by Michael Shea
“Annihilate? Idle threats! Bluff and bluster!” There was a note of resurgent glee and confidence in Zelt’s voice. “She came in anger, friends, unprepared—thinking to face us down by her mere presence. She’s trapped now, and burns with rage, but dares not show her hand. Believe me, for I know her! I have known her intimately. She’s the Veiled Lady, my friends! The Veiled Lady!”
At last Zelt had kindled a real outcry. Here and there came joyful hoots of recognition, and explanations were passed round with an excited warmth. The dowager did not move, but her careful immobility was a kind of betrayal. She glared up at the whore, who was gleeful again, and recovering her oratorical rhythm:
“What? Do some of you not know of the Veiled Lady? My most mysterious Regular? My most dread, exalted Regular?” Shouts begged the details, other voices crowed corroborations. A mimic wail topped all other noise, issuing from some upper balcony:
“Pleeeeeeeese. Oh! Don’t annnn-nyyyyyyye-ulate me! Pleeeeese!”
“Just so! Just so,” howled Zelt above the laughter. “One of your squirmers and pleaders she is, this Veiled Lady I’m talking about. One of your wiggly writhers who pays to beg mercy and be denied! No chipster, mind you—she has me on bimonthly exclusive! Oh, she’s top rank, all right, and the rankest kind of bellycrawler! A tall, firm party—I can tell she’s grey-haired through the veil. An escort always brings her and waits outside. By his tread, though I never see him, I judge him to be a small and agile body. I mean, judge him to have been such! Oh, how could I not have recognized your voice till just this moment??!”
The dowager’s surrounding zone of awe was gone. A whore vaulted on to the back of a chair quite near her, struck an imperious stance, and flourished the blanket she carried like a whip above her head. A second and then a third whore imitated the first, and a hairnetted pimp thrust his face into the dowager’s and shrieked conspiratorially:
“Oh! Isn’t it delicious??”
The dowager apportioned each tormentor one close, cold look, and returned her eyes to Zelt. The Loop seemed irked at the dowager’s silence. Lacking the counterpoint of denial, she lashed down her strokes more fiercely:
“Oh, how you’ve wagged that bottom up at me in supplication! Oh, with what sincerity I’ve scourged it! ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ you’ve quavered, ‘Oh brutal, beautiful, merciless bitch, don’t crush my body utterly, don’t grind me out of existence!’ Wag your royal rump for us now—yes, wave it, do! That fat flag of surrender that beseeches more blows!”
Whores up in the shaft now postured, hanging from their railings with one arm akimbo and scowling erotically. The pantomimers perched on furniture near the dowager had doubled.
Madam Poon’s hand rested on her bodice now, as she stared a moment more up at Zelt. Then her hand came away from her bosom and she smoothly, unhurriedly, stepped sideways, and swung at the legs of a taunting whore. Though the blow seemed to miss, the girl’s left leg collapsed and she pitched to the carpet. With a curtsy-like sweep of her skirts Lady Poon stepped back to let her fall, swept in again to straddle where she sprawled, and gracefully stooped over her. There was a punctured scream. The dowager rose and wiped her stiletto blade on the back of a chair, looking coolly up at the Zanobian who aimed the crossbow down at her from Zelt’s side.
“I am leaving now. If my departure, and the movers’ work, go unopposed, and if you, Loopish filth, are surrendered, bound, to my agent within the next half hour, then all the rest of you will live.” Lady Poon turned and moved grandly towards the antechamber. The first whores she met gave way, staring.
“Lies!” Zelt screamed. “Do you think she’ll let any of us live now that we’ve unveiled and mocked her? If she passes that door, we’re all fried, my friends—every last one of us. Our only hope is to hold her and compel her to a contract freeing us, and guaranteed by sorcery!”
Several of those blocking the antechamber hefted stools as shields against the Lady’s knife, and nervously stood their ground. A general stir, raised by Zelt’s rallying cry, was not precisely caused by her words themselves, but by her voice, for this had echoed very strangely in the lamplit gloom. Indeed, the crowd’s own murmurs had the same uncanny resonance to them, a circumstance that increased their volume and perplexity. The Loop did not yet notice these echoes, nor did the Lady, who whirled back to face Zelt wearing—for the first time—a smile.
