by Martha Carr
“Go ahead and take ‘em.” Maleshi clapped a hand on the guy’s cloaked shoulder. “I don’t think the drow here are going to appreciate you soiling their streets in the middle of the morning.”
“I’ll soil whatever I want, thank you very much.”
“I’ll meet you outside the Heart when you’re finished.”
“You’re gonna sit there all day and wait for me, are you?”
The general smiled. “I would never. But I do know how long it takes you to get down to the lower levels and back up again.”
“Pah. You think I’m so predictable.” Mirl turned and hurried away down the avenue, waving for Cheyenne and Ember to follow. “Keep up, you two. Once we get below, I might not be able to hear you if you fall behind.”
“Wait.” Ember looked at Maleshi. “You’re sending us with him?”
“You can do whatever you want. I hooked you up with an excellent guide.”
“And I’m shit at picking faces out of a crowd!” Mirl let out a shrieking cackle, doubling over as he moved and shaking his head beneath the dark hood.
“Have fun.” Maleshi wiggled her fingers at them and headed toward the fortress. “Try not to spend all your veréle in one place.”
“Not ours.” Ember patted her pocket again and floated slowly after Mirl. “Venga’s.”
“Oh.” Turning around to dip her head at Cheyenne, the general gave her a small smile and widened her silver eyes. “Then never mind.”
She didn’t look at them a second time before disappearing inside the outer walls of the fortress, which were starting to take on the lighter hues of the interior.
“Come on, Em.” Cheyenne nodded at the magical scuttling quickly down the avenue. The drow coming out of their homes and storefronts at the end of a very quiet morning in Hangivol glared at Mirl, some even stepping back inside and shutting their doors again to keep him out.
“I’m usually not very picky,” Ember muttered, “but I’m not sure I’m a fan of that guy as a guide.”
“Most magicals aren’t,” Mirl called, startling them both because he heard their conversation yards behind him. “But if you don’t wanna get lost or kidnapped or mugged or drugged in the darkseller bazaar, your best bet is to follow someone who looks like me. Heh. Or so I’m told.”
He disappeared around the corner into another alley, and Ember frowned. “He’s blind, right?”
“That’s what it seems like, yeah.”
“So how did he know I’m fae?”
Cheyenne said, “Same way everyone knew you were fae before you looked like one.”
Ember grimaced and lowered her voice. “He can fucking smell me too?”
“I think he did the same with me.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t call you ‘drow.’ Just ‘you.’”
“Good point. That’d make it sound like recognition even if it wasn’t.” Cheyenne tried to hold back a laugh. “Maybe he knew it was me because I’m the only drow who would be hanging out with a fae.”
“Ew.” Ember shivered. “I don’t like that he can smell me.”
They rounded the corner and found Mirl waiting for them at the end of the short alley with a mottled hand pressed to the wall. “You’re gonna have to grow a stronger stomach if you wanna make it out of the bazaar in one piece, fae. The darksellers can smell fear too, I swear. It’s how they fund their trade.”
His fingers crawled along the wall like thick, hairless caterpillars as he tilted his head up toward the sky. The hood fell back a little more to reveal the rest of his wrinkled snout and one filmy white eye staring blankly at nothing.
“Ah. Every time, am I right?” He swiped quickly along the wall in three different directions, and a new doorway opened to reveal a tunnel heading down toward the lower levels. “You have maybe thirty seconds before this closes. Don’t be dumb.”
Then he took off into the tunnel, his shuffling gait echoing behind him.
Ember closed her eyes, then floated through the doorway behind him. Cheyenne glanced back at the mouth of the alley, which was fortunately empty. No one’s gonna be spying on the radag they all wanna stay away from. Won’t this be fun?
“Hey, by the way,” Ember whispered, though they were both sure Mirl could hear them in the silence of the tunnel, “what’s a darkseller bazaar?”
“O’gúleesh black market, Em.”
“I should’ve handed you Venga’s money case and stuck with Maleshi.”
