The Night Market (8 page)

“Decent people don’t talk that way.”

Jenny laughed bitterly.

“Oh. Well, we’re fine, then. Because I am not at all
decent.”

Yael peeled her mask off, so fast that the plastic stuck
to her cheeks and stung as she pulled it away.

“I don’t care. I won’t listen to that sort of
language. And my name is Yael. You need to work through all of this.” Yael marched
defiantly to Jenny, pushing her damp bangs from her forehead. Fenrir followed
uncertainly. “Our trip will be even longer if we argue for the whole of it.”

Jenny Frost’s jaw dropped, then stayed that way, staring
at Yael as if she had never seen anything vaguely like her before.

“Are we having the same conversation? Because I could swear
you just told me what to do again. Since when are we traveling together?”

Turning her back to Jenny’s open annoyance, Yael
forced her hands to be steady as she set her duffel bag on the ground and then
opened it.

“You are going to the Nameless City, yes? Well, so am I.
To the Night Market.”

Yael continued digging through her bag while Jenny
stared in bemusement, bending to look at Yael from various angles. She ignored Jenny’s
odd behavior.

“You said that already. Why should I care?”

“Because you are going to the city beyond dreams, the
city beside the ocean where the worst monsters sleep,” Yael said, steeling
herself when her fingers closed around the narrow wooden box that her brother
had left in her charge, in those last frantic days, before he disappeared. “And
you can’t get to the Nameless City without one of these.”

The wooden box was enameled with panels of exotic
rosewood and an ebony inlay depicting the sign by which dreams are remembered
and hearts exposed to the corruption of the King in Yellow. It opened with a
stroke of her hand, pivoting on a hidden mechanism. Like much of what Yael
carried with her, it had belonged to her brother.

Yael could still remember the morning he had announced
its discovery. He charged through the kitchen barefoot and half-dressed,
scandalizing their stepmother and assorted servants. But he didn’t care. He went
straight to Yael to show her his treasure, the product of a lifetime laboring
over dreams. She straightened his knitted skull-cap and held him tightly while he
babbled, cooing over the gleaming silver as if it were a child.

Yael wished she could remember his name, but the
Visitors had taken it.

“Holy fu-”

“Please don’t swear.”

Jenny managed to tear her greedy eyes from the key to
Yael’s face.

“What the fu-”

“I am serious,” Yael said, snapping the box closed,
hiding the tarnished silver key, carved as intricately as scrimshaw, from the
corrosive air of the Waste. “I don’t care for that sort of language.”

“Give me a f... okay, okay. Are you insane? Why do I
need some key?”

“Because you can’t travel to the Nameless City without
one,” Yael said, reciting from memory one of the rambling annotations scribbled
in the books her brother had left behind. “A Silver Key can only be found in a
dream. And that isn’t possible for you, is it, Miss Frost?”

Yael’s confidence seemed to unnerve Jenny. She licked
her lips and shook her head uncertainly.

“I can’t... I don’t sleep. How in the... how do you
know this stuff?” Jenny rubbed her temples as if she felt a headache coming on.
“Have we met before?”

“No. My brother, however, was a very experienced
dreamer, and I was his student,” Yael explained modestly, carefully repacking
her bag. “My dreams warned me of our meeting in a general way, though they
didn’t mention what a foul mouth you would have.”

“Isn’t that fascinating,” Jenny said, rocking urgently
from the balls of her feet to her heels. “There are all sorts of things I want
to know...”

“I only know three things that are meant for you,”
Yael said mildly, zipping up her bag and pulling her mask back over her head.
“The first; you need a Silver Key to find what you are looking for, Miss Frost.
The second; you can’t take mine, because that key is my brother’s dream, and my
brother is gone and no one remembers him besides me. Without me, there is no
key.”

Jenny’s face twitched, her eyes narrowed to slits.

“What’s the third?”

“When I was a child, my brother did something while I
slept.”

Jenny smirked.

“I know how that goes.”

“Don’t be vile,” Yael snapped. “He never touched me. He
did something to my
dreams
. They started to show me things – messages,
warnings... and a map that I have seen every time I closed my eyes since I was eight.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. You dream
about maps?”

“A dream of a map of a country that never was,” Yael
said, suddenly feeling very tired. “You want to cross the Waste, Miss Frost? I
know the way. You want to go to the Nameless City? I can take you there.”

Jenny crossed her arms and lowered her head in
thought, brow furrowed. Yael couldn’t help but notice Jenny’s ears almost came
to points that poked out of her straw-blonde hair; the spray of multi-colored
stars tattooed along her collarbone peaking from under her tattered red
sweatshirt; her right hand, scratched and battered, fingernails painted black
and then nibbled away to ragged nubs. She wasn’t from the Waste, Yael decided.
Jenny Frost came from somewhere much worse.

The sun crept across a furious sky hardly visible
through writhing clouds, and the Waste blossomed around them. Everything was
coated with a uniform layer of pulverized stone, glass, and paint that created glimmerings
of reflective color amongst concrete and dead grass. Jenny studied the cracked
earth between her dusty sneakers and Yael watched her, wondering if she had done
everything right, exactly the way she had been taught to do. She had no anxiety
that her brother was wrong, because he had been right about everything. He had
even kissed Yael goodbye the night he disappeared, the first time he had done
something like that since she was a child.

