The other four men left the circle of women to join Clero, and then five pairs of eyes glittered at me. I stood in the grip of the guard, trying to look suitably beaten down, but somehow I didn’t think I was making it. I don’t like being looked at like that, and my normal self-control was still misplaced.
“For one so young she is truly remarkable,” one of the men commented, letting his eyes move all over me as he sipped from the goblet he was holding. “She also bears a striking resemblance to a certain high-born young lady of our acquaintance, and yet this cannot be she. That particular young lady would not have fallen slave.”
“Which is a fortunate thing,” said another, a stout man with a slobbering leer. “Were she that particular young lady, it would be necessary for us to remove her from among the living, to spare her poor father the shame of knowing his daughter lived as a slave.”
Bellna began trembling at their thinly veiled threat, struck by the horror of her predicament all over again, and I showed everything she felt, making the men around me laugh in amusement. It was suddenly easier to act the way a helplessly trapped young girl should be acting, and that told me my previous trouble with controlling myself had been Bellna again stood with eyes downcast, trembling in the grip of the guard next to me, trying to figure out how Bellna had gotten to me without my knowing it, but I wasn’t given the time I needed to understand what had happened. The men were enjoying their laugh at my expense, but the round and leering fellow had something else to say.
“How gratifying that the slave makes no attempt to claim a falsely elevated status,” he drawled, moving slowly closer until he was no more than inches away from me. “And how generous of you, my lord, to offer her use to us.”
All four of the men were suddenly closer, their drooling approval of that idea thick enough to feel, none of them aware of the stricken looks covering the faces of the eight slave women. Bellna’s panic made me cringe back wide-eyed against the guard holding me, and Clero chuckled indulgently.
“Your interest frightens the child, my friends,” he drawled, getting a good deal of pleasure out of the flinching fear I was showing. “I may perhaps grant you her use later this day, should her training advance in a satisfactory manner. By then, however, you may no longer wish her use.”
The men’s leers froze, and without their taking a single step they were no longer as close as they had been. A chill descended on the group as a whole, but Clero never noticed it.
“She will, of course, be one of my special prizes,” he said, his eyes still glued to me. “She will be taught to hate and fear sexual congress, and to find exquisite release only in the pain of the knife. Her lovely body will be made even lovelier by the scars of the patterns of pleasure – will it not?”
He turned to look at his guests then, and they hastened to assure him that everything he said was true. The man beamed with pleasure at their agreement, never seeing that their blood was probably running almost as cold as mine. The sort of conditioning Clero intended was more than possible; with the right preparation and enough repetition, almost any woman could be taught to respond to a blade the way others responded to men. Sight of the knife hilt would bring on the stirrings of desire, unsheathing the blade would build uncontrollable arousal; the need to be touched by that sharpened edge would grow and grow-until the first, light stroke came to approximate penetration.
Abandoned frenzy would grow as the pain grew and then, at the height of agony, release would finally come. It could he done, I knew it could he done, and as I stared at Clero’s happily smiling face I shook with the revulsion I felt. I didn’t know how many little girls he’d laughingly cut to pieces while they begged for more, and I didn’t care. I just knew I wouldn’t let him make me one of them.
“Now that we have seen her, you may begin with her,” Clero said to the guard holding my arm, the warmth of his expression and tone suitable for offering cookies and milk. “Take her to the holding room beside the punishment cells, remove those chains and replace them with the usual coarse-fiber rope, and then use her. See that at least another ten of my tower guard also use her, but take care that no permanent injury is given her. Do not allow her to become aroused, and do not allow her to feel pleasure. Others will make her feel those things.”
Clero’s pleasant chuckle turned his guests pale and made a couple of them swallow hard, but all the guard did was nod wordlessly and begin to hustle me out of the room. Bellna was crouched in a far corner of my mind, pulsing out whimpering terror, and more than one tendril of that terror was beginning to wrap itself around me. Clero had told the guard to take the chains I wore and replace them with rope, which would make the lock pick I had hidden absolutely worthless. The number of dates he had lined up for me would also go a far piece toward ruining the day, and I could feel desperation tightening the muscles of my body. Whatever I did in the way of escaping would have to be done before the line started to form; after the kind of rape Clero had prescribed for me, I’d be in no condition to do anything but lie there and moan.
