Simon Green - For Heaven's Eyes Only

“You’re welcome to them,” I said. “I don’t want golden warts on my unmentionables.”

“Then I’ll see you around. Be good, my dears, and if you can’t be good don’t do it in front of witnesses!”

She crushed my hand again, slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to rattle my teeth, and barged between Molly and me. Still laughing, she disappeared into the crowd, which immediately fell back to give her plenty of room. Molly and I headed determinedly in the opposite direction.

“Nice friends you have,” said Molly.

“I thought she was a friend of yours,” I said.

“Are we looking for anything specific?” said Molly, linking her arm companionably through mine, though I could barely feel it through the thicknesses of two very heavy coat sleeves. “I mean, apart from the duplicated Drood armour, which we are not going to find, because it never actually appears, no matter what the rumours say.”

“To be honest,” I said, “I think this is the family’s way of getting me out of the Hall for a while. I did wonder at first whether Harry was up to something and wanted me out of the way. . . . But it’s more likely the council thinks I need some time off for rest and relaxation. A little holiday after my near-death experience. And God knows I could use some serious downtime, after all the shit that’s been raining down on me recently. As missions go, this is almost certainly a waste of time. So let us enjoy ourselves and take it easy for once.”

“All right,” said Molly. “I can do that. Hell of a place for a holiday, though.”

“That’s my family for you,” I said.

We strolled on for a while, taking it easy, taking in the sights. The air was still bitterly cold, except for when we walked through brief gusts of heat generated by the stalls’ heaters. Some booths actually had steam rising up from them. The walkways between the displays were covered with simple wooden boards, and there were no signs or directions. As centuries-old fairs went, this one didn’t impress me as being at all well organised. There was certainly no lack of interested customers gathering excitedly before the various stalls, money clearly burning a hole in their pockets. They chattered happily with each other, argued over provenances and delivery routes, and nearly always seemed to end up with the age-old refrain, Anything off for cash? Some people stared in awe at the more impressive offerings, too intimidated to even inquire after the price. I recognised a surprising number of faces from all sides of the tracks: good guys and bad and every shade of grey in between. Everyone needs weapons, no matter what side you’re fighting on.

“Buy me something,” said Molly, after a while.

“Other girls want chocolate or flowers,” I said. “Or shoes.”

“Oh, I want those, too,” said Molly. “But you can’t come to an arms fair and not buy anything. I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that.”

So we looked around to see what there was.

One stall was offering assorted alien technology: from things that fell off the back of an alien starship, or stranded Greys and Reptiloids, or things that fell through dimensional doorways when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. It was all dumped on the benches set out before us, in random heaps and piles. Large, blocky shapes of unfamiliar metal; warped crystal things with strange lights flickering deep inside; semiorganic bits and blobs trailing metallic filaments like tentacles. It could have been the secrets of the universe laid out before us, or the biggest bunch of junk and tat ever assembled in one place. The stall owner cheerfully admitted he had no idea what any of it did.

“It’s old stock, picked up from a fire sale in the Nightside. Got to be worth something, hasn’t it? It’s alien! Pick something, and we’ll fight over a price. You should be able to reverse-engineer something useful out of anything here. Hey, you! No touching!”

The big, hulking man standing next to me sneered haughtily at the stall owner and prodded a weird, wobbling thing with a disdainful fingertip. There was a sharp clap, like a very localised thunderstorm, and then he disappeared, leaving behind a space where he used to be. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum, while for a moment everyone’s hair stood on end. The stallholder blinked a few times, and then recovered wonderfully.

“See! See!” he said, addressing the surrounding crowd. “How useful is that ? Wouldn’t you like to make someone you know disappear?”

We left him haggling with a very interested crowd, while I wondered how he was going to sell the thing without handing it over, or how the buyer was going to carry it away. . . .

Another store boasted an exhaustive display of crystals, magic stones and balls in every shape and colour you could think of. Molly oohed and ahhed over them, but I couldn’t see anything to get excited about. Not one decent aura among the lot of them. According to the middle-aged woman behind the stall, dressed in what she no doubt fondly imaged was the very latest Gypsy chic, everything on the table had a fascinating history or legend attached to it. Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Mind you, she spotted me as an unbeliever straightaway, and concentrated her sales pitch on Molly.

“See this one, dearie? The shimmering sphere with the bloodred flaw? That is the original Scrying Stone that Dr. Dee used to learn the artificial language Enochian, created expressly so that men could talk directly with angels. If you could only reestablish contact with the same spirit that spoke with Dr. Dee, who knows what secrets you might learn?”

“I think the key word in that sentence was if ,” said Molly. “Do I look like a rube? You’d have a better chance of contacting the spirit world if you banged your head against the wall.”

“Well!” said the Gypsy lady, drawing herself up. “I never did. . . .”

“Oh, you must have,” said Molly sweetly.

I took her firmly by the arm and we moved on. Next up was a twee affair almost buried under displays of fresh flowers, offering a wide range of elven artefacts and weapons at really quite reasonable prices. I pointed a few things out to Molly, but she shook her head immediately.

“Never trust an elf, or anything they leave behind. You can bet most of it’s boody-trapped, ready to do something transformative and allegedly humorous to whatever poor fool picks it up without industrial-strength gloves on.”

“They’ve got a wand,” I said. “It looks very nice.”

“Traps are supposed to look inviting. Elf wands are just the sugar coating on the trap, because they’re one of the few elven weapons a human could actually use.”

“I know a private investigator in the Nightside who uses one,” I said. “Larry Oblivion.”

“Yes, but he’s dead!” said Molly. “There’s not a lot more the wand can do to him! Hey, how is it you know someone from the Nightside? I thought Droods weren’t allowed in the Nightside.”

“We have agreed not to enter,” I said. “There’s a difference. We could go in if we wanted to; we choose not to. Wouldn’t be seen dead in the place, myself. I know Larry because he and his brothers did some work for the family recently.”

“Rather you than me,” said Molly. “That Hadleigh Oblivion gives me the creeps.”

Microsoft had a really big presence at the fair; but then, Microsoft has a really big presence everywhere.

I paused before a simple open booth representing the Gun Shops of Usher franchise. It seemed odd that the family who’d bankrolled the Supernatural Arms Faire for so many centuries should have such a modest presence. The man standing behind the counter was Mr. Usher himself. I looked him over thoughtfully, and he nodded politely.