Thar Shaddin

The whores were ignored. The whores were always ignored. The underclass was ignored. Slaves were ignored. Everyone who wasn't at the top got forgotten and simply ceased to exist until they were of use. Solana knew how that worked. She knew it quite well. She prayed to gods she didn't believe existed that her usefulness would not be needed, and that she would simply remain a stain on the wall.

Adomankh was furious. He was not a man given to loud rages; he was no Merysi to revel in the suffering of underlings. He was a man who expected things to go certain ways. He did not really believe in gods either, Solana could see. He was god. God did not like his little universe to suffer the unforseen. It was an insult.

Stella would not have a chance to spring from Adomanhk. His jaw tensed, his nostrils flared. His eyes centered on Merysi, and his proudly erect cock quivered and sagged. He stood, dumping Stella from him without so much as a flicker of his attention. She might as well have been the blood soaking into the ground, for all the heed he then paid her.

Fadil was watching with a twist to his mouth. He seemed bothered mostly to the interruption to the cock sucking, and was staring at Jutaria with a look one might give a bitch that had not performed the right trick on command. Even he looked away, however, when Adomankh gripped Merysi's wrist. The same wrist that connected to the hand that had done such unspeakable things.

Solana understood somewhere in the wretched hind part of her mind what the man intended to do when he drew forth his own knife. A fancy instrument for his lordship's personal use, but a deadly implement all the same. She watched, because she had to see.

"I gave you the only warning you had ever needed as my guest, friend." Adomankh said casually, as Merysi's lustful eyes started to clear with the adrenaline of anger and panic. Adom's tools were always ready, more than ready. That was how he managed to cut off Merysi's thumb before the other man had much of a chance to struggle. Or maybe his reflexes were slowed after depraved sex acts. Who knew.

One moment the thumb was connected, the next Adomankh was holding it out towards Jutaria.

"Woman, take this to your master with my apologies. I would know what price is to be paid for the girl. Slave, you will remove the girl and do with it whatever the woman requires."

As she was nearly thrown from Adomankh's lap, Stella's feet caught her and she stood after a few quick balancing steps from him. She adjusted her little amounts of clothing so that her breasts and genitals were covered again, hating the dirty feeling that her body was giving her, although she had long ago become rather used to it being that way. She watched with silent malice, a hard expression on her face although most people would have assumed it as blank and stupid instead. The thumb was severed and she barely flinched, although the suddenness of it made her fingers quiver with some mix between anticipation and surprise.

She had hoped he would castrate the fat bastard.
She made a silent promise to do so if she was ever to see Merysi again.

Jutaria on the other hand was a little less desensitized to punishments of this nature, and jumped sharply both when the thumb was cut and again when he thrust it in her direction. Her hands were at her mouth; she had wanted to spit the flavor of Fadil out but she was a bit distracted by this "appeasement." She seemed unwilling to touch it, but understood the reasoning behind such an act and held out a bit of cloth from her top, just beneath her breasts. The fabric was so thin that the blood would soak through, but the thought of actually touching it made her skin quiver and her insides squirm.

Adomankh dropped it into the bit of frabric and Jutaria wrapped it and kept it from falling with one hand.

Stella walked to the slave with Jutaria, looking at Suhkra, as if afraid she would die within the minute. The older whore gestured toward Suhkra and said quietly, "She must be returned to Jamil's Tavern immediately for attentions." Medical attention to be more precise, but her sentence was tainted by her slight foreign accent and an odd kind of fear.

Jutaria looked at Adomankh. "Master Jamil will want payment for this and you hear from him soon," she assured him.

The body of the whore lay there befouled and oozing blood, and Solana was expected to pick it up. She was strong for a woman, and the physical labours of the past days had only reinforced those muscles she'd gotten from taking her fencing more seriously than most noblewomen. She reached up to tug at her ear as she stepped forward a trembling step, feeling an itching deep within. She moved quicker when Adomankh and Merysi started growling at each other, handily reminded that she didn't want Adom's attentions on her person.

