outside these walls, and he could not reach it. His wispy body pressed against the tavern door and stopped, as if the wood were iron. Every night he drifted the same circle. Behind the bar. Past the tall windows. Along the crowded tables of laughing patrons who never saw him. Then the door, always the door. He had counted its brass hinges a thousand times. Beyond it lay the street, the city, the man who had ended his life. He could sense the pull of it, faint and cold, like a scent on wind he could not follow. Maeve Amberdrop wiped the bar and watched the empty air where he hovered. She ran the pub her father left her, and she knew every regular by name. She could not see the Piper. But she felt him when the room went quiet and her whiskey glass frosted. "You're restless tonight," she said to nobody the drinkers could name. "Same as always. Round and round." The door opened. Casandra Videncia stepped in, her dark blue robe trailing, star ornaments clinking in her grey hair. She was Maeve's oldest friend and a medium, the one living person who heard the dead. Her eyes found the Piper at once. "There you are," she said. She tilted her head, listening to something the others could not. "He says the answer is past the door. He says he cannot cross." Maeve set down her cloth. "He's tried before?" "Every night for forty years." Casandra laid her tarot deck on the bar. She pulled one card without looking. She smiled at it. "He is bound to a thing, not a place. A thing that stayed inside." She turned to the empty air. "You have circled the room. Now circle it again. Look for what does not belong." The Piper drifted the walls once more. He passed the bar, the windows, the clock ticking above the door. Then he saw it. A single flagstone by the hearth, worn smooth and pale, wrong among the darker stones. He had floated over it a thousand times. He sank toward it now and felt the cold pull sharpen to a point. His death lived under that stone. "There," Casandra whispered. "He has found it." Maeve knelt at the hearth and pried the loose stone up with a knife. Beneath it lay a tarnished brass button, snapped from a coat, and a folded page gone brown with age. She lifted the button to the firelight. On its face, worked in fine gold gears, glinted the mark of a spy. The Piper stared. His killer had left a name behind after all. Now he needed to read it.