by John Ruch
“Monsieur Ilmun, I am sorry we have killed a bunch of people in your place of business and lit it on fire also!” Mieux cried.
The barkeep set his trophies down with a clatter. “You got yourself nicked.” He reached under the bar, and the click of a lock and squeaking of a hinge sounded. He set a small glass vial containing a greenish-black powder on the table.
“Put that on your wounds and bind ’em up a little.”
Most people probably would hesitate to take wound-care advice from a dope-dealer who appeared to have entered a knife fight with only his face as a weapon, but to Ashton’s pragmatic mind, that made him a pretty sound authority. Still, Mieux stiffened slightly.
“True healing comes from the inside outward!” she cried, probably quoting the four-hundred-eighty-fifth fable. “Still, if the powder goes inside the cut, then that probably counts!” She picked up the vial and began dabbing herself.
“Monsieur Ilmun!” she continued, apparently impervious to the pain of stuffing powder into flesh wounds. “Even though this is a terrible moment I must announce that I cannot work here much longer! I’m going on an important wagon ride with my friend Ashton Arrowmask!”
The barkeep gave Ashton an unnerving look and began casually hammering knives into the wall behind the bar.
“Well, darlin’, I was gonna have a word with you anyhow.” He sighed and rubbed the back of his head. “Fact is, you been doing too good a job. Place is a little too cleaned-up for the regulars to feel comfy. And for a man to get his ass handed to him by a sweet thing like yourself—well, you can see that sometimes they’re gonna come back with their friends and raise some Fury.”
Mieux stopped dabbing powder into her wounds and looked at him wide-eyed.
“My stars and garters!” she cried, bizarrely quoting the irritating catchphrase from that play about a were-puppy that all the schoolgirls were flocking to a few years ago. “It’s not possible to do a job too good! Plus I have done it over and over and that’s how you get better, not worse!”
“He’s right, Mieux,” Ashton said in what he hoped was a gentle way. “You’re great at squashing trouble like a cockroach. But that’s not what a place like this is about. Sailors are looking to cut loose. They want some chaos. Not too much, but not too little, either.”
She turned and looked up at him, her eyes huge as if she absorbed his words with them rather than her ears. “I see. It’s a balance!” she cried. “The Sénche-do teaches as much to an equilibrique. I’ve been foolish.” She hung her head, her black bangs shimmering.
“We’re all fools,” Ashton said, trying to wax philosophic. “But your kind of foolish saved a lot of lives here. That’s a pretty good prize to move on with.”
She nodded firmly. “You’re right!” she shouted suddenly, making him jump. “The hunter who scares away the deer but catches a rabbit has still fed her family!”
“And learns better tactics for the next time,” Ashton added.
“Exactly!” she cried in surprise, her thin dark eyebrows raised fully. “You have some wisdom even though you’re a pirate and your aura is totally messed up!”
“So I’ve been told,” he replied randomly. She half-closed her eyes, nonplussed.
Ilmun slapped a stack of argenti coins on the bar. “No hard feelings, Mieux. You done a good job, like I said. You’re welcome to stay here anytime on the house. But right now, the two of you should get out of here and lie low. You take this as your final pay.” He slid the coins over to her and she let them fall into a jacket pocket. She bowed formally.
“You need a place to stash the dope while the Watch pokes around here, I got a room at the Jury Lane Tavern,” Ashton said.
“No worries. You just treat this girl right, Arrowmask. Otherwise, she’ll probably fuck you up herself. But…”—he nodded at the hatchet in its place of pride in the wall—“I’ll come find you anyway.” Ilmun offered his twisted grin.
“Understood.” Ashton extended a hand and they shook on it.
“I think you already had a pretty good friend before I came along,” Ashton remarked to Mieux in the dawn hour after they had collected her belongings and made their way to his room in the Jury Lane. But she said nothing as she sat, legs crossed and eyes closed, atop her trunk, where she insisted on perching after he offered her the cot. He tried to keep his eyes open long enough to consider how she was cute, and crazy, and a mystery. But somewhere between those subjects, his mind got lost in its wanderings and fell into sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rinka Svetkov reclined in the black settee, her long legs crossed, and flipped impatiently through the fragile pages of the old novel she balanced in her ample cleavage, giving the occasional snort and smirk.