The body -- living or no, Solana didn't care -- stank. Sex, blood and the deep rich stench of bowels overwhelmed her as she scooped and lifted with a tremendous effort born of fear. She immediately felt her left arm dampened. That was the end of the body, the horribly abused end. No, both ends had been abused, and in ways Solana would have previously said existed only in the worst, most punishing of afterlives. She felt her stomach roiling, and her right eye trembled and twitched.

They left Adomankh's home.

People moved out of the way when you carried the broken body of a whore. Disgust, anger, one disturbing case of interest, fear: by her ancestors, she just stopped watching. She followed Jutaria and kept her eyes locked to the other woman's head. Her legs trembled with every step, and every four or so she had to stop and resettle the body in her arms. The task. The sack? Surely if she thought of it as something else, something other than everything burned into her memory she wouldn't have to fight the urge to dribble bile down her front and the. . .thing she carried.

By the time they'd reached their destination Solana could have wept with relief. The deep bowel odor had intensified, and her muscles screamed to be released. She'd almost dropped her burden more times than she would care to admit, and Changers knew what would happen to her if she did and word got back to that man.

She feared a man. She was unaccustomed to that.

She wasn't quite ready for the reactions they got when they stepped through the door. But, despite the roil of emotions that it provoked within her, all she could wonder was whether or not she was still going to be whipped at the end of the night, after she'd cleaned the scene of the horror.

The strange kind of tremble rose through Stella's spine and she felt her stomach quiver dangerously. Desensitized as she was to pain and viewing others, namely men, in pain, the wretchedness of these actions struck her. Her insides felt foul and the air smelled putrid and denser than it should have. There was the smell of skin, flesh, of some strange wet fish, blood. She was, for the most part, used to those. But it also reeked of fecal matter and an animal brand of fear. She stuck closely to Jutaria, although she knew that such a woman would not really protect her as she was incapable of doing so. Rank demanded that she be behind her, and the sickness that filled her made her closer than usual. Normally the women would have washed and changed into clean robes before heading back, less to uphold the decency of the establishment and more to boost sales. This time they didn't, and instead walked with the slave all the way back to Jamil's Tavern, half undress, coated in sweat and other bodily fluids, stinking of sex. Neither Jutaria nor Stella appeared to care about the stares. Neither one of them had any real dignity left to care about such exposure, especially when the girl's life could very well be threatened.

Stella didn't know what had happened to Suhkra, but she had heard stories of similar happenings. The Tavern only threw away girls who were useless, but from the looks of it, Suhkra might very well have had her last client.

An odd emotion. Envy?

Jutaria led them around the dark corner to the shabby-bricked walls of Jamil's Tavern. Music played from inside, a mixture of strange flutes and stringed instruments that sounded intentionally exotic and sultry. Warm light poured from the windows, and from the outside it looked almost like a legitimate business. The first sign that it wasn't came from the chipping red paint of the door that looked like it had been painted with a single, cheap coat. There were burns in the wood behind it.

The scent of poor incense plagued the interior with a suffocating air, and the drab, once-white walls made it look more like an old prison than a tavern. A man tending the bar looked up at them with the least-convincing smile Stella had seen anywhere. She watched his face fade to blank, and then to some mixture of morbid curiosity and knowing. He said something in Jerkhos to a much smaller man behind him, who ran off to another room.

Jutaria motioned the slave into a small room (she knocked first) with a small, very stained sleeping pad and cheap, orange drapery lining the wall. "Gentil now," she said, her eyes cooing but her voice sharp and strangled. They waited for hardly a few seconds before a Supervisor shoved into the small room. He made an angry growling noise upon the sight, and smell, of the girl's body. He lowered close to her chest and checked her pulse with his fingers, then stood and watched her like there was nothing to be done.
"Who was the client?"
"Adomankh, he had friend called Merysi," said Jutaria.
"Farahu mach!" he hissed, and smacked her so hard, she squeaked. "Get out! All of you stink of dick," and both Stella and Jutaria knew to leave him there.

Jutaria raced off somewhere, apparently in a hurry to do something. Stella looked at the slave, looked at herself, and wiped her hand over her sweaty face. "Washroom," was all she said before she grabbed Solana's wrist and pulled her with her to the washroom.
They both were dirty, just with different dirts.

