Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2014 23:18:59 -0500 From: redpatience@Safe-mail.net Subject: The Magpie and the Prince Part 6 BOOK TWO In the role of the Mother Superior, Mu? (moo-eh), Sigourney Weaver (complete with shaved head) In the role of Scarabeo, maybe Adrian Brody. If you're into it. Or Leo Dicaprio. Whatever you want. In the role of the Dowager Duchess Ijbet Arcolia, Anjelica Huston In the role of Elumu, Lee Dong Hoon (http://lh6.ggpht.com/-r8LU4iMzazk/UaBNo2O-vdI/AAAAAAAAAKw/iSOpy8SLpLU/s640/tumblr_m2jnqydyo11r2yhb2o2_400.png) XIII. The Spy At last, the five guardsmen had her. The five elite warriors who found her in the palace study had fought her bare-handed wrath with sword and spears shattering only to chase her through the corridors until they cornered her and wrestled her to the ground, crushing the nun of the White Palm under the mass of their iron-shingled armor and muscle. The heap of sweating, straining men still cried for help as they reached for daggers to cut the woman's tendons. Before they could lay a knife to her, however, she inhaled and shouted one syllable. The sound of it split all of their eardrums, burst two men's eyes, and sent the dog pile hurtling through space. Men went flying, breaking bones against stone walls and careening down the corridor as if they had been gored by a raging bull. The mother superior's palm struck the captain of the guard in the breastplate (which saved him from breaking all of his ribs instead of just three) and hurled him down the stairs. With a tremendous crash, he burst through the stained glass rosette on the landing, shattering the white-Mongoose-on-a-field-of Black that was the Arcolia family crest. In the particolored zig-zag of shards that remained at the bottom of the window, the family words stood untouched: "Death to All who Cross us." The Mother Superior, her mask torn off and her identity revealed to her enemies, bounded down fourteen steps in two strides and leapt out the broken window like a diver as fresh reinforcements stormed up the stairwell. She had escaped, but her life would be marked forever more by those six words that stood in the glass at their feet, the oath of that ancient and hateful family of black magic and impossible wealth. XIV. The Prison Elumu waited. He waited and waited, anxious but with growing excitement. His fingers pressed into the wall above him, he tried to hang as little weight as possible from the shackles that bound his wrists. His captors kept him naked, chained to an iron wolf's head mounted ten feet above and when he was practically hanging from the wolf's mouth like this, then he knew it was time for his daily ordeal. He could move about freely for most of the time, wandering the vast stone floors that were heated from below, taking the hearty meals that came through the grate every day at the same time. He could remember nothing of his life before this except hazy images of faces and streets, vague memories of names, the light of the sun and moon. All he knew was that he had two names; some part of him deep down knew his name was Elumu. Another voice in his mind repeatedly insisted that his name was Irau. Irau, Irau, Irau. All that he recalled with vividness about his past was that he must never, ever displease a woman named Ijbet. Death to All who Cross us, he remembered, the creed and legendary promise of the House Arcolia. He was here for a reason--and that reason was to serve the Lady of that house. He loathed her at first, but now he just begged the God of Debt that her purpose would soon be fulfilled. Most of the day, his chains reached around twenty meters long, allowing him to move about as he pleased; however, once every day, or sometimes twice, the wolf's head came alive. The iron beast's eyes glowed red and it snapped up the slack that bound the boy until his near-white nipples brushed the black stone wall beneath it and he stood almost on tip-toe. Saliva from that beastly wall-fixture would drain from its mouth and slicken the chains; this substance smelled of heady spices and had the consistency whipped butter. Neither slippery nor greasy, it blended quickly into the skin and have a warming, euphoric buzz. This stuff drained down his wrists, trickled into his hairless armpits, fell in rivulets down his chest and back and buttocks until it coated the boy's whole body in a sheen of fragrant, glistening oil. At last his waiting was over. The door opened: a narrow tooth of the stone slid into the floor. He could hear somebody entering. Elumu could never find the seam of that door during his hours tracking out the dimensions of his cell; the walls were obsidian-smooth. Yet every day, a new man entered and followed the same procedure. They spoke all manner of languages, and had nothing in common except their feverish body heat and desperate desire to tap Elumu's bottom and spill their seed inside. This man cooed and flirted in his strange language; his voice was gravely and masculine, seductive and terrible. Elumu trembled, gritting his teeth, hoping this one was gentle. "Death to all who cross us," he thought. "I must please the Lady Arcolia." The man's weighty hand closed around one of Elumu's perking cheeks, slid a thumb into his crack and squeezed the fleshy