I stayed where I was for a moment, stunned. It was hard to get used to, the idea that Luc and I weren’t a team any more, that we couldn’t pick up where we left off.
After at least a minute of blinding self-pity, I walked back to the front of the house where I had left my bags. I yanked my respectable dress over my head and tossed it on to the steps to keep it clean. Then, clad only in my midriff-baring faerie chainmail, I swung a muddy hessian sack over my shoulder and went down the hill to visit the pond nymphs.
The pond was the same as ever. Beige, boring, muddy. The few limp lilies that were left entirely failed to perk the place up. There was no sign of my girls. I rummaged in the filthy sack, pulling out some leafy plants. “There I was,” I said aloud. “About to make a clean break with the OtherRealm. I was going to leave without promising to come back, without letting them have that piece of me, but I saw these babies on a market stall and I couldn’t resist bringing them back to you.”
Slowly, I lowered the plants into the murky water of the pond. The first water lily had flowers of a vibrant purple. As soon as it touched the water, the petals exploded in showers of silver glitter, making the pond shimmer and glow. The second lily was pink and yellow candy-striped, heavenly scented with peppermint, strawberries and cream. The last lily was midnight black with a shimmer of an opal crescent moon in its centre. As I watched, the opal moon swelled into fullness and back again, sliding through its phases in the blink of an eye. I had brought baby seedlings too, a dozen different varieties just waiting to do their stuff. I floated every one of them in the pond.
The nymphs emerged. Maybe it was my imagination, but they didn’t look like the fright-wives they had always been. There was a new glow about them, a radiance. They would never be less than terrifying, but the new lilies had sparked some life into them.
Or, perhaps, my definition of beauty had shifted a little.
“Ssssank you,” said Globula.
“Presssssy,” said another nymph, admiring the new adornments. “Beausssiful,” she added, leaning forward to inhale a baby crimson lily.
“Like your boootsss,” Globula said shyly.
I grinned, preening in my chainmail lingerie. “Well, I’m glad someone finally noticed my boots.” My new outfit went so well with the soft grey leather.
“Ssssat poor hero,” she said, laughter bubbling in her watery voice.
I laughed too, remembering the last day I had been here, tricking the wandering hero out of his clothes and horse and troll head… Then I sighed, not feeling cheerful any more. “Globula, is it true that water nymphs can see the future in their own reflection?”
“Somesssimes,” she admitted.
“I’m worried about Luc and these goddesses. If he annoys them too much, they could blast him into infinity with one bat of their eyelashes. He is going to ask me for help eventually, isn’t he?”
“Swim firssss,” said Globula insistently. “Anssswers afsserwards.”
It wasn’t a bad offer, and the water lilies had perked up the pond no end. I’d never seen it so sparkling and crystal clear. “Your wish is my command.” I pulled off my boots and my faerie chainmail, then plunged into the cool, real water. I missed the OtherRealm already, but I couldn’t go back. Not until I got things sorted in my mortal life.
In the mean time, I spent the afternoon swimming with the pond nymphs and trying to forget about my worries. Maybe they would sort themselves out, in time.
–§–§–§–§–§–
Mocklore Survival Guide #7:
Prophecy and Portents
If a pond nymph ever tells you anything about the future, listen. She knows these things. I confidently believed that Luc would give in and ask me for help with his goddess troubles within a week or so, and everything between us would be okay again. Globula told me that I would be waiting far, far longer than that. I told her she was crazy.
Eight years later, I’m still waiting.
Queen of Courtesans
Zibria always sounded like my kind of town, even if the streets aren’t literally paved with gold anymore. Asses milk, rose petals, sequined frocks and snake-bite suicides…oh, yes. This place had style.
As a half hobgoblin girl with a devotion to chainmail lingerie, I had a feeling I was going to fit right in.
When I finally did get a chance to visit the City of Eternal Wonders, it was festival time. The streets were lined with carousing crowds in weird and wonderful costumes.
