The question was purest rhetoric. The bloody corpse was testimony to the price of gainsaying this intruder. Seylalha wrenched a heavy tassel from one of the pillows and shredded it behind her. She clung to the belief that her life had been an arrow directed to this night, her dance would be her salvation; but that belief was shaken as the eunuchs who had ruled her for so many years cowered in fear and the feasting men made a doomed attempt to find hiding places.

With an unpleasant smile the man-god strode to the table where he ripped a mouthful of bread from the loaf, drained the beaker of salted water and lifted the crude sword. He shifted it once or twice in his hand, his fingers adjusting to its awkward balance. With the same smile still on his lips he advanced towards the terrified men in white.

Screaming, despite the drugs, they raced through the tent as he winnowed through their numbers. The wisest, least drugged, plunged through the netting into the company of musicians. The man-god stalked his ersatz-brethren as if the darkness did not exist and with a vicious determination that bespoke his acceptance of the role. He shoved the shrieking women aside with his free hand and delivered the final strokes with the bloody sword. The killing completed, he set about gathering the heads of his enemies and placing them in a gory heap on the banquet table -a task made no easier to do or watch by the edgeless sword he wielded.

Still kneeling among the pillows, Seylalha drew the sheer silk tightly around herself, twisting the loose ends about her arms until she had become a sea -green statue, for the cloth did nothing to conceal her beauty and little to conceal her pale, quivering fear. When the blood-smeared stranger who was more god than man had placed the last trophy upon the table he vented his divine violence on the woman-garbed eunuchs. Seylalha pulled the pins from her hair; the honey-brown cascade covered her eyes and hid her from the sight of the guardians lying butchered on the ground. She took fistfuls of hair and pressed them against her ears, but that was not enough to block the knowledge of how the half-men had died. As she had done so many times as a child and as a woman, she began to rock back and forth, keening softly to gods whose names she had long since forgotten.

'It is time, Azyuna.'

His voice broke into her prayers. His hand clamped over her wrist and drew her inexorably to her feet. Her legs shook and she could not remain upright except through his hold on her. When he shook her slightly she only closed her eyes tighter and swayed limply in his grasp.

'Open your eyes, girl. It is time!'

Obedient to the outside will Seylalha opened her eyes and shook back her hair. The hand that gripped her was clean. The voice that commanded her had something of that forgotten wild land of her birth in it. His hair was the same colour as her own, but he was not a man come to claim his bride. She hung from his grip as mute and fearful as the quiet women behind the torn netting.

'You are obviously the one to make Azyuna's pleas - however little you resemble her. Do not force me to hurt you more than I must already!' he whispered urgently, leaning close to her ear, his breath as warm and thick as blood. 'Or have they not told you the whole legend? I am myself, I am Vashanka - we both grow impatient, girl. Dance because your life depends on it.'

He flicked her wrist and sent her sprawling to the blood-dampened carpet. She brushed her hair away with a forearm made red from his grip. The man-god had shed the sombre clothing he had worn for the killing and stood near the pillows in a clean gold-worked tunic, but the crude sword still hung by his thigh - a rusty blush on the white tunic to mark where its cleaning had not been complete. She read the tension in his legs, the minute extension of his left hand towards the sword-hilt, the slight lowering of one eyebrow and remembered that the dance was her freedom.

Seylalha brought one hand through the tangled mane of her hair, pointed two fingers to her musicians. They struck a ragged, jarring chord to mark their own apprehensions but the tam-bourist found her throbbing drone and the dance began.

At first she felt the uneven ground beneath the rug and the damp spots upon it, just as she saw those icy eyes and the outstretched fingers. Then there were only the years of practice. the music and the desperation of the dance itself. Three times she felt herself collapse on a misplaced foot; three times the music saved her and, writhing, twisting, she caught herself with will-driven muscles that dared not feel their torture.

Her lungs were on fire, her heartbeat louder than the droning tambour and she danced. She heard only the pounding rhythms of the music and her heart; she saw Azyuna, dark and voluptuous, as she had first performed it before her long toothed, bloodstained brother.

The god Vashanka smiled and Seylalha, honey-hair and sea-green silk twined together, began the dervish finale of the dance. There was a salt-metal taste in her mouth when she doubled into a barely controlled collapse on the carpet, limbs trembling and glimmering with sweat in the torchlight.

Darkness hovered at the end of her thoughts, the total darkness of exhaustion and death; a freedom she had not anticipated, but in the still-bright centre of her thoughts she saw first the bloody god then the white-and-honey stranger, both smiling, both walking slowly towards her. The sword was gone.

Strong arms parted the hair from her shoulders, lifted her effortlessly from the carpet and held her close against cool, dry skin. A leaden arm shook off its tiredness and found his shoulder to rest on. Had Azyuna loved her brother so deeply?

'Release her! I'm the proper sister for your lusts.' A voice which was not Seylalha's filled the tent with images of fire and ice.

'Cime!' the white-and-honey man said while Seylalha slid helplessly back to the carpet.

'She is a slave, a temple's pawn - their tool to capture you and Vashanka both!'

'What brought you here?' the man's voice was filled with wonder as well as anger and, perhaps, a trace of fear. 'You did not know ...' .

'The smells of sorcery, priests and the timely knowledge of intrigue. I owe you this much. They mean to bind the God.'

'They meant to fill the lily-Prince with Vashanka and gain a Prince if not a child. Their plans are sufficiently thwarted.'

Seylalha twisted slowly, raising an arm slightly to see past her hair to the tall, slender woman with the steel-streaked hair. Her breath came easier now; the dance had not killed her - only the god could give her freedom now.

'Mortal flesh is no bond - as you well know. Vashanka's children bear a special curse ...' the man-god said, taking a step towards the woman.

'Then we'll complete their sorry ritual and damn the curse. They'll kill the slut when she bleeds again and for us - who knows? A god's freedom?'

The woman, Cime, jerked the knot loose from her vest, revealing a body that belied the steel in her hair. Seylalha felt the man step further away from her. Cime's words echoed mockingly in her ears. She had envisioned Vashanka falling upon his dark sister, this man-god would do no less. And she, Seylalha, would lie unbroken until the full moon. While brother and sister advanced slowly towards each other Seylalha's toes closed over the hilt of the discarded sword and dragged it into her reach. With serpentine swiftness and silence she shot between the pair, facing the woman, breaking the spell that drew them together.

'He is mine!' she screamed in a voice so seldom used that it might have belonged to Azyuna herself. 'He is mine to bring my child, my freedom!' She held the sword to the other woman's breast.