But more attention young men attracted the young black girl, lying on stone. She was clad only in a loincloth and glistened with the oil with which the old man occasionally poured her body from a bowl. Face dasya was much sleeker than the soldiers-dasa Ahani seen.
The girl's eyes and full lips were equally parted, and she seemed to be falling asleep, for her small bosom rose and fell steadily and seldom. The torchlight glinted on dasya's long hair, as oiled as her slender body.
The old man's voice took on a broken intonation, and his left hand, holding the Cup, slowly circled over the black body of the girl. A thin trickle of viscous liquid trickled down her curly hair, her forehead and plump nose, her prominent lips, her thin neck and the hollow between her collarbones, her chest and sunken stomach, her slender thighs and small toes.
The curved stone blade in the black sorcerer's right fist rose slowly and glinted with its sharpened point. His voice was almost a shriek, and Ahani knew he could not delay.
Abruptly he leaped from the wall and ran across the hall to a stone plinth with three steps leading up to it. But the old sorcerer heard a rustle behind him and turned. His wrinkled face was framed by a necklace of curved predator's teeth. The sorcerer's robes fluttered as he moved, and for a moment Ahani thought he was looking at a demon he had never seen before, a mottled demon with a wide mouth studded with sharp, glittering fangs.
Seeing a fair-haired youth in a wolf's skin and with a long steel dagger, the black sorcerer cried out furiously and swung his blade at him. His eyes, already huge, widened half his face in surprise and anger.
In the next instant, the point of the dagger sliced through das's animal hide and sank with a creak into his chest a little to the left of the center. Ahani clapped his left hand over the sorcerer's mouth to keep him from making a sound and betraying him to the warriors guarding the entrance.
The old black man jerked and cried out in agony, but the sound was muffled and barely audible. His dark pupils stared into Ahani's icy eyes, and the curved dagger fell from his exhausted hand and clattered down the stairs.
A moment later the sorcerer collapsed to the floor and lay still, and Ahani stepped over his body and bent over the girl. Her large, dark brown pupils wandered aimlessly through the gloom that hid the high ceiling of the hall until they came to the young man's face. The arched eyebrows rose slowly in surprise. https://author.today/reader/34445/260905
