Trial of Flowers

Book : City Imperishable

by Jay Lake

Genres: Fantasy; Fantasy action & adventure; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

The City Imperishable's secret master and heir to the long-vacant throne has vanished from a locked room, as politics have turned deadly in a bid to revive the city's long-vanished empire. The city's dwarfs, stunted from spending their childhoods in confining boxes, are restive. Bijaz the Dwarf, leader of the Sewn faction among the dwarfs, fights their persecution. Jason the Factor, friend and apprentice to the missing master, works to maintain stability in the absence of a guiding hand. Imago of Lockwood struggles to revive the office of Lord Mayor in a bid to turn the City Imperishable away from the path of destruction. These three must contend with one another as they race to resolve the threats to the city. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Release date: September 1, 2006

Publisher: Night Shade

Print pages: 300

Sample

JASON THE FACTOR

The lindens along Pondwater Avenue burned, making light and shadows of their own in the moonless night. One by one the trees exploded as the sap within passed the boiling point, the noise spurring the scream of panicked horses in back alley stables. Sharp-scented smoke stung Jason’s eyes as bark and woodpunk swirled burning into the dark autumn sky.

No hand had set the fire, no angry curse had driven the blaze. The trees had burst into flame of their own accord. Jason knew he should have been moved to fear by the sight, but the noumenal, or at least the passing strange, had become too commonplace of late.

As the explosions died away, servants and laborers moving in to douse the embers. There was nothing to be learned here. No one knew any more than he did. Jason turned his face back toward the river and home.

Recently everyone had studied caution. Even he, barely thirty, felt the weight of the city on his shoulders. His father had left no legacy save struggle, pain and the soul bottles long scattered throughout the City Imperishable. Instead, Jason had found purpose in committing himself to his master’s work of keeping the City Imperishable secured from the secret wars of the noumenal world. This season the task threatened to overwhelm him.

As he walked Jason slipped a silver obol from his pocket and worried it between his fingers. The familiar face his touch found on the coin resembled his master—Ignatius of Redtower, Second Counselor to the Inner Chamber of the Assemblage of Burgesses. While Jason himself was mainly a tradesman, Ignatius was a true initiate of the mysteries of the noumenal world, a philosophick doctor of the Hermetic Orders. The connections between the two of them were deep and tangled, rooted in the fall of Jason’s father.

A dwarf awaited Jason where Pondwater Avenue crossed Silver Alley. Lips scarred with old thread holes, fever-eyed, his heavy square body tottered on the stunted legs of his kind. Thousands of dwarfs dwelled, or had dwelt, within the City Imperishable. Raised in confined boxes to shape their legs and torsos, dwarfs were well educated as a result of being a captive audience in the most literal sense. Traditionally they worked as civil servants or in commerce throughout the city.

Jason understood this all too well. After the disastrous collapse of the family fortunes, he had spent the final, most difficult years of his childhood in the care of his father’s business manager, one Bijaz the dwarf. Strange times, during which he had learned many of the ways and rituals of the city dwarfs, including fingertalk. He’d paid a high price for his tutelage. Bijaz had sewn Jason’s lips shut in a perverse echo of dwarf custom. Somewhere in the endless nights with needle and candle, Jason had discovered a taste for pain in himself, and eventually in others.

In the end he and his father’s business manager had parted without the encumbrance of friendship. Jason had gone on his way, weathering the strange affair of the soul bottles that had in turn led him into Ignatius’ service and toward a higher sense of purpose than mere finance or dissolute vice. The old dwarf had moved on as well, and now stood high in the councils of his kind, speaking for the Sewn faction to the Inner Chamber and the Burgesses.

Onesiphorous, the dwarf now waiting for him, was a leader opposed to Bijaz and the Sewn. The Slashed were a “free dwarf” movement that had seeped into the city’s cobbled streets during the wet, hot days of the recent summer. As that season turned to autumn, the Slashed leader had sought Jason out. Jason felt disposed to favor his cause, just for the sake of the thing.

“Factor,” said the dwarf. No fingertalk for the Slashed. It was a point of pride among the rebellious. His voice was different, too, lacking the whistling undertones of a traditional dwarf. The lips of the Sewn were stitched tight around a little opening pursed for nutrition and speech, always as if poised for some pain-barbed kiss.

“Onesiphorous.” Jason nodded, drifting to a halt beneath the black iron pole of the gas lamp where the dwarf awaited him. “Out enjoying the arboreal autos-da-fé?”

