Pengram ushered in a young woman, or effeminate young man, about fourteen or fifteen years old. She wore a man’s overcoat, threadbare and dirty, that concealed her figure, but the face and hands were feminine enough; her lips, cheeks and eyes were heavily made up in a way no respectable woman would decorate herself, but her hair seemed to have been recently and incompetently cut short.
Boss Ftero was a busy man at the best of times. This week, since his long-time rival Boss Sgadrim had died (or at least disappeared; the rumors were many and contradictory, but he certainly hadn’t been seen in five days or more), he was busier than ever. Sgadrim’s sons and his other lieutenants were fighting over who would be his successor, and Ftero was determined to take advantage of the confusion and carve out a large chunk of Sgadrim’s territory adjoining his own. Probably as far as Mirror Square, and maybe as far as Kurintu Street. Things looked good so far, with Sgadrim’s lieutenants focusing mainly on each other and not yet retaliating for Ftero’s so-far minor incursions.
“All right, Tesro, you’re the carrot for this operation, and Gurim’s the stick. Take several enforcers and pay a little visit to Sgadrim’s joydust operation on Silversmith Street.”
“Upstairs from the hat-shop, right.”
“You know it. Walk in and inform them they’re working for us now, with fifteen percent pay raises all around. If they don’t like that, Gurim, you can break a few fingers to start with, and work your way up to heads if necessary.”
Once Tesro and Gurim had left, Ftero asked his secretary, Pengram: “Has Ftymsar reported back about the Kusrem Avenue operation?”
“No, Boss — but there’s someone else here to see you.”
“Who?”
“She won’t give her name,” Pengram said. “Or his, maybe. Looks like a girl, but sounds like a castrato... probably one of Madam Esgara’s girly-boys, if I had to guess. Says he, she, whatever, has some information about Sgadrim and his organization and will give it only to you.”
“Well, send her in.”
Pengram left, and moments later ushered in a young woman, or effeminate young man, about fourteen or fifteen years old. She wore a man’s overcoat, threadbare and dirty, that concealed her figure, but the face and hands were feminine enough; her lips, cheeks and eyes were heavily made up in a way no respectable woman would decorate herself, but her hair seemed to have been recently and incompetently cut short.
“Sit down,” Ftero said. “Pengram tells me you’ve got something to tell me about Sgadrim’s organization.”
The young person looked at him and said — his voice was definitely that of a castrato — “I guess you don’t recognize me, Uncle Ftero? I’m Tyngsen.”
Ftero gaped, searching the boy’s features for resemblance to the nephew he hadn’t seen in seven years — the nephew he’d thought had been killed at the same time as his father, Ftero’s younger brother and right-hand man, and the rest of his family.
“Sgadrim’s men made us watch while they killed Mom and Dad,” the boy continued. “Me and Kisri, I mean. Then they took us away, and I think they set fire to the house on the way out...”
“Yes,” Ftero muttered, “we thought you were killed in the fire too...”
“When they got us to another house, somewhere across town, they made me watch while they raped Kisri, and they made her watch while they castrated me. Then they separated us — sent us to different whorehouses. They told me they’d kill Kisri if I misbehaved or tried to escape, and I think they told her they’d kill me if she did. They let us write letters to each other, to prove we were still alive. So I didn’t try to escape until her letters stopped coming, and I figured out she was dead, or maybe had escaped...?” He looked at his uncle with a faint glimmer of hope. Ftero had to crush it.
“If she did, she didn’t come here. And I don’t know where else she could have gone... We’ll look for her, though, I promise. And... if Sgadrim isn’t dead, I’ll kill him with my own hands.”
“He is,” Tyngsen said. “I killed him when I escaped. Madam Esgara, too.”
Ftero looked at the boy with respect. “Five days ago?”
“I think so.”
“Where have you been since then?”
Tyngsen told how he had gotten thoroughly lost, and wandered around the city for several days before finding his way to his uncle’s territory. He’d been arrested twice and spent two nights in jail; once for solicitation, before he managed to steal some men’s clothes and cut his hair, and once for vagrancy.
“Why didn’t you wash off the whorehouse makeup first thing?” Ftero asked at one point.
“It doesn’t come off,” Tyngsen said, with a bitter laugh. “Madam Esgara’s alchemist put it on so it would stay, not long after he castrated me.”
He’d been cautious about who he asked directions of, and how; he’d been confined to the upper storey of Madam Esgara’s bordello for the last seven years, and his knowledge of the streets even in the neighborhood he’d lived in as a child was rusty. He couldn’t exactly ask respectable citizens in other quarters of the city, or even near here, which way it was to Boss Ftero’s territory. But he finally found his way into some streets he recognized, and then managed to spot some of Ftero’s errand-boys, running messages and packages from one joydust operation or gaming house to another.
“It took some work to catch up with one of them and convince him to listen to me — they’re fast, and they’re good at spotting tails and evading them, and I’m out of shape after living at Madam Esgara’s for so long, never going outside. But I managed to convince one of them that I had important information for you, and he led me to one of your gaming houses, and introduced me to somebody who led me here.”
Ftero nodded. “I’m glad to see you again — I can’t find words for how glad. You say you’ve killed Sgadrim and Esgara already; I can’t thank you enough for that, though I know you did it for yourself and Kisri, not so much for me. But if there’s anybody else who mistreated you in the last seven years, anybody you want to put a contract out on, let me know. And if my alchemists and sorcerers can fix you, I’ll have them do it, no matter what it costs... But first, tell me what you know about Sgadrim’s operations?”
“Sure. The other stuff can wait; you need to know this now, 'cause if it’s not outdated already, it will be soon...”
Ftero called Pengram in to take notes as Tyngsen told what he had overheard Sgadrim and his lieutenants talking about in recent months. After they’d been listening to Tyngsen’s account for half an hour or so, occasionally asking questions, Ftero heard a low rumbling noise from Tyngsen’s stomach.
“You’re hungry,” he said. “When did you eat last?”
“Yesterday afternoon sometime...?”
“Pengram, send an errand boy to the Hureshan takeout place around the corner; have them send plenty of food for the three of us.”
Tyngsen thanked his uncle, and resumed where he’d left off.
They continued talking after the food arrived, and after they’d finished eating it. From time to time, Ftero would look startled at some piece of intelligence Tyngsen had mentioned, and send Pengram with an urgent message to one lieutenant or another, then tell Tyngsen to go on. Finally, Tyngsen said, “That’s all I can remember right now. If I think of anything else later, I’ll tell you.”
“This will help a lot,” Ftero said. “I have a cot in the back room there you can rest on, now, and as soon as I can spare Pengram from his other duties I’ll have him drive you to my house. Within a few days I’ll have my alchemists and sorcerers take a look at you and see what they can do for you; right now they’re a little busy.”
“Thanks, Uncle,” Tyngsen said. “I could use a rest.” Ftero showed him the small room with the cot, and returned to his work.
Four evenings later, Boss Ftero had Symsar, one of his best alchemists, summoned to his house. The servants were dismissed and Ftero, Symsar and Tyngsen met in the bedroom that Ftero had given to Tyngsen on the youth’s arrival.
“Tyngsen, why don’t you tell Symsar everything you can remember about what Madam Esgara’s alchemists did to you,” Ftero suggested. “I don’t know if he can fix it all or if we’ll have to get a sorcerer to do part of it —”
“I can’t make things grow back after they’ve been cut off,” Symsar said apologetically. “I think a good sorcerer probably can, though. Tell me what they did and I’ll see what I can do.”
Tyngsen began: “Well, they castrated me first, and then they put some kind of poultice on the wound —”
“Did they cut off everything, or just your testicles?”
“Everything. They kept changing the poultice every few hours until it wasn’t bleeding or oozing anymore. And then they did some other things down there, more cutting and another series of poultices until that healed. And then they started on my face... You can see what they did there, I guess, or at least I don’t think I can tell you any more, I don’t know the names of the potions they used or what went into them.”
“How did they administer them? Make you drink them, or rub them on, or inject them?”
“Oh, right. They used a needle and injected little drops of stuff into my lips and the flesh around my eyes and my cheeks. And then they started me drinking stuff, a big glass of nasty-tasting stuff every month on the night of the new moon.”
“What color was it?... Did it bubble...? Was it more sour or bitter tasting...?” Symsar made notes as Tyngsen answered these questions. “And they had you drinking that stuff for how many moons?”
“For seven years — every new moon until six days ago.”
“Is he going to get withdrawal sickness if he stops taking it all at once?” Ftero asked anxiously.
“I don’t think so,” Symsar said, stroking his grey beard thoughtfully. “That kind of reaction usually happens with drugs you take every day, or several times a day. Let me examine him more closely... Tyngsen, I’ll need you to remove your clothes.”
“Do you want me to leave, Tyngsen?” Ftero asked.
“Ah... you can stay, I guess,” Tyngsen said, glancing back and forth from his uncle to the alchemist and beginning to unbutton his tunic.
When he was undressed, the alchemist looked over his slight figure with a clinical eye. He had breasts, small enough that his loose tunic had entirely concealed them, but his nipples were not as large as a girl’s. His hips were perhaps as wide and his waist as narrow, proportionate to his height, as a thirteen or fourteen-year-old girl, and his hairless crotch looked superficially like a girl’s; but Symsar suspected that a closer examination would show this to be purely cosmetic. That was the province of a sorcerer or a surgeon; he wasn’t going to humiliate Tyngsen more than necessary by examining him there now.
“Turn around slowly, please... All right, you can get dressed now. I’m still not quite sure what potion they were using on you, but ceasing to use it shouldn’t cause problems. As for reversing its effects, though... I can give you something that will help some, if you keep taking it regularly for years the way you’ve been taking the other one. But if a sorcerer can give you back your penis and testicles, my potion won’t be necessary; and if not, well, the most mine will do is make your breasts slowly atrophy, make you grow a beard, and help you develop a more masculine muscle tone, if you also get plenty of exercise. What I can do right away, or at least within a few days, is remove the permanent makeup from your face. I’ll come by tomorrow, shall I, with the first of those potions?”
“Yes, this time tomorrow will suit,” Ftero said.
“It may take longer to undo the extra thickness they induced in your lips,” Symsar warned, “but my tattoo-removal potion should probably take care of the coloring within hours. I’ll return tomorrow evening, then, Boss.”
“Good... Thank you. And remember, not a word of Tyngsen’s condition to anyone. I expect he’ll remain secluded until we’ve reversed as much of those butchers' work as we can.”
Symsar glanced sympathetically at the young castrato. “I hope the sorcerers can fix him,” he said, and took his leave.
The next evening, Symsar returned and applied the tattoo-removal potion. It left Tyngsen’s face tingling for the rest of the night, and stopped him from getting any sleep until long after midnight; he slept until past noon the next day. Three days later, Ftero left his office just after lunch, returned home, picked up Tyngsen, and drove to the office of Gurefkam.
Gurefkam was a skilled sorcerer who had done work for Ftero as well as other powerful men in the city, including Tyngsen’s late tormentor Sgadrim, and the mayor. Even Ftero could not demand an appointment with him at a moment’s notice, or summon him to his house. He greeted Ftero and Tyngsen courteously, but without the deference that most people showed to a boss with Ftero’s reputation.
“Come into the inner chamber,” he said, “and tell me what ails you and what you require. Your message was not of the most detailed, Boss Ftero.”
“It’s a matter to be circumspect about,” Ftero said. “I didn’t want to take any chances, in case the message should be intercepted.” He asked Tyngsen, “Do you want to tell him or shall I?”
“I can do it,” Tyngsen said, and he repeated his story, with more details about the work Madam Esgara’s surgeon and alchemist had done on him, and fewer details of his escape, than he had given when he first told his uncle. Gurefkam looked grave, but asked few questions until Tyngsen had finished. Then he said,
“I am sorry to say that I cannot restore your manhood. At least not fully — not so that you could lie with a woman and get her with child; and even to enable you to urinate standing up will tax my resources to the utmost.”
