The bedcurtains were tied back to reveal a tall, strapping young blond man lying faceup on a mound of pillows, naked under the sheet rucked around his hips. He breathed in a blend of musk, spices, and orange peelâLarsson's cologneâalong with whispers of linseed oil, old wool, fabric softener, and lemon verbena. The moonlit Chambre de Mille Fleurs was large and opulent, its walls draped with fifteenth-century tapestries for which the Louvre or the Met would offer a fortune, if their existence were known. He found his footing on the velvet-upholstered window seat, curled into a crouch, and rubbed his eyes with the hem of his black T-shirt. Sweat trickled from beneath his black woolen cap, stinging his eyes, as he clambered over the projecting bay and stole into the room through one of the narrow openings. Elic hauled himself up one-armed, quivering with the effort, until he could just reach the stone bracket supporting the window. This castle was built not to repel outsiders, but to conceal and safeguard its permanent residents. Straining upward, he got a good grip on a notch meant to secure battle scaffolding, though it had never been used for that purpose.
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The moon was full tonight, illuminating the topography of the tower wall as if it were midafternoonâthough Elic could have scaled it on the blackest night, having done so countless times over the six centuries in which it had stood. In a whispered growl, Elic cursed those, like Larsson, who insisted upon locking their chamber doors here, as if Château de la Grotte Cachée were some hôtel public instead of what it was: the most private of private homes. The oriel window of the bedchamber assigned to Viktor Larsson loomed just overhead, its stained glass casements thrown wide open on this unusually warm night. He could have invited her to join him tonight, could have shared this gabru with her, as he sometimes did, but not this time.
“Urkhish,” she'd said as he stalked away. Inigo, in that merrily smirky way of his, had dubbed them “Elic's Alphas.” It was what they called certain guests of the chateau, those in whom Elic took a particular interest. “He's a gabru, Lili.” A strong, mighty young man. “Why him?” she'd asked earlier this evening, in the extinct Akkadian tongue she'd taught him so that their conversations, some of them, could be theirs and theirs alone.
The jasmine oil with which she anointed her throat and breasts, her salty-sweet skin, her heat, her desire drifted around him on a waft of sultry air. He looked over his shoulder, peering off into the darksome woods, nostrils flaring as he tasted the night: juniper and wild roses, honeysuckle, musty earth, ancient oaksâ¦and Ilutu-Lili. Halfway up the north postern tower of the castle, Elic paused, one hand gripping a chink in the soot-black stone, both bare feet poised on a narrow corbel. S HE WAS out there somewhere, watching him. The bed-clothes from the bedd pull I, and lay them naked all to view.įrom the seventeenth-century ballad, “The Mad, Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow” They were known at an early period in Gaul by the name of Dusii, from which, as the church taught that all these mythic personages were devils, we derive our modern word Deuce, used in such phrases as “the Deuce take you!”įrom The Worship of the Generative Powers by Thomas Wright, 1865 As Incubi, they visited the house by night, and violated the persons of the females, and some of the most celebrated heroes of early mediæval romances, such as Merlin, were thus the children of Incubi. Woe to the modesty of maiden or woman who ventured incautiously into their haunts.
There were personages connected with the worship of Priapus who appear to have been common to the Romans under and before the empire, and to the foreign races who settled upon its ruinsâ¦
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