The Ring of Perliss Ch. 05: Sungold

"A rope would be merciful," I said calmly. "This cure will restore their minds, but once I am done they will never become hard without suffering a torturous pain. Can you imagine a more fitting punishment?"

He shuffled his feet uncertainly as he weighed up this possibility and its potential for giving these four young men, all well known and previously much liked, a second chance. "Never?" he queried.

"Never," I said firmly.

"Can't promise nothing," he muttered.

"Allow me into the cell, then. At the worst, I'll give them one last pleasure. At the best, they may yet prove their worth to this place. The town will heal faster if no blood of its own is shed."

"Aye," he said. "Go on, then." He unlocked the cell door.

As soon as I entered, the four men howled with lust and fought against their bonds. A few faces peered in from the road outside through the bars of the high window. I ignored the watchers, and avoided meeting the eyes of the men. "Cunt," they pleaded. "Need cunt. Need..."

I knelt in front of the first and took out my jar. The contents were darker now, the remains of the old asparagus cream blended with crushed peppercorns and cooked over oak under the rising sun. On the jar itself I had inscribed mystical symbols of unwinding, a tricky thing to do since any spell to unwind spells wants to unwind itself. It was necessary to balance a number of different symbols against each other, and I had been puzzling over how to do it ever since leaving Fandralko.

"Enjoy this moment," I said, "for you will never know pleasure like it again." With one hand I held the jar beneath to capture the drooling cum, and with the other I massaged a measure of the dark cream into the swollen balls and rigid, throbbing cock.

The man moaned with lust, thrusting urgently through my slippery fingers, his cum splashing against my tunic whenever I moved too slowly. There was no subtlety to it. I could sense in his growls and whimpers and in his desperate and erratic thrusting when he was close, and I aimed his cock firmly into the jar as a great volume of cum erupted.

Peppery steam rose from the jar as his cum was absorbed into the cream, and his lustful moans gave way to a sudden wretched sobbing as I continued stroking his hard, twitching cock. But that too gave way to a wide-eyed look of horror. "It burns!" he cried, writhing away from me, wriggling free of my loving hand. "It burns!"

I repeated the procedure with the second, the third, the fourth, until all four men had learned the cruelty of the spell I had wrought. "You are free of the madness now," I said, wiping my tunic clean as best I could. "But you must pay for what you have done, no matter that you weren't yourselves." I saw only fear in their eyes. They said nothing.

Outside the cell, the guard shook his head in bewilderment. "I can see they are much improved, but how am I to persuade them out there?"

"Just buy some time," I said wearily, unhappy with the role of torturer I had made for myself. "The truth will soon be apparent to all."

*

"As King of the Atteyni, Dar-Gratt was ruthless and brilliant on the battlefield, but amongst his own people he was honoured for his skill with wizardry and his particular friendship with Lord Derushil. It is said that the palace at Tanarwel was built by Dar-Gratt himself under the guidance of the Divine Smith."

Hanwe yawned. "These are old stories of older times. People are always claiming they're the son of a god or the daughter of a goddess, but I don't believe any of it."

I raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you a descendant of Lady Ulaxr?"

"So it is said, but even if Lady Ulaxr herself were to say it, I would remain sceptical. We fear the power of the gods, but they are not without limits. Otherwise I could never have stolen her silver cock."

"In later years," I continued reading, "Dar-Gratt relented in his anger towards his father, and invited the Atteyni to build a temple to Lord Uxur. A great festival was held to celebrate its opening, and Uxur himself attended the consecration of the altar.

"All there who saw Uxur's sungold cock yearned to feel its touch, and the god revelled in that admiration. In that moment of distraction, Dar-Gratt struck his father with the Dawn Blade, severing the god's golden cock. Uxur fled before his son's wrath, and Dar-Gratt claimed the golden cock for himself."

Hanwe laughed. "I thought I was brave for taking the silver from a statue. Dar-Gratt took the gold from the living god!"

I shook my head at her. It wasn't clever to taunt the gods the way she did. "There's a note at the end. The abandonment of the Twins' temples dates from this time. Lord Uxur has not been seen since, and Lady Ulaxr is said to have made the secret isle of Lliria her home."

"That much at least is true," Hanwe said.

Perhaps the rest of it was too. "Let me see your sword," I said.

Hanwe passed it to me, and I drew it with reverent care. Even to my mundane senses it spoke of beautiful craftsmanship, the blade polished to a flawless edge. To my witchy senses it spoke of an ancient power - sufficient even, perhaps, to sever a golden cock from a god.

