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We lost at Dubhe. Even with your rank, you don’t even know how many eggs the emperor had in that basket, and there’s not even enough left for an omelet. The fleet doesn’t really exist anymore. They may not even tell anyone: the emperor may already be gone. The secret police are about to arrest anyone connected to naval production, just in case they want to have a trial. Get out, and I hope I see you on Yeg or somewhere else where the girls are pretty and the liquor flows freely. Hes
I blew out a long breath: the air I had held in my lungs since reading the first sentence of the message. I deleted it, mechanically, wondering for a moment whether if I could have deleted it from my brain, I would have, just for the sake of having a night with Chalondra that I could cherish as the walls of the empire collapsed around our ears. Despite everything, the thought of what she must look like, bound to my bedpost… the first pleasure girl I had chosen for myself, to buy and to own… already a treasure beyond price to me simply for the way shehad looked up into my eyes, on her knees before me, as I had watched her learn what fucking was…
I couldn’t pretend. As much as I thought it probably wouldn’t come to a trial, that I would almost certainly have a better shot of escaping the conquest of Vion by the Magisterians if I stayed, rather than making a highly suspicious-looking exit, I couldn’t do that to Chalondra. I would, in all probability, be arrested—placed under guard here in Gravamir House, which represented the standard for nobles under suspicion.
Then, if I let it all play out, the secret police and the judiciary would melt away as they escaped the conquerors, and I could even make a deal with the Magisterians. I knew, after all, that their cause was the juster one, and that the empire was corrupt beyond any hope of reformation. That knowledge came from a deep understanding of imperial finance, which would allow me to help my new overlords recover a great many assets. I might not get a Magisterian peerage for myself, of course, but at least I would end up living in style on a world of my choice.
But the moment the police arrived, Chalondra would be taken from me. Most nobles thought the law archaic, and indeed barbaric. It came from a period of imperial history when suspicion had existed openly among the emperor and his courtiers, rather than covertly, as it did here at what seemed the empire’s end. Both as a form of retribution and perhaps more importantly as a way of removing from a noble under suspicion a possible means of communication with his co-conspirators, a noble’s chattel servants—including above all his concubines—were immediately alienated from them upon arrest.
Technically, the law provided for compensation for this taking, should the noble be exonerated of whatever suspicion had led to their detention. The law specified, however, that the actualservants taken would not themselves be returned even in that case. Any servant alienated from an arrested noble belonged to the emperor from that point forward.
It might not amount to an actual death sentence for Chalondra, but if I were indeed detained, she would undoubtedly find herself given to the secret police. Deep in the bowels of the imperial palace, she would undergo a brutal sexual initiation at their hands, whipped with merciless severity on the slightest pretext, whether she complied or not.
Thoughts of the tender initiation I had planned for her, the application of loving discipline when necessary to help her find her submission, the unimagined pleasures to which I would force her until she begged for her defloration… they didn’t vanish completely. I rather wished they had, so that I could concentrate more completely on the ideas that had taken the rest of my focus. Escape with a Kamnian concubine was going to require a great deal of care if we were to have the slightest chance of getting away safely.
I stepped outside my study and saw that Franla waited there, on the bench in the hallway. She rose as I emerged, ready I felt certain to give me a final report on Chalondra’s training before I went in to my new pleasure girl. I cursed inwardly for a moment. I had expected her to depart for her duties in another house.
“My Lord?” she inquired, clearly taking in my troubled expression.
I had only a split second to decide whether I could trust her. It seemed clear that here at the end there would be ample opportunities for superior servants to gain advantage through betrayal, but her help could on the other hand prove invaluable. I made the decision on pure instinct.
“Franla,” I said softly, “please come with me. The empire is about to fall, and we’re going to escape with Chalondra.”
Chalondra
The minutes went by not like hours—more like eons, during every second of which I had to remember to keep breathing. The first few of those eons I spent on my feet, standing close to the bedpost with my hands clasped together, looking nervously over my left shoulder at the doors that had swung closed behind Mistress Franla.
