‘Wrap him up in that,’ she said sarcastically. ‘It wouldn’t do to have a mess down the hallways, now would it?’ She tilted her head slightly, and the manacles sprang open, sending the slave crashing to the marble floor. ‘And after you have cleaned this room, wait outside the door for me. You are to accompany me to a meeting this afternoon.’ She turned her back on him. ‘Just don’t be loitering about in here when I come out of my bath.’

  ‘Yes, Mistress, I mean no, Mistress,’ the short one murmured. ‘I shan’t be here when you come out.’

  She rather disinterestedly watched him drag the bloody body out of the room and close the huge doors behind him. Smiling to herself, she then luxuriously turned and, stretching her lithe body like an alley cat, walked to her bath.

  After inserting one toe into the water, she knew that the dwarf had gotten the temperature just right. Very hot. She slowly lowered herself the rest of the way in before realizing she was still wearing the bloody silk robe. Smiling, she closed her eyes and made it vanish. No matter. She could conjure a hundred more just like it if she chose to.

  Looking to her left, she gestured with a long fingernail to open the stained-glass windows to her bathroom. She had to admit that the Parthalonian countryside was every bit as beautiful as Eutracia had been 327 years ago, before their forced exile. But Parthalon was different. The people the sorceresses had found here had been little more than ignorant peasants, and the Coven had taken great pains to ensure that it stayed that way. There had been neither a tradition of royalty nor a standing army here, such as had been inflicted upon Eutracia by the so-called Directorate of Wizards. Her eyes narrowed. The mere thought of those wizards made her heart beat faster with hate.

  Enslaving Parthalon had actually been very easy, she remembered, especially in light of the fact that there had been no presence of endowed blood here. Their defenses had been feeble at best. Thousands had died all manner of hideous and imaginative deaths, but before too long the people had bowed to the four mistresses as their rulers. It had actually been rather amusing. Most of the people had been terrified of the thing called magic, having never seen it before, and they had stayed that way to this day, cloaked in a blind fear that the Coven had no intention of removing.

  But the absence of endowed blood had proven to be a sword that could cut both ways. Although the entire country had easily come under the Coven’s control, there were no men of endowed blood here with whom to procreate. None of the mistresses would ever dream of conceiving a child with one of these churlish cretins. And so the quest for the birth of a special female child of endowed blood from someone among the four of them had been lain aside as impossible, and the Coven had tried a different approach. It would take centuries, they knew, but it was the only way. And now, over 300 years later, they were so close to completing their goal – as long as everything happened exactly as planned, and at the appropriate time.

  Suddenly an interesting thought came to her. Time. Such an invincible enemy, such an indispensable ally. Even time itself we can now manipulate, just as it also manipulates us. She laid her head back against the cool marble of the huge tub and closed her eyes, lost in her thoughts.

  Their slaves had been taken at random from the population as needed – for forced labor, or for other …uses. Indeed, the name ‘the Stables’ had been her idea for the area of the Recluse where they kept those particular male and female slaves. And only beautiful ones. They did not serve in the traditional roles that one would expect of a palace. No, the ones like Stefan all served the Coven as sexual entertainment. Except for the First Mistress, she thought. Again the corners of her mouth turned up into a smile. This had been her idea, and there must be hundreds of them of both sexes in the Stables by now, with three of the four mistresses making great use of the privilege. As a precaution they were tended to by deaf mutes only, and thus there could be no knowledge among the populace of the Stable slaves’ existence or purpose.

  But what the populace knew or didn’t know really was of no importance. All of the more traditional servants and workers in the Recluse were slaves who had been taken from the countryside. The huge Recluse itself, the fortress home of the Coven, had been built with slave labor from Parthalon. When it was completed, all the workers had been put to death so that the inner layout of the castle remained a secret. With the exception of her personal slave, Geldon, once a native of Parthalon was taken into the Recluse there was only one way for him or her to leave.

  Dead.