Carmelina was a fevered tale of an empousa, a life-hating phantom of Duxian folklore, who took the form of a mad, risen-from-the-grave noblewoman seducing young girls to slake her thirst for their blood. She proved to be quite good at this job at until a bearded prune of an Imperial University professor killed her with a silvered crossbow, restoring boring, sexless authority to the world in what was supposedly a happy ending. The book was a minor hit in its time, mostly forgotten today, but a main inspiration for the modern empousa thrillers, like Empousa Empire, still in its record run at the Morpheum, and the much better Empussy, which was filthy enough to be banned in Millennium for the past three decades. Rinka flipped to the end of the book so quickly that pages tore.
“Ooh, an old man with a crossbow! Please don’t kill me again!” she said aloud, holding her elegant hands up mockingly, the glossy nails painted purple with pink stars. She fell into a deathly stillness for a moment. Then her head turned smoothly and silently as an owl’s as she considered the low bookcase of mementos beneath the shuttered window. A time-darkened skull with a couple of still-clinging beard whiskers sat there, positioned so the quarrel hole was evident. She smiled thinly.
“I like my ending better,” she said with a cold chuckle.
She tossed the book aside carelessly and rose with a dancer’s poise. Her stiletto-heeled boots were as black and glossy as the chilly marble floor she clacked across at a measured pace. Black trousers clung tight to the curves of her hips, the severe look partly offset with a flounced blouse of purple silk unbuttoned a good deal farther than some would call tasteful. She didn’t know any of those people and didn’t care what they thought.
She stalked without a glance past her framed poster of Cap’n Trent, the pirate-bard who wore his shirt even farther open than she did and whose Mixed-Up Mix-Fiend was the hot-shit hit of the moment. Her mind was on the past tonight.
She ran a fingertip gently along the spine of the drake statue on the windowsill, following its sinuous line that flowed up and down, side to side, all at once. Its maroon glaze had been fired a hundred generations ago and it had survived a hundred battles to be here today. It had endured. Like her, it was created in a place then still commonly called Vollach, slurred into today’s “Volania” first by the Corcorids and then Weàlae invaders. Like her, it had come to life in the long month of darkness when Atel’s Trail was lost. She ran her nails along the maker’s mark on its underside with a bone-like rattle.
She next lifted a cube of volcano-toughened black stone. Her tiny piece of Castle Tashlin. Her dominion. Its tapered towers had been built with an elegance unimaginable to the blockheaded paladins of the Tetragate, whose idea of design was gluing new ugly hunks of stone onto old ugly hunks of stone. And it had broken a score of armies before it fell like a landmark tree finally giving up to a storm.
She pursed her lips with an air of self-amusement. She was reminiscing as though poor Princess Rinka had lost her innocence to the ravages of barbarians. She recalled the day of her sixth year when she methodically plucked the kittens one by one away from mother cat Petra, calmly observing her feline panic and yowls. It had given her a thrill that guilt only seasoned rather than cooled. She had returned the kittens eventually, of course. It was only later that she excelled in taking things aw
ay forever.
The leather on the Vollach skin dagger’s scabbard was dried and cracking. She lifted it with care and slid the blade sideways out of its unusually configured holster. Its amber grip was warm in her hand as she held the distinctive trefoil tip up to the wan candlelight. The voidives and voidivas of the Vollachs used skin daggers to flay captured enemies alive, then waved the bloody curtains of flesh as battle flags. Imperials called the voidives and voidivas “counts” and “countesses.” As usual, they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, or who they were fighting.
Her gaze moved beyond the blade to the collection of cameos. One depicted a decadently handsome man with curls; another a celestial teen girl with flowing locks. They were faces lost to time, and even she remembered them less with each passing day. She returned the dagger to its rack.
“The Incendium will be full by now. Time to think about my own face instead.”
