Gay Erotic Stories

Assassins After Dark By Mark James

I

The banging on the door worked its way into Haken’s head like a rotten, throbbing tooth. “Alright!” he bawled out, throwing back the matted, filthy furs he slept in. Where the hell was the bitch? “The World ain’t ending is it?” he said, drawing on his trousers. The banging got louder, like maybe the man on the other side had decided to dance on the door. “You fucking better have a Gods-cursed good reason for -”, Haken said, yanking the door open. The words died on his lips when he saw Diogo and Valak.

“Bright morning to you,” Diogo said, smiling cheerily and walking past Haken. Valak followed, tall, silent and deadly.

“Find the bitch,” Diogo said to Valak.

“Right,” he said, disappearing into the darkness beyond the tiny room.

Diogo sat on a chair, tilted it back on two legs and put his black boots up on a rickety wooden table. He looked Haken up and down, a tall thick man whose bloated belly showed the ale he packed away every night. His sleep bleary eyes were squeezed down to tiny points in the bright morning sunlight streaming in from outside. His scent filled the small room, stale liquor, piss and a nearly overpowering odor of sweat. Great oily drops rolled down the sides of his face as he stood looking at Diogo.

There was a thud in the other room, followed by a small, yipping cry, then Valak’s low, grating voice saying, “No you don’t, bitch.”

Haken stood perfectly still as if to say, You’re not here. This is a nightmare and soon I’ll wake up and take a piss. You’re nothing but a full, aching bladder, mister.

“Your payment’s late,” Diogo said, looking at the sack of shit in front of him.

“I been meaning to come by,” Haken said. He licked his dry lips and tried a smile. He didn’t quite make it and ended up bearing his teeth in an idiot grin instead.

“Yeah?” Diogo said, looking him up and down.

His dark brown assassin’s eyes bore into Haken. Diogo’s thickly muscled body always gave him the look of a crouched tiger, poised and ready to strike, even when he was sitting with his feet up and his arms crossed against his chest.

Valak came back into the room, dragging a pale, frightened slave boy by the arm. He backed the frantically struggling boy into a corner and let him pull away, afraid that if he held his frail arm too tight, he would break his thin bones. The boy cowered in the far corner of the room, and looked from one man to the other with green eyes round with fear. His hair, honey brown in the shaft of sunlight that stabbed into the dank rooms, fell across his pallid face, giving him the wild look of an animal caught in a trap.

“You hear that Valak? He’s been meaning to come by,” Diogo said to his friend. He’d taken out a knife and now he used it to clean his nails.

“Right,” Valak said, looking down at the boy in the corner.

His hard, angular face, nearly lost in dark shadows, showed no emotion. In the small room, he towered over the slave boy, tall and built hard and compact somehow. He had a deadly air about him, like a cross bow always cocked and ready to deal death at a moment’s notice.

He pulled the boy from the corner, dug his long fingers into his hair and pulled his head back hard. His other hand moved eerily fast, and a knife appeared from nowhere. He pressed the cold, wickedly sharp blade to the pulse in the boy’s throat, and looked at Diogo, waiting.

The slave boy tried to pull back from the knife, but Valak paid no mind. He pulled the boy’s hair tighter to keep him from cutting his own throat in panic. Unshed tears glistened in the boy’s soft green eyes and hung like gems in his long lashes. Tiny desperate sounds came from the slave boy, but no words escaped his lips.

“Where’s my fucking tokens?” Diogo said, looking at the tableau of Valak and the boy.

II

Diogo wasn’t smiling anymore. His hard eyes had gone a cold shade, the color of freshly turned grave dirt. Haken, a one time farmer, had turned into a veteran gambler and a long term loser. He was a battle hardened veteran of every Poker table in Emyhr and far beyond. He’d spent endless summers in dark corners of shit hole taverns with whores so filthy, a man didn’t know if his cock would rot after he fucked them. And he’d come to know the look in Diogo’s eyes—a deadman’s eyes. He read the message in those inhumanly hard eyes with a kind of perfect clarity that spoke of death and bloody things to come. Pay me or die you fucking shit sack, those eyes said. And they would kill him too, just to make an example--especially that one holding his boy, who looked like a man itching for a reason to dig his knife into hot, steaming guts. Or maybe he’d do it for no reason at all.

The veteran gambler, turned long term loser, looked from one man to the other and wished mightily that the earth would open and swallow them both.

“My friends,” he said, in his best let’s-be-reasonable voice. He smiled broadly, and this time it lit up his whole face, like sunshine coming out from clouds. He looked like the young man he used to be before he found his true calling at the bottom of a mug of ale. “I can work this out, give me time.”

“Cut the bitch,” Diogo said in a low, irritated voice. He didn’t look up from his work on his nails. “Make him scream.”

Valak increased the pressure on the knife ever so slightly. A drop of blood formed on the boy’s throat. He was used to using knives on men, that’s why what happened next took him completely by surprise.

III . The slave boy went purely crazy, thrashing and screaming, begging Valak not to kill him, to please have mercy on a worthless slave boy, please. Valak was forced to drop his knife, or the boy’s struggles would have cut his throat from ear to ear. Valak slapped the boy’s face hard, leaving a brilliant red mark on his too pale cheek.

“Quit it, you stupid bitch,” Valak yelled into his face, “or you’ll fucking kill yourself!”

He grabbed the boy’s too thin arm again, Gods, nothing’s right about this bitch, he had time to think, and bent to get his knife, but the boy kicked out a scrawny leg and the knife went twirling across the warped, wooden floor. Valak looked at the boy. He wasn’t stupid then, just afraid.

Valak gave his arm a rough shake and the feel of the boy’s bones just beneath his skin damped his anger. The boy grimaced in pain and cringed from the blow he expected.

Valak did something he never did. That’s what kept him alive in his line of work. He acted without thinking. Without realizing he was going to do it, he swept the boy up into his arms and slung his impossibly light weight over his shoulder like the world’s lightest sack of potatoes.

The boy immediately beat his tiny fists on Valak’s back, but he was ready for that. The boy’s tunic had pulled up and his naked ass stuck out over Valak’s shoulder. He brought his big calloused hand down on the boy’s naked ass, with not even half the force his hard, muscled arm could have given the boy. But it was enough to make the slave boy yelp and scream, until his white ass turned beet red.

“Behave bitch, or I’ll lay into you real good,” Valak said in his hoarse voice. IV

The boy’s struggles stopped as if a switch had turned off and Diogo saw something that gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his belly. A tiny smile touched the corners of Valak’s mouth. He looked from that hint of a smile on his friend’s face to Haken, who stood with his mouth hanging open like a door that’s come unhinged. Oh Gods, I don’t need this shit, Diogo thought.

Beads of sweat stood out on Haken’s oily forehead. His hair was scattered helter-skelter from sleep, like grass grown wild. He brushed at it, as if neatness counted.

