The room was sparse, but it had some personal elements to it. There was a large, roughly made bed, but the sheets on it looked far better quality than she would have expected. There were no pillows; horns and pillows probably did not coexist well. The desk in one corner and the full-height mirror beside it were quite ornate. The chairs in the room were simple, and probably supplied by the castle. There was a door in the back of the room with an iron bath visible through the gap. Ceri developed a sudden urge to go all the way through with the sex if he would just let her have a decent wash afterward.
‘Here,’ the Devos growled. She looked at him and saw his hand held out, fingers curled under. She held out her own hand and he dropped three silver coins into her palm. ‘One extra on account. Do well and you’ll get three more.’ He turned away before she could respond, walking over to an armour stand in the corner of the room.
Ceri dropped the coins into her bag, and then the bag on the floor near the door. The question was how far she was going to go with this. She definitely wanted him out of his armour; she could see the enchantments on it and they could have been purely physical protection, but she was betting on something which prevented magical influence. She turned to see him unbuckling the steel plates which covered his shoulders. There was still a chain shirt, and various other bits of plate. The metal codpiece looked uncomfortable. Sidling over to the bed, she considered her options. She could hit him as soon as he was naked, but then there would be no sounds of sex from the room, which might arouse suspicion. On the other hand, having sex with Hiffy to get help was one thing, and quite pleasant, but was she willing to let a six-foot purple demon fuck her on the off-chance that someone might wonder why she wasn’t screaming?
‘I’m Torn, by the way,’ he said. The imperative, authoritative tone he had used outside was gone. He actually sounded kind of resigned, as though he was engaging a woman for sex because it was expected, or a duty.
‘Sha,’ she replied and he chuckled; “Sha” meant “blue.”
‘An appropriate name. It suits you.’
‘Thank you.’ She had no idea what “Torn” meant so she could not comment on that. ‘I, uh, I’ve never been with a Devos before.’
‘I assure you we’re not that different from most det, just better.’ She gave a timid giggle in response. ‘I’m surprised someone hasn’t taken you as a pleasure slave. If I could afford a rarity like you I’d buy you myself.’ That probably sounded really complimentary to a det. Ceri pretty much decided he was going to sleep through the evening. Then he turned around.
He was… big; the codpiece had to have been really uncomfortable. Semi-flaccid still, his penis was thick and quite long and Ceri felt herself getting aroused. It was the stupid ankle chain; fairy silver and enchanted, the chain was a demonstration of the love between her and Lily, but like most fae enchantments it had a twisted sense of humour. Lily still found it humorous that a symbol of love made it more likely that Ceri would go off and fuck someone else. At times like this Ceri really did not think it was funny.
‘Wow,’ Ceri said, not entirely faking it. Her eyes widened, and he got harder at her reaction which made her eyes widen further. He crossed the distance between them in two strides. There might have been resignation in his voice, but he was a Devos, all about himself. Taking her shoulders, he turned her around, pushed her face into the bed sheets, and stepped up behind her. The first push was a little painful and she let out a sharp cry, half grunt, half shriek, but she got into it quickly enough even if it was like being stuffed with a fist. She gripped the sheets, bit her lip, and let him get on with it while her body decided it was going to enjoy itself anyway. Soon she was panting out little shocked gasps with each thrust, her hands making fists in the sheets and her back arching in response to the pulses of pleasure swelling up from her nether regions. When he did, finally, climax, the extra pressure and wild thrusting pushed her over the edge and she was fairly certain that the screaming would convince anyone in the building that Torn was having a good time.
He pulled out, laughing, and gave her a slap on the rump while she lay there panting for breath. She was mildly disgusted with herself for enjoying it, but he could not know that.
‘How was your first Devos, Sha?’
Ceri struggled onto her back. Her top had slipped down to her waist and he looked down at her, admiring the sight. ‘The… noise didn’t… give it away?’ she panted. She needed to control of her breathing soon. If he decided to go again before she could get her spell together they would be at it all night.
