“Not yet, but it won’t be long. He’s at the Crystal Bar, chatting on Gala. He still thinks one of these days he’ll get her for free.”
“If he does, he’ll be disappointed.” Kierendal rose and stretched, arching her back. “Actual passion interferes with her technique. Zakke?”
Her stonebender houseboy instantly appeared in the doorway, all broad shoulders and neatly shaved weak chin; he’d been eavesdropping, as usual—it was part of his job. “Yes, Kierendal?”
“Tell the kitchen I’ll be wanting brunch. Whatever they have that’s alive—oysters will do. And a fresh comb of honey—Tup will be joining me, I think.” As she spoke, a mist swirled and coalesced around her, draping like cloth from her bony arms.
Zakke nodded and ticked his fingers, making mental notes. He was a sweet boy, really, if not too bright. And he was very strong and loyal; Kierendal decided impulsively on the spot to finally let him grow in his traditional stonebender beard to cover that unfortunate chin.
Now she stood motionless and built her image; it was a simple process, especially now—the page of Hamman’s book she’d studied that very morning had provided an interesting twist in substantiating a Fantasy. She opened her Shell to the Flow and drew it around her as a lesser woman might draw silk. It wrapped her lovingly, gently concealing, enveloping, coloring the air in which she stood with sheer and translucent pastel.
While her hands pulled the mist into the apparent solidity of cloth, they also stroked her body into the shape she desired. As she did this, her coiled metallic hair seemed to unbind itself and flow in beautiful curls—now definitely golden—about shoulders that had a touch of human color to them now, and a soft roundness that matched the breasts she had massaged into a swelling feminine curve.
When the process was complete, she still appeared exotic—still obviously of the First Folk, unquestionably primal, with the slant of her now violet eyes and the pronounced points at the tips of her ears—but there was a gentle quality of innocence in the fullness of her lips, a softer texture to her gold-touched cheeks, a sweet arc to her hip that would catch at the heart of any man. She now hid behind a face that had never been touched by the frown of thought.
She smiled as she altered the drape of her illusionary clothing with a twist of her mind and a hand that followed it. It would amuse her to walk naked among her unsuspecting staff and clientele. And it would amuse her even more that Pischu would have to follow her, knowing she was naked.
“Well. Let us see if we can convince Lucky Janner that this is not his lucky day.”
Zakke opened the door; Pischu stepped respectfully aside. After only a short walk down two flights of stairs and along a guarded corridor, Kierendal entered her kingdom.
Alien Games was a fairyland of vice. Rails of gleaming brass surrounded the gaming pits that dimpled the floor. Three wide steps of glistening purple-veined marble circled each pit like a bull’s-eye. Swivel-hipped girls and flat-bellied boys—all in scant clothing revealing their astonishing grace and beauty—ferried trays of cocktails and various other intoxicants over carpets of crushed red velvet. These servers, human and primal, were no less intoxicating than the contents of their trays, and no less available—and in some cases, substantially less expensive. Five huge crystal chandeliers held no candles but radiated a soothing amber light that seemed to have no definite source. Even now, well before noon, the gaming pits were largely filled with crowds of sweating men and women watching the tumble of dice or flip of cards with the bloodshot concentration of hungover hawks.
Those clients not engaged in gambling, or in drinking themselves blind at one of the seven bars, all watched the show. Up on the narrow thrust stage that projected above the gaming floor, an apparently human female with a glorious spray of raven hair took well-acted pleasure from a pair of male treetoppers. Nearing the end of this particular performance, she was already nude and bathed in sweat, trembling with feigned passion, while the treetoppers swirled around her on the blurs of their diaphanous wings like oversize hummingbirds. They carried silken cords and trailed them across her body—binding and unbinding her, slithering knotted silk over the translucent purity of her flesh.
This “girl” was one of Kierendal’s best performers; even now, men and women both were rising from their seats to take the hands of nearby whores. Kierendal watched the show for a moment, smiling to herself and shaking her head; if only those guests who’d become so aroused in watching her knew that she was actually a fifty-year-old ogrillo bitch with flaccid dugs and finger-sized warts all over her body.
