DARK TIMES AT THE MIDNIGHT MARKET
Robert Silverberg
Business was slow nowadays for the spellmongers of Bombifale’s famed Midnight Market, and getting slower all the time. No one regretted that more than Ghambivole Zwoll, licensed dealer in potions and spells: a person of the Vroonish race, a small many-tentacled creature with a jutting beak and fiery yellow eyes, who represented the fourth generation of his line to hold the fifth stall in the leftmost rank of the back room of the Midnight Market of Bombifale.
Oh, the glorious times he could remember! The crowds of eager buyers for the wizardry he had for sale! The challenges triumphantly met, the wonders of conjuring that he had performed! In those great days of yore he had moved without fear through the strangest of realms, journeying among the cockatrices and gorgons, the flame-spitting basilisks and winged serpents, the universes beyond the universe, to bring back the secrets needed to meet the demands of his insatiable clients.
But now—but now—!
Popular interest in the various thaumaturgic arts, which had begun to sprout on Majipoor in the reign of the Coronal Lord Prankipin, had grown into a wild planetwide craze in the days of his glorious successor, Lord Confalume. That king’s personal dabblings in sorcery had done much to spur the mode for it. But it had been gradually waning during the reigns of the more skeptical monarchs who had followed him, Lord Prestimion and then Lord Dekkeret, and now, a century and more after Dekkeret’s time, sorcery had become a mere minor commodity, neither more nor less in demand than pepper, wine, dishware, or any other commonly used good. When one had need, one consulted the appropriate sort of wizard; but the era when a magus would be besieged by importunate patrons all through the hours of the clock was long over.
In those days the sorcerers’ section of the market was open only on the first and third Seadays of the month, creating pent-up demand that helped to spur a sense of urgency among the purchasers. But for the past decade the wizards had, of necessity, kept their shops open night after night to make themselves readily available to such few customers as did appear, and even so their trade seemed to be waning steadily year after year.
Even a dozen years ago Ghambivole Zwoll had had more work than he could handle. But two years back he had been forced to take in a partner, Shostik-Willeron of the Su-Suheris race, and together they barely managed to eke out a modest living in this era of diminishing fascination with all forms of magecraft. Their coffers were dipping ever lower, their debts were mounting to an uncomfortable level, and they were near the point where they might have to discharge their one employee, the stolid, husky Skandar woman who swept and tidied for them every evening before the shop opened. So it was a matter of some excitement one night, three hours past midnight, when a tall, swaggering young man clad in the flamboyant garb of an aristocrat—close-fitting blue coat with ruffled sleeves trimmed with gold, flaring skirts, wide-brimmed hat trimmed with leather of some costly sort—came sweeping into their shop.
He was red-haired, blue-eyed, handsome, energetic. He had the look of wealth about him. But there was something else about him, or so it seemed to Ghambivole Zwoll: the smirking set of his mouth, the overly rakish slant of his hat that cried scoundrel, wastrel, idler.
No matter. Ghambivole Zwoll had dealt with plenty of those in his time. So long as they paid their bills on time, Ghambivole Zwoll had no concern with his clients’ moral failings.
The proud lordling struck a lofty pose, his hand resting on the gleaming hilt of the sword that hung from a broad beribboned baldric at his side, and boomed, “I will have a love potion, if you please. To snare the heart of a lady of the highest birth! And I mean to spare no expense.”
Ghambivole Zwoll masked his joy with a calm, businesslike demeanor. He stared up—and up and up and up, for the new client was very tall indeed and Vroons are diminutive beings, knee-high at best to humans—and said judiciously, “Yes, yes, of course. We offer such compounds at every level of efficacy and potency.” He reached for a writing tablet. “Your name, please?”
He expected some fanciful pseudonym. Instead his visitor said grandly, “I am the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran, fourth son of the third son of the Count of Canzilaine.”
“Indeed,” said Ghambivole Zwoll, a little stunned, for the Count of Canzilaine was one of the wealthiest and most influential men of Castle Mount. He looked across the room toward the towering figure of Shostik-Willeron, standing against the far wall. The Su-Suheris appeared to be displaying mixed emotions, his optimistic right-hand head glittering with pleasure at the prospect of a hefty fee but the left-hand head, which disliked such high-born fops as this, glowering in distaste. The Vroon shot him a quick, bright-eyed glance to let him know that he would handle this client without interference. “I’ll need to know the details of your requirements, of course.”
“Details?”
“The goal you hope to achieve—whether it be only a seduction and light romance, or something deeper, leading, even, perhaps to a marriage. And some information about the lady’s age and physical appearance, her approximate height and weight, you understand, so that we may calculate the proper dosage.” He risked letting the intense blaze of his yellow eyes meet the blander gaze of the marquis. As tactfully as he could he said, “You will, I hope, be forthcoming about these matters, or it may be difficult to fulfill your needs. She is young, I take it?”
“Of course. Eighteen.”
