The Fine Art of Torture (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 3)

by Ashley Zacharias

  Irene cringed at the sound and reflexively pressed her hands to her own shoulders. She had too many hours of experience with each of these devices to watch unmoved when the other slaves endured the same torture.

  The professor cast a quick smile in her direction. He knew that she was suffering in empathy with the other slaves. And he liked it.

  Men asked questions of the professor about what was happening to the slaves. He was happy to deliver little lectures in response. He was a professor to the core.

  Ten minutes later, he gestured to the next slave.

  This one, a dark-haired woman with a thin face, was pilloried. Her head and wrists were trapped at waist height so that she was bent double, exposing her sex from behind.

  She would feel only minor discomfort for a few minutes. Then her back would begin to ache. Within fifteen or twenty minutes, the pain would be acute.

  A cane was propped against the base of the device, right below her face. At some point, probably soon, the professor would increase her pain dramatically by caning her ass.

  The slave was staring down at the cane, anticipating the pain to come.

  She was terrified. Every slave knew that the cane, if applied severely, either because of a lack of expertise or as a deliberate punishment, could cut and cause permanent scars.

  Irene knew that the professor had a fine hand. He never cut or scarred a slave.

  But the woman in the pillory didn’t know that. She could only wonder how badly she would be scarred.

  Ten minutes after that, the professor locked a brunette into the spiked chair. It looked about the same as the bed of nails, but Irene knew that it was worse. The spikes were sharper and they were pressed into more parts of the slave’s body.

  The woman was crying piteously after five minutes and begging to be released.

  The room was slowing filling with screams, howls, and moans as more slaves were subjected to more variety of torture.

  Some of the members of the audience were laughing and joking, but some were cringing in sympathy for the tortured women. An observer who lacked experience would think that the men who laughed and joked were the sadists, but Irene knew better. A man might make a joke and laugh to hide his discomfort, whereas a sadist might love feeling that he was sharing the pain felt by the tortured woman.

  The men and women that Irene watched were the ones who showed no emotion at all. Those were the sociopaths.

  The professor returned to the crucifixion frame and lowered the slave’s hands until her heels were resting on the floor. She had been suspended for almost half an hour and was gasping for breath because the stress on her chest from her posture interfered with the proper operation of her diaphragm.

  Irene was not grateful to him for showing mercy because that was not what he was doing. He would only let the slave rest her legs for a few minutes and then would crank her back up, again forcing her to over-exert her aching calves to try to support her weight. He knew that she would suffer more if he varied the pain than if he kept it constant and let her habituate to it.

  He gestured to the next slave. She was strapped to the whipping bench. The professor immediately began flogging her with a multi-tailed whip. He spent a full ten minutes working slowly down from her shoulders to her ankles.

  She screamed at every stroke.

  By the time he was finished, her voice was growing hoarse.

  There was only a single slave standing with Irene at the back wall now. A short, emotional brunette. She had watched each slave get tortured ahead of her and was already weeping copiously, knowing that some terrible torture was waiting for her.

  There were only two devices left.

  The professor led her to the scales that Irene had designed and strapped her hands onto the bar. Then he slowly loaded twenty-pound weights into the pan on the other side.

  The sixth weight slowly lifted the slave off the ground. She weighed slightly less than a hundred and twenty pounds – a good fifteen pounds less than Irene.

  The professor removed the last weight so that the slave’s feet returned to the floor.

  The professor had not left the chain at the same length as when Irene had designed and tested the device, but he had shortened it by a couple of links.

  When Irene had been in the device, she could rise on her toes and relieve the stress on her upraised arms by lowering the pan on the other side to the floor.

  This slave, shorter to begin with and now stretched by a shorter chain, could not do that. No matter how high she rose on her toes, she could not lower the pan to the floor. She could not, even for an instant, relieve the hundred pounds of weight pulling on her shoulders.

  Irene preferred her original arrangement. She liked putting the slave in a dilemma between favoring her shoulders and favoring her legs. But she could understand the professor’s reasoning. This arrangement resembled suspension more than crucifixion. He wanted as much variety as possible in the methods of torture and didn’t need a second crucificada.

  Once she was installed, the professor returned to the slave who was pilloried and caned her buttocks and upper thighs with precision and vigor.

  The cane whistled through the air. The slave howled at every stroke and struggled mightily in the pillory. Her legs danced a fine jig and her ass wriggled like a pair of giant white grubs but she couldn’t dodge the professor’s slow, precise, carefully-aimed strokes.

  When he was finished, the audience applauded.

  The slave’s ass was thoroughly striped with red welts but there was not a drop of blood to be seen.

  The slave, however, undoubtedly thought that her ass had been cut to ribbons. Trapped in the pillory, there was no way for her to look at herself and see that it was not so.

  The professor returned to the crucifixion frame. All the time that he was cranking that slave’s heels back off the ground, she wailed and begged for mercy.

  She knew that there was no chance on earth that she would get the least consideration, but she was so desperate for her crucifixion not to resume that she was offering irrational pleas.

