Lyndon Hardy - Secret Of The Sixth Magic

Jemidon looked at Delia rubbing her arm, her lips still set firm. "You have no cause," he said. "It is not her fault that your tent is not abuzz with gawkers like the others. Raise up a flap or two. Add some light and sound."

"My partner, Melizar, wants buyers, not ones who only look and then go their way," Drandor said. "And do not waste any thoughts on the girl. She is not a bondsman with rights and privileges, but fully indentured, no different from a lute, a painted vase, or any other item I have to sell. I can do with her what I will."

Drandor followed Jemidon's eyes back to Delia and grunted. "Unless, of course, the gentleman is sufficiently smitten to bargain for her as well. Although I warn you, the price will be dear. She cost no less than fifteen tokens in the exchanges at Pluton. And it would take much more to compensate for my lost pleasures, if she were to go."

Delia reached out her hand and placed it on Jemidon's, which was resting on the counter, her eyes opening wide in sudden expectancy. He looked into their deepness and sucked in his breath. If he had a purse of gold, impulsively, he knew how he would spend it. Only with a determined effort was he able to will his faltering attention back to Drandor.

"You mentioned items from faraway lands," he said quickly. "Perhaps there will be something more to my liking."

Drandor grunted and pulled aside the curtain. Jemidon rounded the counter and stepped into the rear portion of the tent. Bolts of cloth, stacked precariously, towered on one side of the entrance. Cases of spices, their aromas competing for attention, framed the other. Huge bottles filled with dense green swamp gas lined the far wall in front of another tentflap that must lead to a final compartment beyond. A small furnace with coals still smoldering stood beneath a large wooden frame, from which hung a collection of shackles, spikes, and chains. Pokers and tongs, their tips thrust into the cooling sand, still glowed a dull cherry red. Scattered about were sketches of terrified women straining against their bonds to avoid the touch of searing iron. One was draped carelessly over the body of a small rodent, its limbs bound to a small wooden frame by tightly turned loops of thin wire and its crushed skull lying in a pool of blood. Near the center of the tent, stringed instruments and long, hollow reeds lay in a jumble on top of a pile of small drums, their heads pulled tight by tiny weights spaced around their rims.

From a cage in a far corner, cloaked in shadow, Jemidon heard a canine growl, followed by another deeper than the first. Instinctively, he froze and held his breath. He had encountered large mastiffs before, but somehow these guttural rolls touched a primitive nerve. It had been a warning, and he knew he would not be given another.

"Not now, my pretties," Drandor said. "This is for business."

A single paw thudded against the framework in defiant protest, and then there was silence. Jemidon slowly let out his breath. He peered into the pen, trying to see what could shake a crate so large and stoutly built; but except for four burning eyes, there was only blackness. He smoothed the short hairs on the back of his neck and glanced over the other stacks and containers.

"And what is that?" he asked with forced casualness, pointing at a lattice of wires and beads that stood waist-high to his left. "Another puzzle that I have not seen before?"

Part of the structure resembled a model scaffolding, with struts at right angles methodically outlining an array of touching cubes. But other lines of differing colors radiated from the vertices at odd angles, creating amorphous bulges and isolated tendrils that snaked into the air. Some of the nodes where many lines came together were encased in intricately carved and brightly colored beads. Even from a distance, Jemidon saw that with the proper twist a bead could be decoupled and slid along one of the wires to the next vertex down the line.

He reached to touch the curious structure, but a high-pitched voice cut him short. "Property of my master, property of Melizer," it said. "I am a guardian, and you must not touch."

Jemidon looked upward and saw that the light from one of the lamps was not produced by a flame, but by the incandescence of a tiny imp, flittering brightly in a glass prison. Its large head was in grotesque proportion to the delicate limbs and gossamer wings. One eye seemed swollen shut from a wart that covered most of one jowl and sprouted three coarse black hairs as thick as nails.

"An imp in a bottle," Jemidon wondered aloud. "Why, after the archmage battled the demon prince years ago, I thought all wizards abandoned such indiscretions. You deal in marvels indeed."

"Like the lattice, there are a few items not for sale," Drandor said quickly. He glanced at the flap leading to the third compartment and then spoke as if he were on a stage, enunciating each word so that everyone listening could hear. "The imp and the drums are the private property of my partner. He merely stores them here while-while he rests. The pets are a gift from him to me."

Drandor paused, watching the tentflap, apparently awaiting a reaction. The canvas rippled slightly and a wave of cold air sluggishly rolled underneath the gap above the floor rugs, but nothing else happened. Drandor let out his breath and turned his attention back to Jemidon.

"But no matter. What else, what else?" he suggested. "State your pleasure. I can satisfy a prince with what I have in stock today."

Jemidon watched the flap a moment more as the cold coiled about his ankles. But the canvas hung straight. Except for the gentle breathing of the mastiffs, he heard nothing. With a shrug, he turned back to what had originally attracted his interest.

"I have only copper," he said absently as he studied first the imp and then the lattice underneath. "The gold around my neck I will not part with for any of this."

"Oniy copper!" Drandor exclaimed. "Copper and no gold! I am to show these choice wares only to those willing to pay, and in a discreet manner besides. Melizar wills it so. Take your imposturing to another tent, where they are more gullible and less prudent with their precious time."

Drandor grabbed Jemidon by the arm, but he shrugged the trader off. "A moment, just a moment more. There is some pattern about the way the struts leave the central cube at an angle. See, with a few more cross bracings, they would form another symmetry there."

"Begone, I say." Drandor reached for Jemidon a second time but then stopped as a blast of trumpets suddenly pierced the air.

A muted cry soaked through the heavy canvas of the tent. "The high prince. The high prince. He disembarks in an hour for the first night of illusions at the hall. Bondsmen of the prince and his retinue, attend unto your lords."

Farnel and his sorceries popped back into Jemidon's mind, and he knew that time enough had been spent at the bazaar. Despite his reluctance, he must immediately return. There would be little time left now in which to prepare. He looked at Drandor's scowl and again at the cage in the corner. With an irritated wave, he indicated that he was going.

"I will return, Drandor," he called as he passed through the front tent. "There is much here that interests me." He cast one glance back at Delia, standing like a statue behind the counter. "Yes, much more that I would like to understand exceedingly well."

Farnel's reaction upon Jemidon's return was an energetic one. "Tonight," the master said. "We must present what we have tonight. My peers will determine the final list at the end of the audition session that is taking place now. They will make the selection and be done with it, so that the winners have time to prepare."

"But as you have said, we are not quite ready," Jemidon replied. "Only the barest of sketches with no substance behind any of them."