“Then who else can you recommend?” Ftero said. “I know sorcery can fix this — in my grandfather’s time Boss Rumisyn’s son was tortured and castrated by his enemies, and Rumisyn got him fixed up, though it cost him a third of his wealth. And he has descendants still living.”
“There is a spell that can regrow lost limbs, or other parts, if it is applied soon after the injury is sustained,” Gurefkam said. “Its ingredients are rare and costly, but still to be found. And there is also a spell which, at low power, can restore an aged man’s potency, and at the highest power, can restore the manhood of a eunuch or even turn a natural-born woman into a man. But this latter spell requires ingredients which can no longer be had at any price — even the lesser form of it requires two ounces of powdered unicorn horn and the incisors of a black dragon, and the greater form, which Tyngsen would need, requires an entire horn and a whole set of teeth. The last known unicorn was killed three hundred years ago, the last black dragon nearer five hundred, and the last remaining supplies of their horns and teeth were used up three generations ago. In your grandfather’s time, as you remarked. I know of no source for either of those; if you can find them, I will be happy to perform the spell at a reasonable cost.”
“But... there’s a pair of unicorns in the zoo at Dyram, aren’t there?”
“No, those are rhinoceroses. They’ve been hunted to the brink of extinction by fools who thought they could substitute rhinoceros horn for unicorn horn in these and other spells... but don’t think of sending someone to sneak into the zoo and cut off their horns. It would do your nephew no good, even if they succeeded.”
Ftero clenched his teeth and was silent. Finally Tyngsen spoke:
“All right. I didn’t really expect you could make that stuff grow back. And I don’t mind, really... I don’t care for lying with women, or with men either, and I guess it would be convenient to be able to pee standing up again, but I’m used to sitting down. But can you make me not look so much like a girl? If nobody can tell when I’ve got clothes on that I’m like a girl between my legs, then that’s enough for me. Symsar says his potion will make the boobs go away but it might take years for it to work; can you do it faster?”
“I could, but it would be unnecessarily costly and complex to use sorcery for that. A surgeon could remove them in an hour or so. I can also use sorcery to give you a masculine appearance in other respects... in fact... hmm. Let me think.”
He stared off into a corner of the room, muttering under his breath for a few moments from time to time. Then he rose, went to a bookshelf, and took down a couple of volumes, one of which he opened up on his desk, and read. Ftero and Tyngsen watched silently. After reading two or three pages in one volume, and several more in the other, Gurefkam looked up at Tyngsen and said: “It is the appearance of masculinity that you desire, yes?”
“If the reality is impossible, the appearance would be enough. Actually, from what I’ve seen of men, I’m not sure I’d want the reality even if it were possible.”
“Then perhaps a persistent illusion will serve your purpose.”
“Is that really all you can do?” Ftero said.
“No. With enough money to buy certain rare ingredients, I could reshape the structure of Tyngsen’s face and rebuild his hips and waist in a more masculine shape. I could even give him a sort of pseudo-penis, a mere tube of flesh which would let him urinate standing up. But it would cost a hundred times as much as the illusion spell — which will not be cheap — and it would take months, perhaps more than a year, during which Tyngsen will be in constant pain. The illusion spell I have in mind can be cast on the next full moon, in the course of a few hours, and will require only a brief discomfort and inconvenience on Tyngsen’s part. The only disadvantage, compared to the arduous series of body-shaping spells, would be that he will still need to sit down to urinate, and that he will need to avoid the most powerful anti-sorcery charms and dead areas where sorcery doesn’t work. But there are no such places in Kosyndar, or within fifty miles of it, and an anti-sorcery charm powerful enough to dispel this illusion would probably be part of an attack on his life, such that staying alive would be more of a concern than keeping his secret.”
“I say we try it, Uncle,” Tyngsen said. “I don’t think the other one is worth it. I just want people to look at me and respect me, to see a man, somebody who can do a man’s job. Not a girl who’s good for only one thing.”
“Tell us more about this illusion spell,” Ftero said gruffly. “Is it going to make his voice sound right, too? Will it fool mirrors and cameras...?”
I'll probably post part two in about a week.
"The Manumission Game" is inspired by (though not exactly a sequel to) an old story from the Transformation Stories Archive. I'll identify that story and its author in an afterword after part six is posted, but you're welcome to speculate about it in the comments. Probably it will be obvious to people who remember the story in question by the end of part four, if not part three.
A Notional Treason, a transgender fantasy of manners in the same setting as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
In his years in Madam Esgara’s house he’d seen too many men who thought themselves tough and smart make fools of themselves over women and boys. He wasn’t sure if he would have become like that if he’d gotten his male parts back, but he suspected it was likely. It was probably best this way, having the appearance of masculinity without the vulnerability to women or the urgent need for them.
Five days later, Ftero and Tyngsen returned to Gurefkam’s office at sunset. Tyngsen had not left Ftero’s house since his previous visit to Gurefkam’s office, and he had not seen much of his uncle, except when he rose early enough to eat breakfast with him, or was up after midnight to see him come home and stagger to his bed. Ftero was still at war with Sgadrim’s lieutenants, who were still at war with each other; he had carved off several blocks at the edge of Sgadrim’s former territory and was pretty confident he would be able to hold on to them. He told Tyngsen a little about the progress of the war when they ate breakfast together, but he rarely took his other meals at home these days.
Gurefkam let them in and led them downstairs into a windowless cellar, its ceiling shrouded with the smoke from dozens of tallow candles.
“You haven’t eaten or drunk anything in the last six hours, have you?” Gurefkam asked.
“No,” Tyngsen said.
“If you need to use the toilet, do it now.”
Tyngsen didn’t need to.
“Undress and step into that circle there. Ftero, you may sit in the chair yonder, or in the waiting room upstairs. Be quiet, in any case.”
Gurefkam reviewed with Tyngsen the part of the spell he would need to recite, which he had given him to study in the interim. Once satisfied that Tyngsen had memorized it thoroughly, he undressed and stepped into another circle a short distance from the other, where a small cauldron sat on a smoldering brazier. He began speaking the spell while putting pinches, drops and whole handfuls of various substances from jars, vials and baskets into the cauldron. Tyngsen listened carefully for his cues, and chimed in at the appropriate points with his parts of the spell. He didn’t feel anything obviously magical going on.
A long time passed — there was no clock in the room, and Tyngsen measured the time by the increasing aches in his feet and legs and back. Gurefkam had warned him not to sit down during the spell, or step out of the circle, though he could move around within it or change his stance as necessary to minimize his discomfort. The nudity didn’t bother him; he’d been exposed to the eyes of strangers and enemies so many times, and suffered far worse humiliations nearly as often, that being exposed to two men he trusted was nothing.
Finally, just after he spoke his last spell-part, he closed his eyes as Gurefkam had warned him to do. There was a flash of light that penetrated his closed eyelids so that little sparks danced before his eyes for some time after he opened them. When his eyes finally adjusted to the dim light, he looked down at himself and saw a flat, hairy chest, a slightly less hairy belly below, and a penis and testicles dangling between suddenly hairy legs. He hadn’t felt anything except the flash of light. He touched his chest and felt the soft, hairless breasts, touched between his legs and felt the numb scar tissue around his nether lips. To the eye, his fingers were grasping his non-existent penis.
He looked up at Gurefkam and glanced aside at Ftero, who was looking at him in astonishment. Gurefkam poured water over the coals in the brazier, then stepped out of his circle and said, “It is done. You can rest now.”
“It looks perfect!” Ftero said enthusiastically, and Tyngsen added,
“Yes, thank you ever so much. And thank you, Uncle, for paying for this.”
“I would have done even more for my only nephew, if I could have. If there were a unicorn left alive I’d hunt it down and tear its horn off with my bare hands. And — your voice is deeper, too, isn’t it?”
Tyngsen’s own voice hadn’t sounded any different to him, but he trusted his uncle’s perceptions.
“Here,” Gurefkam said, turning on the light switch, “take a look at yourself.” He picked up a hand-mirror from a table in the corner, and held it up to Tyngsen’s face.
Tyngsen saw a square jaw and faint stubble covering his lower cheeks and chin. He touched his face and felt skin as smooth as before.
“Get dressed,” Gurefkam said, “and I’ll show you how the spell works with a camera.” Tyngsen put his clothes on, and noticed that his pants appeared to bulge slightly at the crotch. After snuffing the candles, Gurefkam picked up a Tachyeidolon from the table, and took a snapshot of Tyngsen’s head and shoulders. Moments later Tyngsen and Ftero watched as the photo developed before their eyes, showing Tyngsen’s new masculine face.
“It’s looks good,” Ftero said.
“It’s perfect,” Tyngsen said. “Thank you again.”
“I’ll have the other half of the money to you by noon today,” Ftero added.
Gurefkam nodded. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Boss Ftero, as always. Good day.”
It was just past dawn when they went out the front door. Ftero drove Tyngsen home, and took a brief nap before going out again. Tyngsen slept much of the day, then spent some time looking at himself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom before he descended and asked Ftero’s cook for something to eat. This would do, he thought. He was secretly glad that Gurefkam hadn’t been able to restore him. In his years in Madam Esgara’s house he’d seen too many men who thought themselves tough and smart make fools of themselves over women and boys. He wasn’t sure if he would have become like that if he’d gotten his male parts back, but he suspected it was likely. It was probably best this way, having the appearance of masculinity without the vulnerability to women or the urgent need for them.
After a day’s rest to recover from the spell, Tyngsen told his uncle that he was ready to go to work, and Ftero assigned him to follow Tesro on his daily rounds, and help him out with various tasks. He worked various small jobs in different parts of Ftero’s organization over the next couple of years, and took Symsar’s potion once a month, and worked out — Ftero had a weight machine in his basement, which he was usually too busy to use nowadays. Gradually he built up muscle and became nearly as strong as the illusion would lead people to think. His uncle, who had been placing spies in Sgadrim’s organization, had them search all of Sgadrim’s bordellos for Kisri; they learned that she had been in Madam Kurenga’s bordello, but had died of the pox a few months before.
Tyngsen learned the business quickly, and acquired the respect of Ftero’s people. By the time he was nineteen, Ftero put him in charge of protection for one of the bordellos in his territory. A few years later, he was in charge of all of them — not the management of the prostitutes themselves, but of the enforcers who ensured that the customers didn’t make trouble, and made the houses too hard a nut for the police to crack. He got on well with the girls and boys and madams; from his years in Madam Esgara’s house he knew how to treat them and how not, and they liked him because he was friendly without being pushy, and never asked them for sexual favors like his predecessors.
But eventually, that forbearance led to some talk, which gradually got back to him; he realized that his celibacy was undermining his men’s respect for him. He knew what he needed to do about that; it could, he thought, combine neatly with a plan he had been maturing ever since his escape. He’d been saving money ever since he started working for his uncle, and now he hired Kuspar, a freelancer who wasn’t too closely associated with Ftero’s organization and thus wouldn’t be viewed with suspicion by Madam Esgara’s successor.
He gave Kuspar his instructions; the man asked a few questions, then nodded and departed. That evening he met Tyngsen at a restaurant his uncle owned, and told him what he’d learned.
“She’s still alive, still there. Madam Skyngsa says she’s pretty popular with the customers and she wouldn’t think of selling her for less than fifteen thousand marks.”
Tyngsen nodded, relieved to hear that his friend still lived. “Good. Try to talk her down some, but if I have to pay that much, I can.”
“If you’re not in a hurry, and you don’t think anyone else is likely to come along and outbid you, I’d suggest that I wait a couple of days before I go back. If Madam Skyngsa thinks you don’t care that much about the girl, she’ll more likely be willing to take our lower offer.”
Tyngsen chewed his lip and thought. “No... I don’t know why anyone else would be trying to buy her just now, if she’s stayed there all this time. I don’t like her staying there longer than necessary... but she’s been there so many years a couple of days longer won’t hurt. Use your judgment.”
