“May I get you something to drink?”
“Qualis, if you have any.” Amoli paused while Myrtis passed the request along to Ambutta. “I can’t do it, Myrtis—this whole scheme of yours is impossible. It will ruin me!”
The liqueur arrived. Ambutta carried a finely wrought silver tray with one glass of the deep red liquid. Amoli’s hands shook violently as she grasped the glass and emptied it in one gulp. Ambutta looked sagely to her mistress; the other madam was, perhaps, victim of the same addiction as her girls?
“I’ve been approached by Jubal. For a small fee, he will send his men up here tomorrow night to ambush the Hell Hounds. He has been looking for an opportunity to eliminate them. With them gone, Kittycat won’t be able to make trouble for us.”
“So Jubal is supplying the krrf now?” Myrtis replied without sympathy.
“They all have to pay to land their shipments in the Night Secrets, or Jubal will reveal their activities to the Hell Hounds. His plan is fair. I can deal with him directly. So can anyone else—he trades in anything. But you and Lythande will have to unseal the tunnels so his men face no undue risk tomorrow night.”
The remnants of Myrtis’s cordiality disappeared. The Golden Lily had been isolated from the rat’s nest of passages on the Street when Myrtis realized the extent of krrf addiction within it. Unkind experience warned her against mixing drugs and courtesans. There were always men like Jubal waiting for the first sign of weakness, and soon the houses were nothing more than slaver’s dens; the madams forgotten. Jubal feared magic, so she had asked Lythande to seal the tunnels with eerily visible wards. So long as she—Myrtis—lived, the Street would be hers, and not Jubal’s, nor the city’s.
“There are other suppliers whose prices are not so high. Or perhaps Jubal has promised you a place in his mansion? I have heard he learned things besides fighting in the pits of Ranke. Of course, his home is hardly the place for sensitive people to live.”
Myrtis wrinkled her nose in the accepted way to indicate someone who lived Downwind. Amoli replied with an equally understandable gesture of insult and derision, but she left the parlour without looking back.
The problems with Jubal and the smugglers were only just beginning. Myrtis pondered them after Ambutta removed the tray and glass from the room. Jubal’s ruthless ambition was potentially more dangerous than any threat radiating directly from the Hell Hounds. But they were completely distinct from the matters at hand, so Myrtis put them out of her mind.
The second evening was not as lucrative as the first, nor the third day as frantic as the second. Lythande’s aphrodisiac potion appeared in the hands of a dazed street urchin. The geas the magician had placed on the young beggar dissipated as soon as the vial left his hands. He had glanced around him in confusion and disappeared at a run before the day-steward could hand him a copper coin for his inconvenience.
Myrtis poured the vial into a small bottle of qualis which she then placed between two glasses on the silver tray. The decor of the parlour had been changed subtly during the day. The red liqueur replaced the black-bound ledger which had been banished to the night steward’s cubicle in the lower rooms. The draperies around her bed were tied back, and a padded silk coverlet was creased to show the plump pillows. Musky incense crept into the room from burners hidden in the corners. Beside her bed, a large box containing the three hundred gold pieces sat on a table.
Myrtis hadn’t put on any of her jewellery. It would only have detracted from the ebony low-cut, side-slit gown she wore. The image was perfect. No one but Zalbar would see her until the dawn, and she was determined that her efforts and planning would not be in vain.
She waited alone, remembering her first days as a courtesan in Ilsig, when Lythande was a magician’s raw apprentice and her own experiences a nightmare adventure. At that time she had lived to fall wildly in love with any young lordling who could offer her the dazzling splendour of privilege. But no man came forward to rescue her from the ethereal, but doomed, world of the courtesan. Before her heauty faded, she had made her pact with Lythande. The magician visited her infrequently, and for all her boasting, there was no passionate love between them. The spells had let Myrtis win for herself the permanent splendour she had wanted as a young girl; a splendour no high-handed barbarian from Ranke was going to strip away.