Similarly, the purple-veined marble was in truth splintered pine, weathered to the color of dirt; the gleaming brass was actually rusty cast iron, and the service staff were pox-raddled and dull eyed, most of them broken-down ex-whores.
All this illusion stirred the Flow into fantastic whirls of energy, but did not deplete it; it all was powered by a single shiny black griffinstone no larger than the first joint of Kierendal’s thumb—which, she reminded herself, she’d need to replace later this month.
Kierendal paused in the doorway long enough to be joined by her three overt guards—massive ogres with unfiled tusks, wearing light chainmail painted with the scarlet and brass motif of the house and carrying wickedly spiked morningstars slung at their waists. All of Alien Games’overt security staff were ogres, or their nocturnal cousins, trolls; they were uniformly stupid, but huge and terrifically strong—and the sure knowledge that troublemakers would not only be killed but eaten helped Kierendal maintain an orderly business. She had never been robbed.
The overwhelming menace of the ogres also allowed her to let her guests go armed, as disagreements rarely became fatal before the ogres could break them up. And letting men keep their swords improved the whoring; men are universally friskier when they have their steel penises belted at their sides.
She extended her Shell and twitched the Flow in currents toward three of her coverts—two humans and one fey who were flawlessly impersonating innocent guests. The fey and one human looked up at what they perceived as her whisper in their ear. At the Crystal Bar, she sent. The one in the slashed-velvet doublet and shoulder-draw sword is Berne. Get close and stick there. She sent the other human to stand behind Lucky Janner in the bones pit.
Even as her coverts approached, Berne pushed himself away from the bar, giving up on Gala for now; he strode toward the bones pit, the diagonally shoulder-slung scabbard that held a long straight blade slapping at his back. The coverts were too experienced to announce themselves by a sudden change of direction, and so Kierendal hurried to reach the pit first, ogres stomping at her heels.
Janner, the deep, slanting scar across his nose glowing white against a face flushed with victory, grinned fiercely at Kierendal as she approached.
“I’b habing a gread day, Kier! Gread! Can’d belieb id!” Due to the hatchet wound that had destroyed his sinuses, Lucky Janner perpetually sounded like a man with a severe head cold.
Kierendal modulated her voice into the aristocratic tones she used for guest contact. “Of course we are very pleased at your success, Janner. Today, your nickname is well deserved. Can I perhaps tear you away from the table for a minute? Business of mutual interest . . . ?”
“Innda minnid. I’b onnda roll.”
Kierendal watched Janner’s clumsy gumming of the dice with distaste. What in the world was he using? Snot?
Berne glided down the steps into the pit just as Janner made his point. A cold ball gathered in Kierendal’s stomach; Berne walked with the loose-limbed dangerous grace of a puma, and his pale eyes had the fixed reptilian stare of a reflexive killer. His Shell flickered scarlet and white with barely repressed violence.
He’d been created Count only a few months before, but Kierendal’s sources informed her that he was one of the new Emperor’s closest confidants—some reports claimed he was Ma’elKoth’s personal assassin—and he was known to command the Grey Cats. Every time she looked at him, Kierendal well believed the ta
le that Berne had received Monastic training—his instinctive weight-forward balance and perfect kinesthetic awareness were both convincing and unsettling. His swordplay was already legendary: he never wore armor in battle or duel, depending solely on his blade-skills for defense.
Whatever the truth about him might be, he was unquestionably one of the most dangerous men in the Empire. It was widely said that no one had ever lived to cross him twice.
He nodded expressionlessly to Kierendal as he slid into a place at the table; he didn’t spare the ogres even a glance. He laid a stack of royals against Janner’s next throw.
“Play or pass, buttface. Let’s go.”
“Buddface . . . ?” The color that rose up Janner’s neck was a deeper scarlet than the flush of victory.
“Has a crack in it, no?” Berne laughed. He was always his own best audience. “Tell you, though, if my butt was that ugly I’d never get laid again—be ashamed to take my pants off.” Now the two coverts were finally coming down the steps behind him, much to Kierendal’s relief.
