by Paul Stewart
Over aerial bridges, up rope-ladders and down, they hurried. This way and that. Onwards and inwards. It was as though they had been swallowed up by a huge and monstrous beast, and were now lost within its cavernous innards. Above, below and on every side, there was feverish activity as life coursed through its veins. The air was stale, orange-red, and throbbed like a beating heart. Chaotic, it had seemed at first, yet a closer look revealed that underlying it all was order, purpose.
They passed business after small business - shops, stalls, makeshift trestle-tables - each one with its owner shouting out never-to-be-repeated bargains, trying to catch their eye. One that did was up on a platform just above their heads - a solitary lugtroll, her white cockade pinned to a tall plumed hat, hawking glittering jewellery.
‘Look,’ Cowlquape gasped. ‘It's aliveY
Twig looked closely. The lad was right. Each of the necklaces, bracelets and brooches was sparkling, not with precious stones, but with live firebugs which had been fixed into position with filaments of wire twisted round their glowing abdomens.
Spooler nodded at their own bodies, glowing ever so faintly in the dimly-lit gloom. ‘Best get out of here before she decides to use us two!’ he said.
And on they went. Past hanging cages laden with huddled birds, crates of reptiles and insects, and dying hollowed trees with bars at the gaping holes, forming
cages to woodbears and white-collar wolves; past rows of sleeping oakbats, their ankles tethered to the branches with leather jesses.
A while later, Twig stopped at a food stall, where a vendor - like the hapless goblin he'd seen earlier - had tilder sausages and woodhog steaks sizzling on a hanging stove. He bought three steaks and three hunks of oak bread, handed them round and they continued walking, eating as they went.
‘Something to satisfy your thirst, too?’ came a voice soon after.
Twig paused. Cowlquape and Spooler stopped beside him. The creature who had spoken to them was a gabtroll. She was stooped, with warty skin, drooping pink ears and, most bizarre of all, bulbous green eyeballs swaying at the end of long eye-stalks, which her long slurping tongue kept moist and clean. She looked up from her steaming pot.
‘I've the finest herbal teas in the whole of the slave market,’ she told them, her eyes swaying on their rubbery stalks. ‘You,’ she said, the eyes focusing in on Cowlquape, ‘for you, I would recommend an infusion of hairy charlock and oak-apple. It emboldens the timid of heart. And is excellent for vertigo.’ She smiled at Spooler, and her tongue slurped noisily over the peering eye-balls. ‘For you, wood-comphrey, I think. It's a general pick-me-up.’ She smiled and slurped again. ‘And you certainly look as though you could do with one.’
She turned to Twig. Her face twitched with surprise and her eyes bounced in and out on their stalks.
‘What?’ said Twig, somewhat taken aback. ‘Do you not know what I should drink?’
‘Oh, I know all right,’ the gabtroll said softly. Her eyes stared directly into his own. ‘Bristleweed,’ she said.
‘Bristleweed,’ Twig repeated. He turned to the others and laughed. ‘Sounds delicious.’
The gabtroll's eyes retracted. ‘Its name sounds common enough, I'll grant you,’ she said. ‘Yet bristleweed is one of the rarest herbs in all the Deepwoods.’ Her voice lowered to a hushed whisper. ‘It grows in purple clumps among the skulls and bones at the base of the flesh-eating blood-oak tree. Harvesting it is a nightmare,’ she added, and her eyes peered closely into Twig's once more. ‘As I'm sure you can imagine.’
Twig nodded. He'd had first-hand experience of the monstrous tree, as the gabtroll seemed to sense.
‘You are a seeker, a searcher,’ the gabtroll continued, without taking a breath. Her rubbery brow creased with concentration. ‘Looking for others …’
‘Perhaps,’ said Twig.
‘Yet there is someone else you do not realize that you seek,’ said the gabtroll, and smiled. ‘And bristleweed will help you.’
‘It will?’ said Twig.
The gabtroll nodded. She sprinkled a spoonful of the powdered purple herb into a wooden mug, ladled in warm water from the pot and stirred it round with a wooden spoon. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take it. Don't expect immediate results, but in time it will help you find the one you are looking for.’ She paused. ‘Yourself.’
‘Find myself?’ said Twig, disappointed. ‘But I'm not lost.’
