“Now that you have tried and failed,” she murmured with that same gentle purr, “I shall claim your formidable member as my memento of the occasion, my trophy.” She gestured to her necklace that was now almost under his nose.
Prior suddenly realized that these were not little twisted twigs, but severed, dehydrated penises. There were about fifty of them strung together, some circumcised, some not. All had been hacked off at the base, and a few even had shrunken testicles dangling like beads on their strings.
His erection evanesced. What a bitch!
She lifted one delicate hand, and the nails on her slender fingers snapped out like the claws of a cat, as sharp as razor blades. “What a fine specimen this will make!"
Prior put his hand involuntarily to his crotch. His penis could be replaced, but he suspected that once she cut it he would have lost the battle, by the demonic terms of this quest. Regardless, he could bleed to death if she cut it beyond the socket-valve, for the plugged-in member kept that open.
“That won't help you,” she said in a dulcet tone. “You entered the pentagram; you made a romantic overture to me, despite my demurrals. You may not depart until our delightful business together has been consummated.” She reached for his shrinking penis, light glinting from those double-edged talons.
Prior lurched to his feet, but stumbled immediately. Vines encircled his ankles, holding him prisoner. Her feet had reverted to vegetative status—clinging, thorny strands. He kicked and struggled, but succeeded only in lacerating his ankles, while she hoisted her fabulous bosom and lovely head and reached her sleek, dagger-tipped arm toward his wilting crotch. She was in no hurry; she knew she had him.
“Here, you whitepekkered shitslinger!” Black called.
Prior looked up at this friendly hailing and saw the Negro throwing something at him. He caught it automatically.
It was the Pipecleaner model attachment.
“Thanks, Brother!” Prior called gratefully. And to the fair demoness: “Cutie, hold your trophy-cutter. I have not yet begun to fuck."
Swiftly he twisted off Monster and threw it aside. It was not completely flaccid and some blood squirted, but that couldn't be helped. He twisted on Pipecleaner and willed it instantly erect. The wide-open sight of her manicured cleft assisted this endeavor nicely.
The sultry demoness viewed the change and blanched. “That's not fair!” she wailed. “You changed weapons in the middle of the tourney!"
“All's fair in love and war, sweetheart,” he replied. “If this isn't love, it must be war. Now serve up your sweet little cherry, ‘cause I'm aiming to make the pie."
She struggled, but she was built for sex-appeal rather than combat—as all the finest women were—and her own vine-feet held her delicious posterior captive. Prior caught her wrists to nullify the knife-nails and pressed down on her voluptuous form. Her shape was truly immortal! As his moderately hairy chest crushed flat her surging female breasts, his thin long penis probed her twisting, twitching cleft. Now his practice with Oubliette stood him in good stead; he knew how to zero in no-handed on a pinpoint target.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough. The channel was still too tight for the ship. He had range and azimuth, but the Pipecleaner bent painfully rather than penetrating that constricted orifice. What a minuscule hole, considering the complete and generous sexuality of the remainder of the demoness.
But that was the point of it. She wasn't supposed to be readily breached.
“So you figure you're impregnable,” Prior grated as his crotch twinged again. “Well, I'm still going to impregnate you—or vaporize you in the attempt!” And wondered if that made sense.
He sat up, holding her at penis-length, and slapped her pretty face a bit, trying to loosen up that crack. Her head rolled back and forth, but she was laughing at him. She was demonic, literally. There was only one place he could really hurt her, and that was between the legs—where he couldn't penetrate. He couldn't even get his little finger in; he had tried. It would take a sledgehammer to drive in a pin, he thought despairingly.
Her feet became feet again, and she kicked them about, making things more difficult. Her nails were still claws, or maybe modified thorns, so he couldn't let her hands be free for long. He was getting nowhere. In time he would wear himself out—and it was a fair guess that she never would tire.
Still, there were positions and positions. This frontal assault was not the best for loose entry. Maybe some other configuration...