If I stood close enough to the post, I could rest my elbows alongside my ribs, so that I didn’t have to support my arms with the failing strength of my shoulders, or let my wrists hang from the cuffs. But that posture, almost touching the ancient, ornate wood of the bed’s structure, made me much more conscious of my body than I wanted to be. Every time I shifted my weight from foot to foot, simply to keep my toes from going numb, I felt myself brush up against the bedpost, down there.
It took me several eons to realize that it was something strange about the geometry of the bed itself that caused that distracting, unwelcome friction: the post had a sort of knob, a protrusion that looked a little lighter in color, and thus perhaps rather more worn than the rest of the dark wood. As soon as I had noticed it, I found that my body had an irresistible urge not to step back and away from the distraction but instead to get closer to it. To rub myself—the front of the lacy panties, the place where they covered the neediest part of my pussy—against the knob.
I understood, with a flush of heat all over my body, that the knob did not represent some vital part of the bed’s construction, or some whim of its designer—unless the designer happened to have been a noble who foresaw bringing bonded concubines into the finished structure. Or, rather, binding pleasure girls to its posts.
The knob could only be there, on the bedpost, to permit a girl to rub her pussy against it.
The idea, flashing into my head, came along with a mental image of the girl, the blue-haired girl dressed only in tiny white panties, who stood up against the post now. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and I noticed that the picture in my mind’s eye existed there, in my master’s bedchamber: there was a mirror on the wall, to my right, reflecting back to my eyes the lewd spectacle.
I bit my lip, and I watched, and I moved my hips because I had to see. I whimpered with the need that shot through my limbs as I pressed my clit against the smooth curve of the ancient wood.
Breathing raggedly, I tried again. I put my hands out a little, and I took hold of the post, realizing with a start that carved into its heavy shaft were the outlines of two hands, just about the size of mine: the barons of Gravamir had provided the girl bound to the bed with a place to hold on as she shamed herself the way I had just begun to do.
Shameful,I thought, and the spirited part of me couldn’t figure out why the idea didn’t make me stop. It didn’t even make me stop watching myself in the mirror. It didn’t make me stop whimpering, as I thought of how many young women must have done this, while they waited for their masters to come and fuck them… must have ridden the bedpost in a helpless quest forrelease from their need and the tormenting pleasure of the wood and the lace that covered their wet, wayward cunnies.
She went up and down with a lewd, bouncing rhythm in her bending knees, the blue-haired girl in the mirror. She… Wetquim, the pleasure girl… the fuck toy… she needed it so badly. Surely her master would understand.
Only then did I remember what Mistress Franla had said, only a few minutes before—a few eons before, in my perception, of course, a length of time that I tried to tell myself might explain my failure to connect her words with my lewd ride on the bedpost. I shuddered as I recalled it, her warning against touching myself, and her promise of terrible punishment, should I be discovered stealing his lordship’s pleasure from my pussy.
So desperate for satisfaction had I become, and so anxious about what would befall me when my master arrived, that I persuaded myself for a moment that my mistress must not have meantthis—that she had secured my hands, and told me I need not fear, seeing that she had done so. I did close my eyes, though, because I knew that if I kept watching myself in the mirror, I would understand what I refused to understand: that of course she had forbidden me to do this—to rub my pussy against the bed post, to moan from my chest as I heard the soft noises from between my thighs take on a wetness that reminded me, blushingly, of the sounds my mouth had made on my master’s thrusting cock when he had fucked me there.
I couldn’t stop. I tried to stop. I tried to tell myself to stop. Instead, my ride grew more frantic, because I knew I must finish before my master arrived. The thought of him finding me, stopping my desperate self-pleasure, whipping me for my theft, fucking me over and over to teach me obedience… the little scenes in my imagination sent fear through my mind and mybody, but they also hastened the urgency of the pleasure. I cried out, because I could feel the climax just ahead.
“Chalondra,” I heard my master say from the doorway. “Stop that right now.”
CHAPTER 26
Chalondra
I froze. My eyes flew open and I turned my head to see them, Baron Gravamir and Mistress Franla, walking swiftly towards me. At first I felt certain my master would produce a paddle from the pocket of his robe and begin simply to spank me with it. For an instant I even had the lewd, fleeting hope that if he did, I would be able to keep rubbing myself against the knob—that perhaps I could even come that way, while his lordship bestowed the correction I had so thoroughly earned.