“If you got a stash Haken, now’s the time to dig it out of whatever filthy hole you got it in,” Diogo said. “Down your pants, up your ass, I don’t care. Get my fucking tokens. Now!”

“I got half,” Haken said, inching around Valak and the boy. “Half Diogo. I’ll give you the rest come Temple Day. Someone owes me.” Haken’s voice was desperate and somehow whiny at the same time.

“Nobody owes you nothing, you stinking drunk. You owe half the town and you’re in hock to the other half.”

“I swear. This sailor, he’ll be back in town come Temple Day. He owes me.”

Diogo dropped his feet to the floor, and let the chair slam to the ground. The sound was loud in the silence. The only other sound was the slave boy’s sniveling whimpers.

“I don’t want half you lying shit sack. You got ‘til Temple Day to get me all of it. Any later and I take it out of his ass,” Diogo said, pointing to Haken’s slave boy. “Bring the bitch, Valak.”

“Hey, wait,” Haken said. “The bitch’s worth five—no--ten times what I owe you.” He started to go after the men and his boy.

Valak put the boy down and pushed him toward Diogo. He headed for Haken and both men met in the middle of the darkly shadowed room.

“No!” Diogo cried out. “Valak, back off him!”

But it was as if Diogo had said nothing. Valak grabbed Haken’s shoulders and jammed his right knee viciously into the other man’s crotch. Haken doubled over, screaming. Valak grabbed his hair and whispered into his ear, “Don’t pay shit sack. I’ll enjoy coming for you.” He let him go and stood back as Haken crumbled to the floor, holding his balls and gasping for breath.

Valak turned to the boy and grabbed his skinny arm. He bent low so he was eye to eye with the boy. “You going to fuck with me?”

The boy shook his head back and forth slowly, watching Valak warily, like a lion that might pounce and eat him. He looked past Valak to his Master, still squirming on the floor, then tore his eyes away and looked at Valak again. The tears in his eyes slipped down his cheeks. Valak wiped the boy’s wet cheeks with the back of his hand.

“Do what I say and I won’t hurt you,” he told the scared boy. He picked up his knife and held it up in front of the boy. “Fuck with me, and I’ll cut on you just for fun. You got me?”

The slave boy nodded enthusiastically. Valak thought if the boy shook his head any harder, it might fall right off his body. He held out his hand and after a moment’s thought, the boy took it obediently and went with Valak out into Emyhr’s bright morning sunshine. Diogo marveled at that. He could have never gotten the boy to take his hand. He would have to take him by force. Just before they left, Valak gave Haken a sidelong look that Diogo knew better than he wanted to – cutter’s eyes. Haken was too busy writhing on the floor, trying to catch his breath, to see his coming fate in Valak’s furious eyes. V

“Siri,” the boy had said in a kind of “Oh Gods, I’m fucked” voice when Diogo asked his name. He sat on the floor beside Diogo’s writing table in the back room of the whorehouse. It was a grotto like room, with a low ceiling, carved out of the dark stone behind the whorehouse. Two torches burned on the wall behind Diogo. The dark walls and ceiling had a fine dusting of soot from countless torches.

Besides the massive table, the only other furniture in the room was two cherry wood straight back chairs that matched the table. The dark red wood glowed with a mellow gleam that made the stark black walls look more like a room and less like a stone crypt. Diogo slid a beat up leather pouch from a drawer, pushed aside the papers on his desk, and started rolling a smoke.

“That shit will kill you,” Valak said.

Diogo shrugged. “If you got a point, make it.” It was an old joke between them.

Valak, who didn’t hurt slave boys for the sake of it, had bought the boy a plate of sausages, bread cakes and scrambled eggs. Siri shoveled the food down his throat, with hardly a pause in his mouth, with almost alarming speed. Diogo and Valak exchanged a silent glance.

“For the love of the crops boy, when’s the last time you ate?” Valak asked.

The boy paused a moment, a thick bread cake wrapped around a sausage that dripped oil poised at his lips, thinking. “Yesterday Sir. Master had meat last night,” the boy said. “He gave me bread and gravy.” His face brightened. “All the gravy.” He popped the sausage and bread into his mouth, making his cheeks bulge comically.

“Well slow down. You’re not worth anything dead, you know,” Valak said with a rough edge in his voice.

His boys were used to Valak’s rough ways. They knew when their Handler was mildly annoyed, and when he was about to whip some serious ass. But Siri wasn’t one of his boys. A shadow of fear crossed the slave boy’s pale face. The memory of Valak’s cold knife pressed to his throat haunted his eyes.

“Go on boy, eat,” Valak said in a softer voice. “I’ll bring you more if you gobble it all.”

The boy looked at him, unbelieving. “You would do that Sir?”

Valak nodded. “Yeah. So slow down, I mean it.”

Diogo saw a look on his friend’s face that he had come to know and dread. “No,” Diogo said, making the word two syllables. He shot up his forefinger, ticking it back and forth. “Don’t be thinking of it.”

“What?” Valak said, his eyes wide, his hands spread, palms up.

“Don’t be looking at him like a stray pup. Our stable’s full.”

The soft stray pup look vanished from Valak’s face and that hard, dangerous look that was never far, came into his eyes. Cutter’s eyes, Diogo called them. That’s how Valak looked when he was carving up a screaming man like a Gods- Blessed Feast Day bird.

“Haken’s scum,” Valak said.

Diogo let it go. Countless summers of friendship had taught him not to argue with those cutter’s eyes.

All this seemed to go by the boy, who went on eating without looking up at the men. Outside, seven bells rang.

“Call them in,” Diogo said. “Let’s take care of this. Daylight’s wasting.”

The boy spared Valak no glance when he left. Diogo sat back with the air of a man at a particularly good magic show and watched the boy stuff another tremendous bread wrapped sausage into his mouth.

The moment the boy swallowed the last of the food, he looked afraid again. He wiped the crumbs from his soft lips and knelt between Diogo’s legs looking more scared than ever. “You going to sell me off, Sir? To Tooth n’ Claw?”

The boy misread the surprise on Diogo’s face and started apologizing. “I’m sorry Sir. I didn’t mean any disrespect Sir. I know it’s your decision Sir. Please Sir, I - ”

“What makes you say that boy?” Diogo said, studying the boy close.

Siri squirmed under his hard gaze and shrugged and looked down at Diogo’s boots. “Master’s always saying he’d sell me if I was worth anything. Always says a place like Tooth n’ Claw is where a useless slut like me belongs.” Tears slipped from the boy’s big green eyes. “Is that where you’re selling me?”

Diogo was no good at handling slaveboys. Anything he said or did made things worse. He wished like hell Valak would hurry up. “I’m not selling you anywhere boy. I’m giving you back as soon as your Master pays me.”

The boy’s tears began in earnest. Gods-damn it, Diogo thought, where the fuck’s Valak? “Softly boy. You’ll be home before - ”

“He won’t pay you,” Siri shouted in a high screechy voice that grated on Diogo’s ears. “He probably left town already. He’ll be on the first ship out.”

