“You’re looking at the tunnel’s first trick. It’s become the tent’s entire interior.”
“How do you know that?” Pircifir asked her.
“It’s a time thing, brother,” Grimalkin told him.
From behind them came a low, self-satisfied chuckle, and they turned to see the barker. “You didn’t go inside,” he chided them.
“It would eat us,” Khorii said.
“Don’t be silly, little girl. It’s perfectly safe.” He brushed past them and stepped inside. “Too close for you? How about a window right—here?” With a stick, he drew a domed shape on the side of the “tent,” crisscrossing it with marks. The marks sucked in the material between them so that it stood in ridges. At first, the film left between the ridges was opaque, but gradually it became transparent, and Khorii saw a spitting camel walking past, led by his trainer.
“A higher ceiling? Watch!” He swished the stick in a circle above his head, and the cone lengthened, then, as the swishes became broader, widened again until the ceiling was approximately a meter higher. “Perhaps you’d be happier in a dome?” he asked, and ran around the room, his coattails flapping as he poked and swished at the wall until it spread into a dome shape.
“A castle?” Grimalkin asked.
“A small one, maybe,” the man said. “This is just a small tunnel, after all. I’d have to feed it a lot more tents and cages to have enough to make something larger. But it has lots of bigger brothers and sisters where it comes from.”
“Where would that be?” Grimalkin asked.
“A trade secret, my hairy friend. A trade secret.”
“What if we wished to place a custom order?” Pircifir asked.
“I’m a showman, not a merchant,” the man said. “I search the universe for these wonders, but they come from a great distance, and I’ve no intention of going back there.”
Pircifir named quite a hefty sum, but the man said, “You have little insight into the soul of an artist like myself, sir. My assistant told me that your little friend here ruined the symbiont effect of my serpent, and now you wish me to disclose the secret source of my other act. I couldn’t possibly consider that without a truly intriguing and appealing replacement—such as the unicorn girls there.”
“We’re not—” Khorii began, but Pircifir crooked his finger to Grimalkin and called him over.
“You can’t sell us,” Khorii protested.
Grimalkin reached back to pat her arm reassuringly, and she caught his warning glance and a flicker of eye movement in the direction of the barker. Tuning in, she wasn’t surprised to find that the showman had more than simple bargaining on his mind.
“Once I have those twins caged, I can move them far away before their owners discover that I’ve told them to look in the wrong sector instead of the one where the tunnels were actually found. Maybe I can go back to their planet and get some more and do a really classy act, unicorn princesses in a castle tower kind of thing. Ought to be a big draw, along with these girls making stuff like the snake’s tumor disappear.”
“Did you also catch the real location of the tunnel planet as he thought about it?” Khorii asked Ariin.
“Yes, but I have no intention of telling those two until we’re back safe aboard the ship. I don’t want to be on display again.”
“We might be able to come to an agreement,” Pircifir said. “But you have to throw in your current specimen as well. These girls are quite extraordinary.”
“No way,” the man said. “I need that specimen. I’ll take one of them for revealing the location where you can get your own, and the other one in payment for ruining my snake act. That’s the best I can do.”
“Very well,” Pircifir said. “Your loss. Come along, girls.”
The showman shrugged shoulders unusually broad and muscular for someone of his otherwise-slight build. He smiled philosophically and waved at them, trying to make them think this was