RI S NATION ANK
On the door itself hung a small hand-lettered wooden placard, the words spelled out in faded but carefully drawn cursives:
LAST NATIONAL BANK
Lalage Saint-Alaban, Prop.
Love Philtres
Tea Readings
Psychotropic Drugs
“What is this?” I began; but Justice had already raced up the steps leading to a set of huge metal doors. A great steel ring hung there. Justice banged this once, twice. As the third clang echoed down the empty avenue a tiny slit opened in the door. An alarmingly bright blue eye peered out.
“Lalage!” he yelled. “It’s Justice—”
The blue eye disappeared. A harsh grating signaled bolts being drawn. One of the doors creaked inward.
“Justice!” In the shadows I glimpsed a small figure that drew up sharply at the sight of me. Justice stepped past me into the room. I hesitated.
“It’s all right, Wen— Aidan,” he called back. “It’s only Lalage.”
“Justice,” the woman rebuked. She peered at me suspiciously.
“A friend, Lalage. A Patron.”
“Oh, all right,” she sighed, and pulled the door back another inch.
It opened onto a great chamber. The only light filtered from windows high overhead, touching the room with glints of green and gold. Tables made of dismembered automobiles were scattered across the floor, chairs over-turned or leaning against them haphazardly. Small shapes fluttered around them. There was a strong animal smell.
“Thank you, Lalage. I wasn’t certain you’d still be here …” His voice faded as he stepped farther into the cavernous room.
The woman laughed, turning a series of bolts and locks within the door. “Where else would I go? Too old for the duties of pleasure now. And you can’t really picture me in the kitchen at Saint-Alaban, can you, Justice?”
They laughed. Lalage crossed the room to embrace Justice, leaving me to wander among the tables of a forsaken hospice. The fluttering shapes were birds, guinea hens and peahens and doves. Peacocks dragged soiled trains through the muck. In the shadows a number of small barred chambers protected shattered glass monitors and more empty chairs.
Justice called to me across the room and I joined them, nudging guinea hens from my path. “Lalage, may I introduce my companion, Aidan.”
She inclined her head toward me. Then she smiled and raised three fingers to her mouth, a gesture that Justice imitated: the Paphians’ beck.
“A handsome leman, Justice,” she said, gazing at me and winking. “Especially for a. Curator—”
“I’m not his leman!” I began hotly, when Justice cut me off.
“No, he’s not my lover. We’re merely traveling together.”
“I understand.” Lalage nodded, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. Now that we stood in the center of the chamber I could see her more clearly in the hazy light. She was smaller than Justice and myself, very thin, and wearing a shift of some heavy green fabric, once no doubt very fine, now sloppily tied with a black sash and spattered with bird droppings and streaks of dust. But her hands were small and slender (if dirty), heavy with jeweled bracelets and antique rings; and her eyes were carefully painted to play up their oblique tilt and odd color: a dark and clouded blue. Her gray hair—blond once as Justice’s—was loosely braided above a pointed foxlike face. And I smelled in her sweat expensive spices—cinnamon, sandalwood, bitter rue. She bent to pick up a bedraggled guinea hen and stroked it gently.
“An interesting traveling companion, Justice.” She stared at my auburn stubble. “Someday you will have to tell me of your adventures there in the Citadel.” She tipped her head in the direction of the river, toward HEL . “We thought you had forsaken us for the Ascendants.”
Justice tossed back his head, avoiding her eyes. “I missed our people. But tell me, cousin: there are no guests?”
Lalage sighed, picking matted down from the guinea fowl’s breast. “Hardly ever now. Outside trade has fallen off. I was supposed to receive more frilite and morpha from the Botanists, but I haven’t seen them for nearly two weeks.”
She lowered her voice, glancing at the dim vault arching high above us. “There was trouble, Justice. A new Governor was sent here from the Citadel. The Curators were in an uproar. He came here, last week—”
Justice nodded. “In the woods—we saw two janissaries taken by the trees.”
“They were in his party. They arrived that night, I fed them, acted innocence, even gave them the last of my morpha tubes. Next morning sent them on their way.”
Her eyes glittered. I could smell her cunning like a thick musk. She tossed the guinea hen into the air and it flapped into the darkness. “The Governors will never hear from them again.”
Justice nodded, cast me an uneasy glance. “But otherwise, things are as they were? Our people?”
She shook her head and began to cross the room. “They come here seldom. They fear being this close to the edge of the City. I’ve been lonely this last week; I’ll be delighted to serve you both. Come with me.”
We followed her, Justice giving me warning looks when I angrily started to question him. Small round tables edged the far wall of the room, some of them still littered with tumblers sticky with absinthium and broken candicaine pipettes. Scrawny roosters and glossy black hens picked among the refuse. I kicked at a shattered morpha tube, the once-bright label with its grinning Man in the Moon faded to a pale blur.
“I haven’t cleaned in a while,” Lalage admitted. “It hardly seems worth it, with no Patrons …”
We followed her into a narrow passageway. Runners of pleated rubber covered the floor, brittle and curling with age. The hall was lit by elongated tubes stretching across the length of the ceiling. These were filled with murky water that sparkled pale blue and green, phosphorescent algae and diatoms that emitted a faint eerie glow. Fortunately the birds preferred the half-light of the rotunda. I inhaled with some relief the cooler air, only slightly tainted with the bittersweet smell of stale absinthium.
“If you wait here for a few minutes I’ll make the atrium ready for you.” She flashed me a brilliant smile before disappearing behind a fringed curtain.
When she was gone I turned to Justice.
“You’re a Paphian,” I said, pushing him against the wall. “You’ve stolen me to be a prostitute.”
He winced, shook his head. “No, Wendy. But I am a Paphian.” He drew his hand to his mouth and rested three fingers upon his lower lip: the Paphians’ beck, signifying the three sexes. “But I have no claim on you. They would have killed you, Wendy. I would have killed you before I’d leave you to them …”
I scented his arousal again, tinged now with the metallic edge of fear as he edged away from me. I felt a sudden rush, as though I had received a jolt of acetelthylene. Where the small nodes bulged from my temples a faint warmth spread until my hair prickled and stood on end. And suddenly I felt it, felt Him, that overwhelming desire and terror surging through me like raw adrenaline. I laughed.
“I was the wrong toy for you to steal, Justice,” I whispered. I brought my face close to his, until his shallow breathing warmed me. I brushed my tongue against his cheeks, tasted his bitter pleasure. Then I bit his mouth, until I felt my teeth meet through his soft skin.
With a cry he kicked me away, but not before I kissed him to draw a sharp draught of blood. I reeled backward, dizzy at the intensity of his desire, and drew my hand to my face to wipe the blood from my chin. I started to lick my fingers; but he grabbed me.
“I did not steal you! I saved you—”
But his words echoed meaninglessly as I gave myself up to a sudden shuddering ecstasy. I struck at him only to trip and fall. Pain blurred into an image dredged from the last fevered drop of blood upon my tongue: