Gharek followed the voice’s direction and was startled to see not a child but the old woman Asil. In all the time she’d been in his clutches, he’d never heard her speak, and the young voice paired with the wizened face was startling. Even more startling was the dog lying next to her in a protective pose, head up, ears forward as it watched the crowd. Gharek recognized the cur. It had once helped a blind man who saw too much guard the entrance to Koopman’s tent in the Maesor.
Siora smiled and bowed to Asil. She didn’t reply but her gaze traveled to Malachus on Gharek’s other side, half hopeful, half pleading.
Malachus continued. “They want to buy a horse from us and ride to Domora. They have money to pay.”
“We don’t necessarily have a horse to sell.”
The rebuttal came from a man standing on the opposite side of the circle, a fearsome sort who probably did the job of camp guardian when the draga couldn’t.
Siora leaned close to Gharek and whispered, “That’s Kursak. The wagon master I mentioned earlier.”
He sighed inwardly. Of the many free trader bands travelingthis road, why did it have to be this particular one he and Siora literally ran into outside of Midrigar?
Kursak cut across the circle’s center, skirting the fire until he stopped a few steps from where Gharek and Siora stood with Malachus. “I’d hang you by your own entrails if it were solely up to me, cat’s-paw, but it isn’t. That being said, I won’t sell you a dirty stocking until I hear how you ended up in the cursed city and why.” He gestured to Siora. “She’s told us some, but I want to hear your version of the tale.”
And catch me in a lie, Gharek thought. He hid a smile. He was familiar with this game, played by one far more formidable than this wagon master. Dalvila always listened for the lie in any conversation she exchanged with her minions, courtiers, and any unlucky bastard who gained her attention. Her ear for a falsehood had been honed to an accuracy comparable to that of a hound with a scent. Gharek played the game and played it well. He was, after all, still alive to play it again.
He pointed to the dog beside Asil. The cur’s lips peeled back in a silent snarl. “I know that dog. It once guarded the stall of a man named Koopman. Koopman sold tapestries and carpets in the Maesor. Trap shadows.” Gasps and a visible recoil undulated through the crowd of listeners. “Koopman wasn’t just a Maesor merchant. He wastheMaesor merchant. No one did business there without his approval, and he was the person you went to first if you were hoping to broker deals with wealthy clients for rare magical artifacts or even to sell something as uninteresting as a love potion.”
“Like a mother-bond,” Malachus said in dry tones.
Gharek nodded. “Just so. We hoped Koopman could help us.Something is roaming these lands, something that doesn’t belong in this world at all, and its power is spreading ever farther out from its source in Midrigar. Some are calling it an eater of ghosts, but it hunts the living as well.” If tension possessed true weight, it would be an anvil. He felt the crowd hold its collective breath as he spoke. “Siora told you of what she’s witnessed so far? Of Kalun and what the ghost-eater did when it appeared in the woodland and later in the general’s camp? Of what it left behind in a rotting barn?” At the many nods and wide-eyed stares, he continued. “Zaredis is holding my daughter as a hostage to make certain I give him information I possess about the palace. Accurate information, current information.” He caught sight of Halani’s expression, a strange dichotomy of sympathy for his daughter and of knowing triumph that fate had meted out an ironic kind of repayment. Gharek could almost hear Halani’s thoughts.Now you know how it feels, cat’s-paw.
He did know, and it was an awful thing. But it wasn’t new to him. He’d lived with the consuming desperation and fear since Estred was a toddler. It threatened to overwhelm him every day, sometimes every hour. Toss in a generous helping of guilt, and it was a poisoned soup of despair and foolish decisions predicated by terror. He bowed briefly to Halani in acknowledgment of the hard hand that was poetic justice.
“Siora,” he said, “bargained with Zaredis as well. Help for the ghost of his twin brother. She’d try to find a way to protect him from the ghost-eater in exchange for my child’s continued safety.”
He told them of his plan to either hire Koopman or scour the royal library to find a spell book that could block the eater of souls, a book of wards if possible. Anything that might prevent the entityfrom attacking again and making off with more of the helpless dead, including Kalun and Siora’s father. He described the trap shadow and fleeing through the market for the gate with a scarlet-mouthed creature hard on their heels, of racing through that gate only to find themselves in Midrigar, leagues away from Domora. He mentioned nothing about the Windcry and prayed Siora hadn’t either. If she had and anyone questioned why he excluded it from his narrative, he had an explanation prepared, a twist of these words, an assumption inadvertently made that wasn’t inadvertent at all.
