Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

She came up to within an arm’s length of the Tros and it backed a pace: It remembered the way she used to curry it until its hide showed bare of hair.

He slipped off its back as her throaty voice, arch and full of childish vanity, said, “You wished to see me, Tempus? I can’t imagine why. I did not invite you to my wedding.”

“Because,” he said, reaching out for her with a quick grab and a step forward,

“there isn’t going to be one.”

His hand closed on her arm as hers grabbed for his belt.

They struggled there, and he dropped her by thrusting a leg between her thighs and kicking her balance out from under her.

It was a signal.

As Jihan began to curse and rage and kick beneath him among the charcoal and the bricks, Critias and Strat and Ran-dal began the sacrifice of ox and oil, to pacify the god, while Ischade did whatever Ischade must do to release her wards.

Raping the Froth Daughter wasn’t easy: She was as strong as he and just as agile.

He had counted on the lust they shared and the play-rapes in their past to turn her pique into passion and her body into an instrument he could play for best result.

And something of the sort transpired, though who raped whom, he wasn’t certain, when they rolled half-naked in the ruins, unconcerned with anything about them, while a witch cast spells and soldiers spoke ancient rituals and Randal, the

Tysian wizard, presided over a fiery sacrifice meant to set whatever lurked in

Tasfalen’s free at last.

Since Tempus was, in his way, that self-same sacrifice to Stonnbringer, father of Jihan, and since Jihan’s legs were around him and her teeth sunk firmly in his neck, and since the god within him loved the rape-game and Jihan as well and since Jihan was by then wreaking enough havoc upon his flesh to make him glad the god was in him to bear the brunt of it, he missed the spectacle taking place across the street at Tasfalen’s.