The she heard it again, shouted in a voice filled with anger and obsession.
Rhapsody! I am coming for you! I know where you are; I see you! I will be with you today or on the morrow! Rhapsody!
She clutched the floating mat closer to her chest; then, after a moment, her fear turned to steely resolve.
Not in my lifetime.
50
Shaene was snoring prodigiously in his bed within the ambassador’s chambers of Ylorc, having long given up on supping with Theophila, when he felt an odd sensation, as if his big toe had been licked.
In his sleep he pulled his foot away rapidly, only to feel his leg held down by pressure.
The Canderian glassmaker struggled to open his eyes. As he did, a thrill shot through him, originating at his crotch, where a warm hand other than his own had made itself at home.
He sat up slightly, only to feel the body that was hunched over his, head between his legs, press him firmly to the mattress again.
The coverlet was pulled back by a woman’s hand, revealing a small dark head. Similarly dark eyes in a grinning face looked up at him.
“Shhhhh,” the woman said, running her hands briskly up and down his thighs. “I am sorry I am late.”
The sounds that came forth from Shaene’s throat were unintelligible as words.
Theophila returned to her task.
He let his head fall heavily back against the thin pillow of his bed, surrendering without any resistance whatsoever to the delicious sensations that were being visited upon him below the coverlet, watching the ceiling turn strange colors as the blood rushed away from his brain and streaked rapidly to other parts of his body. Arousal, long arrested, long denied, roared forth from deep within him; he went from soundly asleep to fully primed in a few beats of his rapidly pulsing heart.
“Theophila-”
As if to silence him, her ministrations became all the more eager, all the more intense. Fire of a sort broke out between Shaene’s ears; his head hummed with static, as though it had been completely cut off from the rest of his body.
He moaned foolishly as she pulled back suddenly, stopping before he lost control completely. The erotic sensations that had been flooding through him a moment before were now replaced by prickling guilt, an embarrassment that she had been able to tell how close to the edge he had come with almost no stimulation. He started to speak, to apologize, only to find his mouth covered with her own, her lips as hot as the forges under the mountain.
Shaene abandoned any conscious thought, any ability to move. He did not have the energy to marvel at his good luck, or pinch himself to ascertain the reality of his situation, or wonder at her motives. He merely lay back, rigid in all parts of his body, and tried not to laugh or wheeze or cough as the beautiful woman who had appeared in the dark beneath his blankets rode him vigorously, sending lightning strikes of pleasure through his lonely flesh.
She was a master at building him to the point of release, then backing him quickly down, only to soar to a dizzying, frightening height again a moment later. Her scent, a spicy blend that made his nostrils tingle and his head swim, wrapped around his conscious thought as she whispered erotic words to him in his ear, teased him, coaxed him to fantasize about making love in strange places—on a windswept mountain pass, near the heat of the forges, in the Bolg king’s own bed.
He found himself straining to answer, muttering replies and directions to each of the imaginary venues, only to find his mouth covered again with hers. After the last of the fantasies, when he had murmured how they would have to wait for the changing of the shift of guards at the ninth corridor in order to sneak down the left-hand hallway to the private chambers of Achmed the Snake, to copulate as she had wished on the silken sheets of his bed, she had stopped for a moment, causing waves of prickling shock to roll through him.
“Where?” she demanded, bearing down on him, causing him to gasp with pleasure. “Tell me. Where is the ninth corridor?”
“I—I don’t know,” Shaene answered breathlessly. “I’ve never been allowed near there.”
The Panjeri woman’s eyes grew steely; if he had been looking into them, Shaene would have been terrified, but he was spared from the sight because his own head was tilted back, gasping for air.
He was thereby also spared the sight of those angry eyes resolving into annoyance as she plunged deeper, knobbing him so relentlessly that he could no longer hold on to any semblance of restraint. Indeed, she ceased holding back altogether; if anything, Shaene had a fleeting impression that she went from being amorous to being impatient in the wink of an eye, wishing the act to culminate quickly.
Involuntarily he obliged.
Spent and brainless, he groaned as she rolled off of him, missing the fiery heat that had surrounded him a moment before. Shaene reached for the warm body beside him and missed; he raised his head and looked around.
Theophila was gone.
He was deep in the throes of a nightmare, a dream about his mother.
He had had many such dreams in his life, though they had been fewer and farther between since he had come to the mountain with the other slave boys rescued from Yarim. One by one those children had left Ylorc; orphans, they had no family to return to or that they remembered, so they had been placed by the Lady Cymrian with childless couples that she knew in Tyrian and Navarne, far away from the burning clay and horrific memories of the foundry of Yarim and the dark, clammy tunnels they had been forced to dig beneath it.
But Omet had stayed. He was no orphan, or at least he didn’t think he was; his mother had apprenticed him out of need and the desire to no longer pay for his upkeep. She had known the life to which she was sentencing him, had been fully aware of the guildmistress’s reputation, and had not come to visit him once in the five years of his apprenticeship. He blamed her for all but the last.
But now she was with him at his bedside, weeping quietly, begging his forgiveness as she often did in these dreams, telling him of her sorrow at his loss, and how she had mourned him each of the days of his apprenticeship, praying for him, making offerings on the Patriarch’s altar so that the prayers would be melded with those of other mothers of slave children, channeled through the benison to the Patriarch up to the Creator, the All-God himself.
I am so sorry, Omet, she said in the reverberating voice of the dream world. She brushed a heavy lock of hair away from his forehead.
Omet sighed in his sleep.
His mother’s fingers were callused from years of manual labor, but gentle as they caressed his forehead.
I’ve missed, you, his mother whispered in his dream.
“Have you?” he murmured. “Have you missed me?”
“Oh, very much, Omet. Very much.”
The words were clearer, closer. Omet opened his eyes to find Esten sitting beside him on the bed, where his mother had been a moment before in his dream.
She was caressing his hair.
Her knife pressing against his throat.
Omet inhaled raggedly through his nostrils, letting his breath out cautiously, the knife blade sharp.
“You didn’t think I recognized you, did you, Omet?” she said sweetly, the light from the lantern on the bedside table making her eyes glow wickedly. “But I’ve known you from the beginning.” She ran her free hand through his thick, straight hair and cupped the beard on his chin, letting her fingers linger there. “Once I own someone they are mine forever. Surely you knew that, didn’t you, Omet?”
He stared at her in silence.
Esten moved closer, her back arched like a cat hunting. There was cruelty in her eyes that was mirrored in her muscles, an intense, deliberate movement that carried as much threat as his mind could imagine. She sat on his chest, pinning his arms down with her legs.