The Seven Markets (18 page)

“Just pissed off, then? Okay, I can get behind that. So we’ll nab your old man and you can have your fun. Still, you should have leveled with us.”

“I thought I had.”

“No. You spun us a yarn you knew we wouldn’t buy and dangled enough cash in front of our noses you knew we couldn’t resist. That’s not quite lying, but it’s not leveling either. Like this ‘don’t tell anyone your name’ garbage. What’s that all about?”

“When you give someone your name—your real name, your full name—it gives them power over you. It relinquishes any power you might have and renders you helpless before them. In some cases they can hurt you, or worse, just by having your name.”

“Bullshit.”

“I only wish, Major Presley.”

Docherty raised his hand. The sight of him acting like a kid at school almost made Hart laugh out loud. “What about hurting people? Why can’t we, you know, just shoot the place up when he shows, knock him on the head and go on our merry way?”

“Look around you,” she said. “Do you think these people care one whit about you or me? Most of them aren’t even people, at least not the way you’d reckon. They’re just visitors looking to get home to their loved ones. Visitors gone too long, as I believe I’ve mentioned. I can’t have you shooting them up, can I?”

“So the lady does have a conscience,” Presley said.

“It lingers.”

Hart mimicked McBride and raised his hand. He caught the old bat noting the look of amusement on his face as she pointed at him.

“Okay. We can’t eat or drink—fine—and we can’t tell people our names—also fine. But politely asking your husband to please step into the SUV isn’t going to go too far without the juice to back it up.”

“They’ve seen guns here before, Captain Hart. They know what they do. Wave yours around, shout and make a fuss, maybe shoot up into the air once or twice, and they should be properly mollified.”

“If not?”

“If not, then do what you have to do. But I need my husband and I’m not leaving without him.”

Presley sent Hart with the old bat to book a room in the inn. They had no intention of staying the night, but it was important to scout the rest of the building, and checking in offered the simplest way to do so without arousing suspicion.

“Ask for something on the top floor,” the major said.

McBride added, “Something with a view and not too near the ice machines.”

Hart ignored him. He and the old bat wound their way through a crowd that was becoming increasingly less human. “They’re shedding their glamours,” she said, without explanation.

They had to wait for the innkeeper, but when he arrived he happily assigned them to one of the fifth-floor rooms.

“See?” Hart said.

She didn’t respond, but he caught the innkeeper’s curiosity.

“See what?”

“Oh, my wife here, she heard there was a sixth floor. Said something about renovations and how you’d added a floor to accommodate more guests during the, you know, the high season.”

The innkeeper burbled laughter. If he’d noticed or cared about the gap in their ages, he didn’t say a word, discretion being a valuable trait in a host. “No, no sixth floor here, I’m afraid. Where did you hear this rumor?”

“A friend who stayed here some time ago. She said she stayed on the sixth floor.” She mustered her strength before speaking again. “On the sixth floor with the Prince.”

He bellowed laughter now. “The Prince! I’m never sure
where
his rooms will show up. Once I think he was in the cellar. Something about his lady friend being averse to sunlight, I believe. But the penthouse does seem much more his fashion, doesn’t it? Sweeping views of the whole Market, suns out every window.” When he realized he’d confused his new guest, he stopped short and backed up. “He brings his own rooms, the Prince does. Likes his comfort, doesn’t he? But our rooms here, nice as they are, surely aren’t up to his standards. No, he’s kind enough to bring his rooms and we count ourselves lucky to have him.”

“And where,” the old bat said, speaking with such deliberate slowness Hart couldn’t believe the innkeeper could fail to notice. “Where are his rooms now?”

Hart pushed in front of her. “I’m so sorry, I must apologize. My wife, it’s all she could talk about all day after hearing he was here. You know how it is with royalty, don’t you?”

“Of course, of course. But I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t know. Only his staff can reach his suites. For the rest of us, well, we could be standing in his doorway and not know it.”

“Even to deliver food? Surely a man as powerful as the Prince doesn’t dine down here with the commoners?”