Her face was perfect, as it always was. Disturbingly perfect. The kind of perfection that not only melted hearts and loins, but made even children do double-takes and made adults do what she wanted. Her olive complexion and cascade of raven-wing hair gave her turquoise irises a startling quality. They gleamed in the dim silver mirror in her bedchamber, where she had arrived after striding assuredly through dark halls. The faintest of lines around the mouth and eyes cast a patina of intimidating maturity on her terrible beauty. Her brows were plucked into sardonic, rather wicked arches.
She touched up the heavy cobalt eye shadow and applied a fresh coat of ice-blue lipstick. Giant silver hoop earrings. A chunky jet necklace. A few bangles on the left wrist. She unbuttoned her blouse farther and slipped a purple jewel into her navel.
Yep, she was perfect. Many people were not perfect, and they knew it, and tonight they would suffer for it.
The Temple of Pain, better known as the nightclub Carnis Incendium, lay behind a green door at the end of Eyeout Alley, in a basement beneath a pawnbroker’s shop. The alley was always guarded by two Sally Anns, the prostitutes’ guild that kept order, such as it was, in Cor Cordum’s rougher parts, even in some of the Old Empire ruins. Rinka’s face was, as always, her passport, and they stepped aside as they were struck first by the clacking of her heels, then by her overwhelming perfume, then by those eyes. They looked at her ass as she passed. Everyone always did.
She strode into Incendium like she owned the place, which she partly did, along with Asvelt and some silent partners. She had never understood why temples—especially ones dedicated to exciting deities like Pain—had to be oversized, underused caverns with no fun and no profit. So they had made a place where adherents of Pain could suffer in comfort.
Asvelt, the Incendium’s glamorous hostess, stepped out from behind the desk in the small entryway and gave Rinka her customary embrace. Rinka always began, and often ended, her nights with Asvelt. She liked the blonde’s sharp, perky face, and that she was a head shorter than herself, easily carried to bed or positioned in some pleasurable pose. Most of all, she liked how easy it was with Asvelt—no strings, all business.
Asvelt stood on her tiptoes and kissed her lovelessly. Her soft, warm tongue wormed into Rinka’s mouth and delivered a little lump of hetbane that was balanced on its tip. Rinka smiled coldly into the kiss and swallowed the drug, feeling the buzzing fingers in her brain and belly almost instantly.
“Nice,” Asvelt said after breaking the kiss, running her fingers along the neckline of Rinka’s new blouse. “It suits you.”
“Of course. Everything does.”
Asvelt laughed. “Bitch.”
“Always.” She smirked.
“It’s light business tonight. Make time for me after. It’s been a couple of days and I want you.”
Rinka nodded smoothly and gave her another kiss. Then she slipped behind the black curtain next to the counter and down the sharply turning passage that blocked sights and sounds from curious passers-by.
In the dim red light and cubeb haze beyond, those sights and sounds tonight included a couple having sex on the small stage; nude male and female entertainers on the sunken dance floor; a man spanking another, yelping man on one of the maroon-velvet couches; and a young woman wincing her way through the process of receiving a degrading word tattooed on her rump. In one corner, a half-nude man stood on tiptoe, his weight borne by six paired metal hooks piercing the flesh of his chest and attached by thin chains to a knob in the ceiling. His blood was black in this light. Drummers and cellists laid down a background rhythm for the cavorting and punishing with a mysterious, off-kilter Greenarch tune.
Rinka waded through it all with the aloof indifference of a master gardener passing by a cottage’s flowerbox. She passed through the decadent chamber and down another hallway to a black door decorated with a large “R” set inside a star, the whole decorated with silver sequins.
Her private chamber was a cozy place, its walls hung with warm, garish tapestries of pink-and-black tiger stripes. A comfortable bed long enough for a great pair of legs was tucked into one corner, set off by screens decorated with gigantic red lip-prints. There were a couple of comfortably overstuffed chairs covered in black leather; a table with some menacing pairs of cuffs attached; a small table of alcoholic treats; a waxy, thick-leafed plant that somehow survived in the windowless gloom; and a floor-to-ceiling cabinet hiding a dazzling variety of implements that could make girls sigh or cry.
