The Invisible Hands - Part 1: Gambit (25 page)

“You mean, I have to let him…” Lexyntas began.

“Yes, I mean exactly that. Let him look at you, feel you over, put his fingers, and his dick, where or in whatever he wants. And you'd better 21
moan in contentment, ecstasy even, if you can manage to fake it.

Maybe you even won't have to, if he half knows what he's doing. Do everything you can to make him feel as if his attentions are welcome, eagerly wanted. Believe me, you'll reap the fruits for the rest of your life.”

“I… I have never… I have never been… I don't like guys. Not that way.”

Uckmyo looked earnestly at him.

“Then my only advice is to get over it. It's not your decision, is it?

Listen, there's a chance he shares your preferences. In that case it will just be harder for you to create some kind of rapport that will benefit you. You're very handsome. Pretty even, some would say. If you can use your looks to somehow attach him emotionally to you, you're set for life. If, like you, he's not into boys, you'll have to find a way to become his friend. That is far harder to accomplish than letting him fuck you.”

“I suppose you're right,” Lexyntas said, on the verge of tears.

The head slave felt sorry for him.

“It doesn't always come to that. A friend of mine — he's ten years older than I am, so it was a long time ago — happened to be very pretty as well in his youth. When he was given to his master, who was about the same age, he had every reason to expect becoming his bed companion. As it turned out, his young master was just curious. One time he had to lie naked on the bed, on his back with his legs pulled up while his master just looked at him. At other times he gently went in with one finger and ordered him to contract his sphincter. The strange boy wanted to feel what force he could exert with that particular muscle. At another time he made my friend stand naked on a stool and peeled back his foreskin and then studied his balls. His young master even excused himself when my friend gasped because he had squeezed them uncomfortably hard.”

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“But that's even worse,” Lexyntas exclaimed, appalled. “He just

played with him.”

Uckmyo shrugged.

“Bah. It was all rather harmless. The senator later wrote a book about the human body and how to keep it healthy. Naodyman senators want to be known for their fierce aggressiveness in war, but at the same time they pride themselves on being learned and cultured men. I suppose even at that young age he was already fascinated by how the body functions.”

He chuckled.

”At another occasion my friend was ordered to call him when he had to piss. The young master made him undress, put a finger in his hole and lay one hand upon his lower belly. Then he was ordered to urinate—”

“Oh, Gods,” Lexyntas gasped, flushing.

The head slave laughed out loud now.

“You think that's embarrassing? Let me tell you, he wanted to see, eh, the other, eh, business as well. On a table, crouched over a basin, so his master had a clear view.”

“That's disgusting.”

“It is, isn't it?” Uckmyo said pleasantly. “And it went on for some time. He made my friend eat nothing but nuts for two days at one time, nothing but meat at another occasion. Just to see what the effect would be. Mind you, there were also more innocent experiments.”

“Such as?” Lexyntas, who couldn't help being intrigued, asked.

“There was this one time my friend wasn't allowed to wash himself for several days.”

“Not at all? Nowhere?”

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“Nope. Nowhere,” the head slave laughed, glad that he had managed to lure the young man out of his gloomy disposition. “After a few days he had him undress and looked him all over, all the while taking notes — he always took notes — and sniffing him all over. Then he made my friend wash himself in front of him and again studied him and smelled at his body parts, his feet included.”

Lexyntas couldn't help joining in the laughter. Then he turned serious again.

“When you tell it like that, you make it seem funny. But if it happens to you for real, it's demeaning, having someone make such use of your body. Never mind that it isn't for sex.”

“Ah, but it isn't really your body, is it?” Uckmyo said. “It's actually your master's property, and he can do with it as he sees fit. But I'm not surprised at your reaction. I wondered as well, when he first told me, how I would have felt would it have been me instead of him. He said you get used to it. Your master wants you naked? You get naked as fast as you can. He wants to look his property over? What business is it of yours? See? You just have to get in the right frame of mind. My friend told me that once he managed to do that, it didn't bother him one bit to perform the most intimate functions in front of his owner.”

Lexyntas had paled again.

“That's all in the past now, however. They're both going on in years. They've become… not quite friends. Actually, I don't think there is a word for what they are. Anyway, they sort of got used to each other. Once, when my friend's master was still quite young he fell sick. He was running a fever and very weak. Although he was not one who went for the manly charms, being a pragmatic man, he ordered my friend to relieve his tension, as he called it. My friend looked at him, not understanding what he was ordered to do. ‘Jerk me off,’ his master said. So he did. After he had cleaned up the mess, his master thanked him and went to sleep peacefully. Years later my friend, in his turn, fell sick.

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His master could have ordered some servant to keep an eye on him, but he nursed him himself. When my friend protested that it was beneath his master to wash him, he simply replied, ‘Nonsense, I take care of my things myself.’ That was nice, wasn't it?”

“He was just taking care of his stuff,” Lexyntas replied, tonelessly.

“Not so long ago his master offered to set my friend free. At first he was afraid that he was being thrown out. ‘Who is going to carry your scrolls, and your wax tablets and styluses, when you're going to the Senate?’ he asked. ‘Why, you, who else?’ his master replied, amazed.

‘Only now you'll be doing it as a free man. I'll pay you wages. Not much, mind you, since you'll have free lodgings and board as well.’ ‘So, what's the difference?’ my friend asked. ‘For one, you'll be allowed to wear boots in winter. We're not as young as we used to be, if you hadn't noticed.’ In the end, nothing came of it, though my friend wears boots now, when the weather is inclement. Not proper behavior for a slave, of course. Moreover, since he's becoming arthritic, his master has to tie his laces for him.”

Uckmyo laughed out loud, and Lexyntas joined in.