  As she carefully washed the blood from beneath her nails, her thoughts turned to those days and nights over three centuries ago that she and her sisters had endured trying to cross the Sea of Whispers. She smiled at the brilliant bargain the first sorceress of the Coven had made to ensure their safe passage when the four of them had at last discovered the hideous reason the sea had never been crossed. At the same time she blessed the First Mistress’s mastery of the Vagaries, without the knowledge of which that same bargain could never have been struck. And soon, very soon, they were to cross the Sea of Whispers again for the first time in over 300 years. They had to return to Eutracia at last because the one they had left behind, although useful, did not possess the blood quality necessary to become the fifth mistress – the one that they had needed so badly and for so long in order to complete their plans.

  And then the wizards who had banished them would pay. She reveled in the thought.

  After leaving her bath and brushing her long, dark hair, she walked naked through her quarters to the huge closets that held her wardrobe. Opening the doors, she quickly decided upon red for today. This afternoon’s upcoming meeting was of the greatest importance, and this magnificent gown had long been her favorite. As she dressed, she turned her attention toward the room. Geldon had returned and cleaned it as she had ordered, and was no doubt waiting at the other side of the doors for her to appear. He was the perfect servant, and not for the first time she smiled at her luck in finding him.

  It had been during one of her earliest visits to the Ghetto of the Shunned.

  From the first the Coven had needed a place to confine certain unwanted members of the population, even after the country had been successfully overwhelmed. The problem had been solved very simply by selecting a rather large city just south of the Recluse, conjuring a very high and inescapable wall around it, and then killing all of the citizens inside, whether they had been useful or not. There simply had been no need to sort them all out, and so the Coven exterminated them by means of a plague. This conveniently left the mistresses with vacant living quarters large enough to hold approximately 200,000 souls.

  Then the crippled, the sick, the retarded, the criminal, and everyone else that the Coven deemed simply undesirable were forced into the Ghetto and left to fend for themselves. The results were inevitable: crime, filth, disease, and inbreeding. From the very beginning, relegation to the Ghetto had been an irreversible death sentence. And it had indeed proven itself to be a powerful tool for controlling the actions of the population, especially until provisions for a standing army had been conceived. The simple threat of life in the Ghetto usually made grown men tremble in their boots.

  Although the other Sisters strictly avoided the Ghetto as not worth their time, Succiu visited there often, actually enjoying the change from her wonderful gowns into rags and walking the Ghetto at night in the light of the three same red moons that had illuminated her homeland. She enjoyed seeing the poverty and the desperation, enjoyed anonymously witnessing the occasional rape or murder. Guarded by her powers, she walked among the Ghetto’s inhabitants without fear, occasionally killing at random simply to sharpen her skills.

  She probably would have missed Geldon altogether had it not been for the sound of shattering glass. All of the storefronts in the Ghetto had long since been looted, and Succiu couldn’t imagine that there was any glass left to break.

  Curious, she turned a corner into yet another dark street. Looking up and down it, she finally noticed a bit of movement. The feet of a child in rather odd boots were all that could be seen sticking out of a smashed storefront window, toes down and wriggling, as though the child were scrambling after something. Curious, she reached out and grabbed the child’s collar, launching him backward into the mud and glass that covered the street. What she had mistaken for a child she now saw was a dwarf, wincing in pain at having fallen on the hump between his shoulders. She casually placed one of her boots at the base of his throat.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she demanded.

  He spat upon her leg, defiant. She increased the pressure of the boot on his throat, not really caring whether he lived or died. She could have used her powers to kill him a hundred different ways, but for the moment she was enjoying herself.

  ‘Just one more chance,’ she said calmly.

  ‘Cat,’ was the only word he could muster.

  She lightened the pressure on his throat. ‘What do you mean, “cat”?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ He panted. ‘There’s no food here anymore. I’m hungry. We all are. Cats be good eatin’. One of ’em ran into the store here. Make three meals out of a cat, I can, especially if it’s a big tomcat. Now, thanks to a street whore of the Ghetto, I’m still hungry!’

