Tiller lowered himself down the last few feet of earthy outcropping and began to pick his way closer to the approaching wagon.

  It drew him. There was possibility there. Maeve and Pod had come quickly at Pod’s beckoning, and the way they spoke of this being inspired nothing but awe and the certainty that it could do things.

  Things that might include sending him home to his family.

  The scale of the Shopkeeper’s wagon was not immediately apparent. It was only as it drew nearer that Tiller began to realize just how vast it was. When it was close enough for him to hear the faint squeak of its wheels and the terrible impacts of the footfalls of the creatures pulling it that he truly comprehended how large it really was.

  He would have compared it to a double-decker bus. And favorably at that. It was almost twice as wide and certainly taller. It looked like an overwrought steampunk city, something that had grown on itself, been added to, cobbled together and yet impossibly solid and complete.

  At the front of the wagon six beasts strained. They pulled with a savage, desperate effort that said it was impossible they could have come from far away. And yet their pace never faltered. Their force was endless.

  It was only a deepening of the strangeness of this place when he realized what they were. It did not cast him into shock. Minotaurs. Each of them ten feet tall at least, strapped to the front of the wagon and exerting themselves to their limit to draw the wagon across the expanse. Monstrous muscles and terrible visages. They were terrifying. As they drew closer iron bands gleamed on their forearms. If Pod and Maeve held him in such regard for his stone bracelet, what could it mean that this Shopkeeper could enslave or command six such terrible beasts with iron-ranked bands?

  Maeve was speaking at his shoulder. “You must know the Shopkeeper. Everyone knows the Shopkeeper. But you’ve been acting so strange, love, I need to make sure you know what you’re doing. Do you know him?”

  “No…”

  “No-one knows his rank. But it’s high. Amongst the highest in the whole world. We don’t know his game. He’ll trade with a king one day and a beggar the next. He’ll treat you fairly if you don’t cross him. He has magics. He’s so… oh my, but he’s so strong. He can do anything.”

  “Anything?” Tiller breathed. Anything would include sending him home.

  She darted a glance at him, concerned. “He’ll trade, Tiller, but he can’t be stolen from. You can talk to him, you can bargain, but you have to respect him. They say he can do anything and will give anything for the right price.”

  Tiller watched the wagon roll closer, absorbing Maeve’s sense of wonder and awe. “But… if he’s so important, why is he coming here?”

  Maeve shuddered. “Nobody knows what he’s about. He moves to his own rhythm and his own purposes. Some say he could tear down and conquer the seven realms, but the only time I ever saw him he traded beads with a homeless child.”

  The wagon rolled to a stop and the minotaurs sagged, exhausted in their harnesses. It was less than fifty yards from them. There was no doubting it had come to be here, for them. In the middle of the wall facing them, about halfway along, a little window popped open, the shutter swinging down to form a shelf or counter. It looked like the universe’s most terrifying food truck.

  But Tiller was drawn to it. Scary as it might be, as ominous as Maeve had portrayed it, Tiller sensed the greatness and the possibility. He had already been here, wherever or whatever the hell this place really was, for too long. His family must be going sick with worry. He ached to be with them.

  So Tiller approached the window.

  As he grew closer he could see a single figure standing in the window. It was man-shaped and man-sized, but shrouded in huge, bulky bunched robes. The hood of the robe was drawn up and a mask of a bird, or maybe the skull of a bird, was all that protruded from the dark recesses.

  Tiller was surprised and startled when it greeted him. He had expected the voice of a god. What he heard was just the voice of a man, an ordinary man, distorted by the reverberations of the great bony beak that protruded from its face.

  “Come! Come! Everything you want is on offer. Wonders, trinkets, powers and dreams. Like for like is all that we ask. If you seek miracles, all I ask is for one in exchange.”

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  Tiller came to a stop in front of the window, his hands wringing. He felt a need to speak with deference. “Uh… Shopkeeper, sir… I was hoping-”

  “No sirs for me! Nothing of the sort is needed when addressing this poor peddler. I serve you! The customer is always right, that’s what I’ve learned. Speak up, speak straight. If there’s a sir here, then it’s you, is it not? So do tell me, what can I do for you… sir?”

  Tiller struggled for a moment to find the words. He had the shape of a thought but nothing prepared. Eventually what came out was true and honest and a little pitiful. “I want to go home…”

  The Shopkeeper spoke with unveiled empathy. “I know.”

  “You… you know? Can you do it?”

  The beaked mask nodded slowly. “That I can.”

  “Do you know where home is?”

