"Naw. The boss knew what he was getting when he hired me."
The terrifying ride ended at Grand Central Station. Swarms of passengers were boarding Uptown and Downtown express elevators, and a Midtown freight elevator was disgorging fleets of Mercedes and BMW's. Will deemed it safest to be dropped off here, for when the manticore made his report it would give Florian L'Inconnu no hint as to where he might be squatting. "I'm sorry for all the trouble you've been put through," he said when there was pavement safely beneath his feet again. "I apologize for all the trouble I've inadvertently put you through, and I apologize for any humiliation you may have undergone. I didn't want Alcyone's fetch to treat you as she did. It's very wrong of them to behave so shabbily."
The manticore leered. "Yeah, I'd be a socialist, too, only the money's better working this side of the street."
Then he was gone.
Hot date?" the vixen asked when Will sat down at her booth. She'd taken over a dark corner of a diner and, with small bribes to the management and generous tips to the waitstaff, made it her office. Unlike Nat, she did not require that her center of operations serve alcohol.
"I was with Alcyone., Will admitted. The vixen snapped her fingers for the waitress and pointed at Will. An undine nodded and began pouring a cup. "I'm not sure how she feels about me, though."
"Ah, youth!" The vixen accepted a cup of coffee and handed it to Will. "Trust me, she likes you. I can tell because you've got that gingerly way of walking that men get when their dicks are rubbed raw."
"Vickie, Will said irritably, "you're taking something that's sweet and romantic and—"
"Don't let's start passing judgment on an affair until we know how it comes out, eh? It ain't romantic till it's over.'' The vixen knocked over the saltshaker and muttered a cantrip over the spill. "Let's see what this slut looks like." She blew on the salt. The grains tumbled this way and that and finally formed a recognizable image of Alcyone. She passed her hand over the salt portrait and it took on color.
"Well. The apple doesn't fall from the tree." The vixen sniffed. "A redhead, too. I suppose I should feel flattered." By her tone, Will knew she did not. Yet, looking down upon Alcyone, he could not help but smile.
"She came that close to telling me she loved me," he said. "Oh, kid, you've got it bad! You do realize that when this scam is over, we'll have to leave Babylon? We'll be traveling fast and we'll be traveling light and we won't dare come back for years." "I know that," Will said sullenly.
The vixen studied him silently for a moment. Then she lit a cigarette. "Well, enough of that. Listen. You're gonna have to be careful going out in public nowadays. The polits know what you look like. They've got hold of a photo."
"How'd they get that?"
"How d'ya think? I mailed it to them."
The hawk came flying, swift as an arrow, down the center of the street and then straight at Will's face. He flinched away as it snapped out its wings at the last possible instant and, swerving, creased his cheek with the tip of one flight feather. Something fell into Will's hands. A cell phone. It rang.
"Some friends and I are going clubbing," Alcyone said. "Wait where you are and I'll pick you up."
Will stepped back into the shadowed doorway of a defunct art deco bank building and waited. Not much later, a white stretch limo, longer than life and pale as death, glided up to him. A footman leaped out to open the door.
"Hop in," Alcyone said.
Will did, and the car drove off. He and Alcyone kissed long and hard. "I don't think it would be a good idea for me to be seen in public with you," he said, hoping inwardly that she would suggest they retire to someplace private instead. "My face is known now."
"Tish. I have an invisibility potion." Alcyone led him deeper into the stretch, past masses of orchids and a small waterfall, and flipped down a vanity table. She donned disposable plastic gloves and opened a jar. "Take off your shirt and I'll rub it on you."
16
Moonlight Sonata
Fifteen minutes later, when Will looked in the mirror, a brown-skinned fey stared back at him. Alcyone brushed a pigment into his hair that turned it cobalt blue. "There! Now anybody who looks at you will see a rented escort and give you not a second glance."
"Where are we going?"
"Out." Alcyone gestured just so and a silver bell tinkled. A haint servitor appeared with a bundle of clothes. "Change into these."
