crowds spread out. It was market day in Bescan Square beneath the slowly spinning arches. Stalls made of wood and draped with silk and wool or sun-bleached furs. Corrals full of horses or pigs or sheep, stinking the place up, with another pen in a corner for hired bodyguards – men and women dressed in leather and dripping weapons who wished they were in the guild but instead took on petty jobs that no duellist would look twice at, protecting a sausage stall from thieves or some cargo for coppers.
Reyes took in trade from everywhere in the world, or so they said, and while the sailors never made it further into Reyes than the dockside bars, the traders and more wealthy merchants were less superstitious, or at least more likely to put that aside for a sale.
The market brought it home to Vocho that he really was home – the mishmash of faces, of colours and languages. Copper-haired bronze-skinned Nurre, whose women, tall and regal and looking like the world belonged to them, walked two paces ahead of their bowed silent men, and sold amethyst and opal and agate set in cunning twists of silver and gold. Doe-eyed little spice men and women from Five Islands, hands dyed red by their wares. Hulking great men and women from away inland, who seemed born bearing arms and mostly ended up in the bodyguard pen hiring themselves out by the hour. Tall and rangy men from the deserts away east, with old eyes, solemn smiles and golden rings, whose Castan ancestors had ruled Reyes and the rest of the provinces before the Great Fall. Men from far to the south, from the frozen valley kingdoms, selling furs and oils, little bone trinkets and curses written in pictures scratched onto wooden sticks. Their sailors wore their white-blond hair and reddish beards in braids and sang sad songs, but they only sent their shamans ashore to trade – half a head taller than most Reyes men with legs like tree trunks, shaved heads, bones through their noses and sweat-drenched fur across their shoulders even in the heat, holding poles with beads and dried skulls on they’d rattle at anyone who got close. A very young Vocho had once believed the laughing Nurre woman who’d told him they were ghosts, that’s why they were so pale and strange, and he’d believed it right up until Kacha dared him to touch one and find out for sure. He’d been chased halfway back to the docks by a roaring giant of a man with red whorls painted on his face, and had steered clear of them since.
There were plenty of Reyes traders there too, haggling and hawking, selling little clockwork trinkets or purple flags, pots and pans or spicy sausages whose aroma filled the square. Men and women of the villages around Reyes, mostly swarthy like Vocho himself, with one or two from the south with paler but still golden skin and hair that bleached in the sun, selling fish, squid and whatever else had turned up in their nets. Soothsayers and fortune-tellers, doctors and dentists with their downcast queues who looked on the instruments with a quiet dread. Wood turners with lathes they operated with their feet, carving exquisite bowls and furniture. Bards and storytellers in every aisle, and so many tales of the guild sung or told Vocho often wondered if Eneko paid them. They hurried past those men and women with their heads down.
At the other end of the square, when Kacha took a left towards the more solid, permanent artisans’ shops full of clockwork and swords, Vocho knew where she had in mind to take them and nodded in satisfaction. It might give Dom a bit of a fright, and Cospel would have a fit, but the Hammer and Tongs was just the place for people who didn’t want to be seen and had business they didn’t want anyone to know about. The inn was the centre of Soot Town, inland from the docks and just as seedy but without the benefits of a breeze. What wind Soot Town did get was stained by the reek of the coal fires of blacksmiths and armourers, and lately gunsmiths.
The coal fires were what gave the area its name. Everything was covered in soot. Houses, streets, clothes, horses, people. Smoke curled along the alleys like a browser at a market, looking for things it hadn’t tainted yet. Dom held his handkerchief over his nose, and bleated