She plied her trade with lies and blood, and wove illusions in the minds of men. Lillandyr Shadowglade looked down on her kingdom from her twisted iron balcony. Silk kissed every curve of her body as the stink of the Flesh Quarter rose like a thick perfume from the narrow, cobbled streets below. Sex and incense, vice and murder, the Quarter she ruled over was rife with them. Glory to Baellith, the god of flesh, she thought with a little curl of her lips, lifting her glass of wine.

More often than not the Lady spent her time alone, watching over her kingdom or immersed in study. This night had started no different. She woke as the sun set. She bathed and dressed. She walked the Quarter so that her populace never forgot her face and then she returned to her room in the glittering spire high above the filth.

Her room was opulent, almost oppressively so. Heavy tapestries lay against the stone walls and plush, crimson carpets covered the floors. Incense burned and the shelves were lined with books. Dark magic and demonic texts. Flesh-bound tomes. Forbidden pleasures. Oddities weaved around the well-read books. Bones and crystals, needles made of silver. Sigils burned behind the tapestries, their glow gentle, pulsing with old magic. The Lady had a lot of enemies, for she was beautiful and ambitious, the youngest Marquis in the history of the Empire. She was feared and loved. Despised and envied.

Lillandyr could hear the throb of drums, the tittering of flutes from below the city come to serenade her, to keep the gnawing silence away. She closed her eyes and swayed a little, seduced by her own power and the sounds from the Flesh Quarter below. She didn't gasp or startle when she felt smooth, warm fingers at her elbows. Nor did she step away when she felt pressure against her back, heat from another physical body. No, she smiled as the hands turned her and took up her own delicate appendages to lead her in a wheeling dance. She laughed, drunk on the wine and the city itself.

He often came to her like this, with whimsy and dance, cloaked in shadow and secrets. Vassiago, her Maester of the pleasure houses. While her Quarter was riddled with corruption and greed, it was the nature of her god. Indulgence. Allowing the underbelly to be crawling with scum and drugs and whores gave her the favor from her god she needed to maintain her crown. Some order was attempted to keep the Empire from breathing down her neck, so Lillandyr gathered the city's whores and built for them great palace brothels. Vassiago oversaw them all.

The pleasure houses were garish things, tall and sparkling with gilded paint. Crimson and lurid amongst the squalor of the Flesh Quarter. They were like painted ladies, tempting men with the slick, red heat of them. And the gold flowed into them and her whores were known the world over for their beauty and poise and skill. For a woman in the Flesh Quarter, it was a rare gift to be accepted into a pleasure house. The alternative? Back alley fucks where the client was more apt to slice your throat than pay you.

So Lillandyr danced with her Maester and kissed the corner of his ever-smiling mouth. Vassiago was an elf of indeterminate age. He was straight and tall, thin with a lithe athletic build. He had honey-kissed hair and dressed in oiled leathers that clung to his taut muscle. He always wore a broad, ecstatic grin and a mask. He wore a frightful mask today, ugly, with a long, crooked nose and sharp, narrow slits for eyes. It was leather and dyed black and red.

Vassiago, she thought, wore many masks. Under the frightful one he wore today was the handsome mask of his face. Under that? She couldn't be certain. She had tried many times with her dark and insidious magic to peer into his head, but each time there had been nothing to see. Looking into Vassiago's mind was like looking into a dense, gray fog. It unsettled her and after the last time she had never tried it again.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Vassiago?” she asked as he spun her, his hand on the curve of her back.

“Must we have a reason for coming to bask in the Lady's radiance?” he asked in his sing-song voice. He was light on his feet, graceful. He danced far better than she did, as though he were made of ephemeral shadow and light.

Though his words were very sweet, Lillandyr was not charmed. Vassiago was lovely and full of beautiful words, but he was also brimming with poison. She didn't trust him beyond his duties with her pleasure houses. And she would never trust him with anything beyond their little dance.

As if sensing her ill ease, he roughly tugged her against him, his hands greedily drinking the curves of her hips. “My Lady,” he said with a pout. “You wound us.”

Good, she thought. She wouldn't fall into his web of charm and deceit. “What troubles bring you to my room, sweet Vassiago?” she asked, a little sugar with the bitter draught.

She tolerated his pawing at her. They'd be lovers if he weren't so duplicitous, but as it was she could barely trust him to run her whores. Her heart would remain closed and secreted away, even if his hands felt good on her skin. It always had to be that way. She had learned long ago, and painfully too, that men were only after her flesh and her power. They cared nothing for her wit or intelligence. They only sought to use her. And she, unlike the other noble ladies of Belshalara, would not be had.

He breathed her in and painted a grin on his masked lips with a finger. “We've trouble, my sweet Lady.”

Naturally, she thought. She was already half agitated with him. She had found Vassiago performing on the streets, begging for coin. He had been bold and clever enough to pick her pockets and she had snatched him off the dank, stinking streets and made him important. She didn't want her kindness repaid with incompetence. He should be handling all this on his own. Trouble? She didn't want to be bothered with trouble.

“Yes?” she asked a bit snappishly. “What is it?”

He stopped the dance, released her gently and stepped back with a flourish of creaking leather and lace at his collar. “In the House of the Gilded Lily, your most favored courtesan, Belindra, is refusing to take men into her bed. At first she raised her bed price and then raised it thrice more!” He drew a frown. “And today she turned away the Marquis Eversun, Lord of the Merchant's Quarter.”

