Prelude

 

The girl on the bed lay on her back and watched him anxiously, her large, dark eyes were wide and her breathing made her naked beasts heave and tremble on her chest. The king surveyed them, gently mounded and slipping slightly towards her sides, as he prepared the needles. She was a buxom brunette he had picked up from some court or other - not paid her taxes or something - and had had her Treated.

The afternoon sun struck brightly across the royal bedchamber and lit her body as she lay spreadeagled and waiting. He was standing at the door that led out onto the terrace and was listening to the roar of the city of Tir-Angerlath as it boomed like a sea against the walls of the palace gardens.

He loved being able to take an afternoon off every now and then, have a slave to play with and to play with her while he was naked and at ease, as outside the city throbbed with life and its commerce pumped the money around like blood through a heart. And here he stood at the centre of it, yet in the peace and tranquillity of his own palace. He felt the warm air caress his cock as it stiffened at the prospect of what he was about to do to the girl. While the rest of the city teemed with activity, he was taking his pleasure and he was able to take his time.

He had two emerald headed needles in his hands and holding them so that the sun flashed off the gems he went to sit beside the girl on the bed. Her eyes never left them as he approached her. She had undergone this many times and knew what was coming, however, as a Treated slave she hadn't needed to be tied down - she had stronger bonds than any cuffs or chains. She had the chains in her mind that Treatment had left her with. She had been ordered to stay still and still she would stay. She had been told she was being punished and so would not experience anything other than pain and yet she made no move to cower or protect herself.

King Steffano II smiled down at her as he gripped one breast. He always refused her pleasure when he did this to her because she made such charming noises as she suffered, and besides he loved to see how helpless she was to protect herself. Of course when he fucked her afterwards, she would be told to experience pleasure and would take him for her usual enjoyable ride. With his other hand he adjusted his grip on the needle and placed the point at the tiny, puckered vent of her nipple.

"Sing nicely for me, little bird!" he said.

"Yes, Your Majesty," she whispered, her eyes looking down at her breast where the needle rested.

Then gripping the breast tight about halfway to its root, so that it didn't flatten against her chest, he pushed the point in. There was a second's resistance and then the satisfyingly slow sinking in.

"Aaaah! Owww!" The girl's voice was shrill as the cry broke from behind her gritted teeth.

The king re-set his grip on the breast and on the needle. The breast was so soft it needed him to hold it up near the areola as he went for full insertion. With his thumb bearing down on the emerald set in its head, he pushed on the needle.

"Aaaah! Aaaaah!" Her voice rose higher and higher as the needle sank in and the king bathed in her pain, his cock almost painfully hard now. But with the precious stone adorning the peak of her breast prettily, he rose and went to her other side while the girl panted noisily, trying to dispel the pain.

When he put his big hand on the softness of her left breast he tutted and told her to calm her breathing, her panting was making it hard to aim for the vent properly. Obediently she stopped panting and instead watched his hands as one gripped her breast again, mounding it up so that the nipple was brought into prominence, while the other brought the bright, shiny point of the needle to rest against its tip.

Slowly and relishing her pain as he did so he pushed it in, again stopping after the initial thrust to re-set his grip on the soft breast flesh.

"Aaaah! Aaaaah!" Again she gave the rising cry the king so enjoyed hearing as the metal sank into her.

When he was done he sat back and admired the way the two emeralds winked and glinted at the peaks of her trembling breasts. She looked utterly desirable and it was definitely time to fuck her.

"You sang nicely my little bird! Now I have finished punishing you."

Her body relaxed instantly and she sighed as the pain began to change to pleasure. He moved his hand to her groin and she thrust her pelvis up at him, blatantly offering herself. He rubbed briefly at her clitoris and then slipped his fingers into her, finding her warm, moist and open. Briefly he debated whether to bind the breasts so that when he lay on her the pain and pleasure would be even more intense, but he was urgent on that afternoon and lay down between her wide spread legs, which wrapped themselves around his huge waist as best they could. She reached down and guided him to her entrance, her large hazel eyes were now soft and adoring as her master prepared to enter her. He thrust and she took him in easily, her juices flooding as the jewels in her nipples stimulated her with their pain.

Then the wall buzzed.

The king sighed and turned onto his side, waving one arm to activate it - in sound-only mode.

"Your Majesty!" It was the voice of the general he had sent to shepherd Count Mattias Dinhivent's armoured brigade along his Western border and into Scorat.

"What is it?" he asked irritably.

"They've turned east! They've turned east! They're coming, we can't hold them!"

"What are you blathering about, man!"

"We're under attack! We're being invaded!"

The king sat up, suddenly ashen faced. "But he swore! He...he...he said wealth...he swore...it was Scorat they wanted," he mumbled.

