butter. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked him. ‘I did not bother to ask you.’
The thought of sharing a meal with her, here in this chamber at the top of the world, filled him with a sudden discomfort. ‘No, thank you. I’ve eaten already.’
Sasheen studied him for a lingering moment. She looked at her bare leg and then back to his face. Her hand on the arm of the settle stopped moving; it slapped once, lightly, against the leather. ‘You heard, I’m sure, that we caught up with Lucian at last. The Élash snatched him from Prince Suneed’s court in Ta’if.’
‘Yes. I heard.’
She rose with a soft rustle of her robe and padded across the rug to another table next to the fire. A large, round glass jar sat alone on the tabletop, filled nearly to the brim with a white liquid. There came a sound of glass scraping against glass as she unscrewed the lid with care. Sasheen rolled her right sleeve up to her elbow; leaned forward and took a sniff of the substance within.
‘Royal Milk,’ she said, without taking her eyes from it. Ché blinked. He’d never seen the Milk before, only knew of its existence, the excretions of a queen Cree from the land of the Great Hush, renowned for its powers of vitality.
The wealth of a small kingdom lay inside that single jar alone.
Even from here, he could smell the liquid over the sweetness of the frying butter and sandshrimps. It was an unpleasant scent, like bile. With care, Sasheen dipped her hand into the white liquid within. She grasped something and began to pull it out; a handful of matted hair.
A scalp, Ché thought . . . but then the rest of it followed: a forehead, a pair of closed eyes, a nose, a mouth fixed in a grimace, a dripping chin, a roughly hewn neck. She held this apparition over the jar as the white liquid ran from the severed head and her own hand like quicksilver.
It was the severed head of a middle-aged man, Ché could see as the Milk flowed clear from it. Dark hair turned grey at the temples. A wide full mouth, a long nose, sharp cheekbones and brows.
As the last drop dripped clear of it, Sasheen swung the head over the table and settled it by its ragged neck on the dark surface of tiq.
The face flinched in pain or surprise. Ché stiffened where he sat, his wide-eyed stare fixed on the thing before him. The Matriarch backed away from the head as its eyes flickered open, blinking to clear them, bloodshot and tormented. White Milk spilled from the corners of its lips as it saw Sasheen and glared.
‘Hello, Lucian,’ she said to the thing.
The head closed its lips, seemed to swallow a mouthful of air.
‘Sasheen,’ the man croaked in a strange, wet voice, almost belching the word.
Ché’s eyes darted to the Matriarch then back to the head. It was Lucian all right. Sasheen’s one-time famous lover and general, one of the first of the Lagosian nobility to join the ranks of Mann when the island had first fallen to the Empire – before he had betrayed her, by leading the Lagos rebellion in fighting once more for independence.
Ché had witnessed the pieces of his hung-and-quartered corpse hanging in Freedom Square, with the soldiers stationed below them chasing away the hungry crows. He’d thought that had been the end of the man. It seemed though that Sasheen had other ideas for her ex-lover.
The Holy Matriarch turned her back to the head. She smiled at Ché, sudden mischief in her eyes.
Sasheen raised her right hand to her mouth, licked her fingers one by one. Even as Ché watched her do this, he could see the blood rush to her skin, her eyes begin to dilate even further. She finished with a greedy smack of her lips.
‘Nothing like it in this whole wide world,’ she said breathlessly, and took a step towards Ché, hungry for something.
Once more Ché fought an absurd impulse to laugh. It only worsened as she leaned down towards him, becoming a jostling pain in his chest as she placed her hand against his cheek, pressed her mouth hard against his own. Her tongue darted, parting his lips.
So easy to kill her, he thought, right here and now, if his lips had still been smeared with venom.
The taste of the Royal Milk was like nothing he had ever tasted before. It was neither sweet nor sour, bitter nor