The gabtroll, busying herself with Cowlquape and Spooler's drinks did not look up. ‘Are you sure?’ she said softly. ‘Is there not something missing?’
Twig fell still. The curious creature was right of course. Something was missing. That memory of his time spent on board the Edgedancer, in the middle of the weather vortex. That was what was missing.
What had happened to him there?
Twig raised the cup to his lips and drank the sweet, fragrant tea down in one go. The others did the same and, having paid for their drinks, they set off once again into the vast three-dimensional maze, slung out between the trees.
‘So how's that timid heart of yours, Cowlquape?’ Twig said with a chuckle as they were crossing a hanging walkway some while later.
Cowlquape smiled. ‘Believe it or not, Twig, I reckon the tea must have helped.’ He stopped, clutched hold of the rope hand-rail and looked down. ‘My fear of heights isn't nearly so bad as it was.’
Twig nodded. Gabtrolls were renowned for their understanding of herbs and roots. ‘And you, Spooler?’ he said to the oakelf, scuttling on ahead of them.
‘Never felt better, Captain,’ came the cheery reply.
Cowlquape turned to Twig as they continued after him. ‘And what about you?’ he said. ‘Has the bristle-weed tea helped you to find yourself?’
Twig shook his head. ‘Not yet, Cowlquape,’ he said. ‘Not yet…’
All round them the air grew more and more stifling and the noise louder. Howling. Wailing. Chatter and squawk. Whipcrack and chain-rattle. The hopeless moaning of a band of waifs, wraiths and the lesser trolls, roped to tether-rings. Roars of triumph. Cries of defeat. And orchestrating the whole terrible cacophony, the raucous flocks of flightless bird-creatures who inhabited the slave market: the shrykes.
They came in all shapes and sizes, from the hefty patrol
leaders to the scrawny little snitches and snoopers. All were female - the few miserable male shrykes there were kept penned and treated like slaves themselves.
The colour of the shrykes’ plumage also varied. Most of the guards were tawny; the tally-hens, metallic slate-grey But there were others. Mottled and striped, piebald and spotted. Some woodnut brown, some ironwood grey, some snowbird white. And some were brightly coloured.
Greater in stature than the others and with a certain air of nobility about them, the roost-sisters, as those with real power were called, were answerable only to Mother Muleclaw herself. Despite the apparent frippery of their dress - the gaudy aprons, the ornate headdresses, the golden rings through their beaks - the roost-sisters were greatly feared. Cold and ruthless, they were also terrifyingly unpredictable.
Twig looked up to see one of them now, strutting arrogantly across a crowded upper parapet, wings swinging, beak in the air, and striking out with her leather flail at random as she went. Twig turned away in disgust.
‘The whole accursed place should be razed to the ground,’ he said angrily. ‘Wiped out. Burned down.’
Cowlquape's expression clouded over. ‘I dare say it will be, one day,’ he said. ‘But not before those beyond the slave market decide they have no more need for pets and servants and bound workers. In the Deepwoods. In Undertown. Yes, and in Sanctaphrax, too.’
Twig turned towards his young apprentice. ‘Cowlquape, are you saying that it is in some way our fault that this place exists?’
Cowlquape shrugged. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘We demand, they supply. And as Kobold the Wise said …’
‘Mind your backs!’ came a chorus of shrill voices. ‘Make way! Make way!’
; Twig turned to see half a dozen tawny shryke guards, flails and clubs drawn, marching along a walkway parallel to their own. They were split up into three pairs. Each pair was dragging along a protesting prisoner, beating him savagely as they went.
‘We didn't notice!’ one of them moaned.
‘We can explain!’ protested another.
‘What's happening?’ Cowlquape asked Spooler anxiously. ‘What have they done wrong?’
Spooler nodded towards them. ‘No cockades, see?’ he said. ‘They've rotted away. And now they're about to pay the penalty.’
’I wouldn't like to be in their shoes,’ said Twig with a shudder.
‘Neither would I,’ said Cowlquape, nervously checking his own cockade. It was reassuringly fresh. ‘I do wish we'd hurry up and find that wretched auction place.’
Twig looked round him. ‘Me, too, Cowlquape,’ he said. ‘Me, too.’
