Chapter 10 #2
“I wouldn’t believe in me.” He lifted his shoulders.
There it was, the part he hadn’t even admitted to himself.
“I’m a colossal failure of a system that was built to give me every advantage.
My loyalties shift with my mood, which is cool one moment and hot the next.
I arrived two minutes too late to the citadel to save you.
Now I expect you to believe I’m going to succeed in the impossible? ”
“You know none of that is true, right?” she said softly, barely above a whisper.
“Jesstin, the system failed you. Your loyalty is both your greatest strength and vulnerability. Yes, you can be moody and vexing—I won’t deny you that—but if you believe you could have saved me against an entire force of soldiers sent to kill me, then the trait you failed to mention is delusion. ”
Jesstin cracked a grin. “And arrogance.”
“The sea is full of water, and wintertide is cold,” she said, obviously trying to hide a smile.
His hand found hers. “I don’t know how I’ll bring you back. All I know is you have to be with me when I go through the door. And I’m terrified, Elloven, that you’ll decide not to.”
She laced her fingers through his. “And the soul fragment? What have you given them?”
“If I don’t get it back, my entire family will forget I existed. They won’t know me at all.” His hands animated with more reassurances, but he saw the pained look in her eyes and held back. “I made the bargain knowing it was a temporary problem.”
“Jesstin, why couldn’t you take the damn road like everyone else?”
“We don’t know what time will do back home, any more than we know what it does here.”
“All right, but—”
“Years could pass, El. We can’t waste a minute of daylight, and if it wasn’t a guaranteed bloodbath, we’d be on the road at night too.”
“This is no temporary problem. Those markets move, you know. Did anyone tell you that?”
“Move?” He shook his head. “How?”
“How do they send someone soaring across the Infinitum with magic?” she asked rhetorically.
“The market was a permanent place. It was way too settled not to be,” he replied, though even as he said the words, he recalled the way the Conductor’s wall had become a curtain, how the back room had appeared from nowhere. The wheel. The river. “How do you know this?”
“I don’t,” she admitted. “But it stands to reason that if you can simply ‘think’ it into existence, then it doesn’t adhere to science as we understand it, which is true of most everything else here too.
So it either moves or is invisible until it no longer wants to be, but either way, it must know your intentions, which reasons that it knows you’re planning a theft of services bartered in.
.. well, perhaps not good faith, but you did agree to the terms. What are the chances of them helping you now? ”
If she was right, he’d underestimated the difficulty of the matter. “If I can’t retrieve it quickly, I’ll send you home, then return myself.”
“Uh, uh. No, this goes both ways.” Elloven crossed her arms, wearing the stern look of a cross mother. “Wherever we go, we go together.”
“El—”
“I won’t hear another word.”
Jesstin sputtered a laugh. “You call me stubborn, but have you met yourself?”
“Do you expect me to apologize?”
“Wouldn’t dare,” he said lightly. “If you’re so determined—”
“Jesstin.” Elloven’s expression froze in shock. She shook her head in tight, anxious passes. “Look.”
“At what?” he asked but was already following her gaze. A sign had appeared where none had been before. There was only one directional indicator. “Forum Obscura.” He sucked his teeth. “I suppose that’s for us.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“I’m only sure we won’t find the spiral without help, and even if we eventually got lucky, we’d risk returning to a world we don’t recognize.”
“What kind of vendor are we looking for?”
Not one in fucking pinstripes. “One who deals in maps.”
“If they have a map to this spiral, wouldn’t others have already read it?”
“To what purpose? We only need the spiral to find the doors, doors only people like me can see or use.” Saying it out loud made it sound even stupider, but Ryquin had practically built a religion around its veracity.
“If this market is anything like the one I went to, they’ll seek us out and take us where we need to go.
But time is even weirder in there, so there’s a chance we’ll get stuck there through the night. ”
Elloven laced her hand through his. “Then what are we waiting for?”
“Never mind the darkness,” Elloven whispered as they entered the narrow, obsidian road devoid of others. She hadn’t even noticed the darkness until the sign. “You’ll find no light in the Obscura.” She frowned.
“The next one will tell us how time is useless, blah blah blah,” Jesstin explained. His grip on her hand tightened as the road stretched on.
