Sorceress

The other four were not incompetent swordsmen - they had after all survived this long - but when pushed by two who were not only better than them but sober, they did not last long.

The two trulls, who had clearly not been trulls until their guards had failed them, only stared at them dully. Movarl knew their type, and wasted neither words nor time on talking to them. Holding the bloody tip of his sword under the chin of one of them, he asked "We killed two in the corridor, where are the rest?"

Numbly, she pointed through another door, and Serena followed the finger without making a sound or even seeming to disturb the air she passed through.

Movarl followed her, but only as far as the doorway, keeping one eye behind them but ready to jump to her aid if needed.

She did not need. There were two men sharing one sobbing, abject woman who already bore the marks of numerous beatings on her back and flanks, and she stepped forward with the tip of her sword whistling, the head of the first leaving his shoulders while he was thrusting into the slave's quim from behind.

The girl, perhaps because she was desperate for any distraction from her plight, noticed the intrusion first and panicked even before Serena's sword first bit home, biting down, unconsciously, on the cock being forced down her throat.

The man's holler of pain was so sweet in Serena's ears that she let him live for a little bit longer, moving to skewer him through the eye only when he made a compulsive punch at the girl's head.

He dropped without collecting, leaving the girl huddled on the floor retching, desperately trying to get the taste of blood and man out of her mouth.

Serena kicked the two bodies out of the way to give the girl some room, then turned around to shout for assistance.

Movarl, whose attitude to forced body slaves had contributed to him being a blade for hire and not a brigand, had already bullied the two remaining women into action, thrust a pile of the cleaner blankets at them and bundled them through the door to help their fellow captive.

Serena, more delighted than ever with her choice of hire, pulled the door closed and left them alone with what seemed to be a bucket of clean water while she made a quick but thorough search of the bodies, stripping them in case anything could be remotely worthwhile, and dragging them against the door at the other side of the room.

Movarl had - still moving cautiously - gone to collect the two they had dispatched in the corridor, dragging them both in by their collars. He stripped them and, the bodies now considerably lighter, they carried all eight out of the hall, through a short and defensible corridor, through the stables which held, now, the poor beasts which the brigands had acquired, and dumped them in the middle of the courtyard.

On the first trip, carrying one body each - Movarl was now more accustomed to the easy and startling strength which his employer displayed, but was no nearer to accepting it without wonder - they made sure that the gates were fast and secure. After the last, they saw to the horses and, a lifetime's experience allowing Movarl to win the trust of the suspicious and slightly crazed beasts, he remained while Serena went back to check on the women and, by force of personality if necessary, move them into another room and let them lock the door.

Serena, equipped with an unlit torch and her flint and steel, went back up the cliff to fetch the horses, coaxing them down the path that Movarl had sworn was not passable to any four-footed creature other than a goat. She bought them straight through the fort into the stables, where Movarl had now befriended the other horses and left them in much better condition. Working on their own steeds they were quickly done and back in the dining hall where Serena, for the first time, stood still and allowed a wide smile to sweep across her face.

Neither of them felt secure enough yet to open any more of the harsh brandy that the brigands had with them - although the women in their room were working their way steadily through two bottles - but there was passable food still to be had without cooking anything more.

Looking around at the mess that the brigands had left, it almost felt anticlimactic to Movarl that they had just successfully invaded a fort.

Setting traps to wake them with noise if anybody moved in the night, they took a bedroom each and turned in, although it took the swordsman, who could drop asleep in an instant, many minutes of carefully metred heartbeats before he was happy doing so.

In the middle of the night, he was awake from one heartbeat to the next.

He lay frozen, eyes open but unfocused, trying to work out what had disturbed him. There was no sound, no change in the faint moonlight that glimmered in one corner of the room. And his heart was beating normally. So what had awoken him?

He slid to his feet noiselessly, waited for a dozen heartbeats to see if the world reacted to his presence, and stepped slowly and carefully to the door.

