“I’ve found that watching is the quickest way to learn, and the safest way to stay alive.”
Alucard had shaken his head, exasperated. “The accent of a royal and the sensibilities of a thief.”
But Lila had only smiled. She’d said something very similar once, to Kell. Before she knew he was a royal. And a thief, for that matter.
Now, the crew dispersing, she trailed the captain as he made his winding way into Sasenroche. And as she did, Sasenroche began to change. What seemed from the sea to be a shallow town set against the rocky cliffs turned out to be much deeper, streets spooling away into the outcropping. The town had burrowed into the cliffs; the rock—a dark marble, veined with white—arched and wound and rose and fell everywhere, swallowing up buildings and forming others, revealing alleys and stairways only when you got near. Between the town’s coiled form and the shifting sea mists, it was hard to keep track of the captain. Lila misplaced him several times, but then she’d spot the tail of his coat or catch the clipped sound of his boot, and she’d find him again. She passed a handful of people, but their hoods were up against the cold, their faces lost in shadow.
And then she turned a corner, and the fog-strewn dusk gave way to something else entirely. Something that glittered and shone and smelled like magic.
The Black Market of Sasenroche.
IV
The market rose up around Lila, sudden and massive, as if she’d stepped inside the cliffs themselves and found them hollow. There were dozens upon dozens of stalls, all of them nested under the arched ceiling of rock, the surface of which seemed strangely … alive. She couldn’t tell if the veins in the stone were actually glowing with light, or only reflecting the lanterns that hung from every shop, but either way, the effect was striking.
Alucard kept a casual, ambling pace ahead of her, but it was obvious that he had a destination. Lila followed, but it was hard to keep her attention on the captain instead of the stalls themselves. Most held things she’d never seen before, which wasn’t that special, in and of itself—she hadn’t seen most of what this world had to offer—but she was beginning to understand the basic order, and many of the things she saw here seemed to break it. Magic had a pulse, and here in the Black Market of Sasenroche, it felt erratic.
And yet, most of the things on display seemed, at first glance, fairly innocuous. Where, she wondered, did Sasenroche hide its truly dangerous treasures? Lila had learned firsthand what forbidden magic could do, and while she hoped to never come across a thing like the Black London stone again, she couldn’t stifle her curiosity. Amazing, how quickly the magical became mundane; only months ago she hadn’t known magic was real, and now she felt the urge to search for stranger things.
The market was bustling, but eerily quiet, the murmur of a dozen dialects smoothed by the rock into an ambient shuffle of sound. Ahead, Alucard finally came to a stop before an unmarked stall. It was tented, wrapped in a curtain of deep blue silk that he vanished behind. Lila would lose all pretense of subtlety if she followed him in, so she hung back and waited, examining a table with a range of blades, from short sharp knives to large crescents of metal.
No pistols, though, she noted grimly.
Her own precious revolver, Caster, sat unused in the chest by her bed. She’d run out of bullets, only to find that they didn’t use guns in this world, at least not in Arnes. She supposed she could take the weapon to a metalworker, but the truth was, the object had no place here, and transference was considered treason (look what had happened to Kell, smuggling items in; while one of those items had been her, another had been the black stone), so Lila was a little loath to introduce another weapon. What if it set off some kind of chain reaction? What if it changed the way magic was used? What if it made this world more like hers?
No, it wasn’t worth the risk.
Instead, Caster stayed empty, a reminder of the world she’d left behind. A world she’d never see again.
Lila straightened and let her gaze wander through the market, and when it landed, it was not on weapons, or trinkets, but on herself.
The stall just to her left was filled with mirrors: different shapes and sizes, some framed and some simply panes of coated glass.
There was no vendor in sight, and Lila stepped closer to consider her reflection. She wore a fleece-lined short cloak against the cold, and one of Alucard’s hats (he had enough to spare), a tricorne with a feather made of silver and glass. Beneath the hat, her brown eyes stared back at her, one lighter than the other and useless, though few ever noticed. Her dark hair now skimmed her shoulders, making her look more like a girl than she cared to (she’d let it grow for the con aboard the Copper Thief), and she made a mental note to cut it back to its usual length along her jaw.
Her eyes traveled down.
She still had no chest to speak of, thank god, but four months aboard the Night Spire had effected a subtle transformation. Lila had always been thin—she had no idea if it was natural, or the product of too little food and too much running for too many years—but Alucard’s crew worked hard and ate well, and she’d gone from thin to lean, bony to wiry. The distinctions were small, but they made a difference.
She felt a chill prickle through her fingers, and she looked down to find her hand touching the cold surface of the mirror. Odd, she didn’t remember reaching out.
Glancing up, she found her reflection’s gaze. It considered her. And then, slowly, it began to shift. Her face aged several years, and her coat rippled and darkened into Kell’s, the one with too many pockets and too many sides. A monstrous mask sat atop her head, like a beast with its mouth wide, and flame licked up her reflection’s fingers where they met the mirror, but it did not burn. Water coiled like a snake around her other hand, turning to ice. The ground beneath her reflection’s feet began to crack and split, as if under a weight, and the air around her reflection shuddered. Lila tried to pull her hand away, but she couldn’t, just as she couldn’t tear her gaze from her reflection’s face, where her eyes—both of them—turned black, something swirling in their depths.
The image suddenly let go, and Lila wrenched backward, gasping. Pain scored her hand, and she looked down to see tiny cuts, drops of blood welling on each of her fingertips.
The cuts were clean, the line made by something sharp. Like glass.
She held her hand to her chest, and her reflection—now just a girl in a tricorne hat—did the same.
“The sign says do not touch,” came a voice behind her, and she turned to find the stall’s vendor. He was Faroan, with skin as black as the rock walls, his entire outfit made from a single piece of white silk. He was clean-shaven, like most Faroans, but wore only two gems set into his skin, one beneath each eye. She knew he was the stall’s vendor because of the spectacles on his nose, their glass not simply glass, but mirrors, reflecting her own pale face.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking back to the glass, expecting to see the place where she’d touched it, where it had cut her, but the blood was gone.
“Do you know what these mirrors do?” he asked, and it took her a moment to realize that even though his voice was heavily accented, he was speaking English. Except that no, he wasn’t, not exactly. The words he spoke didn’t line up with the ones she heard. A talisman shone at his throat. At first she’d taken it as some kind of fabric pin, but now it pulsed faintly, and she understood.