by Duncan Pile
“You want to talk about it?” Gaspi asked.
Emmy paused. “Yes…some of it.”
Gaspi waited patiently; she would talk when she was ready.
“Remember what I did for you at the Measure?” she said.
“’Course.” How could he forget? He’d been badly shocked after the fight to the death against the Skelkans, but Emmy had used her powers to heal his mind.
“I just did the same for Adela.”
Gaspi let out a low whistle. Emmy had talked about it with Jonn at the Measure, but events had conspired against them and she’d never had the chance to try. “Did it work?
Emmy smiled wanly. “I really, really hope so.” She looked exhausted.
“Did something go wrong?”
Emmy shook her head. “No, it went as well as I could have hoped. Adela says she feels different already.”
“So what’s the problem? You seem completely flattened.”
Emmy met his gaze. “I had to go through it with her, memory by memory. I had to see and feel every last moment.”
Gaspi was aghast. “As if you were there?”
Emmy shook her head. “As if it were me.”
Gaspi went cold. He had no idea what to say. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. It hadn’t been long since Emmy had recovered from her own trauma, and she still seemed fragile to him. How could she be expected to deal with something so unspeakably horrid?
“Are you gonna be alright?”
“I think so,” she said. “There was some innate protection in the magic that kept me from the worst of it.”
“But don’t you feel…” Gaspi started, but Emmy placed her forefinger on his lips.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I just need to be with you.”
“Okay love,” he said, drawing her into his arms once more. As he sat there, stroking her hair, he found himself wishing that Emmy had been given a different magical gift. Anything but healing! She’d nearly killed herself turning her powers against the Darkman, and now she’d been exposed to the very worst of human evil. He couldn’t understand why healing – surely the most selfless of all magical gifts – exacted such a terrible price from those who practiced it.
…
Adela trailed a fingernail along Jonn’s forearm, looking intently into his guileless brown eyes. He caressed her cheek with his thumb, his fingers moving lightly on her neck and raising goose bumps all over her body. He circled the hollow of her throat with a fingertip and traced the line of her collarbone. Adela revelled in it. There was no fearful urge screaming at her to pull away. Instead, she was acutely aware of an entirely different urge, intensifying by the moment.
Jonn’s touch was tentative, nervous even, concern for her evident in his expression, and Adela found herself appreciating his kindness more than ever. He was a gentle man, always putting her needs ahead of his own, but he needn’t be so careful with her any more. Emmy’s spell-work had changed her, freeing her from the terrible fear that had plagued her for so long.
Reaching up, she slid her hands around his neck and pulled him into a kiss. Tenderness gave way to passion, her breath growing ragged. She explored his back with his hands, her fingers tightening instinctively and pulling him nearer.
Jonn drew back, searching her gaze. “Are you sure?”
“I want this,” she breathed, pulling him into another kiss, and this time Jonn didn’t hold back.
…
Jonn sat alone in the Traveller’s Rest, trying to shake off the strange mood that had cast a shadow over his entire day. He should be happy – Adela was finally free of the past. She could touch him and be touched in return. And last night…well, last night had been incredible, but it left him feeling exposed and vulnerable. He sipped his beer and stared out of the window, watching the blurry shapes of people passing by, distorted by bubbles and imperfections in the glass.
He couldn’t figure it out. Why would such a welcome turn of events leave him feeling so odd? Not odd, he decided. Scared. It was more than a little worrying.
He stayed there for another hour, his thoughts going round in circles, before pushing his barely touched pint aside and leaving the snug. He had neither the time nor the inclination for introspection, and decided to leave it well enough alone. Hopefully the mood would pass soon enough.
Fifteen
“He was going to kill me!” Sophia said, as Madame ushered her into the back room.
“It’s not out of character,” Madame muttered, thinking fast. Sophia collapsed into a chair, but Madame pulled her back to her feet. “There’s no time for that,” she said, shoving a cloak into her hands. “Put this on and cover your face.”
