Everyone needs weapons, no matter what side you’re fighting on.
“Buy me something,” said Molly, after a while.
“Other girls want chocolate or flowers,” I said. “Or shoes.”
“Oh, I want those, too,” said Molly. “But you can’t come to an arms fair and not buy anything. I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that.”
So we looked around to see what there was.
One stall was offering assorted alien technology: from things that fell off the back of an alien starship, or stranded Greys and Reptiloids, or things that fell through dimensional doorways when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. It was all dumped on the benches set out before us, in random heaps and piles. Large, blocky shapes of unfamiliar metal; warped crystal things with strange lights flickering deep inside; semiorganic bits and blobs trailing metallic filaments like tentacles. It could have been the secrets of the universe laid out before us, or the biggest bunch of junk and tat ever assembled in one place. The stall owner cheerfully admitted he had no idea what any of it did.
“It’s old stock, picked up from a fire sale in the Nightside. Got to be worth something, hasn’t it? It’s alien! Pick something, and we’ll fight over a price. You should be able to reverse-engineer something useful out of anything here. Hey, you! No touching!”
The big, hulking man standing next to me sneered haughtily at the stall owner and prodded a weird, wobbling thing with a disdainful fingertip. There was a sharp clap, like a very localised thunderstorm, and then he disappeared, leaving behind a space where he used to be. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum, while for a moment everyone’s hair stood on end. The stallholder blinked a few times, and then recovered wonderfully.
“See! See!” he said, addressing the surrounding crowd. “How useful is
We left him haggling with a very interested crowd, while I wondered how he was going to sell the thing without handing it over, or how the buyer was going to carry it away. . . .
Another store boasted an exhaustive display of crystals, magic stones and balls in every shape and colour you could think of. Molly oohed and ahhed over them, but I couldn’t see anything to get excited about. Not one decent aura among the lot of them. According to the middle-aged woman behind the stall, dressed in what she no doubt fondly imaged was the very latest Gypsy chic, everything on the table had a fascinating history or legend attached to it. Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Mind you, she spotted me as an unbeliever straightaway, and concentrated her sales pitch on Molly.
“See this one, dearie? The shimmering sphere with the bloodred flaw? That is the original Scrying Stone that Dr. Dee used to learn the artificial language Enochian, created expressly so that men could talk directly with angels. If you could only reestablish contact with the same spirit that spoke with Dr. Dee, who knows what secrets you might learn?”
“I think the key word in that sentence was
“Well!” said the Gypsy lady, drawing herself up. “I never did. . . .”
“Oh, you must have,” said Molly sweetly.
I took her firmly by the arm and we moved on. Next up was a twee affair almost buried under displays of fresh flowers, offering a wide range of elven artefacts and weapons at really quite reasonable prices. I pointed a few things out to Molly, but she shook her head immediately.
“Never trust an elf, or anything they leave behind. You can bet most of it’s boody-trapped, ready to do something transformative and allegedly humorous to whatever poor fool picks it up without industrial-strength gloves on.”
“They’ve got a wand,” I said. “It looks very nice.”
“Traps are supposed to look inviting. Elf wands are just the sugar coating on the trap, because they’re one of the few elven weapons a human could actually use.”
“I know a private investigator in the Nightside who uses one,” I said. “Larry Oblivion.”
“Yes, but he’s dead!” said Molly. “There’s not a lot more the wand can do to him! Hey, how is it you know someone from the Nightside? I thought Droods weren’t allowed in the Nightside.”
“We have agreed not to enter,” I said. “There’s a difference. We could go in if we wanted to; we choose not to. Wouldn’t be seen dead in the place, myself. I know Larry because he and his brothers did some work for the family recently.”
“Rather you than me,” said Molly. “That Hadleigh Oblivion gives me the creeps.”
Microsoft had a really big presence at the fair; but then, Microsoft has a really big presence everywhere.
I paused before a simple open booth representing the Gun Shops of Usher franchise. It seemed odd that the family who’d bankrolled the Supernatural Arms Faire for so many centuries should have such a modest presence. The man standing behind the counter was Mr. Usher himself. I looked him over thoughtfully, and he nodded politely.
“I thought you ran the gun shop in the Nightside,” said Molly.
“Oh, I’m there, too, my dear,” said Usher, a small grey man with a small grey voice. The man behind the Gun Shops of Usher, the greatest supplier of murder and mayhem to the world, was a reputable man in a regulation suit, with a broad, square face, a professional smile and a cold, passionless stare from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like what he was: a businessman interested only in business. “I’m there, and I’m here; I’m everywhere there’s a gun shop, Miss Molly. Because there’s always someone who needs a gun.”
“You run them all simultaneously?” I said. “What are you, an avatar of slaughter?”
“Nothing so grand, Mr. Bond,” said Usher. “I’m . . . necessary.”
I looked over the weapons spread out on the table before me. Guns: special, individual, significant guns from throughout history and legend. The Walther PPK that Hitler used to shoot Eva Braun before he turned it on himself. Billy the Kid’s old nickel pistol. The first rifle used to kill an American Indian, and the first rifle sold to an American Indian. Half a dozen guns that had turned on their famous author owners, each one neatly labelled and autographed by the writer. And a rifle from a book depository. Magic bullets extra.
“I see you carry a Colt repeater, Mr. Drood,” said Usher. “Your uncle does very good work.”
“Don’t use that name again,” I said coldly. “I’m here incognito. You blow my cover in front of this crowd and I will blow you away.”
“Of course, Mr. Bond. Your secret is safe with me. You’d be surprised how many secrets I keep.”
Molly and I moved on to the next stall. I wasn’t sure putting a bullet through Mr. Usher’s head would actually kill him, but the formalities have to be observed. Molly gave me a sideways look.
“You don’t like guns, do you? Sort of strange, that, in a secret agent.”
“I can use a gun if I have to,” I said. “But I’m an agent, not an assassin. I kill only when I have to, and I try really hard to take no pleasure or satisfaction from it. Walk too far down that path and you end up in groups like Dusk’s. Because that’s where you belong.”
“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people?” suggested Molly.
“People with guns kill people,” I said. “Guns make it easy for people to kill people. It should never be easy to take someone’s life.”
“Pacifist!” sneered a passerby.
“Hardly,” I said, but he was already gone.
At the next booth, a scientist in the traditional white coat was demonstrating description theory with a blackboard and a piece of chalk, to an only mildly interested crowd. He didn’t seem to have anything to sell, but he was so earnest and determined that people were willing to listen. They watched, frowning, as he stalked back and forth before his blackboard; like so many dogs being shown a card trick, they could sense something clever was happening, but couldn’t follow it.
Basically, the scientist explained, description theory says that if you can describe something exactly, using mathematics, then the maths is the object, and vice versa. So if you change the maths, you change the object. His theory had many applications when it comes to weapons: Description theory bombs, where the maths can persuade a city it isn’t there anymore. Or even transportation, where the maths can persuade the universe that people are where the maths says they are.
By this time, the scientist had the crowd hanging on his every word, and he scurried back and forth before the blackboard, adding a symbol here and taking away one there as he carefully rewrote his maths, getting closer
