I stayed where I was, pepper spray in a steady hand. “Out.”
It was almost enough to make me feel bad, how much he crumpled. But he had his pride to satisfy, and he rallied. “With that attitude,” he warned, “no one will want to make a deal with you. The proprietress doesn’t like people who don’t keep their bargains.”
“Three,” I said. “Two.”
He whipped the door open in a gust of noise and sweat, and slammed it between us.
I waited a ten count before lowering the pepper spray, heart racing. Funny, how being small and young-looking makes the predators of the world think you’re easy prey.
More fool they. Larger women—those who almost never get perved on—are generally far gentler and more naïve than we small ones. They don’t have to learn viciousness in the cradle.
I replaced the pepper spray in its easy-access holster and continued inward. The hallway wasn’t long—only a couple of dozen steps—and it ended at a steep, well-trod spiral staircase. Up I went, and pushed through the heavy fire door at the top.
The room beyond was windowless but brightly lit with sunny yellow lights. Milling people scrutinized displays, murmuring to themselves and to one another, scrawling numbers on silent-auction forms. Occasionally, a high-pitched laugh edged with hysteria interrupted the dignity of the proceedings, and everyone pretended they hadn’t heard it.
Like in the lobby, here was a wide variety of humanity; but here, the offness of the people struck me more, and gave them a certain uniformity. I couldn’t identify what, exactly, was bothering me—and I was too distracted to try.
The interior decorator had really outdone himself. Everything was green. Grassy carpet, emerald velvet displays and damask wallpaper, avocado ceiling. The furniture had been painted green and bore green cushions. The items for auction, although admittedly not always green, were nature themed: exotic flowers, gems, and . . . living creatures.
I didn’t recognize most of the animals, but I was pretty sure the ones I did recognize were endangered or non-native. Although not behind glass—they were tethered or in fine-mesh wire cages—they made no noise and no attempt to escape.
Forget the fire marshal. I’d be contacting Animal Welfare the moment I got out of here.
I walked on, not caring to ask anyone which way. The sorts of people who came to bid in a place like this weren’t ones to whom I’d like to be beholden, even for directions. Besides, there was only one exit. It wasn’t like I could get lost.
I turned through a curtained arch and into a room as blue as the first one had been green. Appropriately enough, this one was filled with water-themed merchandise—from shells to fish to miniature ships. The room after that was purple and sold cloth, sewing machines, and (unless I was misunderstanding) seamstresses. Then came a pink room decked out like a child’s play area; then a red room like a beauty salon, if beauty salons carried liposuction machines, plastic surgeons, and disturbingly real-looking replacement noses, eyeballs, ears, and fingernails.
That red room was the worst so far, but each of the rooms was horrible. The change was gradual, from green to red, but you couldn’t miss it. Room by room, the conversation faded and the faces became more drawn: the skin grayer, the eyes bleaker. If I’d seen anyone from that red room on the street, I’d have thought him a heroin addict. As it was, I suspected the addiction of choice was something else.
And I had not yet found my boss, who had gone this way. Who had not wanted me to tag along. Who had seemed nervous.
Swallowing hard, I wiped my hands on my skirt and passed into the next room.
I expected black or brown to be next, but it was gold: gold as vibrant and oppressive as any of the colors that had come before. There were no bidders currently in this room, although the bidding papers showed there had been. No bidders—but I was not alone.
There were eighteen podiums, and on each stood a human being clothed in gold cloth draped in the ancient Grecian style. They posed, skin painted gold.
There was an ideal for everyone, in this room, a perfect cross-section of Carinan beauty: old, middle-aged, young adult, child; short and tall; male and female. The youngest was maybe eight years old, maybe nine. She looked like she belonged in a commercial, with her cherubic cheeks and glossy locks. The paper at her feet told the story of a bidding war between two numbers. She would not look at me or speak.
The others had no problem looking; their eyes followed me across the room.
I paused again in front of the last display, the one next to the exit. The man who stood on it was about my boss’s age but had a considerably more heroic build. One arm extended before him; the other reeled back, as if about to throw a discus.
“Don’t you get sore, posing like that?” I asked him.
His head inclined ever so slightly, the better to stare at me. I suppose I was an irregularity in this place, not looking like a strung-out drug addict.
“If I bid on you,” I said, “what would I get?”
His voice was ordinary, his accent from Hemmel Prefecture. “Me.”
“You mean you’d be my slave?”
“My debt would transfer to you.”
“Forever?”
He twitched a finger to indicate the bidding sheet. “Until my debt was paid off.”
There was a number on the top right of the sheet that I’d taken for an item code. It was long, and I didn’t have the key to decipher it.
The golden man’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Unless,” he said, “you would like to make a private deal—just between you and me.”
That was what the aged-actor type had wanted too. I reevaluated his proposition in light of this information. I still didn’t know what he’d been after, but I definitely should have pepper-sprayed him.
“Make a private deal?” I echoed. “But what would the proprietress think?”
I said it to provoke a reaction, and I sure got one. His expression seized up; his eyes resumed their middle-distance stare; and I could not get him or anyone else in that room to speak to me again no matter what I said. So I left them behind.
