by Michael Shea
The flagmen and goaders, directing the beasts by signals, specially inflected cries, and prods, faced them off on either side of the saw, and guided their positioning of it before the brothel. The giants lifted their forepaws to the two-handled crank. There was a sharp clapping sound as all the shutters of the top three storeys of the brothel were flung open.
Perfume jars, bottles, cosmetic boxes, phials, and jets of foul-coloured fluids smacked and spattered down—not against the plods, but aimed with fair accuracy at the flagmen and goaders. Several of the latter cried out; a flagman fell stunned, and was dragged to safety by two others. Both teams of workmen retreated, leaving the behemoths, blinking and immobile, under the windows. Zelt’s head thrust out from one of these.
“Bedpans and bottles,” she cried down. “Trash on your heads, fatcats! We won’t be sold away to hell!” She pulled her head in. A flaming mattress was thrust out.
Unfolding in the air, the smouldering pallet flopped squarely on the upstaring eyes of one of the plods. The mountainous animal reared up screaming, flinging the mattress off its face. This movement knocked over the earthsaw which, falling, scored the flank of the second beast. This latter, mad with pain, leapt to one side and collided with a garden wall across the street, leaving a huge crack in it. The engineer sent flagmen and goaders to the beasts, who stood waggling their ears with amazement, and had them brought back from the house. Then he descended angrily on Hex and Slamp:
“Gentlemen! No mention was made of danger to my beasts and men! These people must be brought in hand, or we work no further!”
The labourers, recognizing that a pause had been reached, already stood around in relaxed groups, gossiping, breaking out loaves and cheeses. At various windows whores leaned out to shout jeers and insults. The workmen, munching, shouted cheerfully back. A carnival atmosphere was spreading, a maddening air of ease and jocularity. Hex—glum, void of ideas—watched his swift-moving good fortune grind to a halt before his eyes.
“Slamp,” he said. “Wait here with the crew. A plan has been prepared for this contingency, and I must go to set it in motion. I’ll be back within the hour.”
The engineer’s protest at the length of the delay was silenced by the broker. “I know whom you go to see,” he told Hex, a light in his desperate eyes. “Take my coach. Explain the need of… emergency disciplinary measures. We will wait.”
At the Epicure Inn the dowager awaited Hex’s completion of the sale. The place enjoyed one of Glorak Harbour’s most breathtaking views, but as he was whirled up the ever-steeper streets, he hardly saw the brilliant sprawl of sea and city that spread below him. The dowager, a veteran in the ways of wealth and power, could surely untie this little knot in their proceedings, but at the same time, it shamed Hex to be running back to her like this. To play such a craven role, the Novice, returning for new orders!
She was in one of the inn’s reserved rooms, her coachman standing at the ready by her table. Hex bowed.
“My lady, I bring good news mixed with slight difficulties. First, the sale is made.” He produced the bill-of-draft from his satchel. The dowager did not move—the coachman plucked it from his fingers. Seeing her cold, level stare, Hex cleared his throat and went on:
“The inhabitants of the property—they have resisted their transportation, Madam Poon. Their missiles have forced the plods to be withdrawn from the work. I have, discreetly of course, sought your advice. None knows where I am.”
“They resist, you say?” the dowager asked.
“Yes, Madam. Under the instigation—”
“The whores and pimps, you say? They resist their sale?”
“Yes, Madam. The whores and pimps.”
The dowager’s eyes registered only well-bred disgust and irony. But Hex could discern a simple, unrefined rage. Startled, he asked:
“May I speak a thought of mine?”—and rushed on to do so. “The buyer, as you… predicted, dislikes flamboyant means, fears publicity. But his fears distort his judgement. Many respectable brokers use sorcery in transport, that’s well-known even to men untrained in finance, like myself. It merely means the buyer and seller are in haste, and is not interpreted as masking black purposes. To insist on plod transport means a prolonged confrontation, ensuring a notoriety which the use of wizardry would never stimulate. Why, as for the added cost, I think you may be pleased to—” the happy memory of the excess lictors had struck him, but the dowager cut in:
“Master Hex. I thank you for your services. You can do no more in this matter. I will go to an agent of mine who has greater experience of these accidents. Trouble with it no further. Take any refreshment here you desire and charge it to my account. Then take a coach to my house and await me there.”
