‘Excuse me?’

‘Will you be in Losoto a week from now?’

She shook her head. ‘My ship leaves tomorrow.’

The shopkeeper threw up his hands with mock regret. Suddenly he seemed taller and wilder, an enormous blue-lipped djinn at the centre of the universe. Lanterns suspended from the ceiling whirled around his head like flaming bolas. His eyes blazed. ‘But you’ll miss the rarest treasure of them all. My agent in Valcinder is sending me a jealous knife. They dragged it up from sixty fathoms down. A man died to procure it, and I am told it is superb.’

Her head spun. ‘Is it an Unmer artefact? What does it do?’

‘What does it do? The jealous knife allows two lovers to exchange tactile sensation. Prick each partner’s finger and thereafter each will experience the other’s pleasure or pain. Thus a lonely wife might please her husband across great gulfs of separation, or a brave man endure the pain of childbirth in his woman’s stead.’

‘But why is it called-’

He made a dismissive gesture. ‘The effect is everlasting. Relationships are not.’

Perhaps Ida could remain a few days and return home on a later boat? She had spent so much money already on this trip, but she absolutely had to have that knife. And possibly an aura or two, an Unmer sonnet, a dragon’s eye, or a few vials of passion drained from a corpse. Leave the gold to the magpies; she would indulge her taste for Unmer sorcery. Yes. She simply must stay. She was about to say as much when she heard a great commotion from another part of the market. A woman screamed.

The shopkeeper stared past her, over the tops of the nearest shelves. And then he turned and walked briskly away down the aisle.