This room had a door, not a curtained arch, and I found it was the last room on the level. Beyond it lay only a whitewashed stairwell with a whitewashed staircase going up and, at the top, a whitewashed door. The place smelled like whitewash too, and my heels clicked on the wooden floor.
I didn’t go up immediately; I prefer not to rush headlong into potentially dangerous situations. So I stopped, leaned against the stair rail, and really thought.
Point one: this place was incredibly bizarre.
Point two: there weren’t any guards. Half the displays must be illegal—slavery certainly was—but the auction house didn’t even have a doorman to stop curious personal assistants from wandering in after their errant bosses.
Point three: nothing I’d witnessed thus far had any connection to seidr. I could definitely reject any lingering notions about my boss coming here to consult a seidkonur. Which meant whomever he had come to see must be not only much less respectable, but also much less probable.
Those three points were bad enough on their own, but the fourth was the worst: I had tried to leave, and I had failed. Silvertip roads are bizarre and twisted, but they don’t actively change on you, and they don’t mess with what satellites are telling your GPS. I could accept it if the car’s GPS went out of date or wonky; things break. But for my independent phone, actively streaming updated information, to go crazy in exactly the same way as the car GPS? And my memory is generally excellent. I should have been able to find my way back on my own. Eventually.
I called my boss’s phone again, and again got his voicemail.
My fingers tapped the railing. I’ve always been a firm believer that seidr is superstitious nonsense because magic isn’t real. But this—this seemed like magic. The really ugly sort of magic that makes you crave it more and more even as it takes everything you have. The sort of magic that a man with a towering IQ might think that he could turn
to his advantage because he wouldn’t fall into the same mistakes as most people. He would be careful with his words. He wouldn’t leave any exploitable loopholes in his bargaining.
Like I said, my boss is by far the most brilliant man I’ve ever met, but he can be a total idiot when it comes to people. And he doesn’t read his fairytales.
With a feeling of coming to the end of things, I climbed the stairs and pushed into the room beyond.
Chapter 4:
Extortion
The proprietress, like the room, was dressed in white. The sun had nearly disappeared behind the horizon, leaving the sky above the dome purple dark, and no harsh electric light intruded. Pale moonlight bathed her skin in luminescence, dimming the redness of her hair, brightening the silver of her eyes, softening the razor edges of her skirt suit. She was very tall and very beautiful and very regal. Be in awe of me, her aura commanded, and I was in awe.
For about five seconds. That was how long it took me to catch sight of my boss. No, that’s not right: I’d been looking at him this whole time; I just hadn’t realized it. The proprietress held him folded over one arm, like a waiter holds a hand towel. She held him effortlessly, without wrinkling her perfect suit or bending her spine or tottering in her four-inch heels.
My boss had been folded lengthwise once and then draped evenly, but the proprietress was so tall that neither his hair nor his toes brushed the white wood floor, the same floor as in the stairwell. I kept noticing things around him, like the scrubbed emptiness of the room and the small cracks between floor and wall and dome, because it hurt to look straight at him; my eyes kept sliding off.
He didn’t look any thicker than a towel, but nor did he look thinner than usual. The way he was folded, I could see slivers of his face between his meticulously buffed black shoes. His visible eye was closed, which I hoped meant he was unconscious. Magic or not, being folded up like clean laundry with your back bent at a broken-doll angle couldn’t be comfortable.
Besides, although I wasn’t sure what it would take to release him, I was pretty sure I didn’t want him witnessing it.
“Whatever deal you made with him,” I told the proprietress, “is invalid.”
Her eyebrows went up disdainfully, and I was struck again by the radiance of her skin, the delicate perfection of her nose, the unearthly superiority of her lips.
I was ready for the zinger this time, and returned my most sarcastic look. “You can’t have Jon Nordfeld,” I said slowly, clearly. “Release him.”
The proprietress held on to her glamor whammy as she let the silence stretch, trying to make me feel uncomfortable.
I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I felt utterly focused, waiting for her to speak but not needing it, watching her and calculating.
When she finally spoke, her voice matched the rest of her: icy and beautiful as the ringing of silver bells. She asked: “Are you offering yourself in exchange?” She peered more closely at me and laughed—because, yes, it’s written all over me. Even my boss has noticed, though he pretends he hasn’t. “Do you think that will make him love you?”
Another time, her words would have bothered me. Now, I only thought, So we aren’t playing fair. That’s good to know. To the proprietress, I said, “No, of course not. But that’s the point, isn’t it? He doesn’t love me.”
“Not that I’d take you in exchange if you did offer,” the proprietress mused.
“He doesn’t love me,” I pressed on, “but love demands a response. That’s part of the nature of love. He owes me a response, but he hasn’t given me one. That means he’s in my debt, and being in my debt makes him mine. Since he’s mine, he has no right to offer himself in exchange to you. Your deal is invalid.”
My boss stirred on the proprietress’s arm, as if he had heard me. The instant he moved, she snapped back, hissing in pain. He crumpled to the ground, unfolding and expanding to fill his normal space, to bend only in the ways humans are meant to bend. He groaned faintly and rolled to his side. I was by him in an instant, propping him up. He’s a head taller than I am and seventy pounds heavier, so no way could I carry him. “Come on, sir,” I said. “On your feet. Help me out here.”
