by Michael Shea
“I was lucky in you, sir. I am a meditative person who keeps her dealings to herself. I rejoice that in this departure from my custom I didn’t err, but found a true ally. We’ll have the deed brought, and I’ll explain how to proceed with the sale.”
Hex emerged from the mansion around noon. To the driver of the first cab he was able to find—some blocks out of the exclusively residential Heights—he needed say no more than “the Marketditch Brothel” to be whirled on his way towards that establishment. He himself had known the place before the dowager named it, merely from the epithet “the most egregious brothel in Glorak Harbour”—known it, indeed, inside and out, though he was no “chipster” in the student parlance, having been there only a few score times during his Academy career.
It stood in a waterfront neighbourhood, a five-storey stone box. Small windows, tightly shuttered, were countersunk in its bare façade, and their great number per floor made it look hivelike. This character, accentuated by its swarming activity at night, was part of what made his visit of almost a year ago his last one to date. The girl had been fey and fat-breasted, and Hex had been just on the point of getting his money’s worth. Abruptly he remembered his larger position. All around him, for two storeys above and below, in dozens of identical cells, others copulated. He was surrounded by a host of coupling strangers, each pair of them adding infinitesimally to a faint rocking of the entire building which he fancied he detected even then. A kind of earthquake-panic soured his pleasure.
He entered and found the mute desertion of noon—whores’ night—but otherwise the place was just as it had been. Hex remembered leaning tipsily at the balustrades, peering down on this lobby with its pimp-counters abustle and its fat furniture filled, some of it by clients of a public taste who were actually enjoying their assignees: a vision of vague shapes in turmoil, senseless as the patterns in sea-foam.
The place was not wholly empty now, he found. At one of the bars sat a lean, hairless man, his skullish face intent on some work in his lap. Hex approached and saw that he was polishing the numbered plaques—chips—which the pimps hung under the numerous women’s names on the wall above the bar, to reserve them to waiting clients.
“I don’t come as a client today my friend,” Hex said heartily, “though I won’t deny I’ve done so in the past, on a whim.”
The man, whom Hex had now identified with certainty as the head pimp, tossed his chip into one bin and took up another from a second. “I see sir,” he murmured to his polishing hands politely, not lifting his head.
Hex noticed another presence he had missed—a lone whore, bored, leaning at the third-floor railing, looking down at them.
“No, I come wearing a different cap today,” Hex said. He drew the deed of title from his doublet and stroked it slowly, consideringly across his left palm, as one who whets a blade. To his irritation, the pimp did not even glance at the document, but took up yet another chip.
“I’ve come to tell you that you must prepare for this house’s transportation, this same afternoon. I’ve sold it to an Ungullion man. You see I am its owner. Slamp, the skinbroker with whom you have dealt with these past years, is my agent.” Hex thought his declaration echoed menacingly in the stillness and dark-curtained spaces of the brothel. He smiled, trying to radiate the bland, unfearful nature of the whole affair. The pimp, still polishing, did not look up.
“I see, sir. Plods or wizardry sir? Must we batten down?”
“Plods. The buyer’s no spendthrift. Do batten down. They’ll be here in two hours or somewhat less.” Hex repocketed the deed as he spoke, deeply dissatisfied. Such smooth concession did not speak well for the whores’ compliance with the move. Pimps and whores alike were life-bound to the house, for all had submitted to a soul-shackling, and were incapable of stepping outside it. With it they had a free hand, and since the demon buyer, in his concern for discretion, insisted on the conventional mode of transport, they would have considerable latitude for resistance.
Unwillingly, he turned away, while the whore who had been watching from above came down one of the two staircases that flanked the entryway.
She was nude, saving a belt with a tiny curtain of crotch-bangles. She was Loopish, with the jutting jaw of that race. Her long thighs, the aureoles of fine, white fur round her nipples, and her restless, shifting stance were all equally characteristic.
“Who’s our new owner, your eminence?” Her voice was throaty and strong.
“He’s a downcoaster, Madam. A man from Ungullion.”