“Ah. Eighteen.” The Vroon delicately looked away. “And of limited sexual experience, perhaps?—I have no wish to pry, you understand, but in order to calculate—”
“Yes,” said the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran. “I hold nothing back from you. She is a virgin of the purest purity.”
“Ah,” said Ghambivole Zwoll.
“And moves in the highest circles at court. She is in fact the Lady Alesarda of Muldemar, of whose beauty and wit you undoubtedly have heard report.”
That was jolting news. Ghambivole Zwoll fought to hide any show of the concern that that lady’s name had awakened in him, but he was unable to fight back a complex, anguished writhing of his innumerable tentacles. “The Lady—Alesarda—of Muldemar,” the Vroon said slowly. “Ah. Ah.” His partner was glaring furiously at him now from his station in the corner shadows, the wary left-hand head glowering with wrath and even the normally cheerful right one showing alarm. “I have heard the name—she is, I believe, of royal lineage?”
“Sixth in descent from the Pontifex Prestimion himself.”
“Ah. Ah. Ah.” Ghambivole Zwoll saw that they were getting into exceedingly deep waters. He wished the marquis had kept the lady’s identity to himself. But business was business, and the shop’s exchequer was distressingly low. To mask his uncertainties he scribbled notes for quite some time; and then, looking up at last, said with a cheeriness he certainly did not feel, “We will have what you need in one week’s time. The fee will be—ah—”
Quickly, almost desperately, he reckoned the highest price he thought the traffic would bear, and then doubled it, expecting to be haggled with. “Twenty royals.”
“Twenty,” said the marquis impassively. “So be it.”
Ghambivole wondered what the response would have been if he had said thirty. Or fifty. It had been so long since he had had a client of the marquis’s station that he had forgotten that such people were utterly indifferent to cost. Well, too late now.
“Will a deposit of five cause any difficulties, do you think?”
“Hardly.” Mirl Meldelleran drew a thick, glossy coin from his purse and dropped it on Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk. The Vroon swept it quickly toward him with a trembling tentacle. “One week,” said the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran. “The results, I assume, are guaranteed?”
“Of course,” said Ghambivole Zwoll.
“This is madness,” said Shostik-Willeron, the moment the door of the stall had closed behind the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran and they were alone again. “We will be ruined! A virgin princess of Prestimion’s line, one who moves in the highest circles at court, and you propose to fling her into the bed of the fourth son of a third son?”
“Twenty royals,” Ghambivole Zwoll said. “Do you know what our gross revenue for the past three months has been? Hardly one third as much. I expected him to bargain me down, and I would have settled for ten, or even five. Or three or two. But twenty—twenty!—”
“The risk is tremendous. The sellers of the potion will be traced.”
“What of it? We are not the ones who will debauch the young princess.”
“But it’s an abomination, Ghambivole!” The words were coming from the right-hand head, and that gave Ghambivole Zwoll pause, for the right-hand head always brimmed with enthusiasm and exuberance, while it was the other, the dominant left head, that was ever urging caution. “We’ll be whipped! We’ll be flayed!”
“We are only purveyors, nothing more. We are protected by the mercantile laws. What we sell is legal, and what he plans to use it for is legal too, however deplorable. The girl is of age.”
“So he says.”
“If he’s lied to me about it, the sin is his. Do you think I would dare to ask the grandson of the Count of Canzilaine for an affidavit?”
“But even so, Ghambivole—”
“Twenty royals, Shostik-Willeron.”
They argued over it another fifteen minutes. But in the end the Vroon won, as he knew he would. He was the senior partner; this was his shop, and had been in his family four generations; and he was the only one of the two who had any real skill at wizardry. Shostik-Willeron’s sole contribution to the partnership had been capital, not any great knowledge of the art; and if the shop failed, the Su-Suheris would lose that capital. They were in no position to turn away such lucrative business, chancy though it might be.
The partners were an oddly assorted pair. Like all the Su-Suheris race, Shostik-Willeron was tall and slender, with a pallid body tapering upward to a narrow forking neck a foot in length, atop which sprouted a pair of hairless, vastly elongated heads, each of which had an independent mind and identity. Ghambivole Zwoll could hardly have looked more different: a tiny person, barely reaching as high as his partner’s shins, fragile and insubstantial of body, with a host of flexible rubbery limbs and a small head, out of which jutted a sharp hook of a beak, above which were two huge yellow eyes with horizontal black stripes to serve as pupils. There were times when the Vroon barely avoided being trampled by Shostik-Willeron as they moved about their cramped little emporium.
But Ghambivole Zwoll was accustomed to moving in a world of oversized creatures. Vroons were the dominant beings on their own home planet, but giant Majipoor was Ghambivole Zwoll’s native world, his ancestors having arrived in the great wave of Vroon immigration during the reign of Lord Prankipin, and like all his kind, he wove his way easily and lithely through throngs of heedless entities of much greater size than he, three and four and even five times his height, not only humans but also the reptilian Ghayrogs and the lofty Su-Suheris and the various other peoples of Majipoor, going on up to the gigantic shaggy four-armed Skandars, who stood eight feet tall and taller. Not even the presence of the ponderous, slow-witted Skandar cleaning-woman, Hendaya Zanzan, who moved slowly and clumsily about the shop as she dusted and fussed with its displays, intimidated him with her dangerous bulk.
