My only answer this time was a weak sound.

  "And don't even think of trying to go flaccid on me," she said. "The only way to get out of this is to satisfy me." She was moving faster and faster, but then began to slow again. "And there is one more thing I have to tell you."

  I still couldn't answer, but she didn't seem to care.

  "Because I've been using this technique often—it's one of my favorites, can you tell? My nerves are a little deadened. So it takes me a long time to come. You may have to work very hard, in fact, to get me there." She dragged herself up and down my shaft once more and then pulled off me to lay on her back. "Get to work."

  "Yes, your excellence." I went after her for a bit with my tongue then, only to find that even my mouth felt like it was being shocked and scalded, and eventually I had to put my cock back into that hell hole.

  At least it didn't seem likely to kill me, I reflected. And that was something.

  Part Five

  I woke up in the morning on the pallet at the foot of Kessa's bed. She was nowhere in sight, but there was a small plate of food next to me. I had few bites of bread and fruit and then sat up straight to take inventory. A few deep breaths later and I closed my eyes. I didn't seem to be injured. My back was still sore from the beating they had given me two days ago, and I was a bit stiff from sleeping curled at the foot of the bed, but otherwise, not much the worse for wear. The collar was gone. Could I have been so drained from her abuse that I didn’t' feel them take it off? I tugged on my penis experimentally. Everything seemed in working order there, no obvious physical after effects of Kessa's vaginal punishment device. I had the urge to pull myself to orgasm, as I usually did when I awoke, but I knew there would be hell to pay for that. Instead I took a few more breaths and deflated myself.

  "Show me how you do that."

  I started. I must have been more fatigued than I realized not to have heard Jelan come into the doorway. It was a connecting door between this room and another. His golden hair stood out against the black uniform. Before I could speak he went on. "I'm next in the hierarchy, now. Are you surprised? I found a way to make Miera submit last night."

  I kept silent. If he wanted to brag, so much the better, as maybe I might learn something I could use. But that was all he said on the subject for now as he stood there, staring hungrily at me.

  "Is there a form of address you prefer?" I asked.

  "I like lord," he said, an almost childish sense of relish in his voice. "Lord suits me well, don't you think?"

  "Yes, lord."

  "Follow me." He turned and disappeared into the other room. I followed him through a parlor and then into another room, this one with only the one door, and a window through which the sun was streaming. This exterior wall was inlaid with tiles, and the floor was covered with a thick carpet, woven with designs. He took a seat in a high backed wooden chair and indicated I should kneel in front of him.

  I did, perhaps less smoothly than I had my first night here. My knees were a bit bruised still, but if he noticed any difference he did not say so. "I saw what you did in there, just now. I need you to teach me that."

  "The Arian disciplines... lord?" I asked, almost forgetting the title. "Have you studied them at all?"

  He shook his head. "My sires thought them techniques fit only for whores who please women. I've experimented a bit on my own, but..." He was unaware he had begun to blush, the redness creeping into the fair hair on his head. He narrowed his eyes at me then. "You're mine for now. Show me."

  I had every intention of showing him what I could, and found his demanding tone almost petulant. "I'll do my best, lord," I said, "but not everything can be learned in one day."

  "Don't make excuses."

  "As you say, lord." I took a deep breath. "Please forgive me if my explanations seem obscure. I learned the basics a long time ago and I've never tried to teach them to another person before…"

  At that he slapped me across the face. He spoke slowly and with a clenched jaw. "I do not forgive." He slapped my other cheek to even things, and then said, "And stop stalling."

  My urge just then of course was to grab him by the neck, force him to the ground, and make him beg for his life. I felt fairly certain I could do it, too. But Siksie and I had a deal, and I was committed to it. "Yes, lord. I'm sorry, lord." It wasn't that the slaps had particularly hurt. I've had much worse. But what an insufferable prat he was turning out to be. "If I may suggest that you … expose yourself?"