The guard dragged me out of the great presence and through the doors, and then we went back the way we had come. We continued on past the spot I had started from, went through four or five more rooms, then came to a bare-stoned stair area, beyond which was a door. Another guard lounged against a wall in the stair area, but the guard holding my arm did no more than nod to him before opening the door, shoving me through, then tossing it behind us. I’d been too preoccupied to notice it sooner, but my guard was angry; when the door was closed behind us, I found out why.
“Princess,” he muttered under his breath, shoving me again toward a low wooden table which was, along with a matching bench, the only furniture in the bare stone room. There was also a pile of rope in one corner, but rope didn’t usually count as furnishings. “They waste what other men would kill to possess. A slave such as this one to be put beyond the reach of men!”
The idea made him furious, and he pushed me so hard that I stumbled two steps and landed belly-down on the low table, the wrist chain digging into my body again and the ring knocking the wind out of me.
I lay there with my teeth clenched, sucking air back into my lungs, suddenly as furious as the righteously indignant guard. He wasn’t bothered because of what would be done to me he was bothered by the fact that I would no longer be available for him to do what be wanted to do to me. He was a junior grade sadist too limited to make the big time, and the lack grated. I started to push myself off the wooden table, nearly trembling with a rage that waited for nothing more than the chains to be unlocked, but a big hand in the middle of my back pushed me flat again.
“A slave does not stir from where she is placed,” I was informed by a cold voice, the hand holding me down to the table. “You will be informed when you have my permission to move about else you will find what punishment you did earlier. Do you wish to be punished?”
“No, master,” I forced myself to say in a meek whisper. Just unlock those chains, master, and then we’ll talk about movement and punishment.
“A pity,” he commented, bringing a key to my left wrist cuff and opening it. “A body such as yours is made for no other thing than punishment. I may perhaps fetch a whip before I am done with you.
And I may perhaps shove that whip clear up to your putrid heart, I growled to myself, then gasped as my left arm was twisted hard behind my back. A second later a rope was being tied around my wrist, and I found out what Clero had meant by coars-fibered; the damned thing felt like barbed wire digging into my skin.’ I gasped again and jumped involuntarily, but all that got me was a knee in the back and an amused chuckle.
“After my first use of you, I shall use a length or two of this rope as a seat upon which you may be ridden,” the bastard said, reaching over my right shoulder to unlock the right wrist cuff. “When the ride is done, you will find arousal and pleasure completely beyond you just as the Prince wishes. For your first use, however, you will respond as I wish. Another moment and we may have a closer look at you.”
The extra moment was used up tying my right wrist to my left, an action I found as painful as you would expect with rope like that. It hurt even though I didn’t struggle at all, and then I was turned roughly on my back.
“That slave rag will hamper my enjoyment of you,” the man remarked, bringing his key to the chain around my waist and unlocking it, then pulling it free of my body and throwing it aside. “You will have little further need of it, therefore…”
The sound his hands made ripping the slave shift open ended his sentence, and then he tossed the torn pieces of cloth to either side of me, the look in his eyes heating up as he took me in. The small table was so low and narrow that he was able to straddle me across my thighs and still stay on his feet, and as I looked up at him he reached down and stroked his fingers across my stomach.
“I am familiar with the slave market you come from,”
He said, grinning faintly as he watched’ my face. “At one time I was employed there, before I accepted employment with the Prince. You had best be prepared to serve me.”