“You’re wrong boy,” Diogo said quietly. “No one would do that to me. He’ll pay, and come Temple Day you’ll be back home.”

“Yeah,” the slave boy said, and sat at Diogo’s feet and cried into his hands.

Valak walked in. The relief on Diogo’s face was ecstasy, salvation. “They’re coming,” his Handler said. He was about to say more, but he caught the look on Diogo’s face. “What’s up?”

Diogo told him. In a few minutes, by some magic that made Valak the best Handler Diogo knew, he had the boy smiling. It was a small smile, but it was better than anything Diogo could have done. Siri knelt at Valak’s feet, fiddling with the man’s trousers in a way that would have annoyed Diogo beyond all reason. He didn’t know how Valak did it. Slave boys all over him all the time, with their petty nonsense – this one took that, he said this, it wasn’t me, he got more cake than me - bawling, laughing, noisy. He cringed inside at the thought.

Valak watched over the whores with a savage passion that was nearly frightening. The boys adored him. They obeyed Diogo out of fear, but they followed Valak’s least command out of gratitude.

With men Valak was a murderer, a torturer and a ruthless enemy. With slave boys he was a benign God who ruled fairly and whipped ass like the Devil Man himself. Every time Diogo thought he had Valak figured out, he’d see him with some new pretty he’d bought for the whores or a silly scrap of rug they’d begged him for.

Yet it was Valak who had talked him into the Kathara cut. The whorehouse had become rich because of it. Valak didn’t seem to mind the look of fear and suffering that came into whores’ eyes every night when it came time to serve. If anything, he seemed to think the horror in their eyes belonged there, that they would be somehow incomplete without it. Diogo talked a lot of shit about selling off the whores, but he knew Valak would skin him alive and boil him in oil if he sold even one of the boy whores. In the way of men whose friendship was born in the bloody brotherhood of the battlefield, the men had split the business between them without speaking of it. Diogo managed the money side, Valak managed the whores.

His Handler was a deep one. After nearly half a lifetime of friendship, Diogo was still never sure what dark thoughts went on behind those cutter’s eyes.

VI

The whores came trooping in, quiet and nervous, as they always were around Diogo. He leaned against his desk, watching them walk in and kneel in front of him in a half moon. He didn’t know why they were so afraid of him. He rarely beat them. He left that to Valak.

In the small room, Tashir came too close to Diogo’s desk and brushed some papers off. The boy tried to save them and an inkwell went toppling to the floor, spilling across Diogo’s trousers. The boy whore looked up at Diogo, horrified. He tried to clean the ink and succeeded only in making bigger stains, leaving handprints all over the trousers.

“I’m sorry Bahari,” the boy kept saying. “Sorry.”

The boys never called Diogo by name. Bahari was from the High Speech and translated roughly to ‘Great Sir’ or ‘Lord’.

Diogo jerked his leg out of Tashir’s reach. “Get off me bitch,” he said through clenched teeth. The boy paled and shoved his hands behind his back like Diogo’s trousers had caught fire.

“Yes Sir,” Tashir said miserably. “Sorry. I’m real sorry Sir, about your trousers and all.” Valak watched in silence. This kind of thing always happened to Diogo around the boys. Once, a whore spilled cold soup into Diogo’s lap. It had taken Valak hours to coax the boy out of hiding. He took pity on his friend, who looked ready to slap Tashir into roughly the middle of next week.

“Tashi. To me,” Valak said, snapping his fingers and pointing to the floor beside him, opposite Siri.

The boy hurried to Valak. Anything was better than the look on Diogo’s face. Even the beating Tashir knew was coming.

VII

“You whores, like the life I give you?” Diogo said.

All seven of his boy whores knelt on the floor in front of his desk. He sat behind his desk. Valak sat on the opposite side of the desk in the corner, watching over his boys, as always.

“Yes Sir,” Yahsi said softly.

“You treat us good Sir,” Reya said in a soft murmur.

The boys never spoke much above a whisper in front of Diogo.

“You hear that Valak? My whores think I treat them good.”

“Right.”

“What about your Handler? He treat you good?”

The boys all nodded. Taj slipped a trembling hand into Yashi’s hand. Diogo leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk, trying to ignore the ink stain soaking into his trousers.

“You’re bathed, clean and fed everyday. That’s more than some men in this town have.”

Taj stole a glance at Valak, who looked right back at him. The boy dropped his eyes; sorry he’d ever looked up. Valak was seriously pissed. This was bad--very bad.

“You’re all prime slave flesh,” Diogo was saying. “We paid a wagon load of tokens for every one of you!” Diogo put his feet down with a hard thump that made the boy whores stiffen and huddle closer together. “You’re all the kind of whores that make a man dig deep into his pockets, then sell what he don’t have to fuck your ass.” All the boy whores were looking down at the floor. None dared raise their eyes to him. Diogo looked at his Handler over their bent heads and winked. Siri, silent and watchful beside Valak, saw it.

“Valak, there’s one thing I don’t ever do. I never force a boy to be a whore for me.”

“It’s not worth it,” Valak said in his low, raspy voice. He always sounded like a man on the edge of losing his voice.

“No,” Diogo went on, “I like my bitches to be happy.” Diogo looked at the slave property that he and Valak owned, half and half, all of them beauties that had cost them dearly. Not one boy would fetch less than five thousand gold tokens at auction.

“There’s always Tooth n’ Claw,” Valak said.

A gasp of horror passed among the boys. Taj, the slave whore closest to Diogo said softly, “Please Sir.”

“Who gave you permission to speak bitch?” Valak interrupted, his voice soft and dangerous. The boy cringed at the sound of Valak’s voice as though he’d been slapped.

“Tooth n’ Claw, down on the docks.” Diogo went on, as if Taj had said nothing. “It’s the first place sailors hit to get some ass.”

“He keeps his whores chained up in the day, but I hear he takes them out every three or four moons,” Valak said.

“You think Kadiz would buy one of my whores if they weren’t happy here?”

Valak shrugged. “I don’t see why not. He’s always looking for fresh slave meat.” He looked over at his boys. “You think they should get another chance?”

Diogo shrugged. “That’s up to you and good thing for them. If it was me, I’d sell the bitch. Teach the others not to fuck with me.”

The boy who had spilled the ink crawled to the front and knelt at Diogo’s feet. “Please Bahari. It was my fault. I refused him. Don’t sell me,” the boy said. He cried at Diogo’s feet. “Please, let me stay.”

“Why did you refuse a man?” Diogo said in a low voice that betrayed none of the anger that boiled in him.

“I had already served four men, Sir,” the boy said. He wiped tears from his eyes.

“So you refused a man your ass?”

The boy nodded, twisted the front of his tunic into a bunch. “It hurts so much Bahari,” he said in a small voice.

“No one gives a fuck how much it hurts you whore,” Valak said in that same soft voice. “You pissed me off bitch, that voice said. I’m going to whip you raw!”