Ignoring the haint, who stood unobtrusively ready for any further commands, Will wriggled out of his jeans and into a pair of tight pants. He was coming to realize that a great deal of being high-elven was having a perfect disregard for what one's inferiors—which was to say, almost everybody saw or thought. The shoes fit perfectly and the socks as well; Alcyone hadn't bothered to provide underwear, so he did without. She handed him a white silken sark and when he had donned it, undid the top three buttons and then leaned back to admire her handiwork. "You clean up good."
"You should see me in morning clothes."
Alcyone handed Will's old clothes to the haint who, upon her saying "Take these away and burn them." vanished as silently as he had come.
"I can't help but notice," Will said, "that you're wearing that which your brother called the greatest treasure of House L'Inconnu." He touched the plain moonsilver ring and smiled. "Ask me if I love you."
"No." She drew her hand away.
"Then tell me that you love me."
Alcyone fixed him with those astounding eyes. "I would do anything for you, Will. For you, I'd do things that would make an ogress blush." Will's heart soared. Nevertheless, he persisted. "But do you love me?" She looked away. "I... dare not say."
"It's a simple enough thing. Three words and no witnesses to hold you to them."
"Tie me up and whip me if you like. Fist me, piss on me, dress me up as a milkmaid if you must. Ask me anything except that." "Why?"
"Because I'm a fucking aristocrat, is why!" The limo came to a stop. "We have to put in an appearance at a party first. It's a fund-raiser for the Fata Bloduewedd's reelection campaign, but I'm sure you'll enjoy it anyway."
Two dwarves, one red and one black, fought grimly on the balcony. Their bodies were slick with sweat and their knives gleamed in the floodlights. Their feet kicked up puffs of the sawdust that had been strewn on the flagstones to soak up blood. They were both naked.
Alcyone's friends watched from the roof garden, drinks in hand. They were as tall and glittery up close as their kind always appeared on TV. The males stood with a hand in their slacks pockets jingling coins. The females looked elaborarely bored.
"'Lo, Allie. What's the news?" asked the one Alcyone had identified as the war strategist Lord Venganza. The others were the Lords Jaegerwulf and Lascaux, and the Fatas Caldogatto, Misericordia, and Elspeth, all highly placed in offices that mattered.
"You must have heard that the West moved. Pestilence, doom, and universal destruction are imminent. So what else is new? Its been nothing but paperwork for me ever since. And you?"
"There was a minor rebellion in Ys, easily crushed. The War continues and shows every intention of continuing forever. Who's your friend?"
"His name is Tenali Raman." The group's glances traveled briefly over Will and were gone forever, just as Alcyone had foretold. "I'm showing him the sights."
"Nobody cares about the sights anymore." Fata Elspeth pouted. "I've been at this party almost fifteen minutes and nobody's said anything about my tits!"
"If I start praising your breasts, we'll be here all day, 'Speth," Lord Lascaux said.
Fata Elspeth smiled appreciatively. On the balcony below, one of the dwarves grunted as he took a blade in his side, to light applause.
"Heads up, our next lady-mayor approacheth," Lord Jaegerwulf murmured. There was a crackling in the air, and a whiff of ozone. An elf lady strode toward them, wrapped in an aura of darkness, as if she were a storm cloud. "Time to tug forelocks," she said.
"Tell me I didn't forget Fata Bloduewedd's envelope." Fata
Misericordia dug frantically in her purse. "Oh, gods, I did. No, here it is."
"Wait here, Tenali," Alcyone said. "We have some entirely voluntary and completely legal contributions to make in a venue in no way related to the apparatus of state, for which we will expect no return whatsoever either in terms of influence or of access. This will only take a few minutes."
Will watched them go, feeling awkward and out of place. Then he went to look for the shrimp bowl. In his experience, these functions always had an enormous bowl of iced shrimp somewhere.
A woman dressed too emphatically high-elven to actually be high-elven stopped him with one outstretched leg. She wore high heeled boots and black leather pants. Her red vinyl jacket was zipped low to reveal a bustier with eye-popping decolletage. It was exactly the kind of self-mocking, faux trashy look that Will would have been drawn to (despising himself for it, but drawn nevertheless), had he not been here with Alcyone. "Hello," she said. "I'm Fata Jayne."
