The Demon's Lexicon

4 The Goblin Market

STOP SULKING,” ALAN SAID AS HE PARKED THE CAR.

Nick was not sulking. He simply did not know why Alan exercised his considerable intelligence to achieve such stupid goals. He’d fabricated enormous lies, he’d pleaded and he’d twinkled energetically at old ladies, all in order to get Nick into school. Where Nick had no desire to be, because school was a waste of time. It meant dozens of teachers hassling him about being dyslexic, and it meant Alan working full-time when Alan wanted to go to college. If Alan would just let Nick work full time in the garage, then Alan could go to college and Nick would never be saddled with any more reading, and everyone would be happy.

Only Alan was a stubborn idiot who refused to see reason, and he had actually forced Nick into a school uniform.

Nick said nothing. He was trying to rumple his uniform by sitting still and directing the sheer force of his hatred at it.

“You are sulking,” Alan said into the vacuum of Nick’s stony silence. “You shouldn’t be. You need to complete your education and besides, a man in uniform always looks dashing.”

Nick gave him the kind of look he felt a word like “dashing” deserved.

Alan frowned and said, “I do wish you’d eaten breakfast.”

Nick’s view of his new school, a brown institutional building as square and basically uninspiring as a brick, was suddenly obscured by a girl. She was platinum blond and slim in a schoolgirl skirt.

He supposed there was something to be said for the uniform after all.

“Just to please you, I will,” Nick said, and nodded in the girl’s direction. “Don’t you think she looks like breakfast?”

While Alan checked a smile and began a lecture on speaking of women with respect, Nick snagged his bag and got out of the car. Alan leaned over the passenger seat.

“Remember,” he called. “Just be yourself, and everyone will love you!”

Nick rolled his eyes and made a rude gesture, and Alan drove the car away laughing.

Slouching toward his scholastic fate, Nick caught the blonde’s eyes while they were sliding over him, and held them. Then he winked.

There were enough pretty girls to keep Nick entertained for most of the day. The last class was computers, and while the teacher was droning on, Nick typed “Tony’s Photos” into the search engine.

Luck was with him. He only had to scroll down past half a dozen Tonys who wanted to share their holiday photos with the world before he found a shop in England. Miraculously, it was not a chain. The small website, boasting a chubby and somewhat manic-looking baby, informed him that it was located in Durham.

They had never even lived in Durham — but last year they had lived in Sunderland, thirteen miles away. On the day after Christmas, Alan had disappeared for four days, talking about a Sumerian stone tablet that he’d been called in to examine. Mum had not come out of her room for the entire time Alan was away, and she would not have eaten if Nick had not gone upstairs and forced food down her throat. She’d screamed the entire time Nick was touching her.

Whenever Nick had made a noise in the house, he’d known his mother was listening for it, frozen and panting as if she were a hunted animal. Alan was the one always talking, turning on the TV and the radio, bringing home the weird people who were their only guests. Nick had stopped turning on lights and appliances because it wasn’t worth the bother of sending Mum into hysterics. The house started to seem shut off from the rest of the world, darkness and silence pressing all around until Nick felt as if he could not get out. He wanted to leave, he needed to buy groceries, but he sat on the stairs and waited in the dark.

Winter light had come in with Alan as he opened the door. Nick had looked up from his place on the stairs and said, “You can’t do this again.”

Alan went pale and answered, “I won’t.”

During the four days of darkness, it had never occurred to Nick that Alan could possibly have been lying, or could possibly have abandoned them for his own reasons.

It was occurring to him now.

Nick took down the address and phone number of Tony’s Photos in Durham, and then closed the window.

The next day at school Nick went and found his new crowd. There was a large bike shed around back of the school, which looked like a concrete block Kconick with a sheet of tinfoil on top. He’d seen it yesterday and known at once that this was the place.

Sure enough, there were three boys there already, two of them smoking. One dropped his cigarette on the gravel as soon as he saw Nick. He’d be no trouble. Nick raised his eyebrows, saw the boy’s eyes drop in embarrassment, and turned to the boy who’d kept smoking.

