Cinder's Women: Mouse's Tale Ch. 01

"Yes, this is the troublesome little thief that disrupted our plans. What do you think?"

She tried to shy away as an armored hand lifted her chin. Eyes wide with fear, she felt instinctually that if her Master shared her with this man, she'd be torn in half. She'd once seen a woman who had broken her pelvis by wildly screwing a man almost as big as this one. The woman was in constant pain whenever she walked, and the girl didn't want that to happen to her. If she'd kept her wits about her, she'd have saved herself a worthless fright and seen that he looked at her more as a father looks at the dirty face of his youngest child than a rapist examining a victim.

"You're asking me?" Stanton replied, raising a bushy eyebrow. "I'm the one who thought Anastasia would never be more than an expensive whore. I don't have your eye for a person's potential unless it's obvious."

"Your opinion is still valuable, even when it could be wrong." Cinder spoke again in the same calm monotone, but his eyes blazed at his slave. She flushed with shame and embarrassment, to be bare for her Master after sex was one thing, but before a complete and utter stranger was entirely different. Especially one who's scrutiny was so perfunctory, familiar and indifferent. He looked at her long enough to examine her face, but his eyes didn't linger on her naked body. She almost felt upset. Didn't she at least have a body worth looking at when she was naked?

"If what you told me earlier about her potential is true, she'll be a worthy addition to the Shadows scouting force at the very least. But if she isn't..." He shrugged his broad shoulders and spread his hands, palms up. "There's always room for another hand in the kitchens, I suppose. Maybe she'd like to be an angeline?"

"Time will tell," Cinder said, slowly bunching the leash in one hand, drawing the girl closer. "My luggage?"

"Sent to the former Duke's chambers, as you commanded. Your wagon will be left in the manor's stables for the time being, but the horses will be brought out to our corral."

"Well done. Have a Display Post set up in the main hall, in the usual place. Convince the townspeople to be patient a little longer."

"Will you be along directly?"

"No." His voice had retaken that edge that made the girl nervous. "There's a lesson that needs to be delivered. A half hour or so."

"Aye, m'lord." Stanton saluted by pressing a mailed fist to his chest and bowing briefly from the waist. He took a moment and towered over the girl before turning to go. "You shouldn't have shied away from me. No one but the Master and his Women will be allowed to touch you when you are bound unless it is absolutely necessary. From all others you are quite safe. He'll kill anyone that lays a hand on you without permission. And so will I. Besides, my wife would kill me if she found out, and even he's afraid of angering her."

While the giant Stanton retreated back up the corridor, his two-handed sword rattling on his broad armored back, her Master seized the leash close to the loop around her throat and led the way deeper into the dungeon. He didn't speak and she was too busy keeping up with his long-legged stride to ask questions. Only the slap of her bare feet and the scrape of his hard leather boots echoed in the tight stone corridor. There were other doors to either side, all open and the cells beyond empty.

He led her straight through the open door of the torture chamber and down the stairs into the sunken room. She recognized the pale bloated body of the eunuch jailer where it lay at the bottom of the stairs, his bald head twisted around unnaturally, wide eyes staring blankly over his shoulder at his heels. He led her past the corpse and straight to a thick-legged wooden table laid out with cruel hand-held implements of torture- tongs, sharp forks of twisted iron, barbed whips and branding irons among others. With an angry sweep of his hand, these bloody instruments flew about the room, crashing off of everything. The noise alone drove rats out of hiding and racing for the door.

He ignored all of the infamous devices stationed about the chamber, but she took them all in in one fearful instant. A pit of coals commanded the center of the floor with a grating placed above it, pieces of charred skin still clinging to the metal, more irons thrust into the dying red glow below. The bloody manacles of a rack beckoned from one corner, the cleanest of all the devices, being relatively free of gore and excrement. Faint light caught the rust and gore encrusted spikes of the iron maiden standing in a far corner, the floor around it stained permanently black with the last of life. A wheel, pressing board, and hanging cage were all in sight, as were a half dozen devices whose names and dire purposes she couldn't begin to guess at. A rat and insect gnawed skull leered at the room with its eternal grin and empty sockets, a hole punched neatly through its forehead. Manacles and brackets lined the walls and hung from the thick, smoke blackened rafters menacingly. The room smelled of death and piss and fear and blood and felt evil.