Touch so soon after what Solana had witnessed and the touch of the so befouled body was not welcome, but her initial jerk away from Stella did not immediately dislodge the unwelcome hand. Solana became passive, and allowed herself to be dragged from the room that housed the dead whore. Almost dead, dead, it didn't really matter to Solana. That she had been forced to witness such a depraved act and then carry its twisted fruits was unspeakable in its horror.

The washroom was laughable. A closet of a room, it held a basin on a pedestal with water that did not look as though it was changed more than once or twice daily. Despite that, it was relatively clean, and Solana would lay money on it belonging exclusively to the whores, since the masters wouldn't want to soil whatever washroom potential clients might use. There was a tall sided, cramped tub shoved in the corner, though since it was likely the whores would have to haul the water on what pitifully small free time they had, Solana doubted it was used very often. Easier to scrub with sand or a bucket of water, when trade demanded cleanliness.

They were both silent. What to say? 'Get raped with fruit often?' came to mind, and pressure suddenly built up in her chest and pushed its way past her throat. Solana giggled, an ugly sound. Once that was out, she found herself panting. The air in her lungs was not enough. Her gut twisted, but there was nothing left to retch out, and though bitterness flooded her throat she didn't spit it out. That was all she had. She wrestled her body under control, and put her trembling hands onto the lip of the basin.

Solana smiled at Stella. All the careful and elaborate plans she had fantasized, the subtle manipulations and secretive plotting were nothing. They didn't matter. Her tongue, oh so controlled for all her life, was set loose to flap as it pleased.

"I want to kill my master. Would you like to help me?"

Stella pushed into the tiny washroom, then immediately went to the little basin. From beneath it she pulled out a piece of glassware shaped like a fat pipet, then attached an odd-looking bulb to the end of it made from some form of animal stomach or other lining. She used the instrument to clean herself, paying little attention to the slave. She was so used to doing this several times a day that her movements were mechanical in nature, almost too practiced. The dirtied water was placed in a bucket to be taken out at a later time, already near full of soiled liquid. When she was finished, she used a sponge to clean the important parts of herself, then dry herself, then wash out the glass instrument.

It took her all of five minutes before she took a clean sponge and soaked it in water. She went to the slave and in a strange act that signified neither care nor concern, she removed the veil and moved the sponge across the woman's brow.
"I want to kill my master. Would you like to help me?" her voice sounded shaky, strange, yet hard and serious.

Stella kept wiping her face. She didn't flinch, but her hand slowed while she looked with a firm eye across the slave's face. Then, the recognition took her and she stopped altogether. "The market," she said simply, and didn't know whether the events were connected or not, whether the slave had somehow had something to do with what had just happened. The whole idea seemed unlikely. After all, why would a slave have tried to manipulate the whores into being... abused?

"Ye're serious." The statement made her stare with a curled lip at the woman, not out of disgust but out of something like confusion, or awe. The real answer to the question was, obviously, yes. The long answer was the response to her last beating weeks ago, by none other than Master Jamil himself. "The Master would kill me. I can't. No. The shite are yew thinkin'?" But it was more than obvious from the tone of her voice that she would have done anything to feel the neck of that horrible man in her hands, to put a knife in his foul skull.

Solana's eyes weren't quite focused on Stella as the other woman wiped her face. One more surreal act on top of the others. Solana didn't stop smiling, or trembling.

"We kill him too. Figure us out a way that won't get us killed. I don't want to be the one doing the dying. I had plans and being here wasn't . . ."

Her mind wrenched away to that courtyard, and the trills of suppressed laughter. She felt the sweat on the back of her neck as if it was there, but when she reached back to wipe it there was only her skin.

The feeling of these moments felt dreamlike and as if they were out of sequence with normal life. Even Stella was not used to such behavior from men in general. Touching the slave felt fuzzy, rocky, strange. It was almost as if the sounds outside, the visuals inside, none of it registered. She kept her eyes on the woman, but she was looking through her.

"Ye're insane." The statement seemed like an expected one, but the irony in the words made the second word catch for a moment in her throat. From her tone and the lack of a heavy accent, she could hear that the slave was Eyropan, like herself.
"You're mean," Solana snapped.
"I don' wanna die here either, but these cats is too big to kill," Stella said.
"I didn't see cowardice in you at the -- "
"An' I know if I get out things is just gonna be the same as always," her hand had stopped wiping and she turned away to the basin, wringing out the sponge in the little bucket. She set it in a pile.