They were passing through a section of the slave market where the more exotic Deepwoods creatures were kept. There were fromps coughing and quarms squealing from behind the bars of the hollowed trees, and razorflits, bound by the legs and suspended upside down from hooks, screeching with fury. A rotsucker, imprisoned in a cage far too small for it, oozed a green bile from the end of its tubular mouthpiece that hissed where it dropped and gave off coils of foul-smelling vapour; a muzzled halitoad crouched in a mist of its own noxious breath.
‘It… it's disgusting here,’ said Cowlquape, his voice muffled by the hand he'd clamped over his mouth.
‘Yet no less popular for that,’ Twig commented with a weary sigh.
He'd already noticed that the whole area was bustling with particularly eager buyers. The sound of their haggling reached fever pitch as they all tried to secure deals which would, in turn, make them a pretty profit.
‘Come on,’ he said, lengthening his stride. ‘Let's find that auction once and for all. I don't want to stay in this vile, parasitic place a moment longer than we have to.’
*
An hour later - just as they were about to give up - they saw it: the Grand Central Auction.
Situated on a large, terraced platform, the auction consisted of a long windowless building, a raised stage and a lectern. The whole lot was lit up with heavy hanging glass balls, each one containing a live firebug which gleamed like a candle-flame as it flew round its tiny prison, looking for a way out. They illuminated the auction area so brightly that Twig and Spooler's faint glow faded away completely.
‘Twenty-five? Do I hear twenty-five?’ The auctioneer -a tall noble-looking shryke with pink and purple plumage - clutched her blackwood hammer and scanned the crowd. Tm asking twenty-five for this trio of flat-head goblins. At the peak of their physical condition, they are. Ideal bodyguards or mercenaries. Twenty-five? Thank you. Thirty. Do I hear thirty?’
Twig stared at the scene, his heart beating furiously. Could any of his missing crew be here? The three ragged flat-heads, shackled to one another, stood morosely at the front of the stage. Four tawny shryke guards stood with them, flails and clubs drawn and ready to punish any misdemeanour. The auctioneer stood at the lectern to their right.
‘Forty,’ she said. ‘Do I hear forty?’ She nodded. ‘Forty-five?’
Below her, on a log, sat a stooped, slate-grey tally-hen with a clipboard clutched in her claws. Between licks at the end of her crayon, she was noting down the rising amount.
Cowlquape nudged Twig. ‘Recognize anyone?’ he said.
Twig shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. He peered back into the dark shadows at the back of the stage where an assortment of Deepwoods creatures stood huddled together, waiting their turn to come under the hammer. There were cloddertrogs, mobgnomes, a gnokgoblin with a young'un at her breast, a gangly lugtroll and a couple of unfamiliar wiry, matted-haired trolls from the darkest reaches of the Deepwoods where Twig had never ventured.
‘No-one,’ he said disappointedly.
‘Going once,’ the auctioneer cried out ‘Going twice … Sold!’ she announced, and the blackwood hammer cracked down heavily on the top of the lectern. ‘Sold to the flat-head with the crimson jerkin.’
Twig snorted. Flat-heads buying flat-heads! What kind of a place was this where free-citizens and slaves could only be told apart by cockades? He turned to Cowlquape and Spooler. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘It was worth a try, but we're clearly wasting our time here. Let's go.’
Cowlquape turned to leave. He was as disappointed as the others. In fact the longer he remained in the slave market, the more uneasy he was becoming. If it were up to him, they would cut their losses and depart at once.
‘Lot Nine,’ the auctioneer cried. ‘A waterwaif.’
Twig started. A waterwaif? He'd seen no waterwaif. He turned round and stared back at the stage. And sure enough, there - cowering behind the cluster of cloddertrogs - was a slight, scaly creature with fanned ears and a darting, reptilian tongue. One of the tawny shrykes jabbed him sharply in the back. The waterwaif groaned and hobbled wearily to the front of the stage.
‘I thought we were going,’ said Cowlquape.
‘Wait,’ said Twig.
He stared at the individual before him, then at Spooler, then back at the waterwaif - then back at Spooler.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘I … I'm not sure,’ the oakelf replied. There was excitement in his voice. ‘It could be …’
‘Could be what?’ said Cowlquape.
‘Not what, but who,’ said Twig. ‘It could be Woodfish.’
‘From your crew?’ said Cowlquape.
Twig nodded.