But he couldn't let go of her. Her hands were too dangerous, her legs too lively. Her toenails were barbed, too. How could he shift her about to suit himself under such conditions?
Well...
First thing was to distract her. To make her mad, if that were possible. How short was the temper of a demon? He held her arms spread-eagled and bent down his face, centering on her marvelous bosom. He took her right nipple in his mouth, sucked on it until it swelled ... and chomped down hard.
She yelped and bucked and cursed him in Arabic. Good, he thought; she could feel pain and didn't like it.
He wrestled her flat again and mouthed the other breast, but this time he didn't bite, though her torso was tense and stressed beneath him. He let her struggle and swear ineffectively for a while, then gave the turgid nipple a lingering lick and spat it out.
And made a lightning plunge for the rightie again as she relaxed, and ground it savagely between his molars.
She nearly bucked him into the ceiling. She was mad, all right. Fortunately she lacked the necessary cool for such work. She didn't like being teased.
Prior got to his feet, still holding her wrists. He forced her hands together and grasped her crossed wrists with the fingers of one hand. Her breasts flattened against each other and quivered like warm pudding, but she was too busy screaming obscenities at him to do what she should have: concentrate on breaking the grip. Even the words weren't very effective, because they were not in any language he could understand.
So far so good. He had her mad, so that she was not pursuing her best strategies. Now it got tricky.
Prior clenched his free hand, forming a fist with the knuckles pointed down. He didn't like doing this, even to a demon, but—
He punched her hard in the belly. Her knees came up as her breath whooshed out, and for a moment she was unable to cuss him properly. He couldn't really hurt her supernatural flesh, but while she was distracted by the blow he caught her left ankle and brought it up to her pinioned hands. Then he leaned against that leg from the underside while he positioned his groin and aimed Pipecleaner for the definitive thrust.
Then she caught on to his strategy. But it was too late. Her hands were caught, one long thigh well flexed, and her little cleft stretched wide and taut. He placed the tip of his member against the clenching slit and leaned into it, using her arms for leverage to draw himself in farther. The action was all his.
This position was like riding a bucking bronco upside-down, but it was indeed better for penetration. Her tight vagina was spread to its widest, and the full weight of his body was hammering at the weakened portal, and her frantic kicking with the other leg served only to vibrate the skin of the orifice and work the probing needle in farther. It was still a very tight squeeze, but persistence was making the entry.
It hurt as he drove on and in, for she was very like the pencil-sharpener he had dreamed of. But what was pain, when victory was surging in his loin? Past her straining childlike labia majoris, pressing in between the slick labia minoris, drilling down into that puckered well—
She screamed as he distended her miniature vulva and greased the inner channel with his own preliminary lubricant. She groaned in real agony as he reached operative depth and began jogging. The fit was so compelling that a single bounce was sufficient to bring on his climax. And when the semen sizzled through the constricted conduit and sprayed into her most jealously guarded vestibule, she puffed into vapor and dissipated with a despairing sigh. He didn't even have a chance to mouth h
er tempting breast again; his teeth closed on cold mist.
Only the necklace of dehydrated penises remained, lying inertly on the floor.
Now his member was half-limp and stinging from the excessive torsion and friction as it dribbled on the floor. But he had conquered the second branch of the nefarious Cherry Tree!
Chapter 25—Hot Fudge Spring
The haul to Stage Five was something else. Glassy sheets of sherbet led up to a bloody strawberry glacier with treacherous mint-filled crevices. Prior had never been this far before, and he was daunted by the savagery of the unfamiliar terrain. Twice Klo lost her footing and tumbled into yawning sugar-crystal pits, nearly yanking both men in after her as the rope lost its slack. Once Prior himself missed a piton and skidded toward a noxious rum-raisin cavity, saved only by a lucky grab at a protruding stratum of frozen fudge.