I touched my fingertips to the steel, half fearing I would fall again into the past, but the blade itself seemed to resist that magical perception. "Curious," I murmured, and returned it carefully to its sheath. "It's like nothing else. As if it's not really part of our world, and yet central to it."

Hanwe tucked it away carefully. "Enough reading, my love," she said, and kissed me.

*

We took the road west from Crossroads, following the River Cyun all the way to the sea. Four days we walked, Hanwe setting a hard pace, the wind gusting and the sun rarely glimpsed. North of the river, the terrain was moorland, gentle hills with a carpet of flowers and grasses. Centaur lands, according to the innkeeper, but though I searched often for the sight of these mythical people, I saw none.

Hanwe's instruction with the sword was demanding too. Though the morning exercise was as before, later in the day she taught me simple defensive moves, and would attack me in a variety of ways, forcing me to decide which stances to adopt. Time and time again, she brought the Dawn Blade within a whisker of my neck or close enough elsewhere to suggest some other grievous injury; if I sometimes managed to block her blade with my own, it was more by chance than skill.

My silver blade, forged by Derushil himself, seemed to shrink away from the Dawn Blade. It swung with effortless joy in the morning when there was no blade to oppose it, but against Hanwe's blade it felt heavy and sluggish. "I think my sword is afraid of yours," I said, only half in jest.

"Let's swap," she suggested, and we did. Hanwe attacked with what should have been a gentle thrust, a familiar move that even I should have found easy to divert, but the speed of her blade was startling and I struck it away in panic. The blades met in a shower of sparks and a scream of magic, and I stumbled backwards in shock.

We stared at each other in stunned amazement. "Let's not do that again," I said.

"No," she agreed, studying the silver blade. "It's probably not clever to fight you with a witch killer."

No indeed. Had the moon been in the sky, it might have gone even worse for me.

The weather improved greatly as we reached the coast, though it was still overcast as we climbed at midday to a high promontory overlooking the estuary from the north. I had never seen the sea before, except from a great distance. The expanse of grey-blue before me, the froth of waves and the cries of gulls, quite stole my breath. I might even have fallen, had Hanwe not been there to steady me.

"Do you see the ship?" she asked, pointing.

My eyes picked out eventually the distant sails and masts, peeking above the horizon. "Is it sinking?" I asked. We had passed by a lake along the way that was deep enough and wide enough to swallow the boats that crossed it, but the vastness of the sea was such that it could devour great sailing ships with ease, and I could easily believe its depths were home to terrifying monsters like the one that, supposedly, had attacked Alba.

Hanwe laughed. "To understand the sea, you must first understand that this world is a great sphere." She glanced around and picked up a smooth, egg-shaped stone. "Imagine you were an ant here, and I an ant over here, you would not see me at all, would you?"

"Well, no," I admitted, but to somehow extrapolate that line of reasoning to ourselves and the world, the rock would have to be so big that... "Well," I said again, staring at the distant ship that was disappearing before my eyes. And maybe there was a gentle curve to the horizon, one that if continued might possibly wrap around to itself in a great circle. "Surely at some point it must become so steep that everything falls off the edge. Does the sea become a great waterfall?"

"Maybe," Hanwe said, smirking, and I glared at her for teasing me so.

Here and there across the sea, great shafts of sunlight pierced the clouds to turn the grey into glittering blue, and with a rush of welcome warmth the sun broke through above us, its golden light blazing down at us, and I was falling -

Not from the high cliff, but into the past, to that same high promontory only days earlier, my eyes seeing nothing except mystical symbols bright with meaning. A woman with fiery red hair, on her knees. I could hear her moans of lustful pleasure, but could see only the symbols, but the symbols themselves had taste and texture and colour, and their evocation of hair aflame in sunlight was enough to trigger the memory of her in my divination.

More than that, I could almost taste his cock in my mouth. I could almost feel him between my lips. The power in that sungold cock was phenomenal, and -

- and suddenly I was elsewhere, elsewhen, far away, long before, in a temple to Uxur, in the presence of Uxur himself, a crowd of worshippers lost in admiration of his sungold cock. Again I saw only symbols, but they spoke of Dar-Gratt, King of the Atteyni, of the citadel of Tanarwel, of the Dawn Blade and a scream of divine rage.

- fell into Hanwe's arms. "Lia!" she cried.

"I'm fine," I said, gasping for breath, shocked at being able to see again, thrust back into the present. "This is where I saw him," I said. "Katarra. Standing right here."

Uxur's scream echoed in my imagination for hours afterwards.