by Lee Ramsay
Weak green fire seeped from the younger sorceress’s emerald pendant as the magic responded to her call. The profane jade light brightened with each grunted recitation of the chant. Tendrils of the summoned enchantment wormed through his flesh, seeking the animal at the core of his being.
As a connection formed between them, the filaments piercing what he could only conceive of as his soul, Tristan’s body sucked in a shocked breath. A matching inhalation tore from Satha’s parted lips as her loins rose to meet an involuntary thrust; her clenched flesh relaxed to take him deeper. The young woman’s pupils contracted to pinpricks as her eyes widened, then expanded to swallow all but a sliver of the irises.
“Now you understand,” Ankara purred as she witnessed her kinswoman’s expression. “Do you feel his rage and the fear that feeds it? Do you feel the life racing through his veins like a river current, charged with lightning’s fire?”
“Yes...”
“Do you feel the possibilities stored within his manhood, the potentiality of your womb?”
“Yes...”
“Take it. Take from him that possibility, and blend it with the core of your being. Stoke his fires, and burn away that which is weak within you,” Ankara dug her fingernails into the youth’s shoulders. “Do it, boy. Spend yourself in her.”
Unable to resist, horrified at the grasping sensation of Sathra’s magic clawing his vitals, Tristan’s body obeyed. The younger sorceress no longer resisted, accommodating his intrusion and meeting it with aggressive lust. Grunts as animal as his own rose from her throat as her passions rose. Rhythmic pulses throbbed through his flesh as his seed came hot and hard. Her emerald pendant blazed as he filled her, green radiance pouring through the gaps between their bodies as they writhed together. A portion of his being drained away with a ripping sensation as it flowed into her.
Ankara crowed with triumph as she clung to his back. Her hair spilled across him as her lips pressed against the wound she had bitten into his shoulder. The youth recognized the draw of the older sorceress’s magic feeding from his blood; it paled compared to the younger woman’s raw, unfocused hunger as her body clenched around his intruding manhood.
The enchantment utilized his stolen essence to affect subtle alterations to Sathra’s features. Her alabaster skin grew smoother, the few blemishes marring its quality diminishing. Her nose's line straightened, and her lips became fuller as her features grew more symmetrical. Her icy irises changed as well, shot through with motes of snowy white and silver. Even the deep chestnut of her hair altered, growing fuller with a vibrant luster.
Hungry fascination replaced her loathing. The young woman’s writhing body drew him deeper as her pelvis shifted. The sharp edges of her fingernails dug into his buttocks as her knees rose and fell wider apart.
“Take her again, Tristan,” Ankara commanded.
Tristan’s scream remained locked within his soul as the animal he had become growled with pleasure.
SINCE THEN, ANKARA and Sathra had bedded him more times than he cared to count. On occasion, they did not bother to release him from his chains or feed him the rishka, and simply took him in their mouths while kneeling on the floor to exploit a different form of his helplessness. A portion of his being withered away each time they fed on him, only to be replenished by the rage housed within his flesh.
Everything about the chamber’s design heightened and maintained fear, tension, and humiliation while leaving the prisoners with a sense of timelessness. To keep himself occupied, he cataloged each indignity while searching for some way to engineer an escape.
Judging time by their beddings was impossible, though enough passed for his body to recover. His captors satisfied themselves with the other orphans during these times, either bedding them or slicing into their flesh to drink blood like wine. Similar wounds covered his body, each stitched closed with coarse black thread.
Servants brought buckets of hot water stinking of lye at irregular intervals to mop away the foulness on the floor and wash the prisoners. The women stitched the captives’ injuries and replaced the soiled sheets on the bed with clean ones. Every few days, the servant women shaved his head and scraped away the coppery hairs of his beard. The women were not spared the application of sheers, though their hair was kept long enough to brush their shoulders. Insufficient food affected hair growth; he supposed the trims were intended to further confuse the passage of time.
