Дэйв Дункан - Magic Casement

“You will help me?” Inos exclaimed.

“We’ll see,” the sorceress said darkly.

“I shall need to know a little more. ” She glanced around the room, and her eyes settled on Sagorn, standing stiffly at the end of the line. “Men can be so obnoxious at times…”

She frowned as if puzzled and sauntered over toward him. Rap had never seen a woman move with such grace. Even without his farsight he could detect the glory of her long legs moving within the filmy robe, and he caught glimpses of tiny silver sandals. Oh, those hips! Of course this was sorcery at work. No woman should be able to raise his heart pound like this just by walking across a floor. She had not looked like this when—but he couldn’t recall what she had looked like when she first appeared. It was how she looked now that mattered. Oh, wonder of womanhood! Oh, vision of all man’s desire! Sorcery curdling his brains—dangerous! He knew it, knew he was helpless against it. She was turning him into a helpless slave, a human jelly. All other thoughts had fled his mind.

Inos wrenched her hand loose from his sweaty grip and he barely noticed.

Sagorn straightened up and licked his lips. “Would you turn down the intensity a little, ma’am?” he mumbled. “It’s very hard on the arteries at my age.”

“But what a wonderful way to die!” She laughed and reached up to stroke his cheek with a teasing finger. Rap felt fires of insane jealousy leap through him like lightning bolts.

Sagorn moaned—and was the much-too-handsome Andor.

Queen Rasha sprang back, raising a hand as if to strike. For a bewildering fraction of a second, Rap imagined a glimpse of a heavy, middle-aged woman in a shabby brown wrap, with unkempt gray hair and bare feet, with wrinkles and sagging cheeks. Then the delusion was gone, and the glorious Queen Rasha was there again, radiant in gossamer and pearl, studying Andor in languid amusement.

With hair in disarray, in a gown too large for him, Andor was clutching his left arm, whose sleeve was already darkening with blood, yet he contrived to bow gracefully nonetheless. “Oh, yes!” he said. “Exquisite! Majesty, how may I serve you?”

Queen Rasha nodded to acknowledge the bow, regarding him with some curiosity. “A sequential spell? Fascinating! And well done, too—a very sharp transition. Can it truly be a matched set? Let’s see, the old one would have been the scholar—”

“And I your devoted slave.”

“Of course a lover,” she said curtly, seemingly more to herself than to Andor. Before he could say more she cut him off with a snap of her fingers.

And he had gone. In his place was Darad, huge and ugly, his head still dribbling blood from Rap’s chair-work. He howled, clasping a hand to the eye that Little Chicken had injured. Andor’s blood—and now Darad’s own—had now soaked through the left sleeve of the robe, and his sudden move produced a ripping noise from an overstretched shoulder.

“The fighter!” The sorceress pulled a face and snapped her fingers again.

The gown seemed to fall inward, around the slight form of the flaxen-haired Jalon. His dreamy blue eyes widened at the sight of Rasha. “The artist, ma’am,” he said, bowing. “Your beauty shall evermore be on my lips and my song raised in your—”

“Some other day.” Sultana Rasha snapped fingers a third time, and the brown robe collapsed yet again. All that was visible of the latest occupant was a narrow, dark face peering out from under a tangle of lank black hair—a small and very ordinary impish youth, his mouth and eyes now stretched wide in terror. With a wail, he tried to fall on his knees before the sorceress, but his feet were as immovable as Rap’s, and he succeeded only in dropping to a squat. He raised clasped hands in supplication. The sound of chattering teeth filled the chamber.

“Well!” The sultana appeared to be less antagonistic than she had been toward his predecessors. “Scholar, lover, soldier, artist—and you must be the financier of the group?”

The youth wailed, big eyes peering up at her from a nest of heaped robe. “I mean no harm, your M-M-Majesty!”

“But you’re a bazaar fingersmith if I ever saw one!”

He whimpered. “Just crusts, lady—a few crusts, when I was hungry.”

This was the fifth member of the gang? Thinal, the thief whom Sagorn had called their leader, and Andor’s brother. A less memorable face Rap had never seen. It was pocked, moreover, with oozing acne pustules and marred by unsightly tufts of hair. No one would willingly look even once at Thinal; he would disappear instantly into any crowd in any city of the Impire. Yet the king had told Inos she could trust him!

The sorceress nodded approvingly. “Very fine work. Who did it?”

“Or-Or-Orarinsagu, may it please your Omnipotence.”

“A long time ago, then?”

“Over a c-c-century, Majesty.” For a moment the teeth chattered again, and then the little thief managed to blurt out a plea: “M-M-Majesty? We c-c-crave release…”

“I should not dream of breaking up such a masterpiece.”

The imp wailed and cowered down ever farther into the crumpled brown robe, so that only his hair was visible.

“Besides,” the sorceress said, “having a whole handful of men available when required, but only one at a time to put up with—that seems like an excellent arrangement.”

Leaving the lad apparently sobbing into his knees, she came strolling back along the line. She paused in front of Little Chicken and regarded him with dislike. “You must be a goblin. Your name?”

With his odd-shaped eyes stretched wider than Rap had ever seen them, Little Chicken merely moaned and reached out toward the sorceress. She drifted backward until he was leaning forward at an absurd angle, only the fixation spell on his feet preventing him from crashing to the floor. He continued to moan.

She studied him for a moment, then shrugged. “Not bad below the neck, but the face would have to go.”

She left him there, completely off balance, and wandered past Princess Kadolan without a word, to stop once more before Rap and Inos. “Extraordinary retainers you chose, child,” she muttered.

Why would she call Inos a child when she was no older herself? Her eyes were the same deep red-brown shade as her hair, and they were burning Rap’s soul to ashes. The curve of her breasts below the filmy gauze of her robe was driving him mad, and her nearness made the blood pound in his chest until he felt it was about to burst.

“And a faun? What’s your name, lad?”

He opened his mouth. “Raaaaa…” His name disappeared in a choking noise, as he felt himself strangle in sudden revelation. His name was not Rap. That was only a nickname, a short form of— of his word of power. He had never told anyone his real name, not even the king. It was a great long thing, Raparakagozi —and another twenty syllables-and he had not heard it since his mother had first told it to him, a few days before she became sick, warning him not to repeat it because if an evil sorcerer learned your name he could do you harm and of course she must have seen with her foresight that she was going to die and the fact that he could even remember such gibberish after all these years meant that it was his word of power and now he desperately wanted to tell it to this entrancing seductive beauty standing before him and yet some part of him was screaming at him not to—the words were hard to say, Sagorn had told him—and his tongue tripped between the two set of commands and…

“What is a faun doing so far north?” Queen Rasha inquired before he had resolved his conflict and brought his mouth under control. She curled a lip that men would have died to kiss just once. “But he’s only a halfbreed, isn’t he? That’s a jotunn jaw, and he’s too tall. But those tattoos! Why do savages think that mutilation can possibly improve their appearance?”