“Yeah,” Guido said, all but throttling the towel in his hands.
“Yeh,” I grunted. As advertised, a Troll and a Tough. The Trollop already had the matter in hand.
“You see? We just want you to feel confident in your own charm.”
“Oh!” The matron pinked up, looking pleased. “Then … I'd like the works!” Tananda clapped her hands.
We did not emulate a well-oiled machine, but swing into action we did. The Imp found herself the vortex of a whirlwind of tasteful scarves and draperies that covered her dress's loud print (Imps have notoriously tacky clothes sense), leaving her head and face thrown into stark relief. For an Imp she was not unpleasant to behold once her garments ceased clashing with her cerise complexion.
“Scalp massage,” Tananda ordered. Nervously, I moved in, oiled fingertips at the ready. A Troll's fingers are strong enough to punch holes in the skulls of most of my fellow dimensional beings. I hesitated to touch her until Tananda delivered a sharp slap to my upper back. I plunged ahead, grasping the Imp's scalp between my hands, and began to rub.
“Oooh!” the Imp cried. “Oh! Aaaggh!” I halted at once, concerned that I'd hurt her. “Oooh aaah!” the Imp moaned, tilting her face to look up into my eyes. “That feels so good! Don't stop, please!”
So I didn't. I massaged away, accompanied by an aria of moans and cries of pleasure. Guido, seeming as awkward as I'd felt, applied a hot towel to her face, eliciting a shrill scream, also of pleasure. Tananda moved in and attacked the Imp's long nails with file and a pointed stick.
Guido tossed aside the towel and moved in with the box of paints. My hands were too large, and Tananda was occupied with a more delicate job, so it had fallen to Guido to become the cosmetician. He was not happy about it, but Little Sister had explained that no beauty salon was complete without a purveyor of color and texture, so he was elected by default. His first essay with a brushful of black paint was not salubrious; the Imp jerked her head back just as he applied it to her brow, causing the horizontal line to extend vertically up her forehead. Seeing that it was impossible to salvage his original design, he made the other side the same. Then, bright orange cream in hand, he daubed at one eyelid. By the time his brush arrived at her face, however, the Imp had moved again, and the dot hit her somewhere over the ear.
“Hell with it,” Guido breathed. Attacking his palette like a virtuoso attacks his instrument, Guido drew and dotted, limned and lined, until the Imp's horned head was a work of art, if one cared for the oeuvre of a modern abstractionist. At that, it was not unpleasant to behold.
The female continued to shriek and cry out, but by the time we released her from the chair and placed a hand mirror before her she was smiling broadly. We'd also attracted an audience. As the Imp opened her belt pouch and poured a handful of coins into Tananda's palm, there was a rush toward the chairs. A bevy of females, Deveel and others, got into a scratching, kicking fistfight over who would occupy the third seat. Tananda shot me a quick but meaningful look. I stomped over to the crowd, every step making the floor shake, selected one female at random, lifted her by the scruff and plumped her decisively into the disputed chair. With my brows drawn down nearly to my eyes, I aimed a look at the others that quelled their grumbling. They crowded outward against the tent's inner perimeter to watch.
The Imp staggered out, and we turned our attention to our new customers.
Many hours later, Guido folded down the tent flaps and tied them in a double knot.
“I don't want no one else comin' in here today,” he said firmly. “I am so tired I could fall asleep over the salamander box. Broads! You were right, Tanda! You can do any fool thing to 'em, and they love it!
I spilled face cream down one woman's cleavage, then they was all clamorin' for the same thing. And then when that Deveel showed up with a cart full of scarves, I thought they'd tear him to pieces. They all wanted to try his stuff on at once.”
“I told you,” Tananda said, smugly, counting through the day's receipts. She piled the coins in stacks. There were several, one of them of gold. “Very, very nice. And our cut of the Deveel's profits make a nice addition to our income. We've already nearly paid for our furnishings. This business is very profitable! Once our job is over we might keep the salon going.”
“Speak for yourself, Little Sister,” I said, pouring the last basin of iced water over my head and sinking to the carpet that was covered with clippings of hair, shed scales, and feathers, and dozens of dirty towels. “I would rather go back to my nice, peaceful life as an unfashionable intimidator.”
“There's just one thing more left to do,” Tananda said. “Birkli! Did you get all of them?”
A small creature popped out from behind a tent panel. His body was about the length of my hand, with a hard, blue-black carapace that glittered in the twinkling light of our oil lamps. He was a Shutterbug, from Mount Olimpis in the dimension of Nikkonia. In their natural habitat the males used their ability to reproduce beautiful sights they'd seen on the iridescent scales of their compound wings to impress prospective mates, so they were both artistic and well-traveled. Tanda had had no trouble persuading one to come to Deva to assist us, promising him unique views that he could use to wow the ladies back home.
“All right on the roll,” Birkli chirped, extending a thin black leg. Wrapped around it was a narrow coil of a translucent substance. Tananda unrolled it and looked at it with the aid of a magic lantern behind. The lantern expanded the images so they were visible to larger creatures than the diminutive Shutterbug. “I put them together so you could see them easier. What do you think? What do you think? Do you like them?”
As was the case with all males of his species, he was eager for Tananda's approval. Guido gave me a grin. He and I might as well have been absent. Tananda patted the Shutterbug on the shell and he glowed.
“They're perfect,” she said. From the collection on the table under the mirror she handed him a small but brightly polished silver coin. “There, a Gnomish groat. And the same every day, as we agreed?”
“Perfect, perfect, perfect!” the little creature carolled happily, stowing the coin away under his hard shell. I believe he was happier to receive praise than money. We have had less amenable allies.
“Good,” Guido grunted, as the Shutterbug climbed up into the canvas roof to sleep. “Let's go see if your buddy can recognize any of these dames.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, take it outside, please!” pleaded the bartender at the Shoppers' Repose, an inn at some miles remove from our establishment. Percy agreed to meet me there for a prescheduled brawl. Roaring, I threw a table at the innkeeper. Percy snagged it neatly out of the air before it came anywhere near the Deveel, and broke it over his knee. “I'm begging you, go aw — watch out!”
Percy threw a lamp at me. I crushed the glass chimney, but kept the lit torch in my hand as he charged me, thrusting me out into the street.
“I want you to study these images and tell me if you recognize any of them,” I whispered, as we grappled for the torch. We were festooned with strands of horse brasses, banners that had lately decorated the ceiling of the bar, and hanks of one another's fur. No one who was not looking for it would see a strip of microscopic portraits. It draped across his eyes.
“I've told you I can't do it,” Percy howled. I pushed against his throat with my forearm. With a resigned sigh that sounded to the uninitiated like a moan of pain, scanned it while I bore him to the ground, still with the flaming brand over his head to light up the beetle-wing cells. “No! No one!”