“A love potion,” Ghambivole Zwoll said, setting about his task. “One that is suitable to win the heart of a highborn maiden, slender, delicate—”
The job called for no little forethought. At Ghambivole Zwoll’s request, the Su-Suheris began taking books of reference down from the high shelves, the reliable old book of incantations that Ghambivole Zwoll had kept by his side since his student days in the sorcerers’ city of Triggoin, and the ever-useful Great Grimoire of Hadin Vakkimorin, and Thalimiod Gur’s Book of Specifics, and many another volume—more, in fact, than would possibly be needed. Ghambivole Zwoll suspected that he could compound the potion that the marquis had commissioned out of his own fund of accumulated skills, without recourse to any of these books. But he wanted to take no unnecessary risks; he had a whole week to complete what he could probably deal with in a morning, but any miscalculation due to overconfidence would surely have ugly consequences, and that stupefying fee of twenty royals more than amply compensated him for any unnecessary time that he expended on the task. It was not as though he had a great many other things to do this week, after all.
Besides, he loved to burrow in the great array of wizardly materials with which his forefathers had crammed the small shop. These two centuries of professional magicking had made the place a virtual museum of the magus’s art. It was not an easy shop to find, tucked away as it was in a far back corner of the huge marketplace, but in happier days it had enjoyed great acclaim, and throngs of impatient clients had jostled elbow-to-elbow in the hall just outside, peering in at the racks of arcane powders and oils, bearing the awesome labels Scamion and Thekka Ammoniaca and Elecamp and Golden Rue, and the rows of leather-bound books of great antiquity, and the mysterious devices that sorcerers used, the ammatepilas and rohillas, the ambivials and verilistias, and much more apparatus of that sort, impressive to laymen and useful to practitioners. Even now, in this dreary materialistic era, the patrons of the Midnight Market who had come there to purchase such ordinary things as brooms and baskets, bangles and beads, spices, dried meats, cheese, and wine and honey, often took the trouble to wend their way this deep into the building—for the Midnight Market was a huge subterranean vault, long and low, divided into a myriad narrow aisles, with the sorcerers’ booths tucked away in the hindmost quarter—to stare through the dusty window of Ghambivole Zwoll’s shop. That was all that most of them did, though: stare. The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had been the first patron to step through the doorway in many days.
Ghambivole Zwoll drew the work out for nearly the full week, sequestered in the constricted little Vroon-sized laboratory behind the main showroom, jotting recipes, calculating quantities, measuring, weighing, mixing: the fine brandy of Gimkandale as a base, and then dried ghumba root, and a pinch of fermented hingamort, and some drops of tincture of vejloo, and just a bit of powdered sea-dragon hide, not strictly necessary, but always useful in speeding the effects of such potions. Allow it all to set a little while; then would come the heating, the cooling, the filtering, the titration, the spectral analysis. Meanwhile Shostik-Willeron remained out front, handling a surprising amount of walk-in trade: a Ghayrog who stopped by for a couple of amulets, two tourists from Ni-moya who came in out of nothing more than curiosity and stayed long enough to purchase a dozen of the black candles of divination, and a grain merchant from one of the downslope cities who sought a spell that would cast a blight on the fields of a supplier whom he had come to loathe. Three sales the same week, and also the potion for the marquis!
Ghambivole Zwoll allowed himself to think that perhaps a return to the prosperity of old might be in its early stages.
By the end of the week the job was done. There was one moment of near catastrophe on the evening when Ghambivole Zwoll arrived to begin his night’s work and found the massive Skandar charwoman Hendaya Zanzan bashing around with her mop in his rear workroom, where he had left the vials of ingredients that would go into the marquis’s potion sitting atop his desk in a carefully arranged row. In disbelief, he watched the gigantic woman, who was far too large actually to enter the room, standing at the entrance energetically swinging the mop from side to side and thereby placing everything within in great jeopardy.
“No!” he cried. “What are you doing, idiot? How many times have I told you—Stop! Stop!”
She halted and swung about uncertainly, looming above him like a mountain as she shifted the handle of the mop from one to another of her four hands. “But it has been so many weeks, master, since I last cleaned that room—”
“I’ve told you never to clean that room. Never! Never! And especially not now, when I have work in progress.”
“Never, master?”
“Oh, what a great stupid thing you are. Never: it means Not Ever. Not at any time. Keep your big idiotic mop out of there! Do you understand me, Hendaya Zanzan?”
It seemed to take her quite a while to process the instruction.
