But the room I was in was dim, cool and calm, yet another parlor because this place only had about a hundred of them. This one featured a smallish round table, where I was currently coughing up my guts, a big round rug, and some portraits of past Pythias on the walls. It also had a lot of delicate little chairs where people waiting to see Gertie could kick their heels until she felt like getting around to them.
People like me.
She could take her time as far as I was concerned. Rhea’s touch was soothing and the room was mostly quiet, with shouting coming from several rooms away. Gertie’s private suite appeared to be even more extensive than my own. Even better, it seemed that her heir was needed for the process, otherwise Agnes would almost certainly have been here, telling me off.
Or maybe not, I thought, as she stepped out of nothing almost on top of me.
That was on purpose—she’d said she could see in advance—and would have been startling enough, but she was also holding a knife dripping with blood. So, I think I can be forgiven for rearing back in alarm. And then spewing chunks all over her when the sudden motion hit my fragile stomach.
Well, shit.
She staggered back, strongly resembling a murder victim from all the blood. Or maybe a murderer, because she was still clutching the knife. And looking like she was planning on lunging at me with it, only Rhea got in the way.
“I think we need to calm down,” Rhea said.
“Who cares what you think?” Agnes snarled, and shoved her daughter out of the way.
I shifted the knife out of her hand, because I didn’t like the look in her eyes, causing it to clatter against the wooden floorboards of the corridor outside and to scare a couple of war mages. And, since they all seem to respond to that sort of thing the same way, they rushed in surrounded by a cloud of levitating weapons, all of which were pointed at me. And at Agnes, I guessed, because she was standing beside me.
Which was why the weapons were suddenly gone, even though I hadn’t shifted them anywhere.
The mages were unhappy about this, and started their second favorite thing: shouting. Agnes shouted back, threatening to send them wherever their weapons had gone. I moved the basin so that I could put my head down on the table, and tried not to think at all.
Until someone new joined the party.
“Just what is going on out here?” Gertie demanded, appearing in the doorway.
There was a chorus of “Ladys,” but I didn’t join in.
I felt like crap.
“I asked you a question!” Gertie said, and now the voice was closer.
After a moment, I forced open a single eye. Yes, she was looking at me. Or glaring, to be more accurate.
“I’ve had a bad day,” I told her.
“You’re about to have a worse one.” It was grim.
Yay.
But I got a reprieve, as the purple haired dynamo took a moment to strut around, doing what she did best and ordering everybody about. The war mages were instructed to find their weapons on the heavily slanted roof, because Agnes was a bitch. The gory basin was whisked away by an acolyte with an expression of disgust on her face and a bucket was brought instead. Agnes informed the boss that the matter “has been taken care of”, whatever that meant. And I found myself being hustled into Gertie’s sitting room.
Which was looking a little different than the last time I saw it.
“Redecorating?” I croaked, clutching my bucket.
“If you are going to be sick again, you are going to make sure that it lands in there,” I was told by the lady herself, and she pointed at the receptacle.
“Does it matter?” I asked, glancing around.
The place looked like a gut job to me, with huge slash marks on the walls, knocked over furniture, and a broken mirror that had dusted the carpet with a thousand glittering shards.
“Yes! I have enough to clean up,” Gertie said irritably, as glass crunched under my feet.
And then caused me to stumble and almost fall when it suddenly disappeared.
I staggered over to the sofa, while all the broken pieces jumped back together again, melted into a huge, shining slab, and slammed back into place on the wall.