“Strange,” Prestimion murmured. And they moved along.
But then the merchandise grew even stranger.
“We are entering the market of the sorcerers,” said Septach Melayn quietly. “Shall we stop here first, do you think, for something small to eat?”
Prestimion had no idea what was being sold from the little group of food-stalls that now confronted them; nor, so it appeared, did Septach Melayn. But the aromas were enticing. Some questioning revealed that this stall offered minced bilantoon meat mixed with chopped onions and palm tips, that this one had peppered vyeille wrapped in vine leaves, that the one next to it specialized in the flesh of a red gourd called khiyaar, stewed with beans and tiny morsels of fish. The vendors all were Liimen, the impassive flat-faced three-eyed folk to whom the humblest tasks of Majipoor invariably fell, and they answered Septach Melayn’s queries about their offerings in husky, thickly accented monosyllables, or sometimes not at all. In the end Septach Melayn bought a little array of items more or less at random—Prestimion, as was his custom, carried no money—and they paused at the entrance to the sorcerers’ market to eat. Everything was remarkably tasty; and at Prestimion’s urging, Septach Melayn bought them a flask of some rough, vigorous wine, still bubbling with youth, to wash it down.
Then they went forward.
Prestimion had seen sorcerers’ markets in the city of Triggoin during his time of exile: places where strange potions and ointments could be bought, and amulets of all sorts, and spells deemed to be efficacious in a host of situations. In dark and mysterious Triggoin such places had seemed altogether appropriate and expectable, a natural sort of merchandise for a city where sorcery was the center of economic life. But it was eerie to find such things being sold here in pretty Bombifale, hardly a stone’s throw beneath the walls of his Castle. This place showed him once again what great inroads the occult arts had made in recent years into the everyday existence of Majipoor. There had not been all this sorcery and magicking going on when he was a boy; but the mages called the tune now, and all Majipoor danced to it.
The outer zone of the midnight market had been only sparsely occupied compared with this part. Out there, a scattering of people whose daily lives were lived at unusual hours, or those who had neglected to do their everyday marketing at everyday times, could be seen shopping in a desultory way for the next day’s meat and vegetables. But back here, where goods of a more esoteric kind were sold, the aisles were choked with buyers to the point where it was difficult for Prestimion and Septach Melayn to make their way through them.
“Is it like this every night, I wonder?” Prestimion asked.
“The sorcerers’ market is open only on the first and third Seadays of the month,” the swordsman replied. “Those who need to buy do their buying then.”
Prestimion stared. Here, too, were booths bounded by rows of burlap sacks, too, but not sacks of spices and aromatics. In this place, so the vendors tirelessly chanted, one could obtain all the raw materials of the necromantic arts, powders and oils galore—olustro and elecamp and golden rue, mastic pepper, goblin-sugar and myrrh, aloes and vermilion and maltabar, quicksilver, brimstone, thekka ammoniaca, scamion, pestash, yarkand, dvort. Here were the black candles used in haruspication; here were specifics against curses and demonic possession; here were the wines of the resuscitator and the poultices that warded off the devil-ague. And here were engraved talismans designed to invoke the irgalisteroi, those subterranean prehistoric spirits of the ancient world whom the Shapeshifters had locked up under dire spells twenty thousand years before, and who could sometimes, with the right incantation, be induced to do the bidding of those who called upon them. Prestimion had learned of these beings and others akin to them during his stay in Triggoin, when he was a fugitive taking refuge from Korsibar’s armies.
It was dizzying to behold this infinity of bizarre amulets and mantic instruments and simples and specifics laid out all about him for sale; it was disturbing to see the citizens of Bombifale moving through this marketplace of strangenesses by the hundreds, jostling against each other in their eagerness to put down their hard-earned crowns and royals for such things. They were ordinary folk, modestly dressed; but they were throwing their money about like a throng of earls.
“Is there more?” Prestimion asked in astonishment.
“Oh, yes, yes, much more.”
The floor of the building that housed the market now seemed to take on a downward slant. Evidently they were entering a part of the structure that lay beneath the surface of the street.
It was even smokier here, and more musty. In this sector was a mixture of vendors and entertainers; Prestimion saw some jugglers at work, a group of four-armed Skandars with grayish-red fur energetically flinging knives and balls and lighted torches to each other with high abandon, and musicians with coin jars in front of them grinding away grimly at their viols and tamboors and rikkitawms amidst all the other noise of the place, and ordinary sleight-of-hand magicians who made no pretense at sorcery doing age-old magical tricks with snakes and bright-colored kerchiefs and padlocked chests and knives seemingly passed through throats. Scribes called out, offering to write letters for those who lacked that art; water-carriers with gleaming copper panniers begged to ease the thirst of those around them; bright-eyed little boys invited passersby to gamble at a game that involved the impossibly quick manipulation of small bundles of twigs.
In the midst of all this hubbub Prestimion became aware of a zone of sudden silence, a perceptible avenue of hushed-ness cutting down the center of the crowd. He had no idea at first what could be causing this extraordinary effect. Then Septach Melayn pointed; and Prestimion saw two figures in the uniforms of officers of the Pontificate advancing through the marketplace, creating apprehension and unease as they went.
The first was a Hjort, rough-skinned and puffy-faced and bulging of eye like all his kind, and carrying himself in the exaggeratedly upright stance that always made Hjorts seem pompous and self-important to their fellow inhabitants of Majipoor, though their posture was simply a matter of the way their thick, middle-heavy bodies were constructed. From the Hjort’s shoulders dangled a large pair of scales, which struck Prestimion as being more a badge of office than anything that might have practical use.
It was the second figure, though, that seemed to be the cause of the consternation. A man of the Su-Suheris race, this one was: tremendously tall, nearly as tall, in fact, as a Skandar, and bearing his pair of cold-eyed, hairless, immensely elongated heads atop a narrow, forking neck more than a foot in length. He was a disconcerting sight. His kind always was. Just as a Hjort could not help seeming squat-looking and coarse-featured and comically ugly to people of other races because of his protuberant eyes and ashen-hued pebbly skin, so too did the two gleaming pallid heads of the Su-Suheris unfailingly give them a sinister and utterly alien air.
“The inspector of weights and measures,” said Septach Melayn, in response to an unspoken question from Prestimion.
“In here? I thought you said that no governmental agency regulates this market.”
“None does. Yet the inspector comes, all the same. It is his own private enterprise, which he carries out after the normal hours of his work. He orders each shopkeeper to prove that he gives fair measure and honest price; and whoever fails to pass muster is taken outside and flogged by the other vendors. For this he gets a fee. The dealers here want no improper business activities.”
“But it’s all improper here!” Prestimion cried.