The room he had taken for the night was only a few doors down from the main hall, but his instincts took him in the other direction. It took him mere seconds to glide along the wall towards where a faint glow spilled from the edges of a door. He paused a moment, listening, and heard a low murmur that he strained, unsuccessfully, to decipher.

When he stepped forwards through the heavy wooden door, it almost took him by surprise. He descended the staircase, his brain almost distracting him from wondering what the hell he was doing by idly thinking that he hadn't realised that the fort had a lower level. What he saw when he stepped through the door at the bottom rooted him to the floor with shock.

The glow came from a fire that had been built in a pit in the middle of a room that was at least as big around as the fort's main hall.

Above it, a large cauldron hung from three chains that were each attached to a curved horn of metal rising from the edge of the pit.

Standing with her back to it was a tall figure with long hair and a cape obscuring most of its form. When it turned around, he had difficulty in recognising it as Serena.

The cape was fastened at her neck by a large, slightly tarnished metal clasp, the details of which he could not quite make out. Her hair, which she had always previously held in a tight braid, was loose and held off her face by a metal circlet that appeared to be the same design as the clasp at her throat, and was mirrored by a torc about her neck. She was holding the cape about her, and her feet and ankles showing beneath it were bare save for bracelets about her ankles that appeared to hold pieces of uncut jewels and rough pieces of metal.

Even as he stared at her in disbelief, his brain registered that she was clearly naked or nearly so beneath the cape. Then she smiled warmly at him and said "You came promptly. Good pet," and let the cape swing open.

Above the waist, she was naked save for jewellery which consisted of tarnished, jewel-encrusted metal bands around her upper arms and a length of chain that descended from the torc at her throat and then separated, passed tightly under each breast, lifting them slightly, before wrapping around her flanks and behind her. Where the chain separated into two, there was a metal plate in the crude shape of a bat. Around her waist, she wore a fur that descended to her knees and was slung low on her surprisingly feminine hips, below her slender waist, by another tarnished chain.

Movarl instinctively swung his sword up, and then found himself staring in dumb surprise at his hand where there was no sword to be swung.

Serena said, with a smile in her voice, "Oh, we don't need to worry about that," and gestured in his direction, her fingers flickering quickly. Movarl felt something give way behind his eyes, and his arm dropped lifelessly back to his side. At the same time, he felt his eyes irresistibly drawn downwards to where her breasts, never really hidden by anything she had worn previously, were now swelling proudly from her chest more firmly than any trull he had ever met, with large halos surrounding each nipple.

She walked slowly towards him, the prominent flesh of her breasts, so firm that they did not even rest on the chains that ran under them, dominating his vision while her soft, amused voice slid gently into his mind.

He did not notice when two blank-faced women came forwards and undressed him with unthinking and wooden efficiency. He did not notice when they took an arm each and walked him forwards to where they could shackle his wrists and ankles to a sturdy cross-shaped frame that stood to one side of the fire.

He did notice when they had finished, for that was when he felt his mind at least partly returned to him and some control return to his securely bound limbs.

Waking up in that situation was so far outside his sphere of experience that his self control deserted him and he shouted with rage, convulsing against the frame, which didn't even creak.

"Spare us," she snapped, suddenly as womanly and seductive as an enraged tigress, shutting him up by shock this time, not magic. "I have returned your mind to you, and unlike these nearly useless girls those pathetic bandits managed to get, you'll get to keep it when I'm done with you. I had to prepare you in our little campfire chats, not break you, or you would have been useless to me as a sword or as a man."

Her mental blocks, fragile and temporary things, fell away from him and the return of memory crashed over him. He say her lying asleep, open her eyes and give him a look from under her lids that pulled him in until he drowned in the warm hollow between her thighs.

He saw her kneeling over him, naked, her heavy breasts nearly crushing his chest as she gently but surely undressed him, stroking his nipples and sending sharp, agonising spurts of pleasure straight to his groin as she lowered herself over him.

The memories gave him an erection painful in its suddenness and severity.

