Thieves’ World

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  “By order of Prince Kadakithis, a tax of ten gold pieces for every woman living on the Street of Red Lanterns is to be levied and collected at once if they are to be allowed to continue to practise their trade without incurring official displeasure.”

  Only the slight tensing of Myrtis’s hand betrayed her indignation at Zalbar’s statement. Her voice and face remained dispassionately calm.

  “The royal concubines are no longer pleasing?” she replied with a sneering smile. “You cannot expect every woman on the Street of Red Lanterns to have ten gold pieces. How do you expect them to earn the money for your taxes?”

  “We do not expect them to be able to pay ‘the tax’, madame. We expect to close your brothel and every other house like it on the Street. The women, including yourself, will be sent elsewhere to lead more productive lives.”

  Myrtis stared at the soldier with a practised contempt that ended their conversation. The soldier fingered the hilt of his sword.

  “The tax will be collected, madame. You will have a reasonable amount of time to get the money for yourself and the others. Let us say, three days? I’ll return in the evening.”

  He turned about without waiting for a reply and left through the back door in complete silence. Myrtis went back to interrupted breakfast while the staff and the girls were hysterical with questions and the seeds of rumour. She let them babble in this manner while she ate; then she strode to the head of the common table.

  “Everything shall continue as usual. If it comes to paying their tax, arrangements will be made. You older girls already have ample gold set aside. I will make the necessary adjustments for the newer girls. Unless you doubt me in which case, I’ll arrange a severance for you.”

  “But madame, if we pay once, they will levy the tax again and again until we can’t pay it. Those Hell Hounds …” A girl favoured more by intelligence than beauty spoke up.

  “That is certainly their desire. The Street of Red Lanterns is as old as the walls of Sanctuary itself. I can assure you that we have survived much worse than the Hell Hounds.” Myrtis smiled slightly to herself, remembering the others who had tried and failed to shut down the Street. “Cylene, the others will be coming to see me. Send them up to the parlour. I’ll wait for them there.”

  The emerald day-robe billowed out from behind her as Myrtis ascended the staircase to the lower rooms and up again to her parlour. In the privacy of her rooms, she allowed her anger to surface as she paced.

  “Ambutta!” She shouted, and the young girl who attended her appeared.

  “Yes, madame?”

  “I have a message for you to carry.” She sat at the writing table composing the message as she spoke to the still-out-of-breath girl. “It is to be delivered in the special way as before. No one must see you leave it. Do you understand that? If you cannot leave it without being seen, come back here. Don’t let yourself become suspicious.”

  The girl nodded. She tucked the freshly folded and sealed message into the bodice of her ragged cast-off dress and ran from the room. In time, Myrtis expected her to be a beauty, but she was still very much a child. The message itself was to Lythande, who preferred not to be contacted directly. She would not rely on the magician to solve the Street’s problems with the Hell Hounds, but no one else would understand her anger or alleviate it.

  The Aphrodisia House dominated the Street. The Hell Hounds would come to her first, then visit the other establishments. As word of the tax spread, the other madams would begin a furtive pilgrimage to the back entrance of the Aphrodisia. They looked to Myrtis for guidance, and she looked out the window for inspiration. She had not found one by the time her guests began to appear.

  “It’s an outrage. They’re trying to put us on the streets like common whores!” Dylan of the artificially flaming red hair exclaimed before sitting in the chair Myrtis indicated to her.

  “Nonsense, dear,” Myrtis explained calmly. “They wish to make us slaves and send us to Ranke. In a way, it is a compliment to Sanctuary.”

  “They can’t do such a thing!”

  “No, but it will be up to us to explain that to them.”

  “How?”

  “First we’ll wait until the others arrive. I hear Amoli in the hall; the others won’t be long in coming.”

