Chapter 7
The narrow streets of the fleshmarket wound though the cavernous underbelly of the spa's central building.
The display pens for the human livestock were well-filled, and the machinery devised by the mistress of pain was in place.
Musicians practiced with synthesized lute, recorder and harpsichord as sound technicians clad in maroon rubber from head to toe scurried about like mutts in heat.
"All is in readiness, Francis," Alistair said, looking about the set.
"It looks fabulous," Francis said, stroking his chin and taking a handful of tit and ass from one of the young ladies of the marketplace.
"So do you, if I may say so," Alistair said, taking in Dashwood's coal-gray leotard and tights ensemble, with piping and crotch works of naturally fanged python skin.
"Likewise accept my own compliments, Alistair," Francis said.
Both men were outfitted in designs by Artemis Schwartz, Abbess of Theleme.
Francis especially liked the way Alistair's dick was outlined in deep relief by his codpiece of hard leather.
Draperies of silver chains hung from epaulets and nipple clips on the tall, sandy-haired man's brocaded silk doublet. Alistair's knickers and scarlet-lined cape were of soft manure-tanned antelope skins.
Francis espied a sumptuous pile of puss flesh. Most toothsome selection was she.
Her hide and fanny would bring a good price during the auctions scheduled for later in the evening. After the duel.
He stroked between her split legs as the girl bent over on her hands and knees, drinking filth from a wooden trough.
He ran the edge of his flattened palm between the lips of her brisk vulva.
Then he brought his mitt up to Alistair's nose and wafted the savory fragrance.
"Mmm," said Alistair, sniffing. "It's like randy goat cheese run under a broiler."
"Exquisite," Francis said, licking his wet fingers and dipping into the twat for another sampling of quimjuices.
"I trust the Abbess has everything set for the arrival of the cruel white goddess," Alistair said, inspecting the spikelike gears of one of Diana's contraptions.
Francis fingered another sweetmeat.
He took one firm nipple between his fingers and twisted. He acknowledged the way the girl writhed in pain.
Spitting onto the sweetmeat's visage, he spoke confidently to his partner.
"We are prepared for the advent of Diana Cazad-ora, whether it is indeed tomorrow or she chooses graciously to swoop down on us tonight."
Alistair brought the corners of his yip up slightly in a strained smile.
"And what of the accommodations for Diana's little guest?" Alistair said.
"Cassandra Derringer," Francis said, wiping his hand off on a rag, "will be given the due respect an agent of the law requires."
The two men passed through a blind corridor leading to the stairwell descending into the dungeon beneath the basement.
Behind a wall covered with ingenious devices derived from those of the Spanish Inquisition, was another space, this one filled with tightly bound, padded packages.
"Which one is it?" Alistair asked.
"You mean the many-titted statue of the goddess of the hunt," Francis responded archly.
"The same," Alistair said, looking for a likely sized parcel.
"This one, right here," Francis said.
He turned to his left and slipped a dropcloth from around a large cubical container. With the knife he snapped from the clip at his waistband, he slashed into the thick layers of cardboard and fiber filler.
Francis peeled back a section of the wrapping and revealed the hideous face of the goddess. He next showed several of the multititted sculpture's nipples, tweaking their cooly marbled succulence in turn.
"I still say it's more than indiscreet for us to use this statue in tomorrow's ceremony," Alistair reiterated. "We might damage the merchandise."
"Diana is the one who insisted, after all," Francis recollected. "I think the appearance of the statue, coupled with the presence of our mean detective, should clinch the fate of our dear lady-the cruel mistress of pain."
Alistair allowed a smile as the men passed again from the secret chamber.
"You have made sure all the other items will be cleared out before Cassandra Derringer appears on the scene," Alistair said as they paused at the top of the circular stonework stairway.
"Zahndra will be escorting them across the border during the banquet this evening," Francis said, catching a flicker of life in his cock.
He could hear the slide and clatter of steel from outside in the ceremonial grove. His dick was hard and hot already.
The destruction of Diana Cazadora would give him blinding and painful orgasm.
With the accession of his wife to the queenship, Francis Dashwood would have an even more formidable source of pain. He knew Artemis would be able to stoke his hunger to the fullest.
The two men stepped out onto the rear terrace that overlooked the ceremonial grove.
The grounds of the spa were decorated with glittering boughs of gilt material. Bundles of switches were hung from pine branches, decorated with holly, pine cones and mistletoe.