She stood with all four burly arms drooping, the slow workings of her mind manifesting themselves meanwhile by a series of odd twitchings and clampings of her lips. Ghambivole Zwoll waited, struggling with his temper. He knew it did very little good to get angry with Hendaya Zanzan. The woman was a moron, a great furry clod of a moron, a dull-witted shaggy mass of a creature eight feet high and nearly as wide, hardly more than an animal. Not only stupid but ugly besides, even as Skandars went, flat-faced, empty-eyed, slack-jawed, covered from head to toe with a bestial coarse gray pelt that had the stale stink of some dead creature’s hide left too long to fester in the sun. He had no idea why he had hired her—out of pity, probably—nor why he had kept her on so long. The shop did need to be cleaned once in a while, he supposed, but it had been madness to hire anyone as bulky as a Skandar to do the sweeping in such a small, cluttered space, and in any case Shostik-Willeron had little enough to occupy his time and could easily take care of the chore. But for the grace of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty-royal job Ghambivole Zwoll would have let her go in another week or two. Now it seemed that he could afford to keep her on a little longer, and he would, for discharging her would be an unpleasant task and he tended to postpone all such things; but if business were to slacken once again—
“I am never to go into this little room,” she said finally. “Is that so, master?”
“Very good, Hendaya Zanzan! Very good. Say it once again! Never. Never.”
“Never to go into. The little room. Never.”
“And never means—?”
“Not ever?”
He didn’t care for the interrogative tone of her reply; but he saw that it was the best he was going to get out of the poor thing, and, sending her on her way, he went into his workshop and closed the door behind him. It took him no more than an hour to complete the final titration for the marquis’s potion. While he worked he heard the Su-Suheris moving about in the outer room, talking to someone, then pointlessly shifting furniture about, then whistling to himself in that maddening double-headed counterpoint his species so greatly cherished. What a useless fool the man was! Not a dolt like the Skandar woman, of course, but certainly he had little of the clear-eyed wisdom and cunning that the Su-Suheris, with the benefit of their double brain, were reputed to possess. Ghambivole Zwoll had badly needed an injection of fresh capital to meet the ongoing expenses of his shop or he would never have taken him on as a partner, an act that unquestionably would have brought fiery condemnation upon him from his forebears. If only business would pick up a little, he would surely buy Shostik-Willeron out and return to running the place as a sole proprietorship. But he knew what a futile fantasy that was.
Scowling in annoyance, Ghambivole Zwoll poured his completed potion into an elegant flask worthy of the twenty-royal price, inscribed the accompanying spell on a sheet of vellum. On the appointed day the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran returned, clad even more grandly than before—high-waisted doublet of orange velvet, long-legged golden breeches bedecked with loops of braid and buttons, slender dress sword fastened to a wide silk sash tied in a huge bow. “Is this it?” he asked, holding the flask up to a glowglobe above his head and studying it intently.
“Be certain that you are the object of her gaze when she drinks it,” said the Vroon. “And here,” he said, handing him the vellum scroll, “are the words you must speak as she consumes the potion.”
The marquis’s brow furrowed. “Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour? What nonsense is this?”
“Not nonsense at all. It is a powerful spell. The meaning is, ‘Let her be well disposed to me, let her fall in love with me, let her yield to me.’ And the third word is pronounced mouroph; take care that you get it right, or the effect may be lost. Even worse: you may achieve the opposite of what you desire. Again: Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”
“Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”
“Excellent! But rehearse it many times before you approach her. She will fall helplessly into your arms. I guarantee it, your grace.”
“Well, then. Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour.”
“Mouroph, your grace.”
“Mouroph. Sathis pephoouth mouroph anour.”
“She is yours, your grace.”
“Let us hope so. And this is yours.” The marquis produced his bulging purse and casually tossed two coins, a fine fat ten-royal piece and a glossy fiver, onto Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk. “Good day to you. And may the Divine protect you if you have played me false! Sathis pephoouth mouraph anour. Mouroph. Mouroph.” He spun neatly on his heel and was gone.
Three days passed quietly. Ghambivole Zwoll made two small sales, one for one crown fifty weights, one for slightly less. Otherwise the shop did no business. Creditors devoured most of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s twenty royals almost at once. The Vroon returned to the state of gloom that had occupied him before the arrival of his aristocratic client.
On the second of those three evenings Shostik-Willeron was late coming to the shop; and when he did, both his long, pallid faces were tightly drawn in the Su-Suheris expression of uneasiness verging on despair.
“I warned you we were making a great mistake,” he said at once. “And now I’m sure of it!” It was the right-hand head that spoke: the cheerful, optimistic one, usually.
Ghambivole Zwoll sighed. “What now, Shostik-Willeron?”
“I have been speaking with my kinsman Sagamorn-Endik, who is in service at the Castle. Do you know that the Lady Alesarda of Muldemar, whom you have delivered so blithely into the clutches of that ridiculous dandy with your drug, is spoken of widely at court as the promised bride of the Coronal’s son? That by interfering in those nuptials, by despoiling this precious princess, your marquis runs perilously close to treason? And you and I, as abettors of his crime—”
“It is no crime.”