The dwarf snorted. “No concern of mine what the rich folk up the hills do with their landscaping.”

“I suppose not. So what brings you out to the quality districts?” The Slashed had been moving dwarfs and dwarfesses south to Port Defiance and beyond by the bargeload since the end of summer. Fleeing, much like the ruby-coated parrots of Imperatrix Park had fled.

The City was in trouble. Even the dead knew that.

“Have you had word from Ignatius this last day or two?”

Jason was surprised. The Slashed agitator usually wanted to harangue him regarding city policy or pass word about what was taking place below stairs and behind doors. It was a game of information, rumor traded for wishful thinking. For one, Jason had warned the Slashed about the Fixed Youth Edict. Most of the boxing rooms had been empty when the Provost’s bailiffs had shattered their doors.

That had earned Jason the gratitude of many dwarfs both in and out of the movement. In return Onesiphorous kept him well-informed.

But Ignatius was Jason’s concern, no matter for the Slashed.

Caution, thought Jason. More was burning here than trees. “Ignatius is at his own works.”

“As may be. Still, I would seek him out were I you.”

“Indeed, sir dwarf.”

Onesiphorous turned and stumped downhill, heading toward the River Saltus. The lights of the gas lamps stitched the darkness ahead. Jason matched the dwarf’s pace, waiting to see what else his interlocutor might have to say. His thoughts were awhirl over what might be transpiring with Ignatius.

“This place is still our home,” the dwarf muttered. “Even as we’re leaving.”

“You know the Burgesses have promised to protect your people.” Ignatius had extracted that concession from the First Counselor in the wake of the botched Fixed Youth Edict.

Onesiphorous spat. “As if. Too much coming. Everyone knows there’s armies on the march, looking to burn us all out. There’s been blood in the shadows since long before the Bladed Throne fell empty. That’s the way of life here. But now…there’ll be snow in the Great Hall of the Assemblage before we see greenleaf on the lindens once more. The protection of the Burgesses doesn’t mean a fart in the river.”

“The City will stand.” Jason wished he believed that himself. Tradition said that the City Imperishable had never been conquered by an outside enemy.

“Walls will stand, maybe. Guarding smoke and ashes.” Onesiphorous stopped again, glanced up, catching Jason’s eye. “Why are you staying?”

“It’s still my home.” Ghosts, memories, the only place he knew. His father had died here, Jason lived here. For all that Jason managed a shipping warehouse down along the docks at Sturgeon Quay—when he wasn’t skulking about Ignatius’ errands—he’d never even passed outside the city walls. “There is nowhere else.”

“That’s the difference between you and me. I can see somewhere else.” The dwarf shook his head and waddled away down an alley.

“Then why are you still here?” Jason asked the empty shadows. Somewhere blocks behind him, a tardy linden exploded with a crack like wooden thunder.

The city is.

Those were the city’s words, a motto found on even the oldest coins grubbed from forgotten wood-walled barrows split open during excavations. The same phrase was carved on the lintels of the River Gate and the Sudgate. It was sewn in silk and jeweled banners hanging in the Assemblage of Burgesses, that those worthies might look up from their hard-won graft and consider for a moment whose fortunes they held in their hands.

Jason had recently been considering the merits of “the city was.” This morning he walked the eastern wall, where the shift from “is” to “was” seemed all too easy to see. This expanse of ramified and crumbling stonework was the farthest point in the City Imperishable from his usual riverfront haunts. He was here seeing to the city’s defenses in lieu of Ignatius of Redtower, who as Onesiphorous had pointed out the preceding night, remained obstinately absent—no response to Jason’s letters or increasingly urgent inquiries. Just continued silence.

Or a vanishing.

He would just as soon not have the Slashed dwarf looking after his master’s whereabouts. Jason indulged himself in a swell of sweet anger. Since taking up Ignatius’ service, Jason had mostly neglected the secret playroom hidden below his warehouse, with its whipping frames and branding braziers. Even so, those arts were never too far from his mind, almost the only remnant of his high birth yet available to him. He still had both the skill and pleasure of pain, at least within the rooms of imagination.

“I will kill that dwarf,” he whispered.

His breath puffed into tiny clouds like the ghosts of his words. It was cold, cold far out of season when the fruit of the fall gardens should be setting, and the leaves on the city’s trees first veining to silver, red and brown.

