Sufferance Ch. 08

*You're only a ghost, an echo! I won't help you, I won't, you deserve this punishment! You earned damnation!*

I felt memories swirl and mix in a dark spread of stone, metal, and smoke. Her naked, curvaceous body was his to use as he saw fit. His brutality was expected and would only prove to the others she was no weakling, and he was powerful enough to control her. Especially with her gift of mind.

*You're dead, Kain! You're dead!*

I relived that death yet again and she cried out in disgust and horror at the way that it had happened.

*How...why would you...mate a Drowen? How could you...?*

Psychic hooks snagged hold of my memory, my *real* memories of my trials that led to that: the ritual on the altar, the divine magic and fever-pitch lust that was entirely alien to her. The female Duergar screamed through us both; my trials were the horror story, the very nightmare tales told of the Drowen made clear and real and justified in her fracturing mind.

In return, I saw a brutal slave culture, much more physical than our own but not much different in that the strongest lived longest. The continuous plots and the cruel magic among the Drowen, however, scared the psion down to her core. What she witnessed was too chaotic, the rules changed all the time—at least the Duergar never changed, she thought, at least the beatings and the deaths were straightforward and expected.

Endurance, fortitude, stubborn determination—those with the will to work another day, to worship a neutral, uncaring god who granted no mercy to the weak, those were the ones who crawled over the bodies of the dead to find the riches and the food.

It was the same for us but that the measure of that endurance, that determination, could be physical, or mental, or magical...or it could be an insane influence from the Abyss, or pure luck from a fickle goddess who only never wanted to be bored, and rarely was— watching a people who thrived on the constant ebb and flow of power among them. Even the rule of the Valsharess was not necessarily set in stone, I thought...it could change, easily, given enough time...

*How can you live with that?!* the Duergar cried in my head. *How can you live not knowing what the next waking will bring?*

*If it never changes, that's when I want to be killed,* I replied. "I will have done it all then."

There was a vocal cry from what seemed far off; I thought we may be struggling, rather like I only vaguely remembered struggling with D'Shea...

*That's where the rage comes from! He's afraid and you aren't, but you haven't dominated that fear yet and when he was afraid, he'd force himself on another!"

I became enraged, hot and immediate. That was wrong. It couldn't be, I knew it! *I'm not afraid, Lana! I will not be dominated! Be still and accept me! Do your duty and free me!*

*I can't! You're dead! No, please! Don't! Stop!*

Intense pleasure flooded through our connection suddenly, but in her I recognized the shock and denial—because I'd felt it the last time: a prick she very much didn't want had invaded her body.

Mine.

I surfaced only enough to feel the hard stone scraping and hurting my knees as I pushed forward, her trousers stretched tight across her ankles and partly in the way as I scrabbled to settle myself between her thighs and flopped down heavily on her breasts. I felt her body's pain and discomfort, and the impulse was there to chastise her for not being ready for me. She'd had plenty of warning that I was ready for her, how dare she try to refuse me...?

*I'm glad you're dead, Kain, I'm glad!* Her pure, hateful emotion surged balefully between us. *It brings me rare joy that a Drowen killed you with your prick hanging out!*

*The second Vungren was no better,* I sneered, both insulted and with an odd urge to laugh in pure satisfaction.

*He would protect me from others, unlike you after you were done! He never left me behind, either! Do you know what happened when you left? He never intended me to deal with your ghost if we found it, it was to be him but he still wouldn't leave me behind without protection!*

*Well, he died with great dignity,* I growled spitefully. *Hooked in the balls by the very Drowen he hunted, with his own barb!"

The surge of grief—feared before but confirmed now—infuriated me, made me jealous, possessive. My pride was wounded and all I wanted to do was make her sorry she'd said she felt more for him than me. I thrust harder and she strained; I could feel spikes of pain jump between us—I loved it, it meant she was receiving her punishment. So much better than coupling with a non-psion where I couldn't feel it quite so clearly.

She was my prize, not his. Mine.

*You're mine...*

*No—*

*MINE!*

*What have I done...? You're not...you're female!* the dwarf pleaded. "I know you are, despite that thing you wear!"

