The faint scent of patchouli clung to her, spurring his senses. But then, his senses were scraped as raw as the fingertips he had scored on the parapet, and quivered to the slightest pressure. He could heal his fingertips, but this mingled agony and ecstasy of perception appeared to be incurable. Power? he asked himself. No, just lust.
He tried a smile. It came out crimped and awkward. “I am no slave owner,” he told her. “You are free, free to walk out of here now.”
Her smile revealed even white teeth. “And where would I go, Nazib? Into a cheap camel-drivers’ brothel? No, I am yours.”
That voice washed over him like temple bells calling him to devotion and duty. “Then, then—” Viciously he clenched his teeth and said between them, “Then, will you share dinner with me? I expect nothing more.”
“Surely.” She glanced from the food to the bed, and back to him. He could not tell which interested her more, a good hot meal or a master who was not only harmless but positively simple. Her tongue moved between her lips, and the gesture sent frissons down Gard’s back. His spine coiled like a cobra sensing the nearby tones of its owner’s shenai. He was not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed that she would not leave. The daemon scratched its ear reflectively with a hind paw, and still did not blink.
Deva glided over to the low table, knelt, selected a pomegranate, broke it open. She nibbled delicately at one of the seeds. The brilliance of her eyes was concealed, soft-shadowed by her lashes.
Gard squinted. Now she was not beautiful. Not that she was ugly; she was, well, plain. Neither plump nor lean, short nor tall, her features balanced but undistinguished. She did not have that perfection of face and form he would have expected of a goddess or a demoness. Not the compelling beauty he had seen on the auction block.
But what, but how . . . Very slowly, very cautiously, Gard extended his sixth sense. The daemon’s head went down and its hackles went up. An aura. By all that may or may not be holy, she had an aura. She was surrounded by vibrant cerulean blue, tinted with a purple so rich that in a garment it would have been the legendary Rexian dye.
In the splendor of that aura she changed again, once more attaining the startling beauty that had inebriated his common sense. And yet she did not change. It was something in the way the light touched the planes of her face, like a painting embellished with gold leaf . . .
Her head snapped up. Her eyes transfixed him like a javelin thrust, flickering with the elusive rainbow shades of extraordinary perception.
Gard’s hand clutched the pouch, and the gold pentacle flared, seeming to shoot rays of russet flame between his fingers. The marigolds rustled. His own aura of silver and purple, red and black, rippled quickly around him. The daemon grinned, every sharp tooth glinting, and raked his chest cavity from thorax to liver with a sweep of its wings.
Gard turned, shying away from those suddenly revealed depths as he would avoid a drowning undertow. Deva turned, shying away from the lightning stroke of his awareness as she would evade putting her hand in a fire.
Silence. Gard heard his breath and hers like the veering gusts of wind before a storm. Beware, he thought, of getting what you want. I wanted a woman, not a piece of meat, and I have found one.
He released the pouch. The pentacle creaked and settled back between the letter and the seal. The dragonet subsided, head cocked to the side in a certain coy poise.
Cutlery clicked. Wine gurgled into a goblet. “Here, Nazib,” said Deva. “Let me serve you.” The melody of her voice tautened and played half a pentad higher. He turned back to her. Now, too late, she was demure, kneeling with face downcast and pitcher in hand beside his pillow.
“No,” he said. “We shall eat together.”
Another twinkle between her lashes. She pulled up a pillow for herself and sat. Her hair and the folds of her sari cascaded around her like the garlands draped over the idol of a god.
With a snort that was part aggravation and part appetite, Gard settled beside her. The various aromas of the food lifted his head to float a hands-breadth above his shoulders. Lamb, yes; a mound of saffron rice with currants and almonds. Olives, yogurt, apples, and mangoes. Flat rounds of bread. He tore off half a piece, scooped bits of meat onto it, offered it to Deva with a courtly bow.
“Nazib,” she said, bowing with similar courtesy. Her lovely pearl-like teeth snapped on the food.
Gard scooped up his own serving and took too large a bite. Gods, the taste! He chewed slowly and deliberately, quivering with lingual rapture, the essences of lamb and pepper and wheat permeating every pore. The dragonet wallowed on its back like a kitten, paws waving in ecstasy. When the last savory morsel slipped down his throat, he poured an offering of wine after it and reached for another serving.