It did not help matters that Jason knew no more about military science than he did about transforming gallstones into gemstones. Each artifice had its masters. Jason was skilled at factoring trade, finding profit in the delay of goods upon a dock or the fee split between a bargeman and a port inspector. There were no bills of lading for him this morning, just walls, stones and emplacements. Problems for masons and artillery commanders.

This part of the eastern wall was the highest elevation in the city. To the riverward the City Imperishable stretched to wakefulness. At his feet Wall Street ran amid its rows of ruined houses. Golden corn, ripe for harvest, grew within many of the ancient foundations. Beyond that, spread out across the old Parade Grounds in a confusion of tents and sheds and tailgates, the Green Market was already in chattering session.

Sweeping his gaze west and south Jason could see down Upper Melisande Avenue as it ran through the Temple District to Delator Square. He turned away from memories of his father’s bitter end on the punishment platform there, looking farther north across the Little Bull River, where Cork Street rose up from the banks to the crest of Nannyback Hill. The Rugmaker’s Cupola loomed with its spiral of red and yellow stonework. It was the tallest building in that end of town and the only structure that rose above the level of his vantage. From there he followed the lines of the city back south past Delator Square and along the slope of the New Hill to the flatlands near the River Saltus where the Limerock Palace glowered in dawn’s light. In between and among the landmarks rose a wide forest of towers, rooftops and battlements, chimneys, steam plants and water works, treetops, tentpoles and prayer platforms.

Somewhere out of sight a brass band tootled its way into tune. He heard the laughter of women, the whistles and shouts of the drovers in the market. His nose was assaulted by the smell of cookfires, coal furnaces, horses, oxen, sewage, sweat, even a bit of woodsmoke from the night before, bounded and defined by the inescapable and endless reek of the River Saltus.

This was the City Imperishable.

Home.

Up here it was obvious how the metropolis had over time contracted inward from its defending walls. Crowded and busy as the city was down by the River Saltus, fields of green and gold and brown grew hard by the ancient battlements.

Amid the ruins in the shadow of the eastern wall, “the city is” had already become “the city was.”

Jason turned east to look out across the struggling, straggling country that lay beneath the dominion of the City Imperishable and its nonexistent armies. The Rose Downs climbed toward the bright-limned clouds of morning. The lands were divided by the Little Bull River as it meandered from the grasslands beyond the horizon. An invading horde could have followed the watercourse across the ragged farmland, over the tangled woodlots and dark acres of wild rose, along the winding roads and wandering streams. No one would have stood to oppose such a force save for Jason himself and those latecoming farmers still bringing wagonloads of eggs and potatoes and fresh-slaughtered hogs into the city.

“How are these walls to be standing against anything at all without experienced men to be topping them?” asked a soft voice in a strange accent from somewhere along the Sunward Sea.

Jason startled, sliding on crumbled gravel from the wall’s eroding top as he stepped. He turned, annoyed at his own surprise. “You are the mercenary?” he snapped. This was not an errand he would have sought, save for the need created by his master’s absence.

“Please,” said the man. “To be known as a freerider.” He was small, smaller even than Jason, who had never attained great height himself. Pale eyes, almost the color of ice chips, set in a pale, clean-shaven face topped with silvered hair more blonde than Jason’s own. The freerider wore a nicely tailored frock coat and trousers in a very light blue that set off his eyes. No weapons were in evidence.

“Freerider, then,” said Jason. “Of Winter’s Company. Your name?”

“I am to be Enero. The Winter Boys, we are to call ourselves. But you are not being Ignatius.”

Jason had no great brief for this small man who thought himself so dangerous and smart. An hour or two in his old playroom and Jason would have the soldier dancing a different measure altogether. Nonetheless, his master had intended to meet the man here this morning. “I am Jason the Factor. His agent. You are most clever to notice.’

“Indeed. I am being paid for cleverness. Cleverness or deadness. You are here to be speaking with Ignatius’ voice?”

“Yes.” It was a lie, bald-faced as beardless Enero himself, but Ignatius had not made contact for three days. Last night’s messages after the conversation with Onesiphorous had met with no more success than Jason’s previous efforts. Which was poor news indeed. His master held great influence in the city, and was perhaps heir as well to the Imperatorial throne so long lost in shadow and dust that most had forgotten its existence.