Sophia donned the cloak, peering at Madame from the dark depths of the hood. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere safer than here,” Madame said, grabbing another cloak for herself and pulling it over her stout frame. “You’ll see soon enough. Come!”
She left the room and headed away from the brothel’s main hallway. There were noises all around – the thud of footsteps, muted conversation and muffled noises of pleasure – but they reached the back door without being seen. Madame retrieved the key, unlocked it and led Sophia into the rain. “Quickly now, but don’t run.”
She had to hand it to the girl. She’d just been attacked by the most powerful man in the city and managed to keep her composure, rushing silently through the streets at Madame’s side. As for Stringfellow, he was a monster – a man with fetishist desires that, when inflamed by drink, led to perversions that didn’t bear thinking about. Every one of Madame’s girls lived in terror of being summoned by Stringfellow, but he was too powerful to defy. Whenever a girl set out for his tower, those who remained behind clutched icons of the Lady in her absence, praying for her safe return. Most of the time they came back in one piece, if somewhat the worse for wear, but from time to time Stringfellow abandoned himself to his unnatural lusts and they didn’t come back at all.
Madame caught herself tracing the ring of scar tissue around her throat, as she often did in unguarded moments, and angrily pulled her hand away. The memories still haunted her but, if truth be told, they had also shaped her. She had been Stringfellow’s first victim, or at least his first intended victim. The images had been seared onto her consciousness, a more permanent reminder of that night than the ridge of tissue around her neck.
She led Sophia through the streets, thankful for the driving rain which kept others in their homes. The occasional stranger rushed by with their cloak over their heads, but no-one impeded Madame’s progress through the city. Soaked to the skin, they reached their destination at last – a run-down pub called the Happy Drunk, leaning lazily against the city’s western wall. She led Sophia down the dingy alley separating it from the abandoned building to its right until they reached its end, where they were hidden by obscuring darkness. The smell of rotting vegetables filled Madame’s nostrils as she ran her hands over the wall and found the edges of a door. She knocked gently and, when no-one answered, a little louder. Moments later, a bolt was drawn back with a loud snap and the door swung inward. A girl in a dirty apron stood there, her eyes widening when she saw who it was.
“Madame, come in out of the rain,” she said, ushering them inside. She leaned out and peered down the alley before closing the door behind them.
“Thank you Miri,” Madame said, dripping rainwater all over the floor. “This is Sophia.”
“Another one for the caves?”
“Yes, and straight away.”
“Follow me then,” Miri said, beckoning to Sophia.
“I’ll take her myself,” Madame said. “And Miri, you never saw us.”
“’Course,” Miri said, turning and walking away.
Madame led Sophia along a dimly lit corridor and down a flight of stairs into a cellar, which was filled from floor to ceiling with barrels. Most were small enough for a man to wrap his arms around, but a row of larger casks stood against the back wa
ll. Madame crossed the floor and reached behind the furthest cask on the left. Her fingers scrabbled about until they found the catch – a small vertical lever, set into the wood. She gave it a pull and was rewarded with a dull, clunking sound as the front half of the cask cracked open. Madame swung it the rest of the way, revealing a ragged hole in the floor and the topmost rung of a ladder.
“You first,” Madame said, and Sophia slipped into the hole. She climbed swiftly down the ladder and disappeared from sight. Madame followed, stopping only to reach out and pull the cask closed behind her. The catch clunked back into place and she was left in darkness. She descended carefully, counting twelve rungs before stretching out her foot and finding the rocky floor of the cave.
“Sophia,” she called.
“Madame!” a frightened voice responded.
“Just wait a moment – your eyes will adjust.” Even at night, the cave was never truly dark. Large shafts in the porous rock above let in the light of the moon and stars, though on a cloudy night such as this, that light was very dim.