Lillandyr closed her eyes against the welling of fury inside her. “She still lives... why?” she asked, her voice low and uncharacteristically rough. Refusing clients got a woman flogged. Refusing a Marquis saw that woman sacrificed in the Flesh Pits. Why Belindra had been spared was beyond her.

“Because, my lovely, she is under the protection of Kia Sin'del,” Vassiago said quietly, the lilt of his sing-song voice tamped down to grave tones of gray.

Lillandyr's lips thinned as she stepped into her bedchamber. Maids were at her side, attending her. They were young girls, younger than her, with shy glances and no tongues in their mouths. Lillandyr found the chatter of her lessers in her sanctuary obnoxious. They moved around her, busy little hands eager to dress her more warmly. They slid jewels on her slender fingers and furs around her shoulders. She wore a long cloak of crimson and black, the colors of the great House Shadowglade. On her breast, she wore a silver pin of a gnarled, leafless tree.

Onyx sparkled inky black at her elegantly pointed ears and throat. She sat on a low silk-covered bench as the girls painted her lips and dyed her eyes. She kept her chin raised. Vassiago moved into her room silent on his slippered feet. “So we've come to you for counsel. The Marquis Eversun will be demanding compensation for the insult. He spoke of asking the Emperor for your hand in marriage as punishment.”

She had to force herself not to sneer. Once they'd finished, she nodded and waved them away so that they'd fetch her knee-high, polished leather boots. “I see,” she murmured, letting none of her ire show. She was too private to show her displeasure, especially to Vassiago. His webs ran deep, little rivers of intrigue. Let them think she didn't care. That she was unaffected. She held out a leg so that one girl could affix her boot. The other girl began to pin up the honey-brown curls of her hair in an elaborate twist. The maid adorned Lillandyr's hair with a deep, red rose and a silver brooch with onyx and long, black feathers.

As Lillandyr was presented with a mirror, she nodded her approval. She looked beautiful and intimidating. Her large green eyes were lined with thick, smoky kohl, and her lips were a crimson wound upon her porcelain pale face. The girls perfumed her skin and arranged her cloak over her gown and then they were gone, bowing as they went.

Vassiago watched her and it was clear by the way he shifted on his feet that her silence troubled him. “Belindra's lover is one of Kia's captains,” he explained. “We would have the Captain dealt with... however...” He sighed and held up his hands as though there were nothing he could do.

And in truth, there wasn't anything her Vassiago could do. Kia Sin'del's name was not unknown to her. The rumor of the man had floated up to reach the walls of her glittering spire. Tickled her ears. He was, without even knowing it, a great asset to her. He controlled the scum of the criminal element. They bowed to him and kept the gold flowing in her pleasure houses. They brought slaves to market, illegally, but she turned a blind eye. The Flesh God was happy with her tithes and sacrifices of lovely girls and boys. How those girls and boys made it to the Burning Altar was no real concern of hers. Kia kept it all neat and tidy. They'd never had to meet or speak or send post. He was far beneath her. A peasant. The son of a fisherman. A nobody.

He was the cog and wheel in her relentless and hungry machine. They were never supposed to meet. However now her hand was forced. The Marquis Eversun was a sly bastard who had wanted her as his concubine for years. He had the right to ask for her now. The insult was grave. Only blood and pain would satisfy it.

Vassiago moved towards her and knelt. He swept leather-clad knuckles over the satin of her cheek. It took everything inside her not to pull away. “Say the word, Jewel. What shall we do?”

What to do indeed? she wondered. She refused to deal with Eversun directly. He'd be disgusting and think her body his personal pleasure house. He had groped her the last time they'd been in the same room. Thus she avoided him whenever possible. She glowered down at Vassiago, her displeasure only visible in a tic at her left cheek. He should have dealt with this before it became a real problem.

“Why did you not seek out Kia Sin'del?” she asked, displeased that the drug lord's name was even sullying her tongue.

Vassiago busied himself “fixing” and fussing over her hair. The maid apparently had not done it to his satisfaction. “Oh, we requested audience, my Lady. His guards were quite rude. So very crass.” He was still smiling. Infuriating creature! “We were denied. He claimed he was far too busy to deal with a faggot pimp.”

Her brow rose. “Indeed,” she said with a scowl.

Lillandyr was quiet for a very long time. She weighed her options, the pros and cons of what she was about to do. But then it had been as she'd always said. If you wanted to effect real change, then deal the blows yourself. She rose, pushing Vassiago away gently. She walked to the full-length mirror and took in the lovely sight of her well-dressed form. Her neckline plunged. Jewels sparkled. She lofted her chin and kept all warmth from her delicate features.

She was the most beautiful monster in all the world.

“Well then Vassiago,” she said thinly. “I shall have to go and speak to Kia Sin'del myself. I do wonder,” she murmured, her smile dark and sharp as any blade, “if he will have the unmitigated gall to turn me away?”

Vassiago laughed, delighted, spinning on his heel and dancing away from his Lady into the soft, inky shadows of her room. “We shall be watching you, Serpent, Lady of the First Star of Evening.”

He was gone. And she was alone.

Lady Lillandyr Shadowglade stepped from her resplendent tower to walk the streets herself. She had no attendants and her guards stayed far behind. The look in her malevolent gaze did more than armor and blade to keep those that meant her harm at bay.