Sex is a Job Description? Ch. 17

"I volunteer," General Lathlokos offered in Argo's stead. Vendr's body tightened as he heard the grass part beneath boots behind him.

"One," the general said as he brought the barbed whip down on Vendr's back. Sharp pain flared from his neck to his shoulder. He cringed at the pain and felt the hairline trickles that would end up being a broad flow down his back.

"Two." Another crease of pain, this time across Vendr's lower back. He gritted his teeth so hard his ears rang.

At five lashes, Vendr's voice came through his closed throat.

At ten, he grunted with every new sunspot of pain.

At twenty, he could smell the blood on the ground and feel it between his toes.

At forty, he cried out at each lash tearing his split skin.

At fifty, his head felt as if it were floating in thin air.

Lathlokos dropped the bloody whip to the ground and walked past Vendr with the deepest smirk one could make on his face. Behind him came his captains and the other generals. Not one looked at him as they left the clearing wordlessly.

Vendr dropped to his knees as the majority of the present persons left the immediate area, breathing heavily and trying to numb himself to the fiery pain all over his back. Every breath brought new pain to sear what was left of his skin. He could only imagine how he looked from behind now. It was bound to be something akin to a ripped red blanket.

"Are you able to stand?" Fentin asked. The lord knelt down beside the captain and held his hand out. Vendr took it and was helped to his feet with considerable effort.

"Lord, is this all I was needed for?"

Fentin nodded. "I'm sorry, Vendr. I cannot please everyone, and I need an army. I'll have the apothecaries bring you torridroot and a physician stitch you together again."

Vendr shook his head. "Just torridroot. Naia does not like the apothecaries." He and Fentin shared a look and the moments between his refusal and Fentin's response were tense.

"Do not let her get in the way of your duties, Vendr," Fentin warned, turning to leave. "I understand you care about her, but you are a captain before you are a lover."

"I am Vendr Tendahl before I am anything, Fentin," the giant of a demon returned.

Fentin stopped for a few moments and then nodded in thought. With the resigned sigh of a man who knew he was in the wrong, Fentin said, "You are my friend before you are my captain, Vendr. Don't let me forget that."

With that, the lord left Vendr alone with Mefur and the two mute bodyguards in tow. The captain waited a while before returning to the war camp, coagulating blood drying on his back as he crossed the bridge. By the time he found a spit-roast to grab something from, he was having difficulty walking straight.

He wasn't questioned when he tore the leg off a spit boar, sluggishly pulling flesh that only gave at the heavy cut of a cleaver like it was no more than paper. He took a full helm out of the hands of a soldier and filled it with stew from a cauldron being heated for a fresh meal. He didn't have the strength or the patience to explain what he was doing or go through the proper channels to get what he needed. A helm was good enough for a bowl. The entire leg of a boar was more than enough for he and Naia to share when her appetite returned.

He barely made it back to his tent without confrontation. He swept the flaps aside and inside found Naia humming a tune to herself in the relative darkness. She immediately turned to greet him as he entered, but went pale as she saw him.

He handed the helm to her gently and placed the roasted leg on the table where a few bites of bread still remained uneaten.

"Milord..." she uttered. The look on her face was one of absolute shock and despair.

"Torridroot," Vendr breathed, feeling his head tilt back. His vision was beginning to blur. "Have a bath run for me." Vendr collapsed to the floor and lay on his stomach as Naia hurried into the next room on unstable legs to get servants to help him.

She returned with three servants who set to work helping him up. Naia left the room again in a panic, still holding the helm full of stew in her arms. Moments seemed to pass with lengthy periods of throbbing pain. He couldn't tell what was going on by the time others arrived, time passing unevenly.

Some seconds felt as if they ran the length of the Long Night, others like instants in the past. Vendr's ears started to reverberate with the thrum of his heart, like a drum keeping him connected with reality. His vision was so badly blurred that he couldn't make out faces anymore. He could only tell Naia by the bandages wrapped around her arm and her limping. She had left the stew somewhere, despite his current insistence on her eating before anything else.