She had risen as she spoke, and her coachman was already officiously preceding her to the door. Hex could only rise and return her salute with a bow.
5
Transportations—Foreseen, and Otherwise
The dowager, as she sat in her coach, held a lace handkerchief between her hands. In the course of her ride, she tore this meditatively into seven almost perfectly equal strips, each of which she let fall to the floor. Her hands were patient in the task; her fingertips, white-and-red with strain, worked through the lace’s unequal toughness in a line almost scissors-straight.
When they arrived, the coachman had scarcely dropped the steps and touched the handle of her door when she flung it open and stepped out, ignoring his proffered arm. Slamp was already hurrying to her.
“Madam?”
“There is rebellion here, Master Slamp?”
“Yes, Madam! Murderous insurrection! Foul revolt! Hear me, for my life, something must be done! You know the buyer I stand before—”
“Don’t dictate to me, greedy maggot.” She spoke softly. The coachman leapt in front of her. He dropped to a light crouch, and from that stance fired two near-invisible blows up into the face of the skinbroker. Slamp was lifted from his feet by the first and jerked sideways in the air by the second. He crashed on to the street, a pile of unknit limbs. He lay shaking his head until the glaze left his eyes, and then got humbly to his feet. Both his cheeks, where large gouts of skin were missing, bled.
“I meant no… Excuse… Only that…”
“Attend me,” said the dowager to the coachman, and swept towards the brothel’s door. Though a black drape covered the coach’s coat of arms, its advent had already been recognized as an event. The work crews, gathered round the legs of the withdrawn plods, gossiped busily; the whores had vanished from the windows to report within. The coachman, menacingly, took up his lady’s vanguard, pushed open the door, and held aside for her the scale curtain. His posture was a footman’s who announces an entering notable.
The house was even more awake than Hex and Slamp had found it. Shrill railleries were traded across the shaft by the whores leaning at the railings; cheesepots, loaves, and winejacks now had space on the bars along with the hairnetted pimps; the furry arms of chairs and couches were decorated with crumbs, butter knives, and greasy plates, and the dozens of whores who sprawled there munching—some in their skin-smoothing masks, others trailing blankets shawlwise—displayed a holiday mood. Crusts, cheeses and bottles were passed from diner to diner aerially, and went arcing unpredictably through the glee-loud gloom. The dowager steered her hooped prow through the anteroom, and stopped at the lobby’s edge, with a motion as if holding her skirts back from the brink of a foul pool. The coachman stood beside her.
Their presence spread a silence through the house.
Here and there the whores’ noise flared up in exclamations, bursts of uncertain mockery. But in a few moments all had become the dowager’s audience, submerged in the expectation with which her mute, arrogant stasis effortlessly filled the huge interior. She needed—and used—scarcely more than a speaking voice to reach every ear.
“By your own hands, and your own wills, you bound yourselves to this house. You scum. You thankless filth. For years you’ve had
bed, board, and raiment here. For years, in payment of easy, honest work, you’ve had every benefit. You’ve had your bread, and hours of ease. You’ve—”
“Benefits! Did you say benefits? Or Pain and Fits? Bread and Ease? Or Dread and Disease? For such have been your bounty, oh Enormity. Pain and Fits! Dread and Disease!”
These words were flung from the third-floor railing, and raised applause from the lobby. Zelt leaned from the balustrade, grinning down. Her breasts hung over wagging sarcastically with her vehemence. The dowager locked eyes with her. There was a pause, in which the assembly’s noise fell to a murmur.
“Foul slut. Come down here to me.” Her voice was a velvety growl. It might have deepened the general silence, but for the quickness of Zelt’s reply:
“Oh, readily, Lady Petticoats! Faster than you’ll wish I had when I get in pissing range. Yes yes! Coming!”
