The interior of the house was as resplendent the exterior. The rooms were spacious, and all the ground floor was built around an open courtyard. At its centre stood an ornamental garden of strange trees. These were arranged around a fountain whose centrepiece was carved in the likeness of a pair of naked female humans. Servants of the Spark quickly appeared, and Theo noticed they were all women, too. Furthermore, they all dressed exactly like those who had served the gathering down at the harbour, replete with unusually large assets. The Spark ordered them to return to their duties and leave their unexpected guest to him. With that, Orel helped him up a wide polished staircase. The ground floor had been strange, but the sights that beheld the Oak on the first floor were too much: pictures and busts whose content and subject matter could only be described as salacious if one was willing to paint the collection in the most positive light possible.

  “Is this really your house?” Theo asked, unable to hide his incredulity.

  “Yes,” the Spark replied tersely. He opened a door that was flanked by an especially bizarre and provocative pair of statues of human women with prodigious busts. “I have a place I entertain business partners. My home is for me and a select few friends. My lab is here, too.”

  “I thought it was a brothel,” Theo groaned as he was brought inside another airy room with a balcony looking down into the courtyard below. He gratefully slumped down onto a long couch near said balcony and looked around. Every surface was covered in bowls, jars, and the oddest collection of glassware that the bull had ever seen. Theo, unable to stop himself, leaned forward to touch one such specimen, which had an odd smelling red liquid in it. The Spark appeared, slapped him very hard on the fingers and snatched the odd contraption away.

  “Don’t touch anything!” the scaled snapped, his eyes bright and threatening. “I will make you a painkiller, but you will in turn sit where you are and not touch a fucking thing! I had to design, and commission the creation of half of the devices in this room. They are delicate and they’re bloody expensive, too!”

  “It’s a good thing none of them seemed affected by the explosion in the harbour,” Theo observed. He had noticed the windows in this building were still whole, while the big buildings that flanked it outside had cracked or shattered panes, like so many others of the city.

  “The glass in this building has been enhanced by one of my own chemical compositions,” the Spark replied as if that was some kind of answer. He hurried deeper into his laboratory, and began doing something that the bull was only vaguely aware of. Theo looked around.

  “Why the breasts of human women?”

  “They are aesthetically pleasing,” Orel called back. There followed a series of clinks and liquids being poured together, and then the sounds of a small fire being stoked. “Or at least, they are to me. I find human women to be far more interesting than the females of my own species. Our females are not built like human females at all, and they are only ready for mating a few set times a year, when they are ready to produce an egg. However, males of my kind are much like those of the human variety: ready to go at any moment, if I may be so blunt.”

  “And so are human females,” Theo sighed, remembering the lady from the inn the night before.

  “Glad you understand,” Orel replied, some of the edge in his voice gone. He walked over to Theo, holding a cup of some thick, repulsive looking liquid. “Drink it all. My advice is to take it as if it were a shot. The stuff is vile, but very fast acting.”

  Theo obeyed, and nearly gagged after he had swallowed the whole thing. For some reason the taste made him think of rotting caterpillars, or mounds of dead ants. Orel snapped the cup away from him before he could put it down. As he walked away Theo sat back, and waited for the concoction to take effect. It was then he noticed the table opposite, just by the door. There were a number of odd looking devices laid out upon it that he had never seen before. They were definitely not alchemical, or at least he assumed they weren’t.

  What they were, exactly, was quite beyond the minotaur. They were a collection of more than a dozen pipes of various lengths and thicknesses that were made from a dark grey metal. Most were affixed to assorted varieties of wood. He thought he saw something like the trigger mechanism of a crossbow on at least one of them, but if it was a trigger, it was by far the oddest he'd ever seen in his life. Some of the longer ones looked like exotic walking canes, given the odd looking handles that capped them made of polished wood. There were a couple of much smaller examples on the table before Theo too, though when he tried to reach out to touch one, his fingers just wouldn’t obey him. The minotaur fumbled drunkenly at one for several long moments before finally abandoning the attempt. He was dimly aware of someone, probably Orel, coming out of the dark to stand next to him.

  “What are those?” Theo asked, surprised at how slurred his speech had become. Orel had been right. He couldn’t feel the pain anymore. He couldn’t feel anything.

  “Just another application for my invention that I’m working on,” Orel said. “I hope you don’t mind Theo, but I put a little sleeping draught in with your painkiller. There’s nothing else to be done today, and you look very tired.”

  There was a flicker of rage. Theo let out what he thought was a growl. He wanted to leap up and break the scaled’s neck, but instead he was leaning back into the soft, warm couch. His limbs felt heavy, empty.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “We’ll start looking for your witch tomorrow,” Orel said. He took a hold of the bull, and started gently laying Theo down on his back. “I believe you about it. I do. But right now I need to attend to some business, and I don’t need a moral complication like you following me around.”

  “Bastard…” sighed Theo. He wasn’t sure Orel heard him, and a few seconds after he wasn’t sure of anything any more.

  *

  Time crept along. The sun carved its bright path along the sky, while below the people of Hafenstrand hurried about like insects. They had been disturbed by the explosion, very much so that morning, but as Orel watched them through the large telescope he had in his private bedroom, they were carrying on with their repetitive, uninteresting lives. The only sign of anyone being affected was the way a number of ships had to awkwardly sail around the place where the carrack had been struck and sunk, for fear of their hulls being damaged if they passed over the wreck. That part of the harbour was shallow, and the wreck would need to either be dismantled or hauled up eventually. He made a note on some papers that lay on a desk he kept by the large contraption. Though he had originally purchased it to watch the stars, the heavy device was far more useful to watch the world beneath him. It moved so much faster, and could profit him so much more.

