“No wager necessary,” Drake said. “But I’m afraid I’ve waylaid you long enough. I shall take my leave and allow you to resume your mission.”
Drake gave a graceful bow and reached down to kiss her hand. Instead of making contact, he merely brought his lips to within an inch of her hand. She felt the warmth of his breath and ignored the small shiver that went down her back, blaming that, too, on William Goldman. Then the walking anachronism rose, spun on the balls of his feet, and walked away.
“Huh.” Ree considered the oddity for a moment, then went back to browsing. She had just found a well-loved copy of Underground when Eastwood emerged from the back room, a burlap sack thrown over one shoulder.
“Ready?” he asked.
Ree walked with Eastwood back toward the bar section. “I could spend a week in here.”
Eastwood huffed. “I’ve done that. Wasn’t very fun. But that was more due to the Yu-Gi-Oh! zombies.”
“Metaphorical or literal zombies?”
Grognard joined in from behind the bar, where he had returned to the Most Archetypal Bartender Thing Ever: cleaning glasses. “That time it was literal,” the big man said. “I stopped carrying that crack afterward. The profit wasn’t worth dealing with the junkies.”
“Does every part of the geekverse have a weirdo supernatural aspect?” Ree asked.
Eastwood nodded several times. “Just about. The trick is learning which what goes where and does what.”
“That was some Tennant-level vaguebabble.”
“Thanks, I’ve been practicing.” Eastwood swung the bag out for her. She caught it with a huff. It was somewhere between really heavy and really f—ing heavy. “And on that thought, allons-y!” Somehow he’d acquired a crook-handled umbrella, which he used to gesture as a cane.
“I’m mad, you’re mad, we’re all mad here . . .” Ree voiced to herself as she swung the bag over her shoulder and followed Eastwood out the door and back down into the sewer.
Chapter Seven
Mad Shopper What Shops at Midnight
The sewers had spectacularly failed at getting less drab and gross during their visit to Grognard’s, but after a couple of miles of walking, Ree decided to study the various types of grates, concretes, and doors. Who knew when a taxonomy of sewers would come in handy.
“What exactly is this place we’re going?” Ree asked.
“It’s the Midnight Market. Think of something between a town council meeting and a monthly convention.”
“Well, that’s not the least bit confusing.”
“You can say that again.” Ree was about to reply when Eastwood cut her off. “But please don’t. The Market’s the best place to acquire oddities, and we all check in to resolve issues, make plans, and, usually, get drunk and tell stories about the old times.”
“It sounds like I’ll have a blast.”
“You’ll get plenty of attention.” Eastwood led them down another stairwell. Ree was surprised that there was more down to be had, since they were already in the sewers. But given the week she’d had, it was barely worth a twitch on her WTF-o-meter.
On this level, even Ree had to squat to avoid the low ceiling. Eastwood and her steps synced up, making moaning chords in aged wood over concrete. “That’s the problem. I get hit on or ogled enough at work,” she said.
Eastwood chuckled as he reached the bottom of the stairs and opened another door. “But this will be ogling dangerous enough that you worry for your soul. Far superior, grade-A-plus major-league ogling.”
Ree made ooh I’m scared hands, which resembled spirit fingers, but with a fake-scared expression.
Eastwood gave her a hard look. “Seriously, there are some not-nice people involved. Market is neutral territory, but it doesn’t always stop people when they get in a murdering mood.”
Ree pulled the rapier a foot out of the scabbard. “Hence the sword?”
“Hence.” And with that, Eastwood stopped at another door. “This is it. The doorman is going to ask a bunch of questions—let me answer, and don’t talk unless directly addressed. Once we get inside to the social mixing part, it’ll be less anal-retentive, don’t worry.” Eastwood’s stern default broke, letting out a little bit of warmth.
He knocked fast four times, break, another four, break, and a third set of four. Ree recognized the pattern from Doctor Who and smiled. The familiar trappings of geekdom went a long way toward making the “magic and monsters are real and want to eat you alive” thing less stressful, if only just.
A slat opened in the door, and brown eyes appeared under furrowed brows. “How many antennae on an Imperial probe droid?” a voice asked.
