Crusader. Novel by Sara Douglass

“So,” Raspu said smugly as he stepped outside the door and confronted Gwendylyr. “Have I won

the challenge?”

A maid brushed past them, her face terrified, a pile of neatly-folded linen in her arms.

“You have made a good start” Gwendylyr said, “but the challenge lies in being able to keep the staff

at work. How will things be in a month, Raspu? In two? Will the house be running efficiently, or will it, its

staff, and its butler have slid into irretrievable sloth?”

“A month! I don’t have to do this for an entire —”

“I’ll give you two,” Gwendylyr said. “Have fun.”

And she vanished.

Enchantment gripped Raspu and the house into which he’d walked, and the sun and moon whirled

overhead.

“Interesting,” Qeteb remarked. He and DragonStar now inhabited the same hilltop, although there was

more than five paces between their respective positions. “She’s not someone I’d care to meet over

breakfast.”

DragonStar turned his head slightly and looked at Qeteb, but he did not reply.

The two settled down to wait, and to watch.

The sun and moon twirled overhead, moving so fast the shadows fluttered unceasingly across the

hilltop.

Raspu found he did not like being a butler. The staff had remained in awe of him for an entire

three days, and then subtle changes slowly crept into the daily routine.

The maids who once had wept at the very sight of him, now smirked and moved more insolently

when he appeared. They still swept and scrubbed and polished, but their mouths curled in ..secretive

smiles as he passed, and their eyelashes dipped in flirtatious fans over the curve of their soft cheeks

whenever he paused to shout more orders at them.

Raspu found that his voice noticeably softened whenever they did that, and one day he found

himself reaching out to caress the cheek of one particularly fetching lass.

He jerked his hand back, but not before he saw her mouth arrange itself into a seductive pout.

Moist, red, beguiling.

With just the hint of pearly white teeth behind those plump, tempting …

Raspu jerked away, roared, and vanished down the corridor in stiff-legged (and almost unbearably

frustrated) affront.

The maid giggled, and wriggled her hips in anticipation.

In the kitchen the cook pounded and rolled and sweetened and basted to Raspu’s satisfaction,

but after a week or so he noticed that not all the meat he put out from the now-locked cold room

appeared at table. When he accused the cook of stealing, she wept and wailed and wrung her hands

and fell down in an epileptic fit.

The Demon repressed a sigh. It was too much effort to continue with the harangue,

and only a small bit of meat had gone …

Raspu turned his back and left her massive mound of flesh to twitch and quiver triumphantly on the

rug before the fire.

As soon as the kitchen door slammed behind him, the cook’s flesh trembled to stillness. She smiled,

and her hand drew out the small joint of meat she’d secreted in the voluminous pocket of her apron, and

she began to chew vigorously, setting her flesh to trembling all over again.

But however much the staff managed to annoy him, Raspu found that the household accounts

managed to drive him almost insane with exasperation.

Every morning Raspu had to check the shelves and count all the packets and cans and wedges and

jars.

Then he had to check them all off in his account book.

Then he had to consult with the cook and the downstairs cleaning maids to see what would be

required for that day’s cooking and cleaning. Then he had to dole out with solemn precision, from the

cans and jars and wedges and packets, the portions of starches and wood oils and fireplace blackeners

and flours and sugars and yeasts required.

And then he had to mark all those off in his account book.

Then the upstairs maids needed linens and sheets and pillowcases and dusters, and so

Raspu must march to the linen closet and carefully count out the articles required.

And mark it off in his account book.

Then, after only a brief respite — not even long enough for a cup of tea and a sit down — they were

back with the dirty linen. Raspu must be out again with his account book to check that the dirty linen

numbers and quantities matched the clean numbers and quantities he’d dispatched yesterday, and if they

didn’t, then everything must be dumped into piles and carefully sorted out under his supervision to find the

missing pillowcase, and if the numbers still refused to tally, then Raspu must needs conduct a room by

room search of the upstairs corridors, seeking under every bed and in every dirty clothes hamper for the

pillowcase.

And when he’d wasted four hours in that fruitless search, and was nigh tearing out his hair in

almost unbearable frustration (and determined to tear the offending pillowcase to shreds,

together with the maid who’d lost it, when it was finally found), Raspu sat down to a late and very cold

lunch with his account book only to find that he’d miscounted the number of pillowcases on yesterday’s

tally, and that in fact this morning’s count had been correct. He’d wasted an entire morning — and let his

lunch grow cool and congealed — over a simple error that if he’d not bothered with the cursed

accounting and tallying in the first instance would not have bothered him!

Raspu threw the account book across the room, his plate of disgustingly congealed lunch close after

it, and the cook lowered her head and grinned into the pots atop the stove, and the footmen by

the door raised their eyes to the ceiling and smirked inwardly.

Things were going well.

The challenge was falling into place.

The days spun by.

“Who is that little girl you sent off with the red-headed birdman?” Qeteb asked

conversationally. He could sense Raspu’s dilemma, and it made him rabid with fury.

But not incensed enough to lose his vision of overall destiny.

Nothing he said could have dismayed DragonStar more.

“What little girl?” he said. Behind him the Alaunt shifted, and one or two growled softly.

Qeteb smirked in satisfaction. The tone of DragonStar’s voice was enough, in itself, to make

the probable loss of Raspu bearable.

“No-one,” he said. “I had grown bored and merely invented a question to while away the time.”

DragonStar closed his eyes and cleared his mind, hoping that SpikeFeather and Azhure were safe

enough in the waterways.

As far as he knew the Demons had never ventured down there … but was that

assumption correct enough to assure of Katie’s continued safety?

One lunchtime Raspu entered the kitchen to find one of the footmen leaning against a maid with

his hand nestled inside her open blouse.

As the footman saw Raspu, he leaned away from the girl, slowly pulling out his hand.

The girl’s round, firm breast was exposed to Raspu’s gaze before she pulled the material of her

blouse closed.

Raspu, tired by a morning of chasing after a small and almost empty jar of boot black — only to find

it on the shelf where it was supposed to be anyway — merely ignored both servants and sat down at the

table.

The cook almost dropped his plate of tripe before him, and milk sauce splattered over the table.

Raspu opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again.

He was too tired, and far too hungry, to be bothered. Later, perhaps.

And then, later, the girl who’d let the footman grope her in the kitchen accosted Raspu in a dimly lit

corridor as the Demon was walking slowly, tiredly, towards his room for bed.

“I should explain meself,” the girl mumbled, standing before the Demon.

Raspu sighed. “This can wait until morning,” he said, and tried to push past her.

But she clung to his arm, and he stumbled to a halt.

He noticed her mouth, and remembered the maid who’d pouted so seductively at him. Was

this the same girl?

He felt a stirring of interest.

One should never be intimate with those to whom you must issue orders and directions. That

was the forty-eighth rule (in a total of seventy-two) of the “Butler’s Code of Conduct” which

sat neat and trim and orderly in a workmanlike frame above his pillow.

Raspu had read it assiduously when he’d first embarked upon this ridiculous challenge. But now, as

the girl pressed her warm and curiously pliable flesh against him, and pouted her mouth just so, Raspu

wondered if perhaps he’d passed the test a long time ago.

Surely he’d done enough? Proved himself beyond doubt?

“He’s not important to me,” the girl murmured, and Raspu gave a start of shock — and desire — as

he realised that one of her hands had crept down between his legs.

“Who?” he managed.