The whore plunged into the crowd behind her. Her passage was marked by a stir and a tittering along the third and second balconies, while a merry babbling rekindled throughout the lobby. Zelt reappeared at the first-floor railing opposite the entryway. Positioned like a general in the midst of his force, the shaft’s width from and a storey’s height above her antagonist, she cried with expansively outflung arms:
“Come forward! Come and receive the golden rain! By the Powers, I’ll water you till your hair shoots out and grows to your ankles!”
This raised an outright cheer, and the crowd’s first direct taunts.
“Make way for the pious Po on who owns us!” shrilled a whore.
“This way, you elegant old gash!” cried a pimp, approaching within a few yards and delivering a welcoming bow. He never straightened from the gesture. The coachman sprang forward with all the suddenness and thrust of a leaping feline, bringing his feet forward in mid-air and tightening his body. His right heel loudly snapped the pimp’s bowed neck. Before the corpse had settled to the carpet he leapt again—on to the back of a second pimp who had turned to flee. The coachman locked his knees against the man’s lumbar vertebrae, hooked an arm round underneath his chin, and hauled back. The pimp’s heels snagged in the carpet, his body arched forward, his spine snapped. The coachman rode him to the floor and somersaulted off.
He landed on the balls of his feet and, with a seemingly random fluidity, dodged a heavy perfume jar thrown from above. A whore was just struggling out of an armchair to his right, and he killed her with a blow to the diaphragm. With a side-skip and a kick of his left foot, he crumpled the rib cage of a tall, small-breasted redhead who had just lofted a wine bottle to throw at him.
All in the lobby scrambled to flee, but the abundant, bulky furniture baffled their panicked—and, in many cases, tipsy—efforts. As the dowager stared on, not moving, the coachman now vaulted atop the furry maze of couches and chairs. Nimbling across their backs and arms he did his jerky dance of death, striking his victims’ vainly shielded heads and throats, dodging a rain of missiles from the shaft as liquidly and unpredictably as he moved from prey to prey. Then, as he bounded off a couch-cushion, his feet were snagged in a shawl left sprawled across it. His takeoff was marred and he fell short of the armchair he aimed at, just managing to hook an arm across its back as he went down. In that instant a heavy coffer struck his shoulder with a meaty crunch. The coachman dropped to the floor behind the chair.
“Hal Got you square and hurt you bad, you nasty little ghoul!” Zelt shrieked down, hopping with excitement as, enspirited, those who had fled the coachman now turned and reconverged on him. He regained his feet. He was groggier now—one arm dangling, his face sweat-bright—but still lethally poised. He flourished his good arm and spread his fingers. From their tips sprang six-inch razors, hooked like claws. Like a man fighting off a cloud of hungry blood-flies, he began to rake the air in all directions. Men and women fell clutching at their whistling, spurting throats, collapsed on legs that folded like scythed stems. Still lithe—though less quick—the coachman moved back across the lobby. Leaving a redder wake than he had made going out, he returned to the dowager, and resumed his station at her side.
The dowager languidly raised her hand towards the dead in the lobby—a gesture of presentation. She scanned the faces of shadow-etched alarm that crowded above the railings, and met Zelt’s eyes. Under the lamplit gloom of the great, shrouded skylight, the fallen—there were more than a score of them—had an orgiastic air. The self-abandonment of death’s postures, the outflung limbs and impossibly back-bent heads suggested revelry. Some still feebly moved.
“Can’t you see, you degenerate fools?” Lady Poon’s voice was grave but mellow, almost lilting. “No waste sickens me more than the waste of lives. This is your achievement! It’s the image of your madness!”
“Then let there be no waste! Yes! Let there be none for you or us, Majesty!” Zelt leaned from the balcony with perilous eagerness, crying this. “Sell us to ourselves! We’ll pay the same this demon gives! What is it—ninety, a hundred million? At double shift and quarter ration, we’ll bring you that much in one year—that much above and beyond the normal gate!”
The dowager stared up into Zelt’s face so long a murmuring grew along the railings. There was movement in the crowd filling the corridor behind the Loop, as well as a cautious advance of onlookers down the two staircases flanking the antechamber. To this latter movement the coachman attended calmly, not moving from the dowager’s side, though through the antechamber lay their sole retreat.