The proprietress was staring at me, holding her arm with the opposite hand. There was something brittle about her, and I didn’t like the expression in those silver eyes. I wanted to get out from under it as soon as possible.
I angled my shoulder under my boss’s armpit and stabilized him as he wobbled to his feet. I don’t think he was exactly aware of what was going on, but he could clearly understand my murmured instructions. He stumbled where I guided him, and it was only because we were under that silvery gaze that it seemed to take so long to reach the door.
I tried the knob. I didn’t make a big deal of it, shaking and pounding and crying to the heavens. I turned it once to the left, once to the right, and gave up. It was locked.
“Would you unlock this door, please?” I asked the proprietress. “I don’t want to break anything.”
My boss slipped through my fingers like sand. I yelped and scrabbled to grab on to him, but though I felt his jacket, his face and hair, I couldn’t get a grip. With the soft sound of flowing cloth, he slid through the floor and was gone.
Fury replaced shock, flooding down my arms and morphing my fingers into claws to scratch out eyes. I clenched them to dam it, and the fury flooded back up, flushing my face and burning down through my sternum. My legs ached to leap at her, to force her, through sudden, overwhelming violence, to give him back.
I tamped the anger down, hard. I didn’t need to see her amusement to know that she would use strong emotion, any emotion, against me. I thought of the gold room and the red, and I let my limbs relax. Voice level, neutral, I said, “Where did he go?”
The proprietress said: “Our business is not yet concluded.”
“You have no further business with him,” I said; “we’ve established that. As for me, I have no interest in making a deal with you. I came only for what is mine—and every second you keep Jon Nordfeld from me, you are stealing my property. If you had released him immediately upon recognizing your mistake, I would not have charged you—but I charge you now. If you hold what is mine, you owe me for it. Would you put yourself in my debt?”
The proprietress regarded me with two eyes like distant stars. She said: “Jon Nordfeld made a deal with me using collateral he did not own. Knowingly or not, he conned me. That puts him in my debt—and I always collect on my debts. Since you claim ownership of him, his debt is yours. I am holding him against that debt, to ensure its repayment.”
Unlike my boss, I had read my fairytales. And so I knew that one consistent element is that making deals with fairies or demons or your supernatural creature of choice always ends badly. No matter how clever you think you are, no matter how good the deal you think you are making, they are getting the better end of it.
And the proprietress didn’t play fair.
She went on: “I don’t like the logic you used to free him, and I don’t want it used again. Make a deal with me.”
“I don’t own the logic,” I said. “And I’m not about to make a deal that’ll prevent other people from thinking it up.”
“You can prevent yourself from sharing it. Make a deal with me.”
“Is it even possible for me to make a deal?” I wondered. “Do I own that right? My brothers love me, and my parents and friends and those who love their neighbors. I cannot trade myself.”
“That is your logic, not theirs—and I do not ask for you, only for your silence. Make a deal with me.”
“No.”
The proprietress wasn’t bothered by my refusal; I might as well have stayed quiet. I wondered how many of the people she’d made deals with had had their arms twisted into it. She said: “I don’t like your logic. Invalidate it. Remember that you are in my debt and that I am under no obligation to do anything for you—not even unlock that door. Remember also that I hold Jon Nordfeld as collateral against yo
ur debt, and that once you are dead, your ownership reverts to him.”
“You are holding me against my will,” I said. “Therefore, I am within my rights to break down that door and leave—and I will accrue no debt through property damage.”
The proprietress smiled. I didn’t like her smile any more than I liked her stare. Less. It made me consider how awfully convenient it was that she’d been in the process of folding up my boss at the moment I’d arrived, although he’d entered the auction house two hours before I had.
She had redirected the streets to bring me here, into her territory. And then she had shown me exactly what I needed to see to engage her in her game—a game I didn’t know the rules to. So what made me think I could escape even if I did break down the door?
In stories, fairies and demons always get the better end of the deal.
I had argued that it was within my rights to defend myself, and she hadn’t contradicted me. She was a lot bigger than I was, but I had pepper spray, and I can move pretty quickly when I set my mind to it. If I attacked her—
Then she would have the right to defend herself against me, by any means at her disposal. In her domain, in power, it wouldn’t be possible for me to succeed in such an attack unless it were so sudden, so violent and complete, that she couldn’t react.
It might work, if my chain of logic was correct—which I was far from sure about. I could run while she was unconscious, while Silvertip’s streets had no commands of hers to follow. I might even be able to escape.
But I wouldn’t be able to take my boss with me.
I didn’t try to hide my bitterness. “Tell me what you have in mind,” I said.
If smugness were an energy source, hers could’ve powered Argo Navis for a week. She said: “Offer me something, and I’ll tell you whether it’s acceptable.”
How many of those below had been given such an open-ended offer?
“Incidentally,” she added, “you might consider that Jon Nordfeld knew the dangers before he came here, probably better than you do. He saw what you saw and, knowing and understanding and without the motivation of rescuing a beloved, he still came and he still made a deal with me.”
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