Instead of forcing her onto one of these evil-looking pieces of 'furniture', he pushed her over the table. His hands were sure, binding her legs securely open to those of the table, then her wrists to the legs on the opposite side. Her heart beat fiercely and her breath came laboriously as she rested on her belly with her small, white ass in the air. He pushed a leather-wrapped stick into her mouth and she bit down on the gag. She'd been in this uncomfortable position before. She'd been caught stealing one afternoon by a matronly innkeeper's wife right in the tavern's taproom, led by the ear to the town square and thrown in the public stocks. The fat bitch had bared her ass to the town and beat her painfully red with a willow switch. She'd howled loudly enough to leave her throat raw for days, almost as long as it took for her ass to allow her to sit down without whimpering in pain.

At the end of the beating she'd been left with her torturously welted bottom still exposed, locked in the stocks all night. A lone watchman awakened her at midnight by taking his pleasure from her before letting her go at the coming of dawn. She ran, knowing no one would care what had happened to a lowly thief, she being worse than a cheap whore in their eyes. After that she'd begun carrying her little knife.

Instead of a switch, Cinder took up his multi-tongued flogger, whose straps were no thicker than the width of her finger. As she shrieked unintelligible protests, she felt the hot sting of leather as it fell firmly and repeatedly across her naked ass cheeks. It hurt and it burned. It made her cry and want to promise to behave, want to promise anything. She wanted it to stop. She wanted it to continue. She couldn't tell where the burning in her backside ended and the fire in her cunt began. She felt her mind losing control of her body once more. Moving around behind the girl, he changed to an underhanded whipping technique, making the multiple tails swing between his victim's trembling thighs and slap the tender flesh of her cunt. Every part of the girl's intimate pink skin came in for a lashing. She almost tore free when she unexpectedly came. She whimpered and cried softly until he stopped, her backside a criss-crossed map of red welts.

Gathering a fistful of her hair, he forced her to meet his eyes as he bent over her. She knew her face was burning, not so much from the hot pain of her bottom, but the shame of the hot sexual gravy oozing down her legs. The whip had to be wet from what leaked out from her pussy.

"You are mine, little thief," he stated sharply. "Mine. That means no one touches you without my consent. Be absolutely sure that those who do not have it will suffer for their mistake. Shy away from no one in my presence ever again. Trust that I can and will protect you until you can properly protect yourself."

While tears streamed down her cheeks, she tried to speak around the gag, to beg him for mercy, for the climactic release of satisfaction. He refused to let her use her own voice.

"Say nothing. You speak entirely too much for a master thief in training. Everything that has come out of your mouth has been noise- stale and sick, like chewing on a month-old honeycomb. Say nothing more unless you are bidden to do so." He let her slump back onto the table but continued speaking, punctuating each sentence with a blow from his rough hand against her striped ass. "Forget what you were. That person no longer exists. From this moment on, you are my pet. An animal. A tamed creature bending to my will. A beast. And as no beast in the wilds wears another's skin to hide its own, neither shall you."

She howled like the animal he declared her to be until her voice gave out. In another moment she would have chewed through her bit to keep from crying out but a furious passion filled him as he whaled away at the helplessly bound girl's rump. He stopped the spanking and moved around behind her. Hoping to show how eager she was to please, she tilted her hips in such a way to allow him to enter her wet cunny easier. From out of her sight came the sound of ceramic scraping on wood, then the cracking of a wax stopper.

She didn't know that the oil he began pouring on her was usually used on those victims Duke Victor had roasted over the pit of coals. What she did know that it felt pleasantly cool as it spread across her buttocks and teased through the channel between her sore cheeks. What wasn't so pleasant was the way he used that oil to ease the intrusion of his fingers into her virgin bowels. She bucked as his fingers spread the thick oil inside and out. With her eyes screwed shut, she tried to relax and slow the heavy beating of her heart, but the more she did so, the more insistent and impossible to ignore this latest invasion became. Her bladder voided down her legs in a sudden rush.

She tried to brace herself to no avail. The oil-slick tip of his manhood pressed firmly against her sphincter. He held her narrow hips tightly in his hands. She opened her mouth to complain, but as she did he slipped past her anal ring and turned her protest into a garbled moan of ecstasy. There was no gentle introduction in his taking her this way. Instead he crushed her against the table while slowly driving the whole length of his rigid cock into her virgin rectum. Her thighs danced while his shaft pushed hard against her bowels. It took him a good long time to get his staff buried in her ass.