It was pointless to plead with the servants; he recognized the signs of rishka – a rigid expressionlessness and a slumped posture with stiff movements – and wondered what the drug’s prolonged usage had done to their minds.
Time’s passage was further confused with irregular meals. The yeasty, alcoholic liquid given to them sustained the prisoners without sating their hunger or quenching their thirst. Sometimes the drink carried rishka, soured by the drug’s presence. Beyond a useless observation, he could not see any relevance to the taste.
Hinges on the chamber door remained unoiled to create an ominous creak when opened. So it was, too, with the chain apparatus. Knowing the sounds were deliberate did not prevent him from tensing whenever the braziers flared or the door handle rattled. Those chains remained raised on occasion, leaving the prisoners dangling after the sorceresses departed. While uncomfortable for him, it proved problematic for the others. Most of the men were able to stand, but many of the women were barely able to support themselves on the balls of their feet. Sobs of pain grew constant whenever they were left in such a manner. When the braziers flared to life again, many prisoners were bloodstained from the manacles tearing into their wrists’ thin skin.
The braziers themselves were a ploy to keep the prisoners on edge. Most of the time, they ignited before Sathra’s or Ankara’s arrival. There were times, however, where the pair moved through the gloom to feed on their captives. Reliance on the surge of fire in the braziers to anticipate their torment was useless.
Dushken whelps were often let loose in the room. He realized Urzgeth and a few other huntsmen were using the prisoners to train the youths in anatomy, which they repeatedly demonstrated through beatings. Five prisoners – three women and two men – died during such lessons. Sometimes the women were given to the youngsters as rewards. Tristan was disturbed by this, but it was an insult for the Anahari men imprisoned with him in a way he did not understand.
The prisoners rarely spoke, and when they did, it was in whispers. They learned each other’s names, but little more. Conversation was dangerous; if they were overheard, the Dushken beat them. Of the twenty-three people initially imprisoned in the chamber, only five remained; most had been sacrificed to the blood bath. New prisoners replaced those who had died; the process of breaking them refreshed the remaining captives’ fear.
Tristan’s hate smoldered, hungering for an opportunity to be unleashed. At times he wavered on despair’s edge, too hungry and exhausted to care about his situation, but that would pass. Dougan once told him that, during the War of Tenegath, the most significant weakness faced by those who maintained security was complacency; the longer nothing happened, the less attentive defenders became. Through inattentiveness, opportunities for attack would prevent themselves.
Though this was no wartime army, he reasoned the principle was the same. In time, they would make a mistake; he was convinced of it. He swore he would find an opportunity to strike back, even if it killed him.
By the amused glint in her sapphire eyes, Ankara knew what he was thinking and delighted in it. They both understood that she would be victorious in her quest to break him should he succumb to despair. His hateful defiance was also her victory, which he also recognized.
Some perversity in his nature allowed him to endure.
“You may win,” he muttered in the darkness, a mantra repeated whenever the braziers burned low and the other prisoners dozed around him. He had stopped worrying if his mind was slipping, as the other prisoners often whispered to themselves. “But I will make you pay for it.”
&
nbsp; Chapter 33
Sunlight played through the maple grove’s vibrant leaves. Wind whispered through the branches as the trees sighed secrets to one another. Dorishad’s stream babbled across its banks' mud and stones, feeding the small pond at the hamlet’s heart before continuing its winding path. Summer’s heat shimmered over the fertile fields, making the flittering butterflies appear to vanish and reappear as distorted air bent the light.
Unbound hair falling across her shoulders, the strands lightened by summer sunshine into honey and walnut around a freckled and sun-bronzed face, Jayna sat beneath one of the maples. The front of her bodice gaped open, the laces undone for the breeze to cool the sweat-dampened linen shift clinging to the fullness of her breast. She had abandoned her shoes and stockings, laying them aside to dig her dirty toes into the grass, and pulled her skirts high on her thighs while tucking the front down to preserve her modesty. Her golden-brown eyes crinkled as she smiled up at him, revealing her crooked front tooth and dimples.