“You’ll be fine. No one’s gonna mess with us.”
“But I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried,” Mirl called over his shoulder. “Lotta magicals willing to pay a claw and a tentacle to get either on fresh fae blood. Almost as much as they’d cough up to find a nightstalker in their greedy little grasps.” He cackled again, occasionally reaching out to brush a hand against the tunnel wall.
Ember pressed her lips together. “And that right there is why Maleshi sent us off with him alone.”
“We’ll be in and out of there with the flesh-setter hide in no time, Em.”
“Uh-huh. Hopefully, with all our internal organs intact.”
Cheyenne snorted. “Fingers crossed.”
Chapter Seventeen
Mirl led them down two more tunnels, both of which they accessed through back alleys with only the occasional curse spat his way. The magicals who recognized him stared in disbelief when they also recognized the Black Flame of Ambar’ogúl and her fae Nós Aní traveling with the unsavory radag. Those who didn’t recognize him recognized Cheyenne, if not Ember, and chose to stay away just the same.
At least no one’s groveling at my feet. Maybe we should keep the guy around all the time.
By the time they reached the lower level of the capital, the place was bustling with its usual crowds of lower-class magicals going about their day after last night’s raucous party. Most of them looked about as rough as Cheyenne expected. A small number of them thumped fists on chests when they saw her, but no one had enough time to even consider speaking to her before Mirl ducked down a dirtier, grittier alley and somehow managed to open a new doorway in the metal walls he couldn’t see.
“How does he know?”
“Normally, I’d have no idea.” Cheyenne didn’t bother to turn around and see who was watching them this time before following Mirl through another secret tunnel. “But I’m guessing it’s the same way you can get up and move around without walking.”
“Oh, I see.” Ember folded her arms and shot her friend a sidelong glance as the wall closed behind them. “All disabilities are the same on this side because we all have magic, huh?”
“I mean, I didn’t say that.”
“But you were thinking it.”
“Okay, sorry. It was the first answer that came to mind.”
“Well, you know what?” Ember cocked her head and wrinkled her nose. “You might be right about that.”
“Quit the chitchat, young’uns.” Mirl stopped at the newest tunnel’s dead-end and turned to face them, pulling back his hood one more time with a grin. “If you talk too much, somebody’s gonna end up using it against you.”
“Shut up and follow you, huh?” Ember nodded. “Got it.”
“I didn’t say that. You don’t talk, and those necrotic parasites will have you eating right outta their hands.”
Ember shook her head when Cheyenne frowned at her in concern.
“So stay close, huh?” Mirl twisted his hand on the blank wall in front of him. “And don’t touch anything, or you’ll end up looking like me.”
He cackled and stepped back as the wall unfolded into an incredibly narrow doorway. Thick white smoke trailed out of it from the space beyond, and Cheyenne and Ember hurried to catch up with their guide as he disappeared through the smog.
The darkseller bazaar seemed as crowded as the public marketplace on the lower level, though there was a lot less shouting and brawling and haggling and a lot more brooding.
Cheyenne glanced at a troll woman with such dark purple skin sh
e could have passed for a drow if it weren’t for the scarlet hair and eyes. The troll stared right back at her, not bothering to look down at her work as she scraped a wickedly sharp curved blade against a whetstone with a thick, repetitive motion. Behind her hung a string of what looked like a butcher’s inventory until Cheyenne realized the stringy parts dangling from the bottom was scarlet hair trailing from dangling troll heads.
Still a butcher, I guess. I seriously hope they were dead before she added them to that collection.
The thick smoke cleared away past the first few tables and booths, and it was easy to keep an eye on Mirl’s cloaked figure ahead of them and take a quick look around at the same time.
The smoke, as it turned out, came from a massive Goldsmile den on their right, where a metal fan whirled incessantly and pumped the haze out of the shop and into the far end of the bazaar. Someone inside cackled, and Cheyenne caught a glimpse of narrowed eyes in various colors glowing through the fog.
