The Night Market

The market was lit by ten thousand lanterns, and not one of them cast a shadow.

That was the first thing Isolde noticed when the cathedral door closed behind them and the cold sweet air of a summer night came up around her ankles. She stood at the top of a flight of broad steps, with Odile on one side and Wick on the other and Valerian a pace behind, and looked down into a valley of light. Paper lanterns hung from wires and poles and the eaves of a thousand stalls, red and saffron and green, and all of them burned steadily, without flicker, as bright as little suns. The crowds moved through it, hundreds upon hundreds of figures in hoods and cloaks. Nobody's feet cast a shadow on the cobbles. Nobody's face was clear.

The sky above was black velvet. There were no stars in it, only a faint pale haze, as if someone had breathed on a pane.

"Door Four is passed," said the pleasant voice, from everywhere. "Eight remain."

It was only a murmur. It slid into the air like a thread through cloth and was gone, and the music of the market came up to fill the gap: fiddles, and a high tinkling bell, and a hawker's cry rolling over the rest. Dreams! Fresh dreams! Hour of sleep, two shillings! A stranger's laughter, best price in the Ward!

"It's lovely," said Odile, in a dazed whisper.

"It is not," said Valerian.

"But it's—"

"Everything in it is for sale. Everything has been taken from someone." He looked down the long steps with an expression of faint distaste. "You will want to touch nothing. You will want to taste nothing. You will want to accept no gift, however small, however sweetly offered. And you will want, above all, to listen to me when I tell you to be silent."

"Is that a rule?"

"It is a recommendation."

"From the Overseer?"

"From a man who has been to this place before," said Valerian, "and has not enjoyed it."

…

The first thing they saw was a man dying of a question.

He was one of Gideon's. They had come in a day ahead, she learned later, by a lucky key, and they had camped in the corner of the lower square, a dozen bright-pinned figures huddled round a cookfire. The man was young and sunburned, with a recruit's gawky good humor, and he stood in front of a stall hung with little brass scales. The stall-keeper was a tall hooded shape. It was holding out a small glass bottle, in which something silver turned, and the recruit was grinning.

"That's pretty," he said. "How much?"

Isolde saw Valerian's head come up.

"No," he said, sharply. "Stay—"

It was too late. The stall-keeper's hood tilted. A voice came out of it, soft and courteous, without gender or age, and it said, "A decade, sir. From the far end."

"What?"

"The price of the bottle. Ten years of life, from the tail of your span. Do you accept?"

The recruit laughed. He had not understood. "Ten years? From the far end? Well, that's a good one—"

"You have asked the price," said the stall-keeper. "The asking is the acceptance. I thank you for your custom."

He did not scream. That was the horror of it. He stood there, grinning, and a faint dry wind seemed to pass over him, and his grin stayed where it was while the rest of him gathered itself inward. The sunburn went first, bleaching out. The hair went white. His hands, hanging at his sides, grew thin and knotted; his back began to curve. In the space of three breaths, a gawky boy of twenty-two became a stooped and wrinkled man of sixty, and then—more slowly, with a faint papery rustle—of something older.

He took the bottle. He looked at it, with his old cloudy eyes. Then he sat down, quite gently, on the cobbles, and died.

"Don't look," said Valerian, very low. He had stepped in front of her. He put one gloved hand against her shoulder, turning her away. "It will be quicker if you do not look."

She looked anyway. She saw the Lantern fire flare as a dozen heads came round. She saw Gideon rise, white to the lips, and run.

She wrote it in her notebook with a shaking hand: Door 4. Rule (probable): do not ask the price.

…

The rhyme was painted on the market gate.

They found it by walking, a long walk down the central street between the stalls, past barrows of bottled dusk and trays of teeth and a woman selling jars of other people's lullabies, past a hundred hooded sellers who bowed as they passed, and a hundred more who did not. Everywhere the air smelled of hot sugar and old coins. Wick had taken hold of Odile's apron. Odile had taken hold of Isolde's sleeve. Behind them, Valerian walked with his hands behind his back and his hood up, and the crowds parted for him like a flock of birds.

At the bottom of the street stood the gate: a high arch of rusty iron, grown over with painted ivy. Along the lintel, in flaking gilt letters, ran the market's rhyme, in four lines and four stanzas, with a pretty border of coins.

Ask no price in the market's light,

Price is asked and bound by night.

Name your offer, name it first,

Buyer's blessed and seller's cursed.

What you take, you pay in kind,

Hair or hand or peace of mind.

Weigh it fair and weigh it small,

Leave the stall with nothing, all.

Anyone who haggles late

Pays the coin of his own fate.

Carry only what you've bought;

Leave behind what you've not got.

You may leave when you have paid

Out of every bargain made.

Count your coins and count them twice,

Nothing's cheap that's got no price.

Isolde had her charcoal out before she finished reading. She ran down the first letters with a steady finger: A. W. A. Y.

"Away," she said.

She said it quite calmly. She was long past surprise. A sort of exhausted, stubborn, reasonable fury had settled in her chest, the fury of a scholar who knows she is being addressed. She wrote it down under the others, with her pen steady: WHAT IS LOCKED AWAY.

