“We don’t know what time will do back home, any more than we know what it does here.”
“All right, but?—”
“Years could pass, El. We can’t waste a minute of daylight, and if it wasn’t a guaranteed bloodbath, we’d be on the road at night too.”
“This is no temporary problem. Those markets move, you know. Did anyone tell you that?”
“Move?” He shook his head. “How?”
“How do they send someone soaring across the Infinitum with magic?” she asked rhetorically.
“The market was a permanent place. It was way too settled not to be,” he replied, though even as he said the words, he recalled the way the Conductor’s wall had become a curtain, how the back room had appeared from nowhere. The wheel. The river. “How do you know this?”
“I don’t,” she admitted. “But it stands to reason that if you can simply ‘think’ it into existence, then it doesn’t adhere to science as we understand it, which is true of most everything else here too. So it either moves or is invisible until it no longer wants to be, but either way, it must know your intentions, which reasons that it knows you’re planning a theft of services bartered in... well, perhaps not good faith, but you did agree to the terms. What are the chances of them helping you now?”
If she was right, he’d underestimated the difficulty of the matter. “If I can’t retrieve it quickly, I’ll send you home, then return myself.”
“Uh, uh. No, this goes both ways.” Elloven crossed her arms, wearing the stern look of a cross mother. “Wherever we go, we go together.”
“El—”
“I won’t hear another word.”
Jesstin sputtered a laugh. “You call me stubborn, but have you met yourself?”
“Do you expect me to apologize?”
“Wouldn’t dare,” he said lightly. “If you’re so determined?—”
“Jesstin.” Elloven’s expression froze in shock. She shook her head in tight, anxious passes. “Look.”
“At what?” he asked but was already following her gaze. A sign had appeared where none had been before. There was only one directional indicator. “Forum Obscura.” He sucked his teeth. “I suppose that’s for us.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“I’m only sure we won’t find the spiral without help, and even if we eventually got lucky, we’d risk returning to a world we don’t recognize.”
“What kind of vendor are we looking for?”
Not one in fucking pinstripes. “One who deals in maps.”
“If they have a map to this spiral, wouldn’t others have already read it?”
“To what purpose? We only need the spiral to find the doors, doors only people like me can see or use.” Saying it out loud made it sound even stupider, but Ryquin had practically built a religion around its veracity. “If this market is anything like the one I went to, they’ll seek us out and take us where we need to go. But time is even weirder in there, so there’s a chance we’ll get stuck there through the night.”
Elloven laced her hand through his. “Then what are we waiting for?”
“Never mind the darkness,” Elloven whispered as they entered the narrow, obsidian road devoid of others. She hadn’t even noticed the darkness until the sign. “You’ll find no light in the Obscura.” She frowned.
“The next one will tell us how time is useless, blah blah blah,” Jesstin explained. His grip on her hand tightened as the road stretched on.
Just as he’d said, the following sign read, Time pleads no case here. The dials will show you the time beyond the Obscura. Right after was one advertising an inn, should the patron miss a chance to leave safely. For a modest fee, of course. “Strange no one else is here,” she said.
“It was like that before. There were clients inside the market though.”
The road turned, then fanned into a fairway. New pathways formed, decked in dangling lights, each packed with colorful stalls. The stark silence disintegrated into a lively hubbub of commerce.
Two strangely dressed women, one quite tall, the other remarkably short, approached. They eyed Elloven but addressed Jesstin. “Ah, our man of mirrors has returned!”
