If there was one thing Keeliai knew how to do well, it was bustling marketplaces. This one vaguely reminded Skulduggery of a seventeenth-century bazaar he’d been to once. None of the stores were inside buildings, and none of the wares were under lock and key. The kedan shopkeepers seemed less concerned with theft, and more concerned with crowding as many shoppers around their stall as possible. The sun was just beginning to set, so the paper lanterns were lit and swaying about in the slight breeze blowing in from the Turtle’s edge.

Skulduggery, for his part, was just observing. He didn’t need any of the food or obscure artifacts being sold. He’d already found a kedan seamstress, a small blue woman living in the Earth Sector, who’d agreed to tailor him a new suit. The lack of any sort of dry-cleaning was annoying, but he’d live. Of more concern to him were the spare clothes he’d found to wear in the meantime, which wasn’t so much a suit as a traditional Chinese changshan. And it felt odd.

One of the kedan outside a clothing store selling more of what Skulduggery was reluctantly wearing caught his attention. Not because she was furtive, or standing apart from the surge of the crowd; a good third of the kedan in any given place were like that. It was more that she clearly wasn’t interested in the clothes, and yet hadn't moved for five minutes.

The most likely explanation was that she was waiting for someone. Skulduggery didn’t have much else to do, so he wandered over to the stall and started looking at the jackets, watching her out of the corner of his nonexistent eye.