could return and find nothing of note changed.
Is that any way to live?
Somehow, that chance encounter with the Inspector had given form to Kellen's vague discontent. That was what was wrong with this place! That was why he felt as if he was being smothered all the time, why he was so restless and yearned to be anywhere but here!
Abruptly, Kellen changed his mind. He was not going to the Booksellers' Market. Instead, he would go to the Low Market. Maybe among the discards of generations past he might find something he hadn't seen a thousand times. He hadn't ever been to the Low Market, where (it was said) all the discards of the City eventually ended up. It was in a quarter inhabited by the poorest workers, the street-sweepers, the scullery-help, the collectors of rubbish, the sewer-tenders—people who had a vested interest in allowing those merchants of detritus to camp on their doorsteps twice a sennight.
Yes, he would go there and hope to find something different. And even if he didn't, well, at least being in the Low Market would be something akin to novelty, with the added fillip of knowing that if Lycaelon found out about where his son had gone, he would be utterly horrified.
THERE were no 'stalls' as such in the Low Market, and no awnings sheltering goods and merchants, only a series of spaces laid out in chalk on the cobbles of Bending Square. The 'square' itself was a lopsided space surrounded by apartment buildings of four and five stories, centered by a public pump. Within each space each would-be merchant was free to display what he or she had for sale in whatever manner he or she chose. No Inspectors ever bothered to come here, and in fact, it wasn't even 'officially' a market.
Some of the sellers laid out a pitiful assortment of trash directly on the stones; some had dirty, tattered blankets upon which to display their findings; some presided over a series of wooden boxes through which the customers rummaged. The most prosperous had actual tables, usually with more boxes piled beneath. Kellen stopped before one of these, inspecting the seller's wares curiously.
He fingered an odd piece of sculpture made of brass with just enough silver in the crevices to tell him it had once been plated. The table was heaped with odd metal bric-a-brac, doorknobs, hinges and latches, old keys, tiny dented dishes meant for salt, pewter spoons.
'That there's a knife-rest, sor,' said the ugliest cheerful man—or the cheerfullest ugly man—Kellen had ever seen. He picked up the object that Kellen had been examining with puzzlement, a sort of two-headed horse no longer than his finger. 'Gentry used to have 'em at dinner, so's not to soil the cloth when they put their knives down.' He set the object in the middle of a minuscule clear spot, and demonstrated, setting a knife with the blade on the horse's back and the handle on the table.
Well —something I never heard of! Kellen thought, pleased.
'Fell out of fashion, oh, in my great-great-granddam's time,' the man continued, looking at the object with fondness, and Kellen conceived an irrational desire for the thing. It was absurd, a foolish bit of useless paraphernalia to clutter up an already cluttered dinner table, and he wanted it.
'How much?' he asked, and the haggling began.
Irrational desire or not, Kellen wasn't going to be taken for a gull, if only for the reason that if he paid the asking price, every creature in the market with something to sell would be on him in a heartbeat, determined not to let him go until every coin in his pocket was spent.
It was only when the knife-rest was his that Kellen gave it a good look, and discovered it wasn't a two- headed horse at all—but a two-headed unicorn, the horns worn down by much handling to mere nubs. For some reason, the discovery made him feel immensely cheered, and he tucked it in his pocket, determined to have it re- silvered and start using it at dinner.
And his father wouldn't be able to say a word. There were no edicts against reviving an old fashion, after all, even a foolish one, only against starting something new. The little sculpture rested heavily, but comfortably, in the bottom of his pocket; it felt like a luck-piece.
Maybe I won't use it. Maybe I'll just have it plated and keep it as a charm against boredom.
At the farther end of the square, Kellen spotted a bookseller—one of the prosperous individuals who had tables and boxes of books beneath. The errand that had originally sent Kellen to the Booksellers' Market had been to find a cheap edition of one of the Student Histories—Volume Four, Of Armethalieh and Weather, to be precise. Lycaelon's personal library had one, of course—how could it not?—but Kellen wanted one of his own that he could mark up with his own notes in the margins. This was a practice that infuriated his tutor, Anigrel, and frustrated his father, but as long as he did it in his own books, rather than in the pristine volumes in Lycaelon's library, there was nothing either of them could really say about it. He was, after all, studying.
I might as well see if there's one here. It'll be cheaper, and besides, if it's full of someone else's notes from lectures, I might not need to take any of my own.
Besides, it might be amusing to read what some other Student had thought of the Histories.
He didn't go straight to the bookstall, however, for that would be advertising his interest. Instead, he worked his way down the aisle between the chalk lines, examining a bit of broken clockwork here, a set of mismatched napkins there. It had the same sort of ghoulish fascination as watching the funeral of a stranger, this pawing over the wreckage, the flotsam and jetsam of other people's lives. Who had torn the sleeves out of this sheepskin jacket,