“What? Can you think I care what any of you knows of me? You? Who are all the merest scum and insignificance? It is only from such as you that perfect humiliation can come, and that is why I bring those odd cravings of mine to you and none other! Mock me, you say? Who cares what noise the muck makes when it bubbles? Ah, the consequence you give yourselves! It’s almost charming.”
Still smiling with what seemed genuine, mad mirth, Lady Poon returned a few steps more across the lobby towards Zelt, whom exclusively she addressed. The Loop returned her stare, but sweat shone on her face. She too now had caught the eerie reverberation of the Dowager’s words, which went twisting up through the shaft in cracked and shimmying fragments of sound. The whole house buzzed with the queasy strangeness of the air and Zelt gripped the rail to concentrate on her antagonist who alone, rapt in the passion of her diatribe, still failed to notice.
“You talk to me of miseries?” she continued, crowing. “Imbecile! No one has everything, and therefore all lives are miserable. Self-pitying swine! You’ve sheltered here! You’ve guzzled and coupled and slept here, dry when it rained and warm when the wind blew! What more do you think one gets? Worms in the feet, you say? Bad dreams…?”
But now she too had heard. She stood amazed, jaw hanging, listening to her own last words—wrenched into a ghastly, senseless ululation that went twisting up into the shaft. Then the galleried faces above her screamed as the dowager, and the furniture around her, were drenched with a splash of crimson light. The skylight’s black shroud was on fire with strange, smokeless flames of the deepest blood-red. A holocaust of sound—a vast droning like the after-hum of an immense bell—engulfed the house.
The building’s walls, suddenly frail-seeming, pulsed like living membrane within that hell of noise. Whores, pimps, the dowager—all writhed, clasping their ears and making bent mouths of panic in the undulous red light now flooding the shaft—for the shroud was already consumed, and the unearthly flames still raged fuelless from the glass of the skylight itself.
Then, abruptly, the skull-numbing din sank in volume till the whores could hear each other’s screams and—more—could hear outside the house the sound of an endless conflagration—the hiss and flap and crack of a thousand-league waste of flames.
There was a groan of ruptured steel. The people massed in the antechamber were exploded shrieking into the lobby as the front door was burst inward and three flaming tentacles, each thicker than a man, poured coiling into the antechamber—swaying, probing, seeking.
At her railing Zelt danced with terror and glee.
“We’re there already! We’ve arrived! Hail to our new lords! This way, masters, this way!” She pointed down to where the dowager stood gaping. “That one is fresh!” Zelt screamed. “Feast on her first, my lords! Feast on her first!”
The address of Antil the Elliptical—which, along with his name, had cost Hex ten lictors—was near the inlet’s western end. The still legible “Goodsharbour” painted across the whole width of the building’s second storey attested to its having been a warehouse. There was a bank of windows along its third and top floor, and a man darted across one of these, and disappeared, as Hex approached the front door. This latter he found open, surmounted by an “Enter” sign.
The ground floor, vast and unpartitioned, was a forest of rampways, chutes, and slides. From the ceiling they dropped down to and often through the floor. They were arced, parabolic, straight, helical; they stood so thickly on all sides that Hex could see almost nothing of the room’s farther walls. As he stepped hesitantly inside, a man dropped out of the ceiling and sped down a spiral chute. Hex gathered as
he came through the first curve that the man was dancing madly atop a spinning red sphere the size of a melon.
The man in his turn saw Hex, and addressed him as his last three swift orbits permitted:
“Greetings!… Join you… Upstairs…” and just before he sank through the floor, he pointed to the room’s centre, where Hex noted a staircase, the sole sanely pedestrian accommodation in the place.
The second storey was like the first; the third presented Hex, at the landing, with three doors, only one of which was open. Within this was a large, nearly empty room. In one of its walls was the bank of windows he had seen. In a far corner were a pair of settles and an armchair. The vacant floor featured some two dozen trapdoors without latches, which Hex carefully avoided as he approached the windows.