The man for these times, in other words, when danger threatened on all fronts. The governance of the city was spiraling in on itself like a hawk with a broken wing. The Burgesses paid no mind to anything save who should fall first so that others in power might dance on their bones.

In short, a disaster if Ignatius were well and truly gone. That he would have left without telling Jason or anyone else of his departure—inconceivable. Yet he must have known something might be in the offing, or he would not have arranged for Jason to come out in his stead at this unnatural hour.

So, a lie: “I speak for him.” Then, bad bargaining: “He needed you. We need you.” Ignatius was convinced, Jason knew, that the rumored armies riding from the Yellow Mountains and the Sand Sea were all too real.

The captain of the Winter Boys scratched his naked chin and stared thoughtfully at Jason. “We were to being given quarters for two seasons, for a gross of men and horses, provisioned and victualed, with the services of a good gunsmith and a decent ostler. To be two silver obols per day per man, plus to be a fifty-obol bonus per day for the officers to share.”

That would run almost four hundred silver obols per day with expenses, thought Jason. He had no idea what arrangements Ignatius might actually have intended. Armed toughs set to watch dockside cargo of a moonless night cost no more than a silver obol per blade, not accounting for expenses.

Hired swords did not come with a company of their fellows, armed and armored.

“The arrangements are not mine,” Jason said, trying to hide his ignorance. “I’ll sign a chitty for the provisions and the craftsmen. The good Doctor Ignatius will see to your cash.”

Enero seemed unmoved. “To be riding onward into the Jade Coast is a fine thing in the autumn of the year. Our mother the North Wind is to be plucking at our backs.”

Damn Ignatius, thought Jason, to leave him so uninformed. A man who did not know the value of what he bought had no way to set the price. “Your demands shall be met for a week, then. When Ignatius returns, you will have to answer to him if you have cozened me.” Not that the Inner Chamber was going to be interested in any requests Jason might tender for funds. His loyalty was to Ignatius, not the Assemblage of Burgesses, and that lack of commitment ran in both directions.

Where was Ignatius?

He glanced up to see the Winter Boy studying him closely.

“What are you being in fear of besides the wind?”

So many answers to that, Jason thought. Fires in the night. People dying with words in unknown tongues upon their lips. Panic. These things he did not say. Instead: “You name it. We’re going to have a divine autumn here.”

“Bullets are not to be stopping nightwalkers, but they are to be working wonders against men on horseback.”

“Right.”

“To be giving me my chitty?”

“Of course.” Jason reached inside his overcoat for his own drafts. He would have to cover the first week’s cash out of the company accounts.

Somehow, even with the noumenal attacks and the disappearance of his master, that was the most irritating insult of all.

IMAGO OF LOCKWOOD

“Funds, by the sweet fig of Dorgau, a man needs funds the way a bird needs air!” Imago stalked the low-beamed barroom in the light of stinking oil lamps. His progress was witnessed only by a handful of drooling drunkards and a hulking one-armed Tokhari—a vast brute with the copper skin, autumn brown eyes and black hair of his desert-dwelling folk—who showed no signs of understanding any language he might speak.

Or possibly any language spoken by anyone at all.

Imago wasn’t a tall man, but his boot heels were high. The soles within built up higher. He wasn’t a large man, but the shoulders of his evening coat were padded. The crown of his hat reached somewhat farther than the norm. His dark curly hair he kept oiled and brushed to stand large and frame his face as if he were a bigger man. In short, Imago took care of his appearance, and always seemed more than he was.

At this moment he was infused with the twin fires of wine and penury. He owed money to the Tribade thanks to his run of ill luck in the gaming parlors of Cork Street, and his latest legal ventures had as yet brought him no coin at all.

“You!” he shouted, whirling to point at the Tokhari. “Would you not have heard the case of three sisters beggared by the wrongful acts of the servants of a great trading house?”

“Em zhakkal,” muttered the Tokhari.

“Exactly! He was a jackal.” Imago turned to stamp through another circuit of the low room. Each pass got him a bit closer to the door without alerting the watchful barman, who wanted paying, as barmen always did. Small-minded bastards. “What kind of world is it when a judge can’t stay bought from kippers to chambers?”

Spin and stalk. One more pass and he could step out on the hop.

“I would have paid him,” Imago added, “if the judgment had come through.”

Stride and stride and turn by the empty gun rack at the far end of the room.

The big tribesman glowered. “Izh-al madir.”

