“Shaman Bond, as I live and breathe!” said a familiar fruity aristocratic voice. “Delighted to see you again, dear boy! What the hell are you doing here? Wouldn’t have thought you had the wherewithal to use the bloody pay toilets here! Eh? Eh?”
Augusta Moon stood before me, grinning broadly. A larger-than-life professional troubleshooter and monster hunter, Augusta looked like one of P. G. Wodehouse’s more frightening aunts. Tall and wide and heavy with it, Augusta dressed like some old-fashioned maiden aunt who’d read too many Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries: a battered tweed suit, stout walking shoes and a monocle jammed firmly into her left eye. If Augusta had ever heard of fashion, makeup and femininity, it was only as things other people did. If the cold was bothering her, she hid it remarkably well. She carried a stout oaken walking stick with a heavy silver head that still had dried blood crusted on it from her last encounter with the forces of evil. She also wasn’t above poking people with her stick when she wanted to make a point. People who knew her were usually careful to stand out of arm’s reach. She grabbed my hand and gave it a good mauling, laughing heartily all the while. Some monster hunters are more frightening than others.
Augusta Moon travelled the world doing good, and to hell with whether other people appreciated it.
She finally released my aching hand and scrutinised Molly through her monocle. “Didn’t know the two of you were an item! Hmm. Didn’t see that one coming. Blessed be the world that still has such surprises in it! Look after this one, girl. A hard man is good to find. Eh? Eh?”
“What’s a lady like you doing in a place like this?” I said.
“Oh, doing a little shopping, looking for something new and nasty to put the wind up the ungodly. Not everything responds to being hit over the head with a stout stick, though the Lord knows I’ve tried the method on practically everything under the sun, or hiding from it. I once used this very stick to make a shish kebab out of a vampire. It was his own fault for bending over.”
“You are an appalling person, Augusta,” I said solemnly.
“Only in a good cause, dear boy. What are you doing here, Shaman? Looking for a little something for an engagement present, perhaps? Eh?” She dropped Molly a roguish wink. “Hold out for a ring, dear, and then use it to pierce something exotic! These modern gels, eh, Shaman?” She looked at me thoughtfully. Augusta had a magnificient brain behind her chosen facade. “Wouldn’t have thought you were the gun-running sort, old cheese.”
“I’m here representing someone else,” I said smoothly. “Someone who doesn’t want their face seen, because it would only push the price up. You know how it is.” I gave her my best knowing look. “You aren’t here by chance, Augusta. What are you really looking for?”
She gave her harsh bark of laughter again, and prodded me right above the navel with her walking stick. “No fooling you, eh, Shaman? No, no . . . I was in Delhi last week, searching for the Golden Frogs of Samarkand. Bloody things have gone walkabout again, and the usual rush is on to find them first and claim the bounty. And keep them out of the wrong sort of hands. Ugly-looking brutes, but no accounting for taste, as the vicar said when he kissed the verger. Anyway, the trail ran stone-dead cold in Delhi, but a backstreet encounter in Calcutta pointed me in this direction. So if you should happen to spot the bloody things here, hands off! They’re mine!”
“You’re welcome to them,” I said. “I don’t want golden warts on my unmentionables.”
“Then I’ll see you around. Be good, my dears, and if you can’t be good don’t do it in front of witnesses!”
She crushed my hand again, slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to rattle my teeth, and barged between Molly and me. Still laughing, she disappeared into the crowd, which immediately fell back to give her plenty of room. Molly and I headed determinedly in the opposite direction.
“Nice friends you have,” said Molly.
“I thought she was a friend of yours,” I said.
“Are we looking for anything specific?” said Molly, linking her arm companionably through mine, though I could barely feel it through the thicknesses of two very heavy coat sleeves. “I mean, apart from the duplicated Drood armour, which we are not going to find, because it never actually appears, no matter what the rumours say.”
“To be honest,” I said, “I think this is the family’s way of getting me out of the Hall for a while. I did wonder at first whether Harry was up to something and wanted me out of the way. . . . But it’s more likely the council thinks I need some time off for rest and relaxation. A little holiday after my near-death experience. And God knows I could use some serious downtime, after all the shit that’s been raining down on me recently. As missions go, this is almost certainly a waste of time. So let us enjoy ourselves and take it easy for once.”