“Nick Ryves,” he said. “Mind if I join you?”

He threw out the words like a challenge. He’d found that was the best way to start things, since it always ended up that way in the end.

The boy eyed him with what Nick thought was an unusual amount of hostility to start off with. Usually it took Nick a couple of weeks to antagonize people to that degree.

“Carr,” he said at last. “Joe Carr.”

He was the usual type: He’d be snarling and trying to trip Nick up all the time, like a terrier with a Rottweiler in his yard. Still, much like a terrier, he’d stick around and never cause Nick any real trouble.

Alan had made him promise not to take up smoking. Nick always regretted that on the first day at new schools, when he wished he could smoke instead of talking. He hated talking to strangers. Sooner or later, he always said something that pulled someone up short, and then he had to glare them all into submission.

New schools were always a pain. He could hear Dad in his head all the time on the first days, telling him to blend in, telling him to try and be just like everyone else. All their lives depended on it.

“Nice place you have here,” Nick said after a beat. “Love the scenery. Especially that Cathy girl.”

“Cassie is my girlfriend,” Joe snapped at him.

“Whoops,” Nick said. “Oh well.”

The other two boys snickered, and Nick grinned at them. He’d picked the right group again. When he was little, he’d gravitated toward what was familiar and tried to make friends with people who were like Alan, only without guns hidden under their button-up shirts. People who talked too much and did their homework and who, on reflection, he’d kind of scared.

This was much easier. Dad would’ve approved.

He sat at the back of their next class with Lewis, the boy who hadn’t been smoking. He was still thinking of the picture girl from Durham and he forgot to talk at all, which was a mistake. Long silences made people uneasy.

“You all right?” Lewis asked, shifting as far away from Nick as he could.

“Fine,” Nick snapped, and then thought of Dad. “Just girl problems, you know,” he added as casually as he could.

The other boy sighed, sounding reassured. “Girls always turn out to be problems.”

“Yeah,” Nick answered absentmindedly.

He was still thinking of that hidden picture, that possible hidden trip. He had no problem with Alan’s crushes on girls like Mae, girls who weren’t interested and who were going to be left behind. A girl who could make Ala Kcouushn lie to Nick, though, that was something he wasn’t going to tolerate. He had to know what was going on.

He grinned at Lewis. “She won’t be a problem much longer.”

They all went out afterward, hung around a chip shop with a couple of girls. Sadly, neither of the girls was pretty blond Cassie.

Nick got home after dark, feeling good about the whole group thing being sorted. He thought again that Dad would’ve been proud.

He found Alan in their tiny sitting room, on the floor by the coffee table. The coffee table was covered with papers, and Alan’s head was in his hands.

“Alan,” Nick said, in a command for him to be all right.

Alan lifted his head. “Hi,” he said, and tried for a smile. “I didn’t — I didn’t hear you come in.”

“What’s going on?” Nick barked at him. “What’s wrong? Is that stupid mark hurting you?”

The contented feeling of a job well done evaporated. Nick abruptly wanted to hit something.

Alan sighed. “No.”

The answer came to Nick, inevitable as the tide coming in. Of course it was all Mum’s fault.

“It’s that stupid messenger and what she said to you.”

“I’m just trying to come up with a plan,” Alan told him.

He sounded worn and frayed as an old shirt. Nick hated it; his desire to hit something increased. He walked over to the table instead, to where Alan sat looking tired and rather small.

The papers on the table had magical symbols all over them, drawings of demons’ circles and protective amulets. There were papers covered in Alan’s scrawling handwriting, and then papers with single lines written on them, which had obviously been tossed aside.

“I like this plan,” Nick told him, selecting one of the papers with just one line on it.

The paper read, in large, almost frantic-looking letters: Kill them all.

“It’s a lovely plan, but it wouldn’t work,” Alan said, his voice almost amused. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I need to talk to Merris. I’ve got the numbers of about a dozen people who work for her, and none of them will put me through.”