“Two,” Eastwood said without missing a beat.
“First appearance of Ambush Bug?” the voice asked.
Eastwood cocked his head to the side, thinking. “DC Comics Presents #52.”
“How many times does Inigo Montoya repeat his mantra in the duel with Count Rugen?”
Eastwood scrunched his eyebrows and looked somewhat lost. He turned to Ree, who smiled. “Five,” she said.
“Wrong,” the man said. “It was four.”
Eastwood’s face dropped.
Ree leaned in at the slot and said, “Bullshit. He says it once in the hall, then four times in the basement after he takes the knife to the belly. I can recite the whole scene, if you’d like.”
There was a moment of silence. Ree looked to Eastwood with wide eyes. Eastwood looked at her with a what the hell are you thinking? expression.
Crap. But I was right!
Ree heard a chuckle from within, and then the door swung open with a groaning creak. Ree exhaled, the momentary panic leaving with her breath.
They passed a skinny man with a shaved head and a tattoo of a Warhammer Chaos symbol on his skull, then walked down a dank hallway. Thirty feet later, they emerged into a vast room.
Ree stopped and took in this Midnight Market. The ceiling was at least fifty feet up, the whole room as wide as a football field and nearly as deep. It looked for all the world like a Tim Burtonized version of the exhibitor hall at Gen Con. There were rows of stalls set up with signs, assorted books on ancient shelves, corsets and leather coats and gossamery blouses on dummies, and racks upon racks of increasingly ridiculous-looking swords.
Food carts were parked along the edges of the floor, including one kind of cart that Ree was glad pretty much never made it into the exhibitor hall at Cons—a bar. The sign above the cart said Grognard’s, and Ree recognized the beers on tap.
“You guys drink here, too?”
“Not all of Grognard’s beers are for getting drunk. Where most wizards have potions, he has beer.”
“Magic beer?” she exclaimed. “That’s the best impossible thing yet this week!”
“You’re going to need a big pad of paper for that list,” Eastwood said as he led her down an aisle.
They passed a set of triplets in red, yellow, and blue jumpsuits, arguing in a C-minor chord with a plump woman wearing a tie-dyed shimmery dress. Across the aisle, a living manga teen with spiky purple hair and more hardware on his body than an early Borg poked through dusty old digests. He said something unintelligible as Ree passed, and an honest-to-goodness 3-D speech bubble appeared over his head, showing a paragraph of handwritten Japanese.
Ree let her head track over her shoulder as she passed, continuing to watch the speech bubble. Another one popped up as the kid kept talking.
Eastwood dodged through the moving crowd, sidetracking through an open booth area with pewter miniatures. They passed another dozen stalls, carts, shelves, and thirty more attendees. Ree didn’t recognize a single one of them except as archetypes, variations on people she’d known or characters she’d seen. These were her people, if maybe the awesomely crazy end of that set. For every twenty well-adjusted geeks who punched the clock, doing his or her time in the real world, there might be one of this sort.
She’d had the “all geeks are freaks” fight more than once with Jay, who
did his best to see only the maladjusted side of geekdom. His own interest in Sandman, Hammer horror flicks, and everything Nintendo didn’t make him a geek, of course.
Dick.
But were these folks the actual fringe, or were they an even more obscure subsection that she’d never known before? Did that really matter? Eyes wide, she continued to follow Eastwood across the floor to a space with a hundred or so seats set out in rows like at a discussion panel or an auction house. More than twenty seats were already filled. Some folks were chatting in low voices, others sat alone.
“This is what we’re here for.” Eastwood took a seat a quarter of the way up the aisle, near no one in particular. Ree sat down beside him, continuing to scan the audience. Eastwood leaned over to her and spoke softly. “They’re auctioning off a Claddagh ring, and I need at least one for rituals.”
“What rituals?” Ree asked, but just then a bell rang out three times, echoing through the hall. The shoppers and vendors picked up the pace, the overall din in the room ramping up a notch.
Eastwood leaned in and spoke in a soft voice. “The three suicides in this string have all been virgins, and all recently brokenhearted. That’s a lot of emotional energy, and with a specific accent to it. And a Claddagh ring has the appropriate semiotic resonance. I need to find out who is next and if there are going to be more.”
