Chapter 13
Inside the main tent, it was hot and stuffy, a strong smell of sawdust and sweat assaulting Artair’s nostrils.
The place was packed with people talking and laughing, while on top of three small stages elaborately dressed people shouted over the crowd.
As they neared, Artair stopped to listen to one.
‘Step right up, my good people, and witness the magic of my Lord Barleycorn this morning, the god that’s closest to your hearts, no doubt.
’ The man on the stage wore a tall hat with a flat top and a long, patched coat that was sewn all over with tiny dolls made of corn and twigs.
‘For the coins in your pockets I will bring you his bounty, magicked out of the air in front of your eyes.’
‘Magpies,’ Elver said darkly. She had pulled her hood up and was glowering from beneath it at the press of humans. ‘What sort of mage performs tricks at a fair?’
‘I did think magic was used for grander things.’
Someone from the audience was passing up a handful of change to the mage, who closed his hand around the coins before kissing his fist. When he opened his hand again, the coins were gone.
‘My Lord Barleycorn has accepted your boon! Now let’s see what he gives us in exchange.’
The mage picked up an empty glass from off the stage, and as his fingers brushed it, a ruddy liquid began to swirl up from the bottom, quickly filling it to the rim. He passed the glass to the member of the audience who had given him the coins, and she took a sip.
‘It’s beer!’ she said, to general cheering.
‘Embarrassing,’ said Elver, ‘that they’re impressed with this nonsense. Who’s to say it’s really magic? He could have palmed those coins. Maybe that’s a trick glass. He might not be a magpie at all.’
‘It looked real enough to me,’ said Artair.
It was strange to think that a few days ago there had been nothing in his future but the same four walls and the gardens of the monastery, and now he was seeing magic performed in front of his eyes.
The woman from the audience was passing the beer around for other people to taste, but Elver was dragging them away.
‘Come on, this is just the preamble. The monster exhibits are on the other side of the tent.’
They passed the other two stages at a distance.
On one, a tall mage dressed in black robes, a wide-brimmed hat, and a skeletal crow mask was standing with their head bowed and one pale hand held out in a flourish.
Next to this figure was a shifting shape of uncertain light.
Artair could just about make out a face, the eyes much too hollow, lips moving soundlessly.
The crowd here was hushed, their awed faces painted with ghost-light.
‘Daft,’ said Elver.
The third stage featured a portly, older woman, her grey hair loose over her shoulders.
She was seated on the boards, and from her cupped hands a constant stream of tiny white mice flowed.
They scampered down her leg to the stage, where they joined a growing pattern of mice circles, to the delight of several children in the audience.
‘A mage of Milik the Small,’ commented Elver. ‘You don’t often see those out in the wild. Here, look. I can see the cages.’
This part of the tent was darker. A striking woman in a short red leather coat was speaking in a hushed voice that somehow still carried.
Her face was wide and expressive, with a large mouth ringed in lipstick that matched the jacket she wore.
She had a wooden staff by her side with a silver hook on the end of it.
This, Artair assumed, had to be Booster Barnham herself.
He and Elver approached, standing slightly apart from the human audience.
‘What you are about to see, my good fellows, is not for the faint-hearted,’ the woman with the staff was saying.
‘Each of these cages contains a child of that most fearsome and loathed of the Twelve, the Queen of Serpents.’ Artair glanced at Elver to see if this had angered her, but her expression had not changed.
I’m jih too , he thought. Or the thing inside me is.
‘Captured from all over Tlevrae by our expert hunters, any one of these jih could end your life in an instant— if , that is, they weren’t held back by the bars of our steel cages, blessed and reinforced by a mage of John Barleycorn, the god of blacksmiths.
Do you dare to enter my Den of Monsters? ’
There were mutters and gasps from the humans around them, and many of them held back, afraid to venture any further.
Barnham struck one of the cages with her stick, and the creature inside, a great hairy spider as big as a dog, raised its mandibles and hissed.
One of the children that had been standing in the front of the crowd suddenly turned and ran blindly, colliding with Elver’s legs.
The monster girl took a startled step backwards, as though the boy was made of hot coals, but it was too late.
Artair saw the kid’s pudgy little hand briefly grasp hers—the unthinking action of a child looking for comfort—and then he was crying, holding his burned hand to his chest. The child’s parents scampered after him, their eyes wide.
‘What did you do?’ snapped the father. ‘Did you fall?’
They hadn’t seemed to connect the injury to Elver, and the mother picked up the wailing child and took him back to the tent entrance. Elver shoved her hands in her pockets, scowling.
‘That wasn’t your fault,’ said Artair. Elver transferred her scowl to him.
‘I know it wasn’t,’ she hissed. ‘Stupid human nearly got himself killed. Little idiot. The sooner we’re out of here, the better.’
Booster Barnham had moved on to the next cage, explaining to the audience what each creature was and where they’d captured it. Elver strode towards the cages and Artair had to move quickly to keep up.
‘I can’t see the cub,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Perhaps he’s near the back.’ What if Elver was wrong, and the cub had wandered off somewhere else entirely? They might never find him again, and Mother Maura wouldn’t hesitate to kill the other novices if he failed to give her what she wanted.
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘What?’ Artair blinked. Could Elver read his mind?
