Sunshine

It must have been Paulie’s influence, but I was positively humming a tune—an old folk song about keeping a vampire talking till sunrise: not one of your brighter vampires—while I burrowed through a big sagging cardboard box of junk. Chipped china teacups. Dented tin trays. Small splintery wooden boxes with lids that no longer closed. A bottle opener shaped like a dragon with an extremely undershot lower jaw and pink glass eyes. Pink. The Dragon Anti-Defamation Society should hear about this.

At the bottom, when I touched it, it fizzled right through me, like I’d put my arm in a cappuccino machine. I knew it had to be some kind of ward—nonwarding charms are kind of stickier—but a live ward shouldn’t be in the bottom of a box of cheap junk at a garage sale. Maybe it had fallen out of one of the splintery boxes. I hesitated, then picked it up to get a better look. Gingerly. It had now got my attention, so presumably it wouldn’t feel the need to scramble my arm like an egg again.

I didn’t recognize the style or the design. It was an oval, not quite the length of the palm of my hand, with a slightly raised edge, the whole of it thick and heavy, like an old coin, before the mints got mean and started stamping out pennies that sometimes bent if you dropped them edgewise on a hard floor. It was silver, I thought, or plate; it was so tarnished I couldn’t make out clearly what was on it, except that something was. Three somethings: one each on top, middle, and bottom, rather like an old Egyptian glyph. The only thing I could say for sure was that they weren’t any of the standard Other-preventive sigils I knew of, nor the all-purpose circle-star-and-cross one.

The most interesting thing was that it was live. Very live. Wards aren’t necessarily as master-specific as most charms, and if they aren’t actively in use they can molder quietly for a long time and still be capable of being wakened and doing some warding; but even one that’s been tuned to you specifically shouldn’t leap avidly out at you and wag its tail like a dog wanting to go for a walk.

I could have put it back. I could have taken it to someone in charge and said “You’ve made a mistake. This one still works.” But I didn’t. It seemed to like lying there in my hand. Don’t be ridiculous, I thought. It’s not responding to me personally.

As a soldier in the dented-tin-tray army they shouldn’t be expecting real money for it, but that could only be because they hadn’t noticed it was live. It was still worth a try. I took the two books and the tarnished ward to the suspicious-looking character at the card table with the rusty money box, who snatched them out of my hands as if he knew I was trying something on. But he was so preoccupied with whether or not he should sell me Altar of Darkness (in which it takes the heroine four hundred pages to die), which was certainly worth more than the seventeen blinks for two, which is what the sign on the drooping book table said, that he barely registered my little glyph. I’d done piously outraged innocence when he started haranguing me about Altar and a few of his other customers scowled at him and muttered about fairness. I won that round. So when he looked at the glyph and said “fifty blinks” I sniffed so he would know that I knew he was a brigand and a bandit, and let it pass. He knew more about books. Even a dead ward made out of silver plate was worth more. A blink is a dollar, and has been since after the Wars, when our economy went to pieces, and the average paycheck disappeared in the blink of an eye.

What was more interesting was that he’d touched the glyph and hadn’t said “Wow! That was like putting my hand in a cappuccino machine!”

Aimil had been watching my performance with a straight face. “Well done,” she said, when we got back to the car. “Dark Blood Four as two for seventeen blinks! Zora will be mad with jealousy. Now what is that little thing?‘’ I was balancing my glyph on the top of the books, and I watched as she picked it up. That Mr. Rusty Money Box hadn’t registered anything was one thing; if Aimil didn’t register either it was something else.

She didn’t say anything about a feeling like having her funny bone hit with a hammer. “Hmm. It’s quite—appealing, isn’t it? Even all blackened like this.”

“Appealing”? Maybe it had decided that making people’s hair stand on end wasn’t such a good way of making friends and influencing people. “Can you figure out any of what’s on it?”

She frowned, turning it this way and that in the light. “No clue. Maybe after you get it polished.”