The bell rang again, and more people filtered into the auction area. A woman in a black three-piece suit and slate-gray hair under a top hat walked up to the dais at the front of the auction area, followed by a small legion of whatever the auction equivalent to roadies were called, who carted, hefted, and hauled various boxed and bagged items up into rows and stacks.
“Anything weird that I need to know about how this works?” Ree asked.
“Bidding goes by barter, not cash, and is adjudicated by the auctioneer. Here it’s possible to bid memories as materiel, though I don’t recommend it. Don’t raise your hand or draw attention, and you’ll be fine.”
“Why did I even come if I don’t get to do anything?”
“Do you want to learn about this world or not?” Eastwood snapped, his voice raising a tad. Heads turned, and Ree shrank into herself.
“I want answers, not a handholding, look-but-don’t-touch tour of Magic Con. And to stop the suicides.” Ree shivered, the pool of blood on the carpeted floor superimposed on her vision.
The seated crowd had grown to nearly a hundred by the time the third set of bells rang. The auctioneer scaled a step up and looked out from her podium.
“Greetings, and welcome to the Midnight Market. We have a full docket tonight, so I will dispose of most of the pleasantries. Each of you should already have a voting card. If you are new to the auction, please see one of the attendants in the back.” She gestured down the aisle, and Ree saw a pair of nondescript men at the entrance to the auction area, each wearing a top hat with a card in the brim that read Staff.
No one stood, so the woman continued. “As is custom, we will begin with something to whet your appetite.” The auctioneer pulled a large disc out of a folder and held it up to the audience. “We have for your interest the very first LaserDisc produced of the remastered Star Wars. What am I bid?”
A mountain of a man with blond hair raised his card and boomed out, “I bid an unopened pack of Magic: The Gathering, Arabian Nights.”
Ree nodded in appreciation. A woman in Elegant Gothic Lolita gear called, “Ten hours of instruction in the art of divination.”
The auctioneer considered for a moment, then called, “I have a bid of ten hours of instruction from Lady Lucretia. Any other bidders?”
Ree whispered to Eastwood, “What would you do with that? Aside from treasure it forever?” Ree’s mother had owned a set of the LaserDiscs, but they’d disappeared when she left.
“The primacy is the most important thing, but it’s both rare and untampered by Lucas’s later revisionist hard-on. For a purist practitioner, it’d be an essential ritual tool.”
“Do you have one?” Ree asked.
“Mine were . . . inherited.” Again, the note of sadness in Eastwood’s voice. Ree wondered what story had left him with that scar. If her math was right, he’d been active in the magic world since she was six or so. A lot of time in which to get bitter.
No one else bid, and the blond man didn’t add to his offer, so the disc went to the Lolita diviner. During the shuffle, Eastwood gave Ree the lowdown. “The giant blond guy is Sven Carlssen, badass for hire, makes most of his money bodyguarding. The Goth queen is Lady Lucretia, fortune-teller and rorikon expert.”
Ree regretted not having brought a notebook, so she typed as fast as her thumbs could go on her phone. The next item was a letter from John Lennon to Yoko Ono from April 1968, which went to a Buddy Holly look-alike with Reed Richards gray sideburns.
A nineteenth-century typewriter went to an aging ex-fratboy with double-popped collars, followed by a kukri that was traced to the first commander of the Royal Nepalese Army, which went to Carlssen in exchange for a World War II Japanese officer’s katana.
One hour and a dozen lots into the auction, Eastwood pulled out a tablet and called up some kind of app. He leaned in to Ree and said, “Put on your earbuds and refresh your connection. We may have trouble on the way out.” He handed her the tablet, which was queued up to The Princess Bride.
She nodded, since the buzzing feeling of swashbuckling and wittiness had faded long ago. She attached her earbuds and hunkered down to watch, shielding the light from the crowd with her arms.
Ree had watched back through the duel at the Cliffs of Insanity when Eastwood nudged her with his elbow. “It’s up.”
