<div class="floatleft">(http://i.imgur.com/0y8wEtc.jpg)  </div>It had been the closest to righteous that she'd ever felt.<br/><br/>The black lotus smoke was the only thing she'd found that could numb her mind, and drifting in and out of consciousness brought peace to her mind that she hadn't known she could experience.  All her life she'd steered clear of these places, staring on with contempt at the addled, drug-hazed ghouls that shadowed in and out of the red-lamped shacks and lantern-hung dens that weren't hard to spot when you knew how.  But after the job was done, she had washed the blood from her hands and sobbed like an infant, tears that had been absent from her cheeks for years, deep wailing cries that harkened to the lost infant she had once been on the steppe over her dead pony and dying mother.  Tears as forsaken as those long-ago days when she knew a home, a family, earth under her bare feet, shoots of tiny crops peeking through the cracked black earth.<br/><br/>She wasn't sure how long she'd been in the den-- she had entered flush with coin from the job, having stashed the stolen documents that were worth far more than the chest of currency.  She paid much of it up front for a private room and as much lotus as they cold send her, and the room apparently came with perks.<br/><br/>She reawoke many times over, to re-light a fresh taper, to slick the pipe bowl with the black tar and smoulder it in the flames, the dank smoke filling her mouth and lungs until breathing it in seemed to difficult.  Sometimes she awoke to a need to piss, and those times she drank a tankard of wine as she shambled across thick, burgundy rugs to the pile of pillows and silks that they'd given her to begin the cycle afresh.  Once or twice she remembered a young woman with a face like ivory-- paint, most likely, bowing to resituate the pipe on the nightstand, to gently tap another daub of the slick         lotus tar into the little ceramic thimble.<br/><br/>On one awakening, she had called out for other things, and vaguely remembered that she a pear, its juice trailing down her face as she suckled noisily at the pulpy flesh.  Some time passed-- another light of the tar, and she awoke naked, warm water pooling down her cheek to her small breasts as the young woman sang a soft, mournful song in her foreign tongue, cleaning her tenderly and detached as one might polish an expensive doll.<br/><br/>A flitter of memory of being mounted, a cleanly shaved man of lovely form in the candlelight, his bald head glistening with clean sweat as he thrust into her again and again.  Once it was a girl there between her legs, bringing her off with her mouth and a lethargic, stoned glaze in her dark eyes.  All these things she had asked for, all were given.  These things brought her momentary sensations of pleasure, but were devoid of joy, and they blurred into her desire to be someone to these people-- someone who felt them, who wanted these things, who needed them.<br/><br/>But the opium was all-- the peace, the euphoria, the dreamless sleep.  The face of the noblewoman she had murdered swirled into these dreams as a blissful apparition in those times, and it was easy to forget how her voice had gone to a wet gurgling as the blade punctured her throat and found its way out the other side. The hot rush of her blood was only a warm bath.  Her twiches and thrashings were spasms of lovemaking.  And then the bliss faded, and tears came, and regret.  The knot of shame, the fist of guilt.  Regret's gnashing teeth.<br/><br/>With a soft sigh, Zabeth let her eyes open again, and this time found only darkness.  There was no distant, winding zither music to lull her into peace, and when she reached, there was no pipe to be found.  No silks, no pillows, only sand and stone and pain.<br/><br/><em>I must have been thrown out,</em>she thought, and the grinding nausea of the come-down brought a dry-heave that forced her to roll to her side.  More stone on her bare skin, a dull throb in her head, a heavy weight in each jointed segment of her limbs.  she knew not where she was, nor if anyone saw her naked.  Heaving again, she gathered herself as the spasm passed and managed to paw around for a tarp, an old sheet-  anything to wear.  Finding nothing, she lay back and breathed deep, over and over-- the exercises her guild had shown her, to breathe in slow through her nostrils, out smooth through pursed lip.<br/><br/>Nothing... stone, sand, darkness.  The dank air, the fetid stench of stale water.  She was deep underground... and not alone.  The dungeon of some petty noble?  Possibly... but this was not the streets, this was some new hell.<em>So this is how I die</em>she mused, and eased her way to a sit as the darkness spun, slowing, steadying in her hungover state.  Her head pounded, her throat felt like leather.  Her eyes had to adjust to the darkness, but it would take a moment.