The Dog Said Bow-Wow (26 page)

The imp had a pince-nez at the tip of its nose, a sharp-toothed grimace beneath it, and three pairs of eyes above. All but the middle pair were shut. “A new one, eh?” The tail froze. He opened all six eyes wide and studied Ned for a long, silent moment. Then he closed the bottom four. “You’ll do, I suppose.”

Ned cleared his throat, unaccountably embarrassed. “I’d like —” he began.

“Oh, don’t you worry about what you’d
like
. Gilbrig has a good one for you. Excellent for your first time, I assure you! Up the stairs and to the left. The green door. She’ll be waiting there.”

“I… uh, haven’t been here before. How much will this be?”

The imp picked up his magazine again. “Take it up with the lady afterwards!”

Anxiously, Ned climbed the stairs, clutching the rail to keep from falling. It seemed a long way to the landing at the top and then, all too soon, he was there. He looked right and left. Though the hallway stretched on forever, there was only one door. It was green as a leaf in springtime. He pushed inside.

An elf-woman lounged naked upon the bed. She leaned up on an elbow, studying him thoughtfully. Her face was lovely but impassive, and her skin was palest blue. She had four breasts whose color gradually drained away at their tips, so that her nipples were white as mushrooms.

“Take off your clothes,” she said at last, “and kiss my breasts, one by one.”

But when he obeyed, the elf-woman snapped, “Not so fast! You treat them as if they were a quarryman’s lunch! Linger. Fill your mouth with them. Suck on the nipples. Use your tongue.” Ned altered his approach in accord with her directions. “Yes, that’s better. And your hands as well. Yes. Mmm. Now, if you were to very delicately take one nipple between your teeth and gently pull… Ahhhhh.”

Slowly, slowly, then, ran the chariot-horses of night. The elf-woman was as fragrant as a spice garden, redolent of wild thyme in the crook of her throat, of ginger and nutmeg beneath her breasts, of cinnamon further down. Her nipples tasted not of mushrooms but of honeydew. At times Ned felt his senses reeling from the intensity of sensations. Yet always he wanted more.

Though all the provinces of her flesh were duly visited, ever did the woman demand that he pay especial attention to her breasts. Nor was Ned loath to do so. Until at last, with him frantically working his yard back and forth between her lower breasts, which she pressed tight about him, and with his hands squeezing her upper breasts while pinching hard her nipples, he spasmed and spent. At which very instant she came as well, as though they two were ensorceled to achieve orgasm at the same time.

There was a basin of water on a stand by the bed. With preternatural grace, the elf dipped a washcloth in it, wrung it out, and cleansed her breasts of his seed. Supplely, she slid into a tight pair of trousers, pulled on high, red-leather boots, tucked in her silk blouse and, one-handed, tied up her hair with a ribbon. Over her blouse she strapped a sword harness so that the scabbard lay diagonal across her back with the blade’s hilt peeking up over her left shoulder.

Ned fumbled for his trousers. “Um… How much do I…?”

Contemptuously, she tossed him a gold coin. He stared down at it in astonishment. When he looked up again, the elf-woman was gone.

Gilbrig snickered as Ned came down the stairs. “You see? That wasn’t so difficult, after all! You are a true
sprutluder
now, eh? Come back next week and I’ll have something special for you. Ohhh, yes. Something nice, something nasty, something like nothing you’ve ever had before.” He stuck his fists in his armpits and, pumping his elbows like wings, threw back his head and crowed. “We’ll make your rooster sing!”

Ned found Boyce waiting outside in the three-shadowed moonlight, as he had promised. The man threw down his cigarette and ground it underfoot. “I’m giving you good weight here,” he said. “You should’ve been done an hour ago.” Then, before Ned could speak, “Turn slowly in a circle. You feel how when you’re facing toward the place, there’s a little stiffening, a little rise down there? Eh? Well, that’s how you get here. Follow your prick. After your first visit, it knows the way. Going home, you just take whichever path it’s most reluctant to go down. It’s as simple as that.” He started down the path.

“Boyce, that woman
paid
—”

The apprentice steam fitter spun around, seized Ned by the collar, and shook him angrily. “All right! Now you know what the big secret is. Let’s see if you have wit enough to keep your fat mouth shut about it, shithead.”