  A sad chuckle echoed within the mask. “Home is where the heart is. Never truer than in your case. You want to get back to your family, to your wife, your children. You’re starting to accept the possibility that everything around you is in fact real, not a hallucination. But even as you accept that it only stabs your heart with worry. If this place is real, then you are really separated from the people you love most in the world. I know what people want, Tiller. You’d give anything to go home.”

  Tiller nodded, desperate, excited.

  The Shopkeeper went on, “But you don’t have anything to give in exchange.”

  Desperation seized him. “Please… I need to go back. I have to go home. You have to understand.”

  The Shopkeeper tilted his head, inspecting Tiller. “I do understand. But you must understand my rules as well. There’s very little I can’t do. But I can do nothing without fair exchange. Sending you home is a vast and shattering task. To do it, I will need something vast in return.”

  Tiller looked down at his band and held it up, offering it. “You can have this! All of it!”

  The Shopkeeper laughed. It was not a cruel laugh. “Those sigils wouldn’t pay for one hundredth of one hundredth of what sending you home would cost me. I have to cover my costs.”

  “The band, you could have that too.”

  “The only way to take the band from you is to kill you.”

  Tiller deflated. He felt confused disbelief settle over him. This thing could send him home, but how could he possibly have what was needed to make the trade? It wasn’t fair. It didn’t make sense. The thought of murder flashed in his mind. He extinguished it quickly.

  The Shopkeeper said, “I think we can come to an arrangement. We have time. It’s a free market, Tiller. We live in a free-market economy and any man can make anything of himself. You might not be someone I can trade with today.”

  “But I have to go home today! They must be worried about me!”

  The Shopkeeper waggled a finger at him. The finger he waggled extended from a gloved hand that looked so human. The black leather-gloved hand emerged from a sleeve that hung to the wrist, concealing whatever band and sigils might lie beneath. “It’s not so bad as all that. Time moves differently here. An hour in this place is but a minute in your world. You’ve been here for six hours, including your exhausted little nap. As far as your family knows you’ve only been absent for six minutes. Maybe they think you’re dawdling in the bathroom.”

  “I don’t want to be here.”

  “I know. I can hear it in your voice. You worry for your family, you don’t want them to be concerned at your absence, that’s what you say. It’s true as well. But just as much, you’re scared and confused and want to escape. I can offer you that escape, but I’m sorry to say, you’ll need to adjust to this reality for a little while.”

  “What do you want then? What’s your price?”

  The Shopkeeper’s tone became brighter and eager. “That’s more like it! Let’s talk like businessmen! Yes, sir, we’re here to do business. I have something I don’t need and you do. You need to have something I need. You don’t have it yet, but you’re a resourceful fellow, you could come to have it.”

  “What? Anything!”

  “Ah now, that’s no way to start a bargain! You’re lucky it’s with me that you’re doing your first deal! Would you say that to a car salesman? Or an old lady hawking her china at a yard sale? No! You’d feign disinterest and remain aloof. Remember that. Never tell them you’ll give them anything. Though… in this case it will cost almost everything…”

  Tiller heard his voice become firm, frustration spilling out. “Just name your price.”

  “We trade in gold and sigils here. I’ll tell you my price. Let’s say each level is worth ten of the last. I’ll trade what you want for 100,000 Ash sigils, or 10,000 Cinder sigils, 1,000 Blaze sigils, and so on, all the way to Nova. You want to go home, I’ll trade everything you want for one Nova sigil.”

  The scale of what the being asked was lost on Tiller. His mind raced to try to comprehend the massiveness of this.

  The Shopkeeper went on, “Most would trade 100 gold coins for an Ash sigil of any use. So we could also set the price at 10 million gold.”

  Tiller had no frame of reference. He couldn’t quantify this. What he could comprehend was that it sounded impossible. Or that, at least, it would take an impossibly long time.

  The Shopkeeper leaned forward. “Yes, you’re right if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking. You could be years gathering my fee. Lifetimes even. But remember a year here is less than a week at home. You have the time…”

  Tiller shuddered, “I don’t want to… I can’t be away from them for a year…”

  The Shopkeeper held his arms wide and shrugged apologetically. Then he leaned forward again, resting his hands on the little shelf, leaving all the way out of the wind, his bird mask inching closer to Tiller’s face. It was the skull of something, he could see that. He could see eyes staring at him from the sockets of the skull. They seemed like human eyes. Like his own.

  “You can bring me all of that. The sigils or the coin. Or… there’s one other thing I’d make the trade for. You told me you’d give anything for what I have. Well, Tiller, there is one thing I’d give anything for as well. And I don’t mind telling you. If you can get it for me, then I’ll give you anything you want.”