Ree sat up straight and removed her earbuds, the film’s energy buzzing in her head again, as strong as when they’d left the Dorkcave.
The auctioneer held up a golden ring. “This is the original golden Claddagh ring given to Jim Morrison by Patricia Kennealy, lost in the early nineties and replaced by another. What am I bid?”
Eastwood raised his card and called, “I bid an original White Box Edition Dungeons & Dragons, signed by Gygax and Arneson—well loved and oft used.”
Murmurs spread across the crowd like a wave. Ree knew that normally, collectors would want something mint. But if artifacts and memorabilia ran on nostalgia, maybe the well-loved aspect was a selling point. Something else to ask, Ree noted.
A voice from across the room called, “I bid a playbill from the original run of RENT, signed by all principals.”
Ree rose up in her seat to look at the bidder, a tall, gaunt man with unnaturally long fingers.
The auctioneer considered, then shook her head. “Insufficient. Do I have another bid?”
Lucretia’s card went up. “I bid a marker for one month’s blessing by Lady Fate.”
The auctioneer nodded. “Accepted. Eastwood, do you wish to add to your bid?”
Eastwood considered for a moment. “I will add the first Chaos Orb ever shredded in a tournament.”
A wave of “ooh” and “aah” rippled through the crowd. The Chaos Orb was a famous card from Magic: The Gathering. Dropped from a height above the play area, it destroyed every card it touched. It was an early legend of the Magic community that people had started taking Chaos Orbs, tearing them into dozens of pieces, and trying to scatter them over the entirety of the opponent’s play area like confetti. It was a move filled equally with brilliance and jackassery, though of course it was a onetime ploy. As a result, Chaos Orbs were damned rare anymore.
Lady Lucretia immediately countered, “I will add a marker for a custom-made Lucretia original gown of the holder’s choosing, inlaid with my most powerful blessings and protections.”
Eastwood cursed under his breath, “Bitch.” He fidgeted, biting his lower lip.
Either he’s taking this item pretty personally, really hates Lucretia, or is a sore loser.
The auctioneer looked to Eastwood again, asking for another bid. He gritted his teeth, then said, “I
will add a first-edition Obi-Wan Kenobi FX lightsaber, once wielded by Branwen nic Catrin, the late Jedi of Pearson.”
A dozen gasps erupted from within the audience.
Sven Carlssen turned in his chair and flashed a nasty look at Eastwood. “Don’t you dare.”
“Silence!” called the auctioneer, her voice somehow filling the room from all directions. The room fell silent save for the echoes of her voice. “Lady Lucretia, do you wish to add to your bid?”
Lucretia shook her head. “If Eastwood is willing to part with so dear a thing, his need for this ring must be greater than my own. I withdraw my bid.”
The auctioneer looked around. “Do I have any other bids?” There was no response except more murmurs and shuffling. It was as if anyone else were scared to go for the item. She must have been hot shit around here, Ree mused.
“Going once, twice . . . sold to Eastwood for a signed white-box Dungeons & Dragons set, the original confetti Chaos Orb, and the lightsaber of Branwen nic Catrin.”
The auctioneer clapped her gavel and the crowd applauded.
Eastwood sighed a deep sigh. “This had better work.”
The auction moved on with several more lots, but Eastwood stepped out a few minutes later, Ree following.
“Who was Branwen? Is that the Jedi you were talking about?” she asked.
“Yes. She was a . . . close friend.” Eastwood said it in a way that made it clear she had been much more than just a friend. “When she passed, I inherited her implements and collections, according to her will.”
“Not that I don’t appreciate you wanting to save people’s lives, but why is that Claddagh so important that you’d trade off her weapon?”
“It’s what she’d want. She was the most selfless person I ever met. She’d approve.” Eastwood sounded like he was trying to convince himself that what he said was true.
“Let’s take a walk. Want a drink?” Ree said, jumping into her Take Care of a Friend in Crisis mode without even realizing it.
“I shouldn’t, but thanks.” Eastwood’s walls went back up, and Ree backed off. They wandered the floor until the auction was over. Ree continued to take mental and digital notes about the stalls, the merchants, and the buyers.
Geekomancy Page 9