“He does, sir, as a matter of fact. Great man, the Prince, great man.” The innkeeper was visibly puffed up with pride. “But there is a door in our kitchen right to his dining room. Likes a private breakfast, the Prince does.”

“Who doesn’t?” Hart said. He signed a false name to the register as the old bat had instructed and led her, arm in arm, up the stairs to their room on the fifth floor.

Hart waited until they were exploring the second floor before he started talking. “So tell me what’s really going on,” he said.

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“Sure you do. You played us for fools and hey, I get it. Five years on stand-by for an op like something out of
Hansel and Gretel
. Who wouldn’t take that money?”

“But now it’s real and you want out?”

Hart’s grin was bigger than his entire face. “Out? Hell no. I just like to know what dog made the mess I’m getting ready to step in.”

She nodded as if to say,
fair enough.

“I’ve already told you everything I know, and guessed at a fair amount on top of that. I
did
think his rooms were on the sixth floor. The times I’ve stayed here with him, at least, that’s where they were.”

“Come on.”

“Pardon me?”

“I mean, come on. Don’t feed me that line. You think I didn’t read your reams of backstory on this place? Pops up every hundred years or so. Different place each time. Come in for a visit and do a spot of shopping. But look at you. Listen, my granny’s older than you and she wasn’t walking and talking a century ago.”

“To be fair, it was more like ninety years ago, but the Market didn’t come that time.”

“No?” He caught her trying to change the subject and veered back on course. “Even so, if you were here two hundred years back or whatever, you’re looking pretty spry. How do you explain that?”

“It’s complicated. But if we get our hands on my husband maybe I’ll be able to explain. Anyway, that wasn’t my first visit.”

His eyebrows raised in disbelief.

“This would be, if the Market had come in 1920, my fourth Market.”

“Sure it would.”

“You don’t have to believe me, but given the things you’ve seen, why wouldn’t you?”

“What things?”

She pointed up while knocking on a bare spot of wall. They were finished on the second floor and ready to proceed up to the third. “We should have gone to five and worked our way down.”

“We can skip up if you like.”

“Perhaps.”

“You’re changing the subject,” Hart said. “If you’re the four-hundred-year-old woman, how come all you’re sporting is some gray hair and crow’s feet?”

“Clean living?”

“Ha ha. If I’d known you had a sense of humor we could have started swapping dirty knock-knock jokes five years back. Really?”

“Really?”

“I’m asking, aren’t I?”

They were on the steps. She stopped to catch her breath—the way she hunched over, wheezing, he could almost believe she’d been walking and talking for four centuries.

“Here,” she said, pulling at the chain around her neck. It caught on something, and he was forced to watch for more than half a minute as she struggled to extricate it.

“What’s that?”

“My wedding gift. It’s safe to touch. Now, at least.”

“It’s cracked.”

“Yes. That happened in New York, incidentally. But that wasn’t what kept the Market away.”

“What did?”

“My husband. He was away on his honeymoon.”

“Ouch. I take it you weren’t invited?”

“Hardly. I went there hoping to be reunited with him. We’d become . . . separated after my second Market. He sent me on an errand, and while I was away the Market moved on.”

Hart shook his head. “You know how that sounds, right?”

“Of course. But I also know how it sounds when you and your friends carry on about real-time satellite connections and laser-sighted rifles. Imagine what that sounds like to someone who was born in the early eighteenth century.”

“Sure. Of course. Naturally.”

“It’s fine either way, Captain Hart. But you asked and I’m trying to tell you.” She fingered the fractured gem, stroking it like she might a cat. “Before this broke, it would pulse with power. It beat in time with my own heart. And it kept me young and vital, saving me up for him.”

“Saving you up?”

“Literally. More than keeping me young, it kept me
his
. His in mind, body, and soul. No man could touch me unless he wanted to burn. But that didn’t matter because so long as I wore this I didn’t want anyone else’s touch but his.”

“Take it off, then.”

She smiled. “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

“None of this can be real, you know that? I mean, I’ve been out in the world, lady. I’ve seen things. I’ve done things. It’s a rough life, but there are no magic gems that let you live four hundred years without aging.”