“Madame Myrtis?”
A peremptory knock on the door forced her from her thoughts. She had impressed the voice in her memory and recognized it though she had only heard it once before.
“Do come in.”
She opened the door for him, pleased to see by the hesitation in his step that he was unaware that he would be entering her parlour and boudoir.
“I have come to collect the taxes!” he said quickly. His military precision did not completely conceal his awe and vague embarrassment at viewing the royal and erotic scene displayed before him.
He did not turn as Myrtis shut the door behind him and quietly slid a concealed bolt into place.
“You have very nearly undone me, captain,” she said with downcast eyes and a light touch on his arm. “It is not so easy as you might think to raise such a large sum of money.”
She lifted the ebony box inlaid with pearl from the table beside her bed and carried it slowly to him. He hesitated before taking it from her arms.
“I must count it, madame,” he said almost apologetically.
“I understand. You will find that it is all there. My word is good.”
“You … you are much different now from how you seemed two days ago.”
“It is the difference between night and day.”
He began assembling piles of gold on her ledger table in front of the silver tray with the qualis.
“We have been forced to cut back our orders to the town’s merchants in order to pay you.”
From the surprised yet thoughtful look he gave her, Myrtis guessed that the Hell Hounds had begun to hear complaints and anxious whinings from the respectable parts of town as Mikkun and his friends called back their loans and credit.
“Still,” she continued, “I realize that you are doing only what you have been told to do. It’s not you personally who is to blame if any of the merchants and purveyors suffer because the Street no longer functions as it once did.”
Zalbar continued shuffling his piles of coins around, only half-listening to Myrtis. He had half the gold in the box neatly arranged when Myrtis slipped the glass stopper out of the qualis decanter.
“Will you join me in a glass of qualis, since it is not your fault and we still have a few luxuries in our larder. They tell me a damp fog lies heavy on the streets.”
He looked up from his counting and his eyes brightened at the sight of the deep red liqueur. The common variety of qualis, though still expensive, had a duller colour and was inclined to visible sediment. A man of his position might live a full life and never glimpse a fine, pure qualis, much less be offered a glass of it. Clearly the Hell Hound was tempted.
“A small glass, perhaps.”
She poured two equally full glasses and set them both on the table in front of him while she replaced the stopper and took the bottle to the table by her bed. An undetectable glance in a side mirror confirmed that Zalbar lifted the glass farthest from him. Calmly she returned and raised the other.
“A toast then. To the future of your prince and to the Aphrodisia House!”
The glasses clinked.
The potion Lythande had made was brewed in part from the same berries as the qualis itself. The fine liqueur made a perfect concealing dilutant. Myrtis could taste the subtle difference the charm itself made in the normal flavour of the intoxicant, but Zalbar, who had never tasted even the common qualis, assumed that the extra warmth was only a part of the legendary mystique of the liqueur. When he had finished his drink, Myrtis swallowed the last others and waited patiently for the faint flush which would confirm that the potion was working.
It appeared in Zalbar first. He became bored with his
counting, fondling one coin while his eyes drifted off towards nothingness. Myrtis took the coin from his fingers. The potion took longer to affect her, and its action when it did was lessened by the number of times she had taken it before and by the age inhibiting spells Lythande wove about her. She had not needed the potion, however, to summon an attraction towards the handsome soldier nor to coax him to his feet and then to her bed.
Zalbar protested that he was not himself and did not understand what was happening to him. Myrtis did not trouble herself to argue with him. Lythande’s potion was not one to rouse a wild, blind lust, but one which endowed a lifelong affection in the drinker. The pure qualis played a part in weakening his resistance. She held him behind the curtains of her bed until he had no doubt of his love for her. Then she helped him dress again.
“I’ll show you the secrets of the Aphrodisia House,” she whispered in his ear.
“I believe I have already found them.”
“There are more.”