“Ah! Ah ha! Would you believe it? Someone whispered to me that he was a demon! What’s the name of this Ungullion man, sir?” She came closer with the question, grinning up into his face. Hex smelled her musk, and felt the taunt.
“I’m not free to say, Madam,” he said stiffly.
“Few are free to do anything, precious few. Except for the rich. I’m Zelt, I’m a whore, not a madam, so call me ‘whore’, Your Highness.”
Hex stepped around her. She sprang ahead of him, cupping her breasts in her hands to run. She turned in front of the curtain, blocking his exit.
“Good whore, I must pass.”
“Good owner, all things must pass. You’re selling us to a demon. I’ve heard rumours. One gathers many things, lying on one’s back. Demons have been in town, looking up skinbrokers.”
“Don’t call me a liar, whore.”
“Demons, Ineffable One. Names. Dreadful, hair-raising names have been whispered. Names that could buy a city of whorehouses at a nod. How will it be with us tonight, after the sale? What’ll be hugging us close, and where?”
“Get out of the way!” Hex raged, her ugly accuracy angering him to the needed force. She shrugged—a breast-bobbling operation—and stepped aside.
“Owner, my arse!” she called to his back. “Poon’s puppet!” Hex threw the door shut on the words, which struck him like a snakebite. Fears poisoned his cab ride back to the foothills, to Slamp’s brokerage.
This was a two-storey house of weathered timbers. The man who opened the door was short. He wore a fur-trimmed robe. His moustaches were waxed, and his long hair was interrupted on the crown by a bald spot. His bow, courtly in intention, was evidently abbreviated by a stoutness which his robe concealed.
“Good day, I am Slamp. Whom do I serve?”
“My name is Bramt Hex. I own the Marketditch Brothel.”
“The Marketditch Brothel! I am honoured to meet you for the first time, after so many years of satisfying association! By the powers! Your brothel is just what absorbs me at present. I feel a great stroke of luck is about to fall on us both, Master Hex. Tell me quickly: do you wish to sell this property?”
“Why, yes! Yes, I do!”
“Now this is a rare crossing of paths, Master Hex! Would you believe it? A buyer desiring this very property of yours sits even now above, in my office. Will you join us?”
4
A Hard Bargain
Hex was not at ease as he climbed the stairs behind the broker. The dowager had told him to hold out for a hundred million, and to combine firmness and tact equally, which indicated that the transaction, though prearranged, was to some degree genuinely at hazard. Meanwhile Slamp’s jovial pretence betrayed underlying fear. The man’s voice was not quite steady. Moreover, there was a smell, an acrid, faecal stink, that teased their nostrils as they climbed the dim stairwell. It seemed to Hex a kind of sensory echo of the fear he felt infecting his host, and it grew stronger as they topped the stairs. He decided it was coming from a door Slamp now led him to.
The broker paused before this door, his hand above its latch, and Hex started. It was an ordinary wooden door they had approached, but what they stood before was massive, rusty iron, all rivet-studded and dank. That light, insistent stench that leaked from this phantasmal door seemed to be the source of the hallucination. Hex shook his head, and saw again the same wood panelling, as Slamp pushed it open and led him into malodorous gloom.
The room was an office, its
windows heavily draped.
There were a table heaped with scrolls and ledgers and several chairs, in one of which the demon sat. But it was also—fleetingly, in unpredictable pulses—a different room, a room whose walls were of oozing, earth-sunk stone and gapped with the mossy doorframes of long corridors that echoed, just audibly, with restless, shackled multitudes. Hex understood the demon was the font of this phantasmagoric trance, and it helped him keep a semblance of poise. He sat in a chair of padded leather (intermittently, a rusty iron stool) that faced the entity.
The demon wore—was, in a way—a black cape and a wide-brimmed black hat. White smoke swelled and tenanted these garments. The restless, ragged hands were smoke—fuming out of shape, reformed each instant. The face was smoke, in which the eyes and mouth were jagged gaps. The demon’s upward-welling substance did not diffuse through the room, but gathered in a column over him and vanished neatly through a slit in the air. Slamp was saying something about wind, and, gladly, Bramt Hex turned his eyes to the broker.
“What wind, did you say?”
