Silversword looked to Georginne a second before I did. “What do you have?”
The little shoe-mistress emerged from her sack with a pair of shabby looking high heels. “These amplify the skills of the wearer,” she said.
“Excellent,” I breathed. “Any way to make them more specific to courtesans?”
Georginne reached for her carpet back. “I have some beads that belonged to Queen Clio of Zibria.”
Demi’s smile was heartbreaking, but hopeful. “Really Queen Clio?”
“Of course,” said Georginne, already threading a needle. The beads were perfect little pearls, almost as white as the snow around us.
A howl reverberated through the woods, the howl of a courtesan on the warpath. “Better hurry,” said Eliander, drawing his sword again.
Silversword was frowning. “What has Queen Clio to do with courtesans?”
“She founded our profession,” said Demi, almost babbling with enthusiasm. “She declared that there should be a more independent order of concubines, who could not be owned or controlled by others. She even trained as a courtesan herself, saying that the skills would make her a better queen.”
Silversword pulled a knife from somewhere and sliced his palm in a rapid movement, holding his own blood out to Georginne as she worked. “You’d better use this, then. Queen Clio of Zibria was my great-grandmother.”
Everyone was full of surprises today.
Georginne accepted the palm full of blood without flinching, and drew the blood into the shoe she was stitching. “Demi’s, too,” she said after a moment, and Silversword passed his knife to Demi so she could also put her blood into the shoes.
We all shivered as a breeze passed over us. It worried me. There had been no wind here the whole time—it was too natural somehow, like stars. It didn’t fit with this artificial little place. “She’s coming for us,” I said.
Demi took the completed shoes from Georginne with trembling hands. They were lopsided little things, all blood and pearls and faded silk, but they were strangely beautiful. Slowly, Demi reached down to slide them on to her feet. She hesitated. “They don’t fit.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said impatiently. “Just put them on.”
“I can’t!”
“Take your other shoes off first,” I snapped.
“It won’t make any difference,” Georginne said in that placid, calm voice that I was really beginning to hate. “I didn’t make them for her, Bounty.”
Everyone looked at me. I had a horrible sinking feeling in my gut. “Oh, no, no, no! I’m not even the beginning of a courtesan!”
“You are now,” said Demi, sounding so relieved that I wanted to bite her.
–§–§–§–§–§–
The shoes fit perfectly. In retrospect, I should have been more worried about that, but I was too busy being worried about the overwhelming power that they bled into my body. Stand up straight was their first command, and I wasn’t sure if the words were in my mind or in the shoes themselves.
You are glamour, the shoes told me. You are queen of the world. You are Courtesan.
Hear me roar, I thought back at them. They didn’t laugh. Shoes have no sense of humour.
Walk as courtesan, they thought back at me. You are elegance. You are arrogance. You are beauty.
In that instant I was all of those things and more. I walked across the snow as the haughtiest glamourpuss that ever lived. I breathed poise in and elegance out. My limbs were soft, liquid silk and my spine was so straight and proud it was practically screaming in pain.
I am Courtesan. Hear me purr.
Demi was in my head, that perfect silver mermaid she had been when she first greeted me at the Academy, before she collapsed into self-doubt. Silversword was there, the cool exterior that had protected him from the power of the Senior Mistresses. Georginne was there in every stitch, but I wasn’t sure what qualities she was adding to the mix apart from the vital knowledge of how to walk in exceptionally high heels, and I was already pretty good at that.
Behind all of them was another voice, a queenly presence that hovered in the pearls of my shoes. I didn’t know much about Queen Clio of Zibria except that she had been the second most beautiful woman of her era, and that she was so glamorous it made everybody’s teeth hurt.
Except, apparently, Silversword’s great-grandfather.
Was it Queen Clio’s imperious voice telling me to face my enemy as one woman to another, to begin the duel by arching my eyebrow and end it by crushing the bitch’s face into the ground? I don’t know, but the voice was starting to get on my nerves.
