This combination seemed to be enough. The Red Martians pocketed their bribe with odd winks of their compound eyes. "Go round to the back door. They may give your story a listen."

The Red Martians on the back door proved a lot less receptive, even with their orange palms well-crossed with gold. "Sorry, sir. Mrs Coote isn't seeing anyone right now."

Slide might have been forced to resort to more serious persuasion had not a determined female voice echoed from inside. "Wait a moment. Did I hear aright the name of Yancey Slide?"

A formidable woman, voluptuousness in black satin over dangerous corsets, and who greatly reminded Slide of the notorious Mesalina, the wife of the Emperor Claudius, appeared in the doorway. "Mac me for a two-bob, it really is Yancey Slide."

"I fear you have the advantage of me, Mrs. Coote."

"Take a real good demon look, Mr. Slide."

In an instant, Slide knew, but before he could speak, Rosa Coote laid a warning finger on his lips. "Not here, my dear. Don't ever speak my real name in this place, or the walls really will come tumbling down."

On other timelines, and in other bodies, Rosa Coote had been a free roaming lilith, a friend of his long time succubus lover Nephradana, who had been mysteriously missing for some time, and Slide suspected was with Hassan IX. Clearly, like himself, Rosa had come to Mars in this ancient era of Victorian occupation to conceal her real nature and, he could only presume, find expedient refuge from some complication in the more mainstream dimensions. Of all Nephradana's galatrix running girls, the one now called Rosa Coote had always been a favorite of Slide's, and apparently the feeling was reciprocated, since she immediately whisked him into a private, wood paneled office where she poured him a brandy, them lit cigars for both of them. "Finest Red Cuban, darling. Complete with dear old Che on the band. Wrap your laughing gear around that. You look like you've been ridden hard."

Outside the half open door, a stairway parade came and went; ladies, gentleman, human harlots, and Green Martian hostesses of all three genders, in their traditional costumes and body paint, back and forth from the upper more intimate levels of the house, while, inside, Slide and Rosa Coote smoked their cigars and drank brandy, while Rosa explained how she had promoted herself to the Victorians of Mars as the ideal hot hostess for Extrosylvania high society, but she avoided any explanation of why she had come there in the first place. "I mean, it's not totally to my personal taste, all this. They put far too much emphasis on all the whips and girlishness." She glanced at a small diamond wristlet watch. "But I can't stay here chatting all night. Tonight's tableaux is already underway."

"Tableaux?"

"This evening's show is called The Beneficial Chastisement of Wayward Gentlewomen."

"No shit? Live action pornography?"

"They're Victorian's, Slide. What the fuck else do you expect? You should see them on Gentlemen's Smoking Night."

"Indeed."

"So come and watch."

"Your doormen seemed to think that I was dressed too cowboy."

"You're with me, ain't you, Yancey? Nobody is going to say a word while you're with Rosa."

She led Slide into a large, and crowded room, gaslight dim, and with a comfortable pall of cigar smoke, and vintage perfume. The men were dressed formally, but the majority of the women had not only come to see the show, but, as Ovid had once remarked, to make a show of themselves. Tantalizingly laced or suggestive in silk, with plunging decolletage, many were young trophies, mistresses and acquisitions, but a few were clearly more mature lady libertines, who smoked cheroots and gold tipped cigarettes with a knowing, heavy-lidded experience, and lace-gloved expertise. The deep, upholstered chairs and the roman style couches, and more conventional banquets, and the well fed reclining cushions endowed the place with a opulence that was part salon, part nightclub, and in part the lounge of one of the best appointed whorehouses Slide had ever visited. The tall water pipes on the tables among the brandy snifters, and martini glasses, the absinthe sets, vodka coolers, and chilling champagne, reminded Slide of the Le Club des Hachichins at the Hotel de Lauzun, in another time, but of an equally baroque decadence.

The tableaux de jour was in the center of the room, lit by a pair of electric spotlamps in the luxury gloom. A pale blonde, fragile of face, but with a bottom that made Slide's borrowed body sit up and take notice, despite all the reshaping and tetradetoxin, was being held naked and face down on a nightclub table by two of the burly Red Martians, who seemed to do most of Rosa Coote's muscle-work. They wore their livery britches and polished boots, but were stripped to the waist with crimson torsos theatrically oiled. They stood, one on either side of the nude woman, holding her arms outstretched. Heavy, twelve-fingered, Martian hands grasped her by the wrists and pinned down her shoulders. The Martians also made sure that they allowed enough room for a stern and muscular woman in traditional games-mistress attire to have a unimpeded arc of swing with a slim, ribbon-bound whip-bundle of gin-steeped birch boughs, with which she was resolutely beating the bare blonde. Each of the slow and measured strokes created a fresh addition to the crisscross pattern of welts on the white flesh of the pert, already noted bottom, that, with each fresh stripe, wriggled prettily, while she it's owner gritted her teeth, kicked her slender legs, and gasped. Her punisheress had loosened her narrow tie, removed the stud from her starched collar, and rolled back the sleeves of her man's white shirt, revealing that the powerful arm that administered the protracted and measured thrashing with such precise and meticulous effect was in fact a steel and copper prosthetic that, with a mechanical elaboration of pulleys, and pneumatic tubes and valves, seemed to operate quite as well, if not better than the real thing.

Rosa leaned close to Slide and whispered. "Our dear Miss Crabtree lost her arm in her wild youth when she went a bit native and ran off with the Black Pirates of Kamtol."

Slide puffed on his cigar. "Indeed." He was starting to believe that Extrosylvania might be a place where a demon could hide for a while, despite his misgivings back at Doc Zen's.

After a fifteen full and painful, stinging birch strokes, the squirming victim cried out with a high and lispingly theatricality. "Oh! Oh, Richard! I beg and implore you. I swear I will be a good girl in the future. Oh please, my love! My painful lesson is quite learned. Oh, tell the remorseless Miss Crabtree to stay the birch! Tell her to put up the instrument. Enough is enough. I am well whipped and abjectly repentant. I plead, Richard,…oh! for pity's sake…I plead to be flogged no more!"

The naked blonde's entreaties were a little too rehearsed to be altogether plausible, and certainly did not seem to evoke any pity in the tall dark aristocrat who sat at the other end of the table. He was a distinguished figure in frock coat, muttonchop side-whiskers, and a monocle, and as he took in the flagellation from what was clearly the best seat in the house, one hand held a cigar and a brandy glass, and the other caressed the velvet scalp of Green hostess who knelt at his knees and served him.

Rosa leaned close to Slide and whispered. "That's Captain Sir Richard Pendragon Barton, the Queen's Special Agent getting his joint copped by the Green, while the one getting her rump warmed is his current mistress Miss Harriet Marwood. Usually she has the whip hand, so to speak, but they must have contracted for some ringing of the changes tonight."