Kuspar nodded. “I think I can talk her down to twelve thousand easy, maybe ten thousand.”
Three days later, Tyngsen sat on the edge of the seat of an easy chair in the furnished apartment he had just rented, anxiously waiting for Kuspar to show up, or to call him. What if something had gone wrong? What if somebody else had taken an interest in her at the worst possible time, and outbid him? Or if she’d fallen victim to a drunken customer just now, when she was days or hours away from being free...?
There was a knock at the door. Tyngsen jumped up and ran to open it.
There was Kuspar, and standing a little behind him and to his left, a slender pretty girl a couple of inches shorter than Tyngsen. She looked apprehensive, and her first sight of him didn’t seem to relieve her apprehensions. Of course, she wouldn’t recognize him at first glance.
“Come in,” Tyngsen said. Kuspar entered, and the girl followed, looking around curiously.
“I got her for eleven thousand,” Kuspar said with satisfaction.
“Good,” Tyngsen said. “Then your commission is...” He did the math in his head. “Eleven hundred. And I gave you 16,500, and you gave Madam Skyngsa eleven thousand, so I should get forty-four hundred back.”
“I’ve got it right here,” Kuspar said, lifting his valise onto the table. The girl looked on with vague curiosity at these proceedings.
“Wait,” Tyngsen said. “I know I can trust you to say nothing about this. But I have nothing to be ashamed of, and not much to hide. You can keep another thousand of the remainder if you’ll tell people what I want them to know, not as though you brokered the deal yourself, but as though you heard about it from a friend... does that work?”
“That works,” Kuspar said. “What do you want known and what hidden?”
“Listen and learn,” Tyngsen said, and then, turning to the girl: “You did me a good turn once, and I’m returning the favor now. I’ve bought you from Madam Skyngsa, and I’m going to manumit you within the next couple of days, as soon as we can get an appointment with a magistrate. And this apartment is yours; I’ll pay for it until you are in a position to pay for it yourself, or move into other lodgings you like better.”
“I... don’t remember helping you, sir, but I thank you with every string of my heart!”
“I’ll remind you about it later, after Kuspar leaves. Just a moment more, please.” Turning back to Kuspar, he said: “You can mention my name, but not hers. The fact that I’m manumitting her, and putting her up in an apartment, but not where the apartment is.”
“Got it,” Kuspar said, and repeated back his instructions. Then he counted out 3,400 marks from the valise, and handed them over.
“It’s a pleasure doing business with you,” he said.
“Likewise,” Tyngsen said, and saw him out. When the door was closed, he said to the girl, “Relax, make yourself at home. Can I make you some coffee or tea?”
“Tea would be nice,” she said cautiously, apparently unable to believe her good fortune — suspicious, perhaps, that the offer to manumit her was a trick. She sat down on the sofa, but didn’t lean back and relax.
Tyngsen went to the kitchen and started brewing a pot of tea, then returned and sat in the easy chair — near her, but not crowding her.
“You don’t recognize me, Suryndra,” he said; “I look a lot different from when you saw me last. My name is Tyngsen, but you knew me as Pindra.”
“Pindra!” she said, eyes wide, and gaped at him for a few moments. “What happened? Some people said you’d escaped, and some that you’d been killed trying to escape, but I figured if that was true they’ve have shown us your body as a warning...”
“I escaped,” he confirmed. “I would have gotten you and some of the others out as well, if I could, but I couldn’t figure out how... I went to my uncle, Boss Ftero. He was Boss Sgadrim’s rival — you remember —”
“I remember, you told me how you and your sister were taken because your father and uncle pissed Sgadrim off.”
“Well, my uncle paid a sorcerer to do this,” gesturing at his face and body, “— I’ll explain about that soon, it’s not quite what it looks like. And I’ve been working for him, and saving money, and making inquiries about what it would cost to get you out of there. And now you’re free to do as you like, and you’ll be legally free in a day or two.”
Tears were starting up in her eyes. “Thank you, Pindra!” She rose, approached him, and embraced him before he could react. He tensed for a moment, then relaxed and hugged her back.
“You feel softer than you look,” she said, confused.
“I’ll explain about that,” he said, and told her about the impossibility of restoring his manhood by sorcery, and Gurefkam’s illusion spell, and Symsar’s potion.
“So I’ve still got small breasts, under this illusion,” he said. “You’re the first person in the last eight years to get close enough to me to feel them.”
“And...?” She glanced at his crotch, and he nodded.
“I still have to sit down to pee. My subordinates think I’ve got a chronic case of the runs. Everyone knows I disappeared, was kidnapped by one of Uncle Ftero’s enemies when I was a child, and escaped several years later. And there are rumors that they did... bad stuff to me. But Gurefkam and Symsar fixed me up — everyone thinks. Only now...” He explained about the rumors that were circulating to explain his being celibate in spite of being surrounded by prostitutes who, if not directly under his orders, were encouraged by their madams to keep the security staff happy.
“You can do whatever you want,” he said again. “I really want to stress that. If you don’t want to help me, I can find someone else. But I thought I’d ask you first, since you already know my secret, and I wouldn’t have to trust a stranger with it.”
“Help you how?” she asked.
“Pretend to be my mistress,” he explained. “I’ll pay for your apartment and your groceries and so forth, and nice clothes, and come visit a couple of times a week and we can play pangkar and talk about old times. And people will find out I’m coming to see you and paying for your apartment, and assume we’re having sex, and they won’t gossip about me being queer or impotent anymore. For you, well, you get all the benefits of being a powerful man’s mistress without actually having to have sex with some guy whenever he wants it. If you meet somebody and want to have an affair with him, that’s fine, just tell me about it and we’ll figure out a way to keep people from finding out. Or if you want to get married, that’s fine too; I can find another woman to help with my cover story.”
“I’ll be happy to help,” Suryndra said. “You say I’m free to do whatever, but I don’t want to go away. You were my closest friend before you escaped, and I don’t know anybody outside of Madam Skyngsa’s house except you. I’ll be happy to help you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “If you ever get tired of this arrangement and want to do something else, tell me. I’ll help you find someone to teach you whatever trade you want, I’ll buy you a ticket to anywhere you want to go. — Hmm, I think the tea should be ready by now.”
I'll probably post part three in about a week.
A Notional Treason, a transgender fantasy of manners in the same setting as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
"The Manumission Game" is inspired by (though not exactly a sequel to) an old story from the Transformation Stories Archive. I'll identify that story and its author in an afterword after part six is posted, but you're welcome to speculate about it in the comments. Probably it will be obvious to people who remember the story in question by the end of part four, if not part three.
“I know what it’s like to be a slave, and I don’t want you to be slaves. But I’ve run the numbers; I can’t afford to free all of you at once...”
For himself, he didn’t mind losing a huge sum; but he knew that if he looked like he was running the organization into the ground, his lieutenants would challenge him, and sooner or later he’d lose a challenge.
It soon became general knowledge that Tyngsen had bought a girl out of slavery and made her his mistress. The rumors were contradictory about her name, the pimp or madam she had been purchased from, her ethnicity, and several other points; that suited Tyngsen perfectly. Tyngsen had already been remarked on as eccentric for treating the slave-prostitutes just the same as the free girls; when rumors of his manumission of Suryndra got around, the slave girls in the bordellos he was in charge of protecting became even more solicitous for his comfort and were baffled by his polite rejection of their advances. They clearly hoped he would buy them out of slavery, perhaps after he tired of his current mistress. He wished he could free more of them, but his current earnings wouldn’t let him free more than one a year, and then only if he focused on the ones who were almost too old for that kind of work, whose price would be low. He made long-term plans, and kept them to himself.
Within a few more months, not only Suryndra’s existence but her name and face became generally known to those who paid to have Tyngsen watched; and from them, rumors trickled back to Tyngsen’s associates. At that point, he could no longer protect her by keeping his visits to her discreet; so they began to be seen in public together, and he assigned one of his men to guard her apartment when he was not with her.
Once each year, Tyngsen went to Gurefkam to have the illusions spell renewed and adjusted. This cost much less than the original spell had cost his uncle. Gurefkam added faint lines around the mouth and eyes of his illusory face, and gradually thinned and greyed the illusory hair over his still-lush natural hair. Tyngsen cut his own hair in private; since he could not see it, but had to manage by feel, he did it with his eyes closed. How it was shaped or cut scarcely mattered, as long as it did not grow so long as to show itself beyond the edges of the illusion.
Over the next eleven years his uncle entrusted him with more and more responsibility, and his men’s respect for him gradually increased. None of the men or women under his command ever spent more than one night in jail, and rarely that much. His relations with the aldermen and the police were cordial; he and his uncle didn’t step beyond the unofficial bounds of custom, and they didn’t enforce the law with all its rigor in his territory, when they had more disruptive bosses and bosses' lieutenants to worry about.
When his uncle died of a stroke, he took command swiftly and decisively; only one of his uncle’s other lieutenants challenged him for the succession, and that challenge lasted only a couple of hours before a man loyal to Tyngsen shot him in the back.
The day after his uncle’s funeral, Boss Tyngsen called his lieutenants together at his office.
“You all know how my uncle ran this organization,” he told them. “I intend, in most respects, to continue running things the same way. But I intend to make one change in policy. Come, follow me and I’ll show you what I mean.”
Tyngsen and three of his lieutenants got into one car, and the others into another; the latter followed Tyngsen’s car to the bordello nearest to Tyngsen’s office. They parked on the street and went inside. It was an hour before noon, still early in the day for the girls and their madam. One of Tyngsen’s enforcers was on duty in the front room; he stood up alertly as the men entered, then saluted the Boss and asked, “What can I do for you?”
“Wake Madam Nangyna up,” Tyngsen said, “and have her wake the girls and gather them in the parlor. We’ll wait and make ourselves comfortable.” He sat in one of the easy chairs, and invited his lieutenants to avail themselves of the sofas, divans and love seats.
It took some time, but within half an hour Madam Nangyna had gathered all her girls, slave and free, in the parlor. They stood ranged along the wall, some blinking sleepily, others striking provocative poses, trying to catch the eye of one or another lieutenant, or of the Boss himself.
“Is this everybody?” Tyngsen asked Madam Nangyna.
“This is all of them,” she said. Tyngsen stood up and said:
“This mainly concerns the slaves, though I want Madam and the free girls to hear it too. Some of you know I used to be a slave; I was born free, but Boss Sgadrim, an enemy of my father and uncle, kidnapped me and my sister and enslaved us. My sister died in slavery, but I escaped, and came back and worked for my uncle, and now I’m boss of this organization.
“I know what it’s like to be a slave, and I don’t want you to be slaves. But I’ve run the numbers; I can’t afford to free all of you at once. The loss for the year on the bordellos would offset all the profits from the joydust, smuggling and gaming operations. So I’m giving you all two days a week off, just as the free girls have; if you want to work on those days, you’ll earn money toward your freedom, and if you choose to work every other off day, I estimate you’ll buy yourselves out in four or five years. You slaves won’t be charged for room and board out of your off-day earnings, until and unless you’ve bought yourselves out — and then you’ll be earning money every day, so it shouldn’t be hard to pay for it.
“And if you want to get into some other trade after you’re freed, I’ll help with that too. A friend of mine will come in and teach you to read and figure, if you want to learn; and I’ll have others in to teach you other skills, if you want to give up prostitution. That goes for the free girls, too, though you’ll have to pay a few pence a week for the lessons.
“Any questions?”
There was a stunned silence for several seconds. Then one of the slave girls said, “How much money are we going to get when we work extra? And how much do we need to save to buy ourselves out?”
“That depends,” Tyngsen said. “I’ll work with your madam on setting prices for each of you — generally higher for the younger and prettier girls, and lower for the older ones. I’ll set them as low as I can and still have the bordellos turn a profit over the next few years, though. The madams will set aside for you fifty per cent of what the customers pay them for your services on the days you would normally have off, if you want to work some on those days. The same rate as the free girls.”
