It was gathering dusk. The girls could be heard throughout the house, giggling as they prepared for the evening. Myrtis kept no one who showed no aptitude or enjoyment of the profession. Let the other houses bind their girls with poverty or drugs; the Aphrodisia House was the pinnacle of ambition for the working girls of the Street.
'I got your message.' A soft voice called from the drapery-hung doorway near her bed.
'1 was beginning to get worried. My girl has not returned.'
Lythande walked to her side, draping an arm about her shoulders and taking hold of her hand.
'I've heard the rumours in the streets. The new regime has chosen its next enemy, it would seem. What is the truth of their demands?'
'They intend to levy a tax of ten gold pieces on every woman living on the Street.'
Lythande's habitual smile faded, and the blue star tattooed forehead wrinkled into a frown. 'Will you be able to pay that?'
'The intent is not that we pay, but that the Street be closed, and that we be sent up to the empire. If 1 pay it once, they'll keep on levying it until I can't pay.'
'You could close the house ...'
'Never!' Myrtis pulled her hands away. 'The Aphrodisia House is mine. I was running this house when the Rankan Empire was a collection of half-naked barbaric tribes!'
'But they aren't any longer,' Lythande reminded her gently. 'And the Hell Hounds - if not the prince - are making substantial changes in all our lives.'
'They won't interfere with magic, will they?'
Myrtis's concern for Lythande briefly overshadowed her fears for the Aphrodisia House. The magician's thin-lipped smile returned.
'For now it is doubtful. There are men in Ranke who have the ability to affect us directly, but they have not followed the prince to Sanctuary, and I do not know if he could command their loyalty.'
Myrtis stood up. She walked to the leaded-glass window, with its thick, obscuring panes which revealed movement on the Street but very little else. '
'I'll need your help, if it's available,' she said without facing Lythande.
'What can I do?'
'In the past you've prepared a drug for me from a qualis-berry extract. I recall you said it was quite difficult to mix - but I should like enough for two people when it's mixed with pure qualis liqueur.'
'Delicate and precise, but not particularly difficult. It is very subtle. Are you sure you will only need enough to serve two?'
'Yes, Zaibar and myself. I agree; the drug must be subtle.'
'You must be very certain of your methods, then.'
'Of some things, at least. The Street of Red Lanterns does not lie outside the walls of Sanctuary by accident - you know that. The Hell Hounds and their prince have much more to lose by hindering us than by letting the Street exist in peace. If our past purpose were not enough to convince them, then surely the fact that much of the city's gold passes through my hands every year will matter.
'I will use the qualis-berry love potion to open Zaibar's eyes to reality, not to close them.'
'I can have it for you perhaps by tomorrow evening, but more likely the day after. Many of the traders and smugglers of the bazaar are no longer well supplied with the ingredients I will need, but I can investigate other sources. When the Hell Hounds drove the smugglers into the Swamp of Night Secrets, many honest men suffered.'
Myrtis's eyes narrowed, she released the drapery she had clutched.
'And if the Street of Red Lanterns wasn't here ... The mongers and merchants, and even the smugglers, might not want to admit it, but without us to provide them with their gold while "respectable" people offer promises, they would suffer even more than they do now.'
There was a gentle knocking on the door. Lythande stepped back into the shadows of the room. Ambutta entered, a large bruise visible on the side of her face.
'The men have begun to arrive, Madame Myrtis. Will you collect their money, or shall I take the ledger downstairs?'
'I shall attend to them. Send them up to me and, Ambutta -'
She stopped the girl as she headed out of the parlour. 'Go to the kitchen and find out how many days we could go without buying anything from any of the tradesmen.'
'Yes, madame.'
The room was suddenly empty, except for Myrtis. Only a slight rippling of the wall tapestries showed where Lythande had opened a concealed panel and disappeared into the secret passages of the Aphrodisia House. Myrtis had not expected the magician to stay, but despite all their years together, the magician's sudden comings and goings still unsettled her. Standing in front of a full-length mirror, Myrtis rearranged the pearl-and-gold pins in her hair, rubbed scented oils into her skin, and greeted the first gentleman-caller as if the day had been no different from any other.
