Follox

[Rance]

Gloria went to Lady Follox when requested. She was ushered there by one of her men at arms, one of those silent, stubbled fellows wearing a leather helmet that looked like a tired penis. He walked the girl from the Gruelmaster and led her through the muddy backstreets. Once, a beggar in stitched clothing held out her fragile hand for a penny, a coin, anything, and the man shoved her away with his forearm. She fell back into an offal muck, and Gloria, being ashamed to accompany him, tucked her chin against the collar of her dress and swept through the alley in his wake.

Follox's abode was like any other tenement in this part of the port city: it was black with soot and tall and fragile; its windows, poorly measured and badly misshapen, looked like drug-addled eyes staring out into the world. It stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other abandoned structures. The street's cobble had been long broken, and no horses nor carriages dared the unpredictable footing. Stagnant rainwater sat in tiny lakes of mud. Bugs darted and whisked through the air. But the doorway to Follox's home was, at least, representative of its owner: a green door with a crystal knob awaited her, and the man at arms pushed it open for her.

Inside, the smell of sandalwood and incense struck Gloria like an invisible fist.

A room of dark, lacquered wood stretched out for meters. Lamps, burning brightly, hung from hooks in the low ceiling. A fireless hearth of cold marble stood at the end of the room, and Lady Follox sat before it in a dressing gown. Her wooden-backed chair was one of the room's only bits of furniture. Her right arm was extended, its bared length resting in the lap of a man who looked to be delicately prodding at her skin with the flat of a steel blade.

"Gloria," Follox said, turning her chin just slightly, never looking behind her? "Is that you?"

"It's me."

"Come closer."

Hooking her skirts in her fingers, Gloria, as if attending a woman of royalty, scraped forward, until—

"Stop. You'll come no closer. Forgive the cold formality of it all," the woman said. "On a daily basis I conduct audience with a number of men and women who could visit harm upon me in a number of ways. I would rather they keep their distance. Two days ago, I might have invited you into my chamber for tea. But I saw what you managed to do to Hallister's wrist, and I'd be much more happy to keep you at a distance. You understand, my dear."

"I understand." A pause. "Why don't you turn to look at me?"

"What's the use of looking at you when what we say to one another is all that mattesr?"

The surgical attendant, Gloria realized, was holding Follox's arm steady and, with deliberate, careful cuts, was slicing bloody lines into her flesh. Follox never flinched, never even registered the pain.

"Do you ever look at anyone else you talk to? Any of the dangerous folk?"

"No," Follox said. "It's not necessary. I don't need to look at them. There are plenty of other eyes keeping watch for me."

Gloria shifted the weight on her feet and looked, then, at the walls, at the ceiling, and though she found nothing but shadows and the occasional cobweb, she was suddenly wary of the blackened knots, the flickers of firelight, the phantoms that grew there when she turned her head or looked anywhere else. The man tending to Lady Follox's arm reached to a tiny table, and there, flicked a brandy-glass that was suspended over a little candle. Inside, a whitish fluid twitched in response. He carefully withdrew a tiny amount with a glass dropper and flicked three dabs — drop, drop, drop — on the blade of his bloody knife.

Then, unceremoniously, he lay the flat of the blade against the wounds he'd created in Follox's arm. He dragged it across. He smeared the white fluid into the superficial wounds.

Gloria sucked in a shuddering breath.

"What is he doing?"

"Tending to me."

"He's torturing you."

"He's relieving me," Follox said. "Warm poppy milk calms the fires in my bones."

"Dilute it wth alcohol," Gloria offered. "Drink it."

Follox's shoulders started shaking with a quiet and hoarse laugh. She looked to her attendant and said, "I do love how much young women think they know." She settled more comfortably into her chair, let her head hang back, and diverted her eyes toward the ceiling. Her dark hair hung in viselike strands down her back, and for the first time, Gloria realized just how many twisting coils of gray tempered her scalp. "A calm mind and receptive body are essential in my line of work, Gloria. Yours is an existence wholly reliant upon tension: where there is no tension, you create tension. Where there is no conflict, you choose to escalate.

"I prefer to operate on an entirely different spectrum."

A nugget of discomfort started to grow in the pit of Gloria's stomach, so she pressed her lone hand against her belly and said, shortly: "Why did you want to see me? I've no desire to waste your time."

"You've no desire to have your time wasted, it sounds like. Be at ease: I have no want to be in your presence longer than I must. I've met two other Jernos in my time, and you're no exception to the rule: your smell offends me; the darkness of your skin is a slight against everything I've come to know of beauty; your beady stares discomfort me. I dislike you, Gloria Wynsee, but it does not mean I don't recognize my penchant for disapproving of that which does not appeal to my eye."

"I didn't choose this flesh," Gloria said, "or this blood." Her cheeks grew warm and furious. "But it's mine, and I cannot shed it."

"Don't feign shame. You wouldn't shed it if even you were offered the choice."

Gloria's fist tightened against her abdomen. In her mutilated arm, the new stitches she wore swelled against the tension of her muscles. Her yellow teeth ground against themselves. The seamstress blew a few steadying breaths out of her nostrils. "What can I do for you, Aremeda?"

"Your stunt against Hallister put me in an awkward position. I intended to build the odds against you for a few weeks yet. Pit-gamblers are finnicky people, Gloria, and foolish with their coin. They would rather small, reliable payouts than daring risks. The more you lose, the more the odds are against you: a man with two shillings to his name would rather bet one against you and earn a fraction more back when, inevitably, you lose. It's reliable income. It's easy money, as they say."

"I ruined that pattern."

