but herself had ever seen a bite of food or a drop of drink pass the magician’s
lips since the blue star had adorned that high and narrow brow. Nor had any
woman in the Quarter even been able to boast that a great magician had paid for
her favours, or been able to imagine how such a magician behaved in that
situation when all men were alike reduced to flesh and blood.
Perhaps Myrtis could have told if she would; some of her girls thought so, when,
as sometimes happened, Lythande came to the Aphrodisia House and was closeted
long with its owner; even, on rare intervals, for an entire night. It was said,
of Lythande, that the Aphrodisia House itself had been the magician’s gift to
Myrtis, after a famous adventure still whispered in the bazaar, involving an
evil wizard, two horse-traders, a caravan master, and a few assorted toughs who
had prided themselves upon never giving gold for any woman and thought it funny
to cheat an honest working woman. None of them had ever showed their faces -what
was left of them – in Sanctuary again, and Myrtis boasted that she need never
again sweat to earn her living, and never again entertain a man, but would claim
her madam’s privilege of a solitary bed.
And then, too, the girls thought, a magician of Lythande’s stature could have
claimed the most beautiful women from Sanctuary to the mountains beyond Ilsig:
not courtesans alone, but princesses and noblewomen and priestesses would have
been for Lythande’s taking. Myrtis had doubtless been beautiful in her youth,