Word of the taxation campaign against the Street had spread through the city much as Lythande had observed. The result was that many of their frequent guests and visitors came to the house to pay their last respects to an entertainment that they openly expected would be gone in a very short time. Myrtis smiled at each of them as they arrived, accepted their money, and asked their second choice of the girls before assuring them that the Aphrodisia House would never close its doors.
'Madame?'
Ambutta peered around the doorway .when the flow of gentlemen had abated slightly.
'The kitchen says that we have enough food for ten days, but less of ordinary wine and the like.'
Myrtis touched the feather of her pen against her temple.
'Ten days? Someone has grown lax. Our storerooms can hold enough for many months. But ten days is all we will have, and it will have to be enough. Tell the kitchen to place no orders with the tradesmen tomorrow or the next day, and send word to the other backdoors. - .
'And, Ambutta, Irda will carry my messages in the future. It is time that you were taught more important and useful things.'
A steady stream of merchants and tradesmen made their way through the Aphrodisia House to Myrtis's parlour late the next morning as the effects of her orders began to be felt in the town.
'But Madame Myrtis, the tax isn't due yet, and surely the Aphrodisia House has the resources ...' The puffy-faced gentleman who sent meat to half the houses on the Street was alternately irate and wheedling. .
'In such unsettled times as these, good Mikkun, I cannot look to luxuries like expensive meats. I sincerely wish that this were not true. The taste of salted meat has always reminded me of poverty. But the governor's palace does not care about the poverty of those who live outside its walls, though it sends its forces to tax us,' Myrtis said in feigned helplessness.
In deference to the sad occasion she had not put on one of the brightly embroidered day-robes as was her custom but wore a Soberly cut dress of a fashion outdated in Sanctuary at least twenty years before. She had taken off her jewellery, knowing that its absence would cause more rumours than if she had indeed sold a part of it to the gem-cutters. An atmosphere of austerity enveloped the house and every other on the Street, as Mikkun could attest, for he'd visited most of them.
'But madame, I have already slaughtered two cows! For three years I have slaughtered the cows first to assure you the freshest meat early in the day. Today, for no reason, you say you do not want my meat! Madame, you already have a debt to me for those two cows!'
'Mikkun! You have never, in all the years I've known you, extended credit to any house on the Street and now ... now you're asking me to consider my daily purchases a debt to you!' She smiled disarmingly to calm him, knowing full well that the butcher and the others depended on the hard gold from the Street to pay their own debts.
'There will be credit in the future!'
'But we will not be here to use it!' "
Myrtis let her face take on a mournful pout. Let the butcher and his friends start dunning the 'respectable' side of Sanctuary, and word would spread quickly to the palace that something was amiss. A 'something' which she would explain to the Hell Hound captain, Zaibar, when he arrived to
collect the tax. The trades man left her parlour muttering prophecies of doom she hoped would eventually be heard by those in a position to worry about them.
'Madame?'
Ambutta's child-serious face appeared in the doorway moments after the butcher had left. Her ragged dress had already been replaced with one of a more mature cut, brighter colour, and new cloth.
'Amoli waits to speak with you. She is in the kitchen now. Shall I send her up?'
'Yes, bring her up.'
Myrtis sighed after Ambutta left. Amoli was her only rival on the Street. She was a woman who had not learned her trade in the upper rooms of the Aphrodisia, and also one who kept her girls working for her through their addiction to krrf, which she supplied to them. If anyone on the Street was nervous about the tax, though, it was Amoli; she had very little gold to spare. The smugglers had recently been forced by the same Hell Hounds to raise the price of a well refined brick of the drug to maintain their own profits.
'Amoli, good woman, you look exhausted.'
Myrtis assisted a woman less than a third her age to the love-seat.
'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 Zaibar 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, T 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.'
Zaibar 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.
<
br /> '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 Zaibar 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 Zaibar, 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 Zaibar 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.
Zaibar 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.
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