Some of the revelers were already in costume, wearing crowns of antlers, crescent moons and in some cases even full-dress animal outfits.
Alistair laughed joyfully and indicated Antoine
Chevalier capering about. The black man's head was covered with a black leather helmet in the form of a bull's mask.
It was heavily armored with curlicue wire spikes and metal plates. From the top of the casque protruded a set of longhorns.
The ski lifts had been in operation all afternoon, for the convenience of me earlier arrivals, and, even now, as the early festivities were in progress, some of the aficionados were continuing their abandonment to the danger and wildness of the slopes.
"I trust Ms. Peabody will be able to make it for the weekend," Alistair said.
"Yes, so I am told," Francis said slowly. "However, even if she cannot attend, arrangements have been made for her to be taken care of."
Beneath the boughs of a large fir tree an arena had been carved out of the snow.
The Abbess was standing between two contestants, clad in a long white strapless gown of see-through latex that showed the ample white bosom clearly.
Though one's attention was first drawn to the red nips, the triangular patch of cunt hair was tantaliz-ingly, subtly on display.
Artemis's hair was drawn up into two stiff auburn horns and her arms were covered to her shoulders in thin white latex gloves.
As Alistair and Francis continued their stroll toward the ice arena, Antoine, in his Minotaur ensemble, faced off against the flaxen-haired Cynthia Luna.
She and Antoine had arrived from Los Angles late in the afternoon with the word that Diana Cazadora might after all be able to attend the opening night of Saturnalia at Spa Abbey of Theleme.
Now Cynthia stood with her legs spread, in a glittery padded jumpsuit of rubber-treated canvas. Her helmet was a pearlescent sphere symbolizing the moon as a gaping, ghostly transmutation of tit-mound and cunny.
Artemis watched as wired metal plates were attached through openings in the two contestants' body armor.
The sculptured protective electrode plates were snared to Antoine's nipples, clipped around his balls and inserted with a twist up his rectum.
Likewise prepared in her bung and bosom, Cynthia had a cuntplate secured through her clit and by a tang slid up into her twat.
"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," Artemis said, explaining that there would be no rules governing the play of the contest.
She passed to Antoine a three-foot leather-covered dildo tipped like a lance and studded with hooks and spikes.
To Cynthia she presented a long curved hard rubber crescent, reinforced with steel and bearing embedded along its length evil-looking blades cut into the shape of stars.
The Abbess continued her commentary as the duelists took their places at either end of the icy arena.
"There will be no quarter given, and the director has been told to disregard anything the contestants might utter."
The Minotaur brandished his pricklike weapon, sending off a shower of sparks.
"In the event of audience interference in this bout, and any subsequent claims by or on behalf of either contestant," Artemis said, "you well understand that the spa affirms that nothing is true, all is permitted."
Cynthia wafted the scimitar-moon about her head. She struck an overhanging bough, setting off a shimmering curtain of electric flashes.
"Let us begin," Artemis said, withdrawing to a dais upon which she sat in an ice throne flanked by her husband Francis Dashwood to her right, Alistair Weed to her left.
Each contestant moved casually toward the center of the ice ring. Then they crouched and wove tentative, slippery circles about each other on the uneven ice surface of the arena.
Sparks flashing from the electrodes in their stunned sex organs. Showering from the tips of their baleful weaponry.
Cynthia made the initial assault. Her crescent slit into the armored prickstaff, biting in just below the head.
The slick surface of the arena torqued the Moon-maiden into a skid.
Momentarily off balance, Cynthia sank to one knee, an electric fire in her fannyplate.
The Minotaur made a counterstroke, dragging the head of the prickstaff across the glowing tips of the Moon-maiden's electrified tits.
The resultant shower of jismic fireworks set off the crowd.
Cynthia jumped back onto her feet, skidding as the intensity of metallic fear in her tits continued unbearably.
She swiped across the Minotaur's belly as he raised his lordly prickstaff above his head to strike at her.
The sear rent his balls and sizzled his prick as the emission of flares from his crotch continued with the Moon-maiden's attack.
The Minotaur lowered his head and one long horn jammed dicklike into the Moon-maiden's cuntplate. Butting her to the ground, the Minotaur stabbed the prickstaff at the fallen female warrior's face and twat.
Cynthia cascaded into electronic orgasm and a series of laser jets spat off into the eerie light of the early evening.