The worst of it was that the climb was not straightforward. The mountain curved around and about, and was bulged with impassable boulders of icemilk and carved into deadly slanting valleys and jagged channels and shifting cracks and riddled with slippery fossae and ridges and thinly iced sink-holes. The wind was intermittent and spiced with cinnamon; now quiescent, now firing missiles of peach or walnut or chocolate at the weary mountaineers.
Toward noon the maple-flavor snow grew tacky. At first Prior thought it was the marginal heat of the lime-ringed sun; then he realized it was worse. They were coming upon a hot-fudge spring.
There was no reasonable way around it. They had inadvertently entered the canyon formed by the melting snow below the bubbling aperture, and the walls on either side were too sheer to climb, too fragile to trust. It would take half a day to descend and remount another icy face—which might be no better. His map was no good; up here the contours and flavors of the mountain could change with every storm. He should have been warned when he saw that fudge stratum—obviously left over from an earlier flood condition. Now all they could do was plow—or slog—grimly ahead, and hope that this wouldn't turn out to be as bad as it almost certainly was.
Of course, if the slope became impassable, then he would have an excellent excuse to give up his quest. No dishonor in accepting the inevitable.
Prior's boots sank into the chocolate overlay—first half an inch, then two inches, then six. He glanced back at Klo and saw she had taken another spill; her complexion was now a rich Negroid brown. As, perhaps, was his own. Thus did Mt. Icecream seek to equalize them all.
The mud continued to heat and thin. They squished through a level swamp of it, with the canyon walls overhanging threateningly some fifty feet above. They turned a murky corner and found the spring itself.
The chocolate burbled in the center of a pool twenty feet in diameter. At the fringes assorted objects floated—massed fruit-slices, nuts, candy, and solidified chocolate. Overhead the flavored icewater sides arched up into an almost perfect dome. Impossible to scale.
It was warm—seventy or eighty degrees Fahrenheit, here at the dribbling overflow. It might be boiling in the center. They would have to swim around the edge—if there was any viable exit above the spring. There didn't seem to be. The ringwall appeared to have only one aperture—the exit they had entered.
“I swallowed too much chocolate getting in here,” Klo said. “I have to use the ladies’ room."
“You mean you gotta shit,” Black said. “So shit, sister. It'll come out healthy brown. But wait'll I get up current from you."
“He's right,” Prior said. “Nothing will show under all this chocolate, and the stream will carry anything on down the mountain."
She looked dubious, but also in dire need. She began squirming about as though loosening her clothing under the surface. Prior consulted with Black. “Do you have any magic to get us out of this?"
“I'm strictly a summoner,” Black said. “Pentagram, chanting, etcetera. I'm no magician. I can't do anything much here."
“Summon a fireman's ladder, then,” Klo murmured, wiping brown out of her eyes. Prior wondered whether she had finished her nether business or was still in progress.
“Can't. Has to be a supernatural creature. They're the only ones subject to supernatural summons. And I wouldn't dare let any of them out of the pentagram—even if I could make a decent diagram here on this liquid shit, which I can't. Got your turd put out yet, or do you need help?"
She ignored his last remark. “We could make a pentagram on the surface, you know. Look—this white stuff is marshmallow. String this out between the five points—"
Black fished out an object. “Say, there is a lot of shit floating around here.” He squinted, then sniffed. “Shit? This looks just like—"
“I think there's a sidewise eddy,” Klo said. “I didn't know it would float."
Black looked disgusted. He hurled the object far downstream and wiped his hand off on his sodden shirt. “Livin’ breathin’ fecal matter shit!” he exclaimed.
“Healthy brown,” she agreed.
Prior was too weary to laugh. At least they knew Klo had finished. “But the current would break up the pentagram lines,” he pointed out. “Then the demon would escape—and here we are, chocolate covered."
Black scratched his fuzzy head, smearing more chocolate or similar healthy brown on his scalp. “No—I could keep it tight for the duration with a small subsidiary spell. But it still wouldn't solve the problem. How could a demon in the penalty box do anything for us outside?"
“It could drink up the fudge,” Klo said.