Madame waited until she could make out looming shapes in the darkness. “Take my hand,” she said. Sophia’s small hand slipped into hers, clasping it tightly. Madame led her along the smooth, even path until they rounded a corner and passed into an expansive cavern. It was brighter – not because of the large cave mouth ahead of them, beyond which breakers roared and crashed – but because someone had lit a fire. It flickered merrily at the heart of a cluster of makeshift huts, erected on the far side of the cave. Figures could be seen moving about in the firelight, their shadows magnified to immensity on the wall.
“Leila,” Madame called. Someone near the fire rose to their feet, peering out into the darkness. She was tense, her hand on the hilt of a dagger. Madame and Sophia crossed the cavern floor, and as they passed into the firelight, Leila visibly relaxed.
“Madame,” she breathed, and rushed to embrace her. “It’s so good to see you.”
“And you, my dear,” Madame said. She placed a hand on Sophia’s shoulder. “This is Sophia. She will be joining you.”
“Welcome,” Leila said, kissing her warmly on the cheek. “There’s room in Zoe’s hut – the one on the end. You will be safe here.”
“Thank you,” Sophia said, before turning to Madame and taking her hands in her own. “I can never thank you enough.”
Madame shook her head. “No thanks are needed. We are sisters, all of us. All I ask is that you do your part to support the community here and, if I bring another girl, welcome her as you have been welcomed.”
“I promise,” Sophia said.
“And now I must go,” Madame said.
“Please, won’t you stay a while?” Leila said. “We haven’t seen you in weeks, and besides, we caught a brace of firegills in the Daypool today. Stay and eat with us.”
Madame couldn’t, however much she wanted to. “Not this time, my dear. I must be there in case Stringfellow comes looking for Sophia, or he will suspect me.”
Leila’s face fell. “I understand.”
“I’ll try and come back within the week,” Madame said, Leila’s disappointment tugging at her heartstrings. She reached out and ran a coarse thumb over Leila’s cheek. “Until then,” she said, and walked away into the gloom.
…
Madame sat in her chambers, musing on times gone by. She’d become Madame of her own establishment soon after Stringfellow had tried to kill her. The man was a newly minted council member at the time, and much less sure of himself. Perhaps out of guilt, or maybe to stop her from revealing his proclivities to the general populace, he’d established her as the head of her own brothel – the first new establishment to be licensed in Namert in over a decade. The Brothel’s Guild was a closed sisterhood and kept a chokehold on the industry. Whenever a new pleasure-house sprang up, they strangled it like a weed – all through seemingly legitimate means of course.
They’d tried to do the same to her, attacking her business from the moment the doors opened, but Stringfellow had put several of his best men onto it and thwarted every attempt at sabotage. After the first few deaths, the guild had opened its arms to Madame and the trouble had ended as swiftly as it had begun.
With Stringfellow’s backing, business had been good from the start. He sent plenty of work her way and always hired his own girls from Madame’s stable. There was no denying she had benefitted from his patronage over the years, but she knew it wasn’t from the goodness of his heart. His exclusive relationship with Madame’s brothel was a perfect front, behind which he could explore his dark lusts, some of which were illegal even in Namert. After all his outward benefaction, Madame was well and truly in Stringfellow’s pocket, but unbeknownst to him, she was always looking for a way out.
She lived in fear, wondering if the girls he summoned to his chambers would return. She’d thought about escape time and time again, but the docks were heavily guarded and hemmed in by vast rocky outcrops on either side. The only other exit was the main gate, which was guarded day and night to monitor traffic flowing in and out of the city. Even if she managed to sneak a few of her girls through the gate, there was nowhere they could go. Namert had colonised the surrounding flatlands for twenty miles in every direction, and if a fugitive tried to flee the city they’d be overtaken and captured in minutes. However much she wished otherwise, she was a slave to Stringfellow’s wishes and so were her girls. She lived only to protect them, soldiering through each day and praying for a way out.
