Mind Guest (28 page)

“Complete obedience is rewarded,” he said, almost word for word what had been said to the other two girls. “As you have been obedient, you may now claim your reward.”

It seemed as though I was expected to take the food, but the nagging doubt I’d had earlier hadn’t left me. I hesitated as I looked up at him, trying to ignore how unbelievable the device in me had made the crawl, and suddenly, just that easily, everything fell into place.

“I was-was told that my dis-discomfort would be seen to if I were obedient,” I stumbled, humiliated, embarrassed – but desperate. “Must I have the food instead?”

“Did I not tell you she would be the first to respond properly?” my golden-shirt said to the other three men with a laugh of triumph. “A body such as hers must of necessity be responsive.”

“Ours remain virgin and therefore ignorant,” grumbled one of the other golden-shirts while light-shirt laughed. “Yours has had a taste of what a man might do, and is therefore more eager. The wager should not have been made.”

“And yet the wager was made,” my golden-shirt laughed again, tossing away the piece of fowl and wiping his hands on a cloth. “Mine has won and yours have lost. Which is to come first, the punishment or the reward?”

The question was addressed to light-shirt, who looked between me and the now-trembling other girls with lighthearted amusement. He made a show of thinking the question over, probably to increase the girls’

torment, and then he looked back at my golden-shirt.

“The punishment will be given first, I think,” he drawled, completely aware of the terrible disappointment he thought he was causing in me.

“Rewards are given when the master considers it appropriate for them to be given; punishments are given as quickly as they are earned.

Also, the loss of reward will be more keenly felt after punishment.”

“I do not understand what I have done to be punished!” the small, auburn-haired girl wailed, trying to shrink back even as she spoke.

“I was completely obedient!”

“Obedient, perhaps,” light-shirt nodded, looking at her soberly. “As to pleasing, however, the answer is not the same. Is your master to be pleased when you have chosen another thing above his caress? The highest obedience you may give is to consider his pleasure above all else. This is a lesson you must learn before you are fit to serve him.”

The key word again. I heard the other girls choke as the heat flashed through me, and knew their punishment had just been added to. The fact that I was punished right along with them made absolutely no difference to light-shirt, of course; I was nothing but a slave under his training, and the little bit of extra would surely do me good.

“We will also see how truly obedient your slave is,” light-shirt went on to my golden-shirt “Unbind the chain between her wrists, and we will give her the position she must maintain till the time of her reward.”

I gave them the look of frightened anticipation they expected, and my golden-shirt chuckled as he reached down to my waist. I had to lie on my side until the chain was unwound, and then light-shirt rose and gestured me to my feet.

“You will observe your sisters’ punishment from here,” he said, leading me over to the male slave, who was still in a state of intense excitement. I followed with the small, mincing steps forced on me by the ankle chain, and couldn’t help whimpering from Bellna’s worry over what was going to happen. “Go to your hands and knees beside this slave, and then I will direct you further.”

I got down to my hands and knees as quickly as possible, afraid to ask myself what that chief sadist was up to, and then didn’t have to ask. He walked behind me, put an arm around my waist, then lifted me up and put me face down on the male slave’s legs. I gasped and grabbed those legs to keep from falling off, but light-shirt wasn’t finished with placing me. I was tugged backward by the ankles until my arms were just about around the slave’s knees, my own knees were spread by the simple expedient of pushing my ankles closer to me, and then I felt the touch of something being put just inside the furnace that had once been a part of my body. Reason began leaving me when I realized it was the male slave who had been started into me just when I needed him so badly, but a heavy hand kept me from inching backward until I had all of him.

“You may not allow him more deeply within you,” light-shirt ordered as I whimpered again and squirmed hard enough to drive myself even crazier. “Nor may you release him from where he was placed. Also are you forbidden to touch yourself in any manner, for that is a doing reserved to your master alone. You will do no more than watch your sisters’ punishment, and then you will perhaps be given your reward.”

