When she returned to Mantelby Mansion, she needed a place to put the device, and her grandfather’s wine cellar came to mind. Margon Mantelby the elder, Marool’s grandfather, had used a natural cavern below the mansion as a cellar for Mantelby wines, the product of family-owned vineyards. The cool catacombs had been presided over by a cellar master of some reputation, and the wine had been drunk, during the ostentatious banquets given in honor of this or that family achievement.
When Marool had returned to the mansion, it had taken only a few trials to convince her she had no use for the wines since she could neither smell nor taste them, so she converted their vaulted spaces into what she called her playroom. Power for the devices was no problem. A sizeable tributary of the Giles flowed down the canyon behind Mantelby Mansion, and Margon the Elder had long ago partnered with his neighbors in building a small dam and hydroelectric plant to provide domestic lighting and the pumping of water. Marool’s fantastic devices did not fit either category, but she did not trouble herself over that.
The first machine was installed shortly after Marool returned from Nehbe, and in due time she added others. Among them was a device that amplified sexual pleasure by almost but not quite choking the participants during the act, and another that administered a carefully planned series of drugs during excitement. Some devices turned and twisted, holding bodies in ways that allowed persons—one or two or several simultaneously—to juxtapose or penetrate one another in ways otherwise unlikely. And finally, there was one very complicated machine that started its cycle doing interestingly erotic things and went on doing them, with increasing pain, pressure, and intensity, until the participants perished.
Some of them Marool used with her playmates; others were used by her playmates, or her soon to be ex-playmates, on one another while Marool watched. All the machines were designed to be unstoppable except by Marool herself, and she wore the master key upon her wrist and never removed it, not even to bathe or sleep. On that same hand she wore a great obsidian seal ring bearing in intaglio the fanged, flame-haired face of Morrigan.
The furnishings of the playroom included a closet of masks, costumes, and devices, as well as an ornate cabinet of drugs that could, variously, increase pleasure or enable participants to tolerate quite high levels of pain. Though the cabinet was locked, the lock was a simple one, an oversight by Marool, who gave her partners credit for little intelligence and had not thus far been mistaken in doing so.
Marool customarily spent part of every day in this special place. Since the Questioner had arrived with her entourage, however, Marool had not been near it. Though the Questioner and her two assistants customarily kept to their own rooms during daylight and always did so at night, the Questioner’s strange-looking aides were ubiquitous about Mantelby Mansion. Marool had found them at all hours, walking here, looking there, always very interested in what was going on, always intrusively present whenever Marool even thought about amusing herself. The moment Marool learned the entourage had disappeared, she sent a peremptory note to the servants’ quarters ordering Bane and Dyre to join her. She took the absence of the entourage as a sign from Morrigan that she need no longer deprive herself of her pleasures.
Aside from venting the pressures she had built up, there was another reason to bring the brothers to the playroom, one she had so far delayed dealing with. Though Bane and Dyre were innately cruel, though they did not balk at inflicting considerable pain even on one another, qualities that Marool quite enjoyed, the difficulty of keeping the brothers nearby had become prohibitive. She could find other playmates who would be equally cruel and vicious but who did not stink so. She herself could not smell them—or thought she could not, though her body responded to the presence of their smell nonetheless. No matter what she did or did not sense, her servants could smell them too well. Several specialized and expensive staff members had simply gaped, gasped, and fainted away when in the brothers’ vicinity, and they had been unable thereafter to resume their duties. Her latest nephew-steward had confirmed, though only when asked, that the odor given off by the two was asphyxiating, and that it grew worse with each passing day.