187 - As Perfect a Plan

I’m lying on my stomach and I realize I’m not wearing anything at all. This isn’t frightening at all and feels good. There’s someone giving me a massage down my back, and the cool oils heat under a pair... two pairs of hands. Oh that feels so good. It feels like Definas’s hands, firm and sure and not frightened of me. Not trembling with lust either.

The second pair of hands... are more gentle, softer but nice. Someone brushes my hair out of the oil on the back of my neck and kisses me there. I take a deep breath and realize I’m hard. I almost fall out of the dream but those hands have me firmly pressing down on my back. They’re kneeling behind me, between my legs and are running slick hands over my buttocks and slipping the tips of their fingers into the crack between the two pads of flesh.

The other hands... oh... someone’s under me. My cheek is cradled on a breast. A woman. I turn my head in my dream and take a nipple in my mouth as if I’m going to nurse on it, feeling Definas quiver and moan and they do. It feels and smells and tastes so good.

“You haven’t taken anyone inside you yet? I think you’d like that. Here." The tip of a tongue licked down my oily back and stopped right at the tight ring of my anus, quivering there. I shivered, dancing on the point of that tongue. So hot. So good. I was terrified but wanted it, wanted more.

I was hard enough that every touch, every whisper of touch... was like fireworks and cream together. I lay on a woman holding me tight against her breasts... there was wetness and... I caught my breath... and... and... I spasmed. I wanted to push oh... I wanted to push hard. I pushed and rubbed against... against.. Oh dear Ancestors.... a voice in my ear... Definas whispered... um the woman whispered. “You are allowed...”

I opened my eyes, already coming. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to. I yelled into my pillow, barely aware that Gannara had a hand on my shoulder. I... wasn’t dreaming. I was shaking all over and rolled over, almost falling off the bed. The bindings over my genitals hadn’t stopped me from rising but rather held me in place. It was getting cooler and sticky and nastier fast. I pulled my pillow over my face even as Gannara said “Good dream?”

“Ummm. I think so... but I hate the smell of semen...” I pulled the pillow away and scrambled to strip off my genital bindings, gagging at the smell and dampness on them. I hurled them across the cave away from us. “I hate it.”

Gannara signed chalk but said. “I... used to like the smell... at home. Sometimes when I went to cuddle with my mama and papa in their bed in the mornings, it would smell like that, and they told me it was the way love smelled sometimes. And with mama there it smelled different, too.”

“I suppose.” I wasn’t sure if I should be horrified or not, but I got up to wash and he got up to help me.  

“I don’t want to smell like that, though.”

“Yeah.”

**

The rains had given away to early summer heat and I was working through the driest and dullest of the books Joras and Matthas had brought back. Matthas, though he was the senior Mahid, was trained to pretend to be an okas, which was seen to be more difficult for an Aitzas to do. He was able only to hand booksellers lists as if they were from some fessas caste employer and not leaf through as though he could read them. He could only pretend to be looking at the pictures.

Matthas brought more candles and lamp oil however. Apparently in the region, for some reason, the bees were very prolific last year and the abundance of honey and beeswax was seen as a sign from the Gods. Matthas, in character, spat on the ground at the idea that the Gods approved of the fall of the city.

It was hot enough now that the stone coolness in the caverns was welcome, and the upper chambers dry enough to use regularly. I was just happy to get to see the sun every day, shining in through the cracks in the ceiling, making the private little crack in the rock into something that reminded me of the Temple.

Gannara and I settled into a routine where we would variously dream things, more often nightmares than good dreams but he held me through mine and I held him through his, and we came up with a play outside where I was in bad temper and yelling at him all the time. Enough so that Ailadas, very gently, offered to re-teach ‘Etiquette to the Lesser Classes’ and Ilesias yelled at me because he liked Gannara.

2^nd Amitzas approved of the evidence of his eyes and ears, thinking I was doing what he wanted. He thought I was capable of injuring Gannara, the way I treated him now in front of witnesses and gave me a lecture about how it would now be impossible for me to replace my slave as he was not prepared to send someone to snatch a child out of Yeola-e because he did not have the manpower to spare.

I was nasty enough about it that he decided to give me a quick lesson in drawing maximum pain out of a rape without doing a great deal of damage, so I did not wantonly break my father’s gift to me. He’d heard cries in the night coming from my sleeping place and just assumed that was what was going on. I didn’t have any good dreams after that. The bandit who was 2^nd Amitzas’s training toy finally died and the body was dumped deeper in the caverns with rocks piled upon it.

