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first watch. Midnight. It was like a warning.
Murad stood up, towering over her. She was golden in the lantern light before his shadow covered her.
He brushed her nipples and heard the breath sucked down her throat. He grinned, happy at having
punctured her weird composure. Then he bent his head and crushed his mouth on hers.
A FTERWARDS, he remembered how slight she had seemed in his arms, how slim and hard and alive.
She was taut with muscle, every nerve jumping on the surface of her skin.
She had been virgin, too, but had not cried out as he entered her, merely flinching for a second. He
remembered the hot, liquid sensation, the way he pressed her down into the blankets and bit at her neck
and shoulder, her breasts. She had lain quiet under him until something kindled her. Unwillingly she had
moved and begun to make small sounds. Then the coupling had transformed into a battle, a fight for
mastery. Joined together, their bodies had struggled against one another until her scream had rung out
and she had scissored her legs about him and wept furiously in the darkness. They had slept after that,
spent, their bodies glued together by sweat and the fluid of their exertions. It had been strangely peaceful,
like the truce after two armies had battled each other into exhaustion.
He had woken in the dark hour before the dawn or thought he had. He could not breathe. He was
suffocating in a baking, furnace heat and his lungs were being constricted by a crippling weight.
Something huge and heavy was lying atop him, pinioning his limbs. He had opened his eyes, feeling hot
breath on his face, and had seen two yellow lights regarding him from six inches away. The cold gleam of
teeth. A vague impression of two horn-like ears arcing up from a broad, black-furred skull. And the
paralysing heat and weight of it on his body.
He had passed out, or the dream had faded. He woke later, after sunrise, with a scream on his lips but
found himself alone in the gently swaying cot, sunlight streaming in the stern windows, a patch of blood on
the blankets. He drew in shuddering breaths. A dream or nightmare, nothing more. It could be nothing
more.
He swung off the cot on to rubber legs. The ship was rolling more heavily, the bow rising and falling. He
could see white-topped waves breaking in the swell beyond the windows.
It took the last pint in the wine decanter to quell the trembling in his hands, to wipe out the horror of the
dream. When it had faded all he could remember was the taut joy of her under him, the unwilling
surrender. Strangely, he did not feel triumphant at the memory, but quickened, somehow invigorated.
By the time he had broken his fast, he had forgotten the vision of the night entirely. Too much brandy and
wine, perhaps. All he could think of was the slim girl and her bright eyes, the taut joy of her under him.
He hungered for more.
SIXTEEN
T HE Merduk army was on the move.
It had taken time; far too much time, Shahr Baraz thought. Aekir had damaged them more than they had
cared to admit at the time, but now many of their losses had been made good. Fresh troops had been
sent through the Thurian passes before the snows closed them for the winter, and Maghreb, Sultan of
Danrimir, had sent fifty elephants and eight thousand of his personal guard to join the taking of Ormann
Dyke. It was a gesture as much as anything else, with the inevitable political ramifications behind it. The
other sultans had sat up quickly when Aekir had fallen, and soon the scramble for the spoils would begin.
Shahr Baraz had heard camp rumours that ancient Nalbeni, not to be outdone by its northern rival, had
commissioned a fleet of troop transports to cross the Kardian Sea and fall on the southern coastal cities
of Torunna. That snippet made him smile. With luck, it had already reached the ears of the Torunnan king
and might make him detach troops from the north.
Shahr Baraz had no illusions as to the difficulty of the task before him. He had maps of the fortress
complex, made by the troopers of the countless armed reconnaissances he had sent west. The Fimbrians
had first built the dyke, and as with everything they constructed it had been built to last. His distant
ancestors had attacked it once, way back in the mists of tribal memory when it had marked the boundary
of the Fimbrian Empire. They had died in their screaming thousands, it was said, and their bodies had
filled to the brim the dyke itself.
But that was then. This was now. One of the reasons the Merduk advance had been so slow to
recommence after the fall of Aekir was because he had had his engineers at work day and night. The
results of their labour had been dismantled and loaded on to gargantuan waggons, each pulled by four
elephants. Now he had everything he needed: siege-towers, catapults, ballistae. And boats. Many boats.
He sat on his horse on a low muddy hill with a gaggle of staff officers about him and his bodyguard in
silent ranks on the slope below. He watched his army trudging past.
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