Perhaps. The bastard laughed softly as I began to cry, even more when I cut off the crying fast in response to being touched in warning. No more crying without permission, especially no crying which would distract me from the way I felt-and the way the male slave felt. His leg muscles strained under my arms as he gruntingly tried to drive himself into me, over and over again, as though he really had a chance of accomplishing it. I wanted him inside me, just as desperately as he wanted it, but I’d been ordered not to let it happen. Bellna screamed inside my head and tried to take over, but my mind was so full of hatred that she couldn’t do it. A golden haze formed in front of my eyes, making me look longingly at the swords the armed men wore, but I knew I had no chance of taking them.

Another time, something inside me seemed to say. Soon another opportunity will present itself and then the sword will be yours. I settled down behind the golden haze, burning all over, and just waited.

The other two girls were punished again with arousal without relief, but one at a time. The golden haze intensified when I realized they were dragging it out to make it worse for me, but by the time it was all done the haze was gone, Bellna was practically comatose, and I was trying not to move even to breathe. The male slave underneath me was making noises that said he would kill everyone with his bare hands if he ever got loose; I empathized more than he would ever know. At long last I was allowed to crawl away from the slave to my golden-shirt, was ordered to beg to be touched, and then was taken into my golden-shirt’s lap for my reward. He bent me backward over one knee before throwing the tiny skirt out of his way, buried his fist in my hair with a really painful grip, then finally got down to giving me relief. As hot as I was it didn’t take long, and as soon as I had what I’d been promised, I was dumped back on the floor mat to recover. I lay unmoving with my eyes closed, hearing the muffled sobs of the two punished girls, feeling as though I’d been working out a sentence at hard labor. My body was exhausted but my mind slowly grew dear, and then some interesting questions occurred to me.

I’d been too busy to notice it earlier, but I had finally gotten around to wondering what light-shirt and three golden-shirts were made of. Nothing that had been done to us, neither pleasure nor pain, had aroused them in the slightest. They had enjoyed the times they were putting us through hell, but they hadn’t enjoyed it to the point of arousal. The two armed men, I had half-noticed, had been replaced three times since the first pair had brought the male slave, and even so the latest ones had been shifting from foot to foot, growing hot despite being on duty. The other four men had been here right from the start, were intimately involved, and-nothing. What made them so different? And what was the main object of the way we were being treated? The golden-shirts and light-shirt called me and the others slave and referred to themselves as masters, but neither I nor the other girls had been ordered to call them that. All three of us had spoken without specific permission, but we hadn’t been punished for it and our questions had been answered promptly and seriously.

Slaves weren’t usually given that much freedom, and the reason for it became a gnawing, twisting worry.

I was given a generous five minutes to recover, and then all three of us were ordered to our feet. My two fellow victims were so badly in need they could barely walk, but that’s what we were all made to do.

My wrists were left with the relative freedom of having their chain undone, but I was reminded by light-shirt that I was forbidden to touch myself. All seven of us, we three girls, the three goldenshirts, and light-shirt then left the room light-shirt leading; I was first with the other girls in their line positions, a golden-shirt behind each of us.

Outside the room was a tent corridor with other tent rooms leading off it, and all of those rooms were open. Most of the rooms were empty, but a few of them had occupants, mostly doing things I didn’t understand. One naked young girl in slave chains lay alone in a room on a large fur piece, her eyes closed, her body twisting and squirming on the fur, a low, constant moan coming from her throat. As I stared at her it suddenly came to me that her body was covered with faint welts, as though she’d been beaten a little before being put in there, but she didn’t seem to be in pain from that. Her squirming said she was badly in need and quickly growing hotter, and the last glimpse I had of her showed the thin leather strip tied around her waist and one of the thin strips tied to it leading up from between her legs. Her wrists had been as free as the wrist chain let them be, but despite her being alone, her hands had been nowhere near her body. I didn’t know if she was being punished or trained, and if trained, to what purpose?

