stinguished patrons have never enjoyed. His pleasures will be
limited only by what his body can endure."

She walked over to Sordello, asleep on the divan, and ran caressing
fingers down his bare chest and belly. "And he looks to be a strong man
for his age. These scars. Quite the veteran bravo, eh?"

Though the room seemed cool to Daoud, sweat ran over Tilia's bare bosom
down into the deep square collar of her purple gown. Her deadly pectoral
cross lay heavily against the purple satin between her breasts. She
might need that cross tonight, Daoud thought, if anything went wrong
with Sordello.

"I begin to envy the man," said Lorenzo. "Ill-treated as he has been up
to now."

"Surely you are not such a fool," said Daoud brusquely. But then, he
thought, Lorenzo had no real idea what initiation into the Hashishiyya
did to a man.

A few last soft words of instruction to Caterina, Orenetta, and Maiga,
and Tilia led Daoud and Lorenzo to a wall panel which swung open at the
pressure of her finger on a spring. The room they entered was as cool as
the one they had just left, its large open window covered over with fine
netting to let in air and keep out insects. But it was darker. Only a
single fat candle burned in a large stick enameled green, red, and
white.

Francesca, the woman Daoud had lain with on his previous visits to
Tilia's, rose with a smile and came to him. As Daoud took her hand and
kissed it, she squeezed his fingers. The polished, carved beams that ran
up the walls and across the ceiling of this room were the same color as
Francesca's hair, a dark brown. Opposite the window there was a small
fireplace, dark and empty.

"Here, here, and here are the places from which you can watch what goes
on in there," said Tilia, marching along one wall and pointing to tiny
circular openings, each one ringed with a little _O_ of wood. Under each
opening was a couch, and the openings were low enough in the wall so
that one could sit, or even lie down, and still look through them. The
light in this room had to be lower than in the room where Sordello was,
Daoud realized, or the peepholes would be visible on the other side of
the wall.

"Francesca is here for your pleasure, should you find what is happening
on the other side of this wall arousing," said Tilia, dabbing with a
handkerchief at the pool of sweat that kept forming at the top of her
cleavage. It must be her weight, Daoud thought, that made her perspire
so much