"What are your orders, sire?" From behind the voice came the ominous sounds of explosions.

"Sound every alarm you can! Withdraw all forces from the Fyrnathian border! Stand and fight to the last man! Do not let them pass!"

"No, Your Majesty. Thank you, Your Majesty." The wall went quiet.

The king bounded up off the bed and flung on a robe then activated the wall again. The image of his equerry appeared, looking grave and worried.

"I heard, Your Majesty. We are doing all we can to shift every resource west to meet this invasion head on."

"Bring my car and body guards round to the front!"

He lumbered swiftly over to his clothes and began to dress but stopped when he heard a distant booming coming from down by the docks. He rushed out onto the terrace and saw tall columns of smoke rising from the quays and then the rattle of small arms fire and the thuds of pulse rifles. He dashed back to the wall and activated it again. His equerry appeared, standing behind his desk now.

"I don't know!" he almost wailed before the king could ask. "All I know is it's coming from the docks!" Then another phone rang and he answered it, the colour draining from his face as he did so. He put it down and turned back to the king. "Armed men have disembarked from a force of ships that have come up-river. They are well armed and are deploying all through the docks and moving inland," he said dully.

"Tell everyone we're being invaded! Tell them to fight street by street! Get the militias stood to! Issue every weapon we've got to every able bodied man in the city!"

He had to get to the Fyrnathian border, the king thought frantically, trying to blot out the memory of how easily Dinhivent had led him by the nose with his promises of riches even greater than those that Tir-Angerlath had already. From beyond the border he could organise the fightback, but here in the palace he was a sitting duck.

Watched by the startled slavegirl still awaiting him on the bed he grabbed a case of documents and ran for the door, moving with surprising speed for such a big man.

He paused for a second before leaving. "Fly!" he told her and was gone.

Panting and sweating he ran along the many corridors, ignoring the increasing panic around him until at last he reached the main hall. He was halfway across it when there was a loud whistling from directly overhead and the first shell fired in the campaign hit the roof and brought it in. A cloud of thick grey dust enveloped the entire area and in a long drawn out rumble after the initial deafening explosion, hundreds of tons of masonry came down from thirty feet up.

Chapter One

 

The naked, sweating woman in her early twenties, ran full tilt up the hill and paused, panting for breath, at the top to look around. All round her lay the woods and parklands of the royal estates and all she had to do was evade capture until the sun set. If she could do that she could go free. They had told her that back at the palace, and she intended to do just that. She pushed a lock of her unruly blonde hair back out of her eyes and set off for what looked like a dense piece of woodland about a mile away to her left and several hundred feet beneath her. As she leapt down the steep hill, her breasts almost unbalancing her as they lifted and swung in differing rhythms to the rest of her, she reflected that the running shoes she had been given had been a real boon. She never thought to question why - after everything that had been done to her - she had been given them.

Only a week previously Thalia had been a free woman, just like any other Gelderis citizen. She had lived in the city of Kalthank, was a trainee school teacher, single but with a regular boyfriend and had only attended the executions and games at the arena because she was a loyal citizen and trusted her emperor and his government. But then had come the day when she had been driving to school and had been planning some work for later in that day and driven across traffic lights out of sync. The sensor buried in the tarmac had identified her car and she had been arrested.

They hadn't taken her to the police station. Instead she had been taken to the Civil Guard headquarters where she had had to wait with crowds of other equally bewildered citizens in a large room that smelled of despair and fear, until they could be seen and formally charged.

"It'll be the bloody arena for us, you mark my words!" a heavily built man had foretold. "My mate got Treated and some bastard stuck a sword in his guts at the end of a show a couple of weeks ago. I stayed to watch him until he died."

"But at least if you get Treated you can't do anything but go along with it. You even want to go along with it!" someone else put in.

"Yeah! It's if they don't Treat you! Then you'll really suffer and the bastards in the stands will love every minute of it!" put in another.

"I used to go because I thought it was real criminals down there!" a woman cried. "And I only took a short cut across some fields, turned out they belonged to the Earl! I don't want to be fucked to death out to there!"

"Yeah? But I bet you got turned on by watching all the things they do to the other poor sods down there, didn't you?" a cynical voice put in and the woman went abruptly quiet and blushed furiously.

"I watched my sister get hung up by her ankles and flogged for littering! The couple next to me were fucking the whole time she was being whipped. Two hundred lashes, she got," another man put in.

Thalia knew that the emperor and his consort, Lady Wenfell, had decreed that the public executions and entertainments in the arenas should be made more regular and rumours insisted that the authorities were now struggling to find enough criminals to feed the imperial appetite for public retribution. She had a horrible feeling that she had just fallen foul of that very difficulty.