He gave a short laugh, which was still filled with humour, and not a little pride. ‘I said we were better than the det you’re used to.’ Actually, she had preferred Hiffy, Lily was far superior, and Michael had Torn beaten hands down since he did not split her open like a log. ‘Give me a minute or two and we’ll see if I can’t make you scream cracks in the ceiling.’
Yeah, don’t think so. Ceri took a steadying breath, summoned her power, and unleashed it on the Devos. His eyes widened slightly, probably as he sensed the surge in magic, then closed as he slumped onto the floor. Ceri let the breath out and sagged back onto the bed. The hardest part was going to be lifting his bulk onto the bed. Well, that and sneaking into the central part of the castle.
She needed to get the heavy lifting done quickly and add the extra spell to make sure he thought she had stayed with him, but she felt dirty. Stripping off her clothes, she went to the bathroom. There was no hot water, but there was a jug of cold and she used it to wash herself of as much of Torn as possible before heading back into the bedroom and dragging his unconscious form across to the bed. It took all her strength to lift him up and roll him onto his back in the middle of the bed.
‘Big lump,’ she grumbled as she gathered her power together and reached out for his forehead. A few seconds later she nodded; when he woke up he would not remember the sleep spell, but he would remember taking “Sha” half-a-dozen times in imaginative ways she had a sneaking suspicion he would never have thought of on his own, before sending her on her way with a big tip.
Finding his moneybag beside his armour, she extracted another five silvers, dropping them into her bag with the others before adding her “whore” outfit and taking out her street clothes from where they had been hidden under a cloth. She felt better properly dressed, and even better with her hair tucked back into her hood and her face hidden in the cowl, but she cast an invisibility cloak about herself before slipping out of the room; there was no sense in being overconfident of her stealth skills, even if she had learned them from werewolves.
There were a couple of girls in the mess hall, looking dishevelled and talking to guards about who would be next. Hiffy was not among them and Ceri once again hoped that the barmaid was okay. There was no way she could safely check on her, however, so she slipped out into the night and started across the courtyard toward the door she had spotted. Nights were a lot shorter than days; around about eight hours. Ceri suspected it was the putative dust cloud between the world and its sun; light diffraction caused dawn and dusk to be much longer. Whatever the cause, it meant that if she was not out in another six hours she would be trying to escape, with Lily, in the light.
The gate guard was not a problem. Carter had taught her a spell long ago, in what felt like another life, which left its target dazed and, when they came out of it, unaware of what had happened. Whatever enchantments were on the armour, they did not stop the spell from taking effect. Ceri slipped past the guard, through the door he was standing beside, and had it closed before he was aware of what was happening.
Beyond was a corridor through the wall and she could see light at the end; the door was open. It looked like they did not consider that a security issue when they were in a normal operating mode, and she had to admit they were probably right. Except that there was an invisible woman sneaking through the place, so maybe they were not as secure as they thought.
The inner courtyard was broad and covered in flagstones m
ade of a dark, almost iridescent rock. The moons provided very little light; they were three small spheres in the sky which moved far faster than the Earth’s moon. The courtyard was lit instead by crystal globes mounted on poles in a grid perhaps twenty yards apart. Ceri left no shadow as she darted across the flags toward the building which took up the centre of the courtyard. There was one, large, door. It was guarded, but wide open, and Ceri slowed to a stealthy walk to pass the guards.
Still she met no opposition, but now she had to decide whether to go up or down. She could get no sense of where Lily was. Aside from the vague feeling that she was in the city, and probably in the castle, Ceri had had no positive fix on Lily since arriving in this world. That meant she was probably somewhere heavily warded from scrying. Probably. Maybe. She could be wearing something which hid her.