  It was a blatant stall for time on Myrtis’s part. Other than her conviction that the Hell Hounds and their prince would not succeed where others had failed in the past, Myrtis had no idea how to approach the utterly incorruptible elite soldiers. The other madams of the Street talked among themselves, exchanging the insight Myrtis had revealed to Dylan, and reacting poorly to it. Myrtis watched their reflections in the rough-cut glass.

  They were all old. More than half of them had once worked for her. She had watched them age in the unkind manner that often overtakes youthful beauty and transforms it into grotes-querie. Myrtis might have been the youngest of them young enough to be working in the houses instead of running one of them. But when she turned from the window to face them, there was the unmistakable glint of experience and wisdom in her eyes.

  “Well, it wasn’t really a surprise,” she began. “It was rumoured before Kittycat got here, and we’ve seen what has happened to the others the Hell Hounds have been turned loose on. I admit I’d hoped that some of the others would have held their ground better and given us a bit more time.”

  “Time wouldn’t help. I don’t have a hundred gold pieces to give them!” A woman whose white-paste make-up cracked around her eyes as she spoke interrupted Myrtis.

  “You don’t need a hundred gold pieces!” A similarly made-up woman snarled back.

  “The gold is unimportant.” Myrtis’s voice rose above the bickering. “If they can break one of us, they can drive us all out.”

  “We could close our doors; then they’d suffer. Half of my men are from Ranke.”

  “Half of all our men are, Gelicia. They won the war and they’ve got the money,” Myrtis countered. “But they’ll kowtow to the Hell Hounds, Kittycat, and their wives. The men of Ranke are very ambitious. They’ll give up much to preserve their wealth and positions. If the prince is officially frowning on the Street, their loyalties will be less strained if we have closed our doors without putting up a fight.”

  Grudgingly the women agreed.

  “Then what will we do?”

  “Conduct your affairs as always. They’ll come to the Aphrodisia first to collect the taxes, just as they came here first to announce it. Keep the back doors open and I’ll send word. If they can’t collect from me, they won’t bother you.”

  There was mumbled disagreement, but no one dared to look straight at Myrtis and argue the point of her power on the Street. Seated in her high-backed chair, Myrtis smiled contentedly. She had yet to determine the precise solution, but the house madams of the Street of Red Lanterns controlled much of the gold within Sanctuary, and she had just confirmed her control of them.

  They left her parlour quickly after the decision was rendered. If the Street was to function as usual, they all had work to do. She had work to do. The Hell Hounds would not return for three days. In that time, the Aphrodisia House would earn far more than those three hundred gold pieces the empire wanted, and would spend only slightly less than that amount to maintain itself. Myrtis opened the ledger, making new notations in a clear, educated hand. The household sensed that order had been restored at least temporarily, and one by one they filed into the parlour to report their earnings or debts.

  It was well into afternoon and Ambutta had not returned from placing her message behind a loose stone in the wall behind the altar at the temple of Ils, For a moment, Myrtis worried about the girl. The streets of Sanctuary were never truly safe, and perhaps Ambutta no longer seemed as childlike to all eyes. There was always an element of risk. Twice before girls had been lost in the streets, and not even Lythande’s magic could find them again.

  Myrtis put such thoughts aside and ate dinner alone in her parlour. She had thought a bribe o
r offer of free privileges might still be the way out of her problem with the taxes. Prince Kadakithis was probably sincere, though, in his determination to make Sanctuary the ideal city of his adviser’s philosophies while the capital city of the empire displayed many of the same excesses that Sanctuary did. The young prince had a wife and concubines with whom he was supposedly well pleased. There had never been any suspicion that he might partake of the delights of the Street himself. And as for the Hell Hounds, their first visit had been to announce the taxes.

  The elite guard were men made of a finer fibre than most of the soldiers or fighters Sanctuary had known. On reflection, Myrtis doubted that they could be bought or bribed, and knew for certain that they would never relent in their persecution of the Street if the first offer did not succeed in converting them.

  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.

  “I 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 I 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, Zalbar 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 Zalbar’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 at
test, 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, Zalbar, 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.