Finding the market was a bit like seeing a ghost—I didn’t truly believe it was real until we happened on it, and I saw shadows in the corner of my eyes and smelled the dankness of an eldritch thing, its breath misting on my face.
The Nightfall Market crept up on Cal and me in shadows and song—I saw a low lump of tent, and heard a snatch of pipes, and slowly, slowly, like a shy cat coming from under a porch, the Nightfall Market unfolded in front of our eyes.
Tucked into the dark places of the Rustworks, below the crowns of old gears and the empty staring heads of antique automatons, the Nightfall Market pulsed with movement, with sound and laughter. I hadn’t expected laughter. Heretics were meant to be grim, weren’t they? Concerned only with the trickery they called sorcery and the overthrow of reason?
I put aside my nerves. I didn’t belong here, that much was obvious, in my plain wool uniform skirt and with Uptown manners, but if I showed that I was terrified of ending up an example to next year’s frosh—“Did you hear about Grayson? The crazy one who got taken by heretics?”—the citizens of the Nightfall Market would never help me find Conrad.
Cal and I wound among the tents and stalls, made up of oddities and things that regular people would cast aside—fabric and metal and leather, stitched or riveted into a riot of color and odd shapes. The strange bit was, that haphazard as it first appeared, there was a sense of permanence to the place.
A pretty redheaded girl smiled and winked at Cal, her eyes an invitation into a big candy-striped tent that smelled like overripe oranges and orchids. “You looking for a port, sailor?” she called.
“Keep walking, partner,” I told Cal when his head swiveled toward the girl. He gave me a lopsided smile.
“You’re not the type to let a guy have any fun, are you?”
“When we’re safe in Arkham and we’ve found Conrad you can have all the fun your immune system can stomach,” I said, with an eye on the girl and her cosmetic-caked face. She reminded me of a cheaper, brassier version of Cecelia.
Cal made cat noises, and I didn’t hesitate to punch him on the shoulder, though not too hard.
“If you wanted a date, Aoife, you should have passed me a note or two during Mechanical Engineering,” Cal teased. “There were plenty of school dances we missed our chance for.”
I snorted. The idea of a respectable boy like Cal with a girl like me was as ridiculous as the idea of him with the girl from the tent. She’d probably be more acceptable to the professors and his parents. Boys were allowed to go wild once or twice.
“Believe me, Cal, nothing is further from my mind than a date right now,” I told him as I tossed the girl a glare. She waggled her fingers at me before sticking out her tongue. I returned the gesture. I suppose I often don’t leave well enough alone, but Cal was my companion on this little adventure. She could go and find her own.
We turned a bend in the market’s alleyways and came to a square thronged with people. I paused. I had expected the girls of questionable reputations, accompanied by bandits and vagrants of the type popular with sensational writers. But in actuality, an old pipe fire from a house long ago made wreckage was open to the air, and vendors had set up grills and kettles over the flame. The smell was oaky, earthy, a good cut of meat rubbed with spices. My stomach burbled at the scent, and I was reminded that I’d had to miss supper to come here.
“Books!” A boy in a checkered cap and an outdated newsie coat, half again as old as I was, shoved himself into my path, chest puffed like a bullfrog’s. “Spell books! Charmed paper! Never needs erasin’! Tinctures! Good for what ails you!” He squinted into my face. “Not much, by the look of it. Face like an angel on you, girlie.”
“I don’t have any money,” I returned. “You can save your pitch for some superstitious twit who does.”
“Ain’t no superstitions for sale here, miss,” he chimed back. “All of my charms ’er one hundred percent gen-nu-wine. I’ve got magics in my pen and a witch in my kitchen.”
“Magic’s not real,” I said. “If you’re so smart, you should know that.” I was trying to seem like someone who wasn’t easily conned, but my voice sounded small against the chatter of the market.
“Sure, an’ if you really believe that you’d be home in bed.” The kid wrinkled up his nose at me. “I could tell you where to buy a hairbrush instead, maybe. You need it.”
“Say,” Cal intervened, before I could make a move to strangle the little brat. “Where’s a guy find a guide around here?”
The boy spat in the dirt near Cal’s feet. “Piss off, townie. I look like I give out help to Proctor-lovers?”
Cal swiped at him. “You don’t know anything, you little rat.…”
I fished in my pocket for a half-dollar and held it up. The boy’s eyes gleamed to match. “What’s your name?” I said.
“Tavis. Thought you said you didn’t have any scratch?”
I made a second half-dollar join the first. Conrad had liked sleight of hand, though the Proctors frowned on something so close to what heretics considered magic. Tavis was practically panting. “We need a guide out of Lovecraft,” I said. “All the way to Arkham. I have money for that, and you seem like you know how things work around here. Or do you have a big mouth and nothing else?”
The first thing you learned in the School of Engines—if you want to understand how something works, ask the one who does the dirty job. Gear scrubbers and steam ventors and their foreman were in the pits. They knew their Engine intimately.
“I do, at that,” Tavis said. He pointed past the pipe fire to a blue tent. “You want old Dorlock back there. He’s a guide, best damn guide in the Rustworks. He could guide steam back into water. He could—”
I held up a hand, and dropped the two coins into his. I wondered what a pair of silvers bought in the Nightfall Market, besides bad manners from a shyster kid. “That’s fine. And for the record, I like my hair this way.” Truly, I hated it and toyed with chopping it into a modern style daily, but like I said, sometimes I don’t know when to leave it. Besides, I had a feeling Dorlock wasn’t as easily put in his place, and it might well be my last chance to feel in control of things tonight—or ever. Once I found Conrad, I’d have to face running off. I might be expelled. I didn’t think beyond that, because beyond expulsion was a cell in the Catacombs, shock therapy to burn the madness out of me and finally, a place next to my mother. If I lived.
“Sure there isn’t,” Tavis snorted, brandishing his worn wares again. “And hey, townie,” he said to Cal as we started into the crowd. “You watch your girl. She’s got an edge of the pale on her, that one, and it’s like honey in a beehive down here.”
I shuddered, feeling like something rotten had touched me. Cal rolled his eyes. “Stupid little runt.”
“You mean, you don’t feel the urge to be my white knight?” I teased, nudging him in the ribs. “Thought that was your dream job.” This was my idea, and I wasn’t about to let Cal see that second thoughts had started the moment we left the Academy. A good engineer stood behind her plans as sound until they’d been tested and proved otherwise.
“Like you said, Aoife,” Cal grumbled, sounding for all the world like Professor Swan, “grow up.”
An edge of the pale. If I’d had more coins to spare, I’d have asked Tavis what he meant. But my mother’s money was precious, and I needed every penny of it for this man Dorlock.
We skirted the fire and approached where Tavis said the guide lived, my feet slower with each step. Still, I grasped the tent flap firmly and pulled it aside. “Hello?” I peered into the tent, which smelled like a barbershop mixed with cheap liquor. “M-Mr. Dorlock, sir?”
“Hello!” The voice boomed back, sonorous and clearly used to the stage. Dorlock was entirely bald and sported a handlebar mustache, like a circus strongman. Somehow I had expected our guide to be thin and shady, dark as the shadows he slunk through. But Dorlock would stand out at a Hallows’ Eve carnival.