Days had passed, and I found The Market growing stranger the deeper I went.

  Gone were the familiar stalls of dried herbs and trinket charms, the cackling snake-oil merchants and ink-splattered scribes. Here, the alleys narrowed and twisted, the stones were damp beneath my boots, the light more unusual than mere flame-lit lanterns. The signs above shops bore no language I could read. Some bore no signs at all.

  I kept one hand tucked inside of my coat where the dagger rested in its sheath. It was small, an old, almost rusty thing I'd taken to carrying once I realized how easily the Market lost its rules the farther one wandered. I didn’t like it. But this wasn't Market I knew or could trust. It had been years since I felt like this, since just after the orphanage.

  A memory flickered forth related to that thought; Lys, younger, sitting with me on the roof of the orphanage we both grew up in, swinging our legs off a roof top and whispering stories to each other under the moon. We'd made a pact there, over bread stolen late at night from the kitchens: to stay together, no matter what. No one would forget the other. No one would be left behind. Never again.

  The song was louder now, this deep in the market. I followed it around a corner and saw the shop. I knew, at once, that this is where I was being led.

  A squat structure of crooked beams and slumped walls, stitched together from driftwood and dark moss. Tiny mushrooms clung to every surface; pink shelf caps, fat white domes, fungal fronds that swayed in the breeze. The door was crooked on its hinge, and the faint scent of mycelium bled into the stone around it.

  I took a deep breath, and finally worked up the nerve to step inside.

  The air was thick, warm, and smelled of composting wood masked by a light incense. The shelves were cluttered with jars, burlap pouches, hanging braids of drying fungi. A single lantern pulsed, the light from within emanating from a jelly-like spore, casting everything in amber light as it undulated erratically.

  And behind the counter, I saw a man. Sort of.. a man.

  A figure shriveled by time and too many years working in the damp. His robes were patchwork burlap and faded wool, stained with earth. His back was twisted in on itself, one shoulder far higher than the other. But what struck me most was that mushrooms grew from him. Pale caps were scattered across his back, as if they were natural to him. His fingers were weathered, the nails cracked and dark. And when he breathed heavily as he worked around the shop, it sounded like roots rustling back and forth.

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  He turned toward me, his eyes murky and unreadable beneath a heavy brow. And he smiled creepily, slow and knowing, as if he knew I wasn't just some random walk in customer.

  “You’re looking for something,” he rasped. "or... someone?"

  “A woman,” I said. “Her name is Lys. She disappeared a week ago. She had dark hair, eyes dark like river-stones. She was a painter, a lover of mushrooms ... and my lover.”

  The man’s smile didn’t change.

  “I’ve seen many faces. And many lovers of mushrooms. But none quite like that.”

  I stepped closer. “She heard something. A song. And so did I. A choir of low unnatural voices. From somewhere deep inside the Market, I think. I hear it here, now, louder than ever.”

  For the first time, the smile wavered.

  “You... you two heard them?” he asked, voice quieter now. “You’re not supposed to, not unless…”

  He trailed off. Turned back toward his shelf, suddenly busy rearranging a jar of pickled toadstools, silent.

  “You saw her,” I said, voice rising. “I know you did. What is it about the song? Why is it bringing me here?”

  “I can not say,” he said. “You should leave. The song is not meant for you. I can see that.”

  I opened my mouth to argue, but that’s when I saw it.

  A canvas, half-hidden behind a string of drying caps. A forest aglow in gold. A mushroom with a crown of petals. Red barked mushroom trees growing together like cathedral vaults. The brushstrokes, the light; they were hers. Lys.

  I moved without thinking, vaulting over the counter in a fluid single motion. The dagger was in my hand like muscle memory from old, the blade pressed against the softest part of his throat. He flinched, with fear, but mostly resignation. There was no denying it now.

  “Tell me where she is,” I said through my teeth. “Tell me now. Or I swear to every god and goddess that you won’t have breath to speak with ever again.”

  He didn’t blink. But he sighed, unwillingly to continue the facade any longer.

  “There is a place,” he said. “Here. Beneath the Market. Beneath the stone, beneath the roots. It does not show itself to just anyone. But if she heard the song. That means it has already chosen her.”

  I dropped the dagger from his throat, and he shuffled aside, motioning toward a ragged stretch of wall draped in thick moss. As I approached, he pulled the veil aside, revealing a passageway that wound slowly under the ground, lined in pulsing mycelium and drifting spores.

  “They call it the Underbloom,” he said. “The choir sings so it may be found. But only those utterly devout stay.”

  I hesitated. But only for a moment.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked, eyes still sharp, but holding back tears.

  The old man’s smile returned, thin and tired.

  “Because I’ve seen what they become. And I thought… maybe it would be better if you didn’t.”