Pearls Before Twine

Deep within the bowels of a damp cavern off the fringes of a city sewer, there was a wooden door, painted white and gilded in lace. Underneath it, a soft white light leaked out and spilled on the molds and mushrooms that grew below the earth. A small underground river trickled by, and down the cavern echoed the sound of footfalls and jingling plate-mail.

"Right up ahead is her door. I tell you, Karr, you let me do the talking. Succubo are tricksters, every inch of 'em." Both of them were tall fellows, most of their features hid by boiled leather and metal helmets.

"You tryin' to say something? I'm not stupid, Han." Karr was stouter, a bald fellow with no hair to speak of anywhere else. A proud Larmont, his family crest was the otter, so he prided himself on his adherence to maintaining the same seaworthy coat. A man so attached to the sea, naturally Han could see why this inland cavern had disturbed him so. Not cowardice at all, no, just a syndrome of mislocation.

"It's not a matter of intelligence, Karr. More, well, belligerence. I noticed you deprived three men of their thumbs yesterday. Succubo or not, I think Peren might not appreciate your flavor of negotiation." Granted, Han did believe the Dincent brothers who ran that shop were trying to scam his friend. You can't just go haggling that low when enchanted axe-heads are up for sale. It's bad form.

"Hah! Succubo or not, Peren be damned. It's my opinion crooks don't need thumbs anyway. What were they thinking, going that low, and on an enchanted axe? That was just bad form, Han."

"Terribly bad form, Karr. Now then, ready to botch a deal?" Han had been getting this deal organized for nearly two weeks, having dropped quite a few hundred gold ropes on not only succubo tips, but stories about this particular one, Peren. Succubo are highly territorial, and there's a natural rank that determines whether they can usurp another's hunting grounds. Areas near larger cities are hotspots for feeding, so they draw the most powerful succubo, leading to constant competition over roaming rights.

Peren had claimed her lair below the imperial capital, and had held it uncontested for hundreds of years.

"Bah. Ready enough. But still not sure about the talking. There's more than one way to skin a cat, Han. Just hoping I'm not the cat."

"Yes, but they all kill the cat. Nobody here is killing anything, so shut your damn mouth and just hold your axe menacingly. Stare at her earlobes a little if it calms you." Karr laughed, but swept it aside for a serious look. Han turned to the gilded door. Besides having a regular amount of hair, he was just a bit taller than Karr. Much lankier, too, with fingers easily twice as long but narrower, noticeable even in the armor they wore. Those fingers wrapped around a little crystal doorknob, and thrust open the door.

Blinding light spilled back onto cave rock and trickling water, and inside the doorway a pearly bright room glistened. White walls glided upward, carved to look like the draping edges of enormous hanging curtains. Where alcoves formed in the folds of molded marble, dozens of bookcases stood with colorful books and oddities. There were dozens sweeping around the room in a giant arc. Little corners swept bookcases out of sight, probably concealing other exits or entrances from the same room. Succubo lairs existed elsewhere, in the sense that you couldn't just go out another door a few paces away in here expecting to be that far away from the door you walked in. You could be leagues away, but no more than five.

In the middle of the room, a large dais rose up on white platforms shrinking as they rose to form stairs. Atop it stood a large throne and podium iridescent, coated with seafoam and eggwhite lacquer. In the seat, somehow comfortably laid between two armrests, was a small child. She looked to be seven or eight years of age, and was reading from a large book that opened wider than her shoulder-width.

"Are you Peren?" Han asked, shouting somewhat to cover the space. He had not set foot inside the door, and his arm was raised in front of Karr, who felt an undeniable urge to step within.

"Why don't you come and see?" Peren laughed, not having turned away from her book.

"I won't do that. Not until--"

"Until what?" she interrupted, now barely peering at them over her book.

"Until you give the Pledge."

"Smart boys you are." A chime sounded somewhere, but not from a direction Han could point toward. "The Pledge is given."

"This means she can't eat us 'til we're gone again, right?" Karr asked. Han had stepped in, and was motioning behind himself for Karr to shut up and follow him.

Peren put her book down on the podium, with a small reddish bookmark keeping her page. Han could see its cover was something human as he approached, and found the bookmark odder and odder as he came closer. It was not any paper he knew of, and far too bumpy to be some kind of wood, but there was something...

It was a piece of human flesh, still dripping with a bit of blood.

"Oh, this?" she caught his gaze. "Light snack with my reading. My, my, Han, I would not have expected someone like you to bring one unaware of the Pledge. That is risky, especially for you."

"Han, you didn't tell me you and her were on a first-name basis!" Karr whispered, glaring between Peren and Han. "You gonna tell me you slammed her, next? This is all getting a bloody bit shifty!"

"There's no need to whisper, Karr. Succubo ears could pick up warhorns ten leagues out. She hears your every word." Peren flicked her ear for emphasis at that. "And to answer your last question, no. I turned her down." Then, she frowned.