The next question came from Tesro. “Boss, I’d like to see your numbers. I don’t see how we can not lose money doing this. I know you don’t like slavery, but we’ve got to earn a living here.”
“I’ll show you the figures when we get back to the office,” Tyngsen said. “We won’t make as much money on the bordellos as usual, but they won’t lose money either, unless all the slaves buy themselves out in the same year, and they all quit work as soon as they buy themselves out. I figure some will buy themselves out faster and some slower than others, and at least half of them will keep working here as free girls, at least for a while, and that will give us time to gradually replace the ones who quit, same as we’re doing now when they get too old for this kind of work.”
“And what are you going to do about the ensorcelled girls, Boss?” asked Prydasam, his lieutenant in charge of gaming houses. Prydasam had worked with Tyngsen on bordello security when they were young men in Ftero’s employ.
“That might be tricky,” Tyngsen admitted. “I’m going to meet with a couple of sorcerers later this week and start figuring out what will be necessary to break those spells. I think there are several different spells that were used on different girls, and some of them will be easier to break than others. Whatever it costs to break the spells, we’ll add that on to what the girl’s market price would otherwise be when she starts earning her way free.”
“That makes sense,” Prydasam said, nodding.
Over the next four days, Tyngsen made the same announcement to the girls and boys in each bordello. He met privately with each of the madams and went over the roster of prostitutes, setting prices for each of them, as low as he thought he could afford and still not lose money on the bordellos. For himself, he didn’t mind losing a huge sum; but he knew that if he looked like he was running the organization into the ground, his lieutenants would challenge him, and sooner or later he’d lose a challenge.
Then he scheduled a meeting with Ftymsar, the best sorcerer on his staff, at Madam Srulendra’s bordello. No fewer than eight of the girls and boys there were ensorcelled to enforce obedience; some had been purchased in that state from their former masters, others had been ensorcelled by Ftymsar or one of his colleagues after trying to escape. He had Madam Srulendra bring the ensorcelled ones in to the back parlor where he and Ftymsar were talking.
“So what will be involved in freeing them?” Tyngsen asked him.
“The ones I ensorcelled will be pretty easy,” Ftymsar said. “A pinch of mandrake root, the pelt of a white rabbit, three hairs from a wild horse’s tail... it doesn’t need anything very rare or expensive, and the ritual’s only about two hours. We can free a couple of them tonight, and the others tomorrow. And there are two others that Sdireng ensorcelled, using the same spell. But then there are these three others — Madam Srulendra bought them already ensorcelled, and I don’t know what spell was used on them. I’ll have to do some research and figure out what it is and how to break it.”
“You do that,” Tyngsen said, “and go ahead and break the spell on the ones you know how.”
“Are you sure you want to do that now?” Ftymsar said. “I thought you were going to let them earn money and buy themselves out before you freed them.”
“They’ll still legally be slaves,” Tyngsen said, “but I think I want to break those spells as soon as possible. It depends, though. I’ve known a couple of slaves under obedience spells, but I didn’t realize there were different kinds... what about the spell you used, does it leave the subject with enough free will to understand the speech I gave them a couple of days ago, and decide for themselves whether they want to rest on their days off or work extra and earn freedom?”
“The one we used is pretty clean,” Ftymsar said; “it stops them from leaving the bordello, except under direct orders from their master or master’s representative — that would be you or Madam Srulendra — and it compels them to obey general and specific orders they’re given. They’re free to do as they please when they aren’t under orders. But as for the spell or spells used on the others — I don’t know.”
“Hmm. Maybe... No, let’s go ahead and break the spells as soon as we can.”
“I’ll need you there,” Ftymsar said. “They’re owned by the organization, but you’re the head of it, so you’re their owner by the terms of the spell, and you’ll need to act a small part in the ritual.”
“All right, coach me on what I’m to do...”
Three nights later, Tyngsen went to Suryndra’s apartment after he got done with business for the day. She smiled when she saw him, and said, “Come in, I’ve got supper ready.”
“How have you been?” he asked, giving her a hug. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you much — things have been busy since Uncle died, I’ve had a lot of work to do to consolidate my hold over the organization and put the new policy in place without provoking a rebellion.”
“I’ve been fine,” she said. “I enjoy seeing you, but I don’t languish from boredom when you’re not here, you know. Not like when you first bought me out and I didn’t know anybody but you... Tell me about work. You said you’ve put the new policy in place — you mean you’ve started freeing the slaves?” They moved into the kitchen and he sat down at the table while she served supper.
He told her about giving the speech to the girls and boys in each bordello on successive mornings. “And the last few days I’ve been working with Ftymsar on breaking the obedience spells on some of the slaves. You remember when I said I could probably come over a few nights ago, and then I called and said I had to cancel? Ftymsar said the ritual had to be done at night, and because I was their owner, I’d have to be there and take part in it.”
“Was it hard?”
“Not too bad,” he said. “Not as bad as the illusion spell Gurefkam put on me. I had to stand in one spell circle, while Ftymsar stood in another with his brazier and spell materials and the slave we were working on stood in another, none of us wearing anything. I was a little worried that the spell might interfere with the illusion, and I called Gurefkam on a secure line to check. But it held up fine. I spoke the parts of the spell Ftymsar coached me on, and stood there listening to him and watching him work for a while, and then it was over and we rested for half an hour before we worked on the next slave. And then we did two more slaves the next night, and I told him I wanted to take a night off before doing any more.”
“That’s good,” she said, “you need your rest. How many more are there?”
“One more under the same spell in that bordello, and nine more in a couple of others. And then there are sixteen others under different obedience spells — at least three that Ftymsar has identified, and some he’s not sure about yet. He warned me that freeing them would be more difficult and complicated, but I don’t know the details yet.”
“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” she said.
“So, how have you been, really?”
She told him about what she’d done in the last few days, the opera she’d seen at Ftipa Hall and the work she’d been doing at the runaway shelter. They sat on the sofa after supper, leaning against one another, listening to the radio and occasionally talking a little, or singing along with Trosundra of Dynusem, whose concert was being broadcast live. He fell asleep, and woke the next morning to find she had taken his shoes off and spread a blanket over him.
A couple of days later, Ftymsar came to see him again. “What have you found out?” Tyngsen asked.
“I’ve identified the spells used on all but five of the slaves in all your bordellos,” he said. “There are four spells, plus at least one unknown spell used on those five others. Three of them I can break with materials I have on hand, or can get within a day or two; but the other will require hippogriff milk. Not hippogriff cheese, but fresh hippogriff milk, and there aren’t any hippogriffs on this continent. It’ll cost two or three thousand marks to have it sent express from Khareush by airship courier under a refrigeration spell, and we’ll have to drop whatever else we’re doing and start the ritual as soon as the courier arrives at the aerodrome — or at dawn the next morning if he arrives at night. Or we could take a trip, you and me and the slave under that spell, to Khareush and cast the spell there.”
“I figure my time’s worth a thousand marks a day or more, and yours is at least half that; let’s send for the milk — unless you think there’s a chance it might not be fresh enough? Good. All right, I’m authorizing that expense. What about the rituals? Don’t waste my time with the technical details, just tell me how my part of them differs from the spell you used before.”
“Most of them are more time-consuming than that one,” Ftymsar said; “five to seven hours. Some can only be cast by daylight, some at night, and one can only be worked on the night of the full moon — there are two slaves under that spell, and I don’t think we can free both of them the same night. And one of these counterspells is... risky.”
“Risky how?”
“There’s a slight chance — if something goes wrong, if the materials are impure or we make a mistake with the ritual — that the spell could infect you or me or both, instead of breaking. We might end up slaves as well, compelled to obey the next free person we see after the spell is completed. Obviously I don’t think the danger’s too great, or I wouldn’t be willing to try it, but I want five thousand marks as a danger bonus on that one.”
“All right. I’m still going to do it, but let’s save it for last; I want to be sure all the others are freed in case something goes wrong and we can’t do any more after that one. And let’s take another precaution; I’ll ask someone I trust to be on hand, just outside the room where we’re casting the spell, so we won’t be enslaved to some random person if the worst happens.
“Now, what about those other five you mentioned?”
“Those are the five women in the attic at Madam Fparadra’s house.”
“...Oh.”
At one time or another in the years he worked protection for one or more of the bordellos, Tyngsen had met or at least seen nearly all the prostitutes working there, slave or free, ensorcelled or not. There were many he didn’t know well; some didn’t speak Kosyan well, or at all, and some were quiet and uncommunicative, but most mixed with the men assigned to protect them from rambunctious customers and were friendly with them, sometimes extremely so. More than a few had married one or another of Tyngsen’s colleagues to get out of the business.
But there were five women, so people said, in the attic at Madam Fparadra’s house who never left their attic; and whom men, even the enforcers or the Boss, never visited just to chat. They were said to be under a powerful spell that made them insatiably obsessed with sex; if a customer or enforcer entered their domain, after Madam Fparadra locked him into the vestibule, he emerged only after the women had gotten all the use they could out of him, blissfully exhausted and with his clothes in tatters if he had not had the presence of mind to remove them before unlocking the inner door. Tyngsen, hearing about this, never ventured to visit them; he wasn’t sure if they would be fooled by his illusion at first glance, but certainly they would be disappointed once they got their hands on him. And there was a chance that their disappointment might blow his cover.
“So,” he said after a moment’s thought, “you’re still not sure what spell they’re under?”
“It’s... a bit hard to research, Boss.” Ftymsar looked embarrassed. “I went there a couple of days ago and had Madam Fparadra let me into the vestibule, and I tried to work a sleep spell on them through the inner door. It felt like it hit the targets, and I gave it several minutes to take effect, and I opened the inner door... well, the sleep spell had no effect on them. Within a few moments I was too distracted to study the spell, and later I was too tired.
“Then yesterday I tried something else — I put a curse on myself, to make me, ah... unable to satisfy women. You owe me for this, boss — it won’t wear off for several more days. This time they figured out I wasn’t any use to them after a quarter of an hour or so, and I still had enough energy left to study the spell. But I couldn’t get any of them to sit still in a spell circle while I worked; whatever that spell they’re under is, it’s not exactly an obedience spell, or maybe it’s only their master they’re compelled to obey, not his representatives. I learned a little of what it’s not, but I still don’t know what it is.”
“Did you ask Madam Fparadra who she bought them from? Maybe we need some old-fashioned detective work, not just a diagnostic spell. Find out who ensorcelled them and ask him, or his apprentices if he’s dead.”
“I checked that. Madam Fparadra says they were already in the house when she started working there under Madam Sgamendra, forty-five years ago — and they don’t look any older than they did then. And we looked through the records in her office, and couldn’t find any receipt for their purchase. We have no idea how old they are or when the spell was cast. I don’t know why someone would waste an immortality spell on slaves, or how somebody rich and powerful enough to buy an immortality spell could get enslaved... and the women don’t seem to remember their past, or at least I couldn’t get them to talk about it.
“But if they’re compelled to obey only their master, then if I go back with you, while I’m still under this impotence curse — I’d need to put the same curse on you, I’m afraid — maybe you can order them to stand still in the circles and I can figure something more out.”
“Let’s schedule a time for that. How much longer will the curse last?”
“At least three more days.”
Tyngsen studied his appointment book. “Let’s do it tonight.” He’d have to call Suryndra and cancel their dinner date, but it couldn’t be helped; he didn’t want to ask Ftymsar to cast that impotence curse on himself again. And he hoped Ftymsar wouldn’t notice anything untoward when he cast that wholly unnecessary curse on Tyngsen himself.
Apologies for the delay on this one, which were prolonged by my staying at a place where the firewall blocks BC as well as by BC's own downtime. I'll probably post part four in about a week.
