And a lord of Ranke, who got up to close the shutters against the sudden and
importunate wind, inhaled the stench that swept up from riverside and suffered a
physical reaction of such intensity he dreamed awake, dreamed something so
intense and so very real that it mingled with the krrf-dream he had taken refuge
in this storm-fraught night. It had something of terror about it. It had
everything of lust. It was like the krrf, destructive and infinitely-desirable
in that way that knowledge of other worlds, even death, has a lust about it, and
a soul trembles on the edge of some great and dangerous height, fascinated by
the flight and the splintering of its own bone and the spatter of its own blood
on the pavings-
Lord Tasfalen took in his breath of a sudden and focused in horror at the
starlit pavings of his own courtyard, realizing how close he had come to
falling. And how desirable it had been. He blamed it on the krrf and flung
himself away and back to the slave who shared his bed, vowing to have a man
whipped for the krrf that must have something in it beyond the ordinary. He
experienced a taint of fear, stood there in his bedroom with the slave staring
up at him in purest terror that the handsome lord was suffering some kind of
seizure, that he had perhaps been poisoned, for which she would be blamed, and
for which she would die. Her whole life passed before her in that moment, before
Tasfalen sank down on the bed in a convulsion he shared with a woman a far
distance from his ornate bedchamber.