anger that had consumed him since his confrontation with the Dragonbane began to solidify into something more tangible in the pit of his stomach. He felt a slight shiver of anticipation.
“The new girls are very eager,” said the madam, keenly attuned to her customer’s moods and massaging where it would do most good. “Hot young sluts from the League, looking for a big Majak prick to suck.”
The shaman shifted impatiently. “Just make sure she’s not drugged like the last one. I want her to feel what I’m doing.”
“Yes, yes, that was a most lamentable error.” Ajana offered him a plate of spiced cake slices. Her voice purred, soft and cozy as wine from the flask neck. “But it won’t be repeated. Ajana’s Place draws your pleasure from you exactly as you would most wish to give it up. All preparations are being made to this single end, of that you may lie back and rest assured.”
It took half an hour to make the preparations, by which time the shaman was lightly drunk and swollen almost to bursting with Ajana’s subtle verbal ministrations. The madam led him up the three flights of stairs with ritual slowness, pausing on each landing so that he could regain his breath and witness through half-drawn curtains scenes of orgiastic abandon that would fuel his arousal. Finally, at the door of the upper room, Ajana took a key from her voluminous robes and handed it to him.
“The lock is oiled and ready,” she said. “Enter and enjoy.”
She left him facing the door. He paused a moment, then inserted the key, twisted, and let himself into the small perfumed space beyond.
Incense candles burned in the corners of the room, giving off more smoke than light. The shadows on the walls flickered like impatient observers as his entry moved the flames. One tiny window showed faint starlight over the plain beyond the city. In the center of the room, the girl was roped to an inverted Y-frame that hung suspended on a pulley system, her arms bound together above her head, her legs spread along the arms of the Y. Her limbs gleamed with recent oiling, and the mass of dark hair around her face was still damp. She was made up in the southern fashion, eyelids heavy with kohl and cheeks painted with Yhelteth symbols, though she was fairly clearly of Trelayne stock.
Beneath it all she was very young and, he saw, afraid.
His grunt of satisfaction seemed to emanate from his stomach.
“You do well to fear me, whore,” he said thickly, pushing the door closed with his back. “Because I’m going to hurt you, just the way you deserve to be hurt.”
On the stairs below, Ajana winced as the first cries floated down to her, and then hurried away to where she wouldn’t have to hear them.
BY THE TIME POLTAR FORCED HIS WAY INTO THE GIRL, HE WAS PANTING from his efforts and the palms of his hands stung from the slaps he’d delivered. He seized the pulleys and worked them, moving both Y-frame and its load down to where he could gloat over the rapidly bruising flesh. The girl’s initial screams for help had changed to more intimate pleas when she realized that no one was coming to rescue her from this honored customer—but she still uttered one more little shriek as he stabbed inside her. He came almost immediately, the pent-up pressure gushing out of him before he had completed a dozen thrusts. His hands, which had been clenched around the girl’s breasts, relaxed and he sagged forward. A string of spittle drooled out of him and onto her flesh.
“Oh, Urann,” he breathed, wiping his mouth. “Oh Ye Gods.”
The sudden pain was as intense as it was incomprehensible. It felt as if his prick had been clamped in a swordsmith’s vise and someone was tightening the screw. He yelped and tried to pull away from the girl, but that part of his anatomy would not go with him. He looked down at himself in confusion and what he saw in the uncertain light brought a high, womanish scream to his lips. The girl’s sex was gone, the flesh between her thighs replaced by a clenched fist whose fingers he could clearly see pulping his shriveling member.
“Don’t go so soon,” said a voice from the girl’s lips.
He looked up and saw that her eyes were open again, that now the kohl and face-paint mask of arousal had smoldered to genuine life. The eyes hooded and looked