  Three ships left the harbour. Orel spotted another one coming to its entrance, a surprisingly graceful looking barge, loaded almost to the point of sinking with timber. That would be for the shipyard, no doubt. Orel quickly scanned the scars in the side of the harbour where the skeletons of a pair of vessels lay at rest on the beach. Yet more ants worked over them and the cranes that set the next part of the structure in place. He liked watching the shipyards from his magnificent seat on the hill. It had been one of the myriad of reasons he had settled here. There was real excitement for Orel in watching something new and useful being created out of nothing. It was an activity he had a deep interest in, and which was obvious by the many inventions he kept in his home. The demonstration today had not gone as planned, and yet even now there was a means of making something out of it.

  As the sun finally set, Orel left his home. He was dressed modestly with a cloak and hood hiding his features. He had left Theo snoring comfortably on the couch in his lab, naked, dry and made comfortable thanks to the devoted attention of his dependable staff of women. The girls he had brought down to the harbour were safely inside his home again, with thick walls and strong doors to see them through the night until their master returned. Orel had little desire to be away long, but as this day had already demonstrated, what one wants and what ones gets are rarely the same thing.

  His place of business, where he entertained and accommodated potential clients, was off on a little visited street to the south of the city. Reaching it required passing through the minotaur and dwarf quarters, where the largest and smallest of the Hafenstrand's people worked their days away. Street sweepers had been redeployed by the Governor by now, and could be seen here and there, sweeping up as much glass as they could. Other teams of liveried men with torches began lighting the street lamps that Orel had a hand in designing, in exchange for a say on just what streets they would be set up on apart from the half dozen obvious ones. His place of business had positively been crawling with the entire entrepreneurial class of the city. Those few weeks were etched in the scaled’s mind as some of the happiest of his life. Would those heady days ever return? He paused at an intersection to stare down from the hill at the darkening harbour. The shifting waters there glimmered in the dim moonlight. Far beyond, one could barely see the island where the old lighthouse had been. The sea had nearly swallowed what little had been left above its surface after his demonstration

  No. The days of men and madams knocking on his door with hefty bags that jingled were over. Next would come Princes and Kings. It was starting already.

  The building was extraordinary only in how ordinary it appeared on the outside. It was big enough to be an inn, though it had no sign above its doors, which were firmly closed and locked. A hint of its deceptive exterior might have been the firm windows in yet another street where the sweepers were busy cleaning up the glass for everyone else. A slit at the door in the possession of a pair of killer’s eyes opened and closed with his special knock. Orel was let inside his own little fief then, which blazed with music and light.

  The furniture was all made from foreign timber, Alay or Sikkara or somewhere equally damp and depressing. The crystal chandeliers were gifts from the brown skinned men of Gath, whose mountains supplied him with most of the powders that made him the most beloved friend of every idiot noble in his teens with his hand in daddy’s pocket. There were statues sent to him by the hands of shadowy agents from Ohd, where the Elvish temples still stood, worshipped by a people of blue scales and golden eyes. The desk he sometimes did business over had a pearl on it which was the size of a human’s head, and was as red as a drop of fresh blood. It came from an island far away without a name, and one of these was said to be given up by the oceans every century or so, in return for the captives the island’s people sacrificed to the sea. It had been business that had earned Orel that pearl, and after it had been concluded he had sworn to never conduct business such as that again. Thinking of all the wonderful things here that he had earned eased the man’s conscience as he walked past his naked, gyrating entertainers and sat at the hearth, where another man awaited him, sipping plum wine as a dwarf female’s head bobbed hungrily over his crotch.

  The guest, whose flesh was the colour of ash trees, offered Orel the slightest of nods. Orel, honoured, returned the favour.

  “I was most impressed by your demonstration this morning,” said the man in a language that was not native to the continent. He adjusted his position on the reclining seat, so that the dwarf could knead his bare buttocks with her hands more efficiently. He moaned briefly, and his hairy brown belly rippled.

  “I am glad that you found the demonstration pleasing,” Orel replied, in the same tongue.

  Not to be outdone, he called one of his favourite human girls over. Her hands were sliding up and down his concave belly and her blonde haired head was soon devouring his own arousal. Orel let out a satisfied moan and leaned back into his own seat, before ordering himself a brandy from one of the servants who stood to attention around them.

  “Let’s talk price, Tengku. You’ve seen what my blackpowder can do. Now, I can offer you the formula, but there’s no guarantee you’ll find an alchemist worth a damn where you’re from.”

  “You could have everything you ever wanted if you come with me, Spark.”

  “I’m way ahead of you in that area,” Orel moaned. He sipped his drink, and quietly enjoyed the way it burned down his chest. He hoped his guest was not contemplating a kidnapping attempt. That had happened once, and Orel hoped the consequences of what had occurred were still fresh enough to discourage any further attempts for a while.

  “I may be a Prince of Sidartha, Spark, but your price per barrel is too demanding. It is not…generous.”

  “Then I will be generous,” Orel declared, feeling himself being coaxed closer to the edge. “You can pay half of what I want now, but after…aah…you will pay me triple my original price.”

  “What?” the man growled. It was the only sign of dissatisfaction though. Given his own moans and the rapid, regular thrusts of his hips, the dwarf was nearly finished with him. “That is too much! Who do you think you are?”

  “The man who is going make you Maharaja of Sidartha,” Orel moaned, with a smile.