had almost struck her. He had made it up to her somehow, and they had celebrated through the night. Feeling that their temporary peace was fragile, he had even tolerated the terrible company she attracted, forsaking his more stolid and interesting companions for his wife’s repellantly gaudy and theatrical friends.
Of course, Eszel was there, and her brother Reki. The bookworm seemed to have found his element among Laranya’s lot. Mos remembered swaying drunkenly, not saying much, while they talked gibberish about inconsequential matters that seemed designed to exclude him from the conversation. What did he know of the ancient philosophers? What did he care for classical Vinaxan sculpture? Beyond occasional attempts by Laranya to rope him into the conversation, like throwing scraps to a starving dog, he had absolutely nothing to contribute.
He frowned as bits and pieces slotted into place. A feeling of resentment, that they were not paying attention to him, their Blood Emperor. Satisfaction that his presence was making both Reki and Eszel very uncomfortable. Ardour . . . that was very strong. He remembered wanting Laranya, a deep stirring that needed satisfaction. Yet he would not ask his own wife to come to bed with him, not in front of the peacocks she was mingling with. It offended his sense of manhood. She should come with him when he told her to; he would not beg. Heart’s blood, he was the Emperor! But he feared an embarrassing rejection if he commanded her, and she was too wilful to be sure of a yes.
He wanted to go, and he wanted her to come with him. He did not want to leave her here. Sometime during the night, in a moment of drunken clarity, he realised that he did not want to leave her with Eszel. He did not trust what they might do, once he was gone.
Dawn was the last thing he could recall. By then, unable to keep awake beneath the smothering blanket that wine had laid over his senses, he announced loudly and awkwardly that he was going to bed, gazing pointedly at Laranya as he did so. The peacocks all bade him farewell with the usual graceful rituals, and Laranya kissed him swiftly on the lips and said that she would be there soon.
But she did not come. And Mos’s dreams had been bad that night, and uncommonly vivid. Though he could recall only one, he could not shake the feelings it had evoked. A dream of hot, red rutting, of walking invisibly into a room and finding his wife there, fingers clawing the back of the man who thrust between her legs, gasping and moaning the way she did when Mos was with her. And he was powerless in his dream, impotent, unable to intervene or to see the face of the man that was cuckolding him. Weak and pathetic. Like that moment when Kakre had loomed over him, cowed him like a child.
He lay back down in his bed, his jaw clenched bitterly. First the Weave-lord, now his own wife? Did they conspire to humiliate him? Sense told him that Laranya was probably still where he left her, still celebrating with the inexhaustible zest for life that was one of the things he loved in her. But he would never know what had gone on in those lost hours since dawn, and his dream tormented him as he waited angrily for her return.
The townsfolk of Ashiki had learned to fear the coming of the night.
Aestival Week had been a cursed time for them. There were no celebrations now. They were only a tiny community, and new to the Fault. Scholars and their families, mainly, though their personal wealth had been used to hire soldiers as guards. In the past few years, there had seemed to be more and more people fleeing to the Xarana Fault to escape the oppressive atmosphere in the cities, the sense of slowly rising tension. The Weavers’ eyes were everywhere except here, and the scholars and thinkers who had founded Ashiki had feared persecution for their radical ideas more than they feared the tales they heard of the Fault.
They had not heard the right tales.
Their arrival in the Fault had been blessed with good luck. Guided by Zanya or Shintu or both, they had happened upon a secluded vale near the east bank of the Rahn, at the foot of the great falls. Initially it had appeared to be an ill omen, a charnel-house of corpses that horrified them;