Solana watched her, eyes hard.

"Fecking crazy," Stella said, as if to drive in her point. Her mind was spinning. She felt numb all over. Her lip quivered.
"Get over it. You're more than a quivering sack of parts to please men. Yeah? More," Solana said, contemptuous and not at all sympathetic.

Cornered by these words, Stella walked the single pace to the porcelain bath and gripped its rim with her fingers. Then, without knowing exactly why or what she was doing, she swiftly turned around and punched the slave in the jaw. She dropped her fists and they quivered, in some form of anguish or uncertainty, she couldn't have been sure.

"We have to kill them," Stella said, with an uncharacteristic softness. The aggression followed by those words seemed final, to her. She rubbed the knuckles of the hand she'd punched with, staring at the floor.

Solana reeled back, her arm coming up in a defensive block for a follow up strike that didn't occur. Her mouth opened in a snarl, and the pain prevented her from immediately hearing what Stella said. Not that it mattered, at this point. What did Stella have to say that would be useful? She was raw and potent rage: exactly why Solana wanted her, and not some other whore.

Solana straightened, fingers to her jaw. "Save it for them," she growled. The layers of composure that had begun to reclaim her were once more stripped. She was not in Corezo any more. While the principle was the same, she could not act the same and expect the same results. So it was that she offered Stella a crazy sneer of her own.

"How long do we have in here?"

One of her knuckles was bleeding; the skin had burned a bit with the friction of the sudden aggression. She put her hand in her mouth and started sucking the blood out of the tiny wound, still staring at the floor. She'd never noticed how dirty it was until now. Her body quivered slightly, either with shock or with confusion, or some combination of the two.

She paused for a moment before answering. Her mind was churning with images of blood, hatred, and possibilities for the future. Possibilities that until now, she hadn't thought about in years. The mere idea that she could be more was a taunting one, a thought that she had explored but always eventually shot down.

"Five, ten minute, maybe. The girls'll be tryin't see Suhkra and wha's happened," she said finally.

"You got a plan?"

Solana wasn't smiling now. "Information," she said heavily, "is the key to the success of any assassination. I will need to know the routine of your master as well as my own. What substances do they abuse, if any. Who they talk to. What their habits are. Anything that can be exploited. We must look for opportunity, and take it where we can. I would prefer for us to be far from the moment of death, but that will happen after we gather details.

"How often are you allowed from this place of your own free will?"

"Not often."
She had been nodding continuously for over a minute. There was something between fear and anger that flooded her inside and out, but she couldn't place the emotion.
"They let me go alone during day runs on occasion, and I can get away from the supervisors when we visit the market crossing to get food," she said, playing with her fingers as if she was counting on them. A banging noise that sounded like broken glass rang from outside and she jumped a moment.

Most supervisors, male and female, knew better than to trust Stella on her own. But she could be slippery when it came to escape. Few were expecting an attempt now anyway because after the kitchen incident two weeks ago, Stella had become more reserved.

Solana immediately turned her head towards the noise, though the source was out of her sight. She'd been staring at Stella coldly. Though she had not reacted too badly to the punch, it would remain a black mark upon her use of Stella, affecting how she would treat the girl when she no longer had use for her.

In the meantime, their time together grew short. "I go to the market before noon each day. When you have useful information for me, meet me there. Understand?" There was a slight sneer in the words.

"Understood." Her voice was a quivering puddle in her ears. The shock from the manor had not worn off yet, and she was still shaken by her own unexpected violence toward the slave. There were questions about her, questions about her origins, any why she seemed to be such an expert on taking down large enemies. Within the span of three minutes she had become a spy for a person she didn't know. She tossed a used rag into a pile of them in the bathroom corner, and opened the door. She stepped through the doorway quickly with her hands folded in front of her.

Immediately she noticed that a group of ten or more people had gathered beside Suhkra's room. A man with a white coat was talking to Muran, one of Jamil's top supervisors. Stella couldn't hear what he was saying over the clamor of voices plugging the tavern, all talking about the girl. Only a handful of men and their selected whores were off at the other side of the bar, lounging on cheap couches or chairs, ignoring the seriousness of the situation.