A Notional Treason, a transgender fantasy of manners in the same setting as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
"The Manumission Game" is inspired by (though not exactly a sequel to) an old story from the Transformation Stories Archive. I'll identify that story and its author in an afterword after part six is posted, but you're welcome to speculate about it in the comments. Probably it will be obvious to people who remember the story in question by the end of part four, if not part three.
“I’m not a woman,” he said in a low voice. “I’m a man, but a wicked alchemist did this to me. Can you tell me anything about the sorcerer who did this to you?”
A haunted look came into the eyes of the women for a moment, but quickly passed. “We have ever been thus,” one of them said.
That night Tyngsen met Ftymsar at Madam Fparadra’s. He found the sorcerer chatting in the parlor with Drispana, one of the older girls — she was just starting to lose her looks, and would need to find another line of work soon, if she couldn’t find a husband.
“You ready?” the Boss asked him.
“Sure. I’ve got everything I need right here,” Ftymsar said, hefting his large black bag of spell-materials.
Madam Fparadra led them upstairs and peered through a small barred window in the door. “Good, the inner door is closed...” She unlocked the outer door, let them into the vestibule, and locked them in.
Tyngsen studied the room. The inner door had a hydraulic mechanism attached, apparently to close it automatically if it wasn’t held open. From this side, it looked easy to open; he wasn’t sure what kept the women on the other side from opening it, or how their customers got out when they were finished.
“You know the drill,” Ftymsar said, “undress and step into this circle.” He knelt and sketched a circle on the floor with green chalk.
“How are you supposed to cast this curse on somebody I don’t like if you need them to undress and step into a circle?” Tyngsen said, untying his shoes.
“Oh, I can cast it from a thousand miles away if I’ve got some of the guy’s hair or fingernails, or dirty underwear or used condoms, or any of several other things with a connection to him. But it’s a lot faster and easier if the target cooperates. You want to be here all night?”
“You’re the expert,” Tyngsen said, taking off the rest of his clothes and stepping into the circle. The impotence curse turned out to be a fairly quick spell; he didn’t feel anything, of course, and he watched Ftymsar carefully to see if he detected anything off about him. He didn’t seem to suspect anything, at least not while he was working the spell.
“You took that awfully calm,” he remarked as he put his materials back into his bag. “Most guys would be a little nervous about losing the ability to get it up for four days or more... I can’t guarantee it will wear off sooner than a week, but if it lasts longer than that, come to me and I’ll do another spell to break it.”
Tyngsen shrugged. “My lady friend and I are old enough we don’t jump in the sack like teenagers every time we see each other,” he said. “A few nights of quiet cuddling and talking will be good for us. — What next?”
Ftymsar took a deep breath. “Now... we go in. Let them do what they want with you, and they’ll probably lose interest in a few minutes. Then I’ll draw the circles and you tell them to step into them and stand still. Identify yourself first, tell them you’re their master, Boss Ftero’s heir, and so forth.”
“All right. Let’s do it.”
“Follow me through the door as quick as you can... Leave your clothes out here, you won’t need them.” Ftymsar turned the doorknob, pulled the door open just far enough to admit him, and slipped through; Tyngsen was on his heels, and pulled the door to behind him, hearing it click loudly as it shut. He glanced back and saw that from this side the doorknob was a kind of puzzle; then his attention was drawn to his surroundings.
There were five women, all young and beautiful and none wearing anything, scattered around on beds, chairs and couches. They were of different ethnicities, their skin ranging from pale to ebon and their builds as diverse again.
“Thou hast returned!” cried a small slender woman with pale skin, rising from a couch and stepping rapidly toward the men.
“And brought with thee a friend,” said a taller and darker woman, jumping out of bed and following her companion.
“Dost fare better this day?” another one asked Ftymsar. “Oh, I hope so!”
“There’s something’s amiss about thee,” said the fourth, approaching Tyngsen and looking him forthrightly up and down. The fifth took Tyngsen’s hand and said dubiously, “He seemeth manly enow...”
Ftymsar was being dragged, unresisting, into one of the large beds by three of the women, leaving these two to study Tyngsen uncertainly.
“I’m afraid I can’t do what you want,” Tyngsen said, uncertain if they would be able to understand him. “I’m under an impotence curse, like my friend there.”
“Mayhap... but let us try thy mettle ere we despair,” one of the women said, taking him by the left arm. The other took his right, and they pulled him toward another bed. He let them.
It didn’t take them long to figure out that he wasn’t what he looked like.
“I can see it, but I can’t touch it,” one of them said in frustration as she groped his crotch.
“I feel these but see them not,” the other said, grasping his vestigial breasts. “Is it a woman or a man?”
Tyngsen glanced at the other bed, where Ftymsar seemed to be thoroughly distracted with the other women’s useless ministrations. Hopefully he hadn’t heard that.
“I’m not a woman,” he said in a low voice. “I’m a man, but a wicked alchemist did this to me. Can you tell me anything about the sorcerer who did this to you?”
A haunted look came into the eyes of the women for a moment, but quickly passed. “We have ever been thus,” one of them said.
“What’s your name?”
“We need no names.”
It was time to try something different. “Listen,” he said, “I’m your master, Boss Tyngsen. Your owner. Boss Ftero, who used to own you, was my uncle, and I’m his heir and successor.”
“Oh,” one of them said. She seemed uninterested. “Let us go, and see whether his friend hath recovered his strength,” she said to her companion, and got up to go over to the other bed.
The other woman continued groping Tyngsen’s crotch for a little longer, and said, “Thou’rt a girl; I feel thy cunt though there be something amiss about it. Why not join us in taking our pleasure of yon fellow?”
“I’m not a girl,” Tyngsen insisted quietly. “It just feels that way...” He thought about trying to explain, and gave up. “I don’t enjoy it when a guy puts his thing in down there.”
“It’s the only joy we ever have,” the woman said. “Thou must surely be sad, if thou hast no joy in being tumbled. Hast suffered some injury there?” He could barely feel her finger in the numb cavity the alchemist had cut into him; still, he didn’t like it. He pushed her hand away gently and said:
“Yes, I suffered an injury there once. But I’m not sad, there are other good things in life besides sex. We’ll break this spell and you’ll be able to think of and enjoy other things.”
“Oh.” She seemed finally to lose interest in him, jumped up and wandered over to the other bed. About that time a couple of the women who had been trying without success to get Ftymsar erect lost interest in him and headed toward the bed Tyngsen was just getting out of. He tried to tell them he was their master, but with no better success.
Ftymsar, in the other bed, patiently endured the attentions of the other women while the three who had first accosted him discovered to their disappointment that Tyngsen wasn’t equipped to satisfy them. Finally, all five seemed to grow bored and retreated to the other end of the room, pouting. Tyngsen sat up and looked at Ftymsar, wondering how much he had overheard of what the women had said about Tyngsen, or what he had said to them about himself.
If he had overheard anything odd, he didn’t let on. Probably he had been too distracted by the women in bed with him, even with the impotence spell, to notice what the others were saying. He said to Tyngsen, “Did you try telling them you were their master?”
“I did. They didn’t seem to care.”
Ftymsar sighed. “Okay, it’s not an obedience spell at all. It’s just an obsession spell. That narrows it down a lot. I still don’t know how it works, but...” He mused quietly for a few moments, then went to where he had dropped his black bag when the women grabbed him, opened it, and got out the chalks. He drew a couple of circles in the floor, and said to Tyngsen:
“Try this. Just grab one of them — the smallest, the hazel-eyed girl there — pull her into this circle, and hold her there, if you can.”
“I can, unless the others gang up on me.” Tyngsen tried ordering and cajoling her first, though. “Listen,” he said to her, approaching the couch where she lay and looking down at her, “come stand in that circle over there.”
“Thou canst not pleasure me,” she said. “Wherefore should I obey thee?”
“No, I can’t pleasure you. But you’ll be able to have other kinds of fun later, if you do this now.”
“What other kind may there be?” She lost interest in him and gazed at the wall vacantly.
He took her by the shoulders and lifted her from the couch. She didn’t resist much, and after brief glances at him the others didn’t seem to care. He frog-marched her into the circle and stood there.
“When may some other men come?” she said. “Thou and thy friend are of no use.”
“Later,” Tyngsen promised her. “Right now you need to stand still and be quiet.”
She was, for a while, though not all through Ftymsar’s diagnostic spell. A couple more times, at intervals of half an hour or so, she complained that she was bored and that Tyngsen and Ftymsar were no fun. Tyngsen worried that she would say something to give away his secret to Ftymsar, but she wasn’t that specific in her complaints.
Finally, Ftymsar said: “Let her go, and let’s get out of here.”
He worked the puzzle set into the door — it was fairly simple, but apparently too complicated for the women to figure out — and he and Tyngsen slipped through quickly. The women didn’t try to follow them.
“What did you learn?” Tyngsen asked as they got dressed in the vestibule.
“I’ll need to study and think about what I’ve seen,” Ftymsar said with a frown. “It’s a complex spell, but I think it was supposed to be temporary, and something went wrong with the conditions that were supposed to terminate it. The immortality might be a side-effect of that; they can’t age or die until the conditions of the spell are fulfilled and they’re freed. If I can figure out what those conditions were supposed to be, and we can replicate them... then we might not need a counterspell at all.”
“Let me know what you find out. Meanwhile, let’s do the counterspells for the ones we know how to disenchant.”
They finished getting dressed, and rang the bell. Madam Fparadra came and looked through the grille, verified that none of the women were in the vestibule with them, and let them out.
Two days or nights out of three for the next twelve days, Tyngsen met with Ftymsar to free one or more of the ensorcelled slaves. Then they had to wait until the next full moon to free another, and then till the following full moon to free the other slave ensorcelled under that spell. Then Ftymsar sent to his contacts in Khareush, and they settled in to wait for the hippogriff milk.
Tyngsen had already told Suryndra about what he had planned, and now he warned her that the time was imminent.
“You’re so brave,” she said. “I don’t know if I could risk getting enslaved again, even to free somebody I cared about. Much less getting ensorcelled so I wouldn’t even want to try to escape... If those busybodies who preach against the bosses knew what you were really like, they’d shut their mouths quick.”
Tyngsen shrugged uncomfortably. “I try to do right by my people,” he said. “My uncle did, too, but he didn’t know what it was like being a slave.”
She squeezed his hand, and looked at him with tears in her eyes. “Don’t mess up! I don’t want you as my slave, I want —” She looked away. “I’m afraid it would mess up our friendship, if you got magically enslaved to me.”
“I won’t mess up,” Tyngsen said. “And Ftymsar has good reason to be even more careful than usual. We’ll be fine.”
A week passed. If the airship to Khareush had made the best possible time, and Ftymsar’s contact had been able to get a batch of hippogriff milk on the very next airship back to Kosyndar that same day, and that airship made the best possible time... then the milk could arrive any hour now. Tyngsen kept his radio tuned to the station that monitored air traffic, and whenever an airship from the east was spotted coming in over the coast, his nerves were on edge until he knew whether it was coming from Khareush and headed for Kosyndar. When such a ship was finally spotted, he gave Pengram his instructions, left the office, picked up Suryndra at her apartment, and went to Madam Rispema’s house.
Madam Rispema greeted them at the door. “I just had a call from Ftymsar,” she said; “he’s met with the courier at the aerodrome and is on his way here.”
“Good,” Tyngsen said. “Please send for...” He hesitated a moment before remembering the name of the slave they were to disenchant today. “Kefpidra. And have you got the room ready to Ftymsar’s specifications?”
“Right this way, Boss,” she said.
She showed them two rooms with a connecting door. The larger of the two had bars affixed to its door into the hallway, so there was no way out except through the adjoining room. Suryndra would wait in the outer room while Ftymsar and Tyngsen tried to free Kefpidra from the spell she had been placed under by her former master. If anything went wrong, Suryndra would be the first free person they saw, afterward.
