Myth-Gotten Gains

The Bazaar is well known throughout the dimensions as the go-to place for almost kind of merchandise. If it can be bought, sold, traded, stolen and sold again, it's for sale in one of the tents, booths, open-air rings, tables and even cloths spread on the ground in its dirty, crowded, noisy, hot lanes. You can get a tattoo anywhere on your body, including the inside. You can, as I know to my everlasting regret, buy a live dragon here. (If you have any sense at all, you won't.)

You can find restaurants serving food from countless lands, including one of the only Pervish restaurants I have ever found ex-dimension. Most other races don't want to serve Pervish food, because it tends to be ambulatory, and it has a pretty strong aroma—make that stench. No item or ingredient is so exotic that money won't bring it to your table, unless it's sentient. Even the locals aren't that sick.

The local species, who run most of the establishments, are known as Deveels. In appearance they're similar to the beings of Klahdish nightmares, with dark red skin, little horns on either side of their foreheads, and lower limbs that end in hooves. To deal with a Deveel, you had better be a savvy trader or be willing to lose whatever you're carrying on you. There's no truth in the rumor that you can lose your soul to one of the merchants in the Bazaar, unless you were foolish enough to put it on the table in the first place. In other words, you need to understand what you have agreed to, and make certain that there are no handy loopholes in your verbal contract, or the shopkeeper will wriggle out of fulfilling his end of the bargain if he can find any way at all to do so.

They are the slickest businesspeople in the universe, and they can sense the presence of money. Being cheated by a Deveel is a normal event in the Bazaar, but if you can keep your head, you can find goods of surprising quality among the acres and acres of dreck. Some of the finest craftspeople of all races have shops there. The chances were also pretty good that if any of the other treasures of the Golden Hoard were presently for sale, they might be kicking around here. I thought it was worth taking a look.

The Bazaar was also the site of the former offices of M.Y.T.H., Inc., the operation that had been headed up by my old partner, Skeeve, with me as his advisor. The tent, which was, to quote another dimensional traveler, was substantially bigger on the inside than it was on the outside because of a common trick used in the Bazaar and elsewhere, of setting only the front door, and maybe the anteroom, of a building in a particular dimension, and carving the rest of the space out of a neighboring dimension by means of a spell. Our tent backed onto a dimension called limbo, which even the Deveels were loath to visit. The main race there was vampires, with werewolves and a few other children of the night thrown in for makeweight, or make-wight, if you like. It had explained why our tent had been priced so reasonably even though it was located on a main thoroughfare. Skeeve insisted that the Limboans were as afraid of us as we were of them, but the place gave me the creeps. Still, I used it as my pied-a-terre — you can't argue with the fact that it was already paid for. A few of the gang came and went as business brought them to Deva, but it wasn't like the old days.

Even though most people would hesitate to tangle with a Pervect, especially a notable like myself, I felt very uncomfortable carrying three very valuable pieces of magikal hardware through the Bazaar. The pickpockets and thieves that roamed the lanes could smell gold through ten layers of bespelled safe-satchels, let alone buried in the middle of ancient sacks that we'd lifted from a nearby potato field in Klah.

Ersatz we couldn't hide at all, except to cover his hilt with an old sack. Bumping along on Calypsa's narrow shoulder, he was getting a lot of attention from the shopkeepers we passed. I kept a hand on the D-hopper in my pocket. It was an ancient artifact, and there weren't many around. No way after all this time was I losing my ride.

"I don't see why you have to have a special carrying case," I told Asti sourly. "That kid who had you on his shelf sure didn't have a fancy set up for you, especially not one with jewels and tooled leather."

"I don't expect dancing girls and acolytes, Mr. Aahz," Asti said, smugly, now that she knew she was getting her way.

"It's just Aahz," I said.