Immediately beyond the wall was a broad, muddy square, packed full of makeshift market stalls. Wares were spread on portable tables, arranged in the backs of carts, or simply laid on blankets on the ground, their owners standing nearby to shout to the crowds and keep an eye out for pickpockets. It was a familiar sight for Maya—she’d been to any number of market days, in cities much larger than Grace—but Tanax looked overwhelmed by the sheer chaos.

“Doesn’t Skyreach have a market?” Maya said, raising her voice to be heard.

“Of course it does,” Tanax said, a bit wide-eyed. “It’s just a little bit more … orderly.”

Another difference, they soon discovered, was in the kind of goods available. There was food, of course, and the usual things any city needed—leatherwork, masonry, smithing, medicine, and so on. But here in Grace, it all seemed like a sideshow beside the city’s economic heart: the trade in alchemical products and arcana. Maya had thought the market in Deepfire was vast, but this was on another scale entirely, and far more permanent-looking. Staples like quickheal, bone-break potion, firestarters, and glowstones were everywhere, but that was only the start. There were bombs and torches, powders and philters, stoppered bottles roiling with colored gases and greasy tonics promising the impossible. Maya doubted half of it was real, but that didn’t seem to discourage the sellers from shouting over one another about the fantastic benefits of this or that elixir.

“Dhak,” Tanax muttered, setting his jaw. “A whole market full of dhak. Chosen defend us.”

“It can’t be that dangerous,” Beq said. The lenses in her spectacles clicked and whirred rapidly as she zoomed in on one interesting tidbit after another. “The city’s still standing.”

“That doesn’t tell you how many people have been killed by contaminated medicine,” Tanax said. “Or sacrificed by dhakim. Life is cheap in the Splinter Kingdoms.” His lips tightened. “We ought to have burned this place to the ground decades ago.”

Maya shook her head silently. Nicomidi’s flight might have made Tanax question his place, but apparently it hadn’t shaken his Dogmatic sympathies. His face only grew more thunderous as they made their way through the market, to a section where the stalls were watched by armed and armored men. The merchandise was displayed in locked cases fronted by iron bars as well, a necessary precaution when a sneak thief could slip thousands of thalers into a pocket. The goods on offer ranged from broken junk—bits of unmetal, cracked crystals—through rare but comprehensible devices like rockcrackers and blaster rifles, all the way to apparently complete but utterly incomprehensible machines. The latter drew Beq like a fly to honey, and Maya was forced to take hold of her arm and pilot her away from one crystal-and-glass mechanism after another.