I asked a few people what we were celebrating, then tried more seriously to get directions to the building I was looking for, but they all just laughed at me and capered on. After a while I gave up, grabbed a drinking bowl and joined the fun.
I was dancing with a man in a cheetah mask who had gold paint spotted down his arms and belly when a silver mermaid tapped me on the shoulder. “Bounty Fenetre? You were asking about the Courtesan’s Academy.”
“Word travels fast!” I had to yell so she could hear me.
She motioned me to follow, so I abandoned my dancing partner and bunny-hopped after her. Built over a large hill, the city of Zibria is mostly steps. Luckily for the mermaid, her costume allowed her to unhook the bottom of her tail so she could walk. What amazed me was the exceptional grace with which she moved, despite the constraints of her figure-hugging costume. She glided with an elegance I could never have dreamed of—and for a moment I desperately wanted to know how she did it.
Envy makes me bitchy. “Aren’t you a little dry for a mermaid?”
“Aren’t you a little tall for a hobgoblin?” she shot back.
I hate that. People expect me to be four foot tall, brown and wrinkly. Just because mortals have drawn us that way for centuries doesn’t mean hobgoblins actually look like that. Okay, quite a few hobgoblins look like that, but we happen to come in all shapes and sizes. By all accounts, my father was six foot three and drop-dead handsome, despite the silver eyes and bright green hair.
As for me? Well, you’d hardly know I was half hob if I didn’t go around telling everyone. My only legacies from the hobgoblin side of the family are mighty abs, wide eyes, constantly tangled hair and a greenish tinge around my toenails. If it wasn’t for my habit of wearing midriff-baring chainmail ensembles, I’d look just like everyone else.
A zillion steps later, the mermaid and I were nearly at the crest of the Zibrian hill. When we paused to catch our breath (this was politeness on her part—she was so poised she probably didn’t need to breathe) I asked her what the carnival was in aid of. It was too late in the spring for Bronzfetish or Bridesmorn.
“Our Sultan died five days ago,” said the mermaid. “This is his funeral.”
Some funeral. I’d seen more depressing circuses. “No one liked him much, then?”
“Local tradition,” she explained. “We celebrate his life through joyous revels, instead of wailing over his death. As soon as the pyre has been lit, everyone in the city dresses up to act out legendary scenes from his life.”
I looked down at the streets below. Two centaurs sang a lusty drinking song while setting up a limbo contest for a mob of toga-clad zebras and a cigar-smoking unicorn. “He had an interesting life.”
The mermaid shrugged, managing even to make that simple gesture an exercise in extreme elegance. “We take the odd liberty. It wouldn’t be much fun if the whole city had to dress up as a middle-aged man who sat on a throne all day and liked his cup of tea every hour on the hour. We only have three teacup costumes in the whole city.”
She led me to a building that looked like nothing much in particular—though it would have been grand enough in the old days when every wall in Zibria gleamed with marble, gold or jewelled mosaic. Inside, we followed a grand corridor lit with torches and decorated with grim, matriarchal portraits. If it wasn’t for the fact that the old bats in the portraits all wore little but satin scraps and sequins, I might have imagined myself in the wrong place.
“It was good of you to answer our summons so quickly,” said the merma
id in measured tones.
“I didn’t have anything better to do,” I said truthfully. “I wouldn’t mind knowing, though, if I was invited at the request of the Courtesan’s Academy, or the SPZ? The invitation—” summons, apparently, “—was unclear.”
“The Secret Police of Zibria doesn’t exist,” she chided, her carefully trained voice skills drenching me with her superiority.
“So the rumour that the Courtesan’s Academy is a front for the Secret Police…?”
“Is only a rumour.”
And I was an Anglorachnid ballet dancer.
–§–§–§–§–§–
The mermaid’s name was Demi. I learned this as we walked up and down countless corridors, heading for the inner sanctum of the Senior Mistresses of the Courtesan Academy. We also had time to trade info on hair conditioners, shoe styles, and our favourite costumiers. We were practically best friends by the end of the trek, though she hadn’t let anything slip about the SPZ.
Obviously, I was going to have to get her drunk.