“A trinket for your mother, drow?” An old skaxen with dull brown-orange skin drooping in folds off his frame lurched away from his table to approach her. “Made from the bones of the giant ulundo.”
Cheyenne glanced at the dangling loops of a necklace the skaxen presented to her, made of bones with a few bits of flesh and hair still dangling from them, and pretended to consider the offer. “Nope. My mother would strangle me in my sleep before she thanked me for a gift like that.”
The skaxen chuckled, and they saw that all but one of his short, pointy teeth was missing. “Sounds like a drow after my own heart.”
“Yeah, good luck.” She stepped past the end of his table without turning back and shook her head.
“Okay.” Ember nudged her friend’s arm and leaned toward her. “While you’re yucking it up about your mom with the creeper back there, I’m starting to feel like this was a really, really bad idea.”
“What?”
“Ten o’clock. Three o’clock. One o’clock. Shit, Cheyenne. Every fucking o’clock.”
Cheyenne cast quick glances at the long metal tables and storefronts built into the walls of the bazaar. Guess I know which part of the city Peridosh was modeled after.
Gnarled, hunched, unwashed, sneering magicals huddled in dark recesses and in dimly lit doorways, staring not at Cheyenne but at the fae floating alongside her. A magical with black and red skin and short brown horns protruding from his bald head chuckled when they passed. A black tongue darted out of his grinning mouth to lick his fingers, which were covered in a rust-colored substance like mud, then he lifted his fingers to his horns and stared unblinkingly at Ember.
“Gross. Creepy. It stinks down here.” Ember eyed a magical of indeterminate gender who looked like a giant walking-stick bug, cringing as it pried thick gray fingernails from someone else’s severed fingers one at a time and tossed them into a metal tin. “And I’m starting to think I might be claustrophobic.”
“Don’t go there, Em. Just keep moving, and keep your eyes to yourself, huh?”
“And look where? At the back of Mirl’s head?”
“I mean, it’s not a pretty picture, but at least it’s not looking at you like you’re on the magical auction block.”
“Christ.”
Mirl stopped abruptly, cocked his head upward to sniff the air, then pointed at the shop to his left. “There you go.”
The girls stopped behind him, and Ember swallowed. “Those are bones.”
“Better than hanging a bell on the door, eh?” Mirl tittered. “You can find your way back out. I have other business to take care of down here, but you didn’t hear that from me.” He hobbled away from them, then stopped again and shot them another wide grin. “And don’t go searching around all wide-eyed for someone to help you. That’s like blood in the water. R’leer’ll come to you when he’s ready.”
“How long does that usually take?” Ember asked, her voice coming out in a hoarse whisper.
“As long as he wants.” Mirl pointed at her, though his stubby clawed finger aimed more toward her thigh, and snickered before bustling away and disappearing into the eerily quiet crowd.
“You know what?” Ember swallowed thickly. “I prefer fighting back the blight at your mom’s house to this.”
“Shouldn’t take nearly as much effort, though.”
“Shouldn’t it? Great.”
Cheyenne nodded at the curtain of bones strung on thin metal wires hanging from the shop’s doorway. They rustled and clacked as she brushed them aside to duck through the door. Sounds like voices.
“Oh, fuck.” Ember batted the bone strands aside with both hands like she’d walked through a cobweb and spun to glare at them. “They talk.”
“You heard it too, huh?” Cheyenne gazed around the shop and found four other magicals staring at her from various dark recesses behind stuffed shelves and through another string of bones and dried flowers dangling from the ceiling.
“I am not down for this.”
“Keep it together, Em.” Cheyenne leaned toward her friend and whispered, “They’re watching us, and I don’t wanna start anything down here.”
Ember stiffened, her violet eyes widening even more than usual. “Are you telling me you’re freaked out too? ‘Cause we can leave.”
“I’m kinda diggin’ the vibe.”
The fae girl blanched a light, washed-out shade of pink. “You’re kidding.”
“I said kinda. I wanna see what’s up in this place, okay? Mirl said this R’leer guy would come to us, so let’s take a look around and pretend we know what we’re doing.”
