Chapter Five #2
“She doesn’t give her friendship easily, but when she does, she is the loyalest friend in Virelith. And she has taken a liking to you. So do not take advantage of that, or you will have me to answer to.”
“I understand,” I murmured. Zlata gave me one final, scathing glance and then swept away.
When the work for the day was done, Mieka and I walked briskly through the gray streets.
Mieka had lent me a pair of fingerless gloves and a caped coat that had probably belonged to a large man once.
Baldbeak hunkered down on my shoulder, chewing at an end of the Hair whenever an unfortunate strand came within his grasp and continuing his assault on the woolen cap when he couldn’t get hold of the Hair.
“So where is this Undermarket?” I asked.
“Have you heard of the Corpse Roads?”
“Yes.”
“It’s on one of the old roads that survived, under Quell. Here.”
The area of Quell we walked through now seemed industrial—warehouses and workshops rather than private dwellings or shops. We stopped beside a staircase that led down from the street into what looked like the basement of an old house. Mieka seemed nervous.
“I don’t go down there often,” she said.
“Is it dangerous?”
“No … and yes. It is safe from the Temple, at least. Surrounded by wards and well hidden.”
“Then there are mages involved in the black market, too?”
“What? Oh, you mean to cast the wards? No, those aren’t made by official mages, as far as I know. It makes the whole place rather … unpredictable. But there are some mages who dabble in the black market, I’m sure.”
Baldbeak seemed agitated, flapping towards me with claws extended and then wheeling away without landing.
“What’s wrong?”
Too dark. Too under.
“You can stay out here and wait for me. You don’t have to come.”
No. Have to.
“You don’t,” I said, exasperated. “I’ll find out more about the book and then I’ll come out. You’ll be fine out here.”
He clacked his beak and gave an agitated raark.
“What’s the matter?” asked Mieka.
“I’m not sure. He doesn’t want to go underground, and he doesn’t want to leave me, either.”
Have to come, said Baldbeak again.
“You don’t!” I held out my arm, and he landed heavily just below my elbow, nearly knocking me off-balance. “I’ll be fine.”
Not safe.
“Just leave him,” said Mieka. “We won’t be long.”
I rubbed my finger against the sparse feathers at the base of his beak, which he usually liked, but he snapped at my hand. I shook him off, irritated.
“I’ll be back soon,” I promised.
Mieka took me by the arm, and together we started to descend the steps that led to the Undermarket. Baldbeak perched on an iron bollard by the entrance and raark-ed at me desolately until we were out of earshot.
The staircase was only dimly lit by small glims spaced far apart on the stone walls, and I had to concentrate to keep my footing.
Thankfully, the steps were dry, and although the dust in the air made me cough, I didn’t have to worry about slipping.
All I could hear was the rasp of our boots against the rough stone and Mieka’s even breathing near my ear.
A small greenish glow grew larger and larger as we walked and then became the shape of a doorway, lit by a single, rather dim and flickering, glim above its lintel.
“How do we get in?” I hissed.
Mieke turned her wrist over. In the dim light, I saw a dark blue glyph inked into her brown skin. When she held it to the door, it swung open.
“A tattoo? That seems awfully … permanent.”
“And painful. But it works.”
With every day away from the Tower, it seemed, I learned more and more about how much beauty was in the world.
At first, the rail of hanging cloth I had seen at the dressmaker’s shop had seemed the most sublime and dazzling array of human-made colors and textures that I had ever seen.
Then the vigorous, vivid stitchery of the great tapestry had shown me how a story could be told in color and line … And now there was the Undermarket.
In a way, it was a little like the Plague tapestry come to life—vibrantly, almost aggressively colorful and crowded, bright and luminous and dazzling.
Unlike the tapestry, though, it was as full of movement as an anthill.
I had to stand still for several minutes just to let my eyes and ears adjust to the swirling color and noise.
The glims here were of all shapes and shades, as if they had been taken from a hundred different places and cobbled together haphazardly to create a chaotic bouquet of color and light.
It had the effect of making the whole place look rather like a stained-glass window, and of shedding rainbow light on the bones embedded in the walls.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
“All the Corpse Roads had bones set into their walls,” said Mieka. “The Temple collapsed those it could, but they ran all across Virelith. Some mages of our … profession, a long time ago, persuaded them to overlook this one.”