Tashir said nothing. It was safer to keep your mouth shut when Valak sounded like that.

“I hand picked--all of you!” Diogo swore. He leaned back against his desk. The boy at his feet took hold of his leg and wet his trousers with his tears, getting ink all over his tunic. Diogo let him stay like that, ignoring him. If he touched Tashir right now, he might beat his stupid face in. ”I give you privileges most whores wouldn’t dream of. In the day, you have the run of the whorehouse. You go out on the back balcony, instead of being locked in downstairs. On Festival Days, you eat sweetmeats. You don’t have to kneel when I come in a room. You bitches live good here.”

Diogo leaned down and grabbed the front of Tashir’s ink stained tunic. “You see this tunic?” He shook the boy and let him go. “I have to pay for another one. You’re whores,” he yelled at them. “That’s why we bought you. I’m generous. I tell you only four men a night. But if a man wants your ass, how dare any one of you refuse!

“Sir, please,” Tashir said.

“Shut the fuck up!” Diogo shouted into the boy’s face. Spit flew from his lips and landed on Tashir’s cheeks. VIII

You cost tokens last night bitch,” Valak said to Tashir. “I’m giving that man your ass tonight, free.” The boy hung his head and cried into his ink stained hands.

Diogo saw the mess and threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Whatever you do to them Valak, make sure you welt their whore asses good.”

“I’ll leave good marks,” Valak said. “You done with them?” Diogo nodded.“Go downstairs and bathe,” Valak said. “I’ll be down.”

The boys all rose to their feet and hurried out as fast as they could without running. Siri looked up at Valak, unsure what he should do. “Go with them,” Valak said. The boy followed after the whores, running to catch up to them. Valak closed the door behind him and turned back to Diogo. A smile surfaced on his hard face.

“Tooth n’ Claw. I wouldn’t let you sell a rabid dog into that slime pit.”

“No. But they don’t know that,” Diogo said. He sat at his desk and pressed his tented fingers to his temples. “Refusing a man.” He shook his head. “Who bought Tashir, you or me?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Valak said. “He’s a good bitch. I’ll take care of it before they go to sleep.” The laughter left Valak’s face. “What happened last night?”

“You sure they’re gone?” Diogo said. He looked at the door the whores had left partly open.

Valak nodded. “I’m sure. No bitch wants to be near me right now.”

“I told them about Nehad.”

“And?”

“You sound like Balir. And nothing! We’ll meet again in two days. If a miracle doesn’t fall out of the sky, we’ll be out of time.”

Diogo put his feet up again. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

“You think Jaseer knows about Lessel yet?” Valak said.

“I’m sure his watchdog already told him,” Diogo said without opening his eyes.

Valak paced the tiny room. His long legs covered the small open space between the dark walls in three or four steps. Before Emyhr, Diogo and Valak had been what Diogo called purveyors of information. Sometimes powerful men needed information. Or needed things done. Things they couldn’t risk getting dirty with.

That’s where Diogo and Valak came in. Diogo negotiated the deals and Valak handled the blood work. Diogo softened up men with words that conjured such horrors that men fell to their knees, begging to tell anything, give up any friend, yield any secret. The men who didn’t succumb to Diogo’s words, faced Valak’s knife. His talent was carving up men like a roast of meat, one screaming piece at a time. Between the two of them, they had made a fortune, selling their talents to the rich and powerful. Eight summers ago, the two friends came to Emyhr and pooled their riches and bought Black Horse and the whores. In two summers, they made all their tokens back. The whorehouse had made them rich. The gambling in the back room made them even richer. Now they were businessmen by day and assassins after dark.

Diogo opened his eyes and watched Valak pace the room. He had known his friend for too long not to know that something was eating at him. “Something on your mind?” Diogo said.

Valak turned to him. “Why’d you kill Lessel? I thought yesterday was just for talk.”

“What? Sorry you missed out on it? I probably didn’t carve him up as neat and pretty as you,” Diogo shrugged, “but he gave me what I needed.”

“Where does that get us?” Valak said. “Jaseer will be so mad, he’ll be cross-eyed.”

“When you’re on the battlefield, what’s the best way to distract your enemy?” Diogo said.

Valak stared at the wall, thinking. “Get him off balance. Hurt him, piss him off, make him - ” he stopped. Diogo put his legs down, waiting for him to finish. “Make him so mad he can’t see straight,” Valak said.

“Angry men make mistakes,” Diogo said. He yawned and stretched. “I need some sleep. Lessel yesterday, the catacombs last night, Haken this morning. I’ve been working like a bitch my friend.”

“You think Haken will pay?” Back to that. “The bitch said he already left town, ran out on us.”

“That’s too bad,” Valak said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “I was looking forward to slicing off a couple fingers.”

“What’s he done to you?” Diogo said, although he knew his friend well enough to know the answer.

Valak looked at Diogo like he’d turned suddenly stupid. “Did you see how he kept his bitch? The boy dirty, hungry and whip marks all over his back. What could a scared boy like that do to deserve scars on his back? Fucking drunk. Coward.”

“If he ran out, we’ll sell the boy at - ”

But Valak didn’t let Diogo finish. “No,” he said.

“Valak, our stable’s full. He’s a worthless whore – scared, skinny and all scarred up. We can’t - ”

“I said no!” Valak looked his friend in the eye.

“Be it,” Diogo said, giving up. There was no use arguing with Valak when he looked at you like that. “But he belongs to you, not the business. I don’t want any part of him.”

“Agreed,” Valak said.

Diogo stifled another yawn. “I’m going. Don’t beat them too bad, I need them in the whorehouse tonight.”

“I know how to take care of my boys,” Valak said quietly.

IX

“You got a name?” Yahsi said to Siri when the boys got downstairs.

“Forget his fucking name. Hurry up,” Taj said. His voice was tinged with hysteria. “Don’t let him come down here and find us standing around flapping our lips at the new bitch. We’re already in it for thirty lashes.” “He never gives us thirty,” Reya said, pushing his curly brown hair back from the tawny skin of his smooth face.

Taj whirled on the boy. “Shut up! He will if he hears you!”

The door opened and Valak walked into the slave quarters. Taj looked around at him, frozen in the act of taking off his tunic. Some of the other boys were already bathing. They all froze, their eyes riveted on Valak. Reya’s confidence crumbled like wet sand. Had Valak heard him? Oh Gods, please – don’t let it be. Fourteen pair of eyes watched Valak take off his tunic. He only did that when he planned to work up a sweat. His lean, muscled chest sloped down to his flat belly, ridged with muscle. “Finish bathing,” he said. “Take a bath Siri.”

The slave quarters was basically a big square hole that had been carved out of the stone underneath the whorehouse. Valak had let the whores put up silks on the black walls and he’d bought them cushions that added bright splashes of color that did nothing to push back the gloom of the stone darkness the boys lived in.