Another room had two girls in white slave ponchos being rewarded the way I had been rewarded, and their sobs of pleasure and relief seemed to take no notice of the way they were being hurt at the same time.

One of them was bent forward by the armlock her golden-shirt held her in while he gave her secondary relief, and the other was bent backward by a tight fistful of hair in the same way I’d been held.

The two girls behind me whimpered at the sight, but the next room held a sight that made them whimper even more. A pretty girl in slave green was being used by a dark gold-shirted guard who had dropped his pants for the occasion, and her moan-filled writhings were so intense that they reached out to me as well. It would have been a lot worse, though, if the sight hadn’t brought up a very disturbing question: we three and the two girls being rewarded were given hand relief and nothing more; we were even being trained to beg to be touched rather than used. It was possible that they wanted the other two to remain virgins, but Bellna wasn’t a virgin. The girls in green. were used normally even though it was still rape; what the hell did they have in mind for us?

I could have spent a lot of time prodding at the questions I had, but the walk didn’t talk long enough. The second room down from the guard and his slave was our destination, and we were led into it. The front of it was nothing more than a narrow corridor formed by heavy hide partitions making up separate, small rooms, and three older women stepped out of three of those rooms. All three of the women were beautiful, all three of them wore slave chains and green cloth ponchos, and all three of them immediately knelt to light-shirt.

“Slaves, there are new slaves here for you to assist,” light-shirt told them, giving them the same sort of pleased inspection he seemed to give all slave females. “Have them seen to by our return.”

“Yes, master,” the three women murmured together, then rose gracefully to smile at us newcomers. The one on the right came over to me, touched my face gently with a long-fingered hand, then put her arm around my shoulders and led me to the right, toward the small room she’d come out of. She lifted the leather flap, urged me in first, followed and dropped the flap, then put her arms around me and hugged me.

“Dear sister, I am so pleased for you,” she said in a low, throaty voice, patting my back. “You have already learned to give pleasure to our masters, I see, and have clearly been given pleasure in turn. How I wish I had been so quick to learn! The ecstasy I was unable to receive, merely because of my own slowness! Ah, me. I joy that you need not wait as long as I.”

She patted my shoulder again and let me go, then smiled at the confusion she could see on my face. I was still pretending to feel what the Bellna presence really was feeling, and my confusion amused her.

“I am able to know of your success through two things,” she said, patting my cheek again. “Although you are clearly in discomfort from the device you wear, you are scarcely in such discomfort as the others, showing that you have been eased. Also have you been allowed the full grace and attractiveness of your chains, a further reward for one who has earned approval. You are now able to move and gesture as a woman, rather than be restrained as a child.”

“I am now-womanly?” I asked, looking down at the chains and then back to my new friend as though I really believed her. “I am no longer to be burdened with the look of a mere girl?”

“No, you are no longer a mere girl,” she laughed in good-natured amusement, looking me over with a lighthearted indulgence I was sure she didn’t really feel. “It is for that reason that you must pretend to childlike qualities, so that you may give further pleasure to our masters-and thereby reach your ultimate reward the sooner.”

“I cannot understand what you speak of,” I protested in Bellna-innocence, but I was very much afraid that I did understand. “For what reason must I pretend to childishness, and what ultimate reward do you speak of?”

“Perhaps it would be best if I were to explain all things to you,”

she mused, one slim finger tapping her lips as she considered the idea. “Yes, I shall give you what explanations you require, yet must I minister to you the while. Should the necessary be left undone when the masters return, we will both be punished. Come here.”

She gestured me over to the back of the tiny room, where buckets of water, piles of soft clothes, jars and bottles and all sorts of paraphernalia stood. When we got there she stopped and reached out to the poncho I wore, beginning to tug it off me.

“I must see to the freshening of your body,” she explained, having more trouble undressing me than light-shirt had had with the blonde slave. She would have had an easier time of it if she’d been bigger, but she was the biggest of the three who had been waiting for us and she still didn’t make my height. My golden-shirt had called me