Street Rats

1.

Judging by her costume, the woman—or just a girl, rather—looked to be a Honshon or Honshond, however they were pronouncing it these days. It was striking, if nothing else. Frankly Chade found herself astonished. She had never believed those stories. To her, the idea that any dedicated warrior—any female, especially—would dress in such a way had always seemed entirely ridiculous, no matter how primitive or outright barbaric their culture might be. Above all other considerations, it wasn't practical, was it? She couldn't see how anybody could fight in an outfit like that, unless you were plain mad. Wouldn't one just get cut to pieces? A warrior needed armor. The Honshon version didn't seem to qualify.

It might be a religious thing. Perhaps getting oneself mutilated and killed was the whole point. Giving oneself up to one's bloodthirsty god or goddess or whatever ... Yes, that was plausible. Intentional, savage madness. Fanaticism.

She would be quick, at least. Agile. Proper armor must be cumbersome. The weight of all the pieces, all that metal. Lacking any would be to some advantage in that respect, letting her jump and dodge around real easy in contrast to full-armored opponents. But would it be enough? Didn't seem likely, the more she thought it through. If one could really fight effectively without armor, people would surely have taken notice by now and nobody would keep using the stuff.

Then again, the girl might have some magic to rely on, in place of armor. Chade thought she could sense some power around the girl. Not much—a faint sort of crackling. It was only noticeable if you looked for it, if you had the ability. The Witchsight. One had to be a witch to have that, of course.

The Honshon or Honshond was slight—perhaps that made her look younger than she was—and her body was browned all over from sun, her hair bleached by it. Braided, it was slung forward over one shoulder, the near-white rope of it dangling to her waist, silver wires and colored beads threaded through it. She had striking elfin ears that jutted up at least a finger's length clear over the top of her head. Very narrow and very sharply pointed, at the tips, though they didn't stand quite straight, drooping out a bit on either side. They should have looked damn silly, but they didn't, not really. Chade thought she mightn't mind having interesting ears, like that. She also knew a great many men fancied them, for whatever reason. Thought them cute. And supposedly they were extraordinarily sensitive—and not just for hearing. What was it supposed to called, the state the Fay went into when excited, their furious legendary sex-frenzy? Thune or Thome, something like that. The spiked ears were not at all furry, the way she'd been told. Nor did they look much like a rabbit's or a cat's, as people often claimed. They reminded Chade, instead, more of reeds or fern leaves, the individual blades. They twitched and shifted around a great deal, as she talked and laughed over there at the bar—very expressive, those constant movements.

Her name, if Chade had overheard it right, was Nirri. That didn't sound like a Honshonish name. Had a Paskian sound to it, instead. And she didn't seem to speak with the usual Fay accent. Could she be a halfblood? Some Paskian knights were said to take Fay wives, from time to time (consensually or otherwise). No Paskian woman would dress in that fashion, displaying so much of her skin so shamelessly. Of course this city where they were was a long, long way from Pask.

The strange girl was quite beautiful, really, wild as she looked. And yes, Chade had to admit, though it dishonored her to acknowledge it, she found herself attracted to the creature. Strongly attracted, in fact. Even if her barbaric costume was, speaking strickly, whorish. All the same, despite her natural and inherent disapproval, Chade could not deny its provocation—the strength of it. Lewd as it was, without doubt, on that level, it worked, and powerfully. Chone couldn't stop looking at the girl, and at the girl's displayed form, and she couldn't stop admiring it. She just might have to approach her ... later ... soon ...

A foolish impulse. It wouldn't work. Not likely. The girl would spurn her, a girl like that, confronted with someone like Chade, in her thick witch's cape and with her thick scholar's eyeglasses. They were of age, more or less ... but too different. Creatures of entirely different worlds. Of course, that was largely what made the idea so compelling. But it would be impossible, even to the level of mere conversation. Neither would have anything to say.