How could she know if I didn't? If only felt good, satisfying doing this, wearing this...

*Drowen!*

I kept fucking her harder, hurting her, I'd strangle the very breath of the cheating, ungrateful Tugren when I was done—

*R-Red Sister! Listen to me, you have to remember!*

My victim took great pains to wrench loose my memory of Auslan and then throw it between us, and she held the arresting image in my mind until I finally experienced a feeling that was from before my introduction to the Feldeu. Then she switched the image to another: Callitro. She didn't know who they were but knew that they were mine—not his—and the ghost couldn't even pretend that they were anything other than Drow.

She started pulling out other male faces from my memories, from my life before the Red Sisters. It cooled the fever that had been building, stopped a rise that was going to lead to a violent murder. Our struggle eased and her pain stopped crackling through my head. I stopped and we were breathless though still connected.

*So many mates,* she murmured. *All of your own choosing, Drowen. Tell me, why so many?*

*Fun.*

I knew she was confused by that. *And...?*

*Desire. Challenge.*

*Not for children?*

I laughed inside our head. *Not possible at the time.*

She understood why after the next moment as a painful memory flashed between us and I felt the horror that she held for my kind once again. Even with some rules in place, some which we enforced more than others, those wide-spread obsessions pushed the boundaries all the time...and it was a sickness to her, that obsession and subversion within our "society."

Similar differences between her kind would be worked out in a fighting ring, with weapons and witnesses. It made it official and everyone followed the result— until the next time. No worship balls, no two-faced politics, just open hate, violence, and aggression.

*Even if it were possible, I wouldn't have taken so many just for children, Lana. You have your ways to find purpose. I have mine. Through strength or through speed, take your pick.*

She seemed to accept that as all pain, aside from shallow scrapes and bruises, finally subsided.

*A Duergar would be driven mad, taking on the death-memory of a Drowen,* she thought quietly. *You...just live with it. You will continue doing so.*

A fearful surge tried to come up as I gripped her harder, as I thought surely there had to be something she could do to make it all stop...! But Lana immediately thought of my male lovers again and the rise ended.

*It's not really Kain in your mind.* She almost seemed to be talking to herself. *Just a leftover shard of his memory. I feel shame for talking back to it, for making it real again... You might not have...made me remember what it was like...with him."

Her body shifted uncomfortably and I became aware enough to withdraw the Feldeu from her without ever climaxing. For the first time, I did not feel the need. I did not even know this was possible; the magic did not urge me to begin coupling toward completion again. I could still feel its heat, its stiffness, but it was....controlled. I controlled it.

*You are already absorbing the shard into your own psyche, Drowen.* Lana's thought sounded tired, and it felt as if she'd given up and submitted to the more dominant will—as she had long been used to doing, over and over again. That was why she was speaking, telling me her thoughts plainly.

*The catalyst...that thing attached to you...is helping but you will not need it with time. The impulses...will lose their cohesion and will become just memories for you. You only understand too well right now that he would not want to dissolve into chaos, that it is his greatest fear...*

*Especially when he died that way.* I felt her acknowledge my finishing her thought.

*And he *is* dead, Drowen. You killed him.*

Her tone held no accusation whatsoever, no regret; it was a statement of fact.

It was really just the Tugren dwarf and me in this tunnel, then... and it had always been just me and D'Shea, and sometimes Lelinahdara, back in the cloister. My Elder and the Priestess had always spoken of the "imprint" as a foreign body, a male piece that needed to be exorcised out of my mind. The experimental magic they'd performed...they had described it as if it all would rise like some solid body of knowledge and suddenly spill from me like a lanced boil. They would hear my confession and I would be cleansed. It would be gone, once they figured out how to reach it, how to control it....

It had been easier for me to cage it up, then, and only let it out when there was something inescapably male on which I could focus. But this female Duergar was saying....that it would just be part of me going forward. Stop fighting it, bend with the change, it would become...just me.

I was me, and always would be.

"Kill me now, Drowen," Lana spoke to me with her physical voice now, hoarse, wheezing. "Just make it quick."