“Persuaded with …?”
“Magic,” said Mieka. “And coin. The two most powerful forces in the kingdom.”
Some of the stalls looked temporary and haphazard, but others were set into the bone walls. A skeletal hand with its fingers dangling on wires hung outside one of the stalls near us, the bones click-clacking against each other like macabre wind chimes.
“All right,” said Mieka, rubbing her gloved hands together. “We’ll split up and ask around about the Book Man. The deeper you go, the more … unique the wares. So start here and move back.”
I nodded. I felt a bit overwhelmed.
“Is this where you know Patrick from? The Undermarket?” I was still curious about the strange man I had met on the road, who had appeared like a sardonic fairy godmother just when I needed him and guided me to Mieka’s workshop.
“In a way,” she said vaguely. “Look, there’s someone I have to talk to. You start wandering around, and I’ll catch up when I can.”
My heart thudding, I made my way through the crowd, putting my hand up to the knitted cap every few steps to make sure my Hair remained contained.
It would have been convenient to bump into a rare-book dealer right away, but unlikely.
Instead, I wandered the market, gradually pressing deeper, pretending interest in one gewgaw or another.
It wasn’t hard. In fact, it was harder not to become absorbed in the array of items for sale.
I did notice, though, that there were no spellbooks.
“Excuse me.” I stopped a friendly looking woman with a profusion of ginger curls. “Where would I find spellbooks?”
She recoiled. “I beg your pardon?”
“I mean …”
“I heard you.” She dropped her voice. “There’s nothing of that sort here. It’s far too dangerous, even for the Undermarket.”
“But there’s a book dealer I’m looking for. He’s known as …”
She had already turned away.
I kept going, pausing every now and then at a stall.
A woman with tightly bound hair under a loosely knotted scarf sold various oils and ointments in glass jars.
I couldn’t read the labels, of course, but I picked up one with a viscous purple substance inside and held it up to my eye to see the light through it, feigning interest.
“Two drops of that on your pillow, and you will dream of your true love,” said the woman with a wide, sly smile.
“Oh,” I said vaguely. Then a thought struck me. “Wait, do you have other oils … for memories? For regaining memories?”
“Is it your own memories you want to see, or someone else’s?” said the woman. “Say, your sweetheart’s? Do you want to know if he was true?”
“No, my own,” I said. “Something to help me remember.”
The emptiness of my memory of that day in the Tower still frightened me—a snowstorm of white, eternally restless nothing. Nameless, formless, impossible to touch. If I spent too long in the contemplation of it, I felt, I would melt away into it like a raindrop into a river.
“And what do you have to offer me in exchange for this, my dear?” The woman suddenly seemed a lot less wheedling and a lot more businesslike, sitting straight on her stool and dropping the old fortune-teller act.
I fished out the embroidered handkerchiefs I had brought with me and proffered them. She shook her head.
“They are pretty, and you have skill,” she said. “But I don’t deal in things such as these.”
“Then what do you want?” I said. “I don’t have anything else to give.”
“Give me your hand,” she said.
I extended it nervously. She took it in her own, which was bony and weighed down by a number of heavy rings, and studied it, then dipped her mouth to my palm. I felt the wet scrape of her tongue and jerked my hand away.
“What in Plague’s name are you doing?”
She licked her lips. “Interesting,” she said. “Many layers of magic here. Some affinity with animals, I taste … and, ah, yes, there’s the needlework. But beneath …”
I watched her, frozen with horrified fascination.
“Hmm.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Interesting. But I don’t think you’re quite ready to hear about that yet, my dear.”
She reached out a hand and touched a slender strand of Hair that had escaped from my hat—lightly, caressingly. It shivered under her hand.
“I would take a lock of your hair, my dear, in exchange for the memory potion.”
The Hair bristled in indignation.
“I would give you one, and gladly,” I said (the Hair pulled at my scalp, hard, as punishment), “but it will not suffer being cut.”
“By ordinary methods, perhaps,” said the old woman.
She pulled out a pair of silver scissors shaped like a standing heron.
The shanks and handles served as its legs, and the blades were its upward-pointing beak.
The carving was so skilled that it had captured the tension in the bird’s posture, its sense of poised attention, as if it had heard a sound and was just about to fly away. I could swear I saw it blink.
“Just a few strands,” she said, “and I will give you what you seek.”