Chapter Twenty Six

  As Night Falls

  Freya prayed the others wouldn’t find out about this.

  “You bastard,” she said to the handsomely dressed dwarf sitting opposite her. “You absolute bastard.”

  The dwarf smiled and slid the little wooden tile into place. Preventing Freya from completing the castle she had been building for half of the game. “Was wide open, couldn’t help it.”

  Freya tossed down a field tile and leaned back in her chair, letting the other three players, a young man wearing a poorly made Chicago Bears jersey, a Brazilian wearing furs that seemed entirely too warm, and a strange person with orange skin, take their ultimately futile turns. Carcasonne was one of her favorite board games, despite it always ending just as it did here. As soon as she saw the tent marked ‘Source Games’ she knew she would regret not checking it out.

  The tent was unnaturally warm. Tall shelves filled with all kinds of board games from the Source lined the walls of the tent. Though the games themselves looked nothing like the versions she was used to. Their boxes were wooden with the name of the game burned into the side and tops. Most games that used cardboard tiles or game boards instead used wood for those components. Game cards were made of a flimsy triple-bonded paper.

  A large stack of boxes beside the shelves held extra copies of the most popular games, with more specialty titles being made to order. The man running the stand was a dead ringer for Colonel Mustard from Clue. He had thick white hair with mutton chops that connected to his Mustache. The all yellow tunic and trousers was a poor approximation of the Colonel’s suit, but she got the idea. Especially after he insisted he be referred to only as ‘The Colonel’

  The cool glow of dusk screamed that she had been here for far too long. But the dwarf, who’s name she hadn’t discovered yet, kept insisting on one more game. And in truth she was happy to just enjoy this. But she needed to at least pick up some basics for herself before calling it a night. A few more turns around the table had the Dwarf declaring victory and scooping up the game as her prize.

  “Been a pleasure boys, and girl.” The Dwarf said as he strode off with the game tucked under his arm.

  The Colonel slid a small stack of Carcassonne games between the three remaining players. “Discount if each of you buys one.”

  The orange person, or whatever, snapped up one of the games. That was odd, Freya didn’t think they were enjoying the game. They had been silent the whole time. Freya grabbed the second box with a resigned groan. She was this far in already. The Bears fan, seeing the glares from the others grabbed the last one. They all paid the almost certainly inflated price and went their separate ways.

  Freya hefted the box in her hands. She still needed to bite the bullet and get a door back to her room at the Mind’s Mirror. The price was far beyond what she could manage now though. Two hundred pages, a hefty portion of her entire stockpile. While she waited for riches to fall into her lap, Roman’s infinite pockets would have to hold onto the game. She could just stuff the game in her bag, but she wanted to feel the weight of it in her hands.

  A few vendors were closing up shop, though most seemed to be staying open well into the night. The inescapable torrent of buyers had slowed to barely a trickle. They moved aimlessly between the stands in scattered groups. Freya joined the stilted flow looking for something beyond the board game to bring back.

  The rest of the stands had all manner of interesting things, forged weapons, trinkets, and even a stand that was just a crude recreation of a typical Living room in the Source Realm. The TV was just a wooden box with a portal shining where the screen would have been. Several children of varying species were playing on the sofa and inspecting the television set. It was so strange, they were just as interested in the Source as Freya was in the Harbor. Of course they would be, a whole second world only spoken of by the strange people who came from there.

  What was it she actually needed still? Freya opened up her bag and rifled through what she had gathered. From Roman’s stockpile she had gathered plenty of tools, and weapons. She had bombs, grappling hooks, a handful of potions. She wore the boots of feather falling and a kind of leather utility belt. It was enchanted to have impossibly deep pockets. Like her bag of holding but less spacious. She needed some more earthen things she could manipulate easily to fill those pockets with.

  A sign with a large sword carved into it caught her eye. It was nailed to a post beside a large tent much like the one she had just left. Freya stepped into the shop. There were rows of weapon and equipment racks much like Roman’s armory. Though this place was far better organized. All the melee weapons were next to each other, which were then organized into smaller groups of like weapons, swords with swords, axes with axes. Then there was an equally large section filled with ranged weapons. Bows, Crossbows, crude firearms, javelins and slings. None of the weapons looked familiar, she figured this stand wasn’t run by a Fable-Walker. Usually her kind liked everything they did to be some kind of veiled pop-culture reference.

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  Freya approached the friendly looking woman about a foot taller than herself. “You wouldn’t happen to have any stone or mineral based weapons or ammo would you?”

  The woman cocked her head. “Stone? We have some, but not much. Unless of course you count obsidian, in which case we have a little more.”

  Would obsidian work? It had to right? It was just a different kind of stone when you got down to it. Or was it? Freya wasn’t into geology enough to know for sure.

  “Show me.”

  The woman lead Freya to a couple small boxes in the far back corner of the tent. One was filled with stone spearheads and arrowheads. The other had a number of the same items but instead crafted out of Obsidian or other types of glass. Freya felt for the Obsidian, her power could detect it. She made a few knives wiggle just to confirm it. They did as she commanded. Though only the obsidian, the items made of regular glass didn’t react to her at all.