“Can she help?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know,” Alan said, a note of bleakness creeping in. “God, I hope so. We might have to wait until the Goblin Market; we’ll see her then.”

Nick nodded, and then hesitated. He couldn’t think of a way to say what he wanted to, and for a moment he was tempted to let it go, but he looked down at Alan’s bowed head and tried all the same.

“Don’t—” he said, and stopped. “You’ve got a demon’s mark on you. This isn’t the time to think about—” He thought of Mum and Mae and the girl in the picture. “Don’t worry about anyone else. If it bothers you so much, I’ll do K I&m a something about Mum. I’ll find a way to help her. Whatever you need, I’ll do it. Just make sure that you’re all right. Nobody else matters.”

Alan looked up at him with dark troubled eyes, blue under shadows.

“I know she isn’t good to you, but you’ve lived with her all your life. Does the idea of her dying—” He swallowed. “Do you care at all?”

Nick wondered why Alan was looking at him with those pleading eyes. Nick had said he would help already.

“You care,” he said. “That’s enough. I’ll help her even if I don’t care. What does it matter?”

Alan looked down at his crumpled papers.

“We’ll go to the Goblin Market and get everything sorted out,” Nick said forcefully. “I told you. Don’t worry about anything but yourself.”

At a new school the teachers always took a while to go over Nick’s reading problems, and Nick always took a while to go over the girls. At home they spent all their time going for their weapons at every noise, waiting for the magicians to do what they had promised and come after Alan. Given that he and Alan had to find new jobs, too, for the first week in London, Nick had no time to do anything about Alan’s mark or his secret.

He thought about both, whether he had time or not, and he could not stop uneasily watching Alan in case he decided to bolt. It came as an enormous relief when Alan informed him that the next Goblin Market would be held near Tiverton in a few days’ time.

“It’s the closest place to Exeter they could have chosen,” Alan said. “We can pick up Mae and Jamie on the way.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “Thrill me, why don’t you.”

Perhaps he would find Mae’s hidden picture next. He scowled at the thought, and Alan caught his expression.

“You don’t have to dance, you know,” he said.

“I told you,” Nick answered, still frowning. “I want to.”

He would deal with the mark and the threat to Mum, and find out about Marie. His brother would be safe. Everything would be like it was before.

Alan went off to call Jamie.

They arranged to meet Mae and Jamie outside Northernhay Gardens in Exeter, around back of the old wall. It was quiet and already growing dark by the time they pulled up. Unfortunately, the headlights of the car were bright enough for them to see Mae’s outfit quite clearly.

“Oh my God,” said Nick, and shut his eyes.

Jamie gave a small, nervous laugh.

“What?” Mae demanded. “Alan told us that we were supposed to dress as we truly are!”

The mad girl was wearing a pink silk crop top and a long white skirt that was all gauze and frills. Every inch of her was decked with metal. She wore ankle bracelets on each ankle, had an army of gleaming bangles lined up along both arms, and was laden down with necklaces. They reminded Nick of the charms around his mother’s neck, a metallic tangle linked into chains by the years.

“And you felt that what you truly are is a Christmas tree with too much tinsel.” Nick grinned. “Huh.”

“Stop it,” said Alan, and then blushed. “I think you look very nice, Mae.”

The sudden smile Mae gave Alan was as sweet as it was unexpected. Alan smiled helplessly back, and Nick thought over this new development. On one hand, if Mae was going to start smiling at him, Alan might sink to even greater depths of idiocy. On the other hand, the girl had a nice smile, Alan seemed happy, and soon they would be at the Goblin Market. Alan’s mark could be removed, and so could Nick’s constant irritable feeling that something had gone terribly wrong with the world.

He was beginning to feel cautiously optimistic about this trip.

Nick drove away from Exeter through the narrow, jolting roads toward Tiverton. Alan’s mouth tightened with every bump in the road, and Nick was almost grateful when the tourists in the back started asking questions.

Jamie coughed. “This may be a silly question, but are there, er — goblins at the Goblin Market?”

“No,” said Nick. “Everyone at the Market is human, just like you.”