Just then, the auctioneer's bidding got underway. ‘Ten!’ she announced. ‘Who'll offer me ten.’ Twig raised his hand. The auctioneer glanced at him. She nodded and turned away again. ‘Fifteen,’ she said. ‘Do I hear fifteen?’ ‘Fifteen,’ came a gruff voice.
‘Twenty?’ said the auctioneer, turning back to Twig.
Twig glanced round at the character who had bid against him - an evil-looking individual with a metal eye-patch, who was leering at the waterwaif with his one good eye and licking his lips ominously. From the emblem embossed into his heavy leather coat, Twig could see he was a leaguesman - though the symbol was none he recognized. He raised his hand a second time.
The auctioneer nodded again. ‘Twenty-five?’ she said. ‘Do I hear twenty-five.’
Twig glanced around again. This time, his gaze met that of the one-eyed leaguesman, who was glaring back at him furiously. ‘Twenty-five!’ he bellowed.
‘Thirty!’ shouted Twig.
‘Thirty-five!’
‘Fifty!’
The leaguesman hesitated for a moment, then - as Twig looked round - his mouth cracked open and his gold teeth glinted in the glow from the imprisoned firebugs. ‘S all yours,’ he sneered.
‘Sold to the individual in the hammelhornskin waistcoat for fifty,’ the auctioneer announced. ‘Come forward to pay the tally-hen and lot number nine is yours.’
Twig stepped up onto the stage. Cowlquape held his breath. Was the waterwaif the crew-member Twig was searching for or not? The next moment, the air resounded with a screech of surprise.
‘You want to do what?’ the tally-hen demanded, her voice loud and incredulous. ‘You want to buy it a cockade?’
Cowlquape's heart leapt. So it was Woodfish after all! He moved closer to the stage, the better to hear what was going on.
‘I think you'll find the amount correct,’ Twig was saying as he handed over a cluster of gold pieces. ‘Fifty for the purchase and an extra two for a white cockade.’
The tally-hen glanced up at the auctioneer questioningly.
‘If he wants to waste his money on fine gestures …’ she sniffed, and her beak clacked with contempt.
The tally-hen shrugged. Fifty-two gold pieces were fifty-two gold pieces after all. She slipped the money into the chest, reached inside the pocket of her pouch and removed a white cockade.
‘Here,’ she said.
Twig took it and handed it
over to the waterwaif. He smiled. ‘For you, fellow free-citizen,’ he said.
‘Th … thank you,’ the waterwaif said uncertainly.
‘Even though you are not the one I hoped you would be,’ said Twig quietly.
Cowlquape gasped. Not the one? What did he mean?
The waterwaif frowned, and listened in on Twig's thoughts. ‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘You thought I was your missing crew-member, Woodfish.’ His fan-like ears fluttered. ‘I'm sorry to disappoint you.’
Twig shrugged. ‘It's not your fault,’ he said. Then, smiling grimly, he reached out and shook the scaly hand of the waterwaif.
‘Lot number ten!’ the auctioneer bellowed above the rising swell of angry voices in the crowd. She looked down impatiently. ‘Will those involved in the previous sale kindly leave the stage.’
Cowlquape and Spooler helped the still somewhat bewildered waterwaif down onto the platform. Twig jumped down after him. The four of them slipped back through the crowd.
On the other side, Twig turned to the waterwaif. ‘Anyway,’ he said, Tm glad to have been of help. Live long and fare well,’ he said formally, and turned away -to be confronted with the furious face of the thwarted leaguesman pressed closely into his own.
‘What do you think you're playing at?’ he said.
‘Playing at?’ said Twig.
The leaguesman seized him by the shoulder and pulled him close. ‘You heard me,’ he spat. ‘Do you realize how long I've been searching for a waterwaif?’ the leaguesman hissed into Twig's ear. His breath was warm, moist and made fetid by the rotten meat trapped between his gold teeth. ‘Thirty-six cockades-worth!’ he said. ‘Thirty-six dumping cockades-worth! This was the first I'd found. And then you come along!’
With that, he drew his dagger. Twig stumbled. The blade glinted. Crying out, the waterwaif leapt between them. The knife plunged into his chest.
A curious look of serenity passed over the waterwaif ‘s face as he tumbled back to the wooden platform. It had all happened so quickly, but he had read the leagues-man's murderous thoughts in an instant. His eyes misted over; his ears fell still.