The Pharoah Contract

She wondered how the guards could find their way through the labyrinth. There were so many turnings and junctures. The great number of beings she had seen indicated that the compound was a place of great activity, but she saw no others in the corridors, until they stopped at a three-way intersection to allow a coffle and its guards to pass. The coffle was made up of a dozen exquisitely matched women, somewhat human in appearance, chained neck to neck, wearing short kilts of silvery metal scales and nothing else. Their skins were toned a pale celadon green, their milky hair long and knotted into complex braids. Their wide lavender eyes looked at Nisa as though she were some odd freak.

Nisa felt acutely the demoralizing effects of her dirty sackcloth tunic and tangled damp hair, and she started to drop her head in shame. But she was still the daughter of the King of Kings — a risen phoenix — and her chin lifted. She stared back at the freakish women, lips set in as haughty a sneer as she could manage.

In a moment the women were gone down the corridor, and Nisa and her guards continued.

They finally reached a long wall set with many doors. As they approached, one door folded back, revealing a very small room. Nisa couldn’t imagine any good reason why she should go in there with the Pung guards, and she pulled back against her leash, tugging at the thin clear strand with her hands.

The larger guard showed its teeth again in that frightening smile, and gestured. Nisa shook her head stubbornly. “Please,” she said. “Why must we go in there?”

The guard released a rumbling sigh and took her by the arm. Effortlessly he propelled her inside. When the other guard was wedged in, the door shut.

Nisa felt a need to whimper, but she forced it down. The alien smell of the guards thickened in the tiny space. Abruptly, she felt as if she were falling and then a whimper did escape her tightly clamped lips; but she noticed that the guards seemed unperturbed. So she assumed that death was not imminent.

A moment later the elevator slowed and stopped, and that sensation was almost as distressing.

The door folded back.

Her first thought was that she had miraculously been transported to her uncle Shimanekh’s harlotry, a place she’d visited more than once, disguised as a visitor from the provinces.

The ceiling was low overhead, as if to concentrate and compress the scents of pleasure. Nisa smelled a hundred subtle odors, sweet wine, pungent smokes, the deep note of human bodies in heat. The room was huge. To each side walls were visible, but the far end of the room was lost in darkness.

Nisa observed a similar range of luxuries — deep carpets and soft fabric, highlighted with the glitter of precious metal and rare stone, everything to please the touch as well as the eye. The furnishings were eccentric: here a divan with cloven feet, there a love seat with snakeskin cushions. She examined a chair with grotesque ebony finials — infant vampires, their tiny mouths stretched wide, exposing long canines. Nisa shuddered, and looked away.

Nisa heard, low and far away, a thread of atonal tinkling music. Other than that, silence filled the room.

But if there were a recognizable aura and purpose to the place, also there were unfamiliar things, things that shocked her with wrongness, things that she could hardly bear to see. There were, instead of the erotic statues that Shimanekh favored, strange glittering wraiths, pale blue, translucent, locked in almost-frozen sexual ecstasy, but moving in slow life. It was as if ghosts copulated in the niches along the walls.

And the lights. On Pharaoh the brightest lights, the only lights other than naked flames, were the gaslights that lighted her father’s palace and a few of the wealthier temples. But here were lights of every hue and intensity, tiny colored lights attached to sleek metal panels everywhere, vast globes of soft pastel luminance, sharp pools of white glare.

She and the Pung seemed to be the only inhabitants of that vast room.

The guards took her to a high-backed chair padded with pale brown leather. They attached her leash to a sturdy iron ring that was built into the arm of the chair, and there they left her, returning into the little room. The larger one waved genially, and she waved back. She was almost sorry to see them go.

She sat alone in the chair for what seemed at least an hour. Her fear was gradually eroded by the advent of boredom. She examined her surroundings with interest; her eye was drawn to a design in the leather of the chair. After a moment she realized that it was a tattoo; in a moment more she recognized a pattern favored by the highlanders who lived on the secondary plateau north of the capital, and she realized what sort of animal had furnished the leather of the chair. Suddenly the touch of it was greasily intolerable and she stood up, still tethered.