With a savage cut of her crescent, plumes of sparks came from the Minotaur's rectum.
Another series of laser jets registered the score as the Minotaur shot off jism into the electric come-conductor in his crotchplate.
The Minotaur retreated, drawing the Moon-maiden on, building her confidence. . He appeared to stumble onto his back on a chink in the icy surface.
The assault of the Moon-maiden was accompanied by a blood-foaming yowl from her maw.
Feminine voices in the crowd shrieked like banshees in heat as their champion Cynthia slashed awesomely across the Minotaur's nippleplates.
She then angled downward, cutting bend sinister across his bowels. The Moon-maiden completed the Z with a splendid rendering of pain across the Minotaur's testicles.
Electric juices forced jism up and out the Minotaur's jimjam.
But he had the Moon-maiden where he wanted her and timed his thrust.
The tip of the studded-leather prickstaff surged into the Moon-maiden's fannyplate, rendering her senseless in wave after wave of orgasm.
The Minotaur then horned her in the cuntplate, and the laser jets registered a continuous assault of come from the fallen Moon-maiden's quim.
As the shuddering female duelist was dragged along the ice to the edge of the arena, her limbs twitched spasmodically.
The victorious Minotaur raised his prickstaff over his homed head and pumped his hips.
"The beast has bested beauty," the Abbess announced. "May the king of beasts reign powerfully with the administration of his atavistic pain. For we all know that the king must soon die."
"That ought to pump them up for next weekend," Alistair said surreptitiously to Francis.
"Yes," Francis said. "What did I tell you? She'll be a marvelous mistress."
"And now," Artemis said, rising from her ice throne, "the king must dine-and so must all of us; my hunger's ravenous!"
The Minotaur sat surrounded by the Abbess and her court atop the low stage at the center of the banquet area of the marketplace.
In the space between the two long rows of tables where the dick-dancers had just finished performing was dragged in by a quartet of male fairy-slaves a large machine-metal device.
Jaws dropped at the hard beauty of the blonde, green-eyed virgin selected from the surrounding flesh market stalls.
She was clamped onto her back straddling the fearsome engine by the thick leather bands running over her forearms.
Her fingernails clutched at her thighs, decorated by stretch rubber chastity-straps.
The blonde virgin's mouth moved in soundless terror. Chewing mournfully on the hard rubber ball held in her maw by the torturously tearing rubber and steel bit.
Sweat and cunt oils puddled the mechanics of the machine and the grinding surface of her virginal form as legs flailed across the sprinkling of steel spikes.
The Minotaur rose from the dessert of meringue tit capped by a black raspberry, wiped his maw and descended to the terrorized virgin.
His hooved gauntlet seized the handle of the crank sticking up between the splayed legs of the prim womanflesh.
As he turned it slowly, savage spiked gears bit into the rubber chastity-straps.
Another gear rotated her right nipple, furling it like a silly-putty flag.
She closed her eyes as if to reject it all as the vise clamped about her left breast.
The twisting of her tit was an abominable humiliation in itself.
But the gears were clawing at her snatch, forcibly breaking her vows of eternal chastity. Of submissive-ness to the cruel white goddess who was her one mistress of pain.
Tonight and for a brief season, the Minotaur reigned and it was now the men who were the sex-masters of their own slavering hunger.
One eye glued on the ongoing ceremonial, Alistair Weed bent his sandy-haired head in between Artemis and Francis.
"I trust Zahndra's mission proceeds as planned."
Francis nodded, taking a bite of the dessert tit before him.
The Abbess licked her fingernails and dropped them to her clit as the Minotaur continued his grisly twist and shout.
Artemis Schwartz awaited her own mm, when she would prove herself mistress of pain.
She could feel the sear of steel in her cunt folds. The twist and nip of gnashing spikes at her tits and clitbud.
Jabbering white-hotness up her arse.
As the blonde virgin erupted into orgasm, the Minotaur shaking come from his purple-black dick dangling threateningly over her crying face, the Abbess spoke in low tones.
"I've arranged for Zahndra to appear this evening immediately upon completion of her run," she said.
"That should be foolproof-enough cover," Alistair said confidently.
"Even with the presence of our hard-titted detective from the art squad," Francis said, a bit short of Alistair's smugness.
"Yes," Artemis said, jiggling her clit through the filmy folds of her latex gown, "where is our dear Cassandra Derringer?"