First things first. We reached our destination, a mighty and imposing set of golden doors, adorned with fine engravings. I recognised several images from 1012 Zibrian Nights, a famous illuminated scroll which has been banned more times than any other work in the Mocklore Empire. Tiny images of courtesans, djinni, kings and fishermen in various compromising positions (many of them physically impossible in our dimension) were expertly etched into the doors.
“Any advice before I face the dragons?” I asked my new best friend.
“They like an old fashioned touch. Curtseying, bowing, scraping, ma’aming…”
“Oh, they sound peachy.”
“That’s one word for them.” Demi knocked on the golden doors. They creaked open a little. “After you.”
Next to her calculated perfection, I felt like some random harpy in rusty armour. “Too late to borrow a hair brush, I suppose?”
The golden doors creaked open further, then swung wide. I strode in, expecting some kind of grand hall with polished floorboards or lovely marble tiles that would make a good clip-clop echo under the heels of my long suede boots. That is the sort of thing you expect to find behind huge golden doors.
Instead, I bumped into a large antique sideboard, tripped over a small floral sofa and landed on an ornamental chamber pot with geraniums growing in it. “Crap!”
Demi had the courtesanly grace not to giggle, but I heard her suppressing it.
“Not very dainty, is she?” commented a voice out of nowhere, a real grandmother of a voice—and I don’t mean that in a nice way. It sounded like the voice of somebody else’s grandmother whose best linen tablecloth you have accidentally thrown up on.
Don’t ask me where I pulled that simile from, I’m still repressing the memory.
The room was cottage-sized, and packed full of furniture. Somebody else’s grandmother furniture. It was a nightmare of floral patterns, lace draperies, and monstrously large cabinets straining under the weight of china dolls and souvenir spoons. There was enough collectible clutter to fill a museum, and none of it was in any logical order. I pulled myself to my feet with the help of a sturdy tea chest giving off a gusty scent of lavender, and a towering bookcase containing only books about cats. I scraped my way around that and almost failed an obstacle course of piano stools, each with hand-stitched embroidery depicting sweet rural scenes. The only sign that this was the inner sanctum of the Courtesan Academy was that the embroidered shepherdesses wore g-string bikinis and fondled their sheep in an intimate manner that I’m sure would be disapproved of by the union.
I had left Demi long behind while making my own ungainly path through the Museum of Old and Dead Furnishings. After staggering through a maze of piano stools, pot pourri and a mountain of crocheted egg-warmers that were, for no obvious reason, teetering on top of a pile of wombat-shaped cookie jars (why would anyone need more than one of those?), I rounded another corner and found myself face to face with the Senior Mistresses.
There were three of them, and they were knitting. I don’t think that sentence fully conveys the sense of dread and intimidation that I felt in that moment.
The first Senior Mistress was enormous, taking up a whole floral-printed sofa on her own. She was dwarfed beneath a huge red wig and a selection of thick gold jewellery that would have made a Sultan’s mouth water. She wore an antique scarlet gown—the kind that scaffolds up the bust, sucks the waist in so hard you want to die, then puffs the lower half into something resembling a piano disguised as a giant pomegranate.
The second Mistress was so thin she was almost translucent, her fingers as scrawny as her knitting needles. She wore a tight, black schoolmarm dress that buttoned right up to the top of her neck, well past her wrists, and several inches past her ankles. If it weren’t for the long black wig, black lipstick, black fingernails (extending into long points), slut-high boot heels (it’s a style, not a judgement!) and spiky silver jewellery, she might have looked almost respectable.
I mean, not respectable by my foster mother’s standards, but that wasn’t a fair bar to reach.
Then there was the third Mistress, clad in a sequined brassiere, hot pants and a blonde beehive wig so high that it was in danger of attaching itself to the hanging plant baskets that swung over their heads. She had to be at least eighty years old, and she was evidently the baby of the three.
I curtseyed. With those knitting needles they were better armed than I was, so it wouldn’t pay to be impolite. “You called, ladies?”