mass with a groan of lust. Elumu could rarely see their faces, but this man leaned in to kiss the boy on the ear and cheek, and to stroke the auburn hair that fell to the boy's neck. This man had strong, handsome features, a square jaw, a broad clean-lined nose. He was very large. Over six feet tall, with skin the color and texture of a black grape, he was strong, and yet capable of incredible gentility. His mouth closed on the boy's neck and his teeth softly pressed on his white throat, his hot tongue lapping at the oil there. Elumu spread his legs as much as he could and strong fingers massaged the thick pad of muscle between his bollocks and his anus. Another two fingers tweaked his nipples and he cried out in alarm and false protest. "Noo," he moaned, but they both knew it was an act. His curved penis was already bobbing back and forth to smack his narrow thighs, glistening liquid flying from it in strings. The man rubbed his bludgeon-sized member all over the boy's buttocks and in between his pert cheeks, slickening it up in the grease that now painted both of their sweating bodies. Sharp pain gripped him as the man pressed his massive head against his anus; the boy yelped and did his best to relax. He was used to being penetrated, but this was a caliber beyond the usual. As the man sunk his spear deeper, he let out a huge sigh of relief, as if Elumu was a balm on a stinging burn, and began gyrating his hips to explore the tight depths of the boy's ass. Pressed against the warm stone of the wall, his shackled hands gripping the chains and his muscular arms flexing to try to pull away from that monstrous pestle tearing into his bowels, Elumu moaned and whimpered in pain that was only very slowly becoming pleasure. The man bumped his hips against the boy's round, bubbled ass, and began to saw earnestly in and out of that tight chute as tears of overwhelming discomfort flowed down the sides of Elumu's cheeks. It would change, soon. Everything changes. This was his mantra. Slowly plunging his shaft in and out and the boy's hole, Elumu's hard cock dwindled into softness as he grit his teeth and struggled to pull himself up the wall. Finally, the man paused, his rod buried almost half way (an impressive amount for anyone to make disappear) between those ivory cheeks. The boy relaxed and breathed and felt his muscles loosening as the man licked and breathed hot meaningless words into his ear. A minute or two of this and Elumu was ready. Though still feeling as if he might burst at any second, Elumu felt his cock nail hard pressed against the warm stone wall. His penetrator began to buck his hips again, and the boy began to feel pleasure soaring over the pain. He blathered ecstatic groans and began pleading as the man quickened his pace; "Please, breed me! Ride me! Please touch me!" The man seemed to know enough of the common tongue to understand what this meant, and grasped the boy's swollen cock with one slick hand. Pumping in unison, Elumu's jaw fell open in abject ecstasy; the rod beat again and again against that sensitive gland in his chute and he lost all control. He let himself hang from the shackles, his full weight supported on that timber-sized cock as the man's thick fist squeezed his own white stick. Hot semen sprayed from his root, and he found himself pressing himself harder and harder, deeper onto that thick mass penetrating him until the man gulped and groaned and forced, finally, the entire length of his shaft into the boy, spurting his own hot seed into that dark, tight chasm. A few more thrusts and then the man removed the impossible serpentine length of his rod from the boy's bottom along with copious gobs of semen, finally bursting his last few ropes and then squeezing the length of it to rub the last coin of semen onto the gaping pink asshole. Abruptly, clanking boots of iron clapped on the stones of Elumu's cell. The boy could scarcely look over his shoulder to see his erstwhile lover being dragged away four men with spears and plate armor. As they cleared off, a woman emerged from their midst, a tower of black satin, her neck and head covered with a white coiffure. At her brow glinted an emerald that hung from her circlet of white gold. Ijbet Arcolia. "You've come to free me!" Elumu exclaimed, "and take me away from these men!" The woman sighed and shook her head. "I'm the one who sent them, you beautiful idiot." Suddenly, she was right next to him, holding up a jar to his mouth. "Drink this," she ordered. Obediently, he drank the colorless rice wine within until it was empty. He burped softly and felt his face warming and his bowels numbing. "What--" "It's alarming that you remember who I am," the woman said. "Your resistance to my drug is formidable. You would have had great potential as a clairvoyant. But I need you to remember nothing. Nothing but the story you will hear again in a moment." Elumu felt his eyelids growing heavy, and went limp in the shackles like a corpse. XIV. Lessons Irau sat cross legged on the floor of the library. Golden sunlight caught the whirl of steam that rose from the wizard's teacup, a white porcelain thing with two handles. He sat on a desk cross legged, Irau on a mat on the floor. Shelves of thousands of volumes of books surrounded them, and all Irau