  ‘Eating cats are you, little man?’ she gloated, maintaining the pressure on his throat. ‘My last meal was highland pheasant with raptor’s eggs.’

  ‘Not just a whore, but a lying whore,’ he snarled. ‘That be only outside food, and only for the rich, at that!’

  She released her foot. ‘Get up.’

  He was perhaps all of three and a half feet tall, with dark hair, filthy clothes, and pudgy, greasy fingers. But she sensed a hidden intelligence in him. A perfect nocturnal creature of the Ghetto, he would be able to come and go virtually unnoticed. Such a person could be useful.

  ‘What was your crime?’ she asked.

  ‘Robbery. I stole some bread for my family. We were starving. But they’re all dead now.’

  The twisted mental image of a dwarfed hunchback trying to hide a loaf of bread that was the size of his arm brought a smile to her face. Growing even more curious, Succiu circled the dwarf as she examined him. The first finger of her left hand toyed with her bottom lip as the seed of an idea came to her.

  ‘How would you like to leave this place? For services rendered, of course?’

  ‘No street whore of the Ghetto has the power of freedom,’ he said sarcastically.

  Succiu was beginning to feel that some instruction was in order.

  ‘That’s no way to speak to a mistress of the Coven,’ she said quietly, pointing a finger at the dwarf.

  ‘Mistress of the Coven, my arse!’ He laughed. One of his fingers came up in an obscene gesture.

  She had noticed the lantern hook earlier, long since looted of its oil lamp. It was fastened to the shop wall just to the left of the broken door. It looked sturdy enough, and if it was not, she would make it so.

  Deliberately, almost gently, she levitated the dwarf up and back through the air toward the shop, and neatly hung him upon the hook through the back of his muddy coat. She turned her exotic head this way and that, examining him as if he were some kind of prize she had just won at a Eutracian province fair. Still defiant and not understanding the gravity of his situation, he wiggled all four limbs at once as if trying to obtain some form of purchase in the humid night air. Finally, he became still. But she could see that it was a stillness born of defiance.

  ‘Bitch!’ he spat venomously.

  ‘Still don’t believe me, little man?’ she asked. ‘I would have thought this small demonstration might have convinced you.’

  ‘No cheap magic trick will convince me you’ve a true sorceress’s power.’ He glared. ‘Besides, the mistresses of the Coven all live in a grand castle. Everybody knows that. No, you’re a street whore. Better looking than the others here, I grant you, and a whore with more tricks up her skirt than most, but a cheap street whore just the same.’

  A smile came to her lips, exposing her perfect, white teeth to the moonlight. ‘What is your name, little man?’ she asked, arms akimbo.

  ‘Geldon.’

  ‘Well, Geldon, it seems I have taken an interest in you. And, as I have said, I am a mistress of the Coven. But no matter. If you do not accept my offer, you will perish. Simple. And the secret that I sometimes walk the Ghetto by night will die with you.’ She laughed at the irony. ‘Such a little man with such a big secret!’

  He tried to spit at her again, but was unable to reach her. ‘For the last time, bitch, leave me be, leave me!’ he screamed fruitlessly. ‘Go find some other poor fool to rent your crotch to!’

  At last, she decided.

  With her arms spread to the stars, her back arched, and her eyes closed, she began the incantation:

  ‘’Tis your blood that is sought;

  ’Tis heat to be wrought;

  No god or man can end my toil;

  No savior may cause this enchantment to spoil.

  I command your blood essence to writhe and churn;

  You shall feel your very soul to burn.’

  Two shafts of bright blue light shot from her hands, joined, and impaled the dangling dwarf to the wall. Immediately he began to tremble.

  The second mistress of the Coven was executing a Blood Pox.

  For the first time, true terror began to escape from the dwarf’s beady eyes as his little body shuddered, then began to shake more violently. Sweat streamed from his face and hands, and his clothing actually began to wrinkle from the heat as the temperature of his blood rose.

