'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 attest, 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, Zaibar, 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.
'May I get you something to drink?'
'Qualis, if you have any.' Amoli paused while Myrtis passed the request along to Ambutta. 'I can't do it, Myrtis - this whole scheme of yours is impossible. It will ruin me!'
The liqueur arrived. Ambutta carried a finely wrought silver tray with one glass of the deep red liquid. Amoli's hands shook violently as she grasped the glass and emptied it in one gulp. Ambutta looked sagely to her mistress; the other madam was, perhaps, victim of the same addiction as her girls?
'I've been approached by Jubal. For a small fee, he will send his men up here tomorrow night to ambush the Hell Hounds. He has been looking for an opportunity to eliminate them. With them gone, Kittycat won't be able to make trouble for us.'
'So Jubal is supplying the krrf now?' Myrtis replied without sympathy.
'They all have to pay to land their shipments in the Night Secrets, or Jubal will reveal their activities to the Hell Hounds. His plan is fair. I can deal with him directly. So can anyone else - he trades in anything. But you and Lythande will have to unseal the tunnels so his men face no undue risk tomorrow night.'
The remnants of Myrtis's cordiality disappeared. The Golden Lily had been isolated from the rat's nest of passages on the Street when Myrtis realized the extent of krrf addiction within it. Unkind experience warned her against mixing drugs and courtesans. There were always men like Jubal waiting for the first sign of weakness, and soon the houses were nothing more than slaver's dens; the madams forgotten. Jubal feared magic, so she had asked Lythande to seal the tunnels with eerily visible wards. So long as she - Myrtis - lived, the Street would be hers, and not Jubal's, nor the city's.
'There are other suppliers whose prices are not so high. Or perhaps Jubal has promised you a place in his mansion? I have heard he learned things besides fighting in the pits of Ranke. Of course, his home is hardly the place for sensitive people to live.'
Myrtis wrinkled her nose in the accepted way to indicate someone who lived Downwind. Amoli replied with an equally understandable gesture of insult and derision, but she left the parlour without looking back.
The problems with Jubal and the smugglers were only just beginning. Myrtis pondered them after Ambutta removed the tray and glass from the room. Jubal's ruthless ambition was potentially more dangerous than any threat radiating directly from the Hell Hounds. But they were completely distinct from the matters at hand, so Myrtis put them out of her mind.