In an instant Stella's hand was grabbed and she was abruptly pulled down a hallway and into one of several empty rooms. The tan-skinned supervisor who had first looked at Suhkra was the one who had shoved her into the room. When the door closed behind her, she realized suddenly that she had never asked the slave's name.

The slave girl was gone, and there was nothing more for Solana to do but return to the place of her imprisonment. To return, and receive her lashing.

As she walked to her cage the sensations of her body became all the more real. The prickle of sand underfoot became individual pinpoints of discomfort, and the slick heat on her skin was a live, slippery touch. Sweat tickled as it pooled and dripped between her breasts and shoulder blades, which ached with remembered strain of the dead burden she had carried. An odor rose above her, exquisitely perfumed with the gut of the human body's secrets that had once been neatly tucked in the whore. All of the feelings experienced individually, separately acknowledged by her frantic mind. All of it engulfing her without overwhelming her; heightened by the sole emotion of fear that pulled her feet to an unusual slowness. Solana, who strode with certainty and arrogance, was reduced to the crawling gait of a beggar.

Air tangled in her chest with her sick heart until the breathing-beating hurt all at once and became almost impossible, choking her back until her entirety trembled with the knowing of what she willingly walked towards.

I will overcome this.

Solana had overseen whippings. She received no unnatural gratification from watching them, but she expected an exactness from the punishments she had ordered, and as Spymistress she had to ensure certain measures gained her the expected results. Flesh had wilted and broken under her hard gaze, and she had accepted then the cruelty of her actions, and the stain such orders undoubtedly lay upon her pristine essence. Solana was not faint of heart, and could and did use whatever came to hand to get what she wanted.

Physical pain was one tool Solana had never had turned upon her. Anguish of the spirit, of the mind she had used and had used against her to varying effects; it was something that could be measured and adjusted. Solana had thought she could understand pain.

Kamesh had her wrists tied. He stood her upright in the small pool open to the sky that the servants brought the washing to, and pushed her face into the heavy bamboo frame that the household laundry was dried upon. Every fiber of rough twine pressed into her skin, and made her dizzy with the perceived numbers that she could not focus upon to count. Her mouth was dry, but it seemed her throat was heavy with thick saliva she could not swallow.

I will get past this.

Her existence balanced in a small aching silence that heralded the first strike, the first crack of dead leather against her living skin.

What was pain?

A whisper of exactness, orders, and a tool brought to her back. Skin split by sheer force. A knife edge salted cry. Sharp bright, searing dark, aching ripples spiking to her groin and curling her toes. Every pleasure twisted. Bowel shaking retching, empty squealing.

Pain was that sweet hollow moment when you thought something might break, and then knew that it had.

Pain was everything.

Eventually the eternal moment came to an end, but it would never end. Solana watched snot, spit and tears dribble down from her face, made blurry by the hot mess in her eyes.

"Do you understand?" Kamesh's insistent hissing resolved into words.

Solana was every prisoner, every culprit, every criminal. "Yes," the word came from her raw throat with the force of her sobbing, every bit of it useless.

Another eternity passed before she found herself on the floor of her small cell, clutching at the pitiful cloth that passed for bedding, as powerless as she'd ever been. There were some nights like that, passed in a painful exhausted haze as her back healed. She was disgraced and without pride, expected to perform her given tasks without excuse. Her memory overlay itself in a duality of roles, the power she'd once wielded half-remembered like a daydream, mocked by her present pain.

The days passed, and the pain curled inward and dug deeply into her muscles, remembered even as her wounds scabbed and began to heal. That her back would never be the same again was something her body told her deep into the night, but she had nothing to offer to herself but the hate that grew up around her forming scars, twisting to bed down with the pain. Hate that she forced in deep, beneath the fear that had found sudden surprising purchase within the panic that she might be whipped again. Fear that grew in the shame of knowing that her body was weak. The fear of pain overcame her will, and into that weakness she crumbled. How often had Solana sneered at a broken servant?

Solana had thought herself invulnerable, immortal in will and ability. Instead, she faced failure.