At the moment, the room also contained one such girl, Rinka’s pet-slave Pesh, a young bard. Asvelt had arranged her well, as she was properly attired in matching pink bra, panties, heels and ball-gag. She knelt as Rinka entered and pressed her face to the taller woman’s thigh as Rinka petted her idly. Then she sat on the floor once more and took up her lute again.
“Play that new Cap’n Trent song,” Rinka commanded. “Then maybe Duram Duram. Something catchy like that.”
Pesh’s dark eyes half-rolled for the briefest second before she obeyed with fluid plucking. Rinka sometimes suspected that the worst pain she inflicted on the little bard was making her play popular songs that she thought were in bad taste or something. Whatever.
She sat in one of the chairs and leaned back with her legs confidently, shamelessly open, one boot planted on the footstool, and waited in the center of her web.
Brenda arrived shortly after, undoubtedly right on time, though Rinka never actually paid attention. Brenda was a chunky, middle-aged housewife who had been visiting this little chamber for a month now. She was a pathetic pain addict a bit too dim to realize she was well past the point of no return.
Tonight she wore a brand new yellow sundress cut low to showcase her plump, saggy breasts. The lack of a bra displayed her already stiff nipples and the metal rings piercing them at Rinka’s behest. A quick learner, she immediately dropped to her knees and, after receiving permission, patted kisses on Rinka’s boots, gazing up with eyes desperate for approval. Then she rose upon command and stood with her hands behind her back, her legs slightly parted, a faint draft stirring the hem of her dress.
Rinka stood as well, looming over the older woman. She cupped Brenda’s cheek and observed almost scientifically as the woman closed her eyes and slightly inclined her head into the touch. Brenda’s lips parted. She was shivering.
Rinka leaned in. “No underwear all week?” she interrogated.
“No, Miss Rinka,” Brenda whispered, opening her eyes again.
“No sex?”
“No, Miss Rinka.” Brenda’s mouth was already going dry. She croaked her words a bit.
“Good girl.” Rinka caressed her face. As Brenda thanked her, Rinka brought her mouth teasingly close, then withdrew the promise of a kiss at the last second.
Brenda liked to be hit, and she would be, but this was the part Rinka liked best. Mental pain. Emotional nudity. Everything laid bare and vulnerable for abuse.
“Is your husband out fucking another woman right now?” she asked conversationally, still caressing the cheek.
Brenda stiffe
ned and bit her lip. “Probably.”
“Why is that, Brenda? Why would he fuck another woman?” She leaned in close to deliver the vulgarity intimately, but also to get a close view of the struggle on the woman’s face.
Brenda pressed her lips together, her eyebrows furrowing upward. “Because I’m a nasty sow,” she said shakily, repeating her memorized words, her face and chest flushing. “And because I am a slut for Miss Rinka.”
“That’s right,” Rinka said huskily into her ear. “That’s exactly what you are. That’s why your husband needs to find pleasure with a real woman. A woman like me.”
Brenda nodded rapidly, fighting to maintain her composure.
“How does that make you feel?” Rinka pressed.
“Sad,” Brenda whispered in a dry croak. “Worthless.”
“Mm-hmm. You are worthless,” Rinka whispered back, dabbing the tip of her tongue into Brenda’s ear. The housewife shivered and moaned.
Rinka took a step back and touched Brenda’s face again. She flinched, and Rinka smiled thinly. She’s afraid of me. She’s learning, Rinka thought. She moved her hands to cup the woman’s dangling boobs, eliciting more lost-in-lust moaning. She ran her fingers inside the neckline.
“You bought this just for me?” Rinka asked, knowing the answer. Brenda had bought a new outfit for last week’s session as well, and the damage done to it in those throes had led to an agreement that Rinka would no longer tear clothes off the frugal bitch. Of course, she had agreed solely because it would make this betrayal all the more delicious. She abruptly seized fistfuls of the fabric and rent it all the way down to mid-crotch. Brenda’s breasts spilled out as she cried, “No, please!”
“Shut up,” Rinka said sharply as she began pinching and tugging the slut’s nipples. She flicked her tongue across her ice-blue lips at the whimpers. “What would your friends say if they saw you right now?” she inquired mockingly, watching Brenda’s face screw up, her bottom lip aquiver. “What would your family say?”