Judgment (15 page)

Judgment

by Denise Hall

and stuff. He couldn't speak, couldn't walk, couldn't use
silverware, but you can bet he did before they literally
conditioned him to not know how."

The two men silently watched the Detective give me the
last of his food, then Jim reached over and dropped the
remains of his lunch in my lap. He wiped his mouth on his
wrist. "I wasn't hungry anyway."

* * * *

Master Deaton strolled casually up and down the rows of tables—observing the Lessers as they expanded and perfected their skills in poetry and creative writing—a cane clasped loosely behind his back. Here and there he paused to read someone's work, or to help with a problem, or to redirect a wandering attention with a warning tap from the end of that cane. As he reached the end of the last row, he circled my desk, set apart from the others.

"Do you need motivation?" he asked. His emotionless, basilisk eyes stared into mine, utterly void of pity or sympathy.

"No, Master," I said softly. Because after three days of looking at him and this unformed brick of clay, I suddenly knew what I would create. I took my hands from my lap, picked up my tools, and diligently set myself to work. By the time for lunch drew near, I had the preliminary shape of a 133

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female in Posture One, bowed down with forehead to the ground.

Tane's guards came for me just before the intercom chimed the noon hour. I waited in my seat until the leash was clipped to my collar, and my hands were cuffed via two leather wrist restraints behind my back—my latest reward for bad behavior. They weren't necessary. The Demerit Caning alone had been enough to convince me never again to throw dishes, knives, forks, or food up onto the masters' dais at Tane or Deaton.

Tane was sitting at his desk, writing letters to masters located on the Outside, when I arrived. The guard unclipped my hands and leash, and without a word, I lowered myself into a subservient position on the floor.

"Rise," he said without looking up, his pen continuing to scratch upon Judgment stationary. Just as quickly, before I had even fully assumed Posture Two, he told me, "Present."

I arched my back, lifting my hips to him. My fingers parted the folds of my sex for his visual enjoyment should he deign to look. My head and shoulders were leaned so far back that they almost touched the floor behind me. He left me like this while he continued to write, and before the first minute had passed, my muscles all strained to hold me thus, causing me to shake.

"I have forty-three orders from eager buyers and only nineteen Elites," he murmured softly, more thinking aloud than speaking to me. "I can think of eleven Midpoints that I can prematurely graduate. One buyer doesn't care about the quality of the product, so long as it can suck and fuck well 134

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enough to please his customers. He wants five, but I won't waste good malleable material on a master of that caliber. I'll give him two low-brow Midpoints and an untrainable Primary."

Had I not already been trembling from exertion, I would have started right then. "Me, Master?" Was I untrainable?

His pen paused its scratching, and he turned his head to look at me. After a moment of unreadable contemplation, he scrapped his chair back and stood up. When he came to me, he reached down to take hold of my collar.

"Up," he said.

At first I was relieved that my aching muscles would no longer be forced to hold the torturous Posture Three. But he soon had me wishing he'd put me back to it.

Tane looped a piece of rope through the rings in my wrist cuffs and hoisted me up onto my toes as he tied me to a hook in one wall. He cut my uniform from my body and left me hanging there nude, a slab of meat strung up for the butcher.

Then he turned out all the lights but the table lamp he wrote by, blanketing me in darkness.

"Now be silent," he told me and went back to his letters.

It wasn't long before my arms began to ache. I tried to alleviate this by standing as high up onto my tiptoes as I could porch, but I simply could not stand that way for long.

My muscles, stretched into this new torment, reacted with sharp contractions of pain so intense that I was bathed by my own sweat within the first half an hour.

And not just my arms, the pain rippled down through my shoulders, into my back, chest and belly, and all the way to 135

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my hips and legs. The entire length of me was a mass of protesting muscle that soon had me whimpering, "Please, Master, this one begs to come down."

He continued to write as though he hadn't heard.

"Please, Master," I pleaded, my voice cracking. My frame jerked as a strong spasm clenched along my tortured shoulders and into my back.

Without raising his eyes, he said, "I told you to be silent."

I started to cry.

He slapped his pen down on the table and stood up. From the trunk at the foot of his bed, he began to withdraw various crops and straps, anal plugs and beads of all sizes and shapes, devices meant to cause both pleasure and pain. What he returned with, however, was a ball gag and weights, which he fastened around each of my ankles.

"Open your mouth," he softly commanded.

Shivering, I obeyed, but sobbed as he gently stuffed the ball bit into my mouth and tied it in place so I couldn't spit it out again.

He patted my bottom in warning. "Now, be silent."

Back at the table, he picked up the pen to continue writing as though he'd never been interrupted.

In an attempt to distract myself from the shooting pain in my extremities, I tried to remember what life was like before Judgment.

There was nothing, just a big empty blank. I couldn't even bring to mind the faces of my parents. Just how long I had been within these mountain walls, I don't know. My days all ran one into the other. Mere weeks felt like years. The chime 136

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of the intercom, as it sang out our daily breaks, marked the passage of time. Each posting of the Demerit list meant another day was almost ended, and I had many of these markers stretching out behind me. I had endured the wrath of nine different Black Masters and narrowly avoided a few others. What did that mean? Had Judgment consumed four, maybe five months of my life?

The shooting pains grew in force and frequency. By the time I heard the intercom chime the dinner hour, muffled wails and moans were coming through my gag. Through a haze of red pain, I heard Tane get up again.

My eyes peeled back in agonized dread to see him return to the trunk. He dug through it briefly, then withdrew a thin, gold chain with gripping clasps at each end. As he came back to me, he cupped my naked breasts in his warm hands.