I had to work to draw in the physical details around us again. Pants down, skin scraped, weapons askew, moisture and heat pressed between bare thighs. I still gripped my dagger in one gloved hand and the other was holding her throat.

"Why?" I asked, easing the pressure on her windpipe so she could speak more easily.

"I know too much," she said simply.

She was absolutely right, of course. The psion had much knowledge of the Red Sisters now and some very intimate details of our race. The grey dwarves had no business knowing any of that and I couldn't let her live...

...but it was interesting to me that she did not want to fight for the right to be the survivor between us. She'd taken it as a foregone conclusion that it would be me who walked away.

"True, but why not be the one to return home?" I asked, confused at her lack of spirit after our first contact and her bold words.

"My second Vungren is dead, now I have no protection," she whispered, blank eyes not seeming to see me directly as her face fell to passiveness. "They will consider me a cursed Tugren after two dead Vungren in two years. Only low males will fight for me now. If I return alone...and they find out what has happened in this twice-cursed area..."

"Wouldn't your knowledge be of worth to them, a bargaining coin?"

She shook her head. "Not without a male of status to vouch for me. And I am...tired, Drowen. I am ready to stop working."

To say such a thing back at her Stronghold, I knew, would mean they'd oblige her only after a sound whipping and wringing the last bit of physical strength they could from her, moving stone or moving anything that needed to be moved...she'd stop working only when her malnourished body failed her.

"You don't care that I would give up, Red Sister," she said. "And you have other pressing matters, don't you? In exchange for my help with the ghost...I only ask you make it quick for me. I know you can."

I could grant her that, yes, and once I did, the entire group—all seven of the Duergar sent out here after the first never returned—would be dealt with according to mission. I'd accept, of course, but first—

"Will they return again next year, having lost eight and knowing little what became of them?"

She nodded, her face hardening at the clear betrayal to her kind. "Yes. They will send fourteen next time. There will be five psions among them. It is tradition. And if those are slaughtered, they will send twenty-eight with seven psions."

"They are that hard-headed," I said.

"They will get what they seek. Strength in numbers. Sooner or later it will work."

"While the females bear more replacements at the Stronghold?" I said wryly, more as a joke, but she nodded silently. "What if they run out of psions?

"It has not happened yet."

Fair enough.

I still had a moderately wet Feldeu pressing to her thigh and I shifted on top of her clumsily; she winced and cursed at me, trying to close her legs against the false phallus and it was apparent that she was feeling some cramping in her muscles. They were an excellent distraction.

I got off her, staying hunched over so my head and shoulders barely missed the low ceiling, and scooted backward from her, pulling up my leathers and cinching my loosened belt. I would have to double-check all my pouches again before leaving here.

She sat up, pulling up her pants as well as I gave a cursory cleaning to my dagger before sheathing it. She glared at me, white eyes flashing dangerously.

"You are not going to kill me, Red Sister? You should, or I will kill you."

"I already did," I replied. "Wait."

She blinked and reached to the side of her neck with her bare hand; I could see in her face the moment she felt the sting of the scratch. She withdrew her hand and saw the bit of blood on her fingers. She nodded, but the deep-seated fear of dying—which any being with a survival instinct possessed—was clear on her face.

I sensed a reflexive surge of psionic energy in the tunnel and started my retreat quickly as possible. I did not want to be anywhere near another psionic Duergar at their moment of death.

I left her to suffocate as the poison seized her muscles and, eventually, her lungs.

****

"Sirana?"

Panagan's voice was agitated and she was already waiting at the mouth of the tunnel when I hauled myself up and out so fast it was as if something might be biting my toes. I had been so focused on getting out before Lana died that I did not even remove the Feldeu from my sex, it was still in my pants—and now with Panagan watching, I couldn't. I quickly grabbed my cloak where I'd left it, needing the added cover for my ridge.

*What in the Abyss happened down here?* she demanded "loudly" with her hands.

*Did you hear anything?* I asked first.