  ‘Agree to my request soon, or I will take you past the point of no return,’ Succiu hissed, watching her handiwork. ‘It is not a pretty sight.’ She laughed. ‘But by then, of course, you will already be blind.’

  Still, the dwarf refused to speak. As he shook more violently against the clapboards of the building, Succiu continued to raise the temperature of his blood, the shaft of blue light becoming more intense in the dark night. She could swear she was beginning to see the toes of his boots starting to curl.

  A stream of urine began to run down the inside of his left leg, then to his boot, and finally to the ground, forming a stinking, steaming, pinkish puddle beneath him. Then he started to scream. His body convulsed against the wall.

  ‘I agree,’ he said faintly.

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’ She laughed. ‘Address me correctly!’

  ‘I agree, Mistress!’ he screamed, his eyes rolling back in his head. She noticed a trickle of blood from one ear running down the side of his squat neck.

  Immediately the shaft of blue light vanished, and Geldon crashed to the wooden sidewalk. Succiu stepped neatly around the pools of perspiration, urine, and blood, and stood over the scarcely breathing dwarf. With a smile, she bent down gracefully, touched a finger to the blood on the left side of his face just below the ear, and placed a drop of it on her tongue.

  From that moment on, he was hers.

  Taking him back to the Recluse, she had protected him with time enchantments and healed him to make him more useful. With two exceptions. She left his hunched back. And she left him impotent and sterile – results of the extreme blood temperature. Once he was well enough, she began using him to do her hunting for her. Hunting the Parthalonian countryside for the slaves that now made up the population of the Stables. And she had purposely left him broken. Teasing him with the possibility of a cure ensured that he would remain faithful.

  She had instructed the Recluse maidservants to clean him, clothe him, and give him quarters. The First Mistress, upon seeing Geldon, had ordered him from the castle and rebuked Succiu for having brought him into their midst without permission. She found the hunchbacked dwarf disgusting to look at, not to mention an inferior life form, being a male of unendowed blood. But when Succiu had outlined her plans for using the dwarf to help her populate the Stables, Failee had relented, provided that Geldon was to be controlled and not left to wander the magnificent hallways of the Recluse at his own discretion. Succiu had gladly agreed and initiated the idea of the rings, thereby both humiliating the dwarf and condemning him to a life of servitude wearing the hated collar.

  Smiling into the mirror as she admired herself in the stunning red gown, she knew that she would soon be gone from this place. Then she would have no need for the dwarf, and she could kill him.

  After a final look of approval at her reflection, she walked to the door. Opening it, she reached down and picked up the end of the jeweled leash that the dutiful dwarf was holding up to her in both palms. Then she led the way down the hall, the dwarf waddling as best he could in order to keep up.

  As Failee ascended the circular stone staircase, her mind raced. Moisture dripped from the dark stone walls, occasionally hissing as it fell into the wall torches. If the entire Coven was not present at the appointed hour, she would see to it that they were punished with some mild form of the Vagaries.

  It would be her pleasure.

  Eventually she reached the top of the staircase and stood before the great double mahogany doors. The Pentangle had been inlaid into each of the doors in brass, and magic was required to enter. These were the doors to the Coven’s Chamber, the highest and most private area of the Recluse.

  As First Mistress of the Coven she had purposely decided to be late, to keep the other mistresses waiting. She uncurled one of her long fingers toward the doors and commanded them to open. To further illustrate the point of her leadership, she levitated herself and slowly glided into the room, finally coming to a stop in front of her throne and gently hovering there in dominance of the others already seated.

  She was relieved to see that the other mistresses of the Coven were dutifully in attendance, each one in her prescribed throne. One throne was placed at each point of the oddly shaped five-cornered table. Two thrones remained blatantly empty. One was Failee’s, into which she gracefully lowered herself. The other throne had been empty for centuries. No one had sat in it since the first day it had been brought to this room, over 300 years ago.

 

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