Tallis turned the corner, passing easily through the curtain of magical darkness that concealed tonight’s chosen street from ignorant passers-by. He was once told that the effect was supplied each week by an anonymous heir of House Thuranni who possessed the Mark of Shadow.
Behind the magic veil, artificial twilight reigned. A host of candles and floating magelights displayed a city block full of dubious, whispering hawkers, street fences, and purveyors of every vice and contraband available in Karrnath.
Tallis fell easily into the crowd and began his hunt for Haedrun.
Soneste’s eyes returned again and again to the alley across from her where a hovering ball of light flickered with tiny threads of electricity. She kept her back to a building with shattered windows and questionable occupancy, wondering if the buoyant light was a spell effect or some sort of urban fey. It was distracting.
She had confirmed the Midnight Market’s existence with one of the Justice Ministry’s less savory prisoners. For his cooperation she was able to convince his keepers to lessen the man’s sentence-to a faster and more painless death than General Thauram, commander of the White Lions, had planned for him.
It was then a matter of finding one of the criminal’s old acquaintances and following him to the Market as the hours grew late. The attraction she’d planted in the thief’s mind to find spiderdust hastened her quest. Soneste had a good eye for addicts.
It had been a gamble. The Midnight Market didn’t cater to the lowliest of Korth’s criminal elements, but her mark evidently knew where a dangerous substance like spiderdust would be available. Soneste silently thanked Olladra for the goddess’s favor so far. She’d had enough setbacks and humiliation already in this uncouth land.
She’d spent the rest of her day scouring the city, plying her skills among the seedier echelons of Korth society. Tallis’s name was known by many, but none she had questioned knew definitively where he could be found. He had a reputation as a burglar and saboteur of discriminating taste and expensive rates. Most of the time, he could be contacted at the Midnight Market. Soneste wondered if this was how Lord Charoth had once found him.
Soneste studied the crowds from beneath a low-hanging hood. With a spoken word, she’d altered her shiftweave clothing into one of its four other nested outfits. She’d used this kit before in the lower districts of Sharn, emulating the attitude of a shadow-dwelling mercenary. Having studied and apprehended city scum so many times, she knew how to adopt their manner and body language. Whenever a passerby looked at her for more than a couple of seconds, she returned the glare with hostility.
Aegis sat upon the ground beside her with a sheet of canvas thrown over him. If he walked free, there would be no concealing his construct nature-the Host knew, in this land he would inevitably attract attention.
Given the nature of the Market, she was comforted knowing the warforged was near. The magewright had managed to make some repairs. He wasn’t fully restored, but he looked a lot less like someone’s damaged property.
“How much longer must I wait, Mistress?” Aegis said, his whisper alarmingly loud.
“Not long,” she whispered back.
Indeed, Soneste did not have to wait long. After scrutinizing every face in the crowd for the last half hour, she finally spied a man of Tallis’s bearing, though his attire gave her pause. He wore a fine coat of deep green with silver buttons and brooch, a tricorn, and an elegant rapier at his belt.
“This might be him,” she said quietly to Aegis. “Stay here unless I call you.” She heard an unhappy grunt in response.
The man approached along the street, eyeing the crowds as carefully as she. Soneste tossed one of the daggers she’d purchased earlier onto the cobbles in front of him. The action garnered a few twitchy glances, but the man in the green coat merely stooped to retrieve it. She immediately stepped away from the wall to approach him, her hood and scarf concealing most of her face. In her left hand she held two more daggers by their blades, as though she’d been juggling the three of them.
“Sorry,” she called out, forcing an impassive tone and an Aundairian accent.
Giving her only a cursory glance, the man handed the dagger back to her, hilt first. She saw a stylized dragon’s head on the ring of his right hand.
“Not a good place for throwing blades around, lady, as I’m sure you know.” He moved on without another word.
It was Tallis, and how different he looked. His face was clean-shaven now. The coat and hat were obviously recent purchases, and the longer hair might have been the work of illusionary magic.
Feigning interest in browsing the Market, she fell into step far enough behind him to remain unnoticed. Tallis moved slowly himself, making an effort to talk to various parties. He looked like a Lyrandar dandy in his kit, but Soneste suspected it served his need to look less like his infamous self.
As she scanned the vendors arrayed on either side of the narrow street, Soneste was again amazed at the audacity of the Midnight Market. Scores of men and women of disparate races carried out illegal transactions of every kind. A fur-cloaked Lhazaarite captain argued with a Karrn huckster, a manacled young man kneeling beside them. A wiry shifter was purchasing glowing bottles from a haughty, loud-mouthed artificer. Soneste even saw a group of surprisingly well-dressed goblins exchanging coffers with a man who might have been a priest of the Dark Six.
Tallis soon stopped to inquire among a cluster of men who looked better suited to the cells of Thronehold Prison than freedom on the streets. Soneste paused at a vendor’s table so as not to draw suspicion, feigning interest in the wares before her.
“What is your need, lady?” a sibilant voice asked. Soneste looked up to see a woman swathed from head to toe in saffron garments. Her eyes, the only part of her body unconcealed, were vivid yellow with black, slitted pupils.
Soneste’s stomach lurched. The woman was yuan-ti, serpent-blooded folk from Xen’drik and the far south. The true severity of the Midnight Market finally took hold within her. She felt a strong desire to quit this place and call the White Lions down upon the whole affair.
No. The Market would endure despite her. The Justice Ministry could not effectively locate it or stamp it out. She felt blasphemous thinking it, but Soneste wondered if perhaps Korth needed the Market.
Certainly the Sharn Watch, itself rife with corruption, could never expose every vice in the City of Towers. Crime was everywhere back home. Soneste been in this city for two days, and already she’d seen a world of difference. Korth was a place of extremes. The streets were safer, yes, but martial law engendered in the Karrnathi populace a dichotomy of moral choices. The Midnight Market and all its lawless indulgences had undoubtedly spawned under the unforgiving Code of Kaius.
Soneste examined the small vials the yuan-ti had revealed under a velvet cloth. Poisons, all of them.
“Blue whinnis,” she said.
Without hesitation, the snake woman selected one small jar and held it up to Soneste. The paste within was darker than she was used to seeing, but it was at least two applications of the incapacitating poison. “Platinum, twenty-six pieces,” the yuan-ti said, her accent sharp.
Sovereign bitch, she thought. Twenty-six dragons! She could get it for eighteen back home.
“Twenty,” Soneste said in turn. “Your formula is unfamiliar to me.”
“Stronger,” the snake woman hissed. “My people make it better. Twenty-five.”
Soneste prepared to bargain further, but she saw Tallis was moving on. “Twenty-five,” she agreed, hoping she wouldn’t regret the purchase. She made the exchange quickly then hastened after her mark.