I glowed with glamour. My enemy glowed even more brightly. She emerged through the silver and gold trees, slowly enough for me to see that she had changed her costume. She was as white as the snow, gleaming so brightly that it hurt to look at her. She was the Queen of Courtesans, and what the hell was I?
I was Bounty Fenetre, a half-hobgoblin ragamuffin in a borrowed pair of shoes, a battered leather gymslip, torn fishnet tights and tangled hair that just wasn’t willing to stay in pigtails any longer. How could I face the Queen of Courtesans on equal terms when she was dressed so much better than I was?
On the other hand, I was wearing a truly kick-ass pair of shoes.
She stepped closer, and I saw her cheekbones sneering at me. Her mouth was so perfect that you’d think it belonged to the Goddess of Pretty Pink Mouths. Her eyes were wide and deep, a colour so original that they belonged in a museum.
And, oh crap, her eyebrows were starting to arch. I had no chance.
The shoes had other ideas. They walked me towards her, so stylishly that my feet almost dissolved with their own smugness. The spirit of Queen Clio filled my skin, and damn it all if I didn’t arch my eyebrow first.
“You cannot defeat me,” slinked Anastazia, Courtesan of Courtesans.
I almost opened my mouth to agree with her, until the shoes reminded me that by breaking our mutually haughty silence, she had conceded a point to me. I said nothing, following up my first victory with a pout to end all pouts, and a head tilt so subtle that my chin almost fainted with pride.
Her nose lifted in chilly challenge.
I breathed, conveying my own self-importance in the soft cloud of air that enveloped my face.
She lifted her lashes, as if to ask how I dared meet her on anything like equal terms.
I let a soft, graceful sneer envelop my face so slowly that she might almost think herself to have imagined it.
She radiated exquisite indignation without moving a muscle, and her power was so fierce in its subtlety that I wavered on the verge of collapsing, declaring my submission, craving her pardon.
The shoes would not let me submit. Silversword’s pride mixed with that of his ancestress, and they both held me upright, unflinching. Demi entered the picture with a brief hint of a move that could win me this game before I gave away that I had never done this before.
As the afterglow of Anastazia’s indignation burned around me, I swivelled my shoes in an agonisingly sophisticated manner, and turned my back on her.
It wasn’t subtle, but boy did it make her furious. She moved frighteningly fast, and was there in front of me by the time I had completed my turn. With outrage burning in her uniquely-coloured irises, she slapped me hard across the face.
If I had fallen, she would have won. It was a bold move. But the shoes caught me, and Queen Clio’s spirit bled from her pearls into my flesh, and she gave me the confidence to do what needed to be done.
I did nothing. I did not even flick an eyelash. I ignored the slap with such pure, poisonous abandon that it was as if she had never touched me. It was, in fact, as if she did not exist.
She sneered at me from on high, but it was too late. The moment had passed. She was not perfect anymore, she was not unbeatable. With haughty, casual disinterest radiating from every pore of my skin, I glanced away from her, as if something slightly more interesting had caught my eye.
Power po
ured from her, the terrible energy of a courtesan scorned, and I was all but flattened by the pressure. I fell to the snow, crushed by the beauty and grace and perfection that she had cultivated for so many decades. She was strong enough to annihilate me, and we both knew it.
Nevertheless, I had won. It was a strange thought. Stranger still was the way that I was able to move so gently, sliding my hand down the neckline and pulling the little, twisted hobgoblin shoe from my breast-band. It came free easily. I pulled it out and extended my arm as if I had all the time in the world, plunging it quite casually into the flesh of the Queen of Courtesans.
The shoe slid into her body like a sharp knife, exactly where her heart would be if it still beat like a mortal’s. She shattered, her skin as brittle as ice, and her poise bled on to the snow. When she fell, it was a graceful movement, but somewhat less than exquisite.