Candles, lit by the whores when they came down, burned around the room, making more shadow than light. The room glowed with a soft yellow light that showed the nervous strain on the boys’ faces as they went about bathing. In one corner of the room, three round holes had been scooped out of the floor so long ago that the stone was worn smooth with age. A pump stood on the edge of each round hole. The baths were filled with cold water and the boys bathed quietly, taking turns. Bath time was usually noisy, filled with gossip from the night before and the boys’ laughter. But today they were quiet and solemn. They shot quick glances across the room at Valak, as if they hoped he’d disappear like a bad dream.

The far corner of the stone room, opposite the door, was the Devotion Corner. A life size statue of Zah Nar stood there. A stone slave boy knelt on all fours, on a stone altar, in front of Zah Nar. The God’s hands were clamped down tight on the boy’s hips, caught in the act of thrusting his great stone cock into the slave boy’s ass. The muscles in his arms flexed, standing out in thick cords of strain. The boy’s mouth was stretched into a scream of agony. His face was a study in pain and fear. “To Suffer is to Serve” was carved into the stone pedestal that supported Zah Nar and the worshipping boy.

A dark wooden table, Zah Nar’s altar, stood in front of the pedestal that supported Zah Nar’s statue. The table had a hump in the middle that was just the right height for a boy to bend over and lift his ass to a man’s cock or to a waiting whip. Manacles were built into the table on opposite sides of the rising bulge, two on each side.

Valak sat on the edge of the altar. On the wall to his left, a series of metal hooks stuck out of the wall. A collection of whips, canes, floggers and slave plugs hung there. Valak chose a short, bamboo cane from the wall. He routinely spied on the boys, gathering information he pretended not to know. He knew the whores called the Devotion Corner the Torture Corner. Not in front of him though. They knew he would tan their ass good if he heard them. He turned to find all the boys standing in a bunch, looking over at him. “You whores bathed?” Valak said, looking at them and holding the cane at both ends. X

The slave whores scattered like fallen pearls. The only sound in the room was the splash of water and low murmurs. He watched his whores bathe. When he and Diogo started the whorehouse, Valak convinced Diogo to part with over half their fortune to get the Kathara Sacrifice for the whores. It was twice the price of the Temple Sacrifice and it was only for boys who had been chosen to follow the Path of the Flaglent, or whatever the fuck they called it. But gold talked louder than the Gods in the ears of the Brothers, and the Temple had done the whores. Valak took every boy he bought for Blackhorse to the Temple and had their pleasure bead removed first, then took them back for the cut. The Kathara cut sewed a boy tighter than any Temple Sacrifice and left them with a deliciously tight hole that drove men into wild ecstasies of pleasure. Men came from miles around to use his whores, even men with their own boys. Most men didn’t have the gold for a Kathara cut.

He’d trained his whores to take a good hard fuck without begging for it to stop or pleading for mercy. After a few hard ass whippings, they learned to take a man’s cock with silent tears and whimpering moans.

His reward for their obedience was to be merciful with them. Four men a night was his rule. Diogo would have made them fuck ‘til they dropped. Valak was good to his boys. Most of the time, he gave them the mercy of using their mouths to pleasure his cock. Nothing was better than looking down and seeing a slave boy’s lips stretched tight around his pumping cock. He loved to see a boy take his load, but not today. On days like this, when they pissed him off, he fucked them hard and made them scream.

XI

“When you’re bathed, come over here. No tunics. Someone find Siri something to put on,” he said.

Taj came first and knelt with his legs spread wide, his hands behind his back. Between his legs, his pierced cock hung limp and useless. That was the first thing Valak did to them. What did a whore need a hard cock for? The rest of the boys came one at a time until a half moon formed with Valak and the altar in the middle. Siri stood back, in a tunic far too big for him, looking at Valak.

“To me boy,” Valak said, looking at him and pointing to the floor beside the altar. After that, he seemed to forget Siri existed. But he didn’t. He watched the boy carefully all morning long. Valak stood up from his place on the edge of the altar. All the boys cringed.

“I’m good to you whores. Diogo says, ‘punish the bitches’. I don’t. I stand up for you. I tell him you’re good whores,” Valak said in his hoarse, grating voice. “You bitches embarrassed me!”

He paced in front of the boys. His lithe, lean body had the smooth grace of a sleek panther on the prowl, or an assassin on the hunt. His black hair was pulled back in a round, silver tube.He stopped in front of them and snapped his fingers.

“Tashir.” The boy hurried forward and knelt at his feet, looking up at him. “Why did you refuse a man last night?”

Tashir parted his lips to speak, but only a thin whimper came out. He tried again. “Please Sir. I already had four men. It hurts us so much to get fucked,” Tashir said. His lips trembled so badly, it was hard to get the words out. Tears welled up in his hazel eyes and overflowed to his soft barely tanned cheeks. “I’m sorry Sir. I didn’t know. You tell us four – I – I - should have come to you. Please don’t sell me,” he finished, almost too low to be heard.

Valak looked down at the boy whore’s tear stained face without pity. “If a man wants your ass and ten men already had you, and your ass hurts so bad you feel like screaming, show me what you do bitch!” he thundered.

The boy bent over and lifted a tight, round ass that was every man’s dream. He spread his legs and lifted his hips, so his pink hole showed.

“Why didn’t you do that last night? You’re my whore. You obey me!”

“I’m sorry Sir. Please,” a sob stopped his words, “please don’t sell me.”

Valak brought the cane down on the boy’s ass, hard. Tashir cried out, but he knew better than to put his ass down. Behind Valak, beside the altar, Siri cringed. He knew what it felt like to get hit like that. “Fucking whore!” Valak said. A look of irritated impatience crossed his face. He paced in the gloom of the dim candle light, passing each kneeling boy so close they smelled his sweat. He hung his head, like a man in prayer.

The slave boys waited in silent fear. Their naked bodies gleamed with a thin sheen of sweat in the cool air of their dungeon home. Tashir cried softly into the carpet. A thick red welt had already risen on his creamy ass.

“You’re all brothers now. You serve together, eat together,” Valak swept the whores with his eyes. “And you get punished together.” He ran the cane across Yahsi’s back. The boy shuddered at the cool feel of the wood on his naked flesh.

He looked up at Valak. “Please forgive us Sir. It won’t happen again,” the boy said. He bent and pressed his trembling lips to Valak’s boots in a kiss and looked up at him again. “Please Sir.”

Sometimes such things worked and the whores avoided a beating. But not today. Valak looked down into the boy’s tear streaked face. He ran his fingers through the boy’s honey brown hair, looked into his round, impossibly light brown eyes. Like all his whores, he was a heart stopping, exotic beauty, almost too good be true. He wiped the tears from the boy’s face.

“What happens when one boy disobeys?” he said, talking to all of them.

“One boy disobeys, every boy pays,” the slave boys all said together, like a litany.

Valak went back to the altar and sat on the corner, stretching his long legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankles. “What’s the punishment for disobeying a man?”

None of the whores answered. On days like this, it was best not to speak until spoken to. By name. “Reya,” Valak said. “Thirty lashes for disobedience to a man Sir,” the whore said in a trembling whisper.