The inside of the castle was brightly lit with runes in the ceiling and on many of the wall pillars. The stone it had been built of was white, some sort of polished marble. It looked to Ceri as though the place, this part of it anyway, had been built to impress visitors. There were none here; there were Devos and Devim, Cherich, various det with collars around their necks or chains linking ear to lip, and a few other demons Ceri did not recognise, but they all seemed to belong to the castle.
Her choice of destination was decided by finding a staircase down before anything else. Hoping she did not run into anyone on the way, she started down and soon found herself in a kitchen. Here there were more det, some collared or chained, and some not. Sitting in a corner and watching over the slaves and servants was a fat Devos who lazily flipped a whip in his right hand. Lily was not going to be here; the dungeon or the bedroom, that was where she would be.
Another staircase beside the first took her further down and the sounds of the kitchen receded as the temperature dropped. The steps took her down a long way, it seemed, and dropped into a corridor lined with cells. They were largely empty, but she checked each one anyway. They were slave pens, she realised. In a couple det were chained to the wall by their collars. None of the ones who were in there looked healthy; she figured that they would be out working if they were. How many slaves did this place go through? Fighting the urge to heal some of the worst ones, she moved on.
A spell unlocked the door at the end of the corridor and she slipped out into the next room as quietly as possible. It looked odd at first. The room was circular in shape with cells around the walls aside from where doors led in from the slave quarters and whatever was out the other side. The cells were more open than the pens; like the cells you saw in westerns, with iron bars rather than walls on one side. The reason was obvious when she recognised the equipment in the middle of the room. There was a rack, stocks of various types, two tables covered in various implements which looked painful. Prisoners were tortured here while the others had no choice but to watch and listen.
There were only two prisoners in the cells and both of them showed signs of having had some of the more pointy implements used on them. One was a Devos, a female, naked and with one horn broken off halfway up, she looked sick, or very tired. Ceri had no idea what the other one was; it looked as though it was made of protoplasm and mouths with a lot of sharp teeth, but there were scars on its hide which looked like they had been seared to keep them from closing. Something oozed out of the wounds, but if it was blood it was the most viscous blood Ceri had ever seen.
She was surprised by the lack of an obvious guard until she neared the door on the other side of the room and spotted the mass of tentacles near it. She grimaced. Lily had described this thing to her and then she had done a bit of reading out of curiosity. It was a Chelvig and the term “tentacle monster” perfectly described it. There was a central core which contained its primary brain, but the rest of it consisted of thirteen tentacles sprouting from that core. Long, green, and smooth, the tentacles were very sensitive, fast, and pretty strong. Chelvig fed on fear; the torture chamber was a perfect home for one and its presence explained the Devos’ fatigue.
Behind it, the door was down a short corridor. Ceri figured she could slip past the demon and out of the door without drawing attention to herself. The Chelvig waited until she put her foot down in the doorway and then unfurled a tentacle, wrapping it around her ankle. Ceri bit back a yelp. Her foot was yanked sideways, toward the opening blossom of green limbs. Another tentacle lashed toward her face and she leaned back, avoiding it. The creature was flailing wildly, unable to see her. She vaguely remembered reading that they saw heat, but her spell would block that too. Clearly it had felt her footfall on the flags. She was about to ready a spell to strike at it when it caught her other ankle and pulled, and she fell face first onto the stone right in front of it. A tentacle wrapped around her neck; now she was in trouble and it knew it, could taste it. She struggled to remain calm as her slimy, green necktie tightened, and then the tip of the thing found her mouth and began trying to force its way in. Frantic now, Ceri reverted to basic instincts; power grew in her hand and she thrust it out toward the creature’s core. There was the smell of burning flesh and the tentacles went slack.
A dead guard. Great. Ceri lay still for several seconds and then looked around. The Devos was at the bars, trying to see what was going on. Well, now Ceri needed a distraction. She flexed her will again and the locks on the two occupied cells clicked open. Climbing to her feet without a word, she headed for the second door, unlocking it and passing through. All she found was another staircase, heading upward. Lily was not in the dungeon and that just left the slave quarters in the tower. She hurried; she had to be up on ground level before the dead guard and escaped prisoners were discovered.