“All right,” said Molly. “I can do that. Hell of a place for a holiday, though.”
“That’s my family for you,” I said.
We strolled on for a while, taking it easy, taking in the sights. The air was still bitterly cold, except for when we walked through brief gusts of heat generated by the stalls’ heaters. Some booths actually had steam rising up from them. The walkways between the displays were covered with simple wooden boards, and there were no signs or directions. As centuries-old fairs went, this one didn’t impress me as being at all well organised. There was certainly no lack of interested customers gathering excitedly before the various stalls, money clearly burning a hole in their pockets. They chattered happily with each other, argued over provenances and delivery routes, and nearly always seemed to end up with the age-old refrain,
Anything off for cash?
Some people stared in awe at the more impressive offerings, too intimidated to even inquire after the price. I recognised a surprising number of faces from all sides of the tracks: good guys and bad and every shade of grey in between. Everyone needs weapons, no matter what side you’re fighting on.
“Buy me something,” said Molly, after a while.
“Other girls want chocolate or flowers,” I said. “Or shoes.”
“Oh, I want those, too,” said Molly. “But you can’t come to an arms fair and not buy anything. I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that.”
So we looked around to see what there was.
One stall was offering assorted alien technology: from things that fell off the back of an alien starship, or stranded Greys and Reptiloids, or things that fell through dimensional doorways when the wind was blowing in the wrong direction. It was all dumped on the benches set out before us, in random heaps and piles. Large, blocky shapes of unfamiliar metal; warped crystal things with strange lights flickering deep inside; semiorganic bits and blobs trailing metallic filaments like tentacles. It could have been the secrets of the universe laid out before us, or the biggest bunch of junk and tat ever assembled in one place. The stall owner cheerfully admitted he had no idea what any of it did.
“It’s old stock, picked up from a fire sale in the Nightside. Got to be worth something, hasn’t it? It’s alien! Pick something, and we’ll fight over a price. You should be able to reverse-engineer something useful out of anything here. Hey, you! No touching!”
The big, hulking man standing next to me sneered haughtily at the stall owner and prodded a weird, wobbling thing with a disdainful fingertip. There was a sharp clap, like a very localised thunderstorm, and then he disappeared, leaving behind a space where he used to be. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum, while for a moment everyone’s hair stood on end. The stallholder blinked a few times, and then recovered wonderfully.
“See! See!” he said, addressing the surrounding crowd. “How useful is
that
? Wouldn’t you like to make someone you know disappear?”
We left him haggling with a very interested crowd, while I wondered how he was going to sell the thing without handing it over, or how the buyer was going to carry it away. . . .
Another store boasted an exhaustive display of crystals, magic stones and balls in every shape and colour you could think of. Molly oohed and ahhed over them, but I couldn’t see anything to get excited about. Not one decent aura among the lot of them. According to the middle-aged woman behind the stall, dressed in what she no doubt fondly imaged was the very latest Gypsy chic, everything on the table had a fascinating history or legend attached to it. Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Mind you, she spotted me as an unbeliever straightaway, and concentrated her sales pitch on Molly.
“See this one, dearie? The shimmering sphere with the bloodred flaw? That is the original Scrying Stone that Dr. Dee used to learn the artificial language Enochian, created expressly so that men could talk directly with angels. If you could only reestablish contact with the same spirit that spoke with Dr. Dee, who knows what secrets you might learn?”
“I think the key word in that sentence was
if
,” said Molly. “Do I look like a rube? You’d have a better chance of contacting the spirit world if you banged your head against the wall.”
“Well!” said the Gypsy lady, drawing herself up. “I never did. . . .”
“Oh, you must have,” said Molly sweetly.
I took her firmly by the arm and we moved on. Next up was a twee affair almost buried under displays of fresh flowers, offering a wide range of elven artefacts and weapons at really quite reasonable prices. I pointed a few things out to Molly, but she shook her head immediately.
“Never trust an elf, or anything they leave behind. You can bet most of it’s boody-trapped, ready to do something transformative and allegedly humorous to whatever poor fool picks it up without industrial-strength gloves on.”