Behind her, Valerian had stopped walking.

He did not say anything. He only stood. After a moment, she felt rather than saw the stir in the air: the same faint sweet note, like a bell struck deep in the ground. She turned. He had his eyes shut. His mouth was set in a hard line. A bead of sweat stood on his temple, and she thought for the first time that he looked, in the colorless lantern light, ill.

"Slowly," he said, to nobody. "Slowly. Slowly."

"I've stopped," said Isolde.

"Yes. Thank you." He opened his eyes. "It is— a most peculiar sensation. As if someone were reading aloud to me in a voice I almost know."

She laid a hand on his sleeve. She did not know why. It was an ordinary gesture, the sort that she would have made to a friend. He looked down at it. Then he drew a breath, long and shaky, and she felt the muscle in his arm go loose.

"What is locked away," he said. "From whom?"

"I don't know yet."

"Or from what?"

"I don't know that either."

"But it will say."

"Yes," said Isolde. "It will say."

…

The key was in a stall at the end of the Street of Clocks.

It was a modest stall, narrow and tall, the last in the row. A small hooded figure sat behind the counter on a high stool, knitting, and the wool in her hands was the color of nothing in particular. Above her head, on a wire, swung a sign in a cramped hand: TIME BOUGHT AND SOLD. No questions. And on the counter in front of her, on a piece of green baize, between a pair of silver spectacles and a thimble of dark liquid, lay a little iron key with a tag of paper tied to the bow.

Door Four, said the tag.

"Do not ask," murmured Valerian.

"I know."

"She will tell you. She is not unkind. It is only that she tells the truth."

"I know." Isolde took a step. She felt perfectly calm. It was, she thought, the calm of a scholar before a final examination: the cold clear stillness that comes when the worst has been imagined and one has decided to answer anyway. She stopped in front of the counter, and the knitting needles ceased.

The hood lifted.

There was no face. There was a darkness, in the shape of a face, with two small points of light in it like candles in a cellar. It regarded her. She had the sense of being weighed on an extremely delicate balance by someone who was in no hurry at all.

"A customer," said the stall-keeper. She had a voice like paper being smoothed. "How nice. How fresh. You are a very careful customer. You have been looking at my sign for a full minute."

"I'd like to buy the key."

"Of course you would."

"I'd like to name my offer first."

"Would you?" The two lights brightened. "How very correct. Go on."

Isolde swallowed. She had practiced the sum on the way. She had done it as she did all her sums, in her small square hand, on the inside of her skull, weighing and re-weighing. She knew the market. She knew what it wanted. A thing of her own, a thing she could spare, small enough to be borne and large enough to be accepted.

Time. It was the thing the stall sold. Time, from the far end. The recruit had paid a decade for a bottle of silver. A key to the next Door must be worth a good deal more.

She said, "I'll give a year."

"A year."

"One year of my life. From the tail of my span. The very last."

"Isolde," said Valerian.

"It's an offer."

"It is a great deal."

"It's the end," she said, without turning. "It's the very end, the last year in the chair, with the shawl, and the cough. I don't expect to use it. I wouldn't know what to do with an extra year at that age." She smiled. It was a stiff, unlovely thing, but it was real. "If I go home, I expect to have plenty. If I don't, it won't matter."

The stall-keeper's lights flickered.

"It is a fair offer," she said at last. "A little high. You have not haggled."

"No."

"Most do."

"I read the gate."

"Ah." A slow dry chuckle. "A reader. We do not see many of those. They keep the old verses in their heads, and then they go and ask the price anyway." She reached out. Her hand was thin as a bundle of twigs. It closed on the key. "I accept. A year, from the far end. I shall enter it in the book."

She held out the key.

Isolde took it. As her fingers closed round the iron, she felt a faint cool tug, deep in her chest, somewhere under the ribs: a very small pull, like a thread drawn through a hem. It did not hurt. It was gone almost at once. She looked down at her hands. They looked the same.

"Is that all?"

"That is all," said the stall-keeper.

…

"I should like," said Valerian, "to purchase something."

Isolde looked at him in astonishment.

He had come up beside her. He had his hood back, and the lanterns put a flat bright light on his face, and he looked tired and strained. He was holding something in his hand. She did not see what it was at first. Then she saw the stall-keeper's lights go bright, and the paper-thin hand come out, and take from him a small folded thing, gray as ash, that had a faint, unpleasant gleam.

"What is that?"

"A dream," said Valerian.

"Yours?"

"It is the only one I have." He wasn't looking at her. "It is a very old one. It comes every night, when I—" He paused, and chose again. "I do not sleep, as a rule. But sometimes, if I rest, it comes. It is always the same. A locked door, and a hand upon the other side. I should be glad to be rid of it."

The stall-keeper held the ash-gray thing up to the light. It turned, and a pale shadow moved across her face.

"A nightmare," she said. "Three hundred years old. And fresh as a daisy. Where on earth did you keep it?"

