The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,144

fake marble columns and false velvet, lulling music and forced laughter, clinking glass and whispered secrets. There were bronzes of naked people, paintings of naked people, colossal urns decorated with naked people. If it was possible to make nakedness boring, the decorators of Cardotti’s had managed it.

Women glided about the hallway with high shoes and hungry smiles, with hair piled and twisted, with clinging clothes of shimmering pearl-white and glistening oil-black. Clothes that gave tricking glimpses of thigh and shoulder through slits and slashes, showed the laces and buckles of elaborate underwear.

“By the dead,” muttered Glaward.

“Very much so,” croaked Antaup, staring around with eyes wide in his mask.

Everybody wore one. A Sipanese tradition, like fog, deceit and the cock-rot. Masks of crushed crystal and lace, leering devils and porcelain dolls. Glaward’s was a whale, appropriately enough, and Jurand’s a bird, Jin’s a gatehouse and Antaup’s a unicorn complete with crystal prong. Leo had, of course, a lion. What else? It had felt foolish when he put it on but now, among so many others, it started to feel dangerous. No one knowing who anyone was. No one having to take responsibility for what they did. No one bound by the usual rules, or by any rules at all. The thought made him excited and worried both at once. His palms itched from it.

A woman swayed towards them across the mosaic floor, snake-hipped, feathers fluttering at her shoulders, holding long arms out in a showman’s flourish. “Welcome to Cardotti’s House of Leisure, my lords!” she crooned in a voice overripe with Styrian song.

“Who says we’re lords?” asked Glaward, grinning.

“We treat every visitor as if they are.” She brushed him under the chin with a gloved fingertip, then looked at Leo. “You are the Young Lion?”

“Some people call me that.”

“It is our honour to entertain so famous a hero.”

He would’ve enjoyed the compliment more if he’d felt she was telling the truth. If he’d felt she was capable of it. “Well, thank you—”

“King Jappo is most keen to speak with you but… otherwise engaged just now. The entertainments of Cardotti’s stand entirely at your disposal in the meantime.”

“I like the sound o’ that,” said Jin, giving Leo a punch on the arm that sent his weight onto his bad side and caused him a twinge of pain. It had been a mistake to walk here. Antaup’s map had led them wrong three times and the damn leg was hurting worse than ever.

“Here at Cardotti’s, we cater for all tastes and make no judgements.” The greeter led them past a half-open door, three figures lurking by lamplight beyond. They were dressed, or perhaps undressed, in much the same way as the women, but they were decidedly not women. Stubbled jaws. Chiselled bodies. By the dead, did he glimpse a muscular pair of buttocks in the shadows? “We stand ready to indulge every whim.”

“Perhaps we’ll just gamble to begin with,” snapped Leo, disgusted. And strangely hot around the ears.

She led them into a panelled room noisy with the flutter of cards, the click of dice, the whirr of the lucky wheel, surely the unluckiest invention of all history for its players. A band with masks like leering faces stroked and tickled and kissed out music which managed to sound somehow dirty. Masked guards lurked. Masked men pushed gambling chips wearily through pools of light stained by coloured Visserine glass. Masked women hung upon them, giggled at tiresome comments, swayed with the music and caressed old grotesques as if they never saw such beautiful gallants.

The place looked like bribery, smelled like lust and sounded like blackmail.

The greeter spirited a box of chips into Leo’s hand. “Enjoy yourselves, my lords.”

“This place is vile,” he muttered as she glided off. He reached up to wipe his sweaty forehead, realised he couldn’t because of the mask.

“You need to live a little!” Glaward swept two drinks from the tray of a waitress with a mask like a golden octopus and started to swill one back while holding out the other.

“I’d best stay sober. I’ve a deal to strike with one of the most powerful men in the world.”

“I haven’t.” Antaup plucked the drink from Glaward’s hand, took a mouthful, then bared his teeth. “Bit sweet.”

“Like everything here—” Leo gasped at a touch on his shoulder and spun about. No assassin at his back, but a willowy blonde in a mask like a butterfly.

“No need to startle, my lord,” she pouted at him.

“I’m not startled!” Though he obviously had been.

She