A manacle dug into his wrist, jolting Tristan from his momentary escape as the lock ground closed. He glowered at the guard’s slack, expressionless face before his eyes followed Sathra’s departure. Much as he feared and hated Ankara, he loathed the younger sorceress. His hands ached for a chance to wring her swanlike neck.
Ankara toyed with him, her game designed to wear him down by stoking fear and anger. Cruel as the older sorceress’s attention was, it served a purpose; the younger of the pair tormented him for her amusement. Despite the rishka and a host of subtle tortures, he had managed to avoid revealing anything about his home. In his delirium, he had let Jayna’s name slip past his lips to Sathra’s ears. Under rishka’s influence, the younger sorceress coaxed information about the girl from him and proceeded to sully the memories.
There were indeed different recipes for the rishka, he discovered. The first formulation weakened resolve against speaking anything but the truth; he was well acquainted with it from his interrogation by both Ankara and Sathra. Another formula that devastated the mind kept the servant women and guardsmen under Ankara’s control. From his observations, it created a fugue state that rendered its victims incapable of more than the most basic and repetitive tasks. He was intimately familiar with the third version; this recipe allowed the sorceresses to heighten the prisoners’ natural responses to stimuli, which freed the body to act on baser instincts while imprisoning them in their minds.
A fourth formula, devised by Sathra under Ankara’s tutelage, was the one he feared the most, as her concoction toyed with his perceptions of time and place. After he was dosed, a suggestion whispered in his ear allowed her to come to him as Jayna. Magic heightened an illusory guise fashioned from the details she wormed out of him. The young noblewoman’s manipulations polluted and heightened his desire. Drug-addled and with his perceptions distorted, he came to her hand willingly – only to have her destroy the illusion and reveal her true identity as they copulated on the satin-draped bed. The essence she siphoned from him was all the richer for his heightened lust and fear of deception.
More than the abuse, he loathed the corruption of his memories. He no longer saw Jayna as she was; regardless of the rishka, Sathra’s visage began to replace his memory even in his dreams. The drug-enhanced deception was imperfect, but it was enough for him to doubt his reality. Flaws in the illusion kept him grounded enough to keep his lips closed around details of his home. Instinctively, he understood such revelations could be disastrous for those he loved.
Ironically, he preferred Ankara’s game – it was cleaner and more honest. Where she toyed with emotions to find the perfect balance of resignation and fear, Sathra’s manipulations of magic and rishka were such that the student outstripped the teacher in the anxiety she engendered. The young noblewoman reveled in her voracious depravity, and though she spared neither man nor woman from her attentions, Tristan held a fascination for her. His fear and hatred enhanced his life force, enriching what she drained from him.
After one such visit by the younger sorceress, the rishka-influenced guard worked the crank and introduced slack to the imprisoned orphans’ chains. Relieved sobs sounded around Tristan as the other orphans sagged to the ground to capture what relief sleep might offer, but he remained standing. Though fading, the rishka still impaired his connection to his body. His mind wandered toward the hypnotic suggestion Sathra implanted after draining him, and he struggled to turn his thoughts away. Enough of the drug remained to addle his mind, and he was unable to escape the violent illusion she had whispered into his subconscious.
The fantasy reformed and replaced the firelit gloom around him. Summer’s wind and heat once more ruffled his hair and clothing, thick with the richness of Dorishad’s fresh-turned soil and crops. Unlike other such fantasy’s centered on the maple groves he loved, he had stealthily followed Jayna beneath the thicker canopy of the oaks growing in the hamlet’s southern reaches, far from the places most of the residents roamed. Unaware of his presence, she had shed her skirts, shoes, and stockings, and was undoing the laces binding her bodice around her torso. The summer-weight weave of her bleached linen shift was thin and made translucent in places where sweat caused the fabric to cling to the sunlight-silhouetted curves of her body.
Why she was out here alone, much less undressing, mattered little; his hands ached to touch what he had so long wanted to. Lurking behind an oak’s concealing bulk, he struggled with the stiffening arousal in his britches and a growing, hungry urge that drowned rational thought.