“To sleep with a simple scullery maid or some illiterate juggler girl, no. But for the fourth son of the third son of a provincial count to seduce a noblewoman destined for a royal marriage, to interpose his sweaty lusts in such high and delicate negotiations, or simply to be the ones who enable him to carry out such a thing, to be the agents who help him to have his way with her—oh, Ghambivole Zwoll, Ghambivole Zwoll, let us hope that that little potion of yours was a worthless draught! Otherwise your marquis is destroyed, and we are destroyed with him.”
“If the potion worked,” said the Vroon in the calmest tone he was capable of mustering, “there is no certainty that what took place between the marquis and the princess will become known to anyone else. And if it does, the marquis will have to look to the consequences of his deed on his own. We are mere merchants, protected by law. But if the potion has failed—and how can it have failed, unless he blundered with the spell?—we owe him twenty royals, to fulfill my guarantee. Where will we get twenty royals, Shostik-Willeron? Conjure them out of the air? Look here.” He opened the cash drawer of his desk. “This is what’s left of it. Three royals, two crowns, and sixty—no, seventy weights. The rest is gone. Let us pray that the potion has done its work, for our own sakes, if nothing else.”
“A princess of Muldemar—a descendant of the great Prestimion—a beautiful lass, innocent, pure, betrothed to the son of the Coronal—”
“Stop it, Shostik-Willeron. For all we know, she’s no more innocent and pure than that ox of a Skandar who works for us, and everybody at the Castle from the Coronal on down knows it and doesn’t care. And even if this tale of royal betrothals should be true—but do we know that it is? Only this kinsman of yours says so—we are in no danger ourselves. We are here to serve the public by making use of our skills, and so we have. We bear no responsibility for our client’s interference in other people’s arrangements. In any case, this blubbering of yours achieves nothing. What’s done is done.” Ghambivole Zwoll made shooing gestures with his outermost ring of tentacles. “Go. Go. If you keep this up you will jangle my nerves tonight to no useful purpose.”
The Vroon’s nerves were indeed already thoroughly jangled, however much he tried to put a good face on the matter. He wished most profoundly that Mirl Meldelleran had never shared with him the identity of his inamorata. It would have been sufficient to know her age, her approximate height and weight, and, perhaps, some inkling of her degree of experience in the wars of love. But no, no, the braggart Mirl Meldelleran had had to go and name her, besides; and if this rumor of a royal marriage truly had any substance to it, and the marquis’s seduction of the princess caused any disruption of that marriage, and the tale of how the marquis had managed to achieve his triumph came out, Shostik-Willeron quite possibly was correct: the magus who had compounded the dastardly potion might very well be made a scapegoat in the hubbub that ensued. Ghambivole Zwoll felt sure that the law would be on his side in any action against him, but a lawyer’s fee for defending him against an outraged Prince of Muldemar or, even worse, the Coronal’s son would be something more than trifling pocket-change, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy as it was.
Still, there was nothing he could do about any of this now. The potion had been made and delivered and, in all likelihood, used, and, as he had said, whatever had happened after that had happened, and he could only wait and see what consequences befell. He mixed himself a mild calming elixir, and after a time it took effect, and he went about his business without giving the matter further thought.
The next evening, half an hour or so before the official opening time of the Midnight Market, Ghambivole Zwoll was moodily going over his accounts when he heard a disturbance in the hall outside, shouting and clatter, and then came the hammering of a fist on the door of his shop; and, looking up, he beheld the gaudy figure of the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran gesturing at him through the time-dimmed glass.
The marquis looked furious, and he was brandishing his bared sword in his right hand, swishing it angrily back and forth. Ghambivole Zwoll had never seen anyone brandishing a drawn sword before, let alone one that was being waved threateningly in front of his own beak. It was a dress sword, ornate and absurd, intended only as an ornamental appurtenance—the fad for swordplay in daily life had long ago ended on Majipoor—but its edge looked quite keen, all the same, and Ghambivole Zwoll had no doubt of the damage it could work on the frail tissues of his small body.
He was alone in the shop. The Skandar woman had already finished her nightly chores and gone, and Shostik-Willeron had not yet arrived. What to do? Darken the room, hide under the desk? No. The marquis had already seen him. He would only smash his way in. That would entail even more expense.
“We are not yet open for business, your grace,” said the Vroon through the closed door.
“I know that. I have no time to wait! Let me in.”
Sadly Ghambivole Zwoll said, “As you wish, sir.”
The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran strode into the shop and took up a stance just inside the door. Everything about him radiated anger, anger, anger. The Vroon looked upward at the figure that rose high above him, and made a mild gesture to indicate that he found the bared sword disconcerting.
“The potion,” he said mildly. “It was satisfactory, I trust?”
“Up to a point, yes. But only up to a point.”
The tale came spilling out quickly enough. The lady had trustingly sipped the drink the marquis had put before her, and the marquis had managed even to recite the spell in proper fashion, and the potion had performed its function most admirably: the Lady Alesarda had instantly fallen into a heated passion, the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had swept her off to bed, and they had passed such a night together as the marquis had never imagined in his most torrid dreams.
