"You're certain that nobody else uses this room for business?" Leigh asked, a location still being identified by the pendulum she held. She'd come out onto the floor in the robes of a guest to the bordello, but she had to be known as something else by the way she stood stark still before this door in particular. Evading detection was no longer on the table or desired.
Almine, the half-elf at her side, had long since given up on staying the mage about her business and trailed behind with as much control of the situation as a kite. "No, if the thing is in there, then we know who has been behind
it
all this time. Be careful, I say like I could stop you at this point."
Leigh knew she must appear to be an angel of vengeance, her eyes stung from days of worry and furious theurgy. The one responsible for Lappy's confinement and the slavery of those Mallow goblins held in the city was just behind this door in the end of it all. She hooked a smile to Almine. "No, you couldn't."
A stasis spell applied to the door, then successive kinetic impulses. It was an old trick, but few were skilled enough with stasis to properly affect it. With the release of the stasis, all of the kinesis hit within shaved fractions of a moment piled onto one another.
The door exploded inward as a spray of fine splinters, moving so quickly that their movement against the air and sister splinters alike caused them to spark up individually, creating an incandescent cloud which cast the inhabitants of the large hall beyond with red flame before the reaction resolved as ash with such violence that the lamps within were blown out as well. So it was, brightness became darkness and the once-pleasant fragrance no doubt in use by the courtesan in question was submerged below the acrid, cloying smell of smoke.
Leigh marched inside, drawing a wand from within her sleeve, an ember of magical force held at its tip pointed from one shocked, male face to another with the promise that the show of magical force just then was far less violent than she was capable of. One unimpressed face came up from the lap of a customer and the owner wiped her lips. Leigh shouted, "All but Simon the mage will leave or die!"
Embarrassed, dishabille men paraded out around her to be drawn away by the staff to safety. Some scowled, but none was stupid enough to complain verbally, slinking off with their tails between their legs like the mongrels they were. But the elf, and she was entirely an elf, did not bother even to dress, leaving her robe hanging half off her waist as she assuredly went around to re-light the lamps of the hall that served as both her living space and her place of work. Let no-one say that evil must be perpetrated only by the ugly, this woman bore such beauteous grace that Leigh, who did not consider herself a slouch when she cared to make herself up, had to fight to avoid her gaze dropping to the floor in shame.
The elf sat in the back of the room upon a pillow and rested a fragile cheek upon the back of a graceful hand. "The cause of disturbance shows itself at last," she said, her deep voice dripping like warm honey from luscious lips. "The door wasn't locked, you might know."
"I did." Leigh didn't move a muscle. An old elf, the one whose wards she'd already come up against and fallen short of, could be capable of all sorts of magick, enough to earn the K. Even her daughter, Almine, had shown the ability to precisely light candles from a distance without incantation and without a word of explanation; and magical instruction did not seem to be a priority in training up a courtesan. "I felt we should understand one another immediately, Simil."
Simil, owner of this bordello, owner of a significantly more scummy goblin operation in the city, magus, laughed with some restraint and gestured to an empty pillow of a seat, though Leigh did not take it. "Dear, do not do me the discourtesy of remaining so on edge when we have been so well acquainted already. And daughter, do not insult me with the thought that you would not be noticed hiding on the edge of the new hole in my wall."
Extreme caution apparent, both Leigh and Almine crept within and eventually came to sit on their knees across from the gorgeous frame of Simil, who for her own part hadn't yet found it necessary to draw her robe back up over her heavy, swaying breasts, no less alluring for the fact that dark ash dappled once-sweaty skin. It felt to Leigh much like those many times she'd stepped into the lair of some big bad, without the comforting presence of Bacchor the knight, the guile and self-assuredness of Sallet the rogue, or even the slippery bard who had travelled with them for a time. Today she had a pseudo-ally in Almine, the decided non-combatant that she was.
"You've put some work into finding me, haven't you?" Simil said, finding a bowl of prepared grapes by her side luckily shielded from the ash explosion and popping one between her plump, kissable lips. "I would congratulate my new mousy, little friend if it weren't for the incompetence of men in finding these facts in the first place. They do so love to be tricked, and if fed enough green flesh will find their feeble curiosity shrivel and fall off. Yes, congratulations would be in order, if I hadn't expected this eventuality a decade past."
"So you know what I want?" Leigh said. "All of them, delivered to a place in the forest that I will describe to the delivery agent of your choosing."
"And I don't presume you intend to pay for my merchandise? I am expected to roll over and allow my belly to be savaged for what, exactly?" Again, Simil popped a grape between her lips, drawing her fingertip out with a slight pop and a thin trail of shimmering, delicious-looking saliva. Leigh could only imagine the fruit bursting with juicy flavour in the woman's mouth. "I know of human magi, you may like to know. Your kind tends toward tricks of magic rather than garner a true understanding of the firmament; it is to be expected of a kind which dies so tragically young that your greatest users of the craft are elderly men. One can only imagine the frightful headway that might be gained on human knowledge if its peak was not placed decades past the reach of the longest-lived among you, by then too decrepit to make use even of the artless tricks they had relied upon.
