Her face blanched in stark terror, but she had no chance to cry out. One warrior caught both of her wrists and yanked them high, forcing her to look at Tasaio, while the other, stiff-faced, pulled out his sword and drove the blade home in her stomach.
She jerked and gave one thin, high scream of abject agony. Then blood fountained from her mouth, pattering in drops on the courtyard path. Her legs crumpled. Held pinioned by the warrior’s grip, she hung through the throes of her dying. Bright blood darkened brighter hair. Then her muscles sagged, and her head rolled forward, and the lovely long white thighs went limp.
‘Take her away,’ Tasaio said on a wild, ragged breath. His eyes were round and his colour high. Then he inhaled deeply as if to calm himself and said to Incomo, ‘I shall bathe. Send two slave girls to attend me, and see that they are young and beautiful, preferably untouched.’
Faintly sick, and distressed that it might show, Incomo bowed. ‘As my Lord wishes.’ He began to leave.
‘I am not done with my instructions,’ Tasaio chided. He walked on down the garden path, his mouth curled at the corners in the faintest beginning of a smile, as he signalled Incomo to follow. ‘I have given some thought to the matter of the Acoma spies. The time has come to turn our knowledge into advantage. Come, I will instruct you before I retire.’
Incomo forced his mind away from the memory of the dying courtesan; he must pay attention. Tasaio was not a man who took kindly to incompetence; he would give orders once, and expect them to be followed to the letter. Yet the avid gleam in the master’s eye left the First Adviser deeply discomforted. He held up a hand that shook despite his best efforts. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested tactfully, ‘my Lord would prefer to discuss such matters of business after the comforts of his bath?’
Tasaio stopped. He turned amber eyes to his First Adviser and studied the older man intently. His smile deepened. ‘You have served my family well,’ he said finally, his tone like unmarked velvet. ‘I will humour you.’
Then he continued down the path, saying, ‘Consider yourself dismissed, until I call.’
The old adviser remained, his heart pounding as if he had finished a hard run. His knees shook. He sensed with uncanny certainty that the master had perceived his weakness, then let the matter pass, as if he knew the First Adviser’s imagination would torment him with abuses far worse than the sport Tasaio planned in his bath with his slave girls. Too shaken yet to feel sadness, Incomo faced facts — against his deepest hopes, Lord Tasaio had inherited the family predilection for viciousness and appetite for pain.
The Lord of the Minwanabi rested in his bathing tub while a servant poured hot water over his shoulders. He watched his First Adviser bow through hazy, half-closed eyes, but Incomo did not deceive himself. Languid though Tasaio might seem, the hands left poised on the rim of the tub were neither slack nor relaxed.
‘I came as my Lord required.’ Incomo straightened, his nostrils flaring as he caught a pungent, sweet odour on the air, explained a moment later as Tasaio reached over and lifted a long pipe of tateesha from a side table. He set the stem between his lips and sucked deeply. The First Adviser of the Minwanabi buried his surprise. The sap of the tateen bush contained a substance that induced euphoria – the nuts were often chewed by slaves in the field to lessen the drudgery of their lives – but the silks, at bloom, contained a powerful narcotic. The smoke brought first an enhancement and then a distortion of perception; prolonged use brought the mind to a trancelike stupor. The First Adviser considered the lure of such a drug to a man who enjoyed inflicting pain on others, then thought better of such musing. It was not his place to question the practices of his master.
‘Incomo,’ said Tasaio with sharp and incisive clarity, ‘I have decided that we must move forward with our plan to destroy the Acoma.’
‘As my Lord commands,’ Incomo said.
Tasaio’s fingers tapped arrhythmically on the tub rim, as if he ticked off points. ‘Once that is accomplished, I shall then destroy that preening calley bird Axantucar.’ His eyes abruptly flicked open. He gazed at the First Adviser, every fibre of him angry. ‘If that buffoon of a cousin of mine had done his duty and destroyed Mara, I would wear the white and gold today.’
Incomo thought it politic not to remind his Lord that it had been Tasaio who had devised the plan to destroy Mara, not Desio. He returned a stiff nod.
Tasaio waved away the bath servant. ‘Leave us.’ Alone with his adviser, and wrapped in rising curls of steam, he drew again on his pipe. Physically, he seemed to relax, and his eyes grew drowsy once more. ‘I want one of those two Acoma spies promoted.’
‘My Lord?’
Tasaio leaned over the edge of the tub and rested his chin upon it. ‘Need I repeat myself?’