A portion of his mind recognized this as no more than a delusion; the taste of Sathra’s mouth lingered on his lips, and the feel of her slick leavings chilled the limpness of his spent manhood. Another portion of his mind, trapped by the rishka and influenced by the sadistic noblewoman’s suggestion, refused to accept his reality as anything more than an echo of a bad dream. He recognized the flaw with the latter part’s reasoning; despite the upswell of violent lust throbbing in his temples and loins, he had no desire to harm Jayna. Such barbarism was counter to his nature.
And thus the hell rishka inflicted as, regardless of his emotions and basic decency, he burst from concealment and threw himself on the young woman he had loved for as long as he could remember. Linen tore as he seized her; her screams of protest as he beat her into bloody submission rent his heart and roused his lust. Her body yielded beneath his ravishment, growing limper as his hands circled her throat and crushed her larynx.
The horrific vision was short-lived as the drug continued to fade from his blood. Disgust warred with terror as he realized his manhood stood stiff and pulsing, the aftershocks of climax rippling through his loins. Much as his conscious mind might protest the existence of such brutality in the darkest corners of his soul, he could not deny the evidence that such violence stirred his basest and most barbaric nature.
Concealed by the chamber’s gloom, the scent of blood and musk clinging to skin heated by violent desire, he wondered if Ankara might be right about him being more animal than man. His teeth clenched as he fought the rishka’s lingering effects and ground the heels of his palms into his eyes to destroy the lingering glimpses of the vision. A broken shriek of rage and terror coiled in his belly and clawed at his throat. He struggled to smother it, knowing that if he surrendered to the urge, his mind and spirit would break and leave him a raving madman.
An unusual grinding sensation against his wrist caught his attention, distracting him from his fraying introspection. Something was different with his manacles. Brow furrowing, he jerked his wrists against the chains binding him to the apparatus overhead. Beneath the clink of the links, he caught a repetition of the grinding sound – accompanied by the sight of the closure on his right wrist parting.
The lock hidden within the cuff had failed to catch.
Adrenaline surged through his veins as he grabbed the metal with his other hand. Metal ground as he strained against the unsecured lock, which gave with a sudden snap. Pin hinges squeaked as the fetter swung
open, loud in the chamber’s relative silence.
His elation was short-lived. The guard’s boots thudded against the floor as he shuffled between the hanging bodies toward the source of the sound. Fear leaped within his chest. Trapped though he was, his right hand still firmly locked in the manacles, he felt free. It was a sensation he did not want to lose.
The drugged soldier drew closer, glassy eyes fixed and hands lifted.
Tristan lunged, slapping aside a clumsy block and smashing his bound fist across the man’s face. Metal links shivered together as he wrapped the chain around the guard’s throat. He ignored the fingernails raking his forearm as the links bit deep and dropped his weight. Teeth clenched, he held the tension as the guard flailed and choked.
The man’s thrashing stilled after a few long moments. Tears ran into the coarse stubble growing along the line of his jaw. He had not wanted to kill him but had seen no other choice. Surely the guard would prefer death to the bondage through rishka. Praying to whatever god or goddess might be watching that he had made the right choice, Tristan eased his hold on the chain and let the body slump to the floor.
He crouched beside the corpse and searched for the keyring tucked into the man’s coat. Keys chimed against the manacle as he searched for the correct one to undo the lock and clattered to the floor once the manacle’s clicked open.
“What are you doing?” one of the men asked in the semi-darkness as Tristan chafed his raw, scabbed wrists.
“Getting out of here. You want to come?”
The man shrank back with a violent shake of the head. “You’re going to get us killed.”
Tristan’s gaze swept the room as he met the eyes of the prisoners staring at him. “I’d rather die than live like this. We are stronger together, but with or without you, I’m going to try.”
One of the women stepped forward as far as her chain would allow, her gaunt features hard as she thrust her hands toward him. “Get me out of these chains.”