Ghambivole Zwoll sensed that there had to be more to the story than that, and indeed there was; for the next night the marquis had returned to Muldemar House, anticipating a renewal of the erotic joys so gloriously inaugurated the night before, only to find himself abruptly, coolly dismissed. The Lady Alesarda had no wish to see him again, not this evening, not the next evening, not any evening at all between now and the end of the universe. The Lady Alesarda requested, via an intermediary, that the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran never so much as look in her direction, should they find themselves ever again in the same social gathering, which was, unfortunately for her, all too likely, considering that they both moved in the same lofty circles among the younger nobility of Castle Mount.
“It was,” said the marquis, smoldering with barely suppressed rage, “the most humiliating experience of my life!”
Ghambivole Zwoll said mildly, “But you came to me seeking, so you said, a night of pleasure with the woman you most desired in all the world. By your own account, my skills have provided you with exactly that.”
“I sought a continuing relationship. I certainly didn’t seek to be spurned after a single night. What am I to think: that when she looked back on our night together, she thought of my embrace as something vile, something loathsome, something that had left her with nothing but black memories that she longed to purge from her mind?”
“I have heard tell that the lady is betrothed to a great prince of Castle Mount,” said the Vroon. “Can it be that when she returned to her proper senses she was smitten by a sense of obligation to her prince? By guilt, by shame, by terrible remorse?”
“I had hoped that her night with me would leave her with no further interest in that other person.”
“As well you might, your grace. But the potion was specifically designed to obtain her surrender on that one occasion when it was administered, and so it did. It would not necessarily have a lingering effect after it had left her body.”
As he spoke the door opened behind the marquis and Shostik-Willeron, arriving for the night, stepped into the shop. The eyes of the Su-Suheris flickered quickly from Ghambivole Zwoll to the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran to the marquis’s unsheathed sword, and a look of terrible dismay crossed his faces. The Vroon signaled to him to be still.
“Literature is full of examples of similar cases,” Ghambivole Zwoll said. “The tale of Lisinamond and Prince Ghorn, for example, in which the prince, after at long last consummating the great desire of his life, discovers that she—”
“Spare me the poetic quotations,” the marquis said. “I don’t regard a single night’s success, followed by icy repudiation the next day, as in any way a fulfillment of your guarantee. I require fuller satisfaction.”
Satisfaction? What did he mean by that? A duel, perhaps? Ghambivole Zwoll, appalled, did not immediately reply. In that moment of silence, Shostik-Willeron stepped forward. “If you will pardon me, your grace,” said the Su-Suheris, “I must point out to you that my partner did not stipulate anything more than the assurance that the potion would secure you the lady’s favors, and it does appear that this was—”
The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran whirled to face him and flicked his sword savagely through the air from side to side before him. “Be quiet, monster, or I’ll cut off your head. Just one of them, you understand. As a special favor I’ll allow you the choice of which it is to be.”
Shostik-Willeron moved into the shadows and said nothing further.
The marquis went on, “To continue: I regard the terms of our agreement as having been breached.”
“A refund, milord, would be very difficult for us to—”
“I’m not interested in a refund. Make me a second potion. A stronger one, much stronger, one that will obliterate all other affections from her mind and bind her to me forever. You make it and I’ll find some way to get it to her and all will be well, and my account with you will be quits. What do you say, wizard? Can you do that?”
The Vroon pondered the question a moment. Shostik-Willeron was right, he knew: Shostik-Willeron had been right all along. They never should have had anything to do with this grimy business. And they should refuse now to continue with it. Like all his kind, he had some slight power of foretelling the future, and the images that came to him by way of such second sight were not encouraging ones. Whether or not the law was on their side, the great lords of Castle Mount certainly were unlikely to be, and if this slippery marquis continued his pursuit of the Lady Alesarda, he would sooner or later bring down the vengeance of those mighty ones not only upon him but upon those who had aided and abetted him in his quest.
On the other hand, that consideration was a relatively abstract one, at least when compared with the sharp and gleaming reality of the sword in the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran’s hand. The great lords of Castle Mount were far away; the sword of the marquis was right here and very close. That alone was incentive enough for the Vroon to plunge ahead with this new task that the marquis required of him, regardless of the obvious riskiness of it.
The hard blue eyes were bright with menace. “Well, little magus? Will you do it or won’t you?”
In a low, weak voice, the Vroon said, “I suppose so, your grace.”
“Good. How soon?”
Again, Ghambivole Zwoll hesitated. “Eight days? Perhaps nine? The task will not be an easy one, and I realize that you will accept nothing less than complete success. I’ll need to consult many sources. And beyond doubt a great many rare ingredients must be obtained, which will take some little while.”
“Eight days,” said the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran. “Not an hour more.”
Compounding such a powerful potion, far more intense than the one he had given the marquis, would be perfectly feasible, of course. It was years since he had made such a thing, but he had not forgotten the art of it. It would call for the utmost in technical skill, Ghambivole Zwoll knew, and would require, just as he had asserted, some rare and costly ingredients: they would have to go back to the moneylenders once again to cover the expense.
