There was a dubious murmur at that, unsurprisingly, since most of those present regarded bribery as something between a handy tool and a form of tax, and none of them had high opinions of mandarins, of whatever nationality.
“Do you think she’s told him about Hart?” an unpopular man named Peyton remarked snidely. “If there was an official in Shanghai he didn’t bribe, I never met him.”
“Hart was no fool,” Crane said. “Blaydon will have a job on his hands to match up.”
“Is that why Mrs. Hart hasn’t remarried? Hart’s glorious memory?” Peyton’s voice was sneering. “Because I heard there was some sort of scandal with some Singapore man. Town, do you know—”
“Tom and Leonora Hart were two of the best friends I’ve ever had,” Crane interrupted, locking eyes with Peyton. “Hart saved my skin more than once. His death devastated Leo. If she is able to marry again, I’m damned glad for her, and if any of you feel the urge to spread spiteful fishwives’ gossip about her or Tom, I suggest you resist it.” Peyton went red. “Leo is perfectly capable of defending her own honour,” Crane went on, loudly enough that the other conversations in the room were suspended, “and I’m sure Blaydon can and will do so for her as well, but just to be clear, I will take any offensive comments about Leonora Hart as a direct personal affront, and I will make the speaker eat his words, at the end of my boot if need be.”
“I’ll back you up on that,” Monk Humphris said.
“Sir, I don’t like your tone to my uncle.” The young man stood as he spoke, slightly too violently.
“And I don’t like your uncle’s tone, so it evens out,” Crane replied, and stood too, staring down at the young man for a couple of deliberately intimidating seconds, before going over to pour himself another whisky from the tantalus. This allowed Monk and the others time to persuade the young man to sit down and be quiet. The words “disgraceful” and “lawless” were audible in Peyton’s nasal voice; “quite right”, “bad man to cross” and “that vicious brute Merrick” came from the others. Judging that a sufficiently comprehensive analysis of his capabilities to put the young spark off, Crane strolled back to his chair, deciding that he’d find out what the hell Leo was playing at in the morning.
Stephen lay naked, arms spread wide, the Magpie Lord’s ring glowing on his finger, illuminating the fingers that curled like claws. He writhed and twisted, uttering incoherent pleas for mercy as his silky cock jutted hard from the reddish curls at his groin.
“Please, my lord, please,” Stephen was sobbing, as Crane positioned himself at the entrance to the small sinewy body.
“Please what?” Crane demanded, nudging the tip of his cock against Stephen’s arse. “Please what?”
Stephen howled out, arching his back, thrusting himself towards Crane. “Please, my lord!”
Crane pushed his shoulders down hard. “One more chance, pretty boy.”
“Make me yours,” said Stephen. “Make me fly. Make the magpies fly.”
“You will fly.” Now he was thrusting in the dark heat of Stephen’s body, watching the birds flutter on his lover’s skin, the black and white flickering over his amber eyes. The seven tattoos were silently flapping and shrieking, and magpies were rising all around them in a storm of wings and cawing as the feathers spread wide from Stephen’s extended arms. “Fly,” he said again, and came hard and hot as the magpies screamed.
He woke up thrashing in a tangle of sheets and an empty bed, sweating, momentarily bewildered, and with an unmistakeable sticky wetness on his belly.
“Fuck,” he muttered aloud and let his head drop back onto the hot pillow as he tried to shake off the dream.
It had only been a few days, damn it. Nocturnal emissions seemed hardly appropriate at his advanced age. And he was beginning to lose patience with the bloody magpies.
Crane, though without magical talent of his own, was the last descendant of the Magpie Lord, a hugely powerful sorcerer, and in some way he didn’t understand he—his blood, his body—acted as a conduit between his ancestor’s power and Stephen’s talent. One of the more bizarre side effects of this was that Crane’s seven tattoos of magpies took on independent life when he and Stephen fucked, flying and hopping across both men’s skin. One had even decided it preferred Stephen and had taken up residence on his back, leaving Crane with the frankly unsettling experience of looking in a mirror and seeing plain unmarked skin where a tattoo used to be, and Stephen the equally disturbing gift of a tattoo that he’d never had inked. Crane could live without the damned birds invading his imaginary love life as well.
He touched a hand to his shoulder, where the defecting tattoo had once spread its wings, uttered a curse on magpies, dreams and absent lovers, shifted into a less sticky patch of sheet, and went back to sleep.
Chapter Three