Bound and Initiated (19 page)

Do not hesitate to degrade your girl, o true man,
ran one of the sayings of the lost books.
Your true majesty will only appear when you master her not only with your cock but with your mind. The creator made her to serve you, and to undergo whatever you choose. If you choose that she should be naked, she must be naked. If you choose that she must make her water in her undergarments, she must wet them thoroughly. If you choose that she shall declare herself a wanton little slattern, she must speak the words you give her to say.

Robert sighed as he watched Sarah concentrate on the monitor, and then turn to Grace to ask a question. Dusk couldn’t come soon enough for him. He switched off the monitor; he could spend all day watching his columba, but he had work to do. The report on the Hong Kong meeting was expected in Rome by close of business there.

The meeting focused on micro-trends in the energy markets. Pater Probus has concerns that our positions are insufficiently leveraged to cause, in due course, the unrest necessary to bring about the changes we seek in Far East governments. Pater Gregarius believes his staff of programmers can inflate the relevant currencies sufficiently that the leveraging issue will become unimportant.

It is the considered opinion of the writer of this report, Pater Borealis
(Robert used his secret Mithraic name, given to him at his initiation to the seventh degree)
, that Pater Gregarius has, largely without fully understanding what he has noticed, discerned a new and potentially highly disruptive element in the energy markets: the advent of real-time processing of…

Claudia called again at 11:30. “She’s doing very well. She found all the thematic mentions in all three test documents.”

“Whoa,” Robert replied. “Has any other columba ever done that?”

“No,” Claudia said. “It’s almost as if she’s had training as an analyst.”

He filed the report at noon, 1700 Rome time, and turned to administrative matters. He had the reports of his five heliodromi to approve. Each pater had a staff of men who ranked just below him, at the sixth degree—the sun-runners, or
heliodromi,
according to the names given to the Mithraic degrees in ancient Rome. The heliodromi saw to the day-to-day running of the guard and the order, exercising their administrative authority through their
persai, leones, and milites,
the ‘Persians,’ ‘lions,’ and ‘soldiers’ who constituted the rank and file of the guard in the field, infiltrating governments, corporations, and every other institution of any importance in global civilization.

The reports were mostly perfunctory, but one of them contained a detail that concerned Robert. Heliodromus Leontinus, a defense-industry lobbyist, wrote,

Miles Ranaeus, a receptionist at CIA headquarters at Langley, reports that Associate Director Seth Goldberg and a senior analyst named Joe Harkins met with a third person for two hours yesterday. Harkins is a conspiracy-focused analyst, and Goldberg is the head of the anti-conspiracy taskforce. The timing seems potentially concerning, since we have seen no other reaction at Langley to the suppressed video.

That video. Up for three hours on an Italian server before the guard’s hackers shut it down at the same moment five nymphobi broke down the door of the corvus who had posted it. The investigation into how a corvus—a first-degree initiate—had managed to get his phone into the Mithraeum in Ostia, and how the heliodromus who recruited him had made such a terrible mistake as to think him trustworthy, continued.

Most corvi (that is, ‘crows’), who were recruited for basic duty as nymphobi, milites, and leones, didn’t understand into what kind of organization they had been recruited, any more than the girls recruited as columbae did. More trust was placed in corvi, though, because of the basic tenets of Mithraism and its emphasis on masculine self-determination. Corvi were allowed to be present at banquet rituals like the one on the leaked video, and they were of course encouraged to fuck nuptae and captae—girls of the third degree—as much as they liked.

Those few recruited for leadership roles, as Robert had been recruited by David Chilton, had a week or so as corvi although they already knew what the guard really did. Frankly, Robert could understand why every few years they had a problem with a corvus telling tales. The guard had enjoyed improbably good fortune, actually, not to have had images leaked previously. The time as a corvus had clearly been intended by Cardinal Otranto as sort of probationary period: those who showed a lack of restraint or of trustworthiness could be weeded out, and their wild stories of sex rituals dismissed.

