His mouth dried as he saw Molin Torchholder himself approaching him. Jordis bowed, smirked, and melted back into the crowd. Lalo forced himself to stand up and meet his patron's eye. for Lord Molin's excess flesh covered a powerful frame, and there was something uncomfortably piercing about his gaze.
'I have to thank you,' said Lord Molin. 'Your work appears to be a success.' His eyes roved ceaselessly from the crowd to Lalo's face and back again. 'Perhaps too successful!' he went on. 'Next to your goddess, my guests appear to be the decorations here!'
Lalo found himself trying to apologize and froze, terrified that he would blurt out the truth.
Molin Torchholder laughed. 'I am trying to compliment you, my good man -1 would like to commission you to do the paintings on my new temple's walls...'
'Master Limner, you appear to be in good spirits today!'
Lalo, who had just turned from the Path of Money into the Avenue of Temples, on his way to make an initial survey of the spaces he was to decorate in the new temple to the Rankan gods, missed a step as the soft voice spoke in his ear. He heard a dry chuckle, felt the hairs rise on his neck and bent to peer more closely at the other man. All he could see beneath the hooded caravaneer's cloak was the gleam of crimson eyes.
'Enas Yorl!'
'More or less...' his companion agreed. 'And you? Are you the same? You have been in my thoughts a great deal. Would you like me to change the gift I gave to you?'
Lalo shivered, remembering those moments when he would have given his soul to lose the power the sorcerer had bestowed upon him. But instead, his soul had been given back to him.
'No. I don't think so,' he answered quietly, and sensed the sorcerer's surprise. 'The debt is mine. Shall I paint you another picture to repay it?' He added, 'Shall I paint a portrait of you, Enas Yorl?'
The sorcerer halted then, and for a moment the painter met fully the red gaze of those unearthly eyes, and he trembled at the immortal weariness he saw there.
Yet it was not Lalo, but Enas Yorl, who was the first to close his eyes and look away.
THEN AZYUNA DANCED by Lynn Abbey
1
He was a handsome man, somewhat less than middle-aged, with a physique that bespoke a soldier, not a pnest. He entered the bazaar-stall of Kul the Silkseller with an authority that sent the other patrons back into the dusty afternoon and brought bright-eyed Kul out from behind his bolts of cloth.
'Your grace?' he fawned.
'I shall require a double length of your finest silk. The colour is not important - the texture is. The silk must flow like water and a candleflame must be bright through four thicknesses.'
Kul thought for a moment, then rummaged up an armload of samples. He would have displayed each, slowly, in its turn, but his customer's eyes fell on a sea-green bolt and Kul realized it would be folly to test the priest's patience.
'Your grace has a fine eye,' he said instead, unrolling a half-length and letting the priest examine the hand and transparency of the cloth.
'How much?'
'Two gold coronations for both lengths.'
'One.'
'But, your grace has only recently arrived from the capital. Surely you recall the fetching-price of such workmanship. See here, the right border is shot with silver threads. It's certainly worth one-and-seven.'
'And this is certainly not the capital. Nine Rankan soldats,' the priest growled, reducing his offer further.
Kul whisked the cloth out of the priest's hand, spinning it expertly around the bolt. 'Nine soldats ... the silver in the cloth is worth more than that! Very well. I've no choice, really. How is a bazaar-merchant to argue with Molin Torchholder, High Priest of Vashanka? Very well, very well - nine soldats it is.'
The priest snapped his fingers and an adolescent temple-mute scurried forward with the priest's purse. The youth selected nine coins, showed them to his master, then handed them to Kul who checked both sides to be certain they weren't shaved - as so much of Sanctuary's currency was. (It was not fitting that a priest handle his own money.) When Kul slipped the small handful of coins into his waist-pouch, Torchholder snapped his fingers a second time and a massively built plainsman ducked under the stall's lintel, holding the door cloth until the priest departed, then taking the bolt from the silent youth.
Molin Torchholder strode purposefully through the crowded Bazaar, confident the slaves would keep pace with him somehow. The silk was almost as good as the merchant claimed, and in the capital, where better money flowed more freely, would have brought twice what the merchant had asked. The priest had not risen so high in the Rankan bureaucracy that he failed to savour a well-finessed haggling.
His sedan-chair awaited him at the bazaar-gate. A second plainsman was there to hold his heavy robes while he stepped over the carved-wood sides. The first had already placed the silk on the seat and stood beside the rearmost poles. The mute pulled a leather-wrapped forked stick from his belt, slapped it once against his thigh and the entourage headed back to the palace.
The plainsmen went to wherever it was that they abided when Molin didn't need their services; the youth carried the cloth to the family's quarters with the strictest instructions that the esteemable Lady Rosanda, Molin's wife, was not to see it. Molin himself wandered through the palace until he came to those rooms now allotted to Vashanka's servants and slaves.
It was the latter who interested him, specifically the lithe Northern slave they called Seylalha who practised the arduous Dance of the Consort at this time each day. The dance was a mortal recreation of the divine dance Azyuna had performed before her brother, Vashanka, persuading him to make her his concubine rather than relegate her to the traitorous ranks of their ten brothers. Seylalha would perform that dance in less than a week at the annual commemoration of the Ten -Slaying.
She had reached the climax of the music when he arrived, beginning the dervish swirls that brought her calf-length honey-coloured hair out into a complete, dazzling circle. The tattered practice rags had long-since been discarded, but she was not yet twirling so fast that the priest could not appreciate the firmness other thighs, the small, upturned breasts. (Azyuna's dance must be danced by a Northern slave or the movements became grotesque.) The slave's face, Molin knew, was as beautiful as her body though it was now hidden by the swinging hair.
He watched until the music exploded in a final crescendo, then slid the spy-hole shut with an audible click. Seylalha would see no virile man until the feast night when she danced for the god himself.
2
The slave had been escorted to her quarters - more properly: returned to her cell. The beefy eunuch turned the key that slid a heavy bolt into place; he needn't have bothered. After ten years of captivity and especially now that she was in Sanctuary, Seylalha was not likely to risk her life in escape-attempts.
He had been there watching again; she knew that and more. They thought her mind was as blank as the surface of a pond on a windless day - but they were wrong. They thought she could remember nothing of her life before they had found her in a squalid slave-pen; she'd merely been too smart to reveal her memories. Neither had she ever revealed that she could understand their Rankan language - had always understood it. True, the women who taught her the dance were all mutes and could reveal nothing, but there were others who had tongues. That was how she came to learn of Sanctuary, of Azyuna and the Feast of the Ten-Slaying.