Deva sat licking sauce from her fingers, her tongue flexing, her face abstracted in contemplative bliss. Gard’s eyes crossed slightly; only one of his hungers could be appeased by food.
He rolled a cool spoonful of yogurt around his mouth and thought, If I can lead her to want me—which could be quite a challenge if her previous owners were the kind of men who use a woman like a dog uses a bone—that would sweeten the coarseness of buying her.
Let us see now, what conversational sally? She could hardly be interested in the latest tragedy at Iksandarun’s theater, or the winner of the last summer’s chariot races, and would know nothing of the latest gossip of Sardis. He sifted grains of fragrant rice through his teeth and essayed, “Have you always been a slave?”
“Yes and no. My impoverished parents sold me into slavery as a babe in Apsurakand. My mistress, Amathe, took me to Ferangipur, and after she died I belonged to the Vizier Bogatyl.”
Unjust, Gard thought, tossing an olive into his mouth and grinding it to a pulp. Parents lay terrible burdens upon their children. “Why did Bogatyl sell you?”
“He did not, Nazib. He set me free to fulfill my vow at the shrine of Saavedra in Apsurakand.”
The olive swelled in his throat and he choked. She would have to be another god-believer. He swallowed. “But then . . .”
Deva piled lamb onto bread and chewed philosophically. “On the way to Apsurakand I was captured by Muktari slave-traders. So here I am.”
The Mohan was a dangerous place, it seemed. “And your vow?”
“Such things have a way of working themselves out.”
Another touching faith, like Senmut’s. He offered her a goblet of wine and a skewed grin. “I am not a lord. My name is Gard.”
“Yes, you are a Nazib,” she remonstrated around a spoonful of yogurt. “You must be an Imparluzi prince, to spend thirteen solidi on a slave.”
“Do not rub it in. I now have nothing at all.”
“No pack train? No retainers?”
“I left the Empire as I entered it, with little more than the clothes on my back.”
“But you are a prince,” she insisted. She contemplated an olive. With her fingertip she removed the pit, her eyes on her task, hidden.
The pomegranate stared up at him, its husk broken to reveal the quivering crimson jelly inside. Like the crushed head of a soldier felled by a mace, he thought, and grimaced. Her quick intelligence was both intriguing and frightening. And quite arousing. “All right. I am a prince. But I have nothing, no realm and no riches.”
“You have me,” she replied equably. And added, “Gard.” Wine left a sheen upon her lips. The lamplight played across her features.
Gard watched mesmerized, stuffing a slice of mango into his mouth. The sweet juices oozed across his tongue. But his was belly as full as a crucible of molten metal in Senmut’s fire pit. Its flames licked upward and drove the blood into his cheeks. The panting breath of the dragonet, a bellows fanning the fire, was so loud that Deva must surely hear it.
She looked up and said again, tasting the hard syllables of his name, “Gard.” Perhaps her face, too, was burnished with blood and yearning. By the three wives of Hurmazi, Gard cried silently, by Pallias, Ranithra, and Kyphasia, not
hing can rust my talents now!
Decisively he shoved his empty plate and goblet away, stood and stretched. The marigolds around his neck tickled his skin, drawing goose flesh. The dragonet’s tail swished back and forth, just the gleam of silver visible between its eyelids.
“Come,” he said. Obediently she rose, lips curved in a private half-smile. He opened the doors onto the balcony and bowed her out. She leaned on the parapet as he had done that afternoon, inspecting the step that had been the auction block as he inspected her, her profile cut as cleanly into the darkness as Andrion’s face upon an imperial denarius. “Look!”
Her head tilted upward. To the east, just above the rooftops, hung a full moon flushed as pink as Dulcamara wine. To the west glittered a lavish spray of stars. Gard raised his hand as if strewing the stars himself, and they wavered, shifting, dancing an intricate figure.
Deva chuckled, pleased.
Gard drew on the sky the shapes of the astrological signs: the jester, for himself, and for her, of course, the maiden—he did not need to ask. He whispered a short incantation, and the constellations met in an embrace.
Deva laughed, like a moon-spangled brook playing over rills of agate and pearl.
