Grundle's Icons

The books cradled her feet; the overcoat lay heavy across her arm; but it was only mid-afternoon, and the color as noise of TerraeAndrae was all about her. Food she did not need; excitement she did. The citizens clad in blue and gold and orange jostled her, the sheep pushed past her, the children ran shouting about her, and the paving stones pushed their way along her shoes. In one of the streets spoking from a trading square, she turned in a circle, looking at the panoply of images. So much movement, she thought: and just outside the gates, all was quiet and empty. Empty was not always undesirable: she could welcome a little empty now, a small space in which to think about everything that was happening. No matter what the wares, how expensive or how cheap the prices: all was mobbed, every store and every stall. Her eyes moved down the shop fronts: dyed woolskins, draped over poles and fingered by buyers… hanks of root vegetables, smelling of dirt and sun, trading hands… strings of deep blue and turquoise, ruby and maroon yellow and periwinkle beads and silk rolled into beads, caressed by seller and eager purchasers…a many-paned window empty of viewers.
Empty? It must be an empty stall – but in all the streets she had walked, she had seen no space empty of buyer and seller. Pushing the overcoat further into the corner of her arms behind the package of boots, she walked along the paving stones, looking at this unusual place.
Grundle’s Icons read a gold-leafed and blue scrolled sign over the doorway. That too was strange: most of the marketers set up bins and poles in the open air. Few had sides to their shops; very few had doors that closed. Her hand was on the door latch before her mind could do more than offer that idea.
The store was closed: the door stuck. No, the door pulled open, but tight in its frame. And she was inside. A center space where customers might stand and bicker or visit. A long counter of dark wood in front of her, that ran the width of the store, and behind it two doorways – one on each end of the wall behind the counter – to a dimmer space she could not see, though there were not curtains on the doorways. The walls on either side of her were filled with closed bins and drawers, from the large ones at the floor, big enough for her to crawl inside, to the small ones near the ceiling. Most of the drawer fronts were square, but several were rectangles, and some were circles or star-shaped, or eight-sided. Each drawer or bin had a handle, and many of them were different from the others: many square-shaped, but some shaped like flowers, or half-moons, sea creatures, trees, tiny sun shapes, and some that looked like stones.
It was dim in the building, dim and smelling of spices: orris and clove, palm heart and sawgrass, with a nose-tickling smell she could not identify.
“It’s curiosity and time,” said a grizzled man behind the counter. “Time. Time’s the main ingredient.”
“Can you hold and compound time?”
“If you know how to do it, you can.”
“Would you want to?”
The man clapped his hands sharply and bits of yellow light flew from them. “Now there’s a questions I’ve not heard in a long time. ‘Would you want to?’ You’re not from here but you’re going to upset the ones who are here if you keep opening your mouth. The Telos would like you. You might even wake him.”