  “How much?”

  “The Stone you can just take, nobody seems to want it. The glass is a silver per pound of material.”

  “I’ll take all the stone and all of the obsidian.” Freya fished out eight silver pieces she raided from Roman’s armory. “That cover you?”

  The woman simply took the silver and backed away. Freya knelt beside the boxes and started filling the pockets on her belt. She fit dozens of bladed tips into her pockets. This would be invaluable. She could fire these arrowheads off rapidly. She imagined her encounter with Sulivar’s soldiers in the woods. If she had her current powers with all this equipment she could have shredded them in seconds.

  Why Roman didn’t carry his equipment with him was beyond Freya’s understanding. There probably was a good reason, but it was horribly risky. He could have died alongside Zora if Freya hadn’t been there.

  The obsidian blades came next. Freya handled these ones a little more gingerly given that they could slice her open if she just looked at them wrong. Before long her belt was filled to the brim with ammunition for the upcoming fight. A sudden burst of excitement filled her. She would be able to dismantle anyone Sulivar decided to throw at them. Was it wrong to be excited at the prospect? More people would die by the time they were finished.

  Freya stopped that line of thought before it dragged her into the dark. She was a formidable fighter, more skilled than the vast majority of other Fable-Walkers. There was nothing wrong with being proud of that fact.

  By the time Freya left, any trace of light had gone out of the sky. The others were certainly going to be pissed. She picked up her pace and made for the fishing village at the center of the market.

  It didn’t take long before one last distraction caught her attention. A tent filled to the brim with books stood like a beacon calling her name. Strangely this was the only stand that had a line to enter. A number of small tables and chairs surrounded the tent, almost every seat was occupied with people reading their purchases.

  One in particular caught her eye. A bald man sat with one leg crossed over the other reading a book thick as his forearm. The title read The Second World War: Blood in the Source. Freya couldn’t help but laugh, even across realms there was one constant, middle aged men fascinated by World War Two. The book sparked a thought however, how much did they know about her world? The bald man’s book was pretty thick, so they must have some level of detail.

  Were the stories from the Source accurate? Or were they embellished, or simply made up altogether? Regardless, this was certainly a way to make money for someone without easy access to pages. Freya desperately needed some way to earn money or pages on her own, and this seemed as viable an option as any. After all, who didn’t want to work in a bookstore?

  Freya looked back at the bald man’s book. Perhaps she could get some of her questions answered. She focused on the book and opened up a small window.

  Item: The Second World War: Blood in the Source

  Description: A particularly dry account of the European Theatre of the Second World War. Written from the perspective of the Americans. Shocking. The author is a born resident of MythHarbor, Dresialla of Felixium. She spends a frankly disturbing amount of pages on her pet theories about the mental state of Adolf Hitler. Most prevalent of which is that he was drugged with LSD by the shadow government that truly controls Switzerland.

  That was certainly strange. But not as bad as it could have been. Maybe Athena was right, her corrupted system could be useful for some things.

  “You’re up.” A gruff voice said from behind her

  Freya looked up to find the line ahead of her had evaporated. The vendor stand was fairly small compared to all the others, only about as large as Freya’s bedroom. But every bit of space was used with a kind of chaotic efficiency. Wooden boxes were tipped on their sides beside and on top of the bookshelves. The small gap under the foot of the bookcases was stuffed with more books. The bookseller, an elderly woman with her nose in a small novel, was herself surrounded on all sides with stacks of books. All of them were labeled appropriately by book type. Harbor Fiction, Harbor History, Source Fiction, Source History, and self-help were among the divisions made.

  Freya cracked a book of Harbor fiction titled Kralthan and the First Bounty. After a few pages she slapped the book shut. What the hell was going on here? A western? A western written by a resident of the Harbor. She grabbed another book. Simply titled Siarna. It was another western. She paged through a dozen other fiction novels. All westerns. Why? How did that make any kind of sense?

  Next up was the section Harbor History. This was something she needed to get a better handle on. So many different titles piqued her interest. The Second Change of the Ways, The Poet: A life, A History of the Corinthian Bastards, The Valorian Civil Wars. She grabbed the book on The Poet and started to read. A Fable-Walker from fourteen hundred years ago. Who was even writing books at that time in the Source? And what kind of book from that period would be well-read enough for The Poet to be the unstoppable force presented here? She single-handedly tore down nations, fought some proto-version of an evidently important modern group, the Ennerchai. The book kept making mentions of that group, and the context in which they were mentioned was not flattering in the slightest.

  “This ain’t a library.” The bookseller grumbled through the pages of her novel.

  “Right, sorry.”

  Freya turned back and grabbed another book from the Harbor Fiction section The Lord of Deliana then speed walked over to the Source fiction section. Mostly familiar titles lined the shelf, Promise of Blood, Dune, Small Gods, The Bone Shard Daughter. All were bound in leather with deckled edges. They looked like one of those youtubers who rebound books into wizard tomes had gotten ahold of them. But after only a few moments Freya caught sight of one book here she couldn’t leave without. She dropped both books on the counter in front of the bookseller. “How much?”