"Such a waste, Han." Where a child had sat before, a lovely woman reclined invitingly. Her face was framed in ringlets of red hair, and where Peren had worn a dress as a child, her older form left a bit less to the imagination. Her skin shined, lightly oiled and tantalizingly quivering in certain places. "Such a waste."

As if Karr and Han had blinked, the woman had vanished, replaced with Peren's younger side in her little floral dress. "Now then, why don't you two tell me why you've come?"

"Compensation."

Sounding all too much like a child, Peren erupted into a fit of giggles, tossing over on her throne. Succubo were known for overreacting to humor. "You willingly approach a creature of seduction for... a reward?"

"I'm sure you appreciate the irony, Peren. But it's true. We can explain more, if you'd like. But mostly, it concerns the inexplicable disappearance of a certain Artin Hanston, who I'm sure you're aware of. Without him, your efforts in the city should triple overnight."

Her cheeks flared, and heat took her face. Hard to read in a girl her age, but Han knew it for inexplicable anger.

"Gagged and bagged, tied to an anchor and now sitting pretty at the bottom of the Swavian. Sure had a lot to say about it, too." Karr looked at them both, a little pride on his face. Karr hated the feeling of his own silence.

"Fitting end. I always thought him more barnacle than man." Peren turned in thought. "What do I owe the two of you for 'gagging' and 'bagging' our friend? I assume you have proof of this?"

Karr had, at this point, begun wandering off around the bookshelves, surprisingly seeming familiar with most of the titles.

"Something from your collection, I think." Han added. "And of course." Han pulled a golden ring from his pocket, holding it up on a leather cord. "His wedding ring. I think you'd know better than anyone the iron of his spousal devotion. He'd have to be dead to separate with that ring."

Peren eyed Karr, who was inspecting a brass cube covered in bores and embossed runes. "You speak the truth, and now I find myself in your debt. What manner of compensation would you like?" she added.

"Well, to be honest, something valuable. We're pinching for money these days, and..."

"Say no more, sweet Han. Choose whatever you like. For the price of Mr. Hanston, I would hope your coffers filled to the brim with good fortune."

"In that case, Karr, bring over that cube. We'll have it."

"A confusing choice. There are manuscripts by Bidanno himself on those shelves, easily worth hundreds of thousands of gold ropes. Are you humans daft?"

"Karr, maybe. I mean, look, he's got his fingers stuck in the damn thing."

Peren's eyes widened, and she cowered back in her chair. At her temples, hair was standing up on end. She held the caricature of a frightened child all too well.

"Han, get this piece of junk off of me!"

"Sorry, Karr, but you got yourself into that one. Playing with fire, I'd say."

"Damnit, the shit-box cut me!"

A stream of blood sluiced out of the box, dripping into splatter-stains on the pearly white floors. Peren's eyes were like moons: enormous and full of dark terror. Her lips quivered, and little fangs showed in her mouth.

"You... you couldn't have known... how did you know what it was? I kept it without knowing... no, the Pledge, I've broken the Pledge!"

"The Cube of Hulnot, a strange, magical box designed for self-laceration. And you kept it, thinking it some harmless shelf-toy. Pride, Peren. You should have known better than to let Karr touch things he didn't yet properly own. Among the strongest of the succubo, and you fell for a simple trick. Like a child."

"You tricked me! You goading humans, you little bastard worms!" Her eyes rolled and her ears quivered, her fingers grew into scythe-like claws and her hair fell off like crops at a harvest. A succubo's wrath was not to be tempted, and outguiling it was the best way to do so. They were armed to the teeth, so to speak.

"Han, I'm really thinking I'd like to take this damn thing off." The Cube had taken in two more fingers, and was somehow gnawing its way up to some of the joints in his hand. "There's a lot of bone I'm starting to miss, and the feeling is less than pleasant."

"Karr, you'll have to wait. It'll fix itself soon."

"This isn't the kind of thing that scabs over, pal."

"Quit your conniving banter, you liver-cunted snails!" Peren screeched, rushing down the dais now with claws flailing in fits of conniption.

"That's enough, Peren." Han knuckled his forehead, closed his eyes, and spoke with a voice that somehow boomed across the marble chamber. "By the Pledge, you've harmed my friend by extension of property. Your mortality is returned to you, and you are stripped of your inhumanity."

Peren's torn little dress fluttered a bit as the rest of her sank back into flesh and dust, scattering in the torrential winds of her own stumbling rush down the dais steps. The bits of her bones still left whole fell and clattered onto the marble floor, until the floor's shape twisted and swallowed them up before flattening again.

"Well, I'll be damned. Finger's back. Sure as hell glad we didn't need the armor, though." He pulled off his helmet, his bald head shining with a halo in the pearly room.

"Told you everything would be fine. Now trash that cube and get the sacks out. We've got looting to do."