“Just like me,” Jamie echoed skeptically.

“Well,” said Nick. “Probably smarter than you.”

“It’s named for a market in a poem,” Alan explained. “The poem mentions magical fruit being sold in a market. We have magical fruit as well — we just don’t sell it.”

“Magical fruit? Like…lemons of sorcery? What do you do with them?”

Nick tossed a cold look over his shoulder at Jamie. “You’ll see.”

Jamie pointedly addressed the next question to Alan alone. “So why is the Goblin Market being held in Tiverton? It’s tiny.”

Alan spread his hands over the dashboard as if it was a lectern, and as if he could form explanatory shapes out of the air if he gestured enthusiastically enough. He’d have liked to be a college professor or something of that sort, Nick thought, and would have been, if it hadn’t been for Mum.

“Tiverton means twy ford ton — the town of two fords. The river Exe and the River Lowman meet at Tiverton, and that means it is protected from attack. Possessed bodies do not like to cross running water.”

The Goblin Market was not being held in the town center, of course. People might have asked a few questions about selling amulets and calling demons in the streets.

It would take place in the old Shrink Hills, past the point where Cranmore Castle stood. Nick and Alan had been to Tiverton before, when the Goblin Market was held there nine years ago. Nick had danced in those hills before. It had been his second Goblin Market, and Dad’s last.

“It’s supposed to be lucky to hold the Goblin Market in a place with some history attached to it,” Alan went on happily. “It’s one of the Goblin Market mottoes: ‘Our world, claimed by our kind.’ Cranmore Castle was a hill fort in the Iron Age, and in 1549 one of the battles of the Prayer Book Rebellion was fought here. It was a battle over whether a child should be christened in the new religion or the old.”

“Who won?” asked Mae.

“What does it matter?” Nick inquired. “All anyone knows is where the bones were found.”

Tiverton was in view on the darkening horizon, a gray mass in the night, dominated by a church and castle that leaned together in a fellowship of crumbling stone and decayed glory in the midst of small streets and tall trees.

They stopped on a dirt road a few fields away from Cranmore Castle, which was now nothing but a mound, gray in the night but green under a daytime sky, a lump in the ground where people had once lived, and lived no longer.

“I expected something a little more castle-shaped,” said Jamie.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Nick said. “Except demons, of course.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a charming conversationalist?” Jamie asked.

“No,” Nick replied honestly.

“I cannot tell you how much that surprises me,” Jamie told him, and Nick gave him a half smile. Nick’s blood was already racing.

There was always a chance that someone had let slip the location of the Goblin Market. Everyone came to the Market prepared for a fight. Everyone was aware of the possibility that magicians might descend upon them on Market night and try to wipe them all out with one blow.

The air on Market nights was always strung tight with nervous excitement. The Market was always balanced on the edge of destruction.

Nick looked out into the night and let his smile spread. That was why he liked it.

“Where is this Market?” Mae asked.

Alan spoke before Nick could tell her to hush. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got directions. The Market is left of the crooked tree, outside the beaten path, and straight on to the moon.”

Jamie blinked and said, “Thank you for clearing that up, Alan.”

His face was pale in the moonlight as they climbed out into the darkness of a country road, fields and trees massed around them on both sides. Nick had not looked at Jamie particularly, except to note with gratitude that he was not dressed up like Mae, but now that he did look, he was sure the boy was thinner than he had been a couple of weeks ago. He and his sister were both shaking, but Nick thought that with Mae it was excitement. With Jamie, it looked like fear.

Of course, once Alan noticed that, he was drawn to Jamie like a mother hen to the littlest chick in the farmyard.

“I know the way,” he said, and offered up the warm, sweet smile that always made people believe he wasn’t carrying six concealed weapons. “Walk with me.” He paused and added, “I see you’re not dazzling us all like Mae.”

“Well, I thought — I thought that I usually look like what I really am.”

Alan’s smile became less reassuring and more genuine. “I’ve always thought the same.”

