RUELLE
The auction hall smells like wool and sweat and the metallic bite of whatever they use to clean the floors between sales. The tile is still damp underfoot.
Livestock in the morning, women in the evening.
Somebody decided that was fine.
I’m not in the holding pen. I paid the auctioneer’s entry fee two hours ago, told his assistant I needed the privy, and didn’t come back.
Nobody noticed. Nobody tracks the last lot of the night.
I’ve been in the crowd since then. Three of tonight’s buyers are creatures I could name on sight. Two are things I’ve never seen before, my brain already turning them over: the color shift along one’s mandible, the question of whether that outer layer is skin or something I’d need a sample to understand.
The rest are humans with more gold than sense, bidding on women the way they’d bid on horses, checking teeth and hips and whatever else they think predicts value.
One of them squeezes a woman’s arm to test the muscle tone. She doesn’t flinch.
I would have bitten him, but I have a professional reputation to consider.
Had. I had a professional reputation.
Now I have the kind that doesn’t open gates, a pack with four small boxes of vials, a notebook, nineteen sealed samples I couldn’t bring myself to abandon, an assay stone, and the clothes I’m standing in.
The bride market isn’t the worst thing that’s happened to me this year.
It’s not even close.
Lot twelve goes, then lot thirteen. The crowd thins as buyers leave with their purchases and the torches burn lower. The auctioneer is tired, and his assistant has started stacking bid paddles.
And then I see him.
He’s against the far column, alone, and I realize he’s been there all night. I didn’t notice him because he wasn’t bidding and I was watching the bidders. Now the crowd has thinned enough that his outline is clear, and I go still.
An Ophidian.
I’ve studied shed specimens and preserved tissue, one set of extracted fangs mounted in a display case at the guild hall, a few pages of notes that read like guesswork.
I have never seen a living one.
He’s tall, broad across the shoulders, narrowing into something the crowd hides. Pale scales, pearl-white, overlap his arms and collarbone, thick at the shoulders and thinning at the neck, the kind of natural defense that makes steel redundant.
It makes me want to know whether each scale moves independently or locks against its neighbors when he flexes.
His gold eyes catch the torchlight. The skull above them is angular and elongated, the back of the head swept into a crest of bony ridges. The snout is pronounced, the jaw heavier than a human’s.
He’s wearing a leather vest over the scales, functional, no ornamentation. Most apex predators I’ve met decorate themselves; this one hasn’t.
His fangs are long enough to show past his lips, the tips resting against his lower jaw. Everyone else in this room would see the fangs first.
I see the dull patches.
Ash where there should be pearl, three that I can count from here, the torchlight catching them wrong. Up close there’ll be more. I know what that looks like even in bad light, the surface reading flat where it should refract.
It’s deterioration. I’ve seen it in samples and once in a live subject years ago, a desert viper brought to the guild hall in a cage, already too far gone.
I’ve been looking at him for thirty seconds, and I already want to get closer.
Then I see the tremor in his hands. Both of them, the right worse than the left. He’s pressing them flat against his thighs because he can’t control what they’re doing and doesn’t want anyone to notice.