“Sell you to yourselves. Double shift and quarter ration.” The dowager still stared at Zelt as, with a low tremor, she returned her words. “Do I actually stand here to hear terms bandied by a slut I own—skin and soul, living or dead? Hear me all. Thus it stands with no more said: you yield, all of you, now, or you will be burnt to ash.” She turned, and the coachman with her, ignoring the Loop’s shrill answer:
“Own us? How do you own us—did you swallow us down? Oh, you could never swallow the things I have, your majesty.” Even as she shouted, Zelt jumped to one side, and her place at the railing was filled by a tall Zanobian female with a crossbow.
Though the exchange was nearly soundless, something alerted the coachman, who whirled as the bowstring hummed. He completed his turn in time to fold himself neatly round the shaft that sprouted from his diaphragm, and fall. He folded and unfolded several times more on the floor, and was still, while pimps and whores rushed down both flights of stairs and filled the antechamber, blocking the door, whose bar was heard to crash into place.
Lady Poon watched these manoeuvres coldly, as though none of them personally concerned her. Looking back at Zelt she began a stately, deliberate progress towards the centre of the lobby.
“So. Not only do you keep weapons here, but you actually seek to detain me. You debauched, lunatic bitch. It seems that violations of contract mean nothing to you—violations of your solemn oaths of indenture.” She seated herself calmly on a couch where all rebellious eyes might fix directly on her. She turned her own eyes, remote and scornful, on the activity around her, seeming a playgoer who reviews a distasteful presentation. The dead were being carried off, and the lobby reoccupied. But those who returned—for all their more truculent looks, and harsher taunts—still left an empty zone immediately around her. Even a weeping whore, who cursed and kicked the coachman’s corpse, flinched from the Lady’s eye, and said nothing as she dragged a dead friend past her.
“Contract, you say,” Zelt howled. The Dowager’s calm unassailability threatened to deprive the revolt of its centre. The more everyone sidestepped her, the less was their many-voiced anger able to focus; it stayed at the level of a mutinous but impotent hubbub. As the Loop continued, her voice grew shrill, and almost frightened: “What of your side of the bargain? Assumed, if never specified? That we would mate with humankind? Where you’re sending us, we’d suffer daily murder! Demons rarely copulate as flesh, and when they do, it’s flesh you’d shake to look on! More often, they enter your blood as ague, or burrow into the soles of your
feet as worms, or eat, digest, and vomit you whole again! And worse than all of these, of course, are the ones that enter you as dreams.”
“Your life, whore,” said the dowager, “is forfeit. You will die. I don’t know why you have concocted this lie of demons, but you have already cost a score of your friends their lives and you will pay for this. The rest of you, all the rest of you, I will excuse with a hundred lashes and half rations for one year. Your fears, played upon by this lunatic, urge me to this mercy. Strict justice demands your lives with hers. There is not one among you who did not bind herself, out of her own free choice and will, to my indenture.”
The hum of reaction to this was fierce, laced as much with laughter as with doubt, but no voice was raised directly against the speaker. Zelt’s answer came raw and angry, an underdog’s blows, slightly wild and wide.
“Our own free choice, rot you? Did you ever crouch for your life on a blind, fat, foggy street? Where I come from, they laugh at the term ‘hill vampire’—there, the Sucks walk right up and try your windows and doors, and you’d better have windows and doors! There were norns galore, and ghouls, ten times nastier than yours, oh eminent bitch! And you sold your skin quick there just for the sake of a room at night, sold it to whoever was buying!”
“My answer is a simple matter.” The dowager looked coolly to the house at large as she spoke. “Accede to your sale, vote now to cooperate in your transportation to Ungullion, and surrender this villainess to me. Your punishment will be no more than I have said, though I’ll see to it that the new owner inflicts it: I’ll make its enforcement one of the conditions of sale. Your alternative is to be burned alive. Yes! For I have been, all along, in mental contact with my wizard. I have endured what I have only to gauge the extent of your madness, and as I find this Loopish slut to be its real instigator, I remain willing to excuse the rest of you. But defy me further, and I will annihilate the lot of you. Depend on it! I have too many holdings to allow the deadly precedent of such insurrection.”