Divine Torment Read online

  For her part the priestess looked levelly at them once, without hurry or hesitation, before turning her attention to the water. She was carrying a wooden platter with crumbs on. She put one knee up on the low tank wall and called out softly, ‘Whaha, whaha.’ It was the cry used by every village girl calling in the livestock to the byre, and the sound plunged Veraine into old memories of dusk and lamplight and the clatter of hooves in a walled yard. The great dark fish in the pool rose to the summons, their slick bodies seething in the water as she bestowed the crumbs among them.

  ‘Any problem with the priests so far?’ Veraine asked in a low voice. He assumed she did not speak Irolian but he was not going to risk it.

  ‘Not yet, sir.’

  When she had finished she walked around and looked down at the map spread on the stone kerb. Feeling slightly uncomfortable, Veraine rose to his feet and Loy followed his lead.

  ‘Priestess,’ he said, politely enough.

  ‘You’ve been busy planning, General,’ she observed. ‘Will you be able to defeat the Horse-eaters?’

  ‘We’re not intending to battle them, Malia Shai; just to hold the city.’

  ‘And can you do that?’ she asked, meeting his gaze squarely. There was no coyness or studied modesty in her attitude, despite the quietness of her voice. ‘Is Mulhanabin going to be saved?’

  ‘No city is entirely safe from siege,’ he said gently. ‘But Mulhanabin is more defensible than most.’

  She considered this. ‘Why can’t you be sure?’

  ‘If the enemy can keep the siege up for long enough, then any stronghold can be starved out in the end, no matter how thick the walls,’ he explained. ‘And there is always the problem of treachery from within. But we assume the Horse-eaters are not good at being patient, and the desert is against them. Even the Rains should work against them, when they come. My advisers tell me that the plain below becomes a sea of mud in the Wet Season, with quagmires deep enough to drown an army in. You might like to pray that the Rains hit us hard this year, Malia Shai.’

  ‘I don’t pray,’ she said.

  He felt again that stab of uneasiness, as if caught on the wrong foot in a fight. ‘Of course not,’ he acknowledged with a wry smile. He couldn’t read her body language or her expression at all, and he did not like that. But her lips were drawn full and her intense eyes were dark enough not to need kohl to heighten their drama as other Yamani women’s did. He did like that.

  ‘You don’t speak like a confident man.’

  He folded his arms. ‘I don’t believe in certainties, Malia Shai. But,’ he concluded, ‘I’m confident that Mulhanabin will not fall. In fact, I’m staking my own life on it.’ He looked sideways at Loy, who could not have been following the conversation in the Yamani language and was looking studiously blank. But Veraine knew exactly what thoughts concerning the young priestess the commander was entertaining, and suddenly found himself irritated by it.

  ‘You have orders to pass on to the ranks. Commander,’ he said coolly.

  Loy snapped a salute and bowed out of the courtyard.

  Veraine glanced down at his sketches of the Citadel layout. ‘Can you tell me what’s inside the Garbhagria? I need to know about all the buildings.’

  ‘The Garbhagria? You can’t include that in your tactics. It’s holy ground.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure that will keep the Horse-eaters out.’

  She tilted her head and seemed to concede the point. ‘It’s a big open chamber. There is the altar and my throne and a small room for relics.’

  ‘Is there any access except those doors just inside? Any stairs down, or way out onto the cliff face behind?’

  She shook her head slowly. ‘No. Not even any windows.’

  ‘What about other rooms in the Inner Temple?’

  ‘There are the chambers of the Malia Shai. My bedroom. The library. Rooms for different rituals and activities. Some of them have windows, but you couldn’t climb out. Not unless you could fly.’

  ‘Oh, you do sleep, then?’ asked Veraine. ‘I would have thought it difficult for you to find the time, in between blighting harvests and destroying cities.’ He tried to soften his cynicism with a smile, but he found it hard to see this young woman as a living goddess. The notion was preposterous.

  But she took his jocular words seriously, it seemed. ‘The goddess Malia is outside time,’ she explained, eyes bright under lowered lashes. ‘I am eternal and unchanging, I am the dark face of the earth. But I am also incarnate in flesh and time. So I can take action, and grow older, and I do have to sleep. And eat. And all other things.’