I began praying to my ancestors in Selestialis, the blessed Sons of the Sun, for his soul and for others who had died to keep me in hiding, and for Arko, since I did not dare approach the Gods at all. It was acceptable for a younger child to make such spiritual mistakes, but I was growing up and no longer dared risk my blackened soul in the light of The Ten. In my mind I talked to Sin when I couldn’t talk to Gannara. And still no news came from the city about our ‘valiant eight’.

Binshala almost despaired of keeping any kind of flesh on me, with the awful cooking and the awful ingredients and I could only swallow so much honey. I grew to hate the sweetness as it was too much, though the flavour and smell of honey, strangely enough, never did pall on me.

Bedchamber assassination attempt foiled
The Pages of Arko, Anae 6, 55-to-last Y.P.A.
By Intharas Terren

The Imperator narrowly escaped with his life last night after several Mahid assassins, apparently diverted from the escort-in-hiding of the late Imperator’s son Minis Aan, infiltrated the Imperial bedchamber through a passage in its headboard.

“Had He been sleeping in the bed as usual, He would likely have been killed,” explained Imperial security chief Kreras Saranieras. “Fortunately He happened to be sleeping elsewhere.”

The Mahid, eight in all, entered the Marble Palace by a previously undiscovered secret passageway from the outside, and crept through its system of hidden tunnels, the security chief explained. The headboard of the Imperial bed is a massive slab of black marble, which had been thought to be solid but in truth contained a consummately-crafted hidden door.

Carrying darts containing instantly-fatal poison, the Mahid found only the Imperatrix and the Imperial boy in the bed. Niku Wahunai successfully used covers and pillows to protect herself, while Skorsas Trinisas rolled off the bed to hide under its edge. Guards in the spring-trap booths then felled five Mahid with stun-darts. The remaining three were captured by guards in the passages.

All eight are dead by their own poison teeth, leaving investigators of the Ministry of Internal Serenity unable to truth-drug them for the whereabouts of Minis.Ser Saranieras declined to comment on why the Imperator was not sleeping in the Imperial bed, nor where he was sleeping, except to say it was in a location not far away, and still well within the perimeter of Imperial-level security.

“What was of greater concern to me was why He was not awakened by His sense for weapons when they were within range,” the security chief said. “We did a healer’s analysis, and it showed that both He and the Imperial Food Taster had been dosed with a sedative too mild to be felt in waking, but strong enough to deaden sleep.” Yeoli security agents and Imperial Sereniteers alike are taking day-and-night shifts both to investigate, and bolster Imperial security so such an attempt does not occur again.

Sereniteers had already determined that Minis’s complement of Mahid when he was sent out of the city by the late Imperator was some fifty men. “Now they are down to forty-two at the most,” said Ser Saranieras. “That is not a bad thing.”

The Imperator himself commented only, “Another day, another assassination attempt. I started work the same time as usual this morning.”

___________

I set the Pages down on the rock outside the caves where I was reading all of the back issues that Joras had brought in from his last market trip. Well. I had to think hard about 2^nd Amitzas’s lessons to keep the corners of my mouth from turning up.

“Ailadas,” I picked up the Pages and laid them in front of him where he sat in the sun on a folding chair. “They did not succeed.” I made my voice as neutral as possible.

He read it, thoughtfully. “Ahem--The first thing would be to see if this has already—ahem-- been reported to the First—Ahem--Second. It will be up to your—ahem—guardian what prayers should be said for their souls.”

“Of course.” I let myself smile now. “I will inquire immediately.”

"Ahem--" he began.

“—I will, of course, finish reading the backlog of Pages, my –ahem—tutor, first.” He nodded, ignoring me impertinence, but with a tiny smile on his lip. “Ailadas. I need to talk to you seriously about a problem I have.”

“A –ahem—problem, Spark… ah, Minis?”

“A theoretical problem I need to work out.”

“Ah. Well, ahem, then let us lay out the parameters of your problem and we will surely be able to solve it.”

“I have a scenario where there are a number of prisoners, held by an elite force, including a child, several women and at least one person who is infirm. Seven altogether. How would they escape… say from a prison very much like these caverns we are in? And how could they not be tracked and re-captured?”

He looked at me over his spectacles and considered. The silence stretched out long enough that I was able to hear the whining hum of Anae beetles in the trees below. “Ahem. Seven you say? Hmmm. Guarded by—well, ahem, let us make this easy and take our own – ahem-- situation as an example. Seven guarded by forty--ahem--Mahid. Let me think on what kind of historical examples I may teach for such an exercise, while you –ahem-- read.”

“Precisely, Ailadas. Thank you. I wish to create a plan as close to perfect as is possible."