*Distant shouts in the Duergar tongue, I heard two voices speaking with force. Were there more down there?* She looked me over; I knew I was disheveled. *You are injured again?*

*Mildly, and yes, one more lay in wait,* I responded, glad she couldn't understand the grey dwarf language. That would have been so difficult to explain; easier to lie to her, particularly being distracted still by the sensation of the Feldeu rubbing along the inside of my leather pants. *She planned to escape with one they'd left behind to watch their mounts.*

*And you killed them both?* she asked earnestly. *I saw none surface, though I paced this entire cavern.*

*Both dead,* I affirmed. *No witnesses to return with tales, Panagan.*

She narrowed her eyes at mine for a few seconds before deciding to believe me and calmed some as she nodded. *Then we have completed our mission as my Elder dictated.*

*Yes.*

At that, Panagan spun and whipped her leg around, solidly striking me in the left knee, and pain overtook me as I cried out and fell. I managed to catch myself but hard pebbles bit into my palms through the gloves and my attempt to get back up was met with a second kick to my temple and I collapsed again.

"I told you that you shouldn't have given away your last healing potion, Sirana," Panagan hissed at me, sounding very pleased and withholding a full-throated laugh. "The hunt for the initiate starts now, but you will be too busy trying to leave this cavern alive."

I withdrew a dagger from my boot, teeth gritted against the pain and my mind full of viscous thoughts, but she had already vanished from my immediate view when I looked up. I had intended to try for a spinning throw at her sprinting form but I realized it would be a waste of a dagger as her cloak shielded her from standing out so clearly against the rock, blurring her form to where I couldn't be sure I'd even hit her.

"Cunt," I growled lividly, my head pounding and my knee throbbing from the strike of her boot. She hadn't cracked my knee—I didn't *think* she hadn't—like I had Moria's in Rausery's sparring room, but it had been a similar kick and it would become near impossible to walk before long as my joint swelled and my leg refused to bend properly.

Leaving me here had to be in direct conflict to what Qivni had told me about Red Sisters not letting other Red Sisters to die on a mission, "and that is what this hunt is." So she'd said. For all I knew, she'd been lying, or it had been a deliberate set-up, having me following a different set of rules. Clearly Panagan had been waiting until the last dwarf had been killed before giving herself the competitive advantage in capturing Jael.

True, I had been planning all along to let Panagan capture Jael ahead of me—much as I didn't really want to—but this change in events infuriated me. If I did not make it back, either in good time or at all, Panagan could tell them anything and they'd have to take the report as is unless they sent someone to investigate. They might not; how was I to know? D'Shea had been left out of the loop on this one, and she would already be displeased with me. Perhaps she would think I had brought this on myself.

Of course I had, but I wouldn't give up; I would see the fruits of my second trial out here in the wilderness. Thanks to several events I could have done without in my short life, I knew a great deal more about this area than Panagan did. If she wanted to even the score, she'd find it a bit more difficult than a simple surprise kick to my leg.

Payback would be riding a fast mount on this one. Literally.

It took time for me to drag myself back down into the tunnel and return again to where the second psion with whom I'd become entangled had finally died. I passed her body, slowing up some to note the rigidity of it and the evidence of foam at her mouth.

Like when Jael had slumped over having lost all strength and chance at life, I felt...regret.

I hadn't wanted to kill this Duergar, somehow, I had only needed to. I would not live long if she still breathed, even if I returned. The Red Sister Prime would no doubt see Lana's survival as a failure similar to being captured alive by an Illithid: I would have compromised the entire Sisterhood, exposed them, made them vulnerable to an entire enemy race, and there was no greater failure than that.

The Duergar had seemed to want to convince me—or perhaps herself—that she was better off with a quick death, anyway. I wasn't sure I could ever agree with her on that, but...as long as it wasn't me believing that I had no more choices left, no more chance for change.

I left the body where it laid and moved past it, the Feldeu still present against my abdomen like a nuzzling fire salamander, using my three good limbs to continue down the route she had been going. I knew I did not have far to go before reaching that water source; I could smell the moisture and heard the telltale trickle of liquid occasionally gulping for air as it moved through the spaces between rocks.

When I eventually stuck my head cautiously out of the tunnel connecting the last cavern with a new one, the first thing I heard was deep breath passing through wide nostrils, coming from what had to be a very wide set of lungs.