The next day, at lunch break, Ned went to the bog and, standing inside one of the stalls with his back against the door, spat into his hand and, eyes closed, jerked off to the memory of the four-teated elf. The lingering scent of her, woman-smell and cinnamon commingled, rose up from his cock.

Ned was neither an introspective nor a reflective man. But the sudden reversal of expected roles last night had disturbed him. He had gone looking for whores, not to be one himself. In some way he couldn’t logic out, it had tainted the experience. Now, however, in the warmth of the day, the memory of illicit flesh was sweet. He called forth specific memories of the little grunting noise she’d made when he entered her from behind and of how, when she’d leant over him to take his willy in her mouth, he’d stroked her moist cleft with his big toe. Always returning, of course, to those fabulous breasts, blue as a strangled man for most of their plumpness and white as corpse-flesh at their tips.

Other workers came and went as he stroked himself, so Ned was careful to maintain the strictest silence, even when he came. But it made him feel good to have such memories and a secret he need share with no one. Even the fact that the wooden stall was painted an industrial green, in crude harmony with the leaf-green door at the top of the bordello stairs, seemed auspicious. He walked back out onto the factory floor with renewed willingness to work and work hard.

The good mood this furtive act engendered lasted until, coming off shift, he remembered the gold he had been paid, stuck a hand in his pocket, and discovered that the fairy coin had overnight turned to a disk of soft dung.

“It’s the new
bögyörö!
” Gilbrig whooped when Ned slouched in. “How’s your
kurva’k fasza’t
hanging? In good form and looking for some action? Locked, loaded, and ready to go, I bet.”

“Fuck off.”

“Your joan’s upstairs, waiting for you. If she hasn’t started already.” The imp drew his middle finger under his nose, sniffing ostentatiously, as if it were a fine cigar. “Vintage
fitte
, nice-nice-nice! Ooh, baby, you’ve got a hot one tonight.”

On first entering the room, however, Ned thought not. The woman therein was tall and homely, and was dressed in the dun, utilitarian garb of a cavalrywoman. “Strip down,” she said brusquely, “and put these on.” Drawing items one by one from a worn-looking pack, she dressed him in a silken under-sark, with over that linen, then leather, and finally chain mail. Yet from the waist down she left him naked. Critically, she looked him over. “You have the height. And as for the face — well, I can always close my eyes.”

But when she put aside her gear and clothing, the body beneath them was as trim and strong and sweet as that of any girl he’d ever fantasized over in Ironbeck. Ned’s shaft hardened at the sight of her.

“Not so fast. First I must anoint you.” Now the cavalrywoman dabbed up three fingers’ worth of ointment from one of several chased-silver boxes on the side table. Strong and calloused hands slathered it onto his tool with the same practiced sureness with which she would have curried her steed or oiled her sword.

Finally she knelt on the bed, legs apart, then leant down and placed the side of her face against the sheet, so that her rump stuck up in the air. “Take me as you would your stallion,” she commanded.

For a moment Ned didn’t understand her. Then, when he did, he flushed, and made such a fumble of his attempt at entry that she reached behind her and scornfully guided him into her lesser orifice. This was a liberty Rosalie had never granted Ned. He began slowly, marveling at the tightness of her nether place and the strangeness of finding himself performing such an act at all. But then the warrior reached a hand behind and slapped him on the haunch so hard that it stung, crying, “Faster, damn you — ride me for all you’re worth!”

So he complied, grabbing her hips with both hands and thrusting into her as hard and fast as he could. In response, she ground her cheeks pink against the chain mail. “Give it your all!” the warrior cried. “For the Mark!”

Up hill and down they galloped. Now Ned knew for certain that there was a
geas
placed upon the room that he would not come before his client, for he lasted far longer than ever he had before, more than he would have thought humanly impossible, even. Despite all the bumping of bodies and squeezing of his prong, his physical energy did not lag, nor did he surrender to his own pleasure.

Until at last, of course, he did, she did, they did. He thought then to simply lie there and never move again. But the warrior had other ideas.

“Lie as if dead.” She crossed his arms over his chest so that the tips of his forefingers touched his shoulders. “If you moan, if you move, if you try to put your arms about me, I’ll kill you. Do you understand? My knife is here on the table, and I know how to use it. One way or another, you must be a corpse.”

