“At one side of the tavern a girl was dancing on the table, her scarlet silks swirling sensuously through the smoke-filled air as she writhed and spun, their gilded sequins flashing in the torchlight. Brazen castanets on her fingertips clashed and rang in an intricate syncopated rhythm, interweaving with that of her bare feet on the coin-strewn tabletop. She was tall and long of limb, with the lithe muscles of a dancer and the buxom build of a pleasure slave. Her hair was as black as polished jet, thrown carelessly back from a face that suggested aristocratic Stygian blood ran in her veins, perhaps mixed with Shemite, yet her skin was unusually pale for one of those races, the color of desert sand. Gazing into the eyes of one of the men clustered about the table — the last to have thrown s