But he had no choice. Doubtless Shostik-Willeron was right that there was great peril in meddling in the romantic affairs of the aristocracy; the marriage of a Coronal’s son to a princess of Muldemar must surely be a matter not just of romance but of high political intrigue, and woe betide anyone who sought to undo such a match for his own sordid purposes. Still, Ghambivole Zwoll wanted to believe, even now, that whatever consequences might befall such meddling would fall upon the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran, not on the lowly proprietors of some unimportant sorcerers’ shop in the Midnight Market. The real peril he and Shostik-Willeron faced, he told himself again and again, was not from so remote a thing as the displeasure of the great lords of the Castle but rather from the uncontrolled anger of the rash, reckless, and frustrated marquis.
Gloomily Shostik-Willeron concurred in this reasoning. And so they floated a new loan, which left them almost as deep in debt as they had been before the marquis and his twenty-royal commission had come to plague their lives. Ghambivole Zwoll sent orders far and wide to suppliers of precious herbs and elixirs and powders, the bone of this creature and the blood of that one, the sap of this tree, the seed of another, potations of a dozen sort, galliuc and ravenswort, spider lettuce and bloodleaf, wolf-parsley and viperbane and black fennel, and waited, fidgeting, until they began to arrive, and commenced, once the proper ingredients for the basis of the drug were in his hands, to mix and measure and weigh and test. He doubted very much that he would have the stuff ready by the eighth day, and in truth he had never regarded that as a realistic goal; but the marquis had insisted. The Vroon hoped that when the marquis did return on the eighth day and found the potion still incomplete, he would see that the magus was toiling in good faith and did indeed hope to have the job done in another day or two, or three, and would be patient until then.
The eighth day came and midnight tolled, and the market was thrown open for business. As Ghambivole Zwoll had expected, the drug was not quite ready. But, to his surprise, the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran did not appear to claim it. He was hardly likely to have forgotten; but something pressing must have cropped up to keep him from making the short journey downslope to Bombifale to pick up his merchandise tonight. Just as well, the Vroon thought.
Nor did the marquis show up on the ninth night either, though Ghambivole Zwoll had brought the stuff to the verge of completion by then. The following afternoon, by dint of having worked all through a difficult sleepless day, the Vroon tipped a few drops of the final reagent into the flask, saw the mixture turn a rewarding amber hue shimmering with highlights of scarlet and green, and knew that the job was finished. If the marquis came here at last this evening to claim his potion, Ghambivole Zwoll would be ready to make delivery. And the marquis would have no complaints this time. The new potion did not even require the recitation of a spell, so powerful was its effect. So the poor high-born simpleton would be spared the effort of memorizing five or six strange words. Ghambivole Zwoll hoped he would be grateful for that.
With midnight still a few hours away, the market had not yet opened for business. Ghambivole Zwoll waited, alone in the shop, tense, eager to have this hazardous transaction done with at last.
A little while later he heard the sounds of some commotion in the hall: an outcry from the warders, someone’s angry response, a further protest from one of the warders. In all likelihood, the Vroon thought, the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran had finally come, and in his usual blustering way was trying to force his way into the market before regular hours.
But the noise outside was none of the marquis’s doing this time. Abruptly, the door of Ghambivole Zwoll’s shop burst open and two sturdy-looking men in fine velvet livery brightly embla-zoned across the left shoulder with the image of the Muldemar Ruby, the huge red stone that was the well-known emblem of that great princely house, came thundering in. They were armed with formidable swords: no foppish dress swords these, but great, gleaming, grim-looking military sabers.
Ghambivole Zwoll understood at once what must have happened. Some Muldemar House maid had confessed, or had been made to confess, that her lady had had an illicit nocturnal visitation. One question had led to another, the whole story had come out, the identity of the sorcerer in question had somehow been revealed, and now these thugs had come on their princely master’s behalf to take revenge.
The way they were glaring at him seemed to leave no doubt of that. But from the manner in which they held themselves, not merely threatening but at the same time wary, ill at ease, it appeared likely that they feared he would use some dark mantic power against them. As if he could! He cursed them for their stupidity, their great useless height and bulk, their mere presence in his shop. What madness it had been, Ghambivole Zwoll thought, for his forebears to have settled on this world of oafish, oversized clods!
“Are you the magus Ghambivole Zwoll?” the bigger of the two demanded, in a voice like rolling boulders. And he slid his great sword a short way into view.
Ghambivole Zwoll, swept now with a terror greater than any he had ever known in his life, shrank back against his desk. If only he could have used some magical power to thrust them out the door, he would have done so. If only. But his powers were gentle ones, and these two were huge, bulky ruffians, and he did not dare make even the slightest move.
“I am,” he murmured, and did what he could to prepare himself for death.
“The Prince of Muldemar will speak with you,” the big man said ominously.
The Prince of Muldemar? Here in the marketplace, in Ghambivole Zwoll’s own shop? The fifth or sixth highest noble of the realm?
Incredible. Unthinkable. The man might just as well have said, The Coronal is here to see you. The Pontifex. The Lady of the Isle.