The Queen is dead, long live the Queen… I rose to my feet with slow, liquid motion. I was Courtesan, the Highest Courtesan in the world. Grace, elegance and exquisite beauty ran in my veins, and my whole body throbbed with how perfect I was.
I took one flawless step, then another. My power filled me from edge to edge, and I gloried in it. There was another courtesan here, crouching in the snow. She would be easy pickings, an after dinner mint following the magnificent spectacle of the main course.
Demi saw me coming for her, and cringed. I could obliterate her with one bat of my eyelashes. I poured towards her, glowing with the marvellous precision of my own movements.
Silversword stepped between us, standing up to me. The man was like a bucket of ice water, his whole body language screaming that my radiant lusciousness left him unmoved. “It doesn’t impress me, Bounty,” he said in a voice so cool that it pulled me apart.
I hesitated for just a moment, and my power wavered. The new Queen of Courtesans had been vanquished in a new and interesting way. In the moment that I hesitated, four people lunged for my feet. Chas and Eliander worked together to separate me from my left blood-and-pearl slipper, while Georginne and Demi practically took their teeth to my right foot. When they had finished, I stood barefoot in the snow, and the chill was enough to bring me back to reality.
“Oh, bloody, bloody hell!”
Silversword looked meaningfully at Georginne, who grudgingly produced a new pair of shoes for me to wear. “Don’t throw these at anyone.”
I was so cold I was willing to promise anything. “Yes, yes! Hand them over.”
Only when my feet were all snuggly and dry did I think of looking at the fallen body of my vanquished Queen of Courtesans. She wasn’t that anymore, of course; the loss of her power had rendered her Anastazia again. She was an ordinary corpse of an average-shaped woman lying there in the snow.
“We should cut her head off, to be sure,” said Fredo.
“Her limbs as well,” said Eliander. “We could bury them in separate places.”
“Good plan,” said Chas, producing a truly wicked set of chopping knives from gods-knew-where.
“Leave the shoe in her heart,” said Georginne, in a small voice. “You don’t want it to start beating again.”
My, they were a bloodthirsty little mob.
“No one’s cutting anything off!” I said loudly. “She’s a conquered, dead old lady. Leave her be.”
“We’ll take her back with us,” said Demi in a clear voice. “We burn our dead in Zibria.”
There was a long pause.
“Works for me,” said Silversword.
“I suppose we could scatter the ashes in different places,” said Eliander.
“I could do a cleansing ritual to prevent her from reconstituting herself,” suggested Fredo.
Chas weighed his chopping knives wistfully. “Are you sure I can’t just cut her head off?”
–§–§–§–§–§–
And then what? We went home. Seemed like the thing to do. We went back to the glass pavilion first to see if Anastazia’s death had released the remaining dark princes and princesses from their demonic bondage. In a way I suppose it had, because we found nothing but little heaps of dancing slippers, and tatters of the costumes they had worn.
Georginne collected up those shoes along with her own, and her sack was seriously bulging by the time we left.
It wasn’t that easy, of course, to leave the snowy realm of the Queen of Courtesans. We had to find the gondola—and also, the river—and the only way to do that was to search the whole damn silver and gold forest until we found where it had been stashed.
Then there was the problem of how to get the gondola to move upriver given that her Majesty’s invisible gondoliers had retired, or faded from existence, or whatever. We managed eventually, poling our way against the current with branches hacked from the silver and gold trees.
It was a long and laborious journey home, and for a while there we all thought there would be no escape, but finally we emerged into the Zibrian canals of the mortal world, and our quest was at an end.
We drifted up the canals so slowly that the Senior Mistresses were informed of our return in plenty of time to be standing on the bank in true stately manner to welcome us home.
There were streamers. Even talk of a parade. Hard to enjoy it, when our only trophy (apart from the silver and gold branches) was an old woman’s body on a makeshift bier.