“Say, you ain't half stupid, for a whiteass sow,” Black said admiringly. “Even if your shit does stink of chocolate. But that still won't get us out of here—we'd just be at the bottom of the lakebed."
“Reverse it, then. Have the demon fill up the place with fudge, and we'll float out the top."
“And get carried down the mountain on a waterfall of boiling chocolate?” Prior demanded. “Too dangerous, and the wrong direction. And if a demon could do that, he'd use it to harm us outside the pentagram, and I'll bet that's forbidden by demonic law. Otherwise every demon ever summoned would circumvent the safeguards and abolish—"
“It ain't that simple, whiteprick,” Black said. “Depends on the type of pentagram. Some summoners do get reamed, but I'm more careful. But mainly, some demons are brighter than others. Get a dumb one and the simplest diagram will hold him, depending on his strength. Now a Mephistopheles is so clever it don't even need the pentagram to haul your ass into hell; it'll talk you there, and—"
“Maybe we need a demon animal, then,” Prior suggested. “One we can talk into—"
“I've got it!” Black cried. “I'll summon a hellephant! Always wanted to conjure one of those."
Klo looked at him. “An elephant? What good would that do? Anyway, you said you couldn't summon a natural creature."
“You and him just form up the diagram while I work up the spell,” Black said excitedly. “This'll exhaust my magic, but man, it'll be an experience!"
Klo shrugged, chocolate dripping from her shoulders. “Let's mark off five points around the pool here, and work in opposite directions.” She scooped up an armful of floating marshmallow and began spreading a string of it across the gooey crust. Prior did the same, shaping the stuff into suitable lengths. He discovered to his surprise that Black's subsidiary holding spell was already in effect; the lines remained in place as they were laid down, despite the slow current.
Chapter 26—Hellephant
It took almost an hour to do the job, but they finally finished with a pentagram twenty feet in diameter, anchored at the corners by icebergs of thick whipped cream. It swayed with the brown eddies, but did not disintegrate and always drew back into place.
“Jism spread on shit,” Black said, shaking his head with admiring wonder. ‘What a pentagram! Should get the award for novelty, even if I don't have power to bring the beast."
He got out his magic powder and candle. He lit the wick, stuck the candle in a floating crust of fruitcake, and sent it drifting into the
pentagram. He began to chant:
FII FEE FOO FELL, LET'S GET RELEVANT!
GET THEE TO HELL, FETCH BACK HELLEPHANT!
And he wafted a cloud of powder toward the flame.
As he completed the ritual, a monster materialized. It resembled an elephant as Mr. Hyde resembled Dr. Jekyll.
“Who in the name of Heaven are you?” the hellephant trumpeted, stomping angrily in the muddy fudge and almost dousing the floating candle. “I just cleaned my feet, and look!” It held up a dripping brown extremity.
“All yours,” Black said to Prior.
“All mine? But what do I do?” He certainly wasn't going to enter into any fornication contest with this thing!
“Make a deal to get us out of here. That was the idea, wasn't it?"
“But—"
“Oh, for pity's sake!” Klo exclaimed. “You timid men will never get anything done.” She addressed the hellephant. “We want to get out of here. Can you help us?"
The hellephant peered down its enormous snout at her. “That depends on where you want to go, madam."
“To the Cherry Tree. Safely."
“There is no safe conduct there for mortals. The guardian demons fornicate—if you'll excuse the uncouth expression—any intruder out of existence."
“We know. We've met a couple. But you can get us to it, whatever else happens?"
“I could bore you a tunnel to the fringe of the Cherry Orchard, as it is not far from here. The tunnel itself will be secure. Will that be satisfactory?"
“See?” Klo said to the men. “Nothing to it.” And to the demon again: “That'll be fine. How soon?"
“The construction will require about fifteen minutes. Usual terms?"
“Don't answer that!” Black warned her.
She ignored him. “What are the usual terms?"
The hellephant made a gesture Prior didn't catch. Klo blushed—and so did the demon, strangely. “Oh,” she said. “Well, I'm not sure—"
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