Valak got up from the altar. The whores cringed and ducked their heads as one. He was a force of nature in their lives. The God in their universe. A merciful God with a wickedly hard streak. He was more real to them than any stone statue. “I will never sell you.” Valak said each word with slow deliberation. “But if you disobey my rule, I’ll beat you without mercy.”

“Diogo would sell us in a blink to turn a profit,” Taj mumbled to Yahsi under his breath.

Valak turned on his heel so quick, he was a blur. “Not unless he thought it was a good day to die!” he said, standing over Taj.

For a brief moment, Taj saw a hard, flat shine in Valak’s eyes that frightened him badly. Had Diogo had been there, he would have known that look - cutter’s eyes. The boy’s bladder went all soft and loose inside him. A trickle of piss was all that escaped his cock, but only because reserves were low. Otherwise he might have capped this nightmare day by spraying piss all over Valak’s trousers. “No one messes with my bitches,” Valak said. “Diogo’s Bahari, but I’m fucking God when it comes to you whores!” He looked at Taj. “You talked in line. One more word and you’re last!” His roughly hoarse voice was calm, undisturbed.

The boy whore looked faint. “I’m sorry Sir,” Taj said through numb lips. Gods, didn’t he miss anything?

Valak swept his eyes over his bitches. It was time for velvet over his iron glove. A little sugar went a long way in bitter tea. “You’re good, obedient whores. So I’m showing you mercy.”

The whores all held their breath, unsure what was coming, knowing only that Valak’s rule was absolute. There were no merciful angels in their world. They waited, wound up as tight as cross bows aimed at the heart. “You’re all getting fifteen lashes with this.” Valak sliced the cane through the air and lashed the edge of the altar. Siri cringed and slammed his shaking hands to his ears, blocking out the whickering sound of the cane cutting air. Wooden splinters went flying past him. All the whores flinched, some whimpered. If Valak hit any of them like that, he would draw blood with the first lash. Yahsi gripped Taj’s hand so hard, the other boy winced.

“Hey, ease up,” Taj whispered from the side of his mouth. Kali’s grip relaxed. A little. The boys all hung their heads, unwilling to look at their Handler. He was merciful to them. He brought them sweetmeats. The whores all knew it was Valak who let them go outside to the fresh air instead of keeping them caged up like exotic restless animals. If not for him, Diogo would have kept them locked up when they weren’t serving men. It was Valak who let them try to push back the darkness of their dungeon with silk curtains and pretty pillows that fooled no one. Because he cared when he didn’t have to, the whores loved Valak. And when they angered him, they were afraid, but they were ashamed too.

“Look at me,” Valak said.

None of the whores met his eyes. In the middle of the rug, Tashir cried quietly. The ugly red welt on his ass was a harsh warning to all the boys. Their turn was coming. Valak looked over his whores like a man looking at a prized jewel collection. “I said look at me,” he said quietly.

All the boys knew the danger that lay beneath that quiet voice. Valak would beat them with a fury if they disobeyed now. Thirty lashes or more. One by one they raised their eyes. And Valak saw what he wanted to see, a mixture of fear, shame and most important, gratitude. When the pain of the beating faded, they would remember that he had been merciful with them. That he had made it better. They would remember that it was better to obey than to piss off their Handler. Like that, Valak kept his whores obedient without being brutal or vicious with them. Except on days like today, when he would be brutally vicious. His bitches would suffer badly before the morning was done. And his heart was sorry for it.

He looked down into their faces, so beautiful, so perfect, as if they were the creations of an artist who molded flesh to the ideals of the Gods. “If something like this happens again,” he said, looking into each boy’s eyes, “I’ll lock the balcony doors and the doors to upstairs. You’ll spend one moon locked in down here in the dark when you’re not serving. No torches. No fucking candles.”

“Please,” Taj said. He was terrified of the dark. He sprang forward and clung to Valak’s trousers with trembling fingers, forgetting his warning. “Gods. Don’t Sir. Please. We’re sorry.”

Valak knew Taj would sleep in a rat’s nest before he slept in pitch darkness. He snapped his fingers and pointed to the line of boys. “Back.”

Taj scooted back in place beside Yahsi, wringing his hands. “Don’t lock us up,” Reya said, crying miserably, “please Sir.” All the whores at Valak’s feet looked up at him with the horror of condemned men.

He paced back to the altar. “I can make things bad for you. You know that don’t you?” The whores nodded, their eyes fixed not on him, but on the stone slave boy behind him, whose mouth hung open in a scream of unspeakable torment. “Don’t fuck with me!” Valak said, bringing the cane down hard on the altar next to him. The boy whores jumped and squeezed even closer together. Yahsi nearly broke Taj’s hand, but the other boy barely noticed. He almost pissed himself again when Valak whacked the altar like that.

“Tashir. Get your whore ass up on the altar,” Valak ordered. The time for talking was done.

XII . Tashir hesitated, crying. He shook his head, no. Temple bells struck eight upstairs in the world of light. Valak waited until the last bell struck. “You going whore?” he said.

“Go on,” Yahsi said in a harsh, desperate whisper. “If he has to come get you, it’s double for all of us.”

Tashir crawled to the altar, moaning in his throat like a wounded animal. The rug doubled and trebled before his tear filled eyes. Valak grabbed him and bent him over the altar and manacled him in place. When he was done, the boy’s ass was lifted high with his legs spread wide, showing his tiny pink hole. The boy pressed his hot cheek to the smooth wood and cried.

“Any boy I catch looking away goes last,” Valak said.

Yeah, Taj thought, and the boy who goes last gets tied to that altar and you’ll rape him hard and make him scream. And all because one of us said no to a man’s cock. Sometimes Taj hated Valak. The slaveboys, including Taj, couldn’t help but stare at the bulge in Valak’s trousers. The boys pressed closer to each other.

“Make your offering whore,” Valak said to Tashir.

“I serve with my suffering. May Zah Nar find my tears pleasing on his altar,” the boy said in a shaky voice.

“Don’t disobey,” Valak said to the watching whores kneeling naked and terrified before him. “If you disobey me, I’ll make you pay!”

XIII

Siri watched Valak get to work on Tashir’s ass. The first blow struck the boy dead center across his succulent round ass. The boy whore cried out as the pain dug cruelly into his flesh. Siri had heard screams before. Mostly his own when his drunken Master beat him because he couldn’t beat the men who wouldn’t hire him, or the pub keeper who refused him more ale on credit.

Siri had learned to keep a low profile around men. He knew the fine art of becoming invisible, like furniture, when a man got that wild look in his eyes that said any nearby slaveboy was in for a major ass whipping if he didn’t walk lightly.

