Chapter 2
Chapter two
Her pinky finger throbbed still.
It’d been two days.
Lux adjusted the pack draped against her hip and stared into the looming city. Loxlen, read the arched iron letters foisted over the road. She swallowed, her throat gone dry. “Crowds,” she muttered. “The bane of my existence.”
Nevermind that she had multiple banes, and crowds were only one of them.
In the four weeks since she’d left Ghadra, she’d managed to avoid anything larger than a village.
She’d taken meals from street vendors or small cafés, and she’d slept in little roadside inns that boasted the same number of rooms as they did stalls for animals.
And all the while, she’d kept her ears trained for very particular words.
Words like “lifeblood”, “immortal”, and “Bartley Tamish”. So far, she’d encountered nothing.
Edgar Dosem and his cabin of horrors was a detour that some might not have deemed necessary, but to her, was a question written in a diary and in want of crossing off.
Because even after everything that’d happened in Ghadra, she still yearned to understand why it did.
Only, she wasn’t sure it had been worth the fingernail.
Lux pulled at the tail of her bandage with her teeth, tightening the cloth until her finger smarted. “Here goes.” Because nothing said “potential buyers of souls” quite like a bustling trading city.
She passed beneath the overlarge iron name and forced a slow breath.
The late mayor of Ghadra, Bartleby Tamish, would have argued with her purpose.
Per his reasoning, he hadn’t been selling his people’s souls, but rather their souls’ tether to their bodies.
Something, she believed, he thought quite a lot less evil.
It didn’t matter to him that without it, not a single one of those bodies would ever have a chance of revival.
That to then drink it was another atrocious thing.
It was irreversible and unforgivable what he had done.
And though he was dead, his own over-aged body providing a slow, steady nourishment for a gallow tree, she felt justified in still loathing him for it all.
Lux tugged back the hood of her new cloak. Enough that she could absorb everything, her periphery unobstructed. A warning from Shaw rattled in her head—that she should never leave herself vulnerable to attack. Her hand rested on the handle of his knife as she walked.
The road had been dirt outside the city.
Now, it was cobblestone. Her boots made a soft clack that was quickly overrun by the rumble of wheels, and she moved out of the way on instinct to make space for a death-cart.
But these weren’t the streets she’d grown up with.
There were no death-carts here. Lux’s attention swung instead to a carriage as it passed her by.
Black, sleek, with twin lanterns, a dour driver, and a stack of leather-bound luggage.
The mayor’s voice returned to her from the Beyond. “The world outside pays very well for the gift of time.”
“Rich for certain,” she grumbled. Then she stepped back onto the road and followed it.
Loxlen wasn’t like Ghadra at all. For one, it wasn’t comprised of shades of grey.
The sun shone brightly upon beige, slate roofs and paler stone walls, and though there were shadowy places and plenty of alleyways, they didn’t give her that sense of foreboding the town she’d left always did.
She would even hazard a guess that if she were to walk through them, she wouldn’t even step in anything unsanitary.
And then there were the people.
She hadn’t seen many yet, as it seemed most were either tucked in their homes on the autumn day, or hidden away in carriages.
A few were on horseback or sat on wagons, and only several walked as she did now.
None, she noticed so far, possessed the shifting eyes of Ghadra’s Dark.
Nor even the upturned noses of Ghadra’s Light.
Even the smell was pleasant: brisk air rather than burning hair.
She continued to trail the carriage. It followed the main road, and though there were many streets nearly as wide, it didn’t turn. There was a common destination at the center of town, and that was where she was sure it headed.
Edgar, the mountain recluse, said Loxlen was a hub of trade.
That, though it was some distance yet from the sea, being at the base of the range caused it to be near enough to offer itself as a prime location for all manner of people to sell and barter and buy.
Lux didn’t know how much stock she could place in a man who never left his own four walls, but she supposed he dragged enough details out of the people who found him. It seemed he was correct in this.
Not a single person cast a furtive glance or a scowl her way the entirety of the time she walked. With her cloak, pack, and dirt-splattered boots, she supposed she looked like any other traveler come to trade. But her hand didn’t leave the knife anyway.
She passed by a woman and child, both wrapped in thin capes and white gloves.