Tyngsen and Suryndra waited tensely in the outer room for a few minutes, until Madam Rispema ushered in Kefpidra. Kefpidra was a tall woman in her mid-thirties, who had been unable to speak until recently, when Tyngsen had countermanded an order given her fifteen years ago by her former master before he died and Madam Rispema bought the girl at the estate sale. She seemed still unused to her voice.
“I’m here, master,” she said.
“Good. I hereby order you to sit down and relax in whichever chair you like best, until Ftymsar gets here.” She sat in the nearest cushioned chair and seemed to go limp, like a marionette whose puppeteer had passed out in a drunken stupor; her head lolled to one side, her mouth gaped, and a few moments later, the crotch of her gown was marked by a spreading stain. Tyngsen cursed his carelessness, the sorcerer who’d placed her under this spell, and the master who’d hired him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You needn’t relax quite so much next time I give you an order like that, and you may move to another chair.” Kefpidra stood up and moved to the nearest chair, a wooden one, but didn’t look Tyngsen or Suryndra in the eyes.
They sat in awkward silence for a time. Suryndra whispered to Tyngsen, “You could end up like that, if something goes wrong. Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Ftymsar thinks it’s safe enough, or he wouldn’t do it. Yes, I’m sure.”
They waited another quarter of an hour before Ftymsar arrived with his black bag. “I’ve got it, Boss,” he said breathlessly. “We should go over the ritual one more time before we start, but we can’t take too long — we’ve only got five and a half hours till sunset, and if we don’t start in the next half hour we’ll have to wait until tomorrow. The milk’s already three days from the hippogriff’s teat, and I think it’s safer to try the spell now than to wait until tomorrow when we’ll have one or two more rehearsals under our belt, but milk that’s less fresh.”
“You’re the expert,” Tyngsen said. “We’ve already rehearsed seven times together, and Suryndra has helped me rehearse my part several more times.”
They reviewed the ritual once more, Suryndra listening anxiously, Kefpidra impassively. Then Tyngsen said: “Kefpidra, follow us into that room there. Suryndra — stay here, guard the outer door, and don’t let anyone else in.”
“Be careful,” she said, and hugged him. If Ftymsar was curious about why Tyngsen didn’t kiss her, he didn’t say anything.
Tyngsen followed Ftymsar into the inner room, and Kefpidra followed him; he shut the door behind them and locked it. The door to the hall was barred on the outside, but he thought it prudent to move a chair in front of it as well, while Ftymsar checked to make sure the chalk circles he’d drawn on the floor a few days earlier were still undisturbed.
“We’re ready,” Ftymsar said. “Undress, and tell her to undress, and get into your circles.”
Tyngsen did so, and gave Kefpidra some additional instructions as well.
Soon they were each nude and in the appropriate circle. Ftymsar lit his brazier, put the first of the spell-materials into the cauldron, and spoke the first words of the spell.
Tyngsen listened carefully for his cues, and spoke his parts without, as far as he could tell, any hesitation or mistake. The form of the spell was rigid enough that they could not leave their circles until it was finished, at risk of, in the early stages, wasting the hippogriff’s milk and their time, or, in the later stages, being entangled in the obedience spell along with Kefpidra. But they could shift their position and posture from time to time, and if they needed to, could relieve themselves into the old-fashioned chamberpots Tyngsen had procured for the purpose, which were set within each circle. Tyngsen had drunk two cups of coffee after he heard the news of the airship’s approach on the radio, to make sure he’d be wide awake and alert until the spell was finished, and not long after the first part of the spell he had to speak, he needed the pot. Kefpidra didn’t need hers until several hours had passed, but she did eventually, and Tyngsen was glad he’d given her specific instructions about it; without them, she might have peed on the floor, dissolving the chalk circle and dooming them all.
Tyngsen had thought himself calm enough when they began, but as the ritual proceeded, he grew more nervous. He was a moment late with one of his responses, and worried that he might have already doomed them by that slip. But Ftymsar didn’t seem concerned about it, so he tried to relax and listen for his next cue. He spoke that response on time, and the next one, and the next one... The light was getting dim. Would they be finished by sunset?
They were, just barely. The setting sun was in Tyngsen’s eyes when Ftymsar spoke the final words. Tyngsen felt a little twinge of headache like he’d felt the other times they’d dispelled an obedience spell, and then Ftymsar poured water over the coals and said: “It’s finished. You can relax and get dressed.”
Tyngsen stepped out of the circle and picked up his underwear. He noticed Kefpidra looking around hesitantly. “How do you feel?” he asked her.
“Strange,” she said.
“You can get dressed,” he said. “Or not. I’m not giving you orders either way. You have the next two days off to do whatever you please, as long as you stay in the bordello, and then you’ll go back to work the next day...”
She picked up her clothes and started getting dressed, then stopped. She looked at Tyngsen for a long moment, then put the rest of her clothes on. “I can do what I want...?”
“Yes, and when Madam Rispema or I tell you what to do in the future, you won’t be magically compelled to do it, and you can interpret our orders sensibly, instead of doing exactly what we say when we speak carelessly like I did a few hours ago. I’m sorry about that, by the way.”
“Thank you, Boss,” she said.
“Do you remember what I said a few months ago, to you and the other girls, about how you can earn your way out of slavery?”
She frowned, and said: “Vaguely... I’m not sure. Can you tell me again, please?”
He repeated the conditions of his offer. “So you don’t have to work for the next couple of days, but if you want to do some work — maybe less than a full night’s work, if you like; you can tell some customers no if you don’t want to serve them — you’ll be earning money toward your freedom.”
Ftymsar had his clothes on by now, and he said, “Have you got the key to this door?”
“Yes, it’s here in my trousers pocket.” Tyngsen unlocked the door, and said, suddenly, “Are you sure it worked right? Might it have gotten transferred to you or me instead of dispelling?”
“Pretty sure,” Ftymsar said. “If that had happened, I think we’d be compelled to obey Kefpidra... But we’ll know for sure when we see Suryndra.”
Tyngsen opened the door and stepped out.
Suryndra jumped up from the chair she’d been sitting in and looked apprehensively at him. “Did it work?” she asked.
“I think so,” he said, “at least for Kefpidra. Try ordering me to do something silly.”
“Stand on one leg and sing ‘Down in Huresh the Lilies Grow’.”
“No.” He stuck his tongue out at her and grinned.
“I think this operation is a success, Boss,” Ftymsar said. “Let’s go home and crash.”
Tyngsen took Suryndra home, and spent the night with her.
I'll probably post part five in about a week.
A Notional Treason, a transgender fantasy of manners in the same setting as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
"The Manumission Game" is inspired by (though not exactly a sequel to) an old story from the Transformation Stories Archive. I'll identify that story and its author in an afterword after part six is posted, but you're welcome to speculate about it in the comments. It may be obvious to people who remember the story in question by this point.
“I think they’re under a curse to remain like that until they sleep with a certain man. Probably the sorcerer who put the curse on them, or his patron — but something went wrong and they never did sleep with the guy, and they’ve been like that for decades, maybe centuries.”
It was two months more before Ftymsar told Tyngsen he had made a breakthrough in figuring out the data he got from the diagnostic spell on the five remaining ensorcelled women. “But I’m afraid it’s bad news,” he said. “I’m not quite sure, but I think they’re under a curse to remain like that until they sleep with a certain man. Probably the sorcerer who put the curse on them, or his patron — but something went wrong and they never did sleep with the guy, and they’ve been like that for decades, maybe centuries.”
“Who...?”
“I don’t know, that’s the problem. And unless he’s immortal too, he’s probably been dead for a while. Odds are that’s what went wrong, he dropped dead of a heart attack before he got to enjoy his curse on them. But there are other possibilities: the man they need to sleep with might be defined in terms of his role or status, not his specific identity.”
“What kind of role or status?”
“Not their owner or master, obviously, because Madam Fparadra said your uncle and your grandfather slept with them more than once. Not a ruler, because they’ve slept with the mayor and some of his predecessors. — Actually, no, they haven’t slept with anybody. They don’t sleep, as far as Madam Fparadra knows — that’s probably why my sleep spell didn’t work on them. I’m going to need to go back in to study the spell again and see if I can figure out more.”
“Have you already cast the impotence curse?”
“No, I wanted to check with you first, and see when it would suit you to be under the curse for a few days.”
Tyngsen thought. He’d had a narrow escape last time, with the women talking about not being able to find his penis and so forth... And he ran the organization that owned them, but being their master hadn’t really let him help with Ftymsar’s magic last time.
“I’m pretty busy these days,” he said, which was true. “Let me know if you have a ritual that really needs me as their master. But we already know I can’t order them around. Ask Madam Fparadra to assign you a couple of the taller, stronger free girls to force one of the ensorcelled women into the circle while you do your diagnostic spell. If that doesn’t work, let me know and I’ll come with you next time.”
“That makes sense,” Ftymsar said. “I’ll try that.”
Ftymsar was back a couple of days later, grinning ecstatically. “I’ve figured it out!”
“Great!” Tyngsen said. “How soon can we disenchant them?”
“Well, maybe not quite figured it out,” Ftymsar amended. “I know a lot more than I did before, but there’s still a couple of things I’m not sure about, that we’ll need to know to free them. And it’s going to be risky, boss, a lot like the spell on Kefpidra — if the worst happens, you’ll end up like them, permanently, or until somebody else comes along willing to risk slavery to free all of you. And even if not, the odds are better than even that you’ll end up like them temporarily in the process of freeing them. You might want to let this one go.”
“I’ll decide when you tell me everything,” Tyngsen said. “What did you figure out and what do you still need to know? And when you say ‘like them,’ you mean obsessed with sex and unable to think of anything else?” He wondered how that would affect him, with his sexless, vaguely feminine body under this illusion spell. Could he possibly be immune to the side-effects Ftymsar was warning him about?
“Yes, and worse — you’d be a woman, for the rest of your life in the worst case, and probably for a few hours. It turns out that at least some and probably all of those women were originally men, and sorcerers. They worked this spell together, and played a game — that’s the part I’m not sure of, what game they were playing, but it was a gambling card game, involving a little more luck than skill. And the winner of the game was supposed to get the losers as his sex slaves until the next dawn — but it ended in a tie, and there was no winner for them to fulfill the conditions of the spell with. I’m not sure if the immortality was a side-effect of the unfulfilled condition, or if they were already immortal because of other spells they’d used. This was a long time ago, Boss — I got some hints of the materials they used for the spell, and there were things in it that haven’t been available for love or money in three hundred years or more.”
“Things like black dragon teeth?”
“A female black dragon’s ovaries, actually, but the point is, this spell must have been cast when black dragons were still around, or hadn’t been extinct long. I wouldn’t dare try to work a counterspell — there’s not enough magic left in the world to do that. The only way out for them is to fulfill the conditions.”
“So... we need to get them to play another round of that game, whatever it was? How do we do that if they’re so obsessed with sex?”
“I think if we can identify the game, there won’t be any problem getting them to play another round of it. It’s the only thing that can divert them from their obsession. But you’ll need to sit down and play with them — and take the risk that if one of them wins, they’ll turn back into the man they were centuries ago, while you become a woman under that same curse, until dawn comes and he’s had his way with you and the rest. Or if there’s another tie...” He left the rest unspoken.
“I think I can avoid a tie, if I understand the rules of the game well enough,” Tyngsen said. “Avoiding a tie matters a lot more than winning.” What he didn’t say was that he was planning to throw the game, and let one of the women win — because there was no way he could free them by having sex with them, even if he won. “Now, do you have a plan to identify the game?”
“No... we can narrow it down some, it won’t be anything invented in the last three hundred years. And it has to be something that works with five players. But beyond that, well. Maybe if a sorcerer who knew more about games did a diagnostic spell on them... but I’m not sure who to call on, or who’d be willing to make himself impotent for a week at any price.”
“I have an idea,” Tyngsen said. “I’ll get back to you.”