“Easy for you to say.” A small shiver ran down Ember’s back, but she stopped it halfway down and pulled herself together. “I should’ve known this was your jam.”
“If they’re not hurting somebody for no reason, then yeah, maybe it is.” Cheyenne widened her eyes at her friend, then turned to stroll casually down the row of shelves lining the wall beside the door.
Ember’s gaze darted around, barely touching the growing number of creepy magicals emerging from the shop’s shadows, and floated quickly after the halfling.
The farther they made their way into the shop, the stranger the items became. Shrunken heads and three-foot wings pried off some unknown creature with bits of flesh and feathers still attached, others with dried-out gossamer membranes that had lost their sheen. Tails and eyes and unrecognizable body parts floating in jars of amber liquid, moving on their own. A metal tub of small black tiles carved with O’gúleesh runes that morphed in and out of faces and whispered to the darkness like the strings of bones in the doorway.
Cheyenne did a double-take at these and raised an eyebrow. Those are bones. Cool.
She kept walking with Ember close behind her, ignoring the stares she could feel on her skin like fingers and tried to look for anything in here she could pick up with the activator. Two thin lines of code scrolled across the tops of the walls, but they were only to keep the shop intact, telling her the place stretched farther back into the walls of Hangivol’s undercity than she could see from here. That was it.
Guess advanced tech and super-dark magic don’t have a lot in common. Good to know.
A bird with maroon and scarlet feathers hung from the ceiling by a thin wire wrapped around its neck. Ember grimaced as she peered up at it. “I wonder how long these things keep in a place like this?”
“It could literally be forever,” Cheyenne muttered.
Ember reached slowly toward the bird. “Yeah, but why would—”
The bird’s wings darted away from its dangling body, its eyes popping open before rolling back in its head. A strangled croak spilled from its sharp black beak, which opened and snapped shut.
“Jesus.” Ember jerked her hand away and stared in horror at the creature, which was now spinning slowly as it hung. The thing’s wings were tucked against its body again, and it closed its eyes when its sharp-taloned legs finally stopped twitching. “This totally counts as hurting someone for no reason.”
> “Em, Mirl said not to touch anything.”
“Screw what he said. This thing’s alive.” Ember reached toward the bird again with both hands, and the thing let out another strangled squawk as it kicked and flapped its wings.
“If you touch that starjaw, I’ll have to charge you for it.”
Both girls jumped at the slow, calm voice right behind them and spun around.
A drow man who looked to be around Cheyenne’s age, if she’d aged like full-blooded drow set his fingers gently on the counter serving as a center display island and glanced up at the fluttering bird dangling by its neck. “And somehow, I doubt a fae has any use for a starjaw’s many properties.”
Ember’s mouth opened and closed as she stared at the bird continuously strangling itself. “It’s still alive.”
“Of course it is.” The drow man’s white eyebrows flickered briefly toward his hairline and the wreath of tiny bones, stringy feathers, and metal beads encircling his head. He whistled sharply, and a massive shape moved toward them from the other side of the shop.
When the giant ogre woman’s scowling features came into view, Ember raised both hands and floated backward to bump against the center counter. “Hey, I didn’t touch anything, okay? You don’t have to get aggressive about it.”
The ogre woman reached toward the struggling bird and gripped its black talons in one meaty hand while stroking her finger down the creature’s feathered breast. It fell still with a shuddering coo and could have passed for a dead bird once more. With a grunt, the ogre looked down at Ember and put a hand to her throat. “It calms her. Don’t touch.”
Ember stared after the ogre woman lumbering away into the shadows, her mouth open in shock. “Strangling? Strangling calms the bird?”
“Starjaws have an attitude when they’re not handled appropriately.” The drow man cocked his head, strands of bones and beads clacking as they fell over his shoulder with his long white hair and eyed the still bird one more time. “Gyla has a gentle touch when it counts.”
“I don’t even…” Ember put a hand to her throat and swallowed. “This place.”