"You ruined that pattern. You lost me money I would have made when I could anticipate your eventual win and instruct my retainers to bet accordingly. I am very upset. But you can fix it."

"By winning?"

Aremeda Follox laughed. Her surgical attendant wiped the blood free of her arm. A thousand other tiny scars fettered her skin.

"How good are you, Gloria Wynsee, at stealing?"

[Rance]

"Stealing? I don't steal. I deplore it."

Follox turned her head enough to look upon the creases gouged in her arm. Gloria never saw full view of the woman's eyes, even from this angle. "Do understand, Gloria, that conviction is the third most useless personal trait behind integrity and naiveté. I didn't ask whether you have some moral obligation for or against the task; I asked whether you were good at it."

"I've never tried my hand at it."

"I suppose we'll find out. A trial by fire, then."

"That which a person earns or owns is their own. I'll not divest them of it. The labor of our sweat and our fingers is often our only worth," the seamstress said. "I know too many people whose families, should a purse go missing, would wither and starve."

Follox tightened her fist at the extension of her mutilated arm. With a few tense squeezes, a few tears of blood ran from the wounds. The surgeon wiped them away with the edge of kerchief. "It's enough," Follox said to him. "I needn't any more at the moment. Return to your tasks. Call upon me at nightfall with a doubled regimen. I slept poorly last night, and don't intend to spend another day under the thumb of exhaustion." Silent, obedient, the surgeon nodded and began to wrap the tender canyons in his benefactor's arm. Follox raised her voice again to Gloria. "Forgive me — what were you saying?"

"That I find stealing," Gloria said, "a reprehensible practice."

The surgeon, once he was done tending to Follox's arm, returned his dropper to its vessell, wadded up the bloody fabric, and retired without ceremony. He stood and drifted away from Follox like an unwanted ghost, dissolving into the next room and leaving the two women alone with but a few yards of hardwood flooring to separate them.

"Reprehensible she calls it! Because you, my darling Gloria," Aremeda Follox said, stifling a laugh, "you are simply a paragon of moral living! Don't build up such weak walls around yourself. You fill your pockets as an illegal pit-fighter — and a riotously poor one at that. You hail from a culture and society that not only embraces slavery, but thrives on it. You carry no qualms against drinking liquor or smoking a pipe and have, by my guess, enjoyed your own share of the poppy more than once. Shall I continue?"

Gloria, underneath the shadow of her bonnet, tightened her jaw and locked her stare on the spine of Follox's chair. The woman continued:

"You don't attend Seventhday mass. You curse as does a sailor. You're in Razasan as a representative of Ruann, and if you don't already know, child, wearing that anvil as you do is as great a mark of moral flexibility as any."

"Are you getting to your point?"

"You're an estranged mother a sea apart from her child. You fucked out of wedlock and carried the equivalent of a whore's baby. I know for fact, whether or not you've admitted it, that you've shed the blood of others and killed other humans, albeit under the guise of some greater obligation. To Myrken Wood, was it? You have no claim to nobility, Gloria, so don't use it as an excuse to break the rules of human society only when it suits you. Stealing," the woman finalized, "would be the least of your transgressions."

A spark of discomfort flared to life in Gloria's breast. Impulse would have driven her to strike at the woman for it all, for those comments of her child, for the presumption that she was right, but she hadn't invested enough hatred in Aremeda Follox to merit much more than passing disdain. So why, she wondered, did she suddenly feel undressed, like a child exposed to the world on the testing day of her Odos? An instinct beat inside her, a second heart, a fear that the seamstress couldn't articulate in words, even in thoughts. Instead of telling her to lash out and spurn this woman, threaten her, smother her with fury as impulse had instructed Gloria Wynsee to do so many other times, natural urgency she was deflated and shrunken. Made small. Made wary, like a mouse backed into a corner.

Fear.

Why? Why am I afraid of this woman?

Because she is not a neophyte at coercion,, came the response inside her, not as actual words or in the form of true subconscious conversation, but as a listless fluctuation of sensations and feelings in her gut. Her mind equivocated them into the closest approximation of words. And in her closed mouth, behind the prison of her broken teeth, a worm-sized tendril of Black Oil thrashed against the top of her mouth. Because she presents a threat to you. A future threat, a threat undisclosed, but a threat nonetheless. Get out of here. Now.

The seamstress cleared her throat. The Black Oil slithered into the corner of her mouth and along the ridgeline of her gums, hiding away from the candlelight that crept into her mouth when she spoke. "Fine," she said. "Fine. If you want me to steal, what would you have me steal?"

"That which you stole from me with your foolish victory over Hallister. What you proved to me, Gloria, is that with but one hand, you're still a viable contender in and out of the pit. What you showed to me the other night was that people can be afraid of you. You visited upon that man — a soldier — a capacity for delivering pain without remorse. You'll find when you return to your room at the Gruelmaster a list of names, some which may be familiar to you, and others which may not be. These are the names of men and women who've borrowed coin from me in good faith and have chosen not to pay me back. And accompanying their names will be the value of their unpaid debts, as well as a location where they can be found.

"You'll find them. You'll take back the money that's owed to me. And if they don't comply," Aremeda Follox instructed, "you will beat them, break them, or bludgeon them until they do."

Gloria's mouth was struck with a sudden dryness. "That's — that's not stealing."

Settling into the soothing rhythm of the poppy in her veins, Follox's words began to slow. "Oh. You're absolutely right. It isn't. Then you should find it, using your impeccable moral compass, wholly navigable terrain. It's not stealing at all, my dear Gloria.

"It's business."