He tried to tell her several times that she needed to eat and that he would be fine, but he didn't think she paid his words any mind. He vaguely felt himself walking, and then hitting something with both his feet. He grunted with discomfort.

Afterwards, he felt as if he were boiling alive from the neck down and he couldn't keep his head upright anymore. The world spun around him as he sucked in breath after breath of cloying, hot air. It felt like he was breathing a salt spray from the sea and he coughed so hard sparks began to shoot across his field of vision.

For hours he didn't know what was happening as his body felt like it was floating across nothingness.

Eventually, his vision cleared and the world around him stopped spinning. He moved his fingers around and then raised his hands to his face. They were hot and smelled like iron. He looked down at himself and realized that he was sitting in a large tub filled with murky red water, presumably colored by his own blood.

He looked around for Naia, but didn't see her.

"Naia," he said in a tone unfamiliar to himself. It took him a long while to understand that it was anxiousness in his voice. His own voice, anxious?

"Naia," he said again more firmly this time. "Where are you?"

"Milord?" she answered from behind him. Vendr began to turn to find her, but winced in pain as his entire back felt as if it were being held by fishhooks. He settled for craning his neck to locate here.

"Naia?"

She came into view, limping and bruised across the entire left side of her jaw. "I am here."

Vendr's blood boiled at seeing the entire left side of her jaw dark purple and red. "Who did this to you?" he growled, grabbing the sides of the tub to pull himself out of it. His hands refused to grab the bronze tub hard enough to support his weight and he slid against his back with a hiss in pain.

Naia looked away guiltily. "You did...as we put you in the bath. I am fine. You were very weak earlier."

Vendr didn't say anything back to her. He slumped in the water and felt a wave of loathing come over himself as he glanced at her jaw. He could see the absolute pain in her expression, despite her best efforts to hide it from him. He'd struck a wounded girl. Pathetic.

He motioned with his head for her to get into the tub with him, and she only just obeyed without questioning him. Her slender, naked body slipped into the water in one motion. She bore the pain as her wounds met the hot water and the bandages around them became soaked with the mix of blood and water.

She turned her back to him and positioned herself against his chest, leaning back without hesitating. She raised her mangled left hand to his and wrapped her remaining fingers around his thumb gently. Vendr did his best to close his hand around her fingers without hurting her, gingerly applying pressure with nearly-numb fingers. They must have used an anesthetic on him while he was in a delirium.

Naia broke him from his thoughts in a weak voice. "Am I really irreplaceable?"

Vendr hugged her tighter to him with his right arm and she pushed herself into a comfortable position with her legs. "You are a chanter. There is not a single chanter in this army aside from you. You are, without a doubt, irreplaceable."

"Am I just a replacement for the one that came before me? Avana?" she asked without looking at him. She didn't stiffen at his hesitance to answer, or at the answer she thought she would get. She seemed to have already accepted that she was not the first baphomet he'd had.

"You are not a replacement. Nor was she."

"Then what are we?" She didn't sound convinced.

Vendr sighed. "There are no replacements for a broken heart. You are not my first love, but Avana was not either. I cannot replace the pieces of my heart that went with her to her end." He lifted his hand to her chin and turned her face up so he could look her in the eyes. "But my heart is not broken when I am with you."

"Milord," she admonished, turning bright red in the face. She looked away embarrassedly. "I...I do not feel as if I can mend a broken heart."

Vendr gave her a sad smile. "I feel as if I cannot mend yours either."

Naia nodded in agreement. "How would you fix me? I am a broken cripple with one hand. I am a slave even here, with the man I..." Her throat closed and she raised her hand to her eyes. "My master. How can you want me?"

"Let me tell you about the woman I first loved. My wife of one evening, Pelash." He knew he could draw Naia away from her tears. She wiped her eyes and managed to take her mind away from herself and focus on him. He felt her wounded hand squeeze his thumb tightly.

"Pelash," she whispered unconsciously.

"Pelash was from the same village I am from, south of the Avonal Falls, called Tarkleigh. I was only fifty then, and she younger than I. I had never spoken to her before the day I fell in love with her, but I talked to her as easily as I did my closest comrades. I didn't know what a baphomet was when I met her, let alone what they could do as chanters. I remember dreaming about her during the Long Nights of my youth, her long hair, her hips, her smile. She was perfect to me, more beautiful than any succubus in the Second Circle."