The two huge footmen stepped aside. Into the shop came now a golden-haired man of fifty or so, short of stature and slender but broad-shouldered and regal of bearing. His lips were thin and tightly compressed, his face was narrow. It could almost have been the face Ghambivole Zwoll had often seen on coins of long ago, the face of this prince’s royal ancestor five generations removed, the great monarch Prestimion.
There was no mistaking the searing anger in the prince’s keen, intense greenish-blue eyes.
“You have supplied a potion to a certain unimportant lordling of Castle Mount,” the prince said.
Not a question. A statement of fact.
Ghambivole Zwoll’s vision wavered. His tentacles trembled.
“I am licensed, sir, to provide my services to the public as they may be required.”
“Within discretion. Are you aware that you went far beyond the bounds of discretion?”
“I was asked to fulfill a need. The Marquis Mirl Meldelleran requested—”
“You will not name him. Speak of him only as your client. You should know that your client, who committed a foul act with the aid of your skills, has taken himself at our request this very day into exile in Suvrael.”
Ghambivole Zwoll shivered. Suvrael? That terrible place, the sun-blasted, demon-haunted desert continent far to the south? Death would be a more desirable punishment than exile to Suvrael.
In a hoarse croak Ghambivole Zwoll said, “My client asked me to fulfill a need, your grace. I did not think it was my responsibility to—”
“You did not think. You did not think.”
“No, your grace. I did not think.”
There was no possibility of success in disputing the matter with the Prince of Muldemar. Ghambivole Zwoll bowed his head and waited to hear his sentence.
The prince said sternly, “You will forget that you ever had dealings with that client. You will forget his very name. You will forget the purpose for which he came to you. You will forget everything connected with him and with the task you carried out on his behalf. Your client has ceased to exist on Castle Mount. If you keep records, Vroon, you will expunge from them all indication of the so-called service you performed for him. Is that understood?”
Seeing that he evidently was going to be allowed to live, Ghambivole Zwoll bowed his head and said in a husky whisper, “I understand and obey, your grace.”
“Good.”
Was that all? So it seemed. The Vroon gave inward thanks to the half-forgotten gods of his forefathers’ ancestral world.
But then the prince, turning, took a long glance around the cluttered shop. His gaze came to rest on the handsome flask on Ghambivole Zwoll’s desk, the flask containing the new and potent elixir that the Vroon had prepared for the Marquis Mirl Meldelleran.
“What is that?”
“A potion, your grace.”
“Another love potion, is it?”
“Merely a potion, sir.” Then, in agony, when the prince gave him a terrible glare: “Yes. One could call it a love potion.”
“For the same client as before? So that he might compound the damage he has already done?”
“I must reply that I am bound by the laws of confidentiality, sir, not to reveal—”
The Prince of Muldemar responded with a somber laugh. “Yes. Yes! Of course. What a law-abiding thing you are, wizard! Very well. Pick up the flask and drink the stuff yourself.”
“Sir?”
“Drink it!”
Aghast, Ghambivole Zwoll cried, “Sir, I must object!”
The prince nodded to one of the footmen. From the corner of his eye Ghambivole Zwoll saw the ugly glint of a saber’s blade coming once more into view.
“Sir?” he murmured. “Sir?”
“Drink it, or you’ll join your former client in Suvrael, and you’ll count yourself lucky that your fate is no worse.”
“Yes. Yes. I understand and obey.”
There could be no refusing the prince’s command. Ghambivole Zwoll reached for the flask and shakily lifted it to his beak.
Dimly the Vroon watched the Prince of Muldemar and his two footmen leaving the shop, a moment later, slamming the door behind them. It was all he could do to cling to consciousness. His head was spinning. A bright crimson haze whirled about him. He was scarcely able to think coherently.
Then through the fog that engulfed his brain he saw the shop door open again, and the huge Skandar woman Hendaya Zanzan entered to begin her evening’s work of tidying and sweeping. Ghambivole Zwoll stared at her in awe and wonder. Instantly a sudden all-consuming passion overwhelmed him. She was radiant; she was glorious; she glowed before him like a dazzling flame. He had never seen anyone more beautiful.
He ran to her, reached up, clasped his tentacles tightly around her enormous calf. His heart pounded with a great surge of desperate love. His vision blurred as tears of joy dimmed his blazing yellow eyes.
“Oh, beloved—beloved—!”
GREG KEYES, who also writes under the names Gregory Keyes and J. Gregory Keyes, was born in Meridian, Mississippi, to a large, diverse, storytelling family. He received degrees in anthropology from Mississippi State and the University of Georgia before becoming a full-time writer. He is the author of The Waterborn, The Black-god, the Age of Unreason tetralogy, and the Star Wars: New Jedi Order novels Edge of Victory I: Conquest, Edge of Victory II: Rebirth, and The Final Prophecy. In 2003, he began his fantasy quartet called the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, which began with The Briar King and continued with The Charnel, The Blood Knight, and The Born Queen. He lives with his family in Savannah, Georgia, where he is also the head coach of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s fencing club.