One of the two girls arrived with plates of strudel, but only came close enough to set them on the table when the magic had abated.
“You are her, are you not? You are the Drache Girl?”
“I am,” confirmed Senta. “And now you’re going to regale me with a story of how your young lover was a soldier who had never done anything to anyone, but was sent to an early grave by my demon mother?”
The girl needed no reminder of the story. Nobody did. Five years ago, during the war between Brechalon and Freedonia, Senta’s mother, Zurfina the Magnificent, had cast a spell. Senta believed the intent of the spell was to eliminate the attacking warriors at Iquanodon Heath just outside of Port Dechantagne in Birmisia—though guessing Zurfina’s intentions were always hit and miss propositions. In any case, Zurfina’s spell had not only removed the soldiers from Iguanodon Heath. It had blinked out of existence every man in a uniform of the Freedonian Empire anywhere in the world: millions of men who all simply vanished. As did Zurfina herself, never to be seen again.
“Lover?”
“Mannfreund.”
“Nein,” said the girl. “I had no… lover. Mein vater was a postmaster, und mein older bruder—he was a polizist. Mein baby bruder—he collected tickets on the trolley. They are all gone now.”
“Bad luck,” said Senta, rubbing an index finger over her lower lip.
“Ja, luck.” The waitress turned and rejoined her sister.
“Let’s go,” said the sorceress. “I don’t want dessert.”
“As you wish,” said Baxter. He tossed a wad of Freedonian banknotes on the table before getting up and stepping around to pull out Senta’s chair. He followed her as she stepped quickly through the restaurant to the front door. She didn’t look back, but he did. The two blondes were still watching them, and he was back to not being sure which of the two Brechs they were watching.
Though his legs were longer and he wasn’t encumbered by a bustle dress or corset, Baxter still had a hard time keeping up with Senta as she strode quickly down the street.
“You shouldn’t let that upset you,” he said as he fell into step beside her.
“I’m not upset. I’m full.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“If I got upset every time such a situation presented itself, I’d be upset all the time.”
Suddenly gunshots rang out in the night—three shots in quick succession. Two small craters appeared in the building stonework next to Baxter’s head, sending tiny rock chips flying. The third projectile hit a window two feet higher up on the same building. The glass cracked but didn’t shatter.
“I see him!” said Baxter, spotting a figure running away into the night. He produced a .45 caliber revolver from his pocket, and started off at a run after the retreating figure. “I’ll get him!”
“Don’t bother!” called Senta after him. “It’s not worth it!”
He didn’t respond and disappeared around the corner, leaving her standing by herself in the halo of lamplight. She sighed and turned to examine the bullet holes.
“Three times then,” she said. “Three times I’ve been shot at.”
A noise behind her drew Senta’s attention. Beneath the flickering light of the next streetlamp were two children. They looked to be a boy and a girl of about eight or nine. The girl was wearing a brown dress and a bonnet, while the boy had on a great coat and a cap. They reminded Senta a little of her friends Hero and Hertzal, as they had been when she first met them. They too were from Freedonia. As she watched, the two ran into the mouth of a nearby alley.
Retracing her steps to the opening of the alley, the sorceress looked in. It was completely dark beyond the lamplight. She listened. She couldn’t hear the children. She couldn’t hear much of anything really. She heard voices in the distance and a steam engine, but neither of them was from the direction of the gaping darkness before her. With no real thought behind her actions, she stepped into the alley. Twenty or so feet into the darkness, she heard a small splash as she stepped into a puddle.
“Uuthanum.” A small sphere of cool blue light appeared floating before her. The ugly, moldy brick walls of the buildings on either side of her were illuminated, as were the ugly faces of eight men surrounding her. They were dressed as some kind of laborers, maybe dock workers, she thought. Most of them carried clubs. One, a vicious looking fellow with a big scar across his nose was carrying a piece of heavy chain.
“Oh my,” said Senta. “You are an ugly one, aren’t you?”
“Your bodyguard is gone,” said the man, revealing a Brech accent.
“That’s so cute, that you think he’s my bodyguard. So you’re not from around here. Let me guess. Somebody hired you—to what… kill me, rape me?”
“Why limit ourselves to just one,” he grinned.
“Oh I do like a man with ambition,” she said. “Uuthanum regnum.”
All of the men were suddenly stricken. Several bent over in pain and several others simply dropped to the ground. One screamed out. Others began to cry. Scarnose dropped to his knees and gripped himself around his waist. Senta bent down and looked at him.
“Where did those children go, anyway?”
The man let loose a hideous moan. Senta noticed an open but dark doorway at the back of the alley. A shriek brought her attention back to the writhing figure before her.