Nick was glad that Alan felt no need to complement his shirt and jeans with a little earring, but on the whole he approved of Jamie’s decision to look halfway normal. His approval must have been obvious, because as he followed Alan up the hill, Mae fell into step with him and spoke in a combative tone.

“You’re dressed up,” she said. “You’re all in black and you’re carrying a sword. How is that different?”

“I have a reason to dress this way.”

Mae glanced up at him, instantly curious. “And what is that?”

“Oh,” Nick said, teasing a little, “you’ll see.”

He smiled properly at her, looking down into her upturned face, her mouth curved and eyes dark in the moonlight. Then he remembered that this girl was off-limits. He shook his head impatiently and lengthened his stride so she would have to scurry to keep up.

The tree branches overhead were curled around each other like cats leering down at them from the shadows, and the leaves were thick enough to hide the moon. Alan’s red hair looked as black as Nick’s as Nick drew level with them.

Alan broke off a conversation about the beautiful poetry of Christina Risotto or whoever, of all things, to give Nick a reproachful look. “You left Mae?”

That much was obvious, so Nick didn’t bother to answer him. Alan turned and limped back to Mae. When she drew level with him, he offered her his arm.

Nick, left alone with Jamie, felt it his duty to make things clear.

“I realize the fact that my brother talks about poetry is misleading,” he said. “But he’s not that way, all right?”

Jamie gave him a look, then redirected the look. Nick followed his gaze to Alan stooping over Mae and apparently doing an impression of a lame stork attempting a mating dance.

“Really,” Jamie said dryly. “I would never have guessed.”

Nick scowled.

They walked on until there was no path, only grass stretching out on all sides until it was blotted out by the dark fringe of the woods. Alan took the lead from the point where the path failed, but it was obvious to them all where to go. Someone had arranged to have cars parked at strategic points along the fields. The car roofs caught moonbeams, and every metallic place where the light fell formed a bright stepping-stone for them to follow.

On the far side of the mound of earth that people still called Cranmore Castle were enough trees to be counted as wood. Streaming from the heart of the wood, glowing among the leaves and warm against the tree trunks, they saw light from the lamps of the Goblin Market.

Nick fell into step with Alan, leaving the other two to follow them as they chose. He heard a sharp exclamation behind him as they walked into the wood, but he did not know which of them had made it, or why. People were usually taken like that by the Market at first.

It was impossible to see all of the Goblin Market at once. The stalls were placed in a zigzagging circle around the trees, glinting at intervals like secret treasure. There was one stall, and then another, and before they had taken more than a few steps, there were stalls on all sides. The bright drapes over the stall fronts were like flags being flown to declare war. The lamps, hung in twisting pathways up in the boughs, swung in the wind and cast their light on first one stall and then another.

For a moment the spotlight fell on a stall hung with dream catchers, the real kind, bones and feathers and thread formed in the patterns to silence the voices in your head and keep the demons from your bed. Then it swung to a table laden with words, clay tablets tumbled with calfskin-bound volumes, cheap paperbacks lying with scrolls. One stall made its own illumination, since it was hung about with what the Market people called fairy lamps. There were the glowworm lamps to attract your true love, and the beacon lamps you set in a window to call a wanderer home.

Nick took a moment to scan the swaying lights and the shadows creeping around them, the bright stalls and the dark cleared spaces where the dancers were practicing, and then relaxed. There were no gaps in the lines of the stalls and no familiar faces missing. The Market was just as it had been last month, and with luck it would be just the same next month too.

They all had to keep quiet for fear of discovery, so the drums were muffled and the stall owners’ voices were like the clear, low sound of chimes ringing from all sides.

“Come buy!” sang out clearly from every stall. “Come buy!”

“We can buy things like this with ordinary money?” Mae asked, her voice half-awed and half-dubious. “We’re supposed to buy help?”

“We may be the only defense against magicians and demons that there is,” Nick said. “No reason not to turn a profit.”

Phyllis from the chimes stall noticed them first. The Market was in full swing and people were mostly concentrating on business, haggling and comparison shopping. Light glanced on faces without illuminating them.