  Now there was only one slave left to be tortured, Irene, and only one device left to torture her with – the one that she had invented most recently.

  The most terrible torture in the room.

  The one, that if improperly adjusted, could kill in a couple of minutes.

  * * *

  Irene’s heart was pounding as she walked across the room to the device that she had designed.

  The professor opened the door in the back of the narrow cabinet and she crossed the bridge over the two-paces-wide moat. She glanced down and saw large chunks of ice floating in the water. For two weeks, the professor had been freezing pails of water in his freezer and in his friends’ freezers to ensure that they had enough giant ice cubes to last for the entire show.

  She faced the thick glass front while he locked the stainless steel collar about her neck. He took care to lift her golden collar, fasten the steel one, and then let the golden one rest on top of it. The steel felt cold on her skin.

  The steel collar was attached by four short heavy chains to the corners of the cabinet, fixing her head in position She could neither rise nor sink more than a couple of inches.

  The cabinet was open at the top and extended only a few inches above the top of her head. A terrible few inches.

  He closed the door behind her and then he turned on the pump.

  She shivered in dread anticipation as gallons of ice water were pumped from the moat into the giant bucket overhead.

  She stared out of the glass at the men and women who were gathered around, staring back at the naked beauty chained by the neck in the narrow cabinet.

  The bucket was supported by an offset axel less than halfway up the sides. When the water above the pivot point grew heavier than the water below, the giant bucket tipped and dumped its load into the top of the tank.

  Irene had no warning. The pivots were well lubricated and didn’t even creak. A wall of
ice water hit her head before the bucket edge hit the stop. Even though she knew that it was coming, the shock was horrific. She wanted to scream, but didn’t dare lose her breath.

  It took only seconds for the water to fill the cabinet to the brim and overflow into the moat.

  Relieved of its load, the bucket swung back to the upright position.

  Irene’s head was underwater, her hair floating around her face. Her eyes had the blank, open stare of a drowned woman. She dared not move, dared not use even an extra molecule of oxygen as the frigid water drained, ever so slowly through the calibrated spigot in the bottom of the cabinet.

  The valve on the spigot had been carefully adjusted in the test trials to keep the water above the level of Irene’s nose for sixty seconds, give or take five seconds depending on the amount of splashing that slopped water out of the tank.

  Sixty long seconds, especially when the frigid water was draining the heat out of Irene’s body at a rapid rate, demanding that her metabolism race to try to stave off hypothermia, furiously burning the oxygen in her bloodstream and filling her lungs with carbon dioxide.

  Outside the window, the audience held its collective breath in an automatic reflex. Most of those lucky people began breathing again after only a few seconds.

  Irene had no such option. She held her breath.

  After thirty seconds, nobody in the audience was able to keep holding their breath.

  But it didn’t matter how desperately Irene needed to breathe. The water had only descended to the top of her head. By forty-five seconds, the water was at eye level and the pain in her lungs was intense. If she could, she would have traded a caning for a lungful of fresh air.

  She let as much stale air out of her lungs as she could, releasing carbon dioxide to trick her lungs into believing that air was coming.

  She tilted her head back to raise her nose as close to the surface of the slowly-descending water as possible. And she waited.

  By the time she could finally draw a gulp of sweet air, the cold had penetrated to her core. The intense pain was like a thousand razors cutting every inch of her skin.

  And the water at her chin was still falling slowly. It sped up only when it dropped below the level of her shoulders. The cabinet was a tight fit around her body. Above the shoulders, her head and neck were only a small part of the volume of the cabinet. But below her shoulders, her body occupied a higher proportion of the volume of the cabinet. Though the water level was lower and there was less pressure to force the water out of the spigot at her feet, the smaller volume of water in the lower two thirds of the cabinet meant that the level dropped faster.

  Her arms were unrestrained. When the water level had dropped to her waist, she began rubbing her arms and chest, trying to get as warm as possible.

  Her teeth were chattering out of control and her body was shivering so hard that it looked like it was vibrating.

  The pump never stopped. It had been filling the giant overhead bucket from the moat all the time that the water had been flowing out of the cabinet.

  Irene breathed hard and fast, hyperventilating, desperately trying to pack her bloodstream with as much oxygen as possible before the next deluge.

  She had five minutes between the time that the last bit of water drained into the moat and the bucket tipped again.

  The deluge-drain cycle would not stop until the pump was turned off.

  Every ten minutes, she would spend one minute desperately trying to keep from drowning and nine minutes trying to keep from expiring from hypothermia. And it would continue over and over for as long as the professor wished.

  The cycle of pain never stopped.

  The audience never tired of watching. Alternately, she was desperately rubbing her body and gulping air; and resting passively while her hair floated around her head and then settled to cling to her face. The audience loved to stare at her bone-white, freezing skin and nipples contracted to hard, wrinkled nubs. The loved to see her shiver and shake out of control.

  Her suffering was the highlight of the evening and the professor let her keep drowning and freezing for two hours until the show was over and he was ushering the guests out of the exhibition hall.