“You said you weren’t a bounty hunter,” said Mistress Red to me when she saw the corpse of Anastazia.
I almost stuck my tongue out at her, but the vestiges of courtesanry that still lingered in my blood transformed it into a withering stare. Damn it, that was a bad sign.
Back in the Courtesan Academy I was ushered into a dressing room to find my real clothes waiting for me. It was such a relief to scramble into my chainmail lingerie and big grey suede boots—to feel like Bounty again. Was it my imagination, though, or was I throwing on my clothes a little more carefully and gracefully than I used to? There was a quiet knock on the door, and Silversword stepped inside. For the first time, I saw him dressed as himself, rather than in some costume or disguise. Clothes do make the man—or, at least, they tell you an awful lot about him. He was all in grey, with his Emperor’s livery on his arms and chest. Sombre, dignified and business-like.
His boots were grey leather, but not as cute as mine. Thank goodness. A girl has to have some pride.
We looked at each other for a moment, the serious imperial champion and the flighty hobgoblin adventuress.
Another knock, and Demi poked her head in. “There you two are! The Mistresses want to see you.”
“They do?” Hard to get excited about that.
“To present your rewards, of course. Especially you, Bounty. They were very excited when they heard about you channelling Queen Clio to conquer Anastazia. I think they want to offer you a place here, in the Academy.”
Interesting. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
“Don’t be long!” She withdrew.
I looked at Silversword again. Was it my imagination, or had the distance tripled between us since Demi’s announcement? “Come on. You can help me find a window to climb out of.”
He lifted his eyebrow a little. “I would have thought joining the Courtesan Academy was just your sort of thing. Power, glamour, the chance to find out if there really is a Secret Police of Zibria…”
I would have thought exactly the same thing not so long ago. “And end up like Anastazia, all frocks and glitter and desperately trying to out-glamour everyone for eternity? No thanks.”
He was gazing intently at me. “What?” I said defensively.
“People don’t impress me very often, I was appreciating the moment.”
“Moments are one thing,” I said firmly. “Windows are another. Let’s get out of here.”
One window later, we were on our way out of Zibria. Together. I found myself wanting to take my time. “So, I impressed you, huh?”
“A little.”
“Impressed enough to walk a girl home?”
&nbs
p; Was that a smile I saw on his face? A flicker, anyway. A very promising flicker. “I think I can manage that. Where’s home for you?”
“I don’t currently have one.” There’s a flaw in every plan.
“Ah. Well, I have to get back to Dreadnought eventually.”
“Sounds like as good a place as any.” Mm. Dreadnought was right at the other end of Mocklore. It would be a good long journey, with plenty of opportunity for all kinds of interesting developments along the way.
“Excellent,” said Silversword, and he sounded like he meant it.
I had a thought. “I didn’t stop you picking up your reward from the Senior Mistresses, did I?”
“I didn’t do this for a reward,” he said pointedly.
“Well, now you’ve impressed me.”
“Stab me, my life is complete.”
We continued on our merry way, bantering a little and flirting a lot. So he was impressed with me turning down a potentially lucrative and glamorous career as a courtesan, was he? I’d better not tell him that I had souvenired the pearl-and-blood slippers. They were currently stashed in my travel pack between my pillow and my wash bag. I might not want to be a courtesan now, but that doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m a very fickle person.
After all, they are very cute shoes.
Part II
Delta Void is Not a Mercenary
Delta Void and the Unicorn Soup
In Skullcap, a little seaport on the edge of nowhere, there’s a street where only the beautiful people go. Not a formal rule, but one of life’s natural laws: dragons are flameproof, emperors are crazy and you need a beauty licence to get into the Beautiful Street. Even the most beautiful people don’t venture along that particular stretch of cobbled asphalt unless they are looking their tip-top best—wearing their prettiest tunics and their sleekest boots, faces prinked and painted with various colourful metallic compounds. And that’s just the men.
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 97
