by Dante King
“I’m not too sure, my boy,” Igor replied, “but a rather persuasive fellow that I met in an alleyway whilst waiting for Mort to stop talking to his own feet told me that they were the best thing since sliced bread. It was while I was pondering on the true merits of sliced bread that he told me what they were and I missed it.”
The buildings were all leaning drunkenly against one another, which was as apt an architectural quirk as I had ever seen. Some of them had to have been constructed using magic, as there was no other possible explanation as to how they were still standing. One twisted three-story building some way down the street leaned right out into the street, curling over so that its third story window basically peered into its second story one.
“So, all the shops sell drugs and booze, is that about the shape of it?” I asked.
“Many do, of course,” Igor said, “but not all. There are a great deal of shops and boutiques here. They say that there is almost everything that the inebriate could desire tucked behind some door or other in Powder Lane.”
“Which, when you consider the sort of wacky desires that pop into one’s head in the middle of a binge, is pretty impressive, isn’t it?” Leah said, gazing around in that dreamy fashion of hers.
“True, true,” Igor agreed, wagging his head sagely. “Why, when I think of some of the things that I have wanted to get my hands on after a few too many shots of ghoul venom or a fuddleweed cigar… One time, I woke up wearing nothing but this coat and a pair of pretty fetching high heels and my pockets were filled with live terrapins. Where did they come from? I have not the foggiest idea. But I must have purchased them from someone. I also had a receipt, tucked into one of the high heels, for a human-sized hamster wheel with the words ‘for collection’ written at the bottom. Once again, where did I purchase such a thing? I’ve no idea. Somewhere out there though is a shop selling terrapins with a human-sized hamster wheel in it that belongs to me.”
“We should get a move on,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the plethora of fascinating shop windows. “Janet could be anywhere.”
“She’ll definitely be somewhere,” Igor said.
“Of course she’ll be somewhere, cousin,” Leah remarked. “Everyone is somewhere.”
“My point exactly,” Igor said. “Now, let’s do as Mr. Mauler here suggested and get cracking. Mortimer, you have a nose for directions. Whereabouts was it that you and I started shoveling all that powder into our face?”
Although Mort was, ordinarily, one of the most feared bounty hunters in Avalonia, I was dubious as to just how much use he was going to be right now. When Igor had said that he had a nose for directions, Mort had reached up and touched tentatively at his conk as if he expected it to start talking to him like a TomTom or something.
“I can tell you where that was, cousin, no problemo,” said Leah. “I wasn’t on the PPP like you cheeky scatterbrains. Follow me.”
Powder Lane was heaving with people. As we set off, I caught sight of a couple of nymphs that I recognized from the Academy, as well as a large, bald-headed man whom I thought might have been one of Nevermoor’s chandlers. When I pointed these people out to Enwyn, she nodded.
“Yes, I’ve seen quite a few students about already,” she said.
“I don’t get how we never even heard about this place before,” I said.
“That’s not entirely true for me,” Enwyn said as we paused to allow a pair of hysterically laughing women to run past us. They were holding firework sticks in their hands and firing large green smoke pellets at one another from them. As we watched, one of the smoke pellets hit the woman being chased and exploded in a burst of eggy-smelling smoke and a loud farting noise. The woman fell over, and her friend who was chasing her dissolved into laughter.
“You knew about this place, and you never told me about it?” I asked, my head whipping from one side to another as I endeavored to take everything in at once. “Enwyn, you were holding out on me! This place is the most bat shit crazy place that I’ve ever set foot in! I mean, look at that, those guys are getting high on—is that a pie they’re passing around?”
The group of long-haired, bearded dwarves I was pointing at were, indeed, getting high on pie. They were passing what looked like a classic apple pie that grandmammy used to make—or would have done, maybe, if I had known my grandparents. The person holding the pie would take a deep inhalation of the steam coming off the thing, smile hugely, and then levitate about eight feet off the ground.