Myrtis took him by the hand, leading him to one of the drapery-covered walls. She pushed aside the fabric; released a well-oiled catch; took a sconce from the wall then led him into a dark, but airy, passage way.
“Walk carefully in my footsteps, Zalbar—I would not want to lose you to the oubliettes. Perhaps you have wondered why the Street is outside the walls and its buildings are so old and well-built? Perhaps you think Sanctuary’s founders wished to keep us outside their fair city? What you do not know is that these houses—especially the older ones like the Aphrodisia—are not really outside the walls at all. My house is built of stone four feet thick. The shutters on our windows are aged wood from the mountains. We have our own wells and storerooms which can supply us—and the city—for weeks, if necessary. Other passages lead away from here towards the Swamp of Night Secrets, or into Sanctuary and the governor’s palace itself. Whoever has ruled in Sanctuary has always sought our cooperation in moving men and arms if a siege is laid.”
She showed the speechless captain catacombs where a sizeable garrison could wait in complete concealment. He drank water from a deep well whose water had none of the brackish taste so common in the seacoast town. Above he could hear the sounds of parties at the Aphrodisia and the other houses. Zalbar’s military eye took all this in, but his mind saw Myrtis, candle-lit in the black gown, as a man’s dream come true, and the underground fortress she was revealing to him as a soldier’s dream come true. The potion worked its way with him. He wanted both Myrtis and the fortress for his own to protect and control.
“There is so much about Sanctuary that you Rankans know nothing about. You tax the Street and cause havoc with trade in the city. You wish to close the Street and send all of us, including myself, to the slave pens or worse. Your walls will be breachable then. There are men in Sanctuary who would stop at nothing to control these passages, and they know the Swamp and the palace better than you or your children could ever hope to.”
She showed him a wall flickering with runes and magic signs. Zalbar went to touch it and found his fingers singed for his curiosity.
“These warding walls keep us safe now, but they will fade if we are not here to renew them properly. Smugglers and thieves will find the entrances we have kept invulnerable for generations. And you, Zalbar, who wish that Sanctuary will become a place of justice and order, will know in your heart that you are responsible, because you knew what was here and let the others destroy it.”
“No, Myrtis. So long as I live, none of this shall be harmed.”
“There is no other way. Do you not already have your orders to levy a second tax?”
He nodded.
“We have already begun to use the food stored in these basements. The girls are not happy; the merchants are not happy. The Street will die. The merchants will charge higher prices, and the girls will make their way to the streets. There is nowhere else for them to go. Perhaps Jubal will take—”
“I do not think that the Street will suffer such a fate. Once the prince understands the true part you and the others play, he will agree to a nominal tax which would be applied to maintaining the defence of Sanctuary and therefore be returned to you.”
Myrtis smiled to herself. The battle was won. She held his arm tightly and no longer fought the effect of the adulterated qualis in her own emotions. They found an abandoned officer’s quarters and made love on its bare wooden-slats bed and again when they returned to the parlour of the Aphrodisia House.
The night-candle had burned down to its last knob by the time Myrtis released the hidden bolt and let the Hell Hound captain rejoin his men. Lythande was in the room behind her as soon as she shut the door.
“Are you safe now?” the magician asked with a laugh.
“I believe so.”
“The potion?”
“A success, as always. I have not been in love like this for a long time. It is pleasant. I almost do not mind knowing how empty and hurt I will feel as I watch him grow old.”
“Then why use something like the potion? Surely the catacombs themselves would have been enough to convince a Hell Hound?”
“Convince him of what? That the defences of Sanctuary should not be entrusted to whores and courtesans? Except for your potion, there is nothing else to bind him to the idea that we—that I should remain here as I always have. There was no other way!”
“You’re right,” Lythande said, nodding. “Will he return to visit you?”
“He will care, but I do not think he will return. That was not the purpose of the drug.”
She opened the narrow glass-paned doors to the balcony overlooking the emptying lower rooms. The soldiers were gone. She looked back into the room. The three hundred gold pieces still lay half-counted on the table next to the empty decanter. He might return.