But then he realized she had gone over to one of the cages, and she wasn’t speaking to him at all.
The creature behind the bars was a lithe, cat-like monster, with huge eyes like saucers and shaggy, bat-like wings along its back.
Elver passed her hand through the bars, and it came closer, pushing its snout against her fingers.
From behind them, Artair heard more than a few gasps from the audience members that had spotted her.
‘You have to understand,’ Elver was saying, ‘there’s nothing I can do. I’m as out of place as you are…’
‘Elver.’ Artair tried to stand between her and the gathering crowd. ‘People are looking at us, Elver.’
She stood up, and to his alarm he saw that her eyes were very bright, as though she were holding back tears.
‘I can hear them all,’ she said. ‘Some of them have been here for months. For years. Why has the Queen of Serpents allowed this?’
‘Maybe she doesn’t know.’
In the next cage, there was an oozing, shifting creature with too many eyes; the next, a coiled serpent with long, spiralled horns like a deer.
Little flickers of blue fire played around its nostrils.
In the biggest cage, a monster with dark blue fur stood on two legs, a long wolfish face half hidden in shadows.
All the jih now were agitated, hooting or growling, pacing or even driving themselves against the bars.
‘Here,’ said the woman in the red coat. ‘What are you two doing to get them all riled up like that?’ She came over, brandishing the staff with the hook on the end.
‘I see him,’ said Artair. At the very end, in a shiny new cage, the keltraxia cub was spinning in circles, yapping.
Artair found that he could well imagine what he was saying to Elver.
He also realized that they had no plan on how to get the cub out of the tent, or even out of its cage.
A seed of panic bloomed in his chest. How had this already gone so wrong?
In this moment, I am safe, he told himself, And Elver needs my help.
‘All these jih, trapped, kept prisoner by humans, for other humans to gawp at. All their voices…’ Elver was pushing her hands through her hair, her hood falling back to reveal her yellow eyes and her scarred face.
Artair heard one of the humans near them turn to another and say, ‘Looks like that girl should be in a cage too.’ He clenched his fists.
The Other is contained , he reminded himself. I will not do anything rash.
‘We have to get them out,’ said Elver in a low voice. ‘All of them. Now.’
‘How?’ Artair leaned his head towards hers so that only she could hear him. Next to them, Booster Barnham was poking at the furry blue creature with her hooked staff, pushing it back from the bars.
‘I don’t know, I just… I don’t know.’ For the first time since he’d met her, she sounded completely lost. He considered for a moment putting a hand on her shoulder but knew it wouldn’t be welcomed.
‘Perhaps these humans can be reasoned with.’
Elver made a low noise of disgust. ‘Then you don’t know humans. All they care about is themselves, their coin, and their comforts. Jih spirits? We’re less than nothing to them, unless they can exploit us for money.’
‘Surely not all of them are like that.’ But when he looked at the cages, he found himself thinking of the monastery. He was jih too. And wasn’t he also supposed to be kept in a cage?
Elver was flexing her hand in a meaningful way. ‘I could grab the woman in charge. Poison her.’
‘Then what? Poison everyone else?’
‘Why not? They’re all as bad as the woman with the stick.’
Artair frowned. ‘There has to be a better way. I think I have an idea.’ Artair turned to Booster Barnham.
‘My good woman! I would like to buy all your monsters.’
The statement was met with a thunderous silence. At the back of the crowd of humans, someone laughed.
‘Sure you do,’ said the monster keeper. ‘Do you have a death wish? I’ll tell you what, why don’t you buy my tame mages, instead? Much safer, and it’ll give us all a laugh.’ The audience laughed obediently.
‘I’m serious.’ Artair reached into his pack and pulled out the bag of coins he had taken from the abbot’s room.
He had no real idea how much was in it, or even what it was worth, but it was heavy enough.
He crouched, opened the throat of the bag, and began to carefully pour its contents onto the sawdust-covered floor.
Gold and silver coins poured forth, thick and heavy, and very quickly the laughter from the audience dried up.
The demeanour of Barnham had changed too.
Her eyes flickered from Artair to Elver and back again.
‘What’s this? Have you two robbed a merchant or something?’
‘All this, for all your monsters,’ Artair offered grandly. ‘That should be fair, I think.’ He had no idea whether it was, but the keeper was shaking her head, a tight little smile on her face.
‘I don’t know what you’re playing at, lad, but even that tidy sum of money is no replacement for the profit I make parading these creatures from town to town.’ She raised her voice a little, addressing the crowd. ‘What I do is a public service! It’s education, rightly.’
‘Then what about just that one,’ Artair pointed at the keltraxia cub, who had pushed his snout through the bars and was sniffing madly.
‘One cub, not even grown yet. For all this coin. That’s got to represent a reasonable profit?
’ Artair was struck with the sudden urge to laugh, which he swallowed down.
He was attempting to buy the freedom of a jih spirit when he himself contained a monster. ‘What do you say?’
The woman tapped her staff on the ground, perplexed. In that moment, the cub decided to go to the toilet in a loud and dramatic fashion on the floor of the cage.
‘Sold,’ said the monster keeper. ‘Haven’t had time to get attached anyway. Get it out of my sight.’