“If this had happened five years ago, I would have felt sorry for the pain you’re experiencing now.” She ran the palm of her hand across his dirty cheek. “Then again, five years from now, I might wipe out your whole family in retribution. Perhaps you should count yourself lucky. Well, maybe lucky isn’t the right word. Uuthanum.”
Black strands spread from Senta’s hand through Scarnose’s skin. As a new round of screams burst from his mouth, the sorceress stood up and walked past him toward the doorway, leaving the man clawing at his own skin as whole chunks of it blackened and sloughed off.
Up two steps, she entered the doorway. The shining ball of light, which had remained where it had been created, quickly followed her when she snapped her fingers. Beyond a long hallway, was a vast room filled with bodies. Many women and a few men were lying all about the marble-tiled floor. There had to be more than a hundred of them. Some had their heads propped up by pillows, but just as many lay without any attention to comfort. A low moan escaped from the far corner. Here and there a body twitched. Senta moved carefully through the spaces between the bodies. Hearing the clink of glass as her foot kicked something, she looked down to see a tiny, empty indigo vial go skittering away.
“Well well,” she thought aloud. “Somebody is getting rich.”
Suddenly hands gripped her ankle. Kicking her leg loose, she looked down into the milky eyes of a middle-aged woman.
“She wants you,” the woman hissed.
“Who wants me?”
“She wants you.”
“She can go to hell,” said Senta.
The sorceress made her way through the maze of drug-addled bodies to a door that led out onto the street. White opthalium, the see spice, was becoming more and more common. It sapped the will of those who became addicted to it. Senta had seen similar dens back in Brech, though none so large. Made from rare enchanted lotus blossoms and blue fungus from the distant island land of Enclep, and whipped together with relatively potent magic, the drug provided a doorway to a shared fantasy for those who rubbed it upon their eyes. The price for these visions was lethargy, depression, and finally the loss of the will to live.
Senta stopped outside the door and stared back into the room. She was still there, lost in thought, when Baxter came jogging up to her.
“I’m sorry. He got away.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Senta. “Are you sure it was a he?”
Her companion thought for a moment. “No, I suppose not.”
“Let’s get home.”
Baxter put his arm around her shoulders and led her back to the hotel. Senta was lost in silent thought as they passed through the lobby and rode up in the elevator. Once back in the suite, she went directly to her boudoir and began removing her dress and complicated undergarments. She had just slipped into a filmy nightgown made of Mirsannan silk, when Baxter entered, still dressed, carrying a smiling baby.
“Look at what I found,” he said, spinning the child around him. “Come look at her new trick.”
He set the baby on the bed on her stomach and stood back. The little girl, her bright eyes now wide and mouth smiling, pushed herself up onto her hands and knees.
“Ta da!” he said, with a laugh.
Senta looked from child to the man without recognition.
“She’s up on her knees,” he explained. “Soon she’ll be crawling and then there’ll be no keeping up with her.”
“Ah.” The sorceress sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the baby, looking into her face. “I suppose I should be impressed.”
“I sent the women home,” said Baxter, walking into the other room.
The sorceress followed, the baby on her hip. “Senta will need to eat again.”
“Miss Lorvann left us with a bottle.” He took off his coat, hanging it up; then began unfastening the cuffs of his shirt. “You didn’t think that giving your child your name would be confusing?”
“Men do it all the time,” said Senta. “Besides, who do you propose I name her after?”
“Your mother?”
“No, that wouldn’t do. I doubt anyone will name their child Zurfina ever again.”
“Her father then?”
“Is that a hint that you would like me to tell you who he is?”
“I don’t care who he is.” Baxter peeled off his pants, and hung them up.
Senta placed her daughter down in the center of Baxter’s bed and attempted to play peek-a-boo with her, using a pillow to cover her own face, but the girl rolled over, rising to her hands and knees, and began rocking back and forth. Putting the pillow back in place, the sorceress slid up so that she could lie back upon it.
“Besides, bastards don’t get their fathers’ names.”
“Is that a hint?” asked Baxter, stepping out of the closet in his robe.
“A hint at what?”
“A hint that you would like me to marry you and give your child my name.”
“Don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t marry you in any case. You’re probably far too good for the likes of me, and I am most definitely too good for the likes of you.”
Baxter lay down on the other side of the bed, so that little Senta was between the two of them. With a flourish, he produced his cufflink box, shaking it so that it rattled loudly. The baby’s eyes went right to it. She opened them wide in astonishment as her mouth gaped, leaving a long strand of saliva dripping down onto the bed cover. They played with the rattling little box until the child’s eyes began to droop, then her mother scooped her up and sang to her until she was asleep. Baxter stepped into the nursery and returned carrying the cradle, which he sat near the foot of the bed. Once little Senta was placed in it, he turned down the room lights and rejoined Senta the elder in his bed.