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IF IT PLEASES YOU TO KNOW IT, I AM VHUMMIM of Marrow, third daughter of Orris, as the grand niece of the seventeenth Chrysoprase, which is how our rulers were titled in the days before the Wasting Froe, Orris-My-Benefactor inherited an apple cart and a fetish stand In s, and added to the wealth I was not wealthy, but beyond the rolls of the Asaad, the Great Market, I would be envied for the gold at my throat and the silk at lory of Marrow-That-Was

When I was a child, the Asaad was the heart of h its canopies fle bright those draping oranges, those greens, those deep blues! Frankincense bubbled thick and brown in high-riold was reat and s cart wheels, the sound of bartering, the sound of coins solid in the palm! The blessed sky over the Asaad was always blue, the polished stones of the square ever shining For urines, and so proud to acquire the flas, to add to my family’s economy All citizens took part in the Asaad, or one of the smaller satellite markets, if one could not afford the stall rent demanded in the city center To shirk one’s duty to econo irons applied to the arches of the feet So it was that eachthe entire city—the city that rand procession of commerce

My apples were crisp between hundreds upon hundreds of teeth; ht themselves thrice over in luck: bears and snakes and spiders and storks, elephants and crows, and an endless, grotesque variety of Stars I oiled my hair, the pride of my beauty, with the most expensive attar of eems, but once, in this place, we kne to do it My scalp shone green and black My neck was short,to avoid in the Asaad, where any taste is answered by twelve more rarified I preferred date-stuffed serpents with a drizzle of rose-glâce, in my day The juice of pepper-crusted dorround finer than diabirds basted in raspberry sugar and bees’ wings ers In the fruit-sellers’ quarter, poranate skins were packed with the tiniest of edible rubies, so sar Even more complex is the process by which foodstuff is made from the raw material of wealth, but we had s Once I ate a topaz the size of my father’s fist, and its skin split under my teeth like ht it would shine throughto my lips It tasted of summer-baked wheat and the palest of peaches

In the Asaad we ate everything we could buy and we could buy anything Nothing did not answer our hunger, nothing did not have its price

I first heard of it during the third luncheon shift—the whole ry in the middle of the day We ate in shifts so that commerce never truly paused That day I reclined on a red sofa beneath a violet canopy spangled with silver crescents, drinking spiced chocolate in a cup of plain gold I was young then; I could not have expected more A rind of citrine floated in ernail as the quince-seller whispered:

“Have you heard? It’s all the way up to the Rhukmini shops now”

A particularly corpulentand popular hybrid of plum and amethyst, yawned and slapped iridescent blue flies froo about our business Rhukers’ slum, anyway, you old melon-wort, a pale and piece one’s pant leg to avoid the squid ink and ice-chunked cod blood”

The plu various extraneous li slowly into a small elephant’s trunk which sloped over his e, and er by the end of the season He was a man of considerable size, after all

“What’s happened?” I asked, curious I s strand of hair over ether, and a few green trickles wars glittering

“It’s gone,” she said triuoods is our coossip—and she had the upper hand in this other econoarnet, and she never sweat

“Gone?” I was never a conversationalist

“Well,” the plu his lazuli-coatedtrunk with his forefinger, “not entirely There’s bits of it left, blowing around But I daresay no one will be bashing out octopus skulls there anytime soon”

I ate-tattooed teeth (but one art in a city which contained all possible arts) showed behind my thick painted lips I could see the plum-breeder nakedly calculate whether my teeth trumped his trunk in the hierarchy of opulence, which shifted and slid with each new process, alchemy, or ray appendage was safely superior

“Why don’t you go down Rhuk-side and see for yourself? I’ll have my boys watch your cart; they’re as honest as a skulk of foxes, which is to say not particularly, but they sell as well as they steal, and what ?”

I frowned True, they would steal, but his sons had quick tongues and I was young enough to be curious about the city beyond the canopies, young enough to think the stinking alley full of e in off the river ht be worth the loss of a few apples and knuckles of meat