Too Many Answers

Beyond the rugs, Maeril found room to put her staff down without threatening a merchant’s livelihood.

She took it gratefully. The passage opened onto the edge of a market, where three lines of stalls competed for a strip of paving that could reasonably have held one. People moved between them in practiced currents. When someone stopped, the current divided; when Rishi stopped, a basket struck his elbow.

He moved closer to her.

“The Great Bazaar,” Grim said.

“You recognize it?” Maeril asked.

He pointed at a sign painted on the side of a stall. Under a warning against counterfeit change, an arrow directed deliveries toward the arch they had just left.

“I can read.”

“A promising start.”

A shallow pan hissed nearby. Maeril smelled onions catching at their edges, hot bread, and something smoky enough to make her stomach contract with interest. A woman folded a flat cake around the contents of the pan and passed it to a customer through the steam.

Grim followed Maeril’s gaze.

“No.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Don’t buy anything. Don’t eat anything.”

“It smells wonderful.”

“That is how they get you.”

“Grim, that is how food works.”

The vendor raised a hand toward them. Grim moved his armored shoulder between Maeril and the invitation. His attention had already gone to the customer’s payment, a little disk bitten at one edge, and the change returned with it.

Maeril let the smell go. There would be time to resent him properly once they knew which questions were safe to ask.

She settled against a stone pier between stalls and drew a short curve with two fingers across the back of her other hand. The familiar words needed no force. Her breathing steadied; the white stitchwork at her cuff answered.

Magic became visible.

The pier blazed.

She narrowed her eye, searching for anything that resembled the broken wand’s residue. A ward lay beneath the chipped stone, cleanly maintained. Another had been painted across its lower edge by a different hand. Beyond the pier, the vendor’s pan burned with contained heat while a charm at her throat bent attention toward the food. A trinket claimed to protect against fire and carried only the weak shimmer of borrowed color.

Maeril turned her head.

Three glowing outlines overlapped around a single doorframe. A child’s wooden hoop carried more real enchantment than an entire tray of loudly advertised relics. Each key on a passerby’s belt bent the outlines of the stalls behind it into a different shape.

She tried to pick out the wand’s familiar pattern among the overlapping auras.

Four doorways answered. Then six. Then a woman walked past with a bundle of carved handles under one arm, and Maeril lost the distinction between them.

“Maeril.”

Rishi’s voice reached her from close by. She looked at him and found the familiar restraint of his own power among the crowded lights. It gave her something steady to look at while she released the spell.

The market returned to smoke, cloth, and shouting.

“It worked,” she said.

Grim looked around. “Where?”

“Everywhere.”

She pressed the heel of her hand against her right brow. The afterimages lingered beneath it.

Rishi waited until she lowered her hand. “Too much?”

“I can sort a room. I can follow one working through ordinary streets. Here, even the lies are enchanted.”

Her eye went back to the stone pier. Whoever had laid the lower ward had understood how to keep a concealed store dry. She could have read its maker’s habits if she had an hour and a reason.

Elisa may be moving while I admire the joinery, she reminded herself.

Maeril reached for another approach. Height for the hawk; a quieter place; a narrower question put to the spell. The possibilities began to crowd each other as densely as the market’s auras.

“Chime first,” Rishi said.

She looked at him.

“Elisa may have hidden. Someone will have heard Chime.”

From another stall, a voice offered a polished skull to a customer. The skull remained still in a velvet-lined box. Rishi watched the lid close over it.

“And someone may have wanted to keep them.”

Maeril’s appetite disappeared.

Chime had crossed because Elisa should not have to do it alone. Whatever the city knew about mimirs, it would not necessarily know that this one was a companion with a will and a terrible sense of when to sing.

“A floating mimir with opinions,” she said. “Even here, that should leave witnesses.”

“Careful which ones,” Grim said.

He had been watching the people watching them. A stallholder looked away when he turned. Farther along, someone who had shown no interest in their arrival abruptly found a reason to straighten a row of keys.

“You ask every passing stranger about a missing priest and a valuable mimir, you’ll be buying them both back before evening. Assuming the people selling know where they are.”

Rishi’s hand shifted on his staff. “Then who?”

“A broker.”

Maeril looked at the stalls. “Information.”

“Arrivals. Sightings. People who don’t want to be found. Someone sells it.” Grim tugged his pack strap away from the edge of his sword. “Someone always sells it.”

“And you expect honesty?”

“I expect a price I can see before I agree to pay.”

She checked the current moving along the market’s edge and chose a gap. Rishi remained beside her, ready to go, but waited for Grim to indicate where he thought they should begin.

“A broker,” she agreed. “Before we advertise how badly we need one.”

Grim gave the stone pier and the space around them one final look.

“We may be late for that.”

He moved into the crowd. Maeril followed, keeping Rishi on the side her eye could see, while behind her the pan hissed again and the vendor called a new price.