Eventually she had been called out of that room and into another. It was bare and cold and just had an imposing desk set on the far side of it. Two big guards escorted her to stand in front of it. The sergeant behind the desk was busily entering some data on a mobile and didn't look up for a while but when he did, Thalia saw him give her a short but intense look that she recognised; it meant he was mentally undressing her. It was something she was used to, her five foot nine height, thick blonde hair, large breasts and effortlessly maintained, hour glass figure had left her with few girlfriends but as many one-night bunk-ups as she wanted. She wanted more than that but was aware that she had often been taken in and was a notch on quite a few bedposts around the city. She held her head high and looked the sergeant in the eye. To her surprise he didn't show the slightest embarrassment.

"Hmm. We've got a good looking creature here!" he said, getting up and walking around the desk, then walking around her, slowly. She made to turn herself so she could confront him but the two men grabbed her arms and held her where she was. She had been frightened when she came in but now she started to tremble. She knew about some of the things done in the arenas - at shows she hadn't attended because they sounded too grim. And the woman in the other room had mentioned being fucked to death! She knew that that happened. Was that what lay in store for her?

Thalia felt the man come to stand close behind her, she felt his breath on the side of her neck and her bottom was pressed against by his groin. She braced herself for whatever horror was about to come but he moved away, went back behind his desk and gave a short speech. He rattled through it as though he had recited it many times that day already.

"The Emperor has noted that the observance of his laws has become lax and he intends to do something about it. There will be a non-tolerance policy towards all offenders - however slight the offence. They will be publicly punished."

Thalia braced herself for a whipping in the arena - or worse - so his next words took her totally by surprise.

"Strip her!"

Before she could protest the men holding her grabbed the front of her blouse and ripped it open, showering buttons over the floor. Then they wrenched the garment down her arms and while one man undid her bra with an ease that she had rarely encountered in men, the other had unzipped her skirt. She tried to go into a frenzy of self-protection, kicking, hitting, screaming, but it was no use, the men were experts and soon she was being held between them with just a few rags hanging at her shoulders and the remains of her knickers about her ankles.

Rage at her humiliation overcame her fear and she yelled insults at the sergeant as he leaned on his desk, grinning at her distress. He let her go on until she had emptied her vocabulary and was hanging between the men gasping and panting.

"Yep! She'll do. Tell the Imperial Guard they can pick her up from the cells here any time they like," he said. "They probably won't be too long about it so if I were you, lads, I'd take advantage of the good fortune which has dropped a ripe little peach into our laps."

"Wha..?" A strangled cry of bewilderment escaped Thalia before she was dragged away. The Imperial Guard? What did they have to do with anything? But if they were coming for her that meant the emperor himself was involved and everyone knew what happened to those who came to his notice for the wrong reasons. Thalia tasted bile in her mouth as she felt sick with terror. Why was this happening? She had to get out of this nightmare! Now!

The final rags of her underwear had been pulled clear of her feet as she was dragged away and now she was naked but free of any encumbering clothing. She kicked out at one man, wrenched her arm out of his hands as he reeled away and aimed a wild punch at the other. Through sheer luck she connected with his nose and he stepped back just enough to let her go as she wrenched herself out of his grasp too. Without any conscious thought she sprinted for a door and burst through it.

It was another interrogation room and the woman who had been terrified of being fucked to death in the arena was on her knees to another sergeant whose cock was in her mouth. For a split second the three of them froze in a bizarre tableau, then Thalia saw another door and ran for it. She hoped the woman could cock-suck her way out of whatever her sentence was!

The next room she found herself in was even more bizarre, a slavegirl was masturbating the man whose sister had been flogged in the arena, and another guard was measuring the length of his erect cock. Even in that moment, Thalia noted it was a massive member and presumably meant he would be slated for a sexual part in some execution or other, and his own might be included as part of the entertainment. She dashed on, hearing doors slamming open and shut behind her, people shouting and alarms ringing. She found herself in yet another corridor and sprinted for the door at the end, but just as she reached it and had slammed it open to see that it opened onto a courtyard surrounded by buildings, hands grabbed her and dragged her kicking and screaming back inside. Through her hysteria she felt a syringe graze her upper arm and then, quite suddenly, she couldn't move and knew she had been 'stilled', it was the standard nerve agent used to paralyse suspects and prisoners for half an hour. To Thalia it felt as if an invisible cloak had been wrapped around her so tightly that she couldn't move. Not one single muscle beyond those she used to breathe, think and see with, responded. She fell backwards helplessly and jarred her head painfully on the floor. The two guards she had escaped from stood over her. They were breathing heavily and one of them was limping from where she had kicked him. Their faces were flushed and grim and Thalia knew she could expect scant sympathy from them.