“I feel as young as I look,” she whispered to the unnoticing rooms. “I could satisfy every man in this house if I took the notion to, or if anyone of them had half the magnificence of my Zalbar.”
Myrtis turned back to an empty room and went to sleep alone.
The Secret Of The Blue Star
By Marion Zimmer Bradley
ON A NIGHT in Sanctuary, when the streets bore a false glamour in the silver glow of full moon, so that every ruin seemed an enchanted tower and every dark street and square an island of mystery, the mercenary-magician Lythande sallied forth to seek adventure.
Lythande had but recently returned—if the mysterious comings and goings of a magician can be called by so prosaic a name—from guarding a caravan across the Grey Wastes to Twand. Somewhere in the Wastes, a gaggle of desert rats—two-legged rats with poisoned steel teeth—had set upon the caravan, not knowing it was guarded by magic, and had found themselves fighting skeletons that howled and fought with eyes of flame; and at their centre a tall magician with a blue star between blazing eyes, a star that shot lightnings of a cold and paralysing flame. So the desert rats ran, and never stopped running until they reached Aurvesh, and the tales they told did Lythande no harm except in the ears of the pious.
And so there was gold in the pockets of the long, dark, magician’s robe, or perhaps concealed in whatever dwelling sheltered Lythande.
For at the end, the caravan master had been almost more afraid of Lythande than he was of the bandits, a situation which added to the generosity with which he rewarded the magician. According to custom, Lythande neither smiled nor frowned, but remarked, days later, to Myrtis, the proprietor of the Aphrodisia House in the Street of Red Lanterns, that sorcery, while a useful skill and filled with many aesthetic delights for the contemplation of the philosopher, in itself put no beans on the table.
A curious remark, that, Myrtis pondered, putting away the ounce of gold Lythande had bestowed upon her in consideration of a secret which lay many years behind them both. Curious that Lythande should speak of beans on the table, when no one but herself had ever seen a bite of food or a drop of drink pass the magician’s lips since the blue star had adorned that high and narrow brow.
Nor had any woman in the Quarter even been able to boast that a great magician had paid for her favours, or been able to imagine how such a magician behaved in that situation when all men were alike reduced to flesh and blood.
Perhaps Myrtis could have told if she would; some of her girls thought so, when, as sometimes happened, Lythande came to the Aphrodisia House and was closeted long with its owner; even, on rare intervals, for an entire night. It was said, of Lythande, that the Aphrodisia House itself had been the magician’s gift to Myrtis, after a famous adventure still whispered in the bazaar, involving an evil wizard, two horse-traders, a caravan master, and a few assorted toughs who had prided themselves upon never giving gold for any woman and thought it funny to cheat an honest working woman. None of them had ever showed their faces—what was left of them—in Sanctuary again, and Myrtis boasted that she need never again sweat to earn her living, and never again entertain a man, but would claim her madam’s privilege of a solitary bed.
And then, too, the girls thought, a magician of Lythande’s stature could have claimed the most beautiful women from Sanctuary to the mountains beyond Ilsig: not courtesans alone, but princesses and noblewomen and priestesses would have been for Lythande’s taking. Myrtis had doubtless been beautiful in her youth, and certainly she boasted enough of the princes and wizards and travellers who had paid great sums for her love. She was beautiful still (and of course there were those who said that Lythande did not pay her, but that, on the contrary, Myrtis paid the magician great sums to maintain her ageing beauty with strong magic) but her hair had gone grey and she no longer troubled to dye it with henna or goldenwash from Tyrisis-beyond-the-sea.
But if Myrtis were not the woman who knew how Lythande behaved in that most elemental of situations, then there was no woman in Sanctuary who could say. Rumour said also that Lythande called up female demons from the Grey Wastes, to couple in lechery, and certainly Lythande was neither the first nor the last magician of whom that could be said.
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