The drama of the event eventually was forgotten within the drudgery of daily work, and Solana adapted as most humans do. The fact that she had been whipped no longer caught her off guard when the thought penetrated the fog of her mind, and the last vestiges of Solana the noblewomen began to quietly fold into Solana the slave. Her flesh hardened around her bones, and when her eyes emptied of the snake that coiled within her she was called before Kamesh.

The Steward's offices were nothing more than a small windowless room stuffed into the interior of the small mansion of their owner, but what it lacked in elegance it made up with the sheer presence of the records it held. What could have been a mess of ink and papyrus was instead ordered into neat stacks framed by bamboo and neatly labeled. The room held three years' worth of records, the rest being kept in another room that had been named Archives. The system was arcane at best, known wholly by Kamesh alone. However, where he might have been questioned or chastised for his methods, his uncanny ability to produce both results and paperwork at a mere hint from Adomankh had given him something of an aura of invincibility.

Solana had badly underestimated him when they'd first met. He had deliberately fouled the work she'd been given when first joining the ranks of Adomankh's slaves, but his aim had been to determine her ability and intentions and not to hide his own incompetence and lay it at her feet. He had assessed her and used the tools at his disposal to shape her in such a way that she might be useful to him. Within the stuffy room of his office, he searched the deadness in her eyes that signaled her acknowledgement of his power, and he smiled at her.

The serpent coiled tightly within her at that look, that smile, that oil-slick assurance that was at once foreign and familiar. Hadn't that been her? Wasn't that her?

"I expected more from you," Kamesh said after their silence together had stretched. Solana dropped her eyes until they did not touch a single scrap of clothing he wore on his body.

"Were you not once a mighty woman? 'This slave will take too much to bring to heel,' I told Adomankh. 'She is worthless.' Oh, but you are worthless, aren't you? Not so to my purpose, but now I understand why you were sold from Morua's gilded halls and lying nobility. Had I known a single whipping would be all it took, I would have taken the hide from your back in strips the day you were purchased."

Solana studied the woven reed mat under her feet, shying away from the ripple of vibration in her stomach that hinted at heat.

"I hope you understand now that you are mine. I own your movements, and so your movements reflect upon me. Please take heed of this, because I do not like anything happening that disrupts my intentions. Now that we know your limits, understand that I am limited by a very small scope. Master Adomanhk does not like ugliness. Wounds are considered a certain kind of ugliness. I have work that requires your mind, eyes and hands. These things I will not touch. But anything under your clothing is mine to do with as I please," Kamesh paused significantly, and she could feel his eyes upon her, through her, and she curled into herself, "so please do remember that I will take whatever measures necessary to ensure things remain within a certain. . .decorum. You do understand me?"

"Yes," Solana whispered.

"I thought you might. Now, you have dealt with budgets and expenditures before, yes? If you are to be my assistant you must understand certain movements Master Adomankh is taking with his business ventures. I will require you to work with a few small sets of raw numbers, as well as being the second reader of his secondary account books. Errors will not be accepted. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

Kamesh turned to one of the bamboo frames, and picked it up by its leather-bound handles. He handed it to Solana. Though her arms held most of the weight, it still pulled at her tender back. She did her best to hide her wince as Kamesh regarded her.

"This is a minor set of receipts from the operation of this installment." Kamesh turned back to his desk, and picked up a small, bound sheaf of what had to be very expensive paper. "This is the budget for these expenses. I expect you to balance everything given to you."

Kamesh took some time to explain the various entries; expected debits and credits and an estimate of the amount that was expected at the end of her work. Up to this point Solana's small tasks with Kamesh had been copying months old records into the household's shorthand for eventual archiving, and other such boring tasks. This was something new.

"For now you will work here," Kamesh gestured to a small corner that had been cleared with a slate, inkwells and pens neatly set aside as a workspace. It was set upon the floor, with a small cushion for her knees. A small, thinly padded cushion. Solana regarded it without emotion. "I expect that with time you will prove yourself capable of working outside of my office. I do not like sharing space with slaves."

Solana bowed slightly, ignoring the uncomfortable stretch of her back. Under Kamesh's watchful gaze she knelt upon the cushion, closing her eyes and briefly thinking of the open air stench of sunlight and too many bodies, and the passing freedom of market day. Then she began her work.