wanted was to harvest a basket full of those anthologies of songs all spined with red and orange and blue silk and leather and read them for hours and hours. The sorcerer, however, had different plans. The boy was only allowed to read one book a week and the sorcerer would grill him with questions each day demanding that he extrapolate, interpret, analyze, accept and reject and criticize everything about them. The latest was a particularly boring one: Cerumo's Chart of the three substances. It was a medical manual about the body's constituent elements, the basic meridians of energy throughout it, and how it was that sorcery came into existence through the channeling of the body's energies. "What are the three miraculous substances?" the sorcerer asked. "Essence, breath, and spirit." Irau answered for the twelfth time. "And where can the essence be found in greatest concentration?" "Blood, breast-milk, and semen." "A sorcerer or yogi is one who does WHAT with the essence?" "Transmutes it into breath energy." "And then?" "Transmutes breath into spirit." "And then?" "Uses spirit to manipulate the 10,000 phenomena." "Very good. What happens when the essence is depleted?" "The other substances decline as well," Irau whispered. "What happens when the essence is gone altogether?" the wizard asked. This was a new question. Irau blinked drowsily, and thumbed through the pages of the book. It had made no mention of this, as far as he recalled. "What happens when the essence is gone?" the sorcerer repeated. ""The other substances disappear?" the boy guessed. The wizard sipped his tea. His eyes, nearly always lit with a kindly and mischievous sparkle, dimmed. He frowned at the crinkled green leaves at the bottom of his cup. "Unfortunately, no." XV. The Scarab In the city of the Brothers, there was a certain tower that stood at the edge of the temple of the holy heart. Within, in a library forbidden to all but one monk, a fire roared in the hearth for the first time in weeks. Ice melted at the edges of the window, and fragile pages of manuscripts and grimoires dried out from an accumulation of damp, freezing air. To anybody who had entered that study before the fire erupted in the hearth, it would have seemed the abandoned and filthy tomb of a long dead scholar; indeed, the body still sat at the desk. Hunched over a document, jaw broken and gaping, the grayed skin of the face desiccated and stretched over gaunt cheekbones. Mouse-eaten silk hooded and sleeved this academic corpse, and gold rings banded each blackened finger that still held a dried up pen. The only thing in the room that appeared vibrant, bright, or new was the thick seal on the letter before the corpse. There, in deep blue wax was the impression of a scarab seal. The same scarab seal that stood in carved lapis lazuli on the right index ring of the skeleton. The instant the fire burst up in the hearth, all of this disappeared. Where before stood heaps of paper rotten with wet cavities full of worms, tidy books and ledgers now heaped the shelves. Where before the floor was thick with a layer of black mold and frozen puddles of some dark bile, plush carpet sprung up against the feet. Where before the cadaver at the desk gaped as an open-mouthed horror and a husk of a body, now there sat a regal and most impressive man, garlanded with jewels, looping cursive syllables together on clean white paper. He was the Wight, the phantom, the lich of the east, one time High Priest of the Church of the Holy Heart. He was once called Palomeo, but only his nemesis recalled the name. The legends that told of him were limited to the knights templar; all other voices that spoke of him met with unfortunate ends. He had once enjoyed longevity and boundless health like many magicians. He had once been among the most powerful men in the five kingdoms, secret authority and arbiter of the Church of the new God and a magnificent alchemist, exorcist, and diviner of fate. However, his ambitions had led him into foul deeds. The doctrine of his faith led him to the brittle black-and-white view of things all too common among humanity, and his magic became twisted, self-righteous, murderous and perverse. All peaceful means failed to turn him from his abuse of men and women, of animals, of the forces of the elements themselves. At last, his nemesis confronted him in the very room in which he now sat--and was doomed to inhabit forever. The magpie cursed him halfway into the grave, and he was kept among mortals only by the powerful scarab seal that sat before him. The door knocked. "Enter," the man said. The bald and black-mantled form of a friar entered. He shivered from the chill that radiated from the lich's skin. "The house Arcolia has sent a gift, Scarabeo." "More useless gestures of flattery?" the scarab rasped. His words were like stones clapping together; an approximation of a voice. "No, your potency. A tribute of some interest, I believe. A boy. The lady Arcolia claims he is a prince of the Aldeni." The lich jerked his head up, stabbed his pen into the ink pot. "Bring him. Now." ((If you've been a fan?help continue this story! It's like a PBS pledge drive except for radical fantastical pederastical gay erotica! Five dollars would go a long way? redpatience@safe-mail.net ))