From overhead and to the right came her familiar voice. “Will you please be quiet?” If Alberich hadn’t known Myste so well, he would have been certain that she was angry, not trying with might and main to hold back gales of laughter. “People are trying to sleep!”

Her window slammed shut.

Then Myste’s plaint was joined by several other, genuinely irritated voices, calling down to the gaggle of women surrounding Norris to shut up! and go away! and I’ll get the constables on you, see if I don’t!

And it wasn’t long before a constable did appear, and suggest to Norris (as the apparent center of the disturbance), that “It would be very nice, sir, if you and your friends were somewhere else right now.”

And there was nothing else that Norris could do at that point, except to bow to the inevitable. He was going to be stuck with these women for the next candlemark at least. And the only way he was going to get rid of them was back at his own inn, where he knew the ground, and could slip away from them under the guise of attending to nature’s call or something of the sort—or getting one of the cast to find one of his regular bawds to come down and drag him back to his room. The one thing that would embarrass them enough to go away even in their present state of intoxication would be the presence of a real whore.

But it would have to be done there, not here—

Somehow, perhaps by sheer force of personality, he got the group moving, and away they went, still surrounding him on all sides, chattering like a flock of noisy little birds, and he with the look of a man being nibbled to death by ducks.

When they were all out of both sight and hearing, he Mindcalled up to Myste. :I think you can come out now.:

:Just a moment. I was not exactly dressed. I wanted to add some verisimilitude to the illusion that I had gone to bed.:

Now he wished he’d looked up when she leaned out of her window.

Then it struck him; there’d been a hint of—something—in her mind-voice. Was it what he thought it was? Should he? Did he dare?

:If you didn’t read that as an invitation, you’re denser than I thought,: said Kantor.

He couldn’t clear his throat in mind-voice, but he managed a combination of eagerness and diffidence. :I don’t suppose you would care for me to come up instead?:

He heard the purr in her mind-voice, and almost tangled his own feet together, trying to whip himself around and head for the stairs. :Ah, yes. Indeed I would. Please, do.:

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