When she discovered the existence of the caves, she believed her prayers had been answered. The rumour had reached her ears through the loose lips of a drunken client – not directly of course – her waist had filled out years ago, hiding her curves and leaving her plump as a pillow. No-one paid to sleep with her anymore, which was exactly how she liked it. The client had rambled on to one of her girls, speaking of great caves beneath the city’s western wall; a network of caverns that had been once been used by smugglers but which now lay empty. The drunkard believed them to be natural wonders, vast and beautiful, glittering with crystalline minerals.
Madame had spent many an hour poring over maps in the city archives, trying to discover the location of the caves. Her hopes had been dashed more times than she could remember, but the breakthrough had come when she’d cross-referenced the maps against an old fishing chart and found a tiny, scribbled reference to a smuggler’s cove near the seaward wall. A careful search of the area had led her to a row of abandoned establishments, rotting in the shadow of the wall, one of which was the Happy Drunk. She’d spent every penny of her savings purchasing the run-down tavern, and set to work digging beneath the basement floor. She’d expected to be at it for weeks if not months, but three days in she’d broken through the roof of a low, underground passage – an out-flung tributary of the larger caverns. She’d explored the caves hungrily, looking for a way to get her girls out of the city, but to her great disappointment there was no safe place to launch a boat. The mouth of the main cavern opened to the sea, but time and tide had eroded whatever beach or spar the smugglers had once used, and the mighty breakers of the Storm Sea crashed relentlessly against a shelf of jagged rock.
Desperate with disappointment, Madame had returned to the surface and resumed the life she had hoped to escape. It wasn’t until Stringfellow started obsessing about another of her girls – a blonde-haired beauty called Leila – that she found another use for the caverns. Madame had grown increasingly worried about Leila, and the frequency with which Stringfellow summoned her to his tower. One day she had returned covered in bruises, and Madame had known in her bones that the next time Stringfellow summoned her, she wouldn’t return.
Determined to save her, Madame had hidden the girl in the caves, and it wasn’t long before another girl needed hiding, and then another. Soon enough there was a small community dwelling beneath the city.
Seeing the potential in the vast, empty caverns, Madame felt honour-bound to save every endangered girl she came acr
oss, and not just those in her employ. She reached out to guild-members she trusted, asking that any girl who got into trouble be sent straight to her. She recruited every new arrival, keeping them safe until she could smuggle them into the caves and hand them over to Leila, who looked after the burgeoning community of women.
Madame understood the risk she was taking. Sooner or later, the trail of missing girls would lead to her, at which point her life would be forfeit, but she was no longer afraid. She had prayed to the Lady, beseeching her to save the women in her care, and was convinced that her prayers had been answered. She was doing the Lady’s will, and it was the most rewarding thing she’d ever done in her life. She’d spent many a happy day in the caves with her girls, watching them share their collective load; fishing, cooking, cleaning and washing clothes. There was the occasional clash of personalities, but they sorted it out quickly enough. Knowing their lives had been spared made each of them appreciative of what they had.
Madame smiled, thinking fondly of the caves. They were beautiful in their own way. At certain times of day, sunlight flooded the caverns, beaming through great apertures in the rock and illuminating mineral veins that shimmered with opaline hues. More importantly, they were a perfect hideout – inaccessible except through the Happy Drunk and protected by sheer cliffs above. There were numerous natural pools, filled with water swirling up from the depths, two of which were of particular importance to the girls. Named Daypool and Nightpool, each delivered a harvest of frenzied, thrashing fish that disturbed their otherwise calm surfaces. The waters within rose and fell with the tides, and by some trick of nature the Daypool only surrendered its bounty when the sun was high in the sky, and the Nightpool after it had set. To supplement the abundant supply of fish, Madame placed a sack of fruit and vegetables within the barrel in the Happy Drunk’s cellar at the beginning of each week. The girls had fresh water, plenty of bedding, clean huts of their own to sleep in, and a ready-made society of friends that welcomed all newcomers.