It was late in the day, and he knew the man he needed to talk to was always busy in the evenings, so he waited until the next day to call him. Skopansen was the manager of the highest-class gaming house in Tyngsen’s territory. He knew all the games played in Kosyndar or the other cities of the League. And what was more important, now, he knew the history of games better than most historians, who were mostly interested in battles and kings being crowned or deposed, rather than what old-time people did when they were enjoying themselves. Tyngsen had heard him talk about old-time games and complain that no one wanted to play them anymore; he figured Skopansen might be able to figure out what game those poor women had been playing, or at least narrow things down and shorten the period of trial and error.
He met Skopansen for lunch at a restaurant he owned; they sat in a private room in back. While they waited for their food to arrive, Tyngsen told him about the women and what Ftymsar had figured out about them.
“Three hundred years old or more, a card game involving a little more luck than skill... Can we pin down the date or the place any more?”
“Not that I know of... Wait. Maybe we can. The women speak kind of an old-fashioned way. If somebody who knows language like you know games were to listen to them, he might be able to figure out when they got ensorcelled.”
“That would help. But, well, I can give you a list of the games fitting that criterion that were popular here in Kosyndar three to five hundred years ago. The cards were different in those days, you know; there were five suits in the deck rather than four, they had Shoes as well, and what we call Skulls now was Bones then — instead of different numbers of skulls on each card, they all had different bones, a skull on the Ace and a pelvis on the Two and so forth. We’ll need to get an old deck to start with. There’s a company that prints old-style decks, and I’ve got a couple of theirs, but if I were you, I’d try to acquire a really old deck in decent condition. I don’t have a complete deck myself, my oldest deck is missing the Seven of Trumpets, the Five of Bones and the Eleven of Shoes. A complete antique deck that’s not so fragile it will fall apart when you start playing will cost you two or three thousand marks.”
“All right. If you know where to get one, buy it and send me a bill. If you need cash up front, come by the office later today or tomorrow. Now, what games did people play with them in those days...?”
While he was waiting on Skopansen to find and buy a suitable deck, Tyngsen had Pengram pay a visit to the university. When Pengram returned, he told his boss that the Drypasengen Chair of Philology would be willing to help Tyngsen with his arcane researches. They set up a meeting, and Tyngsen invited Ftymsar to join them in the parlor of Madam Fparadra’s house the following evening.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to monopolize your most lucrative assets again tonight, Madam,” Tyngsen told her when he arrived.
“Ah, it’s not every night that someone shows up who can afford them, Boss. More sorcery?”
“Nothing much tonight. We just want to have this professor listen to them talk.”
“Is he doing research on pillow talk?”
Tyngsen just smiled.
The Drypasengen Chair of Philology, when he arrived, turned out to be middle-aged and balding, but to judge from his demeanor toward the girls lounging in the parlor, still pretty healthy. Tyngsen and Ftymsar explained the situation to him.
“So... you have a set of immortal slave prostitutes upstairs? And you want me to listen to them talk, and figure out from their speech how old they are?”
“That was the idea,” Tyngsen said. “They talk pretty old-fashioned, and I thought you might be able to figure out exactly how old-fashioned. We know the spell was probably cast at least three hundred years ago; if you can pin it down to, say, between four hundred and fifty and five hundred years ago, that would help us.”
“It’s possible they’ve picked up newer words and turns of phrase over the centuries,” the Drypasengen Chair said. “I’ve never met an immortal; there don’t seem to be many of them left... but in Nidrasen’s monograph on the speech of immortals, he notes that usually half a percent of their vocabulary is made up of words coined after they turned one hundred. Still, I’ll do what I can, of course.” He looked around and licked his lips. “What am I offered for this service?”
“I figure we’ll give you two nights with the girls upstairs,” Tyngsen said. “That will give you plenty of opportunity to gather linguistic data, or whatever you call it.”
“Ah... yes, I suppose it would.” The Drypasengen Chair’s eyes were wide, and his collar seemed to be uncomfortably tight, judging from how frequently he was adjusting it.
“Thing is,” Tyngsen said, “those girls can be pretty demanding. Ftymsar, the first time you were with them, how much talking did you do? You remember much of what they said?”
“Very little, and no,” Ftymsar said.
“So I think you’ll need to listen to them talk under two different sets of conditions,” Tyngsen said. “Once, as you are now — just go upstairs and enjoy yourself, and if you can get them to talk some while you’re having fun, good; try to remember what they say and figure out later what it means. But tomorrow night — or whenever in the next week fits your schedule best — I’ll have Ftymsar here put a spell on you, and send you in again. You won’t be having sex with them that night — or with any other woman for a week afterward, I’m afraid. You’ll get a lot of cuddling and fondling before the girls figure that out, and maybe this time you’ll be able to get them to talk more — if nothing else they’ll complain about your performance and talk about how bored they are, and you won’t be so distracted so you’ll probably be able to take notes on what they say. Sound good?”
The Drypasengen Chair of Philology considered that. “A week afterward?”
“The impotence curse wears off in no more than eight days, no less than four,” Ftymsar said. “But after a night with those girls, you won’t have much appetite for two or three days anyway, so it’s really only one to five days you’re losing.”
“All right,” the Drypasengen Chair said. “I’ll do it. The odds are against my wife being in the mood any time in the next week.”
Tyngsen and Madam Fparadra led him upstairs and told him about the vestibule and the puzzle on the inside door. “Leave your clothes in the vestibule, or they’ll just get torn off. You can bring in your paper and pencils, but I doubt you’ll get much chance to use them tonight.”
“We shall see,” the Drypasengen Chair said, a broad smile on his face.
Three days later, the Drypasengen Chair sent Tyngsen a detailed report. He listed the archaic words the women had used, and gave definitions (two of them made even Tyngsen, with his whorehouse upbringing, blush — a thing that hadn’t happened in a decade or more), and dates when those words were first attested in writing and last commonly used. He also analyzed the archaic verb forms and inversions of word order, and noted the native cities of the classical writers who had predilections for certain of those words. Finally, he concluded that the women’s formative years had probably been passed between four hundred and four hundred and fifty years ago, almost certainly in one of the northernmost cities of the League, and quite likely in Sderamyn. Tyngsen had Pengram send copies of the report to Skopansen and Ftymsar, and waited for them to get back to him.
Skopansen telephoned him the next day, excitedly saying, “I’ve got your deck, Boss, and it’s a beaut. It only cost eighteen hundred marks, and it’s a genuine hand-painted Fpigansen! There’s real gold on the Archon of Shoes' belt buckle...”
“Great,” Tyngsen said, having no idea what a Fpigansen was. “Have you seen that report on the women’s speech?”
“Yes, I’m looking over it right now. The most popular gambling game in ninth-century Sderamyn was Six-Card Pitch. Tentstakes and Spiral Wheel were also fairly popular.”
“Let’s meet soon, and you can teach me those games.”
Tyngsen went to see Suryndra again, for the first time in several days, and told her of the latest developments in the case of the five ageless women.
“I’m really worried about you,” she said. “What if the same thing that happened to them before happens when you play this game with them?”
“That could only happen if there’s a tie in the game. And — I’ll discuss this with Skopansen, but if ties in those game were at all likely, they would never have been so popular as Skopansen says they were.”
“But even if there’s no tie... you’ll have to lie with a man! You always used to hate that, you got away from it as soon as you could. Now you’re going to do it again...”
“The alchemist left me with nothing to enjoy it with,” he said. “They made me look like a woman, but left me still feeling like a boy, like I ought to be a man somehow. Didn’t you and the other natural women enjoy it sometimes? Not always, of course, but when you had a customer who was — well, not a mean bastard like Sgadrim.”
“Once in a while... But usually it’s not that much fun. I mean, we’re not numb down there like you, but if a guy’s in a hurry and doesn’t care about us — and that’s nineteen men out of twenty, in a bordello — it’s no fun for us either. When it’s not, it’s usually horrible. We got used to it, when it happened every day, and we pretended to shrug it off as though it was no big deal, but now that I’ve got some distance from it I see how horrible it was, almost all the time. I can’t stand thinking of you suffering like that. From what Ftymsar said, those sorcerers did this to themselves — let them go on suffering, if they’ve got enough mind left to suffer with. You’ve broken the enchantments on all the innocents who got enslaved for no fault of their own, and in a few years most of them will be free — let that be enough for you.”
He was silent, thinking. Then: “I’ll talk it over with Ftymsar and Skopansen. Figure out if there’s a strategy I can use to prevent ties, or if there are magical ways to protect me from a backfire like that. I won’t do it if the risk is much higher than it was with Kefpidra. But I won’t rule it out yet, either.”
“I wish you’d reconsider.” She turned her face toward the window, and they didn’t speak for a while.
“The only way they could have gotten a tie in Six-Card Pitch,” Skopansen said when Tyngsen met him for lunch a couple of days later, “is if they were using two or more decks mixed together. Then there’d be a vanishingly small chance that two players are tied with two exact copies of the same best hand. But with a single deck, like you’ll be using, not a chance.”
“Good. What about Tentstakes or Spiral Wheel?”
“Same with Tentstakes. Spiral Wheel is less precise, with all the wildcards, but even there the chances of a tie are pretty slim... less than one in fifty thousand.”
I'll probably post part six and the afterword in about a week.
A Notional Treason, a transgender fantasy of manners in the same setting as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
"The Manumission Game" is inspired by (though not exactly a sequel to) an old story from the Transformation Stories Archive. I'll identify that story and its author in an afterword to part six, but you're welcome to speculate about it in the comments. Probably it's obvious by now to those who remember the story in question.
“I come to play,” he said, holding up the cards and fanning the deck to show the faces. “Do you care for Six-Card Pitch?”
Their faces were suddenly avid. “Nay, Six-Card Pitch is a game for fools. Let’s play a round of Tentstakes,” said the dark-skinned tall woman.
“And the stakes shall be...” the most buxom of the shorter women said, frowning as if she were trying to remember something.
“Ourselves!” another cried.
After playing several more games of Six-Card Pitch, Tentstakes and Spiral Wheel with Skopansen, and one more strategy meeting with Ftymsar, Tyngsen thought he was ready to meet the five women again.
“I can’t put the impotence curse on you this time,” Ftymsar said. “If you win, you’ll need to be able to get it up, and you’ll need to bed all five of them before dawn to free them. You’ll just have to go in waving the deck of cards and hope that distracts them from their obsession. If Skopansen’s right about the kind of game they were playing, and I’m right about the way that spell works, then seeing the cards should distract them at least temporarily, long enough for you to shuffle and deal and so forth. Then... well, if Skopansen’s wrong, I guess you’ll have too much fun to blame him much, right Boss?”
“I guess so.” Tyngsen forced a smile.
He arrived at Madam Fparadra’s house early in the evening, having telephoned her just after noon. She locked him into the vestibule, and he set down the valise with his extra change of clothes. If the cards worked, the women wouldn’t tear off his clothes as soon as he entered... and he’d worn an old suit he didn’t mind replacing if he was wrong. Holding only his eighteen-hundred-mark deck of antique cards, he pushed open the inner door.
The women got up and approached him.
“Behold, it’s the false man!” the smallest of them said. “Wherefore comest thou again, maid?”
“I come to play,” he said, holding up the cards and fanning the deck to show the faces. “Do you care for Six-Card Pitch?”
Their faces were suddenly avid. “Nay, Six-Card Pitch is a game for fools. Let’s play a round of Tentstakes,” said the dark-skinned tall woman.
“And the stakes shall be...” the most buxom of the shorter women said, frowning as if she were trying to remember something.
“Ourselves!” another cried. “Whoever winneth the last hand, that one shall be master of all the rest, from now till the morrow’s dawn!”
“I’m game,” Tyngsen said. He went to the table in the corner and started shuffling the deck. The women pushed several of the less unwieldy chairs closer around the table, and sat down, looking just as eager as they’d been when they thought Ftymsar and Tyngsen could satisfy them.