  He stripped out of the tightskin undersuit but left the tunic on, then sat back down in the chair, his flaccid but sizable penis hanging between his legs.

  I put my own hand around my cock and began to work it slowly up and down. "Now, when you get hard, if you concentrate, you should be able to feel two sources of energy, one that comes from the front of your body, down your chest, over your stomach, which is lifting you up, and the other one that comes from your root, from the heels of your feet up through your thighs, through the center of your body and into your penis from underneath."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Please, lord, just make yourself hard and try to concentrate on feeling the two-directional pull of your erection." He tugged on himself and eyed me suspiciously. "The wave that travels down your front is your arousal, while the wave that pushes up from underneath is your hardness."

  He didn't say anything, but tugged on himself more, while I kept talking. "I think in more physiological terms, the frontal wave is your nervous system and the nerves that control orgasmic sensation, while the root wave is the blood flow which results in hardness, size, and ultimately, ejaculation. If you can control them independently, you can come without ejaculating, vary your size and hardness at will..."

  "I know what the disciplines are for," he growled. "But tell me how to do it."

  I faltered. I actually let my eyes fall, as I floundered for what to say next. "First, you have to feel the difference between the two sources of energy..."

  "Yeah, and?"

  "And then you must control them independently of each other." I tensed for the blow. I already knew there was no use telling him that it took practice. Audan had taught me starting from the first time I masturbated, when it came naturally and easily to me. I couldn't imagine trying to start on the learning now, after how many thousands of orgasms Jelan must have had in his life. The slap was predictably hard.

  "How?" He asked again. The red tip of his cock jutting up through his fingers was as flushed and angry as his face.

  I could not keep the answering anger out of my eyes as I looked up at him. "Once you feel the two sources, you have to create a dam in each river depending on what you want to do."

  "A dam."

  "Metaphorically speaking. If the energy sources feel like a river to you, you create a dam. In your mind."

  He licked his hand and now stroked himself faster. He was growing even larger, larger than me, larger than my father, larger than any penis I'd seen this close before. "My dam is not working," he said. "Do you want to see how big I can get?"

  He had inherited the true Kylaran anatomy, that much I could see as he swelled. He seemed quite proud of his size—really who wouldn't be—as he grew in length and thickness both. Both his fists were now wrapped around his pole and pumping merrily. "Do you like it?" he asked, anger still flaring in his eyes.

  "Yes, lord," I said without much sincerity.

  "You won't," he said. "None of the house slaves do. My sire sends them to me for punishment."

  So, he was a braggart after all.

  "When I want to be nice, I'll start out smaller," he said, his pumps becoming more vigorous. I added my hand to his and he purred in appreciation. As he talked, I fitted my mouth around the engorged head and he beamed with pleasure. "I'll fill her up, or him, and let them think for a moment that it's not going to be that bad. But then I'll, how would you put it? Let the river flow. I can make it hurt. It happens very fast."

  I was already nodding as I bobbed up and down on him. He wasn't protesting my treatment of him so he clearly hadn't foreseen what I had, which is that he could have easily decided to give me the very treatment he was describing.

  "Other times, I just shove it into them, dry. Depends on what they did. Have you ever tried it? It feels like nothing else, just get yourself to that point where you can't get any bigger, any more stretched, and then just ram. The friction is intense and the way they move and scream. But I want it to last longer. It's so intense that after five or six strokes I..."

  His words were lost after that as he began to come in my mouth. He bellowed and bucked on the chair and I didn't even make an attempt at swallowing—it wasn't as if he was going to notice. He stood then, knocking the chair back and me to the side, and pumped hard with his hands to squeeze out two, three additional spurts.

  The deflation was as rapid as his famed inflation, and then he threw himself exhausted onto the bed in the corner.

  I stood and went to him. "That's how you made Miera submit," I said.

  "What?"

  "Once you got inside her, you made it unbearable. You made her beg to stop. Am I right?"