He didn’t see that look in Valak’s eyes. He was the only man he’d ever seen who beat slaveboys with an unnerving, steady calm that was somehow more terrifying than wild rage or drunken meanness. Valak brought the cane down on Tashir’s ass again and again. Blows rained down on the boy like the wrath of a terrible, unforgiving God. The helpless boy writhed and screamed under the biting sting of the lashes that dug into his soft flesh, eating into him with iron teeth. The slave boy’s cries of pain filled the room, and Valak was unrelenting. Looking over at the whores kneeling naked and trembling, Siri realized they had something he used to wish for on those dark nights when his Master reached for his thick leather belt. They had a hand to hold. Even if the boy next to you was getting the same ass whipping, at least you could cry together when it was over. At least you didn’t have to face it alone. As he watched, the kneeling whores grabbed each others hands tighter and tighter until their knuckles turned white.

XIV . When Valak was done with Tashir, he undid the manacles and the boy crawled back to the line of waiting whores. He knelt in line, crying softly and rubbing his hurting ass. Valak had given him the mercy of going first, even though the offense was his. After only one summer with the whores, the boy was still learning their Handler’s hard ways, so he was granted a rough pardon.

Valak paced up and down the line of whores with agonizing slowness, forcing them to wait and see who he would call next. The cane hung by his side like a snake that might strike out at them with a stinging bite. The whores knew from bitter experience that Valak was far less dangerous when he was talking. The one thing the whores dreaded from their Handler wasn’t a scolding, it was this dreadful silence. Like any God, he was most terrifying in the silence of his thoughts, from which anything could come.

As he paced the line, each boy prayed with a terrible desperation that he would be called to the altar next. Let it me be, they prayed. Whip me, cane me – anything – just don’t chain me to that Gods-damned altar and rape me.

Valak read all these thoughts in their frightened eyes. He saw it in the way they shrank from him, yet seemed to press close. Looking at his whores, he felt not sorrow, but a kind of pity. He pitied them in their suffering, but the World was a great machine and every man and boy was part of the machine. They were whores. And they would obey like whores or they would suffer. He beat them because it was their place in the great machine of the World to be beaten and to suffer and to give men pleasure with their suffering.

He didn’t know if that was the work of the Gods, and he didn’t much care. In Valak’s stolid, unimaginative mind, such things as the Gods, Paradise or Hades meant next to nothing. That shit was for philosophers and poets. He was a man in the World and the whores weren’t men. They were meant to serve and obey.

That didn’t mean they should be locked up like prisoners or beaten like animals. But it did mean that they would be obedient or they would suffer. So he fed them, kept them clean and bought them baubles that made them happy. And when he had to, he beat ass. That they suffered wasn’t his fault. He never brought them needless suffering. But they had to suffer. That was the way of the machine of the World. In his own hard way, Valak loved the whores. XV . “Reya,” Valak said.

The boy hurried to the altar, crying, and slipped his hands and feet into the manacles. Valak went to work on his with the cane, and made the boy howl. The whores kept their eyes riveted on the altar, mindful of Valak’s warning. Getting caned was bad. But nobody wanted to be last.

Valak called each boy up for his turn on the altar and kept his promise to Diogo. He welted the ass of every boy he called. The slave boys cried out, begged for mercy, but Valak was relentless. When he was done with them, he sent them back to their brothers, sobbing and shaking, to kneel and watch.

Kiri heard ten bells ring. Only two boys were left. Sweat trickled down Valak’s chest. He stood before both boys, and looked down at them, his legs spread. He held the cane in one hand, looking back and forth between them. The boys looked up at him. They were beyond tears, beyond fear, all the way across the border into stark terror. They breathed like drowning men, taking in shallow greedy swallows of air.

“Shari, to the altar,” Valak said. He looked at Kiri with unpitying eyes. “You’re last bitch!” Shari crawled to the altar, leaving Kiri’s keening wails of terror behind.

“No,” Kiri was saying over and over. He grabbed Valak’s trousers and threw himself to the ground on his belly, wailing, begging for mercy.

“Get your brother!” Valak said to the others.

Taj and Reya grabbed Kiri and pulled him back, looking up at Valak with big, fearful eyes. He could change his mind at any moment punish them all for Kiri’s outburst. They pulled him back in line. Kiri whipped his head back and forth, tossing his blonde waves across his feverish face. Taj took his friend’s hand on one side and Yahsi took his other hand. There was nothing to say, so they said nothing.

“Eyes up here whores!” Valak ordered.

He caned Shari’s ass just as hard as he’d caned the Tashir. Harder, if anything. Kiri closed his eyes. He couldn’t help it.

“Open your eyes,” Taj hissed, “or he’ll have us all back up there for fifteen more!”

Kiri snapped his eyes open. Shari’s cries and whimpers echoed in his ears, but they meant nothing. He stared at the bulge in Valak’s trousers with a kind of horrified fascination. He was last. He started shaking. He thought he might vomit. He was sure he wouldn’t be able to crawl to the altar when the time came. They would all get fifteen more because of him. XVI . At last it was over and Valak undid Shari’s manacles. “Kiri,” he said. The boy cried, rocking back and forth, his face in his hands. “I’m waiting for your ass boy.”

The crying boys filled the room with a chorus of whimpering moans. Valak took a step toward the boys. Kiri gathered his courage. Taj gave his arm one last squeeze and the whimpering slave boy scuttled across the floor in a hurry, racing to the altar before Valak condemned them all to fifteen more lashes. And Kiri would still be last. Valak grabbed him by the hair and pulled the boy’s face close. “You made me wait whore?” he shouted into the boy’s face.

Kiri was beyond words. He only looked into Valak’s hard eyes and uttered a strange moaning whimper. Valak pushed the boy onto the altar and manacled his hands and feet. Before he started in on Kiri, he turned to the half moon of naked boy whores. They looked back at him out of the dark shadows with swollen, red eyes staring out of frightened, tear streaked faces.

“Obey me!” he said. “Or not even the Gods will save you from me.”

“Please Sir,” Kiri moaned, “please. Oh Gods. Please. It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Please!”

The last word turned into a scream when the boy felt the harsh, biting sting of the bamboo cane. Valak caned Kiri’s ass hardest of all. The cane fell again and again to the sickening rhythm of Kiri’s tortured screams. Of all the boy whores, he was the most obedient, the most afraid of the altar. Well before Valak was done, thick, red welts rose on Kiri’s squirming ass. The boy cried and writhed on the altar, filling his lungs again and again and letting out ear splitting screams. Valak’s arm fell over and over, punishing the boy with hard lashes that dug into his tortured flesh.

Finally, he stepped back, breathing hard. He turned to the circle of naked, trembling boys. Ten bells rang. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said. He undid his trousers and stepped out of them. His thick cock rose nearly to his navel. He spit on his hand and grabbed his cock, standing behind Kiri. He greased his cock with his spit, looking at the boy’s welted, squirming ass. His tight pink hole peaked out between his bruised cheeks.

Kiri knew what was coming. He’d seen it, watched it in helpless fear. “Don’t hurt me anymore. Please,” he begged. “Don’t rape me, Gods, please.” Hysterical sobs garbled his words, so they came out, ‘Don ape meeeee, ods, eas!’