He dealt four cards to each of them, then set the deck aside and looked at his cards. The Four of Bones, the Five of Shoes, the Seven and Ten of Moons. As he was considering what to do with them, the woman to his left discarded the Two of Trumpets and drew two more cards. The next player drew one more without discarding anything, as did the next. Then the short, pale woman discarded the Six of Tents and one face-down card, and drew three more. The tall, dark-skinned woman on Tyngsen’s right smiled toothily and threw down the Highwayman. “Proffer me your hands, all of you,” she commanded, and they did, some looking apprehensive and some resigned. She pulled one card from each of their hands, including Tyngsen’s Five of Shoes. After considering them for a few moments, she discarded all but five of the cards in her hand, face down.
Then Tyngsen’s turn came. Without the Five of Shoes, he no longer had a chance of an assorted straight; the best he could do on drawing two cards was two pairs or a triplet, and he couldn’t see how to make his odds worse by discarding something first. He drew two: the Ace of Shoes and the Ten of Bones. A single pair, then, and almost no chance of winning this round — he might even be eliminated.
They went round one more time, all but the player who’d used the Highwayman drawing one more card to make up their losses. Then they all showed their hands.
Tyngsen’s hand wasn’t quite the worst: one other had a single pair, the Sevens of Trumpets and Shoes, and one had assorted trash. She sighed and stood up, stretching in a way that a whole man would have found distracting. “Fie! One of you shall be my master, alas.” She leaned down to the small pale woman and whispered to her, just loud enough for Tyngsen to hear, “I hope thou mayst win.”
The tall dark woman who’d played the Highwayman won that round, naturally enough, with an assorted straight. The player to Tyngsen’s left shuffled and dealt, and the game went on.
In the second round two Powers were played, the Crocodile (which let the small pale woman force the player to her right to take her hand as it was, with no chance to discard something before drawing her last card) and the Sorcerer (which let the buxom woman with red hair draw four more cards before discarding down to five). Tyngsen had nothing dangerously valuable to begin with, and discarded nothing; he drew one more, and achieved another pair, the Eights of Moons and Tents. When the cards were shown, his was still not the worst hand of the round; two others had single pairs, one of them the Threes of Trumpets and Shoes. She pouted and flounced over to one of the beds, saying, “My master shall find me a saucy servant enough, I dare say.” Tyngsen was sure he would, whoever he was.
No Powers turned up in the third round, and Tyngsen, after discarding the Nine of Trumpets to avoid the chance of a straight (he’d started with the Seven of Shoes, the Eight of Shoes, the Nine of Trumpets and the Ten of Tents), managed to draw the Tens of Bones and Moons for a triple. But though this beat one player’s single pair and another’s lower-value triple, it wasn’t the best of that round; the small pale woman had two pairs, including the Archons of Moons and Tents.
In the fourth hand, with three players left, Tyngsen finally managed to achieve a hand of assorted trash. He sighed in relief; there was now no chance he’d be required to do something impossible. He’d had men between his legs before, and hadn’t liked it, but he could endure it one more time, he thought...
When they showed their hands, though, he felt something strange, a warm rush of blood to his crotch and breasts, and a topsy-turvy feeling in his belly. He touched his shirt (he was the only player wearing anything) and found it uncomfortably tight, though Gurefkam’s illusion spell was still holding up, and the shirt still looked like a perfect fit.
“I shall be thy master!” the small pale woman said to him in triumph, and her lone remaining competitor, the woman with red hair, said: “Nay, I’ll be her master and thine! Shuffle and deal, wench!”
“Play fast,” Tyngsen said. “I feel funny. Why is my shirt so tight?”
“Why dost thou wear it?” asked the buxom woman with red hair.
“I don’t know,” Tyngsen said. He took it off, and then his shoes and the rest of his clothes. The two remaining players were discarding and drawing, but he didn’t take much notice of them until they showed their hands, and suddenly the small pale woman stood up and started to grow taller, and slightly darker of skin, and... that’s odd. Her breasts were shrinking and something odd was growing in her crotch... Tyngsen looked down at his own crotch and laughed.
“I’ve won!” the man cried. “I’m the master of all you wenches, and you’ll know and confess it many a time before dawn!” Then he looked around and paused in confusion. “Marry, this is not the room wherein our game began... And who mayst thou be?” he said to Tyngsen. “I know thee not.”
“I’m...” Suddenly the name “Tyngsen” felt wrong. “I’m Pindra,” Tyngsen said. She looked down at herself. “I know I look like a man, but I’m not. Feel this,” and she hugged him from the side, so her breasts spread out on either side of his left arm. A couple of the other women were eagerly approaching him too; the redhead hung on his right arm, and the tall dark-skinned woman put her arms around his neck from behind. The others hung back coyly, beckoning him to one bed or another.
“Thou’rt a woman, then?” he said, hesitantly. “Yet still hast the aspect of a man...” He ran a hand down her side to her hip, then cautiously explored her crotch. She shivered at his touch. Didn’t she used to be numb down there?
“Welladay, it mattereth not — 'tis some unknown aspect of the spell. I see four women, and I feel a fifth under my arm, and there are beds enow... Yet stay, there were five of us. Whence cometh the sixth?”
“I joined your game late,” Pindra said. “You don’t mind, do you?”
“I shall seek an explanation for this anon,” the man said. “But first, to bed!”
Tyngsen woke feeling very strange. When he first sat up, he thought the strange feeling was thoroughly enough accounted for by being sandwiched in between two other men, naked and sound asleep, to judge by their snores. But when he crawled out of bed at the foot, trying not to disturb his companions, he felt something odd at his crotch, and the absence of something on his chest. He stood up and touched his chest — as flat and hairy as it had falsely appeared to be these last nineteen years. And his crotch... there was something, a couple of somethings, he hadn’t had since he was eight years old.
“'Tis almost strange to be a man again, is it not?” said a deep voice from somewhere to his left. He turned, and saw a slender man wearing Tyngsen’s discarded clothes from the night before, except for the shoes, which didn’t seem to fit him. “I scarcely remember the time I passed as a woman, or how long a time it was. Yet meseemeth it was many a year, and it must certes have been more than the one night I bargained for. Thou wast not with us when our game began, nor were we in this room.”
“I can explain about that,” Tyngsen said, and glanced at the bed with its four sleeping occupants. “But maybe I’ll wait till they wake up, and tell you all at once.” He remembered his change of clothes in the vestibule, and went to the puzzle-door to open it.
The man followed him. “Ah, I see,” he said as Tyngsen unlocked the door. “'Tis simple enow... yet meseemeth that when I wore a woman’s shape, it was woefully perplexing.”
“I don’t know why your spell made you stupid as well as female,” Tyngsen said sharply. “I know plenty of women smart enough to figure out this puzzle.” He opened his valise and started getting dressed. “I’ll go downstairs directly, and see if Madam Fparadra can scrounge up some men’s clothes her customers have left behind, for the other guys.” He was still trying to wrap his mind around the enormous fact of his regained manhood, and he didn’t want to have to deal with the disenchanted sorcerer just now. He rang the bell to call for Madam Fparadra.
The sorcerer was trying the door. “Locked,” he muttered. “Wherefore are we locked in?”
“Probably because if you hadn’t been locked in, you would have been wandering all over town jumping the bones of every man between fifteen and fifty,” Tyngsen said. “You were women for a long time, three hundred years or more. For at least the last forty-five years and probably far longer, you’ve been living in a bordello in Kosyndar.”
“Nay...” the man said, looking dazed. “It seemeth but a night past, when we devised our wager-spell and sat down to play, in Yurim’s cabinet in Sderamyn.”
“The sorcerer who figured out the spell you’d used and told me how to break it said you messed up somehow. I guess you shuffled two decks together, to make things more unpredictable, but you forgot that would make an exact tie possible, and you probably forgot to take ties into account when you cast the spell. So with no winner, all of you got turned into insatiable women, instead of just four of you, and none of you could change back until I brought in a deck of cards and got you to pick up the game where you left off, centuries ago.”
“Thou... thou hast freed us, then. Thou sharedst our fate, and let the spell turn you into a woman and let... ach, it was Torsalem who won and fucked us all! Why didst thou go to such lengths to free us?”
Tyngsen stared at him, wondering where Madam Fparadra was. In bed, of course, at this hour. Would one of the servants answer the bell, or would he be locked in with five sorcerers until past noon?
“I just don’t like slavery,” he said curtly.
It was more than an hour before anyone woke to answer the bell. In that time, the other four men awoke, embarrassed and relieved, and heard Tyngsen’s story and told their own. Tyngsen’s disgust with them only increased when he learned that they hadn’t been fools enough to mix two decks and make one where ties were possible; instead, two of them had been scoundrels enough to cheat in the last round, using sorcery to transform their worthless pairs and trash into Archons' pavilions.
Madam Fparadra, when she finally woke, was none too pleased to find all five of her most lucrative women turned into hairy, indocile men; but she kept her mouth shut in front of the Boss, and if she complained in private to her friends, later, Tyngsen didn’t blame her. Tyngsen felt some responsibility for the five displaced sorcerers, though he didn’t like any of them, especially not the man who had exultantly taken advantage of her dim wits and insatiable appetite last night. He packed them into his car (which astonished and frightened them in equal measure) and drove them to a hotel, where he bought them all breakfast and paid in advance for a couple of nights in two adjoining rooms. He telephoned Ftymsar, gave him the address of the hotel and the sorcerers' room numbers, and told him to come over and start getting them oriented to modern life.
“They owe me big for your fees on the diagnostic spells, and the cost of five slave girls, and the guy who won owes me one night’s pay,” he said. “And by the time they’re in a position to start earning money by sorcery, they’ll owe me for however many nights in the hotel. Figure out how powerful they really are, and whether I can collect on the debt if they don’t feel like paying it, or if it’s safer to just let them go.”
Then he drove to Suryndra’s apartment. He wasn’t sure what she would think of the new him. He wasn’t sure what he thought of the new him. The scantily-dressed girls he’d seen that morning at Madam Fparadra’s had affected him strangely; he’d felt his penis stiffening, the way his customers' penises had done when he was in Madam Esgara’s house, and shuddered in horror. He wasn’t going to be like those men! He’d have it cut off again if he had to...
He knocked hesitantly at Suryndra’s door. She answered a minute later, and seemed to pick up on his mood at once. “You look pale,” she said. “Did you...?” He nodded.
“I played cards with them last night, and I lost, of course,” he said. “Though it took until the third round.” He told her what had happened after he was eliminated, and then what happened when the small pale woman, whose name turned out to be Torsalem, won; and what happened the next morning.
“Oh!” she said, and to his surprise she wasn’t horrified, but delighted. “I knew there was something different about you...” She hugged him, as she’d done thousands of times; this time he didn’t feel their breasts squeezing together, but hers against his unyielding chest. His breath caught in his throat.
“You’re all there,” she whispered, touching his crotch gently through his pants. “And everything seems to work right,” she said with a giggle as his manhood — how strange to think of it! — responded.
“You’re not upset, are you?” he asked anxiously. “We can still be friends, even if I’m not... like I was when we met?”
“Oh, I think we can be,” she said. “Let’s find out.”
This is one of several stories I’ve written involving slavery. I’ve been bothered by the way some transformation stories on the net tend to fetishize slavery, and I tried to subvert that trope here, as well as in “Quarantine Cove” and in my novels Wine Can’t be Pressed Into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, showing characters who escape from slavery, or rescue others from slavery. In this particular story I’m not sure I’ve done such a great job of subverting the trope; the reader will have to judge.
This story was inspired by “Cards” by Owl, which I read many years ago on the Transformation Stories Archive. The horrific situation haunted me until I came up with a sequel in my head, that gave the unfortunate characters in “Cards” a reasonably happy ending. It was years later that I decided to actually write this story, not as a direct sequel, but more loosely based on the situation in “Cards,” without being about the same characters or in the same world.
A Notional Treason, a transgender fantasy of manners in the same setting as Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.