“Ah yes,” Igor said as we moved on. “There’s a great little bakery around the corner that specializes in all types of different sweets and savories. Tripping truffles, happy half-and-half cookies, sideways sausage-rolls, pies that will cross yours eyes—that’s not hyperbole either, my eyes were quite literally crossed for thirty-two hours the last time I ate one of those pies.”
“Like I said,” Enwyn replied to me, “I had heard of this place, but thought it was more of a euphemism for wanting to get really inebriated. You know the sort of thing. I might hear, for instance, some girl at the Academy say to another that they should check out Powder Lane that night. Or that her friend spent three days in Powder Lane and was now a shell of a person.”
I nodded. “Like Shit’s Creek,” I said. “And now we find that it’s actually a real place. Like an adult Disneyland. The fraternity boys are going to lose it when I tell them about this place.”
As you might assume in a place called Powder Lane, where even the pies are out to give your neurons a hammering, there were a multitude of taverns, speakeasies, and shady smoking dens dotted amongst the shops. People that could walk in a straight line, or were in a condition in which they could walk at all, were in the minority.
As we passed one place called The Bucket of Blood, there was a huge, world-ending crash and smash of broken glass. A man came flying headfirst out through the front window and landed in the street. He looked to be covered in blood but, as we strolled past, I realized that it was actually hot sauce or something of that kind.
“Bucket of Blood’s Bucket of Spicy Batwing Challenge,” Igor said, answering my unasked question. “There’s always someone who tries to rig the competition.”
A large ogre bouncer wearing sunglasses and smoking a joint the size of a traffic cone slouched over to the unconscious form, prodded him with a toe to ascertain whether he was still alive, and then booted him when he didn’t stir. The downed figure groaned. Apparently pleased with his first-aid skills, the ogre then pointed a wand at the window in a way that told me he did this about fifteen times a day and the glass flew back together to form perfect panes.
Hawkers and peddlers were everywhere, selling the sort of food that drunk people loved; namely either salty, greasy, unidentifiable fried snacks, or the sorts of delicious desserts that had about five distinct textures and could keep someone who’d just smoked four bucket bongs occupied for hours.
Every now and again there would be a series of reports and magical fireworks would blaze through the streets. I knew they were magical because normal fireworks didn’t include fizzling stars that bounced down the street and tried to lift up girls’ skirts. Or pulsating rockets that exploded and filled the night sky with giant, sparkling breasts that jiggled hypnotically.
Powder Lane was, quite literally, the most open-minded place I had ever been. They called Las Vegas ‘Sin City’ back on Earth, but Vegas would have had to roll up its sleeves and get down to some serious homework if it wanted to even come close to Powder Lane. It wasn’t so much how brazen everyone was, but how little anyone else seemed to care.
I cast my mind back to my very first day in this world, when Enwyn had brought me through the portal that had connected Earth with Avalonia. She had pointed out a few delinquent-looking people sprawled around on the streets and told me that they were ‘Mag-heads’—people who broke open stolen vectors and had their brains pleasurably addled by the undiluted magic within them.
Of all the places that I might have expected to see t
hese people, it would have been here, though I couldn’t see anyone surrounded by the broken pieces of anything that might once have been a vector. I figured that there were just so many hammered people staggering about Powder Lane though, that a few people who had sent their brains to outer space with magic instead of good old drugs or alcohol probably weren’t going to stand out so much.
As we strolled down the meandering street, I happened to glance into an alleyway. There was a woman of the Elven persuasion only a few yards away from me, only a little way down the alley, and she was getting eaten out by a slight, blue-skinned woman who I figured was a Selkie or some other aquatic race.
“Sorry,” I said, apologizing automatically after I had received my free eyeful. “Sorry about that.”
The elf, her face shining with sweat and passion, grinned at me and said breathlessly, “Don’t apologize, starchild, just join us!”
“Maybe next time,” I said as we hurried by.