  His smile was a sneer. "You should have seen the look in her eyes. Originally it was she who was to have you next, you know. Until I knocked her down a peg. Last night I cornered her after dinner and asked for a little bedplay. When she realized what I could do to her, she fought tooth and nail."

  "So she didn't ..." I had to be careful with words here. To submit was to agree to certain things, at least by some measures. "Surrender?"

  "Not at all. Though she did beg me in the end. She begged me to stop."

  "And did you?"

  "Only after I was finished."

  Audan had warned that the rules might be different. Siksie, too, had said as much, that among the members of the circle we were at one another's mercy—or lack thereof. But whether my views were out of date or not, I felt what he had done was wrong. It is a debate that will never end—is there a difference between submission and coerced consent? I tried to see a way that it might be justified, but did not find one. If he had raped a house slave on a whim, no Kylar would have given it much thought. But he had raped a peer, pure and simple, to prove he had power over her and because that was how he got off.

  I tried to put it into perspective. Did the fact that we had no ranks while here mean that he could treat her as such without provocation? I thought about my own situation. I had chosen and agreed to go through with it. Kylaran nobles jockeyed for rank and position all the time, but as I understood it, it usually entailed one manipulating the other into a compromised position. If anyone could simply bugger anyone else and take their title, there would be open warfare at all times.

  Besides, some part of me liked Miera. And no part of me liked Jelan. That was enough justification for me. I gave in to my earlier urge, leaped on top of him and sent the pillow flying. He twisted in my arms, trying to escape, but that only made it easier to get him into a choke hold. I dragged him onto the floor.

  "You…!" I had left him enough airflow to talk. His voice was more outraged than fearful. "You're supposed to be my slave today!"

  "Is that how it works? I was given to understand that you are all helping to punish me in my father's name. No one told me that the establishment of hierarchy was suspended in my case." I gave him a little extra squeeze and he made a choking noise. "Did you forget I'm not a slave, but a peer, too?"

  He was so easy to read. Apparently, he had forgotten, and he never would have told me what he did, otherwise.

  "What you did to Miera was wrong," I breathed into his ear. He struggled a bit but the movement only tightened my grip. "If you'd made it a test, if you'd bet her she wouldn't be able to stand it and she couldn't, well, then I would have to let you go. But you forced yourself on her."

  "Didn't!" he said, or something like it, his voice rising with fear as his lungs began to feel deprived.

  "What backwater province did you grow up in not to know that some things are wrong? What would the judiciary say about something like this?"

  "Don't," might have been his next word.

  "I'm going to give you two choices, Jelan. I can ruin you by taking this to judicial. You know they'll remove your lovely club, don't you? You'll lose any chance of remaining in the palace circle, you might even have to leave the planet. It's that, or you submit to me."

  I released him then and he sat on the floor coughing and gasping, and rubbing his throat where I had dug my arm bone into his voice box. "What will you do to me?"

  I smiled. "Do you really want to know in advance? After all your waxing poetic about how great your fucking technique feels, I'm of a mind to try it myself." He blanched. "Or maybe I'll just make you kneel down, kiss my feet, and swear that no matter what happens, I'll always be a rung above you on Zal's Ladder. You will always answer to me."

  Well, he skipped a step, he made his choice by throwing himself at my feet right then, and begging me to spare him all kinds of things. After that display, I didn't need to dirty my hands with him any longer. Part of me thought that to drive the point home I should have really at least made him suck me, but since I was still prohibited from coming, that wouldn't have been nearly as much fun as it could be. Instead I left him there, on the floor of his room, while I wandered out into the castle wondering what would happen next.

  Part Six

  The Sunset Palace, as it is called, is on a stretch of warm coastline, so the fact that I had no clothes was not much of a bother to me. There were plenty of areas of Kylar where nudity was the norm, for both slaves and masters. I was starting to feel rather hungry, however, and since no one seemed to be in charge of taking care of me, I decided to try to find the kitchens. I found my way back to the dining room where we had eaten on the first night here, and from there I followed my nose.