"I'm nobody in particular. Have you seen the shrimp bowl?" "No. Why don't we go back to my place and look for it?" "Urn... If I'm not mistaken, we just met. Let's not rush things." "That's exactly what I'm looking for. Somebody who knows how to take it nice and slow."
"Look. I don't know why you're behaving in this extraordinary fashion, but I'm here with somebody. So whatever it is you want, it's not going to happen."
"But you do like me? I mean, you are attracted to girls?" "Actually, no. I'm not," Will lied. "So why don't you go away?" "Okay, let me give this one last try." fata Jayne leaned close and lightly sang the retrain from The Ballad of Oberon's Arse in his ear.
"Ok, she pegged him high And she pegged him low She pegged him where the sun don't go, She made him do things that a fella don't do... If they could play thus... Why not me and you?
"Try something new, mon petit serin. Expand your horizons." Smilingly, she sucked on one red-nailed fingertip and then touched it to his cheek. Instantly, he was hard as a rock. His face flushed and he could scarce breathe, so great was his physical desire.
Through gritted teeth, Will said. "Your penny-ante aphrodisiac magicks notwithstanding. I despise your offer. Yet as I am a gentleman and out of courtesy for your gender, I shall simply bow and withdraw."
Lightly, the fata said, "No? Ah, well, then I must find somebody else. But fear not, cheri, I shall always remember you as the One Who Got Away."
A minute later Alcyone swept by with her friends in tow. "Let's go," she said. And as they left, "I saw you talking with that trashy little man eater. Did the hit on you?"
"No, we were just talking."
"That's good. Fata Jayne is notorious in our circles. Nobody who leaves with her ever comes back. You have to wonder what she does with them."
Off to the side of the stage, a pianist was playing "Stardust." As the clubbers filtered in and sat at their tables, he spoke into his microphone in a soft and insinuating tone: "Bienvenido, señors y señoras, a Le Club Frottage." He was a pencil thin haint with a garter on one arm and a derby hat cocked to the side. "Heute abend haben wir eine Festlichkeit für Sie. A show, a performance, a star unlike any other. Je vous presente — El Sonámbula! Der Träumengeist! L'Oneiroi des Reves! The one and only Nanshe!"
He slammed both hands down in a dramatic discord and three cacodemons with needle teeth and malicious eyes pushed and propped up and prodded a slumping figure twice their height onto the stage. It was a large breasted and womanly hipped hermaphrodite in an open silk bathrobe.
"Oh, this is a wonderful show," Fata Misericordia said. "I've been here every night this week."
Nanshe's head cormrowed in tight Scandinavian-blond braids, lolled on a shoulder. His penis was a slender and shockingly pink tube emergent from the folds of her labia. The cacodemons whisked away his robe and scattered, leaving her standing alone and naked in the center of the stage, bathed in golden light. The pianist segued into Beethoven's Piano Sonata No 14 in c sharp minor, the Moonlight Sonata.
Briefly, nothing happened. Then a cacodemon returned with a tube of K-Y Jelly, squeezed a dab into the hermaphrodite's hand, and darted away. Nanshe's eyes opened a crack and the hand floated up to the face, where heavy features studied it puzzledly. Then down it drifted again to delicately anoint the genitalia.
Slowly languidly, she began to masturbate. "Dance?" Lord Lascaux said.
Alcyone stood and gave him her hand. Galdogatto and Misericordia followed them onto the floor. Elspeth tugged at Jaegerwulf's hand and.,reluctantly, he went, too. Which left only Lord Venganza staring fiercely and fixedly at the stage act.
This was as good a chance as Will was going to get. Assuming his generic-exotic-foreigner accent and in the timid manner of someone keenly aware of his lowly status, he addressed the war-elf. Sir? I was hoping you could tell me something. I've asked this of everybody but no one seems to know."
Lord Venganza started, "Eh?" "Why does the War exist?"
"It exists because I work extremely hard to bring together billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of soldiers requiring supply lines half a continent long and enough medical facilities to service a medium sized nation. You should be grateful its not you charged with such a task."
"No, I mean what caused it?"