It seemed to Robert inevitable that a few corvi, their minds hormone-addled as they grew used to the idea that they could now have as much sex as they wanted with the pretty young nuptae and captae in their alluring leather-bound nakedness, would prove unequal to the duty of a true man to remain silent. He remembered his time as a corvus, spent almost entirely in the same Mithraeum where Sarah now sat bound to her bench in the study, with a bit of disbelief that his cock hadn’t fallen off.

He switched to the video feed again from the study to see how Sarah was getting along, and he saw on the screen immediately a reminder of those days: a corvus had come to fuck Grace over one of the study tables. As Robert watched, Sarah shot furtive glances at the couple; the blond young man had told Grace to bend over and grasp the opposite edge of the next table over from where Sarah worked, and now he thrust into her from behind, riding her backside with great abandon.

Robert wondered how the corvus, whose name he didn’t know, had singled out Grace. He remembered developing a little infatuation in his own corvus days with a nupta who actually looked a good deal like Sarah. She had worked in the laundry in those days, and every day Robert would go find her, bind her to the folding table, and fuck her up against it, first in her cunt and then in her anus. She belonged to David, actually, and now was his principal liaison in the Roman Mithraeum. Whenever she saw Robert, when he traveled to Rome, she would whisper, “I still remember the laundry room, you wicked corvus.”

Who would develop a corvus-crush on Sarah, he wondered, but quickly pushed the thought away.

The factor that had truly created the problem with the video was that though it was possible here in New York to keep the corvi inside the Mithraeum at all times, the Roman Mithraeum was nowhere near as grand, and the corvi, like their ancient predecessors in the legions, dispersed into Rome when they weren’t banqueting with their Mithraic brothers. Thus the unfortunate Corvus Pastorius, poster of the video, could bring his phone home and, apparently not intending to share the video with anyone except some friends he wanted to impress with a video of the exploits at what he thought was his employer and sex club, he had uploaded it to his kinky social media network with a caption that read, translated from the Italian,
Some crazy-ass sex shit going on at my new job! I love working here!

Corvus Pastorius now lived under close monitoring in a remote town in Southern Italy. He had everything he could ever want, short of leaving that town or being relieved of the necessity of calling a certain number every day to verify that he still understood that his stupidity had doomed him to a life of waiting on tables in a sleepy seaside restaurant.

The video had been up on the Internet for three hours, but it had been shared at least fifty-three times that the guard’s techs could discover, and probably hundreds, if not thousands more that they could not. To assume that the intelligence agencies didn’t have a copy would be foolish in the extreme, but until this item from Heliodromus Leontinus, there had been not the slightest indication that anyone had taken it seriously, let alone found the frame that showed David.

Now, though. This meeting of conspiracy experts.

Suddenly, as he watched Sarah try not to look at the hard fucking her nupta trainer was getting from the well-built blond corvus, Robert’s blood ran cold.

A meeting of conspiracy experts in Langley, and the next morning a columba arrives from Alexandria, Virginia.

He closed the window with the video feed in it and looked up Sarah’s recruitment record. Her background checked out completely: college dropout living in Alexandria writing romance novels. The probe of her laptop showed that she was a 1000 words a day kind of writer with occasional surges: on days she wrote, she had a low of five hundred and a high, when she was finishing
Meeting Steven,
of thirty-five hundred. She had started into
Loving Steven
immediately, Robert saw with an irrational swell of vicarious pride, and had already written twenty thousand words of it.

Careful. You’re starting to think of her as your very own repressed little romance writer. The repressed little romance writer whom you’re planning to deflower tonight. Whom you spanked over your lap last night. Whom you brought to the most adorable orgasm you’d ever seen, after her spanking.

“It’s almost as if she’s had training as an analyst.”

He sat motionless, looking at Sarah’s mostly unremarkable file: a perfectly normal address in Alexandria, a perfectly normal laptop computer, along with an adorably awful set of romance novels.

If she is a CIA analyst,
he thought,
she’s going to be a tightly bound, well-fucked CIA analyst whom I persuade to give her heart and soul to the way of Mithras.