“A lucky wind, I say. That’s blown you here. Master Hex, you see,” he told the demon, “is the owner of the Marketditch Brothel. He has just come to me seeking a buyer for it!”
The smoke-buoyed hat nodded. A whispered voice replied: “Splendid. A splendid stroke of luck.” The mouth squirted wisps and fumes with each sibilant and plosive.
“Assuming, of course, you ask a sensible sum, not exceeding seventy million lictors.”
Hex spread his hands helplessly. “Alas. Our smooth-sailing luck seems to have struck a reef. You see, I have come here with an unnegotiable figure—one hundred and ten million lictors. Debate would be a waste of… breath.”
With horror Hex found himself sunk, deeply and prolongedly in the dungeon place, and found its features more starkly vivid than before. He could see white veins of nitrous encrustation splayed across the ageless prison stones, could hear distinctly the lamentations of a multitude a-wander in darkness without limit. The charnel odour seemed to saturate his very skin, and he could see down some of the corridors now, see torchlight puddled on the flagstones, and figures creeping through those little oases of light. He jumped from his seat, strode to the door, and pressed his back against it, feeling the delusion loosen and fall from him, as if it had been some physical envelope. “What are you doing to me? I protest! I won’t do business under this kind of coercion!”
Slamp had risen to exhort them, but the demon stilled him, raising a tenuous hand which tattered into fragments with its languid, beckoning wave. “Sit, human. You have misunderstood me. I did not finish setting forth my offer.”
Hex returned to his seat, full of relief and self-congratulation. He would get Lady Poon’s price. No! He would get more! He would bring her not only the ninety million (after commission) she expected, but a princely gift besides, fruit of his initiative. Bramt Hex, the cat’s-paw? The Dowager’s lap-dog? Not entirely, it seemed.
“I beg your pardon for my haste. What was the rest of the offer?”
“Why, not much. A slight thing. Simply, eternal life. To live forever. Never to die.”
After a pause, Hex found a crack in his voice when he used it. “You would give me this?”
“I would give you the means to achieve it. I would tell you how to find Yana.”
“And in Yana…?”
“In Yana, the touch of undying is given to all who come seeking it.”
“Is it far?”
“Very far.”
For just a moment, his mind hung amazed. Even as the door to wealth was opening before him, to have the door thrown open on a second and greater wonder! Where might the bold spirit not soar? But then the free flight of ambition became a dread that he should fall. The revelations of demons were murky, doubtful things—fool’s bait. The enterprise in hand was real, and great enough. Not to be jeopardized for the sake of a treacherous rumour, no. It was time to state the price he really aimed at and wrap things up before his adversary worked further mischief on his imagination. He nerved himself to be firm and brusque:
“I am sorry, sir. I feel that you simply refuse to understand me. I will, in the spirit of compromise and goodwill, go down to a hundred and one million lictors, but not a lictor less will I accept. Please do not try me further.”
In the cold, stinking silence that followed, the demon’s cape shuddered and boiled; his smoke raced more thickly up to the air’s seam like a mute, reversed waterfall.
Then he replied. And throughout his answer Bramt Hex—for as long as that unhuman gasping filled his ears—was again in the demon’s vault. He could see it yet more clearly than before. He had time, while he listened, to determine that the movement in the torchlit corridors was that of huge, multibrachiate shapes, all crawling now towards the chamber he sat in.
“I accept the offer, human. You put your terms insultingly. Hear mine. The house must submit to sale. There must be no displays. Neither alarm nor rumours must be raised. This is your responsibility. You will see it met, or suffer indescribably.”
The portals of the demon’s clothes erupted gouts of smoke. The cape collapsed, the hat fell to the floor, and a last thick cloud vanished through its eerie vent. Gasping relief, Slamp rose and tore aside the drapes, thrust up the windows. The breeze rushed in, along with the sweet, wholesome sunlight of the upper world.
Slamp was subdued as he gave Hex the instruments of exchange to sign. When he drew up the bill-of-draft for the payment, Hex asked that he draw it for ninety million, and that the “slight remainder” be given him in specie.