“My dear?” said Imago on his last pass by the Tokhari. “A thought not to be borne.” His hand was on the handle, the door was open and he was out into the cold rain, stepping twice as fast as the outraged shout behind him.

He had two more suits coming before the bench this week, being heard by a different judge from the thieving coxcomb who’d refused to remain properly dishonest. All he needed to do now was find some way to eat, sleep and remain properly dressed on his remaining assets: a copper orichalk and three stringy carrots.

Well, he always had his sharp looks and his sharper wit.

Meanwhile, the rain was soaking into the padding of his jacket, and neither looks nor wit would keep the drops away.

The fortunes of House Lockwood were brought low indeed, Imago thought. He had awoken painfully stiff, his back and legs a prescient echo of the years of his older age yet to come. His brother Humphrey lived with their Mater in a moldering hovel on the banks of the Eeljaw deep in the dread-infested jungles of the Jade Coast, attended by a few retainers, miserable City dwarfs who had lacked the pride to remain within the purview of civilized life.

Not he. Imago and his pride had spent the night sleeping in a farmer’s cart that had recently contained a large quantity of onions. The small scraps that had not been unloaded at market yet stung Imago’s belly, but by the same marker, the waxed canvas tarpaulin sheltered him from night’s cold rain.

And now to judge by the bright steam that filled his vision, the sun had returned with some modicum of warmth.

Imago rolled off the tailgate before the wagon’s owner came to help him on his way. It was a new day, ripe with possibilities for coin, for honor, for a revolution of the soul. The greatest gift the gods had given him was a true appreciation for the potential of each sunrise.

He hit the cobbles to see the potential realized in the form of two Assemblage bailiffs in their red wool tunics, staffs in hand.

“There he is!” shouted one of them.

Imago of Lockwood was off running once more.

It was a hard dodge into the alley at the back of the Root Market, Little Loach Close, then a wild, leaping run through the stacks of baskets stinking with washed horseradish and ginger, around the piles of potatoes and turnips, a drop and scuttle beneath the belly of a draft horse smoking with morning sweat, past the startled shouts of tradesmen and bearers and market idlers.

From the sounds of things behind him, the bailiffs were making slower progress. Imago spun out of the alley mouth onto Upper Filigree Avenue, shrugged free of his dark coat covered with shreds of onion and stepped with purpose into a group of jeweler’s boys hurrying riverward from breaking their night’s fast.

By the time the bailiffs spilled from the alley in pursuit, cursing and bruised amid one last angry flight of tubers, Imago was just another dark-haired man in a pale, stain-mottled shirt.

Once again a day had dawned with promise. Though whatever writ or warrant the Burgesses had laid against him would make it difficult for him to see to his cases later in the week.

It was time to rethink his approach. Numerous curiosities were buried in the laws of the City Imperishable. With luck and skill, he could leverage one or another of those.

Belisare the dwarf was the Claviger Familias of House Lockwood, steward and holder of the keys to the family’s wealth, though that worthy was long fled to the swamps of the Eeljaw with the rest of Imago’s cowardly family. Belisare, as it happened, had a brother who remained in the City Imperishable, one Ducôte. Imago felt it was past time to pay his respects to that good dwarf, and call on the last familial connection that had not yet cast him out.

He hurried toward the docks, where Ducôte operated a scriptorium near Softwood Quay. It wouldn’t do to be loitering on the streets with the bailiffs out searching for him. That of course would be a point in his favor with Ducôte, who was widely known to work with the Slashed.

Filigree Avenue would take him almost all the way down to the water, debouching into the Spice Market. Following the street along the shoulder of Nannyback Hill and riverward, Imago made sure to stay close to groups of men, never walking alone where he might be spotted. There were only so many bailiffs, and they were preoccupied keeping the restless and the angry away from the walls of the Limerock Palace, yet still someone had seen fit to dispatch the men in red for him.

He needed to find a way out from under whatever paper the Assemblage had issued against him. That alone was sufficient to be disaster to his plans. Even setting aside the suits he had been prosecuting—barratry was less and less a useful profession in these suspicious days—he could scarcely garner coin or place his bets on Cork Street without freedom of movement.

That Ducôte might recommend a trip downriver to Belisare and the exile of House Lockwood was a possibility Imago resolutely discarded from his thoughts. No city-dwelling dwarf who was numbered among the Slashed could possibly be so conventional or narrow in his thinking.