“Chimes?” Phyllis asked. “Chimes to call a lover? Chimes with the voice of a bird trapped in them? Chimes that play you whatever song you most desire to hear?”

“No thanks,” said Nick. “We’ve got MTV.”

She peered among the glinting metal and crystal of her wares, and her face cleared. “Oh, Nick, it’s you! Alan, my sweet, come here and kiss an old woman. You get taller every year.”

“You get younger every year,” Alan said, stooping in among the chimes to kiss her.

The stall owners of the Goblin Market had the same indulgent attitude to Alan as all the teachers, landladies, and shopkeepers. Human nature didn’t change, whether you sold love charms or toilet rolls.

“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. She traded in favors. She had enough money, though nobody knew where she got it. Her currency was power.

“Alan, what language is that?” Mae asked, peering at the tablet and looking excited. No wonder Alan’s little crush was so persistent. Nick hadn’t realized she was a big nerd.

“Sumerian,” Alan said.

“The oldest written language in the world, from the world’s first civilization,” Merris explained condescendingly. “It was the written language for Babylon as well. Half of what we know about magic comes from Sumerian records. I do not know what they teach you children in school these days.”

Mae looked impressed. “You can read Sumerian?”

Nick believed that Merris Cromwell was as fond of Alan as she could be fond of something that was not a magical artifact, but she was a businesswoman. She looked extremely bored by the exchange of Sumerian sweet nothings and turned her attention to Nick.

“Which of your demons do you mean to call?”

“Anzu,” Nick said.

People used to laugh at him because he had only ever been able to call two demons, but he was able to call them faster than anyone else, and he never made a mistake.

“Er, excuse me, but how do you call a demon with dancing?” said Jamie, glancing from Merris back to her stall. He looked a lot less caught up in the glamour of it all than Mae did, and he was smiling the nervous smile that Nick was coming to recognize. “Do demons have disco fever?”

He was so weird. Nick didn’t understand him at all.

Merris Cromwell looked as if nobody had ever uttered the words “disco fever” in her presence before. She did not deign to respond to Jamie. Instead she nodded at the shadows and a man Nick did not recognize took her place at the stall. Merris walked through the Goblin Market, sweeping the rest of them in her wake, until they reached the place of the dancers.

There was a spot where the stalls ended and the Market did not, a clearing full of light and music. There were dozens of little lights in the trees above, bright as stars that had somehow become tangled in the branches, and under the lights the grass looked silver and the night behind the dancers’ heads looked like a black velvet backdrop.

There were about six couples already. The women wore bright colors, slashed skirts spinning out like vivid petals as if they were pansies who had come alive after dark. The men were their gliding shadows, all in black, and Nick was aware of Mae’s glance toward him.

Nick gave her a sidelong smile and concentrated on the dancers, on the dark-haired girl wearing poppy red. When the men lifted the girls, she looked like she was flying, her partner’s hands trying to pull her back down to earth and him. She was fast the way a swordsman had to be fast and beautiful with it, a twist of crimson in the air like a trace of blood in water, and the tourists gathering began to resemble sharks.

All the girls wore crowns of fever blossoms. The orange and red petals looked like tiny flames set in the swift dancer’s dark hair.

If a dancer threw someone a fever blossom, it was a token of special favor.

The crowd surrounding the dancers rustled and murmured as the dark-haired dancer drew a blossom from her crown. A slow smile curved her cherry-ripe, gleaming lips. The dancers all spun in perfect synchronized circles, shadow and light, and as she spun the girl in red blew on the blossom cupped in her palm.

The petals burst into the air like a flurry of multicolored butterflies, flying to the winds. The crowd sighed with disappointment and the release of tension. The dancing ceased.

The girl in red broke away from her partner and came toward them.

Before anyone else could speak, Mae said eagerly, “That was amazing.”

Nick laughed a soft, surprised laugh. Girls did not usually react to Sin like that. Mae turned to him with her face bright, her eyes dazzled, and he let her see him smile.

“That was just for the tourists,” he said. “Wait until you see the real thing.”