Vendr cleared his throat as he felt it begin to close. He blinked away the growing moisture in his eyes and continued.

"It was but a few Long Nights before I admitted my feelings for her and told her how I longed for her. She confessed mutual feelings for me and we shared a day and a night in the field beyond the bank of the stream I played at as a child. We fell fast in love and I found out what baphomets are known for aside from their youthful bodies.

But I was not the one to have her. A lord from the Avonal Falls wanted her more than his wife and pressed her family to let him keep her as a servant in his household. She was sent with him to the Avonal Falls and I followed for days, watching the things he was doing to my love. I held back only for the ten incubi guarding him, until they reached his household. As soon as she was alone, I snuck into the servants' quarters and found her. She cried in my arms and told me she was trapped there. If she didn't stay, he would kill her family."

"Who could be so cruel?" Naia asked him, squeezing his thumb harder with concern. She looked up at him and he shook his head slowly.

"Those who think themselves powerful enough to do as they please," he answered. "For weeks, I would see Pelash every chance I could, and the servants of the house came to know me and help me see her. One of them even offered to marry us, and we accepted. So, in the first night we could, I took her from the house and we were married in the forest. She sang from her heart for the last time and I felt as if the Three Realms belonged to me that night.

I returned her to the house before day and we kissed as I left. I..." Vendr swallowed the lump growing in his throat as the memory of Pelash's last 'I love you' to him as he slipped away into the night from Lord Xall's household. "I returned to the forest until the next night. When I returned, I was not told about her death; I was showed. The lord's wife had found Pelash to be unwelcome in her home and had her hanged."

Vendr was silent for a long time, staring into the murky red water at the image of his love hanging from a rope, her beautiful long hair tangled in the noose strangling her broken neck. He decided not to continue. It was hard enough to explain everything until now. He didn't know how he could describe murdering infants with his bare hands and twisting Xall's wife's head backwards with his bare hands. Or pushing a bedpost down Xall's throat until it went through him entirely.

"Milord?"

"How can I want you? You are a chanter. You are my chanter, and I am not broken when I am with you. I wanted Pelash for the same reasons. I loved her. I love you now."

"How do I mend your heart?" Naia questioned, confused.

"You live. You survived where others surely would have died. And that is far more than enough to see my heart brought back together."

"Then I will live for as long as you desire," she replied meekly, turning red all the way across her face. "If I am able."

Vendr tightened his arm around her midsection. "You will make it through this war. Or we will both die in it." He couldn't lose another. If Naia died, he would have no heart left. Watching her pale, tender frame breathe calmly under his protection, he pushed the doubt from his mind. He had the power to keep her safe.

------ Ceria's Estate, Hell ------

Veronaa's temples throbbed as she dismounted her partner and sat up on her knees to observe the poor servant who'd taken her to climax. He was far more muscular than most of the men she'd lain with, far more handsome too. But, as her orgasm faded as quickly as it had begun, she felt that something was missing. The demon wasn't a bad partner, but he didn't have a quality to him to make him memorable.

He was just another prick to ride. He wasn't like the case subjects she'd been with, many of them so good that she still fooled around with them every once in a while. He wasn't like the agents she'd taken to the sheets, who now looked at her as if nothing had happened or avoided her eyes awkwardly as if they weren't used to casual sex.

She sighed and watched the demon's chest rise and fall below her, his eyes closed and his arms out to his sides.

"You are far better than I was told," he said, still panting.

"And you're quite forgettable," Veronaa returned without missing a step. "Tell your mistress I'll just find my own bedmate. You lot aren't working." She swung her leg over and lay back down on her back beside the demon. He pulled himself off the bed, his pride clearly struck with a fatal blow. He left without acknowledging her again, quietly leaving her to her own devices.

