The Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

objects had become a buying and selling of magical objects: that the Market was not about a crusade anymore but about earning a living.
    Everyone pretended the world was different than it was. Nick supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. After all, most people did not even know magic existed. People were good at being blind.
    The voice continued: “Magicians give victims to demons, which means that demons will give them anything they want. The people of the Market can only summon demons in the dance. We would prefer not to summon them at all, but we are desperate. The demons will come because they are desperatetoo, so hungry for our world that anything is better than nothing, but they will give very little in exchange. So we have to stand against the magicians armed with nothing but the information we can gather from demons and little magic toys. These are not attractive odds, which is why I think we should start giving bodies to the demons for the greater good. We can start with people who ask stupid questions.”
    Merris Cromwell emerged from the recesses of her dim and crowded stall, her dress sweeping the ground as she came. She wore her talisman as a brooch, crystals and bones and silk threads forming an intricate pattern under frosted glass, and no other jewelry. She was not the type who depended on anything someone else provided, so she had a scarlet-screened lamp attached to the front of her own stall. Crimson-tinted light fell on her face, on the almost rectangular jaw and the gray-streaked hair, scraped back from a forehead the shape of a cathedral dome.
    Everyone in the Goblin Market had a specialty. Phyllis sold her chimes, the Davies family told fortunes, the Morrises did metalwork, and the silent twins sold words in every form, all the books and tablets and scrolls you could dream of. Merris’s stall was loaded with what looked like specimens from every stall. She specialized in being the best.
    â€œShe’s joking,” Alan explained to Mae. “Merris, this is Mae and Jamie.”
    Merris unbent slightly. “Alan’s young lady, I presume?”
    Mae actually blushed. “Er—no.”
    â€œYoung Nicholas’s, then,” Merris said wearily. “What they all see in you, I cannot imagine.”
    Nick leaned against the stall and smirked at her. “You’ll never know until you try.”
    Merris gave him a quelling look, and Alan nobly distracted her. “They’re people we’re trying to help. Merris, Nick is going to dance tonight. We need a speaking charm.”
    She thought for a moment, and then leaned over to produce a clay tablet from the heaps of her stall. “I want the translation by next month,” she said. “Don’t let Nicholas touch it; it happens to be five thousand years old.”
    Alan glanced at it and nodded, and only then did she press a gleaming white shell on a chain into Alan’s palm and close his fingers over it. Merris Cromwell was the only seller at the Goblin Market who never accepted money. She traded in favors. She had enough money, though nobody knew where she got it. Her currency was power.
    â€œAlan, what language is that?” Mae asked, peering at the tablet and looking excited. No wonder Alan’s little crush was so persistent. Nick hadn’t realized she was a big nerd.
    â€œSumerian,” Alan said.
    â€œThe oldest written language in the world, from the world’s first civilization,” Merris explained condescendingly. “It was the written language for Babylon as well. Half of what we know about magic comes from Sumerian records. I do not know what they teach you children in school these days.”
    Mae looked impressed. “You can read Sumerian?”
    Nick believed that Merris Cromwell was as fond of Alan as she could be fond of something that was not a magical artifact, but she was a businesswoman. She looked extremely bored by the exchange of Sumerian sweet nothings and