The girl Nirri had a slick red coat, with long tails and a tall collar—the collar stood up almost as high over her head as her ears did. But it was all unbuttoned and open in the front, and underneath ... well, under the coat, there wasn't much. Not much at all. And the tails of the coat were literal tails, hanging only in the back, not wrapping around her. In front, the coat ended at the waist, not actually screening her legs at all. In fact it was wrong to call it a coat, wasn't it? It was a jacket. A long-tailed, high-collared jacket. Her boots were furry, shaggy even, but very thin and soft-looking, with a number of buckled straps running up the sides. Very comfortable and flexible, they must be. Made Chade's own footwear feel rather confining and burdensome.

She had two swords, one hung at her waist and the other over her shoulder. Both of them looked too large for her, too long. They both had cupped hilts. You didn't see that style, much, on this continent—grip-guards that screened the whole hand that way. And the craftsmanship was surprisingly sophisticated, for a tribal savage. But then, perhaps she'd bought the things somewhere civilized—or taken them off some felled foe. Or would that violate their traditions and codes? Weren't their swords, and the forging of them, supposed to be sacred? Or was she thinking of some other warrior tribe? Chax had acquired itself a goodly share. No doubt the same was true of any world with people living on it, regardless of its size or its laws or its history.

Besides those hairy boots, and her flashy weapons, there wasn't much else. Two tiny white skirts, essentially, hanging off thin leather straps, with more colored beads running all along their bottom hems. One 'round the waist, and the other 'round her chest—with its strap just above her breasts. The skirts each hung the length of a hand, if that, weighted down by their decorative fringes, those colorful beads, so the strips didn't flip up every time she moved. Or at least not much. Still, they were more like scarves, or handkerchiefs. They screened her body's most coveted treasures, but only just. You could see all of her narrow belly, and all of her smooth-shaven thighs ... her muscles sculpted sleek and tense. She had legs like a yearling deer, light and lithe and bouncy, frisky. A sparkling silver ornament of some kind was planted or pierced through her tiny navel, but Chone couldn't make out what exactly it was. She had a necklace as well, or maybe a few together, made from gold coins and large, curved animal teeth.

You could see her nipples, too, mostly. For they poked out dark against the loose wrap covering them, thin and papery as it was. Like Chade's own, Nirri's breasts were quite small and stood quite high—yet it seemed her nipples were disproportionate. Not only large, but projecting unusually long. Though the tavern was warm, they stood out erect. One couldn't help but keep looking at them ... keep staring at them, indeed, as they seemingly stared back at you.

The wanton shameless hussy. She could use a good slap across her face—or better yet, right across those glaring saucy tits of hers. Teach the savage bitch some caution against sticking them out like that in everybody's face. It just wasn't ... polite. Not in a place like this—unless you were putting them up for sale, deliberately. Otherwise it was just like a taunt. It was crude. This was a city, after all, not the damned lawless jungle.

Chade had come into the place only for a quiet drink or two. Now this degraded monkey of a girl was tormenting her, and Chade was helpless to do anything about it. It wasn't fair. It was making her stomach turn over. The bitch looked too good to look away from. She knew she just should get to her feet and leave, but she could not. She only sat and stared ... and stewed.

At least the girl probably didn't know what she was doing to her—didn't know Chade couldn't stop staring. Nirri appeared totally oblivious to her. Actually Chade's Talent made sure of it. The Honshon savage would never notice Chade was even in the room, unless she herself chose to reveal herself and approach her openly. And she wouldn't—she had already decided that, hadn't she? Of course she had.

Chade's Talent was not of a particularly high level, so whenever she was traveling alone, she relied on a simple protective talisman she had laboriously fashioned some years ago, in the form of a gray mitten, that, so long as she was wearing it, made her appear old and ugly and unpleasant to anyone that looked at her. Therefore nobody did. Not ever. Chade had little skill with combat magic, but she could, and did, walk down the darkest, creepiest alleys and wilderness tracks without fear, for no robber or bloodthirsty monster, no matter how desperate for prey, would take an interest in her—the mitten made her appear too unappealing. Too poor and unhealthy to bother with. A most useful illusion.

The majority of Chaxan witches preferred to flaunt their powers and privileges in front of other Sisters as much as the Mundanes. They sought out duels and battles, for the drama and the glory of it. Chade occasionally wished she possessed such arrogant self-confidence. Except she knew too well the limits of her abilities. She knew she must stick with the cautious magics of disguise and concealment. That was the way of her Sisterhood—the Sisterhood of Shells and Shards, they were called.