  ‘Please don’t take offence,’ Veraine countered soothingly, though he had no idea whether she had. ‘These things are novel to me, and they seem strange.’

  She nodded. ‘I understand. I’m not offended. You Irolians seem very strange to me, after all.’

  He was amused. ‘Mm? How so?’

  She looked him up and down quite openly. ‘Well. You’re men, but you grow your hair long. And what you’re wearing, it looks like a dress to me. If you were Yamani, those would be things women did. Except that it’s a very short dress. It would be against all law and decency.’

  Veraine didn’t quite manage to stifle his smile. ‘The long hair is a warrior tradition; it marks out soldiers. It comes from the time before we were a nation, before we had conquered this land. Then we were always fighting each other, and when you killed a man you took his head and hung it from a pole outside your house. To wear long hair is to show you’re not afraid of battle, to defy your enemies to take your head.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And we do wear trousers for riding. Otherwise it . . . um, rubs.’ He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘There, it makes sense when you explain,’ she pronounced gravely. ‘Anyway, you don’t look like a woman.’

  Veraine laughed out loud, unable to help himself. Then he was delighted and somehow moved to see his own easy grin raise the faintest of echoes in her face, the ghost of a smile warming her lips. It did not look as if she was used to smiling.

  If she wasn’t a goddess, some treacherous part of his mind said, she would let me tumble her, eventually. And I would be willing to put effort into that seduction.

  Then once again she threw him off balance with a glance, a few innocent words. ‘I need to ask you. I’ve never met your gods, General Veraine. Tell me about them; I might need to recognise them.’

  He was nonplussed, but willing enough to indulge her. ‘Well . . . Irolians worship the Seven,’ he said. ‘They are gods of sky and fire. We see them above us, in the heavens or on the mountaintops. Shuga is the greatest of them, the sun himself, the celestial king. But soldiers pray to Sothot, who hurls the lightning.’ He shrugged. ‘We have altars to the moon, and the smithy-fire, and the tempest, and the stars, and the darkness between the stars. You Yamani have a million gods; we make do with seven. It’s plenty.’

  ‘Haven’t you any goddesses?’

  ‘Some of the Seven have wives. Women pray to them. There’s Ay, the goddess of children. And Tesub, who makes mortals fall in love.’ He smiled, teasingly. ‘The goddesses handle trivial things like that.’

  ‘I see. But your great deities are all male?’

  ‘Our priests are all male,’ he said dryly. ‘They may be prone to a little bias.’

  She stared at him.

  Nice eyes, he thought. Nice mouth and arse and . . . this is going to be a long couple of months.

  ‘You,’ she observed, ‘are not reverent. You don’t like priests.’

  He nodded. ‘Do you think Rasa Belit noticed?’

  Her solemn expression did not crack, but she looked away sharply for a moment as if in confusion. ‘You’re not like I was led to expect,’ she said. ‘People say foul things about Irolian soldiers. Terrible stories. They say when you sacked the palace of King Elendram you hung the eaves with the flayed skins of the inhabitants.’

  ‘I’m not like most soldiers,’ he answered, suddenl
y sober. ‘Believe me, most of the stories are true.’

  Veraine ran that strange, brief conversation through his mind that night, as he sat alone in his chamber. He suspected he should have treated the Malia Shai with greater formality, but it was difficult when he kept being distracted by her youth, and by the full curve of her unpainted lips. She was so young. And so serious, so intense. It was like being confronted by some precocious child.

  With a sigh he dismissed the thought and turned another palm-leaf sheet. Each of the dry, brittle pages under his hand was covered with neat black ink-marks, listing the first rough inventory of the city. He was sitting up late to work, long after his men had been dismissed, and the notes were scattered all around him over the bed-sheet. At least it was a comfortable bed, though irritatingly low to the floor, and the room was pleasant. The walls in this chamber were painted with a frieze of peacocks, now softly illuminated by a dozen little lamps. It was a warm night and Veraine was naked, glad that out here in the desert there were none of the blood-sucking insects that plagued the wetter parts of the Empire.