“I plan to purchase a surprise for a certain noble lady who stands high in my esteem,” he explained with shaky gaiety. Slamp glanced at him, plainly aware of an irregularity, but just as plainly deciding it was only the dowager’s business. It was clear that his responsibility to the other principal of this transaction was what engrossed him. He provided Hex with a stout satchel for his draft and his coin, then led the way down to a stabler who kept a coach and driver for him. As they rode together to the brothel Hex, made uneasy by the broker’s gloomy silence, tapped him on the knee.
“Listen, good Slamp. This is foolishness, this idea that using a wizard would be talkmaking or flamboyant. It’s quite common nowadays! Why invite trouble with a protracted plod-move? I’ll gladly share the cost of a wizard.”
“I’m sorry. The buyer was too particular about this. Too many tongues are wagging lately of subworld encroachments. For my own part, I think you are perfectly right. But I stand even more liable to him than you do, my friend. I dare not violate his instructions.”
The first teams of movers were already on hand, stringing traffic barriers at both ends of the lane in front of the brothel, and they told the broker that the plods and earth-saw were on the way. This transportation-readiness plainly betrayed the prearrangement of Hex’s and Slamp’s “lucky” encounter, but the broker was oblivious to the scholar’s grins. He led them to the brothel’s door, and through it. Pushing past the curtain and crossing the antechamber, they found they had the rapt attention of three hundred souls.
The house’s denizens were draped all over the lobby furniture, sat hugging their knees atop both bars, leaned at every railing around the shadowy well of the central shaft. The focus of this conclave was obvious: Zelt, standing in a half-crouch, atop a chairback in the lobby’s centre. She had turned her raging, gibbous eyes on the pair and now she shouted, pointing:
“Ask them! There they stand. Our fat Highness and Slamp, his sawed-off catamite! Isn’t it true, Immensities? That we’re being transported to the subworlds?”
“Madness!” Hex cried. “What did I come here earlier, expressly to tell you? You’re being moved to Ungullion. Why, it’s even pleasanter than Glorak, a greener city by far!”
“Greener!” Zelt shrilled gleefully up at the shrouded skylight. “Plod-flop is green, Your Maggotcy, and you’re a liar! A demon has bought us—isn’t that so?”
“You bra
inless slut!” As he shouted this, Hex envisioned with fearful clarity each foot of distance separating him from the door behind them. Within these walls, they could be torn to pieces. “Consider what you say, fool,” he went on. “Do demons use plods and earthsaws to move property?”
“Yes! Yes!” The Loop fairly danced on the chairback. “They do if they want to avoid astir, and squelch rumours! And isn’t it also true, what they say about demons? That they fasten in swarms of lice and couple by feeding? That they cling to a body as fiery scabs, as gangrenations of the flesh? And isn’t it true that it’s demons who bought us?”
“Rubbish! You will obey!” It was Slamp who exploded with this, causing Hex, but no one else, to jump with startlement, The shrillness of the man’s voice aroused laughter, which brought his wrath to a peak. He tried to shout, but was speechless, and turned on his heel for the door. Hex, not expecting to retire so abruptly, stumbled in his haste to follow. They dived through the chattering curtain with universal jeering at their backs. “Oh sir!” cried a voice. “Your doublet quite kills me, I’m weak at the knees!”
Outside, they congratulated each other on their firmness, cursed the whores, and rushed to meet the movers’ engineer, who had just arrived with the titanoplods. The shovel-jawed quadrupeds, one behind the other, trundled the earth-saw’s forty-foot, circular blade between them. They could not have moved abreast, for either of them alone nearly filled the street widthwise. Their top-set eyes had a mournfully pious look, and their movement had a creaking pomp, an air of clumsy consideration. First they would operate the saw with their armlike forelegs, cutting free the block of pavement and earth the brothel was rooted in. Then they would work the windlass of the great boom whose top, slowly swaying, was even now visible above the rooftops some blocks away. The infamous structure would then be hoisted on to the wheeled platform that was the crane’s foundation, and borne down to a barge already moored in the inlet.
“Set them to it at once,” Slamp told the engineer. “We want to catch the early tide, and still might!”
