Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [14]
Wherever she went, when the door closed behind her, its connection to the shop was severed. Whatever magic was at work, it existed in that other place—Elsewhere, as she thought of it—and could not be conjured from this side. No one would ever force his way into the shop. One would only succeed in breaking through an earthly door that didn’t lead where he hoped to go.
Even Karou was dependent on the whim of Brimstone to admit her. Sometimes he didn’t, however much she knocked, though he had never yet stranded her on the far side of an errand, and she hoped he never would.
This errand turned out to be a black-market auction in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Karou had attended several such, and they were always the same. Cash only, of course, and attended by sundry underworld types like exiled dictators and crime lords with pretensions to culture. The auction items were a mixed salad of stolen museum pieces—a Chagall drawing, the dried uvula of some beheaded saint, a matched set of tusks from a mature African bull elephant.
Yes. A matched set of tusks from a mature African bull elephant.
Karou sighed when she saw them. Brimstone hadn’t told her what she was after, only that she would know it when she saw it, and she did. Oh, and wouldn’t they be a delight to wrangle on public transportation?
Unlike the other bidders, she didn’t have a long black car waiting, or a pair of thug bodyguards to do her heavy lifting. She had only a string of scuppies and her charm, neither of which proved sufficient to persuade a cab driver to hang seven-foot-long elephant tusks out the back of his taxi. So, grumbling, Karou had to drag them six blocks to the nearest Metro station, down the stairs, and through the turnstile. They were wrapped in canvas and duct-taped, and when a street musician lowered his violin to inquire, “Hey lovely, what you got there?” she said, “Musicians who asked questions,” and kept on dragging.
It could have been worse, certainly, and often was. Brimstone sent her to some god-awful places in pursuit of teeth. After the incident in St. Petersburg, when she was recovering from being shot, she’d demanded, “Is my life really worth so little to you?”
As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she’d regretted it. If her life was worth so little to him, she didn’t want him to admit it. Brimstone had his faults, but he was all she had for a family, along with Issa and Twiga and Yasri. If she was just some kind of expendable slave girl, she didn’t want to know.
His answer had neither confirmed nor denied her fear. “Your life? You mean, your body? Your body is nothing but an envelope, Karou. Your soul is another matter, and is not, as far as I know, in any immediate danger.”
“An envelope?” She didn’t like to think of her body as an envelope—something others might be able to open up and rifle through, remove things from like so many clipped coupons.
“I assumed you felt the same way,” he’d said. “The way you scribble on it.”
Brimstone didn’t approve of her tattoos, which was funny, since he was responsible for her first, the eyes on her palms. At least Karou suspected he was, though she didn’t know for sure, since he was incapable of answering even the most basic questions.
“Whatever,” she’d said with a pained sigh. Really: pained. Getting shot hurt, no surprise there. Of course, she couldn’t argue that Brimstone shoved her unprepared into danger. He’d seen to it that she was trained from a young age in martial arts. She never mentioned it to her friends—it was not, her sensei had taught her early, a bragging matter—and they would have been surprised to learn that Karou’s gliding, straight-spined grace went hand in hand with deadly skill. Deadly or not, she’d had the misfortune to discover that karate went only so far against guns.
She’d healed quickly with the help of a pungent salve and, she suspected, magic, but her youthful fearlessness had been shaken, and she went on errands with more trepidation