"I love the feel of your body in my hands." He bent his head to take each nipple into his mouth in turn. He suckled and nipped, gently scrapping his teeth across the tips until they stood up eagerly for his attention. Then he cruelly attached the clamps to me and tightened them down. My toes no longer touched the ground as he tightened the ropes through the hook and hung me further up upon the wall. The pressure in my hips and shoulders seemed to double. My cries were muffled by the gag.

His finger traced down the length of the chain down to my navel. He gave a sharp tug at the center to hear me shriek, the ball stifling me so that I hardly made a sound.

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"Absolutely beautiful," he said, more to himself than to me. Then he left me hanging again and went back to his work.

The hours passed. I barely heard the chime for Lights Out above my own constant mewling cries of pain. My body was consumed by fire. I was one long convulsing wave of burning agony by the time he lay his pen aside. He stretched then as he stood and, with hands on his narrow hips, he slowly stalked me from across the room.

Tears streamed down my face. My nose was running and I was bathed entirely in sweat. I know I couldn't have been a pretty sight, but Tane seemed not to care. He gently brushed clinging tendrils of damp hair back from my eyes, then left me hanging there as he walked out of my peripheral range.

My eyes closed miserably. I whimpered and shuddered as my body tightened in another spasm. The unexpected touch of something cool against the side of my throat had my eyes peeling open again in agonized disbelief. With effort, I brought him into focus. He held a small jar of minty smelling ointment in one hand, his other gently rubbed the pale cream into my neck and shoulders. He covered every inch of my body, up my arms, down my legs to my feet, even taking time to caress between the digits of my fingers and toes.

"Does that feel better?" he asked, soft and solicitous as he bathed my face with a cold, wet cloth.

I groaned, tipping my head back against the stone wall as all the places where he'd been touching my body began to tingle and then to heat. The sensation building hotter and hotter until I burned all over, awash in an ointment that 138

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burned my skin like fire. I groaned constantly, my eyes widening, beseeching him for relief from this new torment.

"Good," he said. "It's beginning to work then."

He only spooned more of that deceptively comforting ointment onto his fingers. "This will help, I promise. You'll be very grateful for this stuff tomorrow when you have to move."

He rubbed it into my back, belly, hips and thighs. My bottom he caressed in slow, rhythmic circles, massaging me with medicinal fire until all sense of cool had turned to flame everywhere. And I mewed continuously, my eyes pleading with him to stop, please stop.

He dipped two fingers back into the jar. Reaching down between my thighs and behind me, he trailed a thick pale line down the crease of my buttocks, over my anus, and up into the quivering folds of my sex. Relentless, he stroked it into me, igniting an unbearable fire there.

As I sobbed around my gag, his mouth dipped to my breasts, opening to take first one tightly clasped nipple, then the other. The heat of his lips aggravated the fire and made it burn ever hotter as he suckled, rubbing his tongue against the stiff, aching tips, so sensitized by the clamps that it felt as if he scraped me raw with sandpaper.

I hurt both inside and out. My arms felt as though they were being slowly pried from their sockets. It was a fight to drag air through my nose to my aching lungs. My head throbbed, my ears filled with the pounding of blood at my temples, like the relentless marching of an army of feet.

Tane forced my legs apart, lifting my limp left leg and wrapping it around his hips, holding it in place with the hand 139

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that held the ointment jar. His other remained busy between my thighs, working the heating solution into me until it felt as if he held a flaming brand between those nether lips. My whimpers grew to screams, long, keening sounds that the ball gag muffled to whimpers.

"That's it," Tane whispered. "Beg for me."

I garbled syllables around the gag frantically. As he thrust two fingers deep inside me, each jerk of my hips felt as though it dislocated my shoulders. He pushed that lotion into my body and that tingling burn sank to my womb, lurching my agonized frame into orgasm. As I shuddered and shook all around him, he smiled into my tear-filled eyes. Only when the convulsions completely stopped did his fingers finally withdraw from me.

I sagged helplessly in his arms, my limbs incapable of supporting me, when he finally removed the weights from my ankles and untied me from the hook.

"It's all right, Infant," he said to me. "Sleep now."

He tucked me into his bed as if I were just that, a weak and defenseless babe, and I sobbed, every inch of me so in pain that I didn't care whether I was quiet or not.

He raised my head and pressed a cup to my lips. "Drink this."

A thick, herbal concoction was poured down my throat, and within minutes I was spiraling deep into the black abyss of sleep.

At some point during the night, he woke me so I could eat.

I could barely move; the agony of simply trying had me crying out. Tane seemed to expect this and fed me dinner in 140

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bed, from his plate no less. Little cubes of meat and cheese with crackers, pieces of sliced apples, pears and grapes, wine from his own cup, which he held to my lips. Funny how something like this could make me feel special, but it did. It was a meal unlike anything a Lesser in the Pit could hope for, with each bite taken from the hand that took delight in tormenting me.

"You please me," Tane told me. "We'll have to do this again. Perhaps tomorrow, if you are well enough to raise your arms over your head. You know I could spend years listening to you weep."

He carried me into the bathroom and cleaned me afterwards because my arms ached to the point of uselessness. Then he carried me back to his bed and lay down beside me to sleep, his arm thrown casually around my waist. As his snores resonated through the room, I slowly, painfully, slid out from under the blankets and his arm.

This, my second escape attempt, was a lesson in absolute agony. I could barely move. Every muscle hurt beyond comprehension. It took forever just to drag myself to his chamber door, which took another lifetime to open due to fumbling fingers that refused to grip. By the time I got that door knob to turn, I was in tears, sweating from exhaustion and pain, my entire body throbbing with the effort it took just to keep standing. Sheer force of will was all that kept me going. The only thing that worked in my favor was the intercom, which this time, thankfully, remained silent.

I found my way outside with very little difficulty. The door to the courtyard was unlocked and though I thought this odd 141