He had to grin. He knew so little, and what little he had gleaned was scarcely a source of reassurance. «There it is,» said Ryld. «Indeed.» Carved from a long, relatively low protrusion of stone, the Jewel Box sat just inches beyond what custom decreed to be the limits of the Bazaar, where all traders were required to shift their stalls to a different spot every sixty-six days. Despite its lack of a signboard or other external advertisement, the establishment had always attracted a steady trickle of shoppers and merchants, and when the two masters descended the stair that ran from street level to the limestone door, Pharaun could hear considerably more sounds of revelry that usual. There was laughter, animated conversation, and a longhorn, yarting, and hand-drum trio playing a lively tune. The third string of the yarting was a little flat. Ryld knocked with the brass knocker, whereupon a little panel slid open in the center of the door. A pair of eyes peered out, then disappeared. The portal swung open. Pharaun grinned. In all his visits there, he had never seen anyone turned away, and he suspected the business with the peephole was just an agreeable bit of nonsense intended to make a visit to the Jewel Box seem even more piquantly criminal. Perhaps the doorman actually would attempt to dissuade a female if one had sought admittance. The low-ceilinged room beyond the threshold smelled of a sweet and mildly intoxicating incense. The three musicians had crowded themselves onto a tiny platform against the west wall. A few of the patrons were attending to the performance, but most had elected to focus on other pleasures. At one table, half a dozen disheveled fellows tossed back their liquor simultaneously in what appeared to be a drinking contest. Other males threw daggers at the target on the wall with a blithe disregard for the safety of those standing in the immediate vicinity of their mark. Dice clattered, cards rustled and slapped, and coins scraped across tabletops as the luckier gamblers raked in their winnings. Ryld studied his surroundings with his customary unobtrusive vigilance, surreptitiously cataloging every potential threat. Still, Pharaun was amused to see that his friend's eyes lingered on the web-shaped sava boards for an instant, which was likely all the time he required to analyze the four contests in progress. Sava was an intricate game representing a war between two noble Houses—at least that was what it currently represented. Pharaun had seen an antique set that recapitulated in miniature the drow's eternal struggle with another race, but such pieces had gone out of fashion long before his birth, probably because no player had wanted to be the dwarves. With its gridlike board regulating movement and its playing pieces of varying capacities, sava resembled games devised by many cultures, but celebrating the chaos in their blood the drow had found a way to introduce an element of randomness into what would otherwise unfold with a mechanical precision. Once per game, each player could forgo his normal move to throw the sava dice. If the spider came up on each, he could move one of his opponent's pieces to eliminate any man of its own color within its normal reach, a rule that acknowledged the dark elves' propensity for doing down their kin even in the face of a serious external threat. Pharaun, who privately considered himself cleverer than Ryld, had always been a little chagrinned that he couldn't defeat the weapons master at sava., but alas, his friend wielded mother, priestess, wizard, warrior, orc slave soldier, and dice as brilliantly as he did a sword. Indeed, he claimed that fighting and sava were the same thing, though Pharaun had never quite understood what the assertion meant. The wizard clapped Ryld on the shoulder and said, «Play. Amuse yourself. Win their gold. Just remember to make conversation while you're at it. See what you can learn. Meanwhile, I'll try my luck in the cellar.» Ryld nodded. Pharaun navigated his way across the crowded room to the bar. Behind it on a stool sat wizened, one-legged Nym, an elderly male who for sheer surly, unwavering misanthropy rivaled any demon the Master of Sorcere had ever conjured. The old retired battle mage was happily engaged in snarling threats, obscenities, and orders at the goblin thralls pouring drinks, but he grudgingly suspended the harassment long enough to accept a handful of gold. In return, he tendered a worn, numbered leather tab with several keys attached. Thus equipped, Pharaun walked through the arch beside the bar and down another flight of steps. At the bottom waited the real business of the Jewel Box and the reason Nym had not seen fit to hang a placard outside. In Menzoberranzan, where a goddess and her priestesses reigned supreme, few female dark elves ever found it necessary to sell their bodies. Only a handful of the sick and infirm, dwelling in the most abject need, had ever stooped to such a degradation. Accordingly, one might assume that any male wishing to purchase intimate companionship would find his choice limited to these rare unappealing specimens or the females of one of the inferior species. But that wasn't quite the case, at least not if a male had a heavy purse. The reason was that, while they generally devoted their military efforts to fighting cloakers, svirfneblin, and other competing civilizations of the Underdark, drow cities on rare occasions waged war on one another. Once in a while, such conflicts yielded female prisoners.