  He bent over the palm-leaves, brushing back behind his ears the stray hair that had escaped from the binding at his nape.

  The slightest sound broke the silence of the temple’s night. Even as he looked up, Veraine’s hand was on the hilt of the short-sword beneath his pillow. It had been the sound of the door falling quietly shut, and someone was in the room with him. Blood jumped in his veins and conflicting emotions warred for supremacy as heartbeat succeeded heartbeat. The first was outrage that anyone could have opened the woven cane door without it creaking and alerting him sooner – if he had realised it possible he would have posted a guard. The second was confusion as he realised that it was the Malia Shai standing in the doorway. And then he thought, I’m bollock-naked, I hope this is what she was expecting, and with that came a thrill of surprised but real pleasure.

  She did not appear to be shocked. She looked quickly around the room and then at him, her expression unfathomable but her finger raised to her lips in a gesture of silence. Then, stepping forward into the room, she reached up and tugged loose the end of her head-cloth, bringing the fabric down and discarding it on the floor. Her dark, slightly curling hair tumbled over her shoulders.

  Veraine released his grip on the sword-hilt. His mouth seemed to have gone dry.

  She moved forward into the room, taking tiny slow steps. As she passed a lamp her hair seemed to flare into life, and Veraine realised that it was the colour of rosewood, a rare feature among the Yamani people. His abdominal muscles tightened.

  In the centre of the room was a mud-brick dais that might have once supported one of the repulsive statues but which now acted as a repository for Veraine’s armour and kit. She circled this slowly, throwing quick glances towards him. Eventually she came to a halt facing him and lowered herself to sit on the edge of the platform. She moistened her lips hungrily.

  Veraine felt he should say something but could not imagine what. His anticipation was only too obvious to her, the thickening length of cock rising between his thighs making any comment redundant. She smiled the slightest of smiles, making desire stab his guts.

  Slowly her hands moved down the length of her body in a languid caress that pressed and explored her breasts and stomach and thighs. Her dark skin stood out against the pale cloth. Like any ordinary Yamani woman, she wore a simple robe over which was wrapped a spiralling length of fabric that gripped her tightly from just beneath her arms to just across her hips, simultaneously constraining and defining the curves of her body. When she reached the loose material of the skirt she began to gather it up, lifting the hem span by span to show the long, slender lines of her legs. She raised the dress until it only just covered her pubic mound; another finger’s breadth and he would be able to see the fuzz of her most intimate fur. But she did not raise it, tantalising him with what remained hidden.

  ‘Come here,’ he managed to whisper. She ignored the command. Instead she groped behind her on the dais and brought out a slim object; it was Veraine’s fighting knife, still in its leather scabbard but free of the belt it normally hung from. She gripped it by the sheath and raised the ivory pommel to brush her cheeks and lips. Then she lowered it between her thighs and pressed the bulbous knob against her mons, first through the cloth and then slipping it up under the hem.

  Veraine, kneeling bolt upright, watched as she stirred herself to the boil, sliding the hilt up and down a furrow that he could not quite see. But he read her pleasure in the way her eyes glazed over, and in the soft slackening of her lips, and in the flush that rose to her cheeks. Her other hand flexed and gripped on the edge of the dais while she rolled her hips, grinding her pubis back and forth. The sight made him hard, as rigid as any sword-hilt. His fingers bit into his own thigh muscles.

  She was obviously needy and soon roused beyond return, but she rode her orgasm silently, her thighs jerking to an inner beat. Veraine clenched his teeth and felt his breath hissing shallowly between them, savouring every nuance of her spasm and putting it to memory. When she finally opened her eyes again she met his gaze with a heat he scarcely believed. She dropped the slick knife and slipped the top of the sash free from under her arm. As she began to unwind it she rose and started to dance. Her movements were the stylised postures of temple ritual, in which the subtle angles of hand and ankle and head were decreed by rules millennia old, simultaneously abrupt and fluid in their procession. The strangeness of the dance struck Veraine with a force that both repulsed and excited him; he was acutely aware how the curve of her hip and arse were emphasised by each alien motion. The only sound was the drumming of her bare heels on the carpet. Slowly she unravelled the length of cloth, twisting and turning each way, hardly an arm’s length from him. He missed no nuance of her movement.

