again and slammed his knuckles across her jawline. Her head was thrown
back violently in the opposite direction and she was knocked flying from
her chair.
Nogo stooped over her and seized her arms, twisting them up behind her
back. He lifted her back into the seat and stood behind her. He held her
in such a surprisingly powerful grip that she could feel the skin of her
upper arms bruising beneath his fingers.
'I have no more time to waste,' Helm said quietly, taking the burning
cheroot from his lips to inspect the glowing tip. 'Let us start again,
Where is Mek Nimmur?' Tessay's left eardrum felt as if it had burst with
the ferocity of those blows. Her hearing buzzed and sang. Her teeth had
been driven halfway through the flesh of her cheek, and her mouth filled
slowly with her own blood.
'Where is Mek Nimmur?' Helm repeated, leaning his face closer to hers.
'What are your friends doing with the dam in the Dandera river?'
She gathered the blood and saliva in her mouth, and suddenly and
explosively spat it into his face.
He recoiled violently and wiped the bloody mess from his eyes with the
palm of his hand.
Hold herV he said to Nogo, and seized the front of her blouse. With one
heave he ripped it open down to her waist, and Nogo giggled and leaned
forward over her shoulder to look at her breasts. He giggled again as
Helm took one of them in his hand and squeezed out the nipple between
his finger and thumb. It was the dark purple colour of a ripe mulberry.
He held her like that, pinching her flesh with his nails until the skin
tore and a droplet of blood welled up and trickled over his thumb. Then
with his other hand he took the burning cheroot from his lips and blew
on the top until it glowed hotly.
'Where is Mek Nimmur?' he asked, and lowered the cheroot towards her
breast. 'WHAt are they doing in the Dandera river?
She stared down in horror as he brought the burning cheroot closer, and
tried to wriggle away from him. But Nogo held her firmly from behind.
She screamed once, on an agonized drawn-out note, as the glowing coal
touched, the tip of her nipple and the delicate skin began to blister.
inter,' said Royan, spreading the enlargement of the fourth face of the
stele from Tanus's tomb under the bright glare of the floodlamp. 'This
is the side that contains Taita's notations, which I am postulating are
those of the bao board. I don't understand all of them, but by a process
of elimination I have determined that the first symbol denotes one of
the four sides, or as he terms them the castles of the board., She
showed him the pages of her notebook on which she had made her
calculations.
'See here, the seated baboon is the north castle, the bee is the south,
the bird is the west and the scorpion the east.' She pointed out to him
the same symbols on the photograph of the stele. 'Then the second and
third figures are numbers - I believe that they designate the file and
the cup. With these we can follow the moves of his imaginary red stones.
The reds are the highest-ranking colours on the board.'
'What about the verses between each set of notations?' Nicholas asked.
'Such as this one here, about the north wind and the storm?'