She'd had to take the mitten off to get service at the bar, but once she got her drink and had paid, she slipped it on again and settled in a back corner booth, and immediately ceased to exist for everyone else in the place. Some moments later, when Nirri and her friends had come in—they were another couple of soldiers, no doubt city watchmen or perhaps privately employed bodyguards, and both female, but both of them were much more covered, much more thoroughly armored in normal, simple, civilized uniforms—none of the three had so much as glanced her direction, not once in the last two hours, though they had taken a table straight across from her.

Nirri's face—it wasn't just the ears that were Fay. Her eyes were too big. Nobody normal ever had eyes that big. The whole face was too perfect, too dazzling. The smile, her teeth. She wasn't natural. Chade was beginning to suspect she had been engineered. A fantasy figure, brought to life with magic. A kind of animated doll. Some warlock's plaything? Somebody must have created this girl, or perhaps she had transformed herself, or paid someone else to do it. Then again it might be a glamor, come to think of it—a projection, an illusion like her own mitten generated, only with the opposite effect. Except Chade should have able to tell for sure, and she could not. Which meant either it was a very good glamor ... very strong, indeed ... or very subtle—just a slight enhancement.

Demons used them too. More often like Chade's spell—inverted glamors to make themselves seem more terrible than they actually were, rather than more beautiful and desirable. Not always but usually. Lots of witches considered demons and Fay to be the same thing, just with different costumes, different cultures. Both sorts were equally dangerous, equally wicked. And equally seductive, more often than not. Both had been initially created out of magic—or so it was claimed, though the histories of conflicting Sisterhoods disagreed if that had been done on purpose or by accident. It was also quite possible such creatures had evolved somehow on their own—out of a raw spellstorm, maybe ... the wild, undirected magic infusing and transforming animals, birds or insects caught by chance in its midst, or even people. This was what could happen, living in a world as rich in magic as theirs had been made to be, when it was made—the witches claimed they had created Chax themselves as an escape from a more Mundane world, its limitations and persecutions. Sacred as that story was, Chade could never fully decide if she believed it, or wanted to.

Related to the Fay or otherwise, demonic was definitely a better description for the girl's look, and for the urges she was stirring up inside Chade. Under the table, under her tunic, she was rubbing between her thighs, a little. No one would know. No one could see. Still it was shameful. She'd become very sticky, down in there. Soaking though her hose. She had to bite her lip. Curled her toes tight in her boots. She wanted to pull them off, and her hose, as well. She squeezed her legs together tight as she could press them, in order to keep herself from spreading them wide.

She should leave. She should go somewhere she could undress and satisfy her lust properly. A bath house would be good, one of the steam rooms. There would be girls there she could have attend to her, one way or another. She had not very much money on her—but enough. Perhaps a boy would be better, so she wouldn't still be thinking so much of the Honshon, making comparisons the whole time. Not a pretty one—somebody rough and husky and well-endowed.

That idea started up a new train of thought. She'd like to see a boy like that—a big, tough bastard—have at the haughty Honshon. A boy as arrogant and savage as the girl herself looked. Yes, she'd enjoy watching that very much. Seeing him make the smug bitch squeal with a jolly good no-nonsense skewering.

No, it would be Chade herself that would get that. If she allowed herself to go somewhere and pay for it to happen.

If she did, she knew she'd still be thinking of the Honshon girl the entire time. Wouldn't be able to help herself. She'd imagine her watching it—the way Chade wanted to watch her. She'd imagine the girl laughing, too.

She would flare so huge, probably. It was going to be ... rather distinctly humiliating, deep down.

No use trying to rationalize it or justify it to herself. One could either stubbornly sweat such urges out, or one went and got them taken care of. One had to choose.

2.