  When she was reduced to the crumpled under-dress he caught her round the waist and pulled her up against him, hard enough to let her know how much he had appreciated the display, and hard enough to demonstrate that he could tolerate no further teasing. Her back flexed under his hands; she felt lithe and yet infinitely fragile against his own rigid frame. Her eyes, staring into his, were huge. He could see the sheen of moisture on her lip and neck, the legacy of her masturbation, and he stooped to taste the perspiration on her throat, using his tongue to draw out a low cry of arousal from her. Her hair smelled of the incense that burned everywhere in the temple, but her skin smelled of honey.

  Still holding her in one arm, he slid the other hand up under her dress, up the inside of her thighs. They were soft as silk. His fingers found the coarser pelt at the junction of her thighs and she nestled eagerly upon his palm. Gently he probed further, and it was with unutterable relief that he found that his fingers encountered no obstacle, no obstacle at all. They slid easily into the rich hot wetness there. She was tight and muscular, and he could feel the pulse thumping through her loins. With two fingers he entered and prised wider that hole. She wriggled on him, trying to drive him deeper. His hand was soaked in her juices.

  Slowly he withdrew, ignoring her whimpers of frustration, his expression not quite cruel. He lifted his slippery fingers to his nostrils, breathing in the mingled scents of her sex – the sweet musk of her natural moisture and the sharper tang of her orgasm. Then he smeared that wetness on her soft lips and kissed it off again, tasting her, deep and unhurried. She yielded under lips and tongue with total abandon, and while he explored her, his hands gathered up the coarse cotton dress.

  When they broke off to gasp for air, he contrived with one pull to wriggle her free of the robe and she was abruptly coppery and naked under his eyes. He ran his palms over her from breasts to hips, entranced and ravenous. The tight sash had flattened the sweetness of her curves and now, unbound, she was more delicious than he could have believed. Between her breasts and around her navel, barely visible against her skin tone, delicate henna spirals traced paths that his tongue was thirsting to follow.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he
murmured, though his voice was thick with lust. For the first time, she did look like a goddess.

  She too stared down at their nearly touching bodies, and reached in to take his pole-hard cock in her hand. Her grip was frustratingly soft, with a gentleness he could only interpret as inexperience, so he closed his hand around hers and showed her how hard to squeeze. When she improvised on this by biting his earlobe as well, his growl of desire nearly choked him.

  He lifted her up and laid her on the bed, desperate to enter her, his cock throbbing with a savage impatience. She stretched out beneath his gaze, reaching up to him. He wanted more than anything to dive into that embrace, but he stooped first to suckle on each of the nipples – so dark they were nearly black – that jutted from the glorious mounts of her tits. She moaned with pleasure and knotted her fingers in his hair, undulating beneath him, and with that he could not bear it any longer. Parting her thighs wide with the weight of his own, he entered her sex with his whole inexorable length.

  Heat fused them. The warmth of the night, the warmth of their naked skins, the warmth of their flesh where it joined in wet darkness. Veraine felt her arms wrap around his ribs and her legs twine about him, her bare feet on the back of his calves. He laid his cheek against hers and, his eyes closed and his face buried in her hair, he thrust into her to the rhythm of her gusting breath and the moans that spilled from her throat. Even past his own straining muscles and galloping heartbeat he felt her tighten up to orgasm, her whole body finally locking against the thunderous current that swept over her and through her. Triumphantly he leaped after her into that dark river and let himself be carried away.

  When he opened his eyes the afterglow was fading, sweat was tickling his jawline and he was very much awake. He stared at the palm-leaf page resting in front of his nose and groaned, ‘Oh no.’ The sticky wetness beneath him was his spilled semen, but there was no slender body between his own and the mounded cushions. The sheet was rucked up under his hands. He raised his head disbelievingly and looked about him. The last of the lamps were burning low, but by their shuddering illumination he became certain that there was no Malia Shai in the room, neither were her clothes scattered on the floor where impatience had discarded them. His weapons lay undisturbed on the dais where Arioc had left them that evening. There was no scent upon his cramped hands except his own. She had never been in the room.