She incoherently screamed herself hoarse while silently begging him to stop in her mind; sure that he was tearing her apart, searing from the inside out. He did neither, although she was stretched to her very limit, the pain quickly turning to pleasure as he slowly began pumping into her. The pressure was incredible, each drive of his hips filling her with his rod of flesh and another burst of sexual heat. The burning in her punished ass soon overcame any resistance she had left, she screamed and wept and came hard, and then came again even harder still. Just as the tortured screams died in her raw throat, he stopped ravaging her ass, only his pulse pushing through her tight ring.

A few heartbeats later, another climax sent delicious spasms through her tired body. The vanished screams became one long, passionate groan when her body took final control from her mind and milked unsuccessfully at his cock. Several heartbeats after she stopped shuddering, he drew himself from her, still perfectly erect. She could only lie there and shake, trying to catch her breath. She wished for the strength to weep for joy.

Miles to the north and far to the west, a small army of mercenary soldiers, men and women of a lesser quality than Cinder's Shadows, broke camp. They were a ragged bunch, worn and tired from months of duty along the barren wastes that formed the border between the Empire and the H'Nurt Freeholds. For the twenty-plus years since the end of the War of Long Days, when the seventy-three H'Nurt Clans swarmed across the barrens and attacked the Empire only to be driven back after three years by the Imperial army bolstered by scores of such mercenary companies; the border patrols had been supplemented by mercenaries hired by the outlying communities and Imperial garrisons. The duty was long and dull but paid well over the short term, even better if a company wished to stay a year or more. It was an ideal post for those coming back from a particularly disastrous campaign in other parts. The money was good because it was direct from the Imperial treasury and held by the Merchant Guild in bond. There was actually very little to do. There were no raiders crossing the stretch of blasted wasteland that made the border. On this side the hills were low and rolling, covered in lush grasses that survived on very little rain. The rivers could not support the deeper draft cargo ships that plied the river highways of the rest of the Empire, so cargo came on wide shallow-bottom barges until even they could go no more. Out here the towns were few and far between, generally clusters of homes at the trading points, farming as much land as they could handle. In the distance, the steep, almost sharp mountains known as the Kiros Teeth hid the nearest lands of the H'Nurt. What lay beyond was unknown, no humans had been there and back, and there were few that even cared to make the attempt. In between the two the land was barren, baked, and uninviting. Until the War, no one knew that another race and culture existed across the wasteland. If the H'Nurt patrolled their side of the border, it was impossible to tell.

But the border needed to be manned, just in case. With the Empire still reeling from the last War, the need for an early warning was still strong. Should the invaders return, the Royal Council would need time to summon help from its allies. That is why groups of mercenaries bolstered the Imperial garrisons. Those either eager for adventure or seeking time to regroup could visit the border for months and be prepared. Most considered it easy money.

It was odd then, that this group would be marching away in such a manner. The Imperial regulars were sorry to see them go. They had served well and would have stayed on for months if the Mistress of Fate had not taken a hand. A few more months and they could afford to completely replace their worst equipment, buy better armor, train in more tactics. They had come east for those very reasons. But a letter had come to their commander one day and now a week later, they were leaving.

They marched west at a regular fifteen miles a day toward destiny.

Brother Baron hated this room, hated being assigned to work here. He didn't care that his superiors thought enough of him to assign him to this great honor, but he still hated it. He would sit for a long time in the sun as soon as the day's session was over with. This room was dark and hot and dry and it smelled terrible.

"It begins! The last pieces are in place!" the gravelly voice in the dark crowed happily. A strange sound drifted from where the voice had come from, a slow shuffling like someone dancing. Brother Baron turned from where he wrote in the dim light of a single weak tallow candle, scratching out in his long, flowing hand his companion's thoughts as he'd been bidden to do. His chest tightened.

"Pardon?" he called to the dark. "Did you say something?"

"Nothing you need worry about, child of mine."

Brother Baron screamed at the hands reaching for him from the shadows beyond the candlelight. Dry, thin skin wrapped around impossibly thin fingers extended towards him, slipped around his throat. There followed the wet snapping of bone and then a very disturbing, complete silence. Brother Baron slumped to a limp heap on the floor, his eyes blankly staring at the last, fitful flutters of the candle.

"The unfaithful shall be cleansed. Rejoice, for you shall be the first of The Great Host."