  None of the other slaves had been mounted on any of the devices for more than an hour. At any time, more than half of them were standing against the back wall. They, too, watched Irene’s ordeal. But they had a different perspective. They knew that each of them would spend time suffering in that infernal device before the end of the show.

  That night, in bed, Irene clutched her quilt about her body. She didn’t stop shivering for over an hour. She didn’t fall asleep until later than that.

  This was only the first night. The exhibition wouldn’t close for a week. She could look forward to a lot more pain.

  * * *

  The following morning, Irene was, once again, shocked almost speechless.

  The professor was about to mount her on the Spanish horse. She was standing beside it, her hands behind her back, waiting for the professor to snap cuffs on them, when a young man, a commoner of means, judging by his clothes, said, “Wait.”

  The professor paused.

  The man held out a large-format, glossy hardcover book, and said, “Before you do that, I’d like an autograph.” He pushed a pen, not toward the professor, but toward Irene.

  She looked at book. It was titled, The Fine Art of Torture. The cover was embellished with a tasteful collage of the devices in the room. The authors’ names were Ragnar Krauss, Ph.D. and Slave Irene.

  Stunned, she took the book from the young man’s hands and looked at the professor for an explanation.

  The professor shrugged. “Didn’t I mention that we’re offering a coffee-table book to accompany the exhibition? So much to do, it must have slipped my mind.”

  She leafed through the book. Each torture device in the exhibition had its own chapter. Each was shown in a number of photographs, which included views of the device from various angles as well as detailed close-ups of its features and mechanisms. Each set of illustrations was followed by Irene’s essay describing her reaction to being tortured on the device and the thoughts that the ordeal had stimulated. Each of her essays was followed by one written by the professor giving a complex academic analysis of the artistic quality of the torture device, set into the proper historical and cultural context.

  “We had to hold off printing and binding until we had your last essay about your ice water cabinet,” the professor said. “I wanted to offer the books last night, but we couldn’t get delivery until this morning.”

  Irene didn’t know what to say.

  The young man was still holding the pen in front of her. She took it and signed, “How noble it is to suffer for one’s art. Your Slave Irene.”

  Before she could put her hands behind her back again, another book and pen was thrust at her. “Hello, Irene.”

  She looked up at the face. “Lord Granger. I trust that you and Lady Kaitlin are doing well.” She and her husband had socialized with Tim and Kait when she had been a lady.

  He smiled. “Quite well. Kaitlin has been … Well, let’s just say that she seems to be enjoying life more the last few months that ever before.”

  Irene smiled. He had no idea that she had arranged for his wife to participate anonymously in an orgy a few months earlier. It sounded like the experience had done their marriage some good. “I’m happy to hear that.” Irene looked down at the book. “How would you like me to sign this?”

  “To both me and Kaitlin.” He looked over at the balance scale. “You designed that?”

  “That and the water cabinet,” she said. “And built them. I’ve become somewhat proficient with woodworking tools.”

  “Who would have guessed?”

  She signed the book.

  “I hope to see you again before long,” he said.

  She knew what he meant. He meant that he hoped that he would have another chance to fuck her as a pleasure slave. She smiled warm
ly. “I’d like that.” She meant it. It was better to be fucked than tortured. Much, much better.

  A short line had formed behind him, mostly men, all with a book and pen in hand. None of them seemed especially interested in the professor’s autograph, though most asked him to sign, too. It was a matter of courtesy.

  Her celebrity was going to save her from being tortured.

  The professor wandered off, leaving her to autograph books by herself.

  He returned a few minutes later with a piece of rope.

  She had been wrong. Her celebrity was not going to save her from torture. He interrupted the autographs for a moment while he tied the middle of the rope to her gold collar and then an end to each wrist. The rope was short enough that she could no longer reach below her navel.

  When she was mounted on the Spanish horse, she could not reach far enough to push herself up off the wedge and relieve the pressure on her cunt. But she could hold books and write inscriptions in them.

  The pain began in a few moments and built rapidly. By the time she signed the third book, she was gasping in distress.

  “That looks like it hurts,” a middle-aged man said as he handed her his book and pen.

  “It hurts like hell,” she said.

  “Good,” a woman said. She was dressed as an aristocrat but Irene did not recognize her. She did not have a book to sign.

  When she saw Irene looking at her, she said, “This is the way I like to see you entertaining my husband. The artistic way.”

  “There is art in my other skills, too,” Irene replied.

  The woman snarled at her and walked away to look at the bottle-blonde slave in the crucifixion frame. The professor, cognizant of the stress of crucifixion, was turning the crank, raising the slave after having given her a few minutes rest halfway through the ordeal. Her renewed screams were attracting attention.

  Irene kept autographing books and trying to chat with people while her crotch ached terribly. The pain didn’t help her handwriting and made thinking difficult. But that didn’t matter. She didn’t have to think. She was inscribing, “How noble it is to suffer for one’s art,” in every book by rote.