The tops of the date palms beside them were giant ferns, shifting and sighing in a cool breeze scented with spring honeysuckle and an unfortunate reek of camel. Gard slipped closer to Deva’s shoulder, luxuriating in a faint emanation of her warmth, not quite touching her. She did not move away. Again his spine shivered.
The moon rose higher, shedding its drunken blush, sobering into the pure silver-gold of electrum. The stars faded before it, erasing the horoscopes Gard had sketched. Slowly, spinning out desire to excruciatingly pleasant lengths, he raised his hand and touched the dark stream of her hair. Smooth, silky tresses tumbled over his hands, perfuming them. Fire traced the darkness of her eyes, sparks floated upward and shooting stars crossed the heavens. His fingertips thrilled, his body responded with embarrassing eagerness, the dragonet sighed happily and settled into a comfortable huddle, paws folded beneath its belly, tail tucked around its toes, wings snugly folded.
Patchouli filled his nostrils, the marigolds blossomed beneath her hands, the pentacle glowed for her touch, and his mouth just brushed hers, so lightly that his entire body shivered. Oh, this was better than it had ever been! Gard’s head swiveled. Lips parted, he closed in.
Hoofbeats punctuated by shouts reverberated across the marketplace and pricked the sensual bubble that enclosed the world.
Gard started up with an oath. Deva’s hands fell from his chest, leaving his skin suddenly cold. Several horsemen surged around the corner and to the front of the inn, reining up with a cacophony of neighs and companionable insults. They were not a commander and his lackeys but aristocrats at play. As Gard had once played, when he had been a noble among noble companions.
“Ho, proprietor! Show yourself!” That voice was a jackal’s howl. Deva ducked. The dragonet’s upper lip rippled in a growl. Gard leaned irascibly over the parapet, tempted to tell them all to obscenity off.
Brassy torchlight picked out the glint of swords and spears, shone off the sweaty coat of a horse, poured down the folds of turbans and coats and sashes. “Your best room,” said the voice. “A meal. Quickly, man. We have ridden far chasing an escaped slave, and are hungry.”
“A meal, gladly, Nazib,” said the proprietor. “But my best room is taken. I have others, at the back . . .”
“Then you shall evict the occupant! Do you not know who I am?”
“Shikar ed Allaudin, Satrap of Muktardagh,” said the proprietor, with a sweeping bow moderated by weary resentment. “I regret, Nazib, that my best room is not available.”
“Ah,” said Deva quietly, her breath tickling Gard’s ear lobe. “Shikar, Shah Menelik’s younger brother.”
Muktari slavers. Surely he was not the one—no, it could not be . . . Gard inhaled, opened his mouth and closed it. He did not want to know if Deva had been captured and sold by Shikar himself. The implication, that that jackal might have gnawed her smooth skin, was a serrated blade tearing sickly green furrows in his mind. Jealousy, and he hardly knew her. His lips tightened in resentment—against Shikar of course, not Deva.
Another shout, from the opposite end of the street. Another rattling landslide of hoofbeats. The dragonet pricked its ears—now what?
A second armed and turbaned group arrived before the doorway, saw the first and contracted defensively, leaving the churned dirt of the marketplace a debatable land between them. Two pack-horses carrying what looked like the carcasses of antelope stood stolidly at the rear; this group, then, was hunting animals, not men.
The proprietor sidled back into the entrance court. Shikar howled, “What? Ferangi worms out after dark? Are you not afraid of the night-demons summoned by that moonstruck Srivastava?”
Night-demons? Gard peered into the light-frilled darkness.
The figure at the head of the opposite troop leaned on his saddlebow. His face was illuminated quite clearly by a torch; square, handsome features, with a magnificent mustache like a diacritical mark above an unaffected smile. His turban was no more intricately wound than those of his followers, but Gard knew in his bones that this man was a prince.
And not just any prince. The arch of the man’s brows, as symmetrical as a scale of justice, and the wry crinkle at the corners of his eyes were familiar, if subtly redrawn: this was Rajinder ed Jamshid, Sumitra’s brother, the heir to the khaddi of Ferangipur. And the Srivastava spoken of so slightingly by Shikar was Rajah Jamshid’s younger daughter. What could Shikar mean, that she was moonstruck?