  In the kitchen I discovered a merry crew of cooking slaves under the direction of a formidable female personage. Her arms were twice the thickness of my legs and her legs I could not see under her protective aprons but they appeared to taper to improbably small feet. Even her jowls were large. "You there!" she pointed at me when I appeared in the doorway. "You don't belong here."

  "You're right about that, mima," I said, using a pet name for "mother" for her, to see how it would work. "But I'm able-bodied and willing to work."

  She gave me a narrow-eyed smile. "Can you cook, or are you only good for bed work?"

  "Whatever is your pleasure, mima. I'm hungry and don't mind earning what I get."

  She laughed at that. "I didn't believe it when she told us, yet here you are, offering favors." She tossed me an apron and a set of loose-fitting kitchen togs. "For now, we could use the help with the vegetable prep. I'll decide later if you need to do something special for me."

  And so I was put to peeling and chopping with a group of four others, two women and two men, which wasn't hard work and wasn't dangerous. The others eyed me nervously, as if they could not quite decide how to react to me. How did I fit in? Was I to be addressed with a title, or not? In technical terms, the rules of the game put me below them, but it was as Miera had so disdainfully said, most of the house slaves were unable to assert themselves above me. It wasn't long before I had rearranged our work area so that one of us was washing, one removing the stems, one peeling, one chopping, while I orchestrated the finished dices into containers.

  Mima—she had told me neither her name nor given me a different form of address—came over just as I was sweeping the last of it into a dish. She laughed and pulled me aside, into the dry goods storage and I thought surely she had come to collect a favor.

  But the first thing she did was give me some advice. "I should have left you buck naked. Then you wouldn't have been so bossy."

  "Did I do something wrong?"

  "Not as such. You got the job done in half the time, But don't you know how slaves are fed?" She leaned close to me, her voice dropping. "You don't have the slightest idea, do you."

  "That's true." I was trying to imagine what she meant. Did they eat without utensils or something?

  "The royal household runs on the quota system. Each one gets ... if they peel this many, they get this many for themselves. It's supposed to reward the faster, harder worker."

  "But..."

  "I know. You cooperated and did more in less time. They were too scared of you to say no."

  "Surely their share can be calculated by percentages?"

  "You're assuming there's someone here who can do mathematics." Her smile was sly. "Fortunately, I can. But that's not true everywhere."

  I must have blinked stupidly because she laughed quietly behind her hand. The slaves I had known in my life had all been educated, trained, made to be as useful as possible. Mirell's house staff were as polished as she. They competed for the honor of serving her. They chose that life. I felt suddenly very naïve. Did I really think that every slave who passed through my father's hands was schooled and groomed like an equal? I knew they brought in shiploads from conquered worlds sometimes, hundreds upon hundreds at a time. What Kessa had been goading me with, the idea that my offworld mother might have been just above animal intelligence, gnawed at me. I knew it wasn't true of her, and yet was that true for some? Unable to read, write, or calculate?

  "Anyway," she said, drawing my attention back to her. "You'll all have to share. When we're done preparing the meal, I'll sit you all down together. But don't be surprised if they don't all treat you like a lord from now on."

  "I didn't mean to..."

  "Sure, you didn't. Personally, I like you as a lord better than as a stray pet."

  "Why is that?"

  "I'd much rather have a lord's favor than some mongrel's, eh?" She batted her eyelashes at me, and I took that as a cue to kiss her. She was all soft folds of flesh and heavy breathing after that, quite easy to please, and by the time we emerged from the storage, the others had finished the preparation and had handed the finished dishes off to the servers. The kitchen slaves and I sat together at a round table in the back, with bowls of soup garnished with fresh herbs, and a loaf of still-warm bread. They all sat staring at me, their hands in their laps. Apparently no one would eat until I ate. I broke the loaf with my hands and gave them each a piece, and then dipped it in my soup. The soup was delicious, thickened into a velveteen texture and very good on the bread.

 

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