“They’ve got a wand,” I said. “It looks very nice.”
“Traps are supposed to look inviting. Elf wands are just the sugar coating on the trap, because they’re one of the few elven weapons a human could actually use.”
“I know a private investigator in the Nightside who uses one,” I said. “Larry Oblivion.”
“Yes, but he’s dead!” said Molly. “There’s not a lot more the wand can do to him! Hey, how is it you know someone from the Nightside? I thought Droods weren’t allowed in the Nightside.”
“We have agreed not to enter,” I said. “There’s a difference. We could go in if we wanted to; we choose not to. Wouldn’t be seen dead in the place, myself. I know Larry because he and his brothers did some work for the family recently.”
“Rather you than me,” said Molly. “That Hadleigh Oblivion gives me the creeps.”
Microsoft had a really big presence at the fair; but then, Microsoft has a really big presence everywhere.
I paused before a simple open booth representing the Gun Shops of Usher franchise. It seemed odd that the family who’d bankrolled the Supernatural Arms Faire for so many centuries should have such a modest presence. The man standing behind the counter was Mr. Usher himself. I looked him over thoughtfully, and he nodded politely.
“I thought you ran the gun shop in the Nightside,” said Molly.
“Oh, I’m there, too, my dear,” said Usher, a small grey man with a small grey voice. The man behind the Gun Shops of Usher, the greatest supplier of murder and mayhem to the world, was a reputable man in a regulation suit, with a broad, square face, a professional smile and a cold, passionless stare from behind wire-rimmed glasses. He looked like what he was: a businessman interested only in business. “I’m there, and I’m here; I’m everywhere there’s a gun shop, Miss Molly. Because there’s always someone who needs a gun.”
“You run them all simultaneously?” I said. “What are you, an avatar of slaughter?”
“Nothing so grand, Mr. Bond,” said Usher. “I’m . . . necessary.”
I looked over the weapons spread out on the table before me. Guns: special, individual, significant guns from throughout history and legend. The Walther PPK that Hitler used to shoot Eva Braun before he turned it on himself. Billy the Kid’s old nickel pistol. The first rifle used to kill an American Indian, and the first rifle sold to an American Indian. Half a dozen guns that had turned on their famous author owners, each one neatly labelled and autographed by the writer. And a rifle from a book depository. Magic bullets extra.
“I see you carry a Colt repeater, Mr. Drood,” said Usher. “Your uncle does very good work.”
“Don’t use that name again,” I said coldly. “I’m here incognito. You blow my cover in front of this crowd and I will blow you away.”
“Of course, Mr. Bond. Your secret is safe with me. You’d be surprised how many secrets I keep.”
Molly and I moved on to the next stall. I wasn’t sure putting a bullet through Mr. Usher’s head would actually kill him, but the formalities have to be observed. Molly gave me a sideways look.
“You don’t like guns, do you? Sort of strange, that, in a secret agent.”
“I can use a gun if I have to,” I said. “But I’m an agent, not an assassin. I kill only when I have to, and I try really hard to take no pleasure or satisfaction from it. Walk too far down that path and you end up in groups like Dusk’s. Because that’s where you belong.”
“Guns don’t kill people; people kill people?” suggested Molly.
“People with guns kill people,” I said. “Guns make it easy for people to kill people. It should never be easy to take someone’s life.”
“Pacifist!” sneered a passerby.
“Hardly,” I said, but he was already gone.
At the next booth, a scientist in the traditional white coat was demonstrating description theory with a blackboard and a piece of chalk, to an only mildly interested crowd. He didn’t seem to have anything to sell, but he was so earnest and determined that people were willing to listen. They watched, frowning, as he stalked back and forth before his blackboard; like so many dogs being shown a card trick, they could sense something clever was happening, but couldn’t follow it.
Basically, the scientist explained, description theory says that if you can describe something exactly, using mathematics, then the maths is the object, and vice versa. So if you change the maths, you change the object. His theory had many applications when it comes to weapons: Description theory bombs, where the maths can persuade a city it isn’t there anymore. Or even transportation, where the maths can persuade the universe that people are where the maths says they are.