Yael wished she could remember his name.

“Alright, Princess. I give up,” Jenny said, grinning
and shaking her head ruefully. Up close, Yael could see that Jenny’s teeth were
unusually sharp and pointed, and she wondered what lurked in the murky depths
of her gene pool. “You guide and I make sure you get there in one piece. Deal?”

Jenny offered her hand. Fenrir whined in disappointment.
Yael folded her arms across her chest defiantly.

“No more swearing. That’s part of the deal.”

“You have to be kidding... oh, whatever. I’ve been
wandering around in circles for days. If pretending we're in elementary school
will get me out of here then I guess I can try.”

They shook. Yael half-expected Jenny to crush her
hand, but her grip was barely there and then gone again, hardly a handshake at
all.

“And you can’t call me that anymore.”

“What?”

“
That
. You know.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. Call you
what?”

“My name is Yael. Call me that.”

“Instead of...”

“You know.”

Jenny laughed and returned to her manic cresting of
the ridge.

“Whatever you say, Princess.”

Yael had to run after her to keep up.

“That! You can’t call me that!”

***

“I think it’s safe for you to take off that mask.”

“Are you kidding? We are aboveground and outside. Not
a chance.”

Jenny looked at her oddly.

“Where are you from, anyway?”

“Nowhere you have ever heard of,” Yael said evasively.

“I am so damn tired of people saying that...”

“Hey! No swearing!”

“What?” Jenny blinked, staring at her blankly. “I
didn’t swear. What are you – oh? You mean damn counts as a swear word? I
thought you just mean the real ones, like cu-”

“All of them.”

“What about ‘bitch’? They say that on TV...”

“That especially.”

“Okay, what about...”

“Did you find the stash yet?”

“Yeah,” Jenny said, pushing a small trunk out from the
small space beneath an exposed foundation jutting out from a hillside like the
petrified bones of a very angular beast. “Give me a hand?”

It took both women and several minutes of pulling and
tugging before they managed to lift the trunk from the confines of the hole and
onto the road. Yael had the disquieting notion that Fenrir was staring
indecently at her.

“These guys have been out here a long time, stealing
sh-”

“Miss Frost!”

“...stuff. Stealing stuff. Let’s hope they took
something,” Jenny said, kicking at the lock, “that we can use.”

Yael watched Jenny batter the chest with her feet and
hands for a while, then sighed and pushed her aside. Yael took a velvet-wrapped
pick set from the pouch at her waist and knelt in front of the chest. The tools
did not belong to her brother – actually, he would have disapproved of the
entire affair, especially how Yael had come upon them and arranged for instruction
in their use.

When Yael was eleven she caught her cousin Ravi
rifling through her stepmother’s underwear drawer, despite a number of locks
designed to prevent such things. She chastised him, assessed the situation with
her usual practicality, then blackmailed him for lessons in the art of opening
closed doors. It wasn’t hard once she got the fundamentals down, learned to
feel the tension and release through her fingers and ignore her eyes entirely. Yael
was hardly a master thief, but she could manage basic locks, given time and the
opportunity to concentrate.

It took about two minutes to get the trunk open. Yael
probably could have done it faster without Jenny leaning over her shoulder, avidly
curious, but she was flattered by the attention, so she didn’t try and shoo her
away. Jenny shouted triumphantly when the lock clicked open, then kicked open
the lid to the chest, hardly giving Yael time to get her hands out of the way.

“Holy sh-”

“Language!”

Jenny grimaced.

“Argh! Fine. Those bastards really had a sweet tooth,
huh?”

“That is a swear as well.”

“What? Which part?”

“Never mind.”

A single look confirmed Jenny’s observation. The chest
was with candy bars, gum, cellophane packages of cookies, and brightly-wrapped
hard candy. Jenny glanced at Yael, shrugged indifferently, and kicked the chest
over, sending candy bars and liquorice sticks sliding down the hillside.

“I guess nobody ever said you had to be practical to steal
for a living.”

Yael and Jenny dug through the pile. Not all of the
contents were entirely composed of sugar, but it was pretty close. They found a
collection of dull knives and battered tools, a handful of poor quality jewelry,
and a half-dozen mismatched shoes – a stark reminder of the unfortunate
travelers ambushed in the lonely wilderness of the Waste. There was a first aid
kit in a metal tin, a bunch of small flares, and a motley selection of things
that sparkled and gleamed underneath the grey sky. Of the three bottles they
found in the chest, one was empty, one held only a mouthful, and the other was
still sealed.

Jenny pitched the empty bottle down the hill, followed
by the almost empty one.

“Germs,” she said, shaking her head.

Yael paused in her search to stare at Jenny in
confusion.

“I thought you didn’t worry about stuff like that,
Miss Frost?”

Jenny made a face and then turned and spat into the
sand.

“Did you see those guys? Whatever they had, I don’t
want it.”

Yael completed the eerie task of digging through what
was likely the clothing of murdered people, trying to ignore the unpleasant
thoughts that the rust-colored stains and the deliberate tears brought to mind.
Jenny unscrewed the long green bottle, sniffed the contents with obvious
suspicion, then shrugged and took a drink. For a moment, she looked as if she
had something important to say, something she wasn’t quite done formulating,
then she began a coughing fit that left her bent double.