“Oh, comb ond,” Janner said, a wild look in his eyes, “if your boyfriend realdy loved you, he’d make allowances . . .”
Other men around the table snickered into their hands, none of them foolish enough to laugh openly. Berne’s face froze. He stepped back from the table, his left hand drifting up toward the hand-and-a-half sword hilt above his right shoulder. Janner squared off, grasping the hilt of the shortsword at his belt. Berne’s Shell had gone crimson—Janner might be dead in a heartbeat.
“Gentlemen.” Kierendal gestured and stepped smoothly between them. Only the barest flicker of Berne’s eyes betrayed the fact that the two coverts at his back each now held the point of a dagger against his kidneys.
“Berne, Lucky Janner is an honored guest, as well as a personal friend. You will not kill him within my establishment.” Berne’s only reply was to rake the illusionary curves of her body with his eyes, from knees to neck, with slow and deliberate insult. Mm, she thought. So that’s how it is. All right. She turned to Janner.
“As for you,” she said in her most scathing tone, “if you must give your life simply to score a point off this man, at least be witty enough that I’ll get a laugh when I repeat it in your eulogy.”
Janner began to protest; Kierendal ignored him. A sudden clatter near the street door drew her eyes. One of the new Faces, a stone-bender female she’d recruited since taking over and moving operations to Alientown, had come sprinting up to the fey who worked in the coat check. With no more than a thought, Kierendal extended a tendril of her Shell to touch his, drawing only enough Flow to power the effect, and shifted her consciousness to his body so she could see and hear the stonebender. He expressionlessly acknowledged her presence with a welcoming swirl of Flow.
The stonebender’s mouth was painted with rich crimson blood that still trickled from her nose, which looked broken. Her neatly trimmed goatee was caked with clots. Her Westerling was thick with the accent of the Gods’ Teeth. “. . . askink me which were Kierendal’s chamber, which door, which winder. He wanted se knock codes . . . he t’ought I was unconscious, so he left and I ran, I ran . . .”
“All right, it’s all right,” the fey said soothingly, his slim hands on her powerful shoulders. “Who was he? Can you describe him?”
Here the Faces’ training paid off; she had memorized her attacker’s appearance even while she was being interrogated and beaten. “Half again a foot taller san me. Straight black hair, shot grey at temples. Dark skin, black eyes, mustache and jawline beard. Broken nose, wis a slantwise scar. And fast. Faster san I’ve ever seen. He had knives, but he used his fists.”
Kierendal thought, that sounds like Caine, and slowly it dawned on her that it could be Caine. She’d heard about the sudden Imperial bounty on his head, had suspected that he must have been in town—and only then did she connect the thoughts that swirled around her.
Caine was asking about me!
With a gasp she found herself back within her own head; her knees were weak and her bowels loose. Panic-thoughts yammered a stunning babble: Who could have hired him? The Imperials? No, they would have sent the Cats for her. The Monasteries, Caine usually worked for the Monasteries, but she had done nothing to attract their lethal disfavor—had she? No, it must be—ah, it was the King of fucking Cant! That bastard! Wasn’t Caine supposed to be hooked into the Subjects? But why? Why now? Or was it the Monasteries after all? Had she told one too many truths about Ma’elKoth?
Stern mental discipline swiftly mastered her panic; she had more immediate issues with which to deal. First things first.
Kierendal prided herself on her ability to think and act in an organized fashion in the midst of a crisis. In only the time it took to breathe deeply in and slowly out again, she had sketched out the rudiments of a plan of defense. She once again reached into the Flow and established contact with the fey in coat check.
In minutes Alien Games would be surrounded, outside, by an invisible army of Faces in teams of three, one member of each three either primal or treetopper for swiftness of communication. The pissoir in the street outside would be covered inside and out, as well as the shaft that sank below it into the limestone caves that underlay the city. The roofs of the surrounding buildings would be scattered with Faces either present or in clear line-of-fire with loaded crossbows. Every combat-capable staff member within the casino would be alerted, and pairs of guards would be placed in every corridor in plain sight of each other. She’d already rejected the idea of calling the Constabulary; worth more than the two-hundred-royal reward would be the knowledge of who wanted her dead badly enough to hire Caine. The coat-check fey met her eyes across the room and nodded his acknowledgment.