As we hurried past a drinking establishment that would have given dive bars across the universe a bad name, I caught sight of five figures lurking around outside. It was the color of the five women’s hair that caught my attention, but it was the palpable air of menace they exuded that held it. They wore similar outfits of ragged dark blues and grays. All five sported different hair styles, but their hair itself was uniformly the bright silver color of burnished steel. They were lounging around chatting to one another. Even though they were slight and athletic in build, the disreputable-looking folk around them had given them a wide berth.
“What’s that place?” I asked in a low voice to Igor.
“Hm? Oh, that watering hole doesn’t have a formal name as such,” Igor said, in an ever so slightly slurred voice. “It’s simply known as The Place.”
“Looks rough,” I said.
Igor chuckled. “If that bar was a brand of lavatory paper, it’d be like wiping your backside with a cheese-grater.”
“Could Janet be in there?” I asked.
Igor shook his head. “That there is a place of cutthroats and thieves, highwaymen, bounty hunters and desperadoes. It’s not a place where business is done, my lad. It is a last refuge. She won’t be there.”
I watched one of the silver-haired women, this one rocking an afro, materialize a knife out of nowhere and examine it. As we moved out of sight, I could swear that she glanced up and caught my eye with her all-silver one.
Powder Lane was the main road, and we stuck to it, but I did notice a few other smaller roads branching off from it: Back Alley, Be Avenue, and Trip Street to name but a few.
“It’s still mind-boggling to think that this place has been right under our noses the whole time,” I said. “And with an entrance at the back of some random pub in Nevermoor no less!”
Enwyn made a noise in her throat, the audible equivalent of a shrug.
“I guess,” she said. “But when have you ever found yourself thinking that it might be nice to pop down to The Goat’s Scrote for a drink in the evening, hm?”
“That’s a bit like asking whether I’ve ever found myself thinking that it might be nice to pop down the road for a glass of racoon piss and a broken bottle in the throat,” I replied.
“Exactly,” said Enwyn. Grinning and giving me a sideways look. “There are more pleasurable ways to spend an evening, aren’t there?”
“Powder Lane has multiple entrances, the Nevermoor portal being just one,” Mort unexpectedly piped up in his apologetic and polite tone, which belied the fact that he was one of the more proficient and cold-blooded killers I had ever personally met. His voice was so quiet that I could barely make out his words over the noise of some female yodeler making an awful noise in front of a shop advertising pickled devil slugs at two silvers for a half dozen.
“There are more ways to get here, more than just the one in Nevermoor?” I asked.
“Yes,” Mort said. “Powder Lane is a place that does not exist on any map. That’s why there is no form of law here. It is why poltergeists can still freely set up their medic stations here without fear of being carted off to the Eldritch Prison.”
“What? There’s no law here?” I asked, flabbergasted at the thought.
“Only the law that people bring with them when they enter,” Mort said.
“And that’s the oldest law of all isn’t it, Mortimer?” Leah said, twirling a finger through her pink hair. “The law that states: treat people as sweetly as you’d like to be treated or don’t get cross when someone kills you for being an aggressive or obnoxious prick.”
“Oh, that law,” I said. “So this place is a sort of international waters area, where the usual rule of the Queen does not extend to?”
Mort nodded. “Yes, the Queen has no sway here. There are points of entry to Powder Lane dotted all over the Avalonian Kingdom. Many of the bounties that I hunt try and make use of these entry and exit points. They run inside their nearest portal, find themselves in Powder Lane, exit out of a different portal, and find themselves a thousand miles from where I was chasing them.”
“Do they ever lose you doing that?” Enwyn asked.
Mort gave her a puzzled look. As if she had asked him the simplest question of all time and he wasn’t sure whether she was poking fun at him.
“No,” he said. “I’m very, very good at my job.”
“And so modest too,” Leah chimed in.
“Where this place, Powder Lane, sprang from up from, and who the first person was that figured out that they could step through holes in the fabric of our world to find it is a complete mystery,” Igor said as we turned a corner and found ourselves in a piazza of sorts.
At that moment, on the corner, we passed one of the poltergeist-run medical bays that Mort had mentioned just before. It wasn’t hard to confuse it with any of the other crooked leaning buildings surrounding it. The medical building was awash with a pale, ghostly greenish light that was the signature of the poltergeists.