"The same, I have often thought, might be said of the pathetic, green vermin. That they, too, are fated to perish within three decades at the outside, more oft sooner through violence or their kind's ever-present illness. One might say that I have done them a favor, giving their piteously short lives meaning in the service of others: those who are willing to degrade themselves so." She glanced at Almine, her own daughter whose blackmail-ensured employment in the goblin pit was being revealed as the machinations of her own mother. For the half-elf's part, there seemed no love lost in the interaction, only a confirmation of biases long held. "Have I ever said that you were not free to walk away upon your own two feet? Idiot girl, you've held this grudge for so long that I would not finance your escapades, as though the home I built does not provide for all your needs from cradle to grave. When I left the homeland, do you think I did so with a sack of gold on my back? Go, you will be neither stopped nor pursued."
Almine did not budge. She seemed to shake with a mixture of terror and wrath, her nails digging into the skin of her knees and her feet curled under her butt for a hasty exit or an opening salvo of blows.
Leigh said, careful that her anger did not wane from the distractions of the flesh all around, "I don't care about your sob story, every evil overlord has one and they die all the same. You are lucky that I haven't decided on burning this very building to the ground and pulling those poor goblins up from underground one by one myself. I'm giving you an opportunity to walk away from this, in fact with the majority of your holdings and yourself intact; do not mistake restraint for mercy."
The woman sighed; it was an intoxicating sound paired with an alluring swell of her ample breasts, yet displayed for all to see with a mild sway of firm, cherry-pink nipples. "It is hardly a sob story, as you say, when the ending is as you see before you. I live now among my children and those in my employ, my students if you would, gathering whatever I please from the top of this world like the foam atop a drink, scooped off with a fingertip to be enjoyed separate from the bitterness below. And when I have finished my tour and I bore of this world, once again I will roam the halls of my ancestors, a servant to my illustrious brothers and sisters, higher in station as a servant than the so-called lordship here. Dear girl, am I right in thinking you are barely past your second decade? Yes, then do you know that there is a cycle in which elfs are viewed as either sluts or prudes? Every forty years or so, I believe."
"Roughly," Leigh said. "My master said that the elfs we see outside Faerie are the least among them, the most ugly, the furthest from divinity." She was glad to see a subtle flash of disdain cross Simil's placid expression, so pressed on. "So once they come out, to sate their curiosity or whatever else, they are necessarily prudish, or seem so, as they are so unused to romantic pursuit that they are shocked to be its subject. Then, once the situation sinks into their heads, they'll take whoever comes to them, however many come to them with a flower in hand. In fact, the reputation of elfs as either one must be vexatious to those who come out in the wrong end of the cycle, while public opinion butts heads with their natural inclinations. So, how long before you allowed yourself to become the locus of a drunken gangbang behind a tavern."
"Five years," answered Simil, simply and without a soupcon of shame.
--
She'd gotten this far on the strength of her skill with the strings, hitching rides with whomever could use the entertainment and frittering away her time with what the common folk considered pleasurable. There really wasn't anything to compare favorably outside the pearly halls of her home, which had flowed with things sweeter than milk and honey, peoples who could actually follow the progression of her musical experimentation and truly appreciate how skilled she must be, each night falling asleep at one or another's feet with drink in hand as her betters went to sate their bodies' other desires with one another. She'd been considered frighteningly ugly by beings so gorgeously perfect that words failed to properly describe their mere presence on the minds of onlookers; a servant like her was happy merely to have a place among them, feeding off their scraps and sleeping on their floors.
Of course, sensual pleasure was denied her, for which of the beautiful ones would take her, but for that she hid and created it herself furtively in the corner when none could see her in the pathetic state of arousal. Fingers stroked soft, wet skin, probed and prodded while her thoughts were fixed on those beautiful beings, biting her tongue when the pleasure overflowed her vessel to avoid being spotted. She knew all of the servants did it in secret, a shared shamefulness spread thin among them but never spoken of. Come together in a loving embrace? To share pleasure as they did secrets? Of course not, though it was hardly prohibited; when one's experience of the day included stolen glances at the masters, bedding any other elf servant became a repulsive concept.
Ah, it happened, she knew, as new elfs had to come from somewhere and not all of them could be the blessed offspring of the masters. The acts which produced them must have been done in the dark, she thought, but she was only a century old when she left to see the world, not yet of age to know such secrets. How parents managed to put aside their mutual disgust for the sake of the race, she could only speculate.
So, one might think, traveling among these
humans
had to be revolting in its every aspect. Not so... for one who had plunged into the trip and deadened their emotions in anticipation. Surely, these people were fantastically ugly by even the standards of her class, but the other side of the coin was also present, and the abject grotesquerie without pretension somehow softened the psychic impact. They nearly worshiped her 'beauty', gave her the most comfortable out of the uncomfortable seats, made sure that she was given a room at the inns she arrived at with an actual bed, provided her the most favored cut of whatever beast of the land they had butchered for that day's meal. She felt, at times, that she need not even play her music, and they would revere her all the same, though such worshipful reclination would be soul-rendingly boring.