Past some intervening rooftops he could see the inlet, looking down the long axis of that marine corridor. In the vigorous late sun, churned by the post-pluvial wind, the sea was a foam-marbled jade. He felt suspended over a host of possibilities, a multitude of epic acts now accessible, numerous as the waves of the open ocean. The nine-hundred and ninety thousand lictors in his pouch burned against him, a lump of sheer thaumaturgical energy. The dowager’s far vaster sum had ridden there and he had felt it far less vividly. These fewer lictors were his own, the fruit of his initiative, and they, properly used, were going to command that arrogant woman’s respect and erase from her lips forever all such cool dismissals as, “you can do no more in this matter!” Decisive action had borne him this far, and now it would secure to him forever his lieutenancy on the winged vessel of Fortune.
One of the traps in the floor snapped up and the lean, bearded dancer hotfooted out of it. Hyper-nimbly he rode his spin-blurred sphere around the floor, dodging trapdoors with every swivel.
“Antil the Elliptical?” Hex asked with a bow.
“The same! A moment please,” cried Antil, still attending to his ride. He dropped through a trap. Some fifteen seconds later he popped out of another one, jumped off the sphere and kicked it smartly. It sped to a far corner, where it hung, still spinning. Cordially Antil indicated the furniture in a different corner.
“The flesh must be kept fit, you see!” he said cheerfully as they seated themselves. He had an anaemic look; his beard was scraggly and his thin, pronounced nose had a rubbed redness about the septum and nostril. His eyes were liquid, suggesting, alternately, sanguine emotion, or an imminent sneeze. “Decay must be fought with exercise, oh, yes yes—” he continued, with genial disclaimer of an objection Hex had not raised. “Even a wizard’s flesh dies, my friend, though somewhat more slowly than other men’s. All flesh dies. Unless of course it has had the touch of undying.”
“I can see that you are remarkably fit, honoured Antil. Such exercise as I saw you doing is certainly terribly demanding. What do you mean by the touch of undying?”
“It certainly is demanding! And even so, it is much below what I could do as a youth. As a young man, I exercised on a sphere no larger than a kickle-nut. Age has forced me to this gross globe you see.”
Hex nodded with interest. “Still, I see you scarcely sweat—surely you’re quite hale. You know, I just this morning heard mention of a touch of undying.”
“Yes.” Antil nodded energetically. “In fact it would take me a whole morning’s dancing to work up a sweat. You know, if you’ll pardon my saying so, you are yourself carrying quite a load of flesh you’d be better off without! You’re sturdily made, shake a leg, sir! I’m convinced you’d shape out just wonderfully with a little discipline!”
“Ah yes!” Hex assented with tepid joviality. “There’s more of me than ought to be, sad truth. You did say something of a touch of undying, didn’t you? Is this perhaps connected with a place called Yana?”
The wizard stared back at Hex. All conviviality had left him.
“Is this the service that you seek of me—knowledge of Yana?”
“In fact no, there is another matter…”
“You must pay for each service I render.”
“Well of course; there’s really no need to—”
“My fee is nine-hundred ninety thousand lictors per service.”
“That is the precise amount I bear,” Hex said quietly, after a pause. Antil nodded.
“Had you more, the price would have been that much higher. Which is your desire then—settlement of the brothel’s difficulty, or answers to your questions about Yana?”
He resented the wizard’s prying insights, and his cavalier use of them, but apprehension as to how much liberty one might take with a wizard kept his voice mild in reply.
“Naturally, I can’t seriously consider abandoning business at hand for the sake of specious rumours. Kindly transport the brothel—doubtless you already know the details?”
“Perfectly, and I accept the commission. Ah, you’ve chosen oddly friend, though I must say most men in your place do the same!” The man’s warmth had returned.
“Well! Do you care to pay me now, Bramt Hex?”
“Ah, payment in advance? Very well.” He spoke stiffly, irritation testing his control. Antil shook his head.
“On the contrary. I perform all commissions co-instantly with the acceptance of them. Pay me. I will show you.”
Paid, Antil flourished his right hand at Hex. A dense scribble of purple lines leapt forth and enmeshed the startled scholar.