She stretched out on her soiled sheets and likened herself to a cat, uncaring for anyone around it. She relaxed some and stared boredly at the ceiling far above her. Murals of great victories and love stories told a hundred times over dominated the room. She'd had a few of them on her ceiling, painted in much different way of course. She didn't care for Ceria's taste in art, or servants.

Thinking back on her own estate, she briefly entertained the thought of leaving the festival and returning home for a while. She dismissed it as a fantasy almost as quickly as she could bring it into full bloom. Her goal down here was to see Tom return to his own realm alive, and Ceria's plans fall through. How could she do that if she was resting comfortably at home?

Her days off in the Mortal Realm were spent doing lots of laundry, hacking, coding, going out to eat in places that took hours to drive to. An age ago, every day had been a day off to her. She had plucked fruit from trees in her orchards and savored their bittersweet meat. Long walks with her husband Doran had produced some of the most philosophically winding debates she had ever had the pleasure of testing herself with.

She reached up idly toward the ceiling and sought to brush the cheek of the man above her. He bore resemblance to her husband...her late husband, Doran. She remembered burning his body herself to rid herself of lingering feelings for him. She'd poured the oils, built the pyre, refused Jerhme's help. She'd done it all herself in hopes that the years of waiting and planning and careful manipulation didn't go to waste.

She had wanted her husband dead, and she had made that happened.

That was it. There was no love for him left within her.

"I've gone and made myself sad," she mused, feeling a tear roll down her cheek. She sat up and felt another meet the corner of her mouth. She cleared her throat and hopped out of her luxurious, dirty bed. Her clothes had been strewn about the room haphazardly, so she went to the wardrobe against the wall and took a short, low-cut dress from it.

If anything, she could at least mingle with the other guests while she was here. She knew some of them, and others she knew how good in bed they were. Perhaps she could find a partner that could satisfy her craving for a good lay.

She admired herself in the mirror for a short while, long, tanned legs disappearing into the dark gold and blue fabric of her dress. She considered herself busty, not quite so large as most of the girls that considered themselves so, but still adequate to catch an eye or two at a glance. She winked at her stunning violet eyes and imagined what kind of a shock a stranger would get from them.

Her mind took her to the dumbfounded look on Tom's face when she'd first taken off her colored contacts in front of him in the shower. Oh, the naivety of that boy. Now that had been a good screw, that hour beneath the warm water, her womanhood embraced by the tongue of a soothsayer.

She felt a spark flicker within her at taking someone's first time at cunnilingus. It had been so long since she'd gotten anyone's first. Thinking back on how he'd acted the entire time, she very well could have believed that she took his virginity too.

Veronaa tore herself away from her thoughts and made for the door. He was a good lay, a great lay, but he was just one of many. She didn't have much use for him now beyond their occasional run-ins, which were becoming problematic. She could feel the changes overcoming her as she slipped further and further away from Veronica and returned to being Veronaa the Vindictive.

It had been so long since she had said what she truly thought, even to Jerhme, that she was at a loss as to how to act towards people that had known her in the Mortal Realm and not this one. The patient, kind woman she had played there was not the same she was here.

She quite liked her human friends, but they didn't know the side of her that really was her. Adjusting to the way she was down here wasn't going well for Tom. He was already suspicious of her motives, and rightly so. As much as she wanted to make sure he was not hurt by Ceria, she wanted to show the bitch up. Ceria might be all powerful here, but Veronaa was queen of the patient hunt.

They both knew that. This bedroom was proof enough of that.

"So you don't like my servant, do you? A shame. I thought I could break him in with you," the lady of the house herself said as she entered Veronaa's room without her usual enormous attendant with her.

"Enough coyness," Veronaa bit abruptly. "Why are you here? I'm going to find a better bedmate."

"When you arrived here. I smelled you all over him." Ceria was suddenly very serious.

Veronaa's interest got the better of her, so she stayed and folded her arms across her chest instead of leaving. "And?"

"You did that to spite me. I can see it in your face. You knew I would find it."

"Which is why I took his soothsayer's tongue and Dana his cock," she quipped back. "To make it blatantly clear what I meant, in case you couldn't already tell."

Ceria bristled at the insult, but remained calm and collected. "You know, I have no plans of killing him."