"In a wall."

"Ah." She was quiet a moment. Then, with the faintest edge of respect, "That is a rare thing, sir. A dream with weight. I shall give you a fair price. Name it first."

He named it.

He named it without hesitation: a pair of gloves. They were lined with gray rabbit fur, soft as a sigh, and as the stall-keeper brought them out, in a flat drawer, Isolde recognized the stitching. They were small. They were exactly the right size for her.

She said nothing. She could not.

He took the gloves. He held them out. His face was expressionless.

"Your hands were cold," said Valerian. "In the wood. I noticed."

"You can't—" She cleared her throat. "That isn't— The covenant doesn't—"

"It is not interference. It is a purchase. I have bought a pair of gloves with my own dream." He still held them out. "I am permitted that. I am permitted, I find, a good many things."

She took the gloves. She put them on. They were warm and soft and fit like a second skin, and she stood in the middle of the market in the light of ten thousand lanterns, with her eyes burning, and a lump in her throat the size of a plum.

"Thank you," said Isolde.

"You are welcome."

"They're lovely."

"Yes." He glanced at the stall-keeper, who had resumed her knitting with an air of great tact. "I am told that the dream will not trouble me tonight. The merchant keeps it. I may, therefore, be able to rest."

"Will you?"

"I do not know." He gave a rueful, bewildered half-shrug. "I have forgotten how."

…

They made camp at the top of a clock tower.

Odile and Wick were asleep by the second chime, curled up like puppies in a corner on a heap of Lantern blankets that Gideon had sent over with his compliments. The Lantern Company's fire burned two streets away. The market had quieted. Far below, the lanterns shone steady and shadowless, and the hum of voices had sunk to a murmur, and the great black clock above them ticked softly in the dark.

She sat on the parapet with her knees drawn up and the new gloves on, looking out. He sat a yard away. They had not spoken for a quarter of an hour. It was an easy silence, which was a curious thing in itself.

"May I ask you something?" she said.

"You may ask."

"You could leave. You've been the Overseer for a long time. You know every Door. You know the way through. You could have walked out of here any day you liked." She turned her head. "Why don't you?"

He was quiet so long that she thought he would not answer.

"I have been here so long," said Valerian, at last, "that I do not remember there is an outside to go to."

He said it quietly and without self-pity, as a man mentions the weather. The lanterns lit one side of his face. The other was in the dark.

"I have a sense of it. As one has a sense of a country one has read about. A place with trees, and weather. With a long road. I know there is something on the other side of the Doors. I know that the Strays all believe they are going to it. But I do not— I have tried to imagine it, and it will not come." He looked down at his hands. "Perhaps it is that I have forgotten. Perhaps it is that there was never anything beyond."

"There is," said Isolde.

"You are very sure."

"I have a sister there. And a bed. And a lamp on a stool." She heard her voice crack. "I know there's an outside. I'm going to show it to you."

He turned his head.

She had not meant to say it. It had come out by itself. She felt her face grow hot, and looked away at the lanterns, and the silence stretched until it was almost audible. Then she felt, rather than saw, the Overseer lean back against the parapet, slowly, with a long breath.

"Perhaps," said Valerian, "I shall let you."

He fell asleep a little after that.

She did not notice at first. She was watching the lights. But when she turned, he was lying with his head against the stone and his arms folded and his eyes closed, as still as an effigy. His face had gone smooth. The hard lines about the mouth had eased. He looked, asleep, about nineteen years old.

She sat very still.

She had never seen him rest. She had never seen him anything but upright, watchful, closed. And now that he lay there in the lantern light, she saw with a small cold shock that he was thin: that the coat hung loose on his shoulders, and the gloves were worn through at the seams, and the dark hollows under his eyes were the hollows of a man who has not rested in three centuries.

Three centuries. The thought arrived by itself. She stared at it. She did not know where it had come from.

She took off the new gloves, and folded them, and put them in his open hand.

…

"Door Four is passed."

It came from the sky.

She woke with a jerk. She had not meant to sleep. The lanterns were guttering; the first hint of gray had come into the haze overhead; and the pleasant voice was speaking, soft and round, as if from a great distance, to the whole of the market at once.

"Eight remain."

She sat up. Her heart was beating hard. It was the same words as before, the same unhurried sweetness. A sleeper in the corner mumbled. A bell chimed somewhere.

"Eight remain," said the voice again.

And then, quite softly, as if it had forgotten that anyone was listening, in a voice that was not the same at all, a thin hollow tired voice with a crack in it, a voice that came, it seemed to her, from somewhere very far below the world:

"Nine."

Silence.

The lanterns swung. The haze drifted. The pleasant voice did not speak again.

Isolde sat on the parapet with her notebook open on her knee and the charcoal gripped in her fist. She did the sum in her head, slowly. Twelve Doors. Four passed. Eight remain.

Thirteen Doors. Four passed. Nine.

She looked at the sleeping man.

His hand was still closed round the gray gloves. His face was still smooth. But as she watched, very slightly, in his sleep, the Overseer of the Doors began to frown.