Just as he’d said, the following sign read, Time pleads no case here. The dials will show you the time beyond the Obscura. Right after was one advertising an inn, should the patron miss a chance to leave safely. For a modest fee, of course. “Strange no one else is here,” she said.
“It was like that before. There were clients inside the market though.”
The road turned, then fanned into a fairway. New pathways formed, decked in dangling lights, each packed with colorful stalls. The stark silence disintegrated into a lively hubbub of commerce.
Two strangely dressed women, one quite tall, the other remarkably short, approached. They eyed Elloven but addressed Jesstin. “Ah, our man of mirrors has returned!”
Elloven snapped her focus to him. “You know them?”
“Not by choice,” he said tersely. “You two get around, don’t you?”
“Can you explain?” asked the shorter one. Though they looked nothing alike, Elloven couldn’t shake the distinct sense they were twins.
“You were just at the other market.”
The “twins” exchanged a theatrical look. “Oh, but there is only one Forum Obscura, man of mirrors,” said the taller one.
“Or you used the especular to travel here and fuck with me. Anyway, not so nice to meet your acquaintance again. I’m looking for a map.”
“Oh, a map,” the women said in perfect, exaggerated sync. Their faces lit up like they were talking about the lost kingdom of Ilynglass. “The standard markets sell plenty of maps, you know.”
“And you fucking know I’m not here for a standard map or a standard market, so show me to whatever devious bastard can help me and get on with it.”
Elloven might not admit it to him, and it was certainly a commentary on her pattern with men, but there was something indescribably erotic about the attitude that arose when Jesstin’s patience was exhausted.
But there was another emotion at play, and she hoped the strange women hadn’t sniffed it out: Jesstin was using insolence to cover his fear.
The twins batted their lashes and smiled in perfect simpatico. They pivoted on their heels and marched down the third path to the right.
Elloven nudged Jesstin to fall behind. “We need the map, but we also need to find another one of those mirrors, so we can get you back to the other market.”
“Yeah,” he said, but he was somewhere else.
They passed the most unusual stalls on their long walk. Potions masters, mind readers, fortune tellers, and more, though the longest line belonged to a woman peddling communication with the living through necromancers.
“You have to be taking the piss,” Jesstin hissed and pulled to a hard stop. “No. Not this bitch.”
Jesstin’s irritation was directed at a woman dressed in a patterned suit that made Elloven’s eyes cross.
She wore a top hat, which had gone out of fashion before Elloven was even born, and her cane was even more distracting than the brash suit.
It gave the illusion it was swirling, endlessly, and Elloven had to make herself stop staring at it.
“I feel compelled to say I am glad to see you found what you were looking for,” said the woman, looking directly at Elloven with a chilling glower. “I expected you might be back, but so soon?”
“Jesstin, who is this?” Elloven asked.
“Has he not told you?” The woman approached, growing taller as she did. She removed her unwieldy hat and bowed low. “Elloven Hawthorne, I’m the Conductor, and we are well met. Are you here to make a deal?”
“You’ll speak to me,” Jesstin said. He released Elloven’s hand and stepped between them. “She doesn’t exist, not to you.”
“But she does. I can see her plain as day.” The Conductor winked and grinned at the murky sky. “Or night.”
The Conductor snapped her fingers, and the twins scampered off, grumbling about overdue commissions.
Elloven almost missed them when left alone with the most unsettling creature she’d ever made acquaintance with.
She had no trouble believing this “conductor” collected pieces of souls, and she wouldn’t be shocked to learn she devoured them at breakfast either.
“I don’t need a mirror—or your nonsense,” Jesstin said. His tone was full of venom, most of which he was obviously holding back. “Your demented twins sent me to the wrong vendor. I’ll find the maps on my own.” He reached for Elloven and tugged her away.
“But you have found the maps, traveler!” The Conductor tapped her cane, and the swirls changed from black and white to red and purple. “There are no other maps here, and here you will find the maps.”
There was something more to the Conductor. Sinister, yes, but that only scratched the surface of what Elloven felt in the trader’s presence.
She’s hungry. No... starving.
The woman wasn’t merely trying to run a business. She was siphoning humanity, one transaction at a time.
“You think your gibberish is mysterious. It’s asinine.” He reared back and spat inches from her pointed boots. “We’ll find another sepulchral market. Elloven, come on.”