Karlsen’s shop was a little harder to find – the Neumarket sprawled across several ragged squares and streets, and its dirty shop-fronts were obscured by a multitude of stalls, wagons and stacks of crates. The people here dressed poorer, spoke less, and were more numerous, the boiling crowd of human traffic threatening to separate the trio more than once.
In the end, they found it in a strange, crooked corner of the market – its windows had lost their glass and been boarded up as a consequence, but the multitude of prints in the mud outside the door suggested it still saw a great volume of custom. A battered sign had been nailed up over the entrance:
Karl Karlsen’s blackpowder Emporium
Powder and Shotte is what We’ve Gotte
Pushing open the door, Seth stifled a cough at the strong chemical smell that assailed him from within – the inside of the shop was dark (due to the lack of windows), a single, glass-shielded lantern burning on the counter. Like Greitling’s, the place was festooned with blackpowder weapons – unlike Greitling’s, they seemed in a uniformly poor state of repair, for the most part stacked like tumbledown piles of lumbers in corners or crates.
A sooty face that was half obscured by a ferocious, brindled beard of sharp black hairs popped up above the counter like a Jack-in-the-box, Karl Karlsen’s grimy face looking around at his ‘customers’ with sharp, jerky movements. The man was at least a head shorter than even Illiiya, almost mistakeable for a Dwarf – scuttling round to the side of the counter, he gave them all an appraising look, taking particular interest in the elf.
“You come to buy powder? Guns?” he snapped. “What’s yer business?”