His grin stretched as he watched me choke, the strength of the heat flashing through me widening my eyes in disbelief. My body was writhing uncontrollably on the narrow table, suddenly in the grip of a horrible, crippling need. He’d keyed me with the conditioning word
“serve,” but worse than that he’d keyed Bellna. It was mostly her lack of control that was doing me in, but there was no way for me to stop it. I moaned and struggled to reach the burning that was destroying me, and to my horror the pain I felt in my wrists from pulling at the rope actively increased my need. I was responding all at once to every bit of conditioning I’d been subjected to, and the guard laughed as he put his hand between my thighs.
“I do believe you are already prepared,” he said, enjoying the way I gurgled and bumped at the toying motion of his fingers. I needed him in me so badly I thought I would die, but he was in no hurry. “It pleases me to see you so eager to serve, slave,” he added with another laugh.
I screamed. Total insanity took me so completely that I remember nothing of what happened immediately after the scream, not until the swirling golden mists faded to the point where I could fight my way out of them. The guard was deep inside me, jolting me into the table with the force of pure abandonment, his swordbelt and sword gone, the ankle chain gone from my ankles. I became aware of the Bellna presence in my head, mindless with released need and simply floating, drinking in the sensations being forced on my body. She was actually enjoying being raped, but it was still my body and I still didn’t. My arms, wrists and hands hurt, and so did my hack, but none of that mattered. What did matter was that the guard was jolting me harder and harder, nearing release, and that meant it would soon be over.
Right after that, if I could still move, it would be my turn.
The guard held back longer than I thought he could, but every man has his limit. He held tight to my thighs when he reached his, enjoying it to the end, and then he reached over to squeeze one of my breasts.
“Should the Prince wish to see a child put upon you, it may already be done,” he panted with a chuckle. “Once, a number of us were set the task of filling the belly of a pain slave. She screamed and fought each time one of us entered her, unable to feel pleasure in the absence of a knife edge. We plumbed her well, we did, pleasuring ourselves in the tightness of her even as we were forced to look away from the scars which covered her. It was her time when she was given to us, therefore did she soon begin to swell, and yet the effort was all for naught. The brat she dropped was male, therefore was its throat quickly cut. Had it been a girl child, the Prince would have had it raised in his own way.”
He laughed as he withdrew from me, but I couldn’t help shuddering.
Clero had surrounded himself with men as twisted as he was, and just being there made me sick to my stomach. There was no doubt that I had to get out of there, and no room for doubt in my mind that I would. I forced myself to sitting on the narrow table, ignoring all pain and weariness, and turned my head to see the guard crouched near a wall, measuring out two more lengths of the rope already on my wrists. My insides tightened at the sight, and I backed up away from the table to the far wall.
“Do you seek to escape, slave?” the man asked, a chuckle accompanying his glance as his hands kept working. “There will be no escape for you, and now there must he additional punishment as well. First you will ride the rope, and then you will wear it as I drive you about the room. Afterward, you will no longer consider moving about without permission.”
The idea gave him such a kick that his chuckle grew a laugh, and I just couldn’t stand any more. If I didn’t get out of there right then, the game would he permanently over for me. The stone floor didn’t look very appealing, but there was no choice at all. I ran two quick. steps forward, ducked my head as I dived for the stones, flipped over smoothly despite what my body felt like, and came up out of the roll with my bound arms in front of me rather than behind. It had taken me a long time to perfect that maneuver, and I’d bothered with it only because of the shock value it produced. My shoulders blazed with pain as I came erect in front of the gawking guard, but pain didn’t matter next to the grim pleasure I felt. I took one more step forward and kicked the crouching guard right in the face, hearing his nose and some of his teeth break as he shot back against the wall. He hit with a heavy thwak and slid down to lie motionless on his side, but right then that wasn’t good enough for me. I moved over to him, pulled him flat by one arm, gauged distances quickly, then axe-kicked him right in the throat. The downward arc of the kick caught him in the windpipe, and that was the end of fun-and-games time for him for keeps.
I stepped back from the body and found that I was trembling, but more with enjoyment than from reaction. The thought of enjoying that sort of killing shocked me, and I turned fast to find the sword the guard had taken off. That world was beginning to get to me, and the best thing I could do was get off it as soon as possible.