She came up at the back of the castle, in what appeared to be utility corridors. Here the masonry was of poorer quality; guests were not supposed to see this part of the building unless they were forced guests. Orienting herself, she headed toward the eastern side, which was where the tower Lily had to be in was. As she went, the stonework got nicer until, slipping through a door and praying no one could see the door moving, she entered into a small chamber with a wide, circular staircase rising from the middle of it.
Somewhere in the castle, bells started ringing and Ceri heard raised voices. The prisoners had made themselves known, it seemed. Ceri was guessing the big mass of mouths had been spotted; the Devos had looked weak, but was still likely to be better at hiding than the mouth monster. Before anything drastic happened, Ceri started up the staircase.
There was nothing but stairs until she got high enough to be out of the main castle building and into the tower. Then she came out into what had to be an audience chamber. It was empty; the castle’s mysterious lord was not giving audiences at this time of night. More likely he was amusing himself with a couple of succubi somewhere above. Whoever he was, it seemed he took his role as mystery man seriously. There was a large, comfortable throne in the room, but Ceri only found it by peeking behind a curtain. And behind the throne was the, narrower, staircase to the upper floors.
It rose upward on one side of the tower, with rooms emerging to the side as she went up. She passed some sort of office where a Devos was bossing around two Devim. They seemed to be filing reports, or accounts, or both. On another floor there were det preparing food. She carried on upward until she found what she was looking for.
The room was sumptuous. Silks hung from the walls, cushions were strewn between padded benches and loungers. And there was Lily, all six of her. There was a Lily stretched out naked on a chaise longe, another was eating grapes from a golden bowl, two of them lying on a pile of cushions engaged in a slow “69.” Ceri looked around at them and blinked. She got no sensation of… Lilyness from any of them, but how could they be mimicking her? They could not know Ceri was there…
‘We’ve been expecting you, Brent.’ The voice came from the back of the room and Ceri looked that way in time to see a figure wrapped in a cowled cloak step from behind a curtain. ‘My Lord sent me here to wait for you. You might as well reveal you
rself, I can see you anyway. The black skin is unexpected.’
Ceri allowed the spell to fade and six copies of Lily looked around, smiling brightly. ‘Mistress! You came for me!’ The chorus drove a spike through Ceri’s heart; she was not sure she ever wanted to hear Lily say that particular word again.
‘Nothing to say, Brent?’ the cloaked figure asked. ‘I’ll make you a deal. If you can figure out which one is the real one, you can have her. I’ll let you walk out of the castle unhindered.’
Ceri narrowed her eyes at the cowl. This demon seemed to know her personally. She knew very few demons, but the voice did sound vaguely familiar. She looked around at the six expectant faces. They were all perfect copies. Chestnut hair fell over full, pert breasts. Flawless porcelain skin was marked only by Ceri’s personal rune tattooed onto their stomachs just above their pubic mounds. Each wore a silver chain around their right ankle. Their dark eyes sparkled and they smiled fanged smiles which were just the way Lily smiled. There seemed to be no difference between them and none of them had that unique feeling that they were Lily, her Lily, her personal demon…
Smiling suddenly, Ceri focussed her power. Not on the cloaked figure or the six succubi, but on herself. Slowly, as she concentrated upon her own being, the dragon within her, her skin began to shine and her eyes glowed blue. She grinned at the cowl and allowed the light to fade. ‘None of them,’ she said. ‘Where is she?’
‘Pick one,’ the lord of the castle growled.
‘You can’t keep her from me, you know? I heard about it from a few of the det. When a demon is marked by their patron it’s illegal to steal them. I could drag you before the local High Lord and have you discorporated.’
‘One of these…’
Thaumatology 10 - The Other Side of Hell Page 6