He opened his mail client and sent David Chilton,
[email protected],
an email.

At 5:57 p.m., the exact time of sunset, Robert stood at the double doors of the Hall of Initiation, dressed in his red robe. From high up in the hall of Mithras, the sunset bell rang. Alex, as
janitor orientalis—
the doorkeeper of the East—said, “
Nox est,
” and Kevin, as
janitor occidentalis—
the doorkeeper of the West—replied, “
Tempus est
.”

Robert said, “
Pater sum. Adsum fututurus
.”

The doors opened before him with a bang, the images of Mithras and the bull giving way to the majestic sight of the hall with its blazing fire, and the vast mosaic in front of it that showed so very many ways to enjoy a girl. He marveled, as he always did, at the depth of symbolism conveyed in that fire: not only the light of Mithras, and the idea of his taming the wild to make civilization possible, but also, for the modern guard, the paramount importance of the world’s insatiable hunger for energy that had almost destroyed their planet already, and would bring the human species to its knees before two hundred years were out.

To burn all that natural gas, day and night, heated the Mithraeum, but it also encapsulated the grim reality of the guard’s mission: to hasten the collapse and to regulate it. That symbolism led also, in the mind of the true man of Mithras, to the duty to fuck; to let the most ecstatic feelings of which the human body was capable reign over him, as he mastered his girl and demonstrated to himself and his fellow true men his strength and his resolve.

Robert walked straight to the door of the pleasure chamber, and pushed its right side so that it swung around to reveal Sarah. Claudia had fed her in the girls’ refectory on the fourth floor, and she had had a bath after that, in the big bathroom that adjoined this pleasure chamber. Claudia had then, Robert knew, perfumed Sarah’s hairless cunt, as well as the more conventional places, with Robert’s favorite eau de cologne, a classic floral scent with a tiny hint of Eastern spices.

As the pleasure chamber was revealed, he pictured the scene in the bathroom as, fresh from the shower, Sarah received the instruction to touch her toes, with her backside to her domina, while the delicate, stinging spray caressed her tender, untried cunt-lips, making her blush and pout. For Sarah must have known why her mistress prepared her pussy thus, of course: a true man would soon open her there, and he liked girls’ cunts to smell sweet when he stooped to examine them before he fucked them. Indeed Robert did like it thus, though his favorite scent was truly the one that arose when he caressed a girl there for a few moments, and her own private wetness’ aroma mingled with the perfume’s to produce a nearly indescribable mingling of elegance and lewdness.

Sarah lay bound to the bench, which now stood between the columns. Her bottom, of course, faced Robert, and her knees were spread so that she could not help showing him her pretty cunt. He had begun to grow hard at the image of Claudia perfuming his columba, and now he found his cock with his right hand, under his robe, and simply enjoyed the sight of the girl he would deflower tonight: her pert bottom-cheeks ready for spanking, her graceful thighs in the leather cuffs, the lovely curve of her back over the bench. In his hand, his cock grew as hard as iron at the sight.

Her head turned slightly, as if she could hardly keep herself from looking back at where she knew he must stand, but knew that she would be punished for interfering with his voyeuristic pleasure that way. When a pater wanted to admire his naked columba from behind, she must keep her eyes respectfully forward.

A little reluctantly, Robert let go of his cock then, and strode to her, smiling at the thought of how much greater the pleasure would be inside her tight little cunt. He put his hand on her bottom possessively, and felt a shiver go through Sarah’s body.

“Hello, columba,” he said softly.

“Hello, pater,” Sarah replied in a meek little voice.

“I’ve missed you today. Did you have a pleasant day?” He began to rub her bottom gently, just letting his fingertips linger a bit at the tender spot where her cunt-lips began, where he could already see a little of her arousal shining.

“Y-yes,” Sarah stammered.

“Did you like watching Grace get fucked, in the study room? I checked in on the video feed and saw that.”

Sarah gave only a little whimper in response as Robert’s fingers became more insistent, rubbing now all the way to her clitoris.

“How did it make you feel,” he murmured, “knowing that you would be fucked tonight?”