“Good evening, Igor!” a chubby female poltergeist said cheerily as she floated by and caught sight of the Rune Mage. “Can we expect to see you this evening?”
Igor smiled at the spectral figure and inclined his head. “Evening, Aurabelle, my dear! I cannot say with any great certainty as to whether or not you will see me later. We can but hope that you won’t, but I wouldn’t put any gold on it. I have ingested a combination of chemical stimulants that would normally tranquilize a unicorn—in fact, I think that unicorn tranquilizers might be what those little biscuits were, Justin!”
“Well, try and behave yourself for once, eh?” the matronly figure chided Igor as she floated toward the front door of the poltergeist healing center. “The coach that you and your cousin crashed into the fountain and tried to set on fire is still in the fountain.”
“I’ll try, I’ll try, I’ll try,” Igor said as he waved at her. “It’s all any of us can do.”
“Spend a bit of time at the medical center, do you?” I asked the mustachioed mage as we walked on.
“Oh, yes,” Igor said. “They always have a room made up for me there. A nice hospitable lot, the poltergeists that work in the private sector here. Not always looking over their shoulders to see if Idman and his Frost Giants are about to kick the door down and arrest them all. Yes, I’m always welcome there.”
“What do they do there, Igor?” Enwyn asked.
“That little home away from home for Igor is where they scoop in the loonies that run amok on the streets of Powder Lane. They help said loonies remember who, and sometimes what, they are,” Leah said in a stage whisper.
“Now, Leah, really!” said Igor. “You know how I feel about the use of the word ‘loony’... Much better to use the proper term, ‘lunatic’ if you’re going to disparage someone’s mental faculties and insinuate they’re off their onion.”
“Sorry, Igor,” Leah said, shooting a wink my way.
“So, they take people who are tripping out too hard there, do they?” I asked.
“That’s right,�
� Igor said suavely, in the manner of a man who was telling someone about a luxurious hotel that they frequented. “Padded cells, ox-hide restraints, sensory deprivation chambers where people can be taken to act out the more insane and mind-bending trips. They’ve got the works.”
A sharp indrawn hiss from Mort cut into Igor’s explanation. Igor turned and let out a strangled cry.
“Sweet merciful mandrake mammary glands!” he hissed, scooching his head down so that basically only his thatch of messy hair was visible over the edge of his collar. “Don’t look, but it’s that same pair of safety officers who ejected Mort and I from Powder Lane.”
I saw where the Rune Mage was pointing with his eyebrows and mustache. Across the piazza, next to a fountain in which the charred remains of a carriage was sitting up to its axles in water, were two large trolls. They were dressed in what was probably the closest thing to an official uniform in all of Powder Lane: matching breastplates of dented steel and leather skirts like what gladiators used to wear.
“Be cool. Just be cool,” I said to Mort, who had pulled his hood up to disguise those unmistakable white-blond mutton chops of his and was endeavoring to fold his lanky frame down and hide behind Enwyn.
The trolls looked pretty sour about something, although, in all honesty, trolls are not renowned for their sunny dispositions and approachably handsome faces. They were glaring around at the masses of pie-eyed humanoids staggering around. This pair of safety officers had the world-weary eyes of two trolls who had seen too much and were still hours from shift-change.
“Look, Igor,” Mort said in a low voice as we gave the fountain and the two trolls a wide berth and carried on in the direction that Leah was leading us, “the carriage did catch fire.”
“Hm, yes. Yes, it did, didn’t it?” Igor said, his eyes barely visible from where they protruded from between his unruly hair and the collar of his jacket. “It seems that it combusted quite efficaciously in the end, did it not?”
We followed Leah out of the other side of the square and further down the lane. While none of Powder Lane could really be considered commercial, the buildings in this section of the street, away from the piazza and the Nevermoor portal, were definitely less flashy. There was a suggestion that the magic holding up these buildings might very well be in imminent danger of running out.