She wheeled away from him, pacing around the fire like a caged wolf. "Look at me!" She shouted, gesturing wildly at herself and her garments and jewellery. "Tarnished! Rusted! Dirty! Having to make do with servants culled from the dregs of second-rate bandits! Needing to enslave a swordsman to return the most minor vitality to a fort that once counted the warlords of the north among its vassals!"

The ensorcelled women returned, bearing between them a small cauldron. Bending with wooden grace, they put the cauldron down, dipped their hands inside and, straightening up, began to spread oil over his chest.

He could hardly believe what was happening, but there was a clarity to every sensation that gave it veracity, even in the middle of what should be an impossible nightmare. Despite the attentions of the naked women on his naked skin as they massaged oil into his nipples, standing close enough that their breasts crushed against him, his erection rapidly wilted.

"My family held this fort for centuries against the world, against the petty warlords and mobility who sought to unseat us! We were feared by all who travelled there passes! They tried to travel the long way around to avoid our taxes, and we made war in the lands in their way! It took an empire to give us battle!"

With a sphincter-tightening revelation, Movarl finally understood. "You're a myth!" he gasped before he could stop himself.

She was suddenly in front of him, standing only barely beyond touching, mad eyes staring into his. He didn't even feel the women oiling his arms, moving with long caresses up and down his lean muscles.

"Myth?" she hissed in his face. "Yes, we made sure that memories of us were repressed when finally we were vanquished and had to run. We made sure that knowledge became story, and story became rumour and a tale to scare the children with. We spent a long time making sure of that, my brother and I."

Shock, which had become fear, now became a sense of unreality not just at odds with the vivid clarity of the situation but actually physically jarring with it. She couldn't be! Not after this long!

As the women knelt, spreading oil down his legs, Serena whirled away from him, her cape slapping over the backs of the slaves, and strode around the fire the other way. "And I survived! My brother retreated to a tower in the forests and called dark things to him to keep him safe, but I survived! I lived among the accursed rabble who have no idea of my arts, I take the occasional man to keep me powerful and woman to keep me young, and I survived!"

As the women reached his feet, the unfocused horror within Movarl's mind crystallised and became starkly specific. What in both hells did this woman who claimed to be over 200 years old mean by "take"?

As Serena came around the fire, she undid the clasp holding her cape closed and let it drop behind her. As she came to once more stand in front of Movarl, she hissed "I need you for that purpose," and undid the chain about her waist, letting the fur fall about her feet.

She wore nothing under it, save a chain slung on the points of her hips that mirrored the one about her breasts and was equally as tarnished as any of the others.

At that moment, with this frightening, mad but potently feminine woman standing close enough for him to see flecks of colour in her pupils and smell her muskiness, Movarl felt hands grasp and oil his sack and flaccid cock, and once more hardened despite himself.

The hands, soft of skin and slender of finger, gently massaged the oil into his flesh as his shaft began to throb painfully hard and his sack became exquisitely sensitive. No stranger to orgies, he could only feel this intensely erotic sensation as another edge on his nightmare, trapping him in unreality.

His eyes were darting wildly around her body, but the next time he met hers he couldn't, no matter how hard he tried, break away.

Her eyes, he suddenly saw, were so green they were almost black, but with red-brown flecks in their depths. They were also huge. In fact, they were getting bigger, seeming to suck him in.

His eyes were not only locked in hers, but locked open as well, giving him no way to escape her overwhelming, mad stare.

Then, when she seized his cock in one hand and squeezed savagely, giving him an indescribable, searing jolt of mingled pleasure and searing pain, he screamed but even tears squeezed out of his eyes couldn't force him to break contact with hers.

She suddenly darted forward and licked the tears off his cheek, and somehow even then she kept his gaze pinned to hers.

He sensed rather than say the manic smile that broke across her face.