Valak pressed his thick cockhead to the boy’s incredibly tight, sacrificed hole. He took his time, and worked his cock head into the boy’s tightness until his whore hole let the swollen head of his cock in. “Get ready to scream bitch,” he said in his harsh, rough voice. Valak grabbed the boy’s ass in both hands and drove his cock deep. His cock went into the boy’s tight hole only a couple of inches. Kiri screamed horribly and tried uselessly to escape the manacles. Valak did it again and again, gaining a few more inches each time he drove his cock into the sweet tightness of the boy’s grasping hole. Kiri threw his head back and screamed in great yelping howls. He alternately cursed Valak and begged him to stop. He cried out to the other boys to help him, please help him. He begged and screamed and cursed and whipped his head from side to side. Spit flew from his lips. His face turned an angry red. His breath hitched in and out of his lungs until he panted like a damned soul outrunning the Devil.

At last Valak’s cock slid all the way into Kiri’s hot, quivering hole and it was ecstasy. He rode the boy with all his might. His hips slammed into Kiri’s ass over and over and over again. The sound of him banging into the whore was loud in the darkness of the stone room. Kiri screamed and struggled, but the manacles trapped him.

Valak grabbed his slender hips, getting a better grip on his sweat slicked skin. The boy cried hysterically, begging Valak for mercy, to please, please don’t rape him. Kiri pulled at the manacles on his wrists, twisting, struggling with the cold, unyielding black iron. It didn’t occur to him that if he got free, he had no place to go except into the fire of Valak’s wrath. That thought wouldn’t come until later, when he soaked his bruised, swollen wrists in warm water.

Now his fear was irrational, a kind of madness that made his body writhe and buck on the altar while he screamed. Only it wasn’t just a senseless scream, Yahsi realized, it was the same word over and over again, all run together – nononononononono – in a voice that rose higher and higher in wild hysteria.

Valak raped him violently and with such brute force that the front of Kiri’s hips would wear black and blue bruises for days, from the impact of Valak’s thrusts banging him into the hard wood of the altar. He raped the boy in an eerie silence that turned the sound of his hips banging into Kiri’s ass into something savage and beastly – inhuman somehow.

Valak fucked the boy’s ass fast and hard. His strongly muscled legs drove his hips into the boy’s quivering, spasming hole with cruel force. Valak panted, sweat rolled down his back. Strands of hair fell across his sweaty face. The boy’s hot little fuckhole grabbed him, squeezing his cock inside tight, pulsing flesh.

Valak was an animal with the helpless slave boy. He gave no quarter. He slammed mercilessly into Kiri, driving him into the unyielding wood again and again. He let out sounds, half grunts of effort, and half moans of pleasure. Valak enjoyed using a boy’s ass like that. That was the most horrifying part for the whores watching.

Taj, who had been with Valak the longest, remembered a horrible day when everyone had gotten what Kiri was getting now. A pushfuc, the whores called it in Low Speak, the patois of slave boys. They had been four whores back then, and Taj would have never thought a man could last that long. But Valak did.

Each of them had been up on the altar, screaming, just like Kiri was screaming now. He’d raped all them savagely. That had been the early days. He didn’t need to do that anymore. A look from their Handler was all it took to make the whores straighten up in a hurry. Yes Sir. You could bet your sore ass on it.

Blood trickled from Kiri’s ass in a thin stream, the boy was nearly breathless with hysteria and pain, and still Valak went on, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, his hips moving in urgent need to the unstoppable, ancient rhythm of animal lust.

“Fuck!” he said in his low, rough voice. He groaned and arched his back. He slammed his hips to the boy’s ass, clenching his teeth, every muscle tensed. He went rigid and pulled Kiri impossibly close, squeezing his hips in a vise like grip that would leave purple bruises for days. His hips jerked convulsively, and his swollen cock filled the boy’s abused ass with hot cum. . Valak let his breath out, stroking into the boy a few more times. Come leaked from the boy’s welted ass. “Shari, get me cloth,” Valak said.

The boy hurried to obey. He came back with a handful of clean white cloths. Valak cleaned himself and put his trousers on. He undid Kiri’s manacles and helped the boy up from the altar. When Valak let him go, Kiri collapsed against him, his head lolling to one side. He hadn’t fainted, but he’d cried himself weak. Valak grabbed him in his arms and carried him to one of the baths.

The shock of the cold water felt good on Kiri’s welted flesh. When Valak cleaned the sticky cum from his sore ass, his touch made the boy cry again. “It’s over boy,” Valak said softly, “come on, stand up.” He wiped the blood from his legs, rinsed the stinking sweat of fear from his tender flesh and lifted him from the bath. While he cleaned Kiri, the other boys got ready for sleep.

By the time Kiri was dry, the whores were in bed, staring up into the darkness of the stone walls that was their home. None had fallen asleep yet. Someone had put Siri into the extra furs. Kiri slipped into his own furs. Valak put on his tunic, picked up the cane and stood in the middle of the furs. All the whores sat up, their eyes turned to him. “I don’t want to hear that anyone takes this out on Tashi. You don’t want me to have to settle anything that comes up, do you?” He bent the cane in his hands, looking around at them. They all shook their heads.

“No Sir,” Reya said quietly.

“Good. Go to sleep. No talking. It’s late.”

He hung the cane on the wall, and then locked the door that led upstairs. He was going to the far side of their quarters, heading to the connecting door to his own rooms, when Tashir stopped him. “Sir?” the boy said softly.

When Valak turned, the boy’s face crumpled and big tears rolled down his cheeks. “I’m sorry Sir. I’ll be a better whore for you.” He struggled with his tears, trying to get out words that were hard to come. “Thank you for not letting him sell me.” He dropped his head and cried into his hands, still stained with ink.

Valak walked back and stood next to Tashir’s furs. “No one sells my whores. Not even me,” Valak said, making a little joke.

Tashir slipped to the stone floor and kissed Valak’s feet. “Thank you. I’m sorry,” he said, crying softly.

Valak sighed. “Come on boy,” he said. He pulled Tashir to his feet and helped him into his furs. “Go to sleep.”

He went around the dark stone chamber, lighting fat, midnight blue candles with three wicks each. He didn’t like his boys to wake up in the dark. It frightened them. When he was done, Valak left them to their tears.

From his own adjoining rooms, he heard them chattering softly in low whispers they thought he couldn’t hear. After a little while, they fell into an exhausted sleep. Before he went to sleep, Valak came back and checked on them. He pulled blankets up around some of them, picked up tunics he’d told them a hundred times to put away.

He sat on Kiri’s furs and pushed the boy’s dark brown hair back from his beautiful face. His eyes were red and swollen from crying. Occasional shudders ran through him. He stared at the boy’s sleeping face for a long time before he got up. As he got up to go, he didn’t see Siri looking out at him from under his partly closed eyelids.

Valak went to his own furs, but it was a long time before sleep claimed him.