“Soothing charms for your poor mother?” asked Phyllis, who had never seen Mum. “Guaranteed to calm an uneasy mind. Special price for you.”
“Not tonight, Phyllis,” Alan answered. “Nick’s dancing, and we need to buy a speaking charm. Have you seen Merris?”
“No,” Phyllis said, her eyes suddenly gleaming brighter than her chimes. “Nick’s dancing?”
Nick took Alan by the scruff of his neck and dragged him away bodily. Alan made the usual protesting sounds about that, but Nick noticed he didn’t try to go back. Nick had forgotten, but he remembered now. He remembered when he was seven and Dad had first asked him to dance, and the way everyone had stared, because he was so young, because the dance came so easily to him. Because the demons came so easily to him.
Alan paused by a stall selling talismans and Nick waited for him, arms crossed over his chest and trying to ignore the rising tide of whispers around him. People who danced in the circle were not magicians. They just had to have enough coordination to keep within the lines of the dance, but their dance called demons. It looked like magic. If people had known Nick’s mother was a magician, if they had known how Nick’s talisman hurt him, they would have called it magic.
Alan put his thin shoulder supportively behind Nick’s and did not say a word, which was how Nick liked things best.
“Fancy a sword forged in lightning? Get your genuine lightning-born blades here! Comes with a free enchanted knife.”
The gleam of sharp steel under colored lights drew Nick like a beacon lamp. Alan moved with him, having Nick’s back, and murmured appreciation at the sight of a beautiful sword Nick had instinctively reached out for. Carl had some gorgeous new stuff in this month.
“You guys have magical arms dealers, too?” Jamie asked faintly.
“We do need weapons,” said Alan. “They cost a lot in the outside world. Here in the Market you can barter and lay up credit.”
Nick slid the sword out of a sleek leather sheath. It made a faint, seductive ringing sound in the air, as if it was begging Nick to take it home.
It looked expensive, though, and a short sword was really more practical for concealment purposes.
Nick weighed the hilt against his palm; it fit his hand, the balance of the blade perfect. When he stepped back and made a few passes with it, the movement felt as natural and sweet as that of his own muscles. He looked up from his absorption in the glittering metal and met Alan’s warm, pleased eyes.
“Like it?”
“We can’t afford it,” Nick said. He meant to sound practical, but his voice came out curt.
“Oh, we could—” Mae began.
“No!” Nick snapped.
“No, but thank you,” Alan told her, gentle but firm. “It’s okay, Nick. I did some extra translations this month and saved up the credit. It’s the first Market since your birthday. Did you think I wasn’t going to get you anything?”
“Oh,” Nick said.
That was why the sword felt like it had been made for him. It had been. Alan couldn’t use a sword himself, his balance was completely off, but he knew all about the design of a good blade. Nick looked at the deadly, beautiful thing again, and while he was looking down, he smiled.
“Like it?” Carl asked with a broad grin. He tossed the sheath at Nick, and Nick caught it absently in his free hand.
Nick shrugged. “It’s not so bad.”
“Think it came out rather well, if I do say so myself,” Carl bragged. “Your brother wanted nothing but the best. Wish I had a brother.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “He’s not so bad either.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking we could use an enchanted knife,” Alan said, taking the knife that came free with the purchase and sliding it into his pocket. He reached out to pat Nick’s shoulder or something stupid, and Nick stepped easily away from him, eyes still on the sword.
They walked on through the Market, weaving through tourists, necromancers with their bone toys and worn teeth, and pied pipers playing instruments that sang with human voices. Nick could not quite bring himself to sheath his new sword, and Alan kept by his side, and if that had been all, it would have been a great Market night.
Unfortunately, he and Alan had not come to the Market alone.
Behind them, Mae said, “All this stuff — it’s magic, isn’t it? I thought you said the magicians were the evil ones. What’s the difference?”
“The difference, my dear girl,” said a new but familiar voice to their left, “is that we use magical things, but none of us have magical powers.”
Nick wasn’t so sure of that, but it was a matter of pride in the Goblin Market. Magicians tended to be the ones with the most power, the ones tainted by it. While the Market folk put up with visitors who could do magic, not one would admit to having a drop of natural power themselves.
A long time ago the Market had been set up to provide help for magicians’ victims. All the born Market folk claimed they were descended from those who had stumbled upon the magicians’ secrets and had sworn to help the innocent and defenseless. Nobody wanted to admit that the people most likely to find out magicians’ secrets were magicians’ families, or magicians themselves.
Nick thought it was just as stupid to deny the fact that some of the Market shopkeepers had magic as it was to deny the fact that what had started out as using magical objects had become a buying and selling of magical objects: that the Market was not about a crusade anymore but about earning a living.
Everyone pretended the world was different than it was. Nick supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. After all, most people did not even know magic existed. People were good at being blind.
The voice continued: “Magicians give victims to demons, which means that demons will give them anything they want. The people of the Market can only summon demons in the dance. We would prefer not to summon them at all, but we are desperate. The demons will come because they are desperate too, so hungry for our world that anything is better than nothing, but they will give very little in exchange. So we have to stand against the magicians armed with nothing but the information we can gather from demons and little magic toys. These are not attractive odds, which is why I think we should start giving bodies to the demons for the greater good. We can start with people who ask stupid questions.”
Merris Cromwell emerged from the recesses of her dim and crowded stall, her dress sweeping the ground as she came. She wore her talisman as a brooch, crystals and bones and silk threads forming an intricate pattern under frosted glass, and no other jewelry. She was not the type who depended on anything someone else provided, so she had a scarlet-screened lamp attached to the front of her own stall. Crimson-tinted light fell on her face, on the almost rectangular jaw and the gray-streaked hair, scraped back from a forehead the shape of a cathedral dome.
Everyone in the Goblin Market had a specialty. Phyllis sold her chimes, the Davies family told fortunes, the Morrises did metalwork, and the silent twins sold words in every form, all the books and tablets and scrolls you could dream of. Merris’s stall was loaded with what looked like specimens from every stall. She specialized in being the best.
“She’s joking,” Alan explained to Mae. “Merris, this is Mae and Jamie.”
Merris unbent slightly. “Alan’s young lady, I presume?”
Mae actually blushed. “Er — no.”
“Young Nicholas’s, then,” Merris said wearily. “What they all see in you, I cannot imagine.”
Nick leaned against the stall and smirked at her. “You’ll never know until you try.”
Merris gave him a quelling look, and Alan nobly distracted her. “They’re people we’re trying to help. Merris, Nick is going to dance tonight. We need a speaking charm.”
She thought for a moment, and then leaned over to produce a clay tablet from the heaps of her stall. “I want the translation by next month,” she said. “Don’t let Nicholas touch it; it happens to be five thousand years old.”
Alan glanced at it and nodded, and only then did she press a gleaming white shell on a chain into Alan’s palm and close his fingers over it. Merris Cromwell was the only seller at the Goblin Market who never accepted money.
