The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)(91)

I felt a hot flush in my belly. I was gripping the sides of the table. Sweat was pouring down my temples. Then a throb in my loins, a deep, painful ache, and suddenly I was so aroused it pained me.

I tore my eyes away from Fayazi, ashamed and bewildered.

Then I noticed the shadow on the floor and realized someone stood behind me. I turned to look at them.

It was a girl—or so she seemed to my eyes—watching me with a sad gaze. She was about my age, well-kept and pretty, barefoot with dark eyes and short hair. She wore a silken red scarf about her neck and a red dress hanging from her shoulders; yet it was little more than two sheets of silk cloth, one covering her front and one covering her back, revealing the bare edge of her hip and her breast.

And I desired her. Inexplicably, suddenly, passionately. She was not as beautiful as Fayazi, not so carefully manicured, but there was something in her bearing, her gaze, in her mere presence that made her so alluring to me that I almost felt I might die.

Then I noticed something strange: a swelling at the girl’s armpit—a slight, purple-hued nodule from an alteration.

I looked into her face and saw the same violent tint at the corner of her jawline, just above her scarf.

I then knew what she was: a plaizaier, a court dancer. A being pheromonally altered for the delights of others. Ana had mentioned such a thing to me, but I had never thought I’d meet one in all my life.

My body ached for her. I wanted nothing more than to grab her, to taste her, to take her, to know every fold and bend of her. Yet my teeth bit down on the shootstraw pipe in my mouth, and I swallowed, flooding my throat with the hot tickle of tobacco; and then, as if I was pulling my head free of a spider’s web, I turned back to face Fayazi.

“I just,” I said quietly, “wish to go, ma’am.”

“Does she not please you?” asked Fayazi. “We have others. Male, if you wish.”

I said nothing. The whole of my body seemed to be boiling over with hot blood.

“What a world it is, Signum,” said Fayazi, “where you are forced to change yourself, break yourself, all for a little scrap of money.” She leaned forward once more. The smell of her was intoxicating. “Are you not owed respite from this?”

The shadow of the court dancer hung on my shoulder like a leaden weight.

“There can be no wrongdoing,” Fayazi said, “in an Empire so broken.”

“I just wish to go,” I said again.

Fayazi gestured to the plaizaier, who walked closer to me. I turned my face away.

“You were wrong, you know,” Fayazi said. “I am a friend to many, Dinios Kol. But never have I met someone so deserving of my friendship as you.”

The plaizaier began to use the front of her dress as a fan, raising it and rippling it toward me, washing me in her scent. A strangely sweet musk, I noticed, redolent of oranje-leaf and mulling spice. My heart was racing, and my loins ached so much I wished to scream.

“Have you found something?” demanded Fayazi suddenly. She stood. “Has Dolabra found something?”

I swallowed. I could see the plaizaier raising the front of her dress and fanning it again; and there, amid the flicker of red, a glimpse of her body, and a winking tuft of pubic thatch.

I tried to keep my eyes on Fayazi. That was when I noticed an odd smudge of white on the side of the gentrywoman’s dress, almost like paint.

Trembling, I looked at Fayazi’s bare arm. Was that paint I spied there? And beneath it, the dark cloud of a bruise—perhaps in the shape of fingertips? Even in that mad moment, I struggled to make note of it.

“What does your immunis know of my father?” said Fayazi, louder. “What has he done?”

Suddenly the axiom was beside her. “Calm, mistress,” she hissed. “Calm…”

“What does she know about him and Taqtasa Blas?” Fayazi demanded.

All dissolved to chaos then. I ignored it all and bit down on the pipe, furious and confused, incensed to be denied control over my own senses.

And then I felt it—a fluttering in my eyes as a memory awoke.

I knew that smell: oranje-leaf and spice. I had smelled it on the scarf of the dead Princeps Misik Jilki, in the Engineering quarters, the day after I’d first come to Talagray.

And I had smelled it in Daretana, too: from Commander Blas’s oil pot.

All three smells were exactly the same.

I gritted my teeth and turned my face to Fayazi Haza. “Y-you l-l-lied to m-me,” I said, forcing the words through my clenched mouth.

A furrow in Fayazi’s smooth brow. “What?”

“S-Signum M-M-Misik Jilki,” I said. “She was h-here. Sm-melled like…like this. I know. Oranje-leaf and s-spice. After she’d been t-touched by the same oils and p-perfume as your…your court dancers here.” I grinned madly. “She f-felt their skin. Knew their flesh. Maybe in…in this same r-room. Didn’t she? Her along w-with…all the others.”

The axiom retreated to the walls, dark eyes watching warily like I’d drawn steel.

“What are you talking about?” spat Fayazi.

“D-did they smell j-just like Commander Blas?” I leaned forward. “For he had a taste f-for the aroma, too, didn’t he? He c-came to like it. That’s wh-why he had a…p-pot of his own.”

Fayazi stared at me, stunned.