“Good,”
the head slave thought.
“Hold on to that story. It's very
rare and unusual. I could have told you of this other friend of mine.

His master, whom he had served for over thirty years, sold him off to
a farm where he would be required to do hard labor, because he was
growing old and slightly deaf. Then again, you just might be lucky.”

“Listen, Lexyntas,” Uckmyo said, softly. “The bad times didn't last very long, and, anyhow, they can't be avoided. The sooner you make your peace with that, the better it will work out for you. It's just a matter of shedding useless pride.”

And therein lay the problem.

21
The royal party took a left turn from the main road and rode

between the two turrets that stood on either side of the main entrance— way to the Damydas demesne. Ten Black Shields on horseback guarded the access to the grounds. Outside, from a vantage point in the woods, on the other side of the main road, two pair of eyes followed every movement.

“That was the high king himself, I'm sure of it,” one man said to the other.

“Very strange indeed,” the second man answered. “All the more so since it was given out that he was inspecting the garrisons on the southeastern border. They must have used a look-alike, a double, to stand in for him. Master Dram must be told as soon as possible.”

“You go, I'll keep watching the entrance.”

The second man nodded, and, keeping low to the ground, started crawling backwards.

In the distance the castle was barely visible through the trees.

Damydas castle was built on an artificial hill, surrounded by a broad fosse.

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“This moat is exceptionally wide,” Tenaxos said to his secretary.

“The baron must have had some work done to the fortifications. I distinctly remember seeing plans of the place when you elevated him to the baronetcy and endowed him with this domain. The castle had a trench, but nothing as impressive as this.”

When they dismounted in the central court they were greeted by Xirull Gliver, former sergeant, recently promoted to captain of the Black Shields.

Xirull had hoped this promotion would make him effectively head of the Black Shields, as Gerrubald, baron of Damydas, had been when he was a captain. And alive. He realized that being associated with the debacle at Elmshill couldn't have spoken in his favor. Still, he had managed to lay almost all of the blame on the late baron and the rest on unhappy coincidences. His statement that, when he arrived on the scene, nobody was there anymore, while in fact he had seen Damydas being hanged, was taken at face value. Who was going to gainsay him?

As far as he knew neither friend nor foe had been aware of his presence, and the time line of the actual events was fuddled.

He had been promoted, but so had four others. The high king seemed to want to keep supreme command of the Black Shields in his own hands, for the time being at least. He couldn't be totally certain, but His Glorious Majesty probably suspected — if he didn't know — what the ultimate ambitions of the baron of Damydas had been. Xirull hadn't been taken into the baron's confidence, but there had been hints. More than mere hints, in fact, but nothing substantial. Most importantly, he was very sure most of the plans had resided in the head of the late would-be usurper and his Mukthar accomplice, so it was equally sure he wouldn't be mentioned in any embarrassing documents that might have survived the baron.

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The last of his lingering fears had been laid to rest when he received the command over the Black Shield squadron that was to occupy the Damydas demesne and isolate it from the rest of the world.

To make doubly sure, he wanted to make an impression to prove that the trust the high king had placed in him was warranted. And Xirull was magnificently prepared by that grand master of making impres— sions himself, the late Bloody Baron.

He would have liked to interrogate the baron's sons, but they had disappeared without a trace. As had their own sons, the baron's grandsons. Nobody knew what had become of them, and Xirull didn't care very much, beyond the fact that they were lost to him as a source of information.

So, in a strange twist of fate, the harsh but highly efficient methods of the Bloody Baron were visited upon his own household staff and servants. For days — and nights — on end the castle reverberated with the bloodcurdling, hair-raising screams of people being tortured, without regard for gender or age.

Xirull had no idea what he was looking for. He only knew there had to be something. Gerrubald of Damydas had been a resourceful man with big, big plans, so it stood to reason he had left traces of them in his lair. What form these took remained to be found out. Written plans, maybe, or a catalog with the secrets of the major noble Houses, perhaps, secret treaties… it could be anything, really.

Day and night he attended the proceedings that were performed in standard Black Shield practice. Humiliate the persons to be interrogated, whatever their rank, by stripping them before their social betters, equals and inferiors. Line them up to witness the ordeal of those who were going before them to mollify them further. Slap them in the face, kick them in the genitals to begin with. Force them to watch what red— hot iron could do to a human body, and let them smell the burning flesh.

21
Xirull was fascinated to see how they almost went mad, desperately trying to tell him what he wanted to hear. Only, they didn't know just what that was. Xirull had never told them, because he didn't know himself. He was just groping blindly around. “Confess“ and “Tell me everything” were the only things he told them in his calm, almost caressing voice. “What, My Lord?” they bellowed. “What do you want to know?” they screamed in terror. “Everything,” he answered, time upon time again.

It was surprising what they told after the nails of their fingers and toes had been torn off, after they had been whipped, after iron rods had been introduced into their anus or vagina, after they had been pricked in arms and legs with long iron needles, after they had been pushed down in chairs with spikes on the seat.

Minor vices, petty thefts, infidelities, betrayals of trust. They shouted them at him, not caring that the people they had lived and worked with, often the victims of their peccadilloes, heard them too, in the hope that it would make the ordeal stop. It didn't. One of the kitchen maids confessed that she had been pregnant, by different lovers, thrice, given birth as many times and had strangled the babies and thrown them into the castle moat, wrapped in a towel, with some stones. The haughty garrison captain, pressed naked into the spiked chair had admitted, howling, when the fourth finger was crushed in a vice, how he had forced the ten-year-old daughter of a chamber maid to suck his cock, while her eleven-year-old sister licked his anus. It didn't even shock his naked audience. They were too terrified about what would be happening to themselves in a short while.