Star Winds

Stooping, he scooped up a handful of the mud, then took Rachad by the wrist and daubed a gob of it on the back of his hand. Immediately Rachad felt a warm, tingling sensation in the flesh of his hand. From it, a feeling of pleasure began to seep into him, a piercing, near-orgasmic pleasure, with an as-yet-undefined sense of expectancy …

He stared at the slime. On closer inspection the clay-colored stuff was actually composed of millions of motes, each a different color so that they all merged into the same muddy brown.

The pleasure intensified. With sudden panic he slopped the slime from him, letting it fall to the tiles, and wiped his hand on his breeches.

The duke laughed softly. “That was merely a foretaste. The real meaning of the slime is in the dreams it brings—waking dreams that take the place of current reality, or sleeping dreams, as you will.”

“It sounds … unhealthy,” Rachad muttered.

“Oh, no … the slime creates no fantasy world. It gives one nothing false or invented … it can create no new experience. What it does is cause one to live over again the pleasurable events one has already experienced—but to experience them intensified and heightened to exquisite, almost unbearable levels. Have you ever felt that life’s pleasures are a disappointment? How often, young man, have you desired a maid, only to find, when eventually you enjoy her, that it is less of a delight than you imagined it would be? Then what you need is the dream-slime. In it you can experience the highlights of life over again, but with an intensity that would make you faint away were you awake.”

Rachad stared bemused at the slumberers in the slime bath, for the first time noticing that they were all naked. “You will appreciate by now,” the duke said in a near-whisper, as though he barely possessed the energy to speak, “that we in the Aegis live a life of the utmost debauchery of the senses, indeed of all the faculties. And if our senses become jaded by abuse, if our bodies can no longer be stimulated to respond, why, it makes no difference. Dream-slime will add all that is missing, and more.”

Wordlessly Rachad followed his guide out of the orchid garden. His mind was scarcely on the other wonders that the duke showed to him, such as the waterfall of drugged wine that tumbled for seven of the Aegis’s levels, splashing onto rocks to form sparkling pools in which one could bathe and become sated. Indeed by this time his own capacity for new sights was itself sated, so much so that he merely felt bewildered when the duke showed him one of the most impressive of the Aegis’s artistic accomplishments: a number of salons and apartments based on illusion, which by means of clever lighting tricks, oddly shaped rooms and ingenious screens that moved unseen by the observer, left the occupant disorientated and unable to make normal perceptual judgments. He was then receptive to new perversions of the senses that were then introduced. Here were boudoirs where, by moving from one part of the room to another, one became either a midget or a giant in relation to one’s sexual partner. Here were private bordellos where women seemed to flit in and out of the walls, the floor, the air, attacking their client in endless streams and enmeshing him in an inescapable web of lechery. Here were painted picturamas so cunningly devised that Rachad could not believe that he would not be able to step into the incredible scenes they depicted.

Shortly he was to receive more evidence that the duke richly deserved his reputation for insanely wanton sensuality. Perceiving that his charge was by now surfeited with new impressions, the haughty aesthete observed that the Aegis’s day was well advanced, and that it was time to repair to the regular evening banquet.

While the meal progressed he turned the pages of The Root of Transformations, commenting lengthily on the text and pointing out significances in the illustrations, even in fine details, which were entirely novel to Rachad, and which he suspected would have been so even to Gebeth. Closing the book, the duke continued, in the vague and faltering voice that clearly belied a keen intellect, to talk of alchemical principles in general. He spoke of the fusion of positive and negative, of the alchemical marriage which must always take place within a sealed vessel, of the joust of the red and black knights, and so on. Going on from that, he gave Rachad the first clear account he had ever heard of the three primordial forces of sulphur, quicksilver and salt.