The prudent, legitimate thing to do with such potentially dangerous captives was interrogate, torture, and kill them. That fact notwithstanding, Nym had on several occasions managed to bribe officers to give him their prisoners, whom he then smuggled into Menzoberranzan and down to the cellar of the Jewel Box. Nym had gone to all this trouble based on the shrewd and well-proven assumption that a goodly number of Menzoberranyr males would pay handsomely for the privilege of dominating a female, and in his establishment, one could do anything one wanted with a captive. Nym would even provide a customer with a bastinado, a brazier of coals, thumbscrews. . his only stipulation being that one must pay a surcharge if one left a permanent mark. Since the brothel's existence was an open secret, Pharaun wasn't sure why the matron mothers hadn't shut it down. On the face of it, it certainly seemed to encourage disrespect for the ruling gender. Perhaps they felt that if a male had a refuge in which to act out his resentments, it would make him all the more deferential to the females in his home. More likely, Nym was slipping them a substantial portion of the take. At any rate, the Jewel Box seemed a reasonable place to seek information concerning rogue males, especially if one had a spy in place. Pharaun wasn't confident that he did anymore, but one never knew. The stairs emptied into a hallway of numbered doors. Moans of passions and grunts of pain sounded faintly from behind several of them. It was busier than usual. The mage strolled down the passage until he found number fourteen. He hesitated for an instant, then scowled and turned the largest of his keys in the lock. The door swung open. Seated on the bed, shackles clutching her wrists and ankles, Pellanistra looked much as he remembered, the same powerful, shapely limbs and heart-shaped face, with only a few more scars where one or another of her visitors had pressed down too hard, as well as a split lip and closed, puffy eye where a more recent caller had beaten her. She lifted her face, saw him, and charged with her long-nailed hands outstretched. Then she staggered as one of her governing enchantments riddled her body with pain, and an instant later hit the end of the chains securing her to the wall. She lost her balance and fell on her rump. «Hello, Pellanistra,» Pharaun said. She spat at him, then screwed up her face at another flare of punishment. The gobbet of saliva fell well short of the wizard's soft, high boots. «Much as I dislike descending to the obvious,» Pharaun said, «I feel compelled to observe that you're only hurting yourself.» He stepped forward and extended his hand. «Come on, let's sit and have a talk, just like in the old days. I'll even remove the shackles if you wish.» «We had a bargain!» she said.
«I refuse to have an extended conversation with someone sitting on the floor. It compromises my dignity as much as it does yours. Come on, be sensible. Take my hand.» She didn't do that, but, chains clinking, she did clamber to her bare feet unassisted. He caught a whiff of some flowery scent that Nym had forced her to wear. «Now, isn't that better?» he asked. «Do you want the manacles off?» «We had a compact, and I was holding up my end.» «I wish you'd invite me to sit down.» «You abandoned me!»
Pharaun spread his slender, long-fingered hands and said, «All right, priestess. If you think it necessary, we'll belabor the self-evident a bit longer. Yes, I recruited you into my service. Yes, you were doing splendidly—well on your way to earning your liberation—but my circumstances changed. Surely you heard something about it.» «Yes. You backed the wrong sister, and Greyanna made a fool of you. She killed her twin, and you were powerless to stop it. If you hadn't turned tail and run away to Sorcere, she would have slain you, too.» Pharaun smiled crookedly. «I don't think I'll encourage the bards to put it quite that way when they compose the epic story of my life.» «But after you established yourself up on Tier Breche, after you were free to come and go as you pleased, you could have returned here.» «I have, on occasion, just not to call on you. I thought it might be a little awkward.» «I could have helped you the same as before.» «Alas, no. After my withdrawal from House Mizzrym, I no longer had a stake in the power struggles within my family or among the noble Houses, either. I no longer needed intelligence about such matters. The only rivalry that concerned me was the one among wizards, and even if you number the foremost practitioners of my art among your guests, I doubt they whisper the esoteric of their newly invented spells in your ears. When it comes to our discoveries, we wizards are a closemouthed breed.» «You don't know what it was like for me. . is like for me, abused and degraded by my inferiors, constrained in body, mind, and soul, unable to commune with Lolth. .»