"Nah," I replied, peering forward in between the beams of light. I kept my fists balled tight at my sides. "Don't think so."
"Don't refuse the Barista's bounty," Eskina cautioned me, alarmed. "If you do, she might refuse to serve you. People would turn themselves inside out to avoid displeasing the Barista! How can you get started in the morning without the coffee?"
But I was on the scent.
"Only one person I've ever known brews coffee that smells that good," I muttered, striding toward the booth.
And I was right. When we neared the little building, a door in the side burst open, and a large blue-white blur zipped out of it and straight into my arms.
"Aahz, you old deveel!" crowed Sibone. The Cafiend's long, sinuous body wound her way around me, the end of her tail flicking side to side with delight. "My goodness, you're looking handsome."
"Suspicion confirmed." I grinned as I introduced her to my friends.
"You know the Barista?" Eskina asked, astonished and, at last, impressed.
"We're old friends," I announced, my arm around Sibone's waist, or where her waist would be if she wasn't a twelve-foot serpent with arms and living hair. "Chumley, Massha, this is Sibone. She's from Caf." Her hands, as flexible as her body, curled about my ears, tickling places that obviously she hadn't forgotten in all these years. I enjoyed the sensation, then snapped back to the realization that I had a mission. "Hey, we've got an audience," I protested.
"And when did that ever stop you?" Sibone purred. Her hair crawled around the back of my neck and caressed it. But she turned to my companions and threw her arms around them. "Come and let me give you love. Any friend of Aahz is a friend of mine."
"What are you doing here?" Sibone and I asked one another in unison.
"You first." I laughed.
"Oh"—Sibone sighed, fanning her pale cheeks with a twist of paper held in a coil of her tail—"too much pressure." She took a refreshing drink from one of the many cups standing on tiny shelves adorning the walls of the Coffee House, and curled up in her basketlike chair like a big white pearl in a ring. I kicked back with my feet crossed on a chaise longue with gold tassel fringe. Massha lounged easily in a contraption like a padded hammock. Chumley perched uneasily on an ottoman too small for his big Trollish posterior. Eskina huddled against a wall between the ever-filling coffee cups and stared at the Barista in deep awe.
Unlike its simple exterior, the interior of the small booth proved to be much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. A surreptitious glance at the map in my pocket showed no detail about the kiosk at the center of The Mall, but Sibone had clearly gone extradimensional for comfort. The room was an easy thirty feet in diameter. The air was filled with the rich, slightly oily aroma of fresh coffee, which brewed in dozens of gigantic urns that stood in arcs flanking the window and in the crystal decanter that stood on a pedestal in the center of the round, mahogany-tiled room. We could see blank-faced, hopeful customers staggering toward the building, their hands held out in supplication. One of Sibone's bubbles would usually do the trick, one sip of elixir restoring character and energy to the customers' faces. Another coin or two clanked magikally into the overflowing golden crock under the counter. Sibone supervised the process for a moment, then turned back to us.
"Everyone in Caf is frenetic, no problem there. It's always crazy, but a few years ago someone in the government decided that anything that feels as good as coffee must be regulated to the bitter dregs. We need coffee to live, so this was very unfair legislation. I was running a multiregion-distribution business of gourmet goods—only the best, of course."
"Of course," I agreed.
"I oversaw picking and processing personally. It was wonderful. I had a slate of faithful customers, and all of them began to get questionnaires from government regulators. Now, you're like me, you don't like snoops. I started asking questions back. They didn't like the fact that some of my blends are made with beans that come from other dimensions. But you know that Caf explorers seeded those plantations thousands of years ago. Those trees are ours. If you like, I was only importing sunlight and water. But the pests did not see it that way. They started to demand that I justify my extradimensional purchases. And then when they asked for full lists of all my customers, and all of their customers, I realized that someone was getting too hyper."
I nodded. A being like her whose blood is mostly caffeine would know how bad that was. She uncurled her long hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"So I have returned to my roots. I have one outlet, here, which I run myself. It is supplied by one farm, which I own myself. I give the gift of life to all those who come to me. I am appreciated."
"Why here?" I asked. "Why not somewhere like Perv, where you'd be a star?"
Sibone patted my leg with one of her tentacle-like hands. "Perv is too focused on the pursuit of the moment. I wanted to go somewhere I was really needed. Here there was a center with nothing to fill it, where people were looking for direction. I provide them with the strength to do what they choose. In the end it is only people that matter."
"Now, that sounds like the old metaphysical Sibone I used to know," I exclaimed. I reached for a hefty brown mug hanging on the wall. Pervects like their coffee like they like their beer, at optimum temperature and in sufficient quantity to drown their tonsils.
"But what about you? I had last heard you were acting as a balance in a lawless place."
I narrowed an eye. That wasn't the way the Merchants' Association would like to have the Bazaar described, but it pretty much explained M.Y.T.H., Inc.'s job.
"Temporarily retired," I stated shortly, hoping that would do. However much I trusted Sibone to understand all that had happened to me recently, I wasn't going to go into any of it in front of Eskina. "I'm here to help out a friend. Someone in The Mall's been masquerading as him, ripping him and a bunch of merchants off, but Eskina here thinks there's a more sinister purpose."
Eskina launched into her story, aided by the picture of Skeeve I was carrying. About five cups of coffee later she sputtered to an end. Sibone patted her on the back.
"So your good friend is being drained by this evil creature Eskina is seeking," Sibone summed up neatly.
"So she says," I replied. I still wasn't completely convinced. "It explains the mechanism as well as anything else. I'm willing to have help chasing down the SOB."
"Help? You?" Sibone asked, astonished. "Why don't you just reach out and grab him, trounce his sorry behind, and spit on the remains?"
I scowled. "It's not so easy. I've lost my powers."
Sibone put out a sympathetic hand. "I'm very sorry. Oh, but then I have to warn you: Cire is running around here."
"Cire!" I exclaimed. A fellow wizard and a friend, but he had a sense of humor you might call playful if you weren't the brunt of it.
"Yes. He just came off a very lucrative contract, has money to burn. He thought he would blow it at The Mall and spend his afternoons drinking my coffee."
I leered at her. "Well, that's half a good reason to hang out here."
Sibone tapped me playfully. "You! Well, let me see if I can help you." She shook her head at me, then stared off into space over our heads. Cafiends never closed their eyes. Close as I'd been to Sibone, I still wasn't sure if it was because they had no eyelids or from living on a steady diet of coffee. "I see all, in the course of the day: the lonely ones who come here, the unready, the sleepy, the unaware, and those who just need a good jolt of joe. I do not believe I have ever seen this face." She tapped Skeeve's portrait.