The woman smiled warmly at Lux, and Lux, so unused to strangers offering anything of the sort, blinked back at her.
It went on far too long. The woman’s smile faded, and her stare turned hard, and as quick as she was to offer Lux welcome, she hauled it back the same.
The pair crossed the road to continue walking on its opposite side.
“Devil below. I’m forever doomed to be socially strange.” She watched them turn, and only when she spun back did she realize the carriage had stopped.
She smacked headlong into it.
“Son of a—”
“My apologies, Miss.”
Lux clutched at her nose with both hands, tilting her head back on the chance it bled. She didn’t know if it did. It felt like it should.
“No. ‘s my fault,” she mumbled from beneath her palms. Risking one hand, she waved his apology away.
Her watering eyes cleared a few moments later, and she saw the man hadn’t left after all but stared at her with a stoic expression that her pessimistic self labeled “boredom”.
He was of average height, middle-aged, with a hat brim so wide, it’d likely keep his shoulders dry in a drizzle, and he held a leather bag at his side.
A second man’s gloved hand reached out and took it from him.
“Will you be all right?” the driver asked her. “Or do I need to see about a healer or physician or an apothecary with a poultice?”
“No apothecaries, thank you,” she replied, releasing her nose. “They’re all quacks.”
“As you say, Miss.”
Her gaze narrowed on him for all of a moment before she remembered why she’d followed this particular carriage to begin with.
While she’d been keeping her ears open for gossip and dealings, she’d also been keeping her eyes open for deep pockets—and a carriage and luggage this fine surely bespoke deep pockets.
Only, she’d gone and ruined it all by hurting herself.
Now, whoever was in that carriage was lost to the crowd.
She scanned the market, but it was bustling beyond belief.
She’d never seen anything so large—not even Ghadra’s Festival of Light could rival it.
And this was a regular Noxday at noon, not even a holiday. Her eyes widened as far as they could.
What a hellscape this is.
People were quite literally everywhere. They ate mushrooms from skewers and bought ale from barrel-minders. They haggled over fabrics and exchanged coin for trinkets. And all the while, Lux’s nose throbbed, and her head ached.
She did not love markets, and she did not enjoy most people. This was, in every sense of the word, a nightmare.
But she would suffer it anyway.
She must.
“Where did your charge go?” she asked of the driver before he could return to his perch.
“My charge?”
“Your passenger.”
The driver’s mouth pinched. “Do you have business?”
“Yes,” she lied.
The man’s gaze swept her up and down. “He’s gone to meet Mistress Farrentail.” He pointed to a large booth angled several stations down from the carriage. “I pity you if you’re lying.”
Lux sneered, but she said nothing else. Wiping at her swollen nose and finding nothing to be ashamed of, she pushed her way farther into the crowd.
She discovered the man easily enough after the driver’s direction. He wore a tall bowler hat and a fine black coat, and his shoes seemed impeccably polished. He hadn’t had to walk nearly as far as she had, sliding down mountainsides.
He appeared to already be in an intense discussion with a woman. One who wore more feathers than fabric, and whose hair was not any shade found in nature. Lux pretended to inspect a pail of wrinkled apples while the man gave up his entire leather bag in exchange for a vial.
Lux’s insides grew heavy. She tried to see the color of the contents in that small bottle, but it disappeared within his coat before she could manage it. When he turned around, she slid from his path.
Because she had been lying. And because the driver’s warning had unnerved her a little.
She realized she wasn’t the only one to behave in this way.
Several marketgoers gave him room. Some, she noted, cast down their eyes and folded their shoulders.
Some offered smiles. Others stared from the safety of the crowd, wary.
The man climbed back into the carriage and, for the first time, Lux noticed the emblem on the door.
An ornate, silver ‘M’. She had no context for it and spun away before the driver could catch her stare. She made instead for the vendor.
“Hello.”
The woman blinked back at her from behind thick spectacles. “Good day. Interested in business or pleasure?”
Lux did a precursory sweep of the vendor’s display. All sorts of feathers were available for purchase; most were from creatures she’d never seen in her life. She recognized a crow feather, and that was all. “Business. I’m in the market for rare things. What do you sell that is most obscure?”