“What is she wearing?” cackled Mistress Blonde.
I clamped my mouth shut so as not to retort ‘look who’s talking!’
“Shut up, Tiffaine,” said Mistress Red. “We’ve got business to discuss.”
“I was only saying…”
“Well, don’t.” Mistress Red stared me up and down. “Young enough, I suppose,” she grunted. “You’re a bounty hunter, I hear.”
“No, ma’am,” I said politely. I’d never said ma’am to anyone in my life, but this seemed like a good time to start. I was out of my depth. There was no one here to flirt with, and that was the only thing I was remotely good at.
She peered disapprovingly at me, through her gold-rimmed monocle. “What did you say?”
“I’m not a bounty hunter, ma’am. People often make that mistake, because of my name. Perfectly understandable.”
Mistress Red looked alarmed. She formed a huddle with the other two Senior Mistresses, and they muttered to each other for a while. I stared at the ceiling, pretending that I couldn’t hear every word that they were saying.
Demi swayed into my field of vision, posing against the wall to show off her curvaceous, mermaid-costumed body to full effect. I was beginning to feel underdressed.
“So you are not a bounty hunter,” said Mistress Red.
“I’m not ruling it out as a potential career, but I haven’t been one yet.”
“But you are a hobgoblin.”
“Half,” I said uneasily.
They shared glances of mutual scorn so sharp I was glad they weren’t pointing them directly at me—chainmail’s not great protection against stab wounds. Especially when the chainmail in question only covers a small fraction of your body.
“What,” said Mistress Black, enunciating carefully, “do you know about the Faerie Quene?”
Ah, I was on safer ground here. “Not much.”
The scornful glances were directed at Demi now. Her years of courtesan training couldn’t stand up to their decades. She writhed and withered under their scorn.
“I mean, not much compared to most fey,” I broke in hastily. “I probably know more than your average mortal. What did you want to know?”
“We want to know how to destroy her,” said Mistress Red.
My mouth opened and closed a few times. There was so much wrong with that sentence I didn’t know where to start. “Wha-at?”
“This one’s loyalties are obviously to the fey bitch,” said Mistress
Blonde. “Let’s kill her.”
“Shut up, Tiffaine,” said Mistress Red. “Why are you surprised, Bounty?”
“Well,” I said, coughing a little on a dry throat. “For a start, she’s powerful. The strongest and mightiest of the fey folk are all terrified of her. No mortal would have half a chance of doing her damage.”
“You said for a start,” Mistress Black said, tilting her head in curiosity. “What else?”
“She’s also gone. She was trapped in another dimension behind the Icewall more than twenty years ago, and it’s not due to reopen for at least another thirty. She’s cut off from the OtherRealm and the mortal realm—no threat to anyone. The only way to assassinate her, even if you could, would be to free her first, which is not the world’s best idea, not to mention being impossible. Or you could wait thirty years, in which case the urgency of your summons seems…unwarranted.”
“Obviously you are lying,” said Mistress Red. She sighed. “You disappoint us, Demitasse. We asked you to find us someone of fey blood who would not have any loyalties to the Faerie Quene.”
Demi looked crushed, and scared. I couldn’t help wondering what kind of punishment she was in for.
“She’s not lying,” broke in Mistress Black.
Demi looked hopeful.
“It was our understanding,” Mistress Red addressed to me, “That the Faerie Quene prefers the mortal world to believe that she is gone, but in truth she remains in the OtherRealm as she always has, stretching out her poisonous talons to toy with mortals from a distance.”
“That’s not true,” I said firmly. At last, something I knew something about. “The OtherRealm is suffering from a major leadership crisis. With the Faerie Quene gone, all the fey races have descended into something like tribal warfare. From what I’ve heard, she was never the most subtle of rulers, and she’d have no reason to hide from her own people.”
Somewhere in mid-babble it occurred to me that this was privileged information that I only knew because my grandfather was stuck in the middle of it, and I probably shouldn’t be spreading it to all and sundry, but hey. Since when have I been able to keep my mouth shut?
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 93