“Lady…”

“Shhhh. I’ll give you something that will help.” She drew a pinch of dust from one of the silver boxes, placed it on the back of her thumbnail, laid it under his nose as he was breathing in, and blew it into his nostril. A cold and wintry numbness spread through Ned’s body. Sensation faded from his flesh. He tried to raise an arm and could not. “Wait!” he tried to say, but no sound came from his mouth. But then, as if in obedience to some compensatory principle, his pecker tingled with heat and began to grow. Which told him that, whatever poison he had been given, at least he was not dying.

The elf-warrior straddled his body, seized him by the root, and then rose up and impaled herself upon him. “Ahhhh, sweet liege,” she sighed, “at last you’re mine.”

She rode him like a trooper.

If there is lust after death, Ned discovered that night, if corpses couple in the grave or damned souls fuck in Hell, then it is a dark and wild mating indeed, compounded of ignorance and desire, abandon and despair. The warrior-woman’s riding of him was tireless, and it went on until she’d worked herself into a frenzy. He, meanwhile, experiencing no sensations but those of his cock, felt her madness overwhelm him, body and thoughts, so that he was nothing but urge, rage, and primal need. Until at last, crying, “Ah! My prince! I die for you!” the rider burst into tears and collapsed upon Ned’s supine body.

Their gallop over, his joan rolled off him, sighed, and lay for a time motionless. Eventually, she blew another drug into his nostrils to undo the effects of the first and stripped him of the war-leader’s costume. While sensation slowly returned to his body, Ned watched her pack away the gear and then dress herself. That pretty body disappeared beneath a cavalrywoman’s practical garb. It was like watching the moon disappear behind clouds. A shirt obscured her breasts and then was tucked into her breeches, eclipsing the last sliver of belly and waist and plunging the world into darkness.

With a groan, Ned sat up. The warrior-woman finished cinching up her harness, then paused before donning her tabard. On it was embroidered a cockatrice silhouetted against the sun, surrounded by runes Ned assumed were of mystic import, though he could read not a one of them. “Do you recognize my livery? Do you ken what prince I have sworn allegiance to?”

“Lady, I do not,” Ned replied. It was only the truth.

“That’s good. I would not have wanted to have to… Well, never mind. Take this for your efforts.” She upended her purse on the sidetable. Gold coins bounced and went rolling across the hardwood floor.

“This is too much!” Ned cried. Had he been able to take it home with him untransformed, he would not have lacked the wit to keep such counsel to himself. But it was useless to him, and so he would not see it thrown away.

The warrior-lady’s face was stern and stoic. “There is no place to spend it where I am going. I have betrayed my prince, my oath, and my company, and tomorrow we will all fall in battle together. Such is my weird. It is a sad and tangled tale and one that no bard shall ever sing.” She took Ned’s chin between thumb and forefinger and studied his face. Fleetingly, her harsh expression softened. “You’ve been a good whore. In another time and fate, perhaps we could have… Well, no matter.”

She kissed him hard, hoisted her pack, and left.

Ned got dressed. Out of tidiness, he gathered up the gold and dumped the coins back in their bag. Out of frugality, he searched the room until he found a floor-board that might be pried up, and hid the bag beneath it. He had no specific reason to do so. But he reasoned that fairy gold might well stay constant in Faerie, and that if so it might prove useful someday. He had grown up in a household where nothing so utile even as rags or straw was ever thrown away.

Such were the experiences that brought Ned more and more frequently to the bordello beyond the world as he knew it. No man could visit that house every night and hold down a job as well. But he was young and strong and could manage two, three, sometimes even four visits in a week. He serviced fox spirits, fire women (here they were properly called salamanders), shape-shifters, a sphinx who scratched him raw and licked him rawer yet, women whose flesh was as cold as the grave though their passions were not, and nymphs with ivy growing in their hair and madness in their eyes. His work suffered, but he did not notice. Nor if he had would he have thought it important. Though he spent hours in Faerie and days in the mundane world, the latter weighed against the former as moonlight did to granite.

Diverse though his experiences were, some things were as unvarying as natural law: Gilbrig always leered at him on the way in and taunted him on the way out. He was always sent to the room with the green door. And not once did his joans treat him like a real man. Sometimes they looked on him with soft pity afterwards. Sometimes they favored him with avaricious smiles. But never did one smile at him in a kindly way. The doomed warrior who had paid him all her gold came as close as any did to regarding him fondly, but even she had not looked upon Ned himself but at a fantasy of what he might have been to her.