When he finished, silence descended among the group with only the background noise of livestock and the crackle of burning wood in the fire to emphasize it. The wagon master stared at Gharek for several moments before shifting attention to Malachus. “They match,” he said.
Malachus nodded. “Agreed, though I’m curious.” Gharek tensed when the draga turned to him. “Why do you think the Maesor was abandoned? And what do you think makes you or others more susceptible to this ghost-eater’s bewitchment when many aren’t affected at all? We had to hold you down to keep you from flying back into the city and certain death. We lost Asil’s brother to the city and would have lost Asil as well if it wasn’t for the dog.” All eyes shifted to Halani’s mother, who embraced the hound and kissed the top of its head.
Gharek had asked himself that question when the enchantment had seized him the first time. It made little sense that one living person was unable to resist it while another had no sense of the compulsion at all. Twice he’d been in the vicinity of Midrigar, netted like a fish each time by the sorcery waiting there. Siora, on the other hand, felt nothing the first time and only a hint the second.One explanation had bounced around in his mind when they’d discovered the Maesor empty, and he’d grown more sure of its validity even if there were some holes in the reasoning that still needed puzzling out.
“The eater of ghosts compelled us. Of that I’m certain. Why me and Asil’s brother and not someone else, I can only guess. I believe the Maesor is the key connecting us.” He had the free traders’ rapt attention now. “Somehow, the sorcery used to create the Maesor itself also created a corridor to the cursed city. I think it’s the gates that did it. The Maesor is a wedge forced between the reality of two or more worlds, and the gates are how people cross from one to the other. We assumed the Maesor opened only onto this world, but what if we’re wrong? What if there are gates we don’t know about? Tears even, from which something beyond our knowledge or understanding has slithered through and now hunts?”
Saying the words aloud made them more real, so much so that the hairs at his nape rose. Siora shivered beside him.
“I’ve had business dealings in the past with Maesor vendors who acquire their illegal goods from those they call koops, who make a living at scavenging the cursed city for artifacts. It’s dangerous work. The koops who make it out alive after such forays often say the city feels as if it only hovers in our world or floats like a boat without an anchor. There’s always a sense of being watched, of feeling the breath of something on their back yet finding nothing behind them when they turn to see.” He and Siora had run for their lives through Midrigar, so he hadn’t lingered long enough to sense anything other than the entity’s compulsion and his own terror.
Malachus added his opinion. “They’re right. When you glimpseMidrigar from the corner of your eye, it has a murk about it and a translucence to its edges, as if it were a rotting blanket and the weft is separating from the warp until it falls apart.”
“The earth is poisoned there,” Halani said. Others nodded in agreement.
“Maesor,” Gharek said, “is an ancient word meaningin betweenand it has that same sensation of floating. All who’ve traded there know it to be a creation fashioned from the twisting and manipulation of sorcery. There’s no life in the market beyond those who buy and sell within its confines. No trees or fields, no rain or breeze. No sun even or day and night. Only an orange and yellowish sky that never changes.”
Siora had sidled ever closer to him, and he reached behind her to grasp her tunic and nudge her against him. He spared her a glance. Her eyes were wide and dark with the memory of her first and hopefully last trip to the sorcery market.
“Things hunt there now,” he told the crowd. “Creatures that chased us through the Maesor and also in the cursed city. The two places are tied together, and I think the eater of ghosts reigns over both. The dead have no defense against it, nor do the living who’ve visited either or both places.” He gestured to Asil’s dog, who again responded with a silent snarl. “Except maybe the dog. I think its last master met his end.” He addressed Malachus directly. “I know that Asil and her brother visited the Maesor when he tried to sell your mother-bond. I think that’s why they fell under the entity’s enchantment. It’s the connection the thing uses to reel in its living victims if they get close enough to either place. I think that’s why you found them outside Midrigar.”
The free traders shuddered to a man. Gharek risked speakingto Asil directly, ignoring Halani’s glare. “Did you hear a voice speak to you inside your head, madam?”
Asil nodded, and the words she recited in that childish voice were bone-chilling. “ ‘Come, meat. I hunger.’ ”
Horrified murmurs of “Gods save us” and other similar remarks echoed through the group. Halani wrapped one arm around her mother’s shoulders and pulled her close. She stared across the circle at Malachus. Gharek could only guess at the wordless conversation between them, but he was sure it likely echoed Kursak’s sharp orders.
The wagon master clapped his hands twice. “No sleeping,” he barked. “We’re out of here as soon as we have the fire quenched, the pots packed, and the animals harnessed. Get moving!” He’d barely finished issuing the order before people scattered, hurrying in every direction to obey, eddying around Gharek, Siora, and Malachus like a fast-moving stream.