She sent: “Use her story for the current description. Pass it through the ranks. Keep me informed. I’ll be in my apartment; use the five-code when you knock. Now move!”
He moved. She let the link dissipate and returned her attention to the immediate events here in the bones pit.
Janner was still talking. She had no idea what he’d said, and less interest. She flicked a finger at the ogre who stood near her right shoulder, and he clamped his massively taloned hands around Janner’s arms and lifted the struggling little man off the floor. “Hey! Hey—!”
“You’re done for the day. Get him out of the pit.”
The ogre hoisted Janner and ponderously carried him up the steps onto the main floor. Kierendal paced beside him.
“You can’d do dthis!”
“I don’t have time to handjob your wounded feelings,” she said, low enough that Berne wouldn’t overhear. “Have a drink at the bar. Grab a bite in the dining room. My treat. Just watch your mouth and stay away from Berne.”
“I can handle himb—”
“No, you can’t. Shut up.” She reached up, took his chin in her surprisingly strong hand, and dug her fingernails into his cheeks. “And stay away from the dice pit until you learn to cheat properly, you stupid shit.” She waved a hand, and the ogre let Janner go with a shove that sent him stumbling off toward the Silver Bar.
“Kierendalll . . .”
Berne leaned motionless on the edge of the knucklebones field, wearing his mocking smile. The pair of coverts were still at his back, daggers still pricking his kidneys. “Can I move now, Kierie? Do I stand here all day?”
She made a sound in her throat that was almost a whine of frustration. “Apologies, Count Berne,” she said. With a wave of a hand she instructed the coverts to release him.
He shrugged once, like he was shaking tension out of his shoulders, and then he paced toward her with that hungry-puma walk of his.
“I have to kill him, y’know,” he said easily. “He insulted me, and I’m obliged to pay him out. It’s the, ahh, honor of the nobility. You understand.”
This, at least, she knew precisely how to handle. She took a step to meet him and looked up meltingly into his eyes. “Please, my lord,” she said with her hands resting on his heavi
ly muscled chest, “I would take it as a personal favor if you could let this pass, forgotten.”
His mocking smile took on a twist of contempt as his arms slid around her slim back and he forced his lips down onto hers. His tongue pushed into her mouth, probing with slimy insistence, and she knew well how to pant and squirm as his hand cupped her illusionary breast.
This was insult deeper than the last, but she had once been as good at her former profession as Berne was at his current one; he never suspected how revolting she found him. When his hand slid roughly down between her legs, she released the tactile part of her illusion of clothing. He found his hand pressed directly to the lips of her vagina, while his other felt the smooth and flawless skin of her back.
He stiffened, then lifted his head and stared down at her with moist surprise. The contempt in his eyes now mingled with sudden lust—contempt and lust that seemed to feed on each other so that both grew together.
“You know what?” he said thickly. “I think I like you after all. I’ll do you that favor, this time. Just remember what you owe me.”
She demurely lowered her head to his shoulder. “Oh, you know us elves—” Using the human slur name for her people gave her not the faintest twinge. “—we have long memories. Allow me to sponsor your morning’s recreation. Tallin, five hundred for the Count.”
The click of the tiles as the croupier pushed them across the field drew Berne’s eyes, but then he looked back down into hers. “A difficult choice,” he murmured.
“You’re very gallant,” she said. “Please, enjoy yourself.”
He shrugged. “Another time, then.”
“Of course.”
She turned crisply and headed for the service door as Berne returned to the pit and warmed the dice. She felt a certain sense of accomplishment: a bit of quick, efficient lick’n’flick to keep Berne happy and Janner alive? Cheap at twice the price.
But she had no time to enjoy minor victories.
Her ogres were close on her heels in a liquid rustle of chainmail; subtle gestures summoned four coverts and the pair of treetopper showboys, who were now on a break. She stopped in the doorway and spoke in the clipped, decisive tone of a feya accustomed to obedience, repeating the orders she’d sent to the fey in coat check.
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