The Styx Bathhouse is a house of some note in the Undercity, a resort of ease and of society for a clientele of every sort. It boasts elaborate brickwork and a generous plan — a great central pool girt about with lesser ones set off to the sides — and marries the Roman manner to the Turkish, opening a broad room in which patrons may mingle and take their leisure. Private chambers stand ready for discreet dealings, so that the place serves admirably for the gathering of local rumour and the transaction of business. It draws the well-born and the humble alike, and folk of no human blood among them, and lies within that vivid arts-quarter known as the Leaky Pit, a district of many venues and unflagging bustle.
Of late the patrons of the Styx Bathhouse have grown notably guarded upon certain heads, and chiefly upon the doings of the Janissaries and the Ghost of March. Talk within its walls keeps subdued, for all that the house is a proper exchange of gossip and news. It is kept by Hussein, who smooths the way for conversation and commerce among his visitors; and it stands hard by the Thieves Bazaar, knit to sundry underground ways, which makes it a place of strategic worth to any who would thread the Undercity. It was Cyrus, the grey-bearded dwarf druid and seller of beads, who first commended the house to the party — a watering-hole of the neighbourhood, prized for its natural virtues and its ready traffic in acquaintance.