They didn't have the kind of boy she wanted at the place she went—none of them had the right look. They were all too clean and too groomed and too beautiful, like Fay themselves. And they were trained to be meek and puppyish. Trained to adore you, and have you boss them around. But the woman that ran the place brought in others for her to look over, right off the street. Or perhaps she only pretended to—perhaps that was part of the show. In any case, most of that new bunch were exactly what Chade had in mind, and she found it difficult to make a final selection. Took her quite a long while. Then the one fellow she finally picked wouldn't go with her unless she also bought his friend beside him. Perhaps she could have argued him out of it, but in the end she didn't bother. She pretended to allow herself to be won over. The friend had the right look, too, after all. Just as perfect for her present inclination. She had almost settled on him, anyway, only she had liked the other's long hair, the way it was braided—yes, like Nirri's, almost, though not as long, and without any shiny wires or baubles in it. His friend's head, like most of the rest of their group, was entirely shaved.

They both, like all these wretched street rats, wore the same sort of raggedy, colorful vests, with no shirts underneath, and loose breeches, with no shoes. Their battered, filthy feet were splayed, hairy and callused, like apes. Their hands looked the same. The bald one had silver teeth, and silver rings planted through his eyebrows. The longhair had a broken nose, not set properly before it had healed, so it was flattened and crooked. Appealingly adorable. They had knives strapped to their forearms and also to their calves. They kept those on, when they took off their clothes, in the corridor outside the steam room. They left their clothes in heaps on the tile floor, ignoring the hooks and shelves you were supposed to use.

Chade herself wore only green towels, wrapped around her body and her hair, and a pair of wooden clogs that were noisy when you walked about in them. Thop-Thop-Thop! They were a bit too big and loose for her, she should have selected another pair, or not bothered with them—you only wore them in the corridors between the different chambers, if you wanted to, to keep your feet clean or maybe to prevent you from slipping. And the towels she'd grabbed, none of them was big enough, in her opinion, so she'd had to put two on around her body, one for her waist and the other for her chest. (Inevitably it made her think of Nirri again and her two silly skirt-wraps.) And then she had a third for her head, a turban for her hair. All her own things had been carried off earlier, by the Fay boys, to be stowed securely somewhere in chests. She had not bathed at all yet. She would afterwards. She had kept her spectacles, however, because her vision was too poor without them, and besides she didn't trust the servants not to break them by mistake—it had happened too many times before—though in the steam room they would keep fogging up. She had a cord for them around her neck, but for now she angled them atop her forehead, rather than let them hang down her chest and bounce around there.

She was going to let these crude street thugs have her body. She was going to get her money's worth—the boys were in for some exercise. She was going to ride them hard as she could, one after the other. She was quite terribly keyed-up. She felt like a drawn bowstring inside—that level of quivering tension. That level of force, like a longbow or a crossbow, powerful enough to blast though plate armor like paper when it was released and fell a charging horseman on the far side of a battlefield ... Her mouth was dry and her throat was itching, while under her towels her nipples were standing out so hard they ached, and her belly was churning just as bad, and her thighs by now had gone slick and shining all the way to her knees with her sacred valley's seeping honey.

She faced them at the doorway. Bald Boy was erect, already, but Longhair wasn't quite there yet. Both were cranking themselves—and she noticed both were shaved clean, all down there. Good to see. She wasn't in the mood for prickling. Bald Boy was grinning; Longhair's face was very serious. Bald Boy had piercings on the underside of his phallus, two or three studs or rings, and more through his jewel bag. That was new for her. She had no idea how that would feel. Longhair had a tattoo over his crotch, a rearing dragon with widespread flaming wings. Chade herself had a tattoo in the same spot, though not as large. A little rearing unicorn, a silhouette in blue. It had magic embedded in it, to enhance her sensitivities, and of course also to protect her from unwanted impregnation, or infection.

Sometimes she wished she hadn't had it done. She hadn't been so prone to lust, before she'd got that mark for herself. If it weren't for that damn enchanted tattoo, she probably wouldn't need to be doing this, right now. She would have better discipline. The elf girl's attractiveness wouldn't have affected her so strong. So irresistibly.

Well, there was no help for that now. Or rather, there was, but only this one—

"First you," she said to Longhair, before motioning them into the room ahead of her, "and then I'll have you next. Sit beside each other on the bench. Not the one facing the door, though." There was no door, actually, only a doorway. Which was annoying, but couldn't be helped. At least the place was quite large and partitioned off a great deal, and seemed mostly deserted. It wasn't likely anyone would show up and disturb them.