It was not conceivable.

BIJAZ THE DWARF

The dwarf was sweating in the heat and smoke of a brazier set before him. Someone in the shadows above and behind him pounded a drum heartbeat-slow. The traditional muslin wrappings of his station clung to his body like winding sheets on a drowned man. His pulse pounded. The stinking surge of desire rising from his crotch, his armpits, the skin at the yoke of his neck, was almost enough to drive him to rub himself against the nearest doorpost.

Instead, he practiced restraint.

He knew that the fire burned with herbs and resin. It was part of why he came here. Bijaz did not partake directly of the myriad of vices so freely available in the City Imperishable. He mortally feared crawling inside a waterpipe and not coming out until he was carried on a board to a pit in the Potter’s Field. All the same, he was not at fault if the very air throbbed with intoxicants. No sin or temptation was appended to the act of breathing itself.

Other furtive shapes sat near him, facing the pit below. Four were obviously boxed dwarfs—all of them Sewn with lips properly sealed. One was perhaps from among the rare cut dwarfs, adult victims trimmed to size by the chirurgeon amid an excess of zeal and funds. There was even a full-man crouched to make himself small in this space where the tall were meant only to be on display. A born dwarfess, almost as rare as a cut dwarf in this city of dwarfs, silently moved from man to man—it was always men who came to these places—offering wine and rainwater in narrow beakers shaped to fit the pursed opening between sewn lips.

Bijaz fingered his own knots. His lips, ever clamped together, were hot to the touch. He would no more have cut them open and joined the Slashed than he would have cut off his pizzle. At that thought, his other hand slipped within the sweat-soaked muslin of his wraps to add to the violent pressure at his groin.

The boy chained in the center of the pit writhed in the blinding glare of a trio of limelights that hissed and flared with the stench of burnt vapor.

Bijaz’s hand began to slowly stroke his cock within his robes. The boy below him was tall, a full-man nearly grown, long-limbed and beautiful. The three dwarfesses with their leather straps and their canvas needles had just withdrawn. Blood twitched upon the boy’s lips in bright ruby beads. He was now one of the Sewn. For a little while. Promised the gods only knew what and doubtless drugged besides, the boy continued to slide his hips back and forth, his body slicked with rubbed-on oils and the tongue tracings of his recent tormentors.

The boy’s moans caught at Bijaz’s ears as the lips of a lover would. His hand moved a little faster within his robes, the sweat flowed from him like mist on the riverbanks of the Jade Coast. To be a dwarf was to spend the years of youth boxed in agony, while the full-men walked laughing and free in the sunlight. To be a dwarf was to have your head stuffed with numbers and letters and facts until wax ran from your ears and your eyes bled, while the full-men drank and gambled and whored in the taverns and gaming parlors of the City Imperishable. To be a dwarf was to be sworn to service and a life of staring at cobblestones and twice-counted coins, while the full-men knelt for honors before the high folk of the city and rode fine horses through the bright streets.

Sometimes a dwarf needed to get back something of his own. Sometimes a dwarf needed to see a full-man brought low. Sometimes a dwarf needed to find his pride in blood and sweat. He had once plucked both pleasure and that missing pride from his old master’s son Jason when that full-man was young and in dire need, but those days were long past. Those moments of trembling passion and blinding light within his head were long gone.

He could rebuild his pride on another’s suffering, for a night or a week or a moon’s passing. Ten gold obols and favors owed the Tribade to enter the doorway, with bare swords at his back ready to strike him down even while he brought himself to climax, should his words or deeds pass beyond the rules of this secret place.

A naked dwarf, masked by a rotting horse’s head, entered the pit. His distended cock was painted bright blue and he carried three slim rapiers on a belt slung over one shoulder. Bijaz felt the hot rush in his groin at the sight of the blades. His thigh sticky and warm, he slumped a bit in his chair and signaled for more wine.

If the horseman were able to stretch the death out for several hours, as the best of them could with good boys and luck, Bijaz might come twice, even three times more this night, and walk out feeling as if he were a real man.

At least for a while.

What he feared was how often he needed to return. How much the Tribade would ask of him for his secret shaming lust.

What he feared was everything. Bijaz wanted the old days back, as badly as he wanted to walk tall and win the love of bright-thighed women who would tower over him in summer fields.

Bijaz was led into a closed carriage and driven awhile through city stre