it speak loudly enough?” the Marquis cried, doffing his coat to expose an elaborately tattooed chest and arms, throwing his arms wide to the wolf boy and tiger girl.
A man and a woman leapt down on either side of the ring. Both were dressed normally, him in jeans and a rough mountaineer’s shirt over a white tee, her in fleece and shorts that looked like they’d taken a hell of amount of outdoor running. They prowled up around me, him catlike, her wolflike, inspecting the lines of my tats, eyeballing the colors, lingering over the more prominent designs. He began sniffing my arm, and I scowled; laughing, he backed off.
After a moment inspecting the Marquis and his pets, the referees or judges or whatever they were returned to the center of the ring and conferred. “Her marks are equal,” the woman cried.
“You lie,” the Marquis cried. “Her flowers are no match for my beasts!”
“Her work is of exceptional quality,” the man said.
The Marquis’ nostrils flared. “And how could you tell from such little work? It is easy to ink one line. Only a true artist can do so consistently. Is she consistent?”
“Her lines are strong, her shading subtle—” the woman began.
“The Marquis is right,” the man interrupted, turning his attention to me, his eyes roaming over my body. “Have you no other samples of your work?”
“I didn’t bring pictures,” I snapped.
“We would not accept them,” he replied. “Have you no other living ink to show?”
“She has no friends here, how would she—” the woman began; then stopped. Now her nostrils flared, and she glared at the man in disgust. “You lecherous bastard,,” she said softly.
“If she has no other ink to show, the Marquis’ challenge must stand,” he said, smiling.
The woman judge turned to me stiffly. “Have you no other—”
“I get the drift,” I said, glaring at the Marquis. Thank God I was wearing a bra. I gave the woman a nod of understanding. “I assume you will rip out his throat for me later? If I rip it out I think that might be construed as an insult.”
“Gladly,” she said, and the man laughed.
“Of course I have more ink to show,” I cried, throwing up my hands, glaring at the Marquis. I was going to kill him, him and his horny little judge, too. But maybe not the little feral girl, smirking at me; I blew her another kiss, and again she hid, this time behind the Marquis, to the delight of the catcalling crowd. Then slowly, sensually, I pulled off my top.
The wolves whistled and the stags snorted and brayed as I lifted the rim of the black cloth up and over my head, revealing my sports bra. I’d thought about this carefully and made the movements slinky without turning it into a complete striptease: I had no desire to further taunt an entire crowd full of werewolves and end up raped or eaten. But my movements had another effect: they shifted and stretched my skin, making the tattoos shimmer like fire.
Tattoos are just pigment inserted into the second layer of the skin, just below the layer of cells you slough off every time you take a shower. So, for starters, you can do with a tattoo anything you can do with regular ink—tint the skin a shade, draw a pretty picture—or draw a design. Some of the simplest ‘magical’ tattoos are just benevolent symbols inked with, essentially, an alchemists’ version of glow-in-the-dark ink.
But real magical tattoos are filled with the compounds that dispense, control and discharge mana; and with the life force of a living being beating just beneath their surface, magical tattoos are some of the most powerful marks around.
When I dropped the shirt into Calaphase’ waiting hand, the vines rippling down my arms were glowing bright and the gems actually starting to glitter. Tattoo magic worked best when exposed to the air, and I was already feeling the burn on my legs where excess mana was bleeding back into my body; so I reached down, lithely, and unzipped first one boot, then the other, making the snakes curling through the vines move and the butterflies shimmer.
There was an art to this, an actual magical skill: the magical tattoo artist I’d apprenticed to called it skindancing, and while I didn’t know the details of that art, over the years I’d grown quite good at storing and dispensing mana simply by flexing and stretching my skin. Until now, I’d only done it by myself, in front of