Xishi is conceived

Humans say the yama aren't like you or I. Allow me to assure you, however, that as different as the average yama is from the average human, they are not half so peculiar as the average yamish royal.
—Maxwell Philips, The True
and Irreverent History of Demonkind

The emperor of the yama was coming into heat; he simply was too drunk to know it.

His humble maidservant, Xoushou, was the reason for both conditions. It was she who had slipped the pharmaceutic accelerator into his meals for the past two weeks, she who kept his silver goblet brimming tonight. Most importantly, she had timed everything so that his sexual cycle would reach its peak while the empress and her clique were unreachable. The emperor himself did not dare interrupt his wife when she was at her private mountain spa. She had made her feelings about that icily clear the first time he tried.

Theirs was not a love match—at least not on the empress's side. Xoushou had come to think the emperor had a yen for his wife, a yen the empress almost never gratified.

Xoushou hid her satisfaction under hooded eyes, fighting not to squirm on her embroidered pillow in the shadowed corner where she sat awaiting further orders. The empress's withholding nature was to the good. Her husband's signs of restlessness were rising, and Xoushou could not deny she was looking forward to enacting every aspect of her revenge. True, the emperor's father had been responsible for banishing Xoushou's family from its rightful place in the inner court, but like all the royal line, Emperor Songyam was a handsome man: tall, slender, and, when his rut was on him, virile as a bull.

His strength was apparent in his pacing, back and forth, back and forth, kicking his lavishly embroidered bed robes away from long, muscled calves. Whatever disadvantages came with the royals' peculiar, inbred genetics, the advantages were obvious. No other yama were as physically perfect, and none had minds as sharp. It took a finely honed intuition to survive among the intrigues of the court, never mind to hold the throne for as many generations as this dynasty had. The power Songyam's bloodline represented was an aphrodisiac even to one who had suffered at its ruthless hands. Fascinated, Xoushou watched the emperor's organ rise, the thickening arch of flesh pushing against his thin sleeping silks.

She wet her lips with anticipation, but he seemed not to notice the change in his body as he passed the deep-set windows. The Forbidden City's moonlit mansions comprised the view, none of them as high or huge as the emperor's. Below his aerie, the Silver River snaked through the large, walled complex of royal houses, its frozen surface powdered by recent snows. The swooping silver rooftops had been powdered, too—still as death, their scheming inhabitants presumably asleep within.

One lone aircar, the crest for a royal house glowing on its side, banked west to avoid the strict no-fly zone above the emperor's home.

Though warmer than the scene outside, the imperial apartments echoed it. Set in a marble palace on the highest of the city's hills, the emperor's rooms were furnished in the delicate blue and white of snow at dusk. Their floors were lacquered, also white, with scrolling patterns of platinum and gems inlaid into the shining surface. Wherever he stepped, the emperor trod upon his own riches. The gems, primarily sapphires and diamonds, twinkled in the candles Xoushou had lit.

She had chosen their illumination not for nostalgia or romance, but to prevent the emperor from noticing that his eyes had grown more sensitive to light. This was one of the first signs that a royal was going into heat. Had Xoushou not been born a daughter of the blood herself, she would not have known this; such secrets were closely held from the inferior ranks. But Xoushou was royal, despite her present lowly status, and she did not wish the emperor to realize what was happening until it was too late.

He stopped pacing, startling her as he turned to speak. "You are sure the empress will not return for another week?"

Xoushou was pleased to hear his words were slurred by drink. Her plan required that his powerful intellect be dulled.

"I am certain, Your Magnificence," she responded in the sweet, low voice she knew to be her greatest seduction. "The empress's chief of staff was very clear about her schedule."

The emperor pulled a face at his favorite pet, a yellow-tufted angelbird that was nibbling on a cricket in its silver cage. Never in a million years would he have shown his frown to Xoushou. To display so great a crack in his self-command, and before a supposed servant, would entail a loss of face no royal yama could recover from. Had he not had two bottles of strong provincial rice wine in his royal belly, he wouldn't have frowned at the bird, either.

"I don't see why Nala has to travel so much," he said with the slightest hint of petulance. "You'd think there was nothing to do here in the capital."

Empress Nala traveled so much because she liked to be alone with her lovers. Unlike her husband, she had no trouble reaching a satisfying climax without her biologically congenial mate.

Rather than share a breath of this awareness, Xoushou lifted the bottle that sat wrapped in its warmer by her side. "Would Your Magnificence like another glass of wine?"

"Had too much already." The emperor leaned his brow against the nearest window's winter-cool glass. "My head hurts. And I'm aroused. Not that she would care."

The last was muttered, but Xoushou knew she could respond.

"Does Your Magnificence need me to summon a pillow girl?"

Her choice of words—"need" rather than "wish"—guaranteed he would refuse. No emperor "needed" a bed partner when he wasn't, so far as he knew, in rut.

Copyright © 2006 by Emma Holly.