Rajinder waved back his companions; disdainfully, they began to dismount and inspect their horses. The Ferangi heir regarded Shikar with all the affection he might afford a boar rushing onto the end of his spear.
“The only demons I see tonight,” he said, “are the Muktari, and no one could possibly fear them. Especially when their leader is so rude as to insult a lady who had the good judgment to refuse his offer of marriage.”
Deva muttered conspiratorially, “Oh yes, Shikar was angry indeed when Srivastava-ji said she would die a virgin rather than marry him. And Rajah Jamshid took her side. Even though Bogatyl, the Vizier, would have welcomed the alliance.”
Gard glanced at her dim form crouching beside his knee. Of course she would be a source of information about Ferangipur and the Mohan. He was slipping, not to have used that argument before now to justify his purchase.
The Muktari bloods muttered truculently. Rajinder grinned and leaped like a leopard from his saddle. “My good man,” he said, drawing the proprietor from the doorway with a slight bow, “beer for my friends and for Satrap Shikar’s as well. And I shall entertain the Satrap himself at dinner.”
“I shall not break bread with you, Ferangi,” Shikar spat.
Rajinder shrugged. “Then perhaps your brother Menelik’s familiar, lurking there outside the tavern, would care to join me?” He spun and called, “Ho, Tarek ed Urgal, if anyone is a demon of the night it is you. Are you not hungry? Spying is such hard work!”
A figure stepped from the shadow of the tavern canopy. Its eyes glinted like flint in the guttering torchlight, and its lips parted in a wolfish smile. “Indeed, Rajinder-ji. I would be glad to join you. Only a fool forgoes a free meal.”
Those eyes. That smile. That voice as smooth as a serpent’s belly. Gard dropped behind the parapet and sat abruptly on the floor beside Deva, his hand on his pentacle. His daemon dived for cover, wrapping its tail around its nose, folding its ears flat to its head. A gray horse outside the tavern. Someone bidding on Deva with Apsuri rials. Tarek?
Gard scrabbled after his wits that skulked somewhere in a food- and sex-induced fog. He glanced at Deva. She glanced at him. He noted that the trousers he wore did nothing to protect his buttocks from the cold, gritty, and probably splintery boards of the floor. Tarek was definitely becoming a pain in the behind.
“I have met Tar
ek before,” he whispered hoarsely, “and I have no wish to . . .” He almost said “cross swords with him again”, but they had not crossed swords, only wills. If Tarek’s was not the stronger, it was at least the more experienced.
Deva was waiting. “I have no wish to meet him again,” he concluded lamely. “Not now, at any rate.” Hellfrost and damnation, must even a pleasant bit of dalliance threaten magical complications! It was all Senmut’s fault. If it had not been for the old monk, he could blunder about in perfect innocence, free of Tarek. Perhaps free of Deva, too . . . He placed a proprietary hand on her arm and she leaned into his touch.
The dragonet peered out over its tail, disgruntled. Why, Gard demanded of it, should I have noticed Tarek’s horse? There has to be more than one gray horse in the Mohan. The question was—his thoughts tumbled like acrobats, piling, leaping, re-forming—the question was Deva.
Had Tarek been bidding on her? Some scheme to do with Menelik or Shikar or both of them? Or had he simply been seeking amusement? Whether he recognized Gard as Senmut’s acolyte, or as Andrion’s disowned nephew, or both, or either, or neither, did he now know him as Deva’s owner? And if so, so what?
Tarek’s voice was counterpointed by the rattle of bridle-bits and the shuffling of feet, equine and human. “Do not bother with the best room, Nazib Shikar. I would imagine any room in this hovel has more bedbugs than Hurmazi has milkmaids.”
Did he mean that, or was he protecting Gard and Deva from Shikar, and if so, why, by Raman’s filed teeth, why?
“Humph,” said Shikar. “Then we shall bed down in your stables, eh?”
A nervous mutter from the proprietor.
“Although,” Shikar continued, “I shall expect a substantial discount on food and drink for my pains.”
The proprietor burbled some reply. Gard heard the clop-clop of the horses being led around the corner, heard the crunch of boots going up the steps and into the entrance court below him, heard steps moving across the marketplace toward the tavern. The pentacle cooled in his hand. He inhaled deeply, rose to his knees, looked over the parapet.
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