"Arrogance," Venganza said. "Laziness, greed, lack of foresight, bad intelligence, an unwillingness to negotiate, a disinclination bordering upon an outright refusal to listen to reason, a reflexive undervaluing of the enemy's resources and resolve an unseemly haste to resort to force — and I suppose there may have been faults on our own
side as well."
"But what is it meant to accomplish?"
"Hum. Well, I suppose the West wants us to pull out of their territory. We can't do that, of course, or they'd advance their armies across our borders, looking tor vengeance. So ultimately we have no option other than to seek complete and total victory." He shrugged. "Which given the lockdown on our most powerful weapons occasioned by His Absent Majesty's abdication of his duties, isn't likely to happen anytime soon."
"But... if there's neither reason nor purpose for the War, why can't you simply put an end to it?"
"For the same reason an avalanche can't be stopped. These things must play out their natural course." Lord Venganza smiled faintly. "At any rate, war is required in order that we may exercise our talents to their fullest. Should I be moving tankers of oil about the world, or speculating in wheat harvests? That's a bloodless and ignoble game." "Then exercise your talents to end the War! That would surely be noble. If you—"
The dancers chose that moment to return, swooping down on their seats like a flock of roosting birds. They chirped and twittered, continuing a conversation that seemed to have no proper beginning and to be in no danger of ever reaching an end.
"... find it harder and harder to care."
"Darling, nobody cares any more. Not anybody who matters, at least."
"What do you make of the rumors about the king's heir? Who's putting them out?"
"It's a grassroots thing, for certain. If it were a conspiracy surely one of us would know."
"Perhaps one does and isn't speaking,'' Fata Elspeth said, with a significant glance at Alcyone.
"Oh, please."
"Your, um, friend," Lord Venganza said, not-looking at Will, "thinks we would be best employed bending all our efforts to end the War."
"One cannot address all the ills of the world," Misericordia said. "There is only so much time, money, compassion, hours in the day. Only the king could address everything at once — and pray the Seven he never returns to try!"
Shocked, Will said, "But everyone yearns tor the king's return."
"Everyone is an ass, then. What possible purpose does it serve to put all the power we have into the hands of an individual of uncertain morals and competence, idiosyncratic enthusiasms, and unknown temperament merely because his father was king? None whatsoever."
"He could end the War, for one thing."
"Yes, but at what cost? In a represent
ational democracy, even one as clotted and corrupt as our own, all groups are represented and, from self-interest, defended. Do you honestly believe that a king would understand the needs and interests of a venture capitalist, a kobold, or a small businessman as well as they do themselves? The abuses of tyranny more commonly arise from ignorance than from malice. And if you think that a monarchy is any less prone to foreign adventure than a democracy, then I suggest you need to reread your Herodotus."
"At least one person can be held accountable."
"No, one person can be killed. The entire society is held accountable."
"Yes, but—"
Alcyone had been staring moodily at the stage act for some time. With sudden decisiveness, she stood and said, "We're leaving."
"Already? Are you sure?" Fata Misericordia asked. "It's considered good luck if Nanshe spurts on you."
At the exit, a red-skinned devil with short horns and a tuxedo jacket bowed slightly to Alcyone and said, "The show wasn't to madame's liking?"
"I liked it fine. But I'm looking for something a little more... sordid. Squalid? No, sordid c'est le seul mot juste."
"Ahhhh. Something low and vile for the highborn and genteel lady." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Well. For a thousand dollars I can offer you the decaying corpse of a sea lion. For three thousand—" He looked down at the bundle of bills Alcyone had slipped into his hand and his eyes widened "I think I know what you want."
They followed him through a door marked PRIVATE and then down a warren of back ways and narrow stairs. The farther they went, the shabbier the halls, the older the paint, the worse the lighting. Will's skin itched with the memory of his days as Jack Riddle.
They emerged in an alleyway beside an overripe and overflowing dumpster. In the wall opposite was a blue metal door with stenciled letters reading:
FORBIDDEN
"What's in there?" Will asked when the devil started to unlock it. "Why, whatever you want, sir!" the devil said ingratiatingly. "Every thing you fear most, oh, yes — atrocities and meaningless cruelty, alienation and despair. Very loathsome, very disgusting, very pleasant, a distinctly refreshing change of pace." He held it open for Will. "Through here."
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