Hex’s sense of body vanished. He was eyes and ears only, mute, a weightless awareness towed like a balloon behind Antil, who strode to one of his windows, opened it, and leapt out.
Hex was plucked through the air. He could read the wind in the inlet’s churning, but felt nothing of it. They crossed tracts of waterfront rooftops, lead-shingle dells, and thickets of stubby chimneypots. Then they paused in air, and plummeted. Pavements next to a gaping hole grew huge beneath Hex’s sight. Then he stood, flesh again, on Marketditch Street.
A titanoplod’s hindquarters were just vanishing around a corner. Farther off, the slowly receding boom rocked above the grey wharfside skyline. Antil was nowhere.
Hex returned to the dowager’s mansion on foot, the better to digest his excitement. There would probably be some difficulties with the buyer, but these would yield before a description of the whores’ rebellion and the dangerous publicity it promised. The consensus would surely be that he had risen to the occasion.
The sun was westering when he reached the palings of the Poon house. On an impulse he tested the gate, and found that it opened compliantly. He strode between the gilt, wind-stirred fronds. The mansion’s portal opened before him, and Korl beamed and bowed him into the antechamber. “Eager welcome, sire Hex. You’re later than expected. The lady’s not back yet. Will you dine, sir?”
“Good evening, Korl!” Hex felt expansive. “Tell me, Korl, don’t you find my doublet prodigious?” The raisin-eyed woman nodded with bright vigour.
“Indeed, yes sir!” she cried, bowing him ahead through the central of the inner doors. Hex stepped, chuckling, into the room. An earthquake of white pain wrenched his neck. As he plunged, lax, into the arms of gravity, the busy, humorous hum of his fantasies became a long, white numbness.
6
A Wizard Saves a Life, And Vampires End Two
Deep in a great swamp, freezing cold and utterly black, a solitary fire burned. Coiling snakes of greasy smoke it sent into the featureless dark.
Bramt Hex grew a little more conscious—enough to recognize this landscape as his own body: a hot, smutty focus of nausea, which coiled up through a still-boundless swamp of awakening nerves. He could not yet find the delicate filaments of control that would open his eyes, but he did discover the indistinct, outlying masses of his limbs. He stirred them. His body—a strengthless sac—rolled until it came up against iron bars. Between these, he vomited.
These bars would be the palings outside the dowager’s mansion. The thought was the one particle of clarity in him as he shuddered and heaved the cold swampwaters out, but even before his convulsio
ns had ended, he realized the unlikeliness of this.
He opened his eyes. He was in a cage. It looked just high enough to sit upright in, and somewhat less than his body’s length on either side. This cage stood on the side of a hill, and under a star-cobbled sky. The breeze, which he felt keenly through his scale doublet, smelled of lush grass and—more elusively—of the sea.
He heard the mutter of burning wood, and then saw two silhouettes just downslope. They sat with their backs to him, screening a fire so small its red glow barely limned their hairy outlines—their batwing ears, their manes that merged with the thick tresses of their shoulders and backs, their barrel-chests thick-staved with prominent ribs.
A new tide swept through Hex, one of horror and misery that could not be vomited out. He had been sold to the skinfarms.
“Help!” he croaked. “Water! Please! Where am I?”
One of the silhouettes towered upright against the fire’s faint backlighting, and strode upslope. The giant had to squat low to present his shadow-face at the bars near the top of Hex’s cage.
“Listen closely, my friend.” The voice was gravelly, the words freighted with warm gusts of wine as they fell down on Hex. “You cried out. This you must not do. Never. Your next loud sound we will punish by crushing your feet, gagging you to mute your moans. Terribly painful, but we’ll have no choice, and your feet needn’t be intact for our purposes.”
“You are selling me to the skinfarms then?”
“Yes. My condolences. Don’t be downcast. At least it’s a secure living. But keep firmly in mind this matter of noise. The night is alive for leagues around. If you could hear as we, and follow the stirrings which we’ve been listening to, you’d want no threats to keep you still. We’re not of a timid species, but things are abroad tonight that we don’t want to invite here. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”