"Pain tastes so sweet," she said in a cracked voice. "I wonder if your life tastes as good as your sweat." She squeezed him hard again, and he screamed again. This time the pain in his cock didn't fade so fast, and it almost blanked out the sensation as she impaled herself upon it, no resistance preventing her from bottoming out on the first thrust.

The sensation when she drew back and dropped onto him again was not one of ecstasy, or even pleasure, although it had both of those in it.

It felt as though the seed in his balls was being sucked out, dragged through flesh that wasn't ready to give it yet but was willing to cooperate. The sensation curdled his belly but became gradually less unpleasant with repetition.

"This is a pleasure for the men whose lives I claim, she said sweetly when she drew back, "Only because your life is so much sweeter and more powerful when I don't have to drag it out of you. Be grateful for that."

She drew her legs up, braced her feet on his thighs strapped to the X, pushed up almost off him and dropped back.

He felt as though her rock-hard but hot and satin-smooth thighs were wrapped simultaneously around his waist, balls and heart and squeezing hard. The jolt of pure pleasure that speared straight into him deprived him of speech.

"You have a lot to be thankful for," her voice dropped to a hiss as she twisted her hips about him, giving him the feeling that a fist inside his belly was clenched around his life and massaging him even as her cunt was massaging his cock.

"You will learn that when I am finished with you!"

He could make no answer to that, not even a swordsman's half-instinctive challenge, for as his breath recovered from the earlier sensation, he felt it sucked out as she drew back, his body if not his mind trying to throw itself after her, desperate to remain buried deep between her spread thighs.

He was left gasping, so torn between his fear of the sorceress and the never-before-experienced levels of pleasure that were beginning to pool in his loins, that he failed to notice that she had dropped her mental hold on him and his mind should have been his own again.

After all, she didn't need his mind at that moment. She had his body. His mind would cum to her after his body had.

The truth, however, was that no man in his situation could possibly have kept control of his mind in any case. She no longer needed her talents when her cunt was just as talented.

And as her cunt pumped him, he felt it pumping out his breath, his energy and his life. Every time she impaled herself upon him it felt as though she was crushing him within her, and every time she drew back she took his essence with her.

It robbed him of the strength in his limbs and the energy in his mind, which was a pity, for it robbed him of the sight of Serena, magnificently statuesque, as, with face and chest flushed down to her swollen breasts, she attacked his body, leaning back with feet braced against his hips and riding him unmercifully, a sight that in any other moment would have driven him wild and given him memories to sustain him for many weeks on the road.

She felt him grow close when the gush of his life every time she drew back until his head was at her entrance grew weak and he no longer had the energy to hold back as she had commanded his body to do.

He came with a shuddering groan that seemed to be the last breath in his body, not enough energy left for screaming, bucking or even a violent spurt, but that was okay - she didn't need his juice. She let herself go then, her own orgasm prising her open to swallow every last available trace of him, sucking him dry before she collapsed onto him, bright-eyed and gasping hard.

Despite the ravages that his body had just been through, he was still hard, and with the help of the angle of the frame, that was enough to support her on him as her legs dropped off his hips and fell to the ground unsupported.

After a few seconds she smiled the self-satisfied smile of the cat who has eaten a pheasant, and pushed herself off, a wet sucking sound marking the moment she relinquished her grip upon him. Then she stepped back and examined him.

At this point she used to glory in the rush of power, like a discerning drinker feeling a particularly fine brandy slide down her throat. But she had been building power for so long now, fuelling her growing abilities and the fort's needs, that even such a swordsman was no more than a sip of warm summer wine for her now.

He was not dead. He hung in his bonds slack of muscle, his face drooping and his eyes vacant, but he still breathed, if shallowly. His mind, however, was effectively dead. She had taken most of the strength of his body, leaving only what his cells needed to survive, but his soul she had swallowed entire.

Standing naked before him, only the now less tarnished chains of rank and property about her waist and her breasts hiding her sweat-sheened body, she ran her gaze over his and slowly her smile changed from self-satisfaction to the delight of new ownership.

"You're mine now," she said as you would talk to a simple-minded dog.