She dangled her wedding present from its chain so he could get a good long look at it. Her eyes went cloudy and for a second he believed her, believed all of it. More, he saw what she’d lost, why she was after her louse of a prince.
You were in love once. He took that from you, didn’t he?

The gem sparked white along its fissure. A shower of tiny, blazing stars showered forth, singeing the stairs and the walls. Hart pulled his hand back before he was burned. He nearly lost his balance and tumbled down the steps.

“Whoa!”

She caught his hand and kept him from falling.

“Got you,” she said, holding on until he steadied himself.

“Lady, how’d you do that? I should have dragged you down with me.”

She shook her head and resumed climbing. Hart seriously considered hiking down the steps, out of the inn, and back to the real world as fast as his feet could carry him, but in the end, he followed. She was going at a good clip now, but he caught up to her at the landing between the fifth and sixth floors.

“Son of a—”

“You see them too, then? I wonder if that’s because you’re with me or if it’s something else. Curious, isn’t it?”

Where the stairs should have ended at the fifth-floor hallway, they instead wound around and continued up to the floor above. They were a perfect match. The banister as well. Even the framed pictures on the wall went with those they’d climbed past during their ascent.

“Who is this guy?” Hart said, his voice filled with terrified wonder.

“My husband. Come on.”

He followed her up the stairs to the sixth floor, the floor that wasn’t there. Instead of an open hallway, however, the stairs ended in a wooden door that rang like steel when he knocked on it.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“Why not? Nobody’s home, right?”

“It’s been a long time. People change, of course, but not him. Not my husband. Oh, he’ll put on airs of change as it suits him, but the capacity for true change, even on so small a scale . . . it just isn’t in him.”

“Let’s see.”

The door was undecorated apart from a single doorknob set slightly higher than normal to accommodate her prince’s height. No keyhole, no lock, none of the more modern appliances one might find out in the real world.

As he watched, she eased her hand around the doorknob, moving with the kind of caution people use around hungry bears. Hart remembered a bodyguard from one of her briefings—Butter or Hutter. Would her prince’s protector have insisted on guarding the suite, or would he have counted on people’s ignorance of its existence to safeguard it?

She turned the doorknob and pushed the door open.

“Ladies first,” Hart said.

“Chicken.”

He grinned and stepped past her, drawing his sidearm. He walked in a half crouch, taking small steps with bent legs, the gun’s barrel pointed at the floor.

“Clear in here,” he said, calling back. She was still standing in the stairwell. He heard footsteps, soft as a kitten’s, and she joined him in the entryway.

“Which way?” Hart said.

“What are we looking for?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t think we’d get this far.”

She slid past him. Ahead, if her briefings had been accurate, were the living room and the morning room, the bedrooms and the Prince’s dining room. There was a kitchen, of course, but it was more for show than actual cooking.

“Follow me. You can holster that, if you like. I’m not sure this is technically still part of the Market.”

He followed her down a hallway and through a door into the most opulent bedroom he’d seen in his entire life.

“Right where I left you,” she said, frowning, eyes far, far away.

“What’s this?”

“My rooms,” she said, after a time. “Come in and close the door behind you. We might be safe in here, for the moment.”

Hart was long past the point of asking questions. Hart pulled the door shut and stood, still holding his sidearm, while she dug into a chest of drawers. She covered the floor of the room with clothes, blouses, skirts and dresses. Hart felt absurdly embarrassed watching her empty several drawers of outdated undergarments onto the floor. He turned his head and waited for her to finish.

“Here! Help me, would you?”

He turned to find her struggling to remove an enormous chest from a much less enormous drawer. There were handles on the ends and he was able to, with some difficulty, free it from its home and lift it up.

“Onto the bed, please.”

He hefted the trunk up onto the bed. If it was as old as she claimed, the mattress should have groaned in protest, but the bed was silent. Aside from a slight indentation in the blankets where the chest dug in, it showed not the least sign of strain.