“Look,” she said, then reached out and squeezed me in a different place than I’d squeezed her, and a lot harder (but in a very nice way). “I’m making you feel good against your will. Does that mean you’re going to complain about me, too? Stand up for your rights? Ooh, you’re such a rebel, Bobby!” Then she gently wrapped her lips around my cock, the part of my body least likely to help me concentrate on arguing at times like these. She drew me past her lips and into her mouth. Very, very cold, then very warm.
Normally I don’t like it when people make fun of me. I always prefer to be the fun-maker, probably because I’m a complete asshole, but I decided I could let myself be exploited just that once, strictly as a learning experience.
fifteen:
riprash
I COULD ONLY watch helplessly as Commissar Niloch approached the cage. His bony spurs stirred and scraped as he walked, like wind shifting dead leaves, and he examined the crush of damned souls with eyes as unfeeling as two shiny red buttons. If I tell you that I could smell him even through the various stenches of being locked in a slave cage in the middle of Hell, you’ll have an idea of how pungent his scent was, sweetness and rotten meat combined, like one of those corpse flowers that lure flies to their doom. It was all I could do not to vomit, and I probably gagged a little, which may have been what drew his attention. I was mostly hidden by the slaves splayed against the bars in front of me, but those tiny eyes suddenly fixed on mine, and he moved closer. His smell rolled over me in a nauseating wave, then he opened his weird mouth and things got a lot worse.
The two bits of his lower jaw clashed together like a crab applauding. I hoped it wasn’t what he did when he was hungry. He was staring straight at me. My demon heart was going like a jackhammer in my chest.
“Are you interested in purchasing more slaves, Commissar?” Riprash came forward. “I’d be happy to find you some healthy ones. I haven’t sorted these yet.” Niloch turned and looked at him, saying nothing, but when Riprash spoke again he had a slight tremor in his voice. “Or, if you’d like, I can clean these up so you can inspect them.”
The commissar laughed, I guess, although the thin whistling didn’t sound much like laughter. “Oh, would you? Perhaps dress them up, too, so they look like little lords and ladies. That would be merry.” He turned back to the cage and, just to make sure my heart kept crashing against my ribs, found my eyes again. “But I must say, I’ve—”
“What’s going on here? Oh, Commissar, it’s true, you’ve graced us with a visit!”
“He’s expecting something,” said another voice almost immediately.
“Shut up or I’ll have you removed,” said the first voice. “Thank you, Lord Commissar, thank you!”
The tubby, two-headed figure of Gagsnatch, the slave-stall’s owner, bustled toward Niloch. One of his heads showed the commissar a wide, ingratiating smile, the other stared with a look of open disinterest. “You do me too much honor!” said Happy Head.
“Any is too much,” said the other head, sullen as a teenage boy.
“Ah,” said Niloch. “At last you favor me with your attendance, slave trader.”
Happy Head immediately screwed his face into a frown of remorse. “I did not know it was you, Commissar! Rest assured that as soon—”
“Shut your mouths,” said Niloch, not much louder than a whisper. “Both.” Silence followed. “Yes, as it happens, you can do something for me. I do have need of more slaves. Send me this crate, just as it is.” Niloch turned back, but this time his gaze only touched me briefly, then swept across the other poor schmucks in the cage. “Yes, this should do. Dear me, don’t bother to clean them. Waste of sand. They’ll serve just fine the way they are.” He paused. “Ah, yes. I see my men have finished here, and I have a long way back to my quarters. Draw up the bill and send the slaves to Gravejaw House immediately.” The commissar rattled out of my line of sight, back the way he had come.
“Thank you, Commissar!” cried Happy Head. “Your custom is the most generous gift you could give me! You are the best lord in the land!”
“But you said he was the worst,” chirped Unhappy Head. “You said he was stupid as a turd and smelled like—”
I had the novel experience of watching someone slap one of his own heads across the mouth hard enough to draw blood. Punishment delivered and Unhappy Head at least temporarily silenced, Gagsnatch hurried after the commissar, spouting words of praise and gratitude.
My heart was finally slowing to a level more like ordinary terror when the door of the slave cage clanked open. “You,” Riprash told me. “Out.”
The other slaves had no real way to make room for me, so he yanked several of them out, causing at least one or two serious injuries, I’m sure. I fought my way toward the opening, only remembering as I got close to it that Gob was in the cage, too, but when I looked back the little hairy kid was slithering his way after me through the other slaves.
Before I could ask Riprash a single question he picked me up under the arms and carried me like a puppy into the back of the stall, into a little area blocked by a screen made of hide and dropped me there. Gob curled up just behind my legs, watching Riprash with an impressive level of concentration, no doubt fermenting half a dozen plans of escape if things went sour. A survivor, that’s what the kid was. That was how I used to think of myself, too, but after meeting Gob I realized now how pathetically easy I’d had it by comparison.
“You lot stay here.” Riprash peered at us over the screen, which I couldn’t have done standing on a box. In the dark his ruined face looked like it was carved of stone. Ugly stone. “No noise!” Then he went out. After a few comparatively quiet minutes I heard him talking with both of his boss’s heads for a while. If Unhappy Head had been cowed by its recent smacking, it had gotten over it; I heard it sniping at almost everything the other head said. At last the three-way palaver ended, and I heard Riprash’s heavy tread returning.
“And now I have to find two more slaves, because that’s how many Niloch counted and that’s how many he’ll expect.” Again the big hands closed on me and lifted. He set me down and looked me over. I swear, if he had said “Fee Fi Fo Fum,” I wouldn’t have batted an eye. Instead he pulled over a large stone, which I couldn’t have moved with a pickup truck and a tow chain, then sat on it.
“Well?”
I stared at him, my head just about emptied by all the kinds of scared I was. “Well, what?” I said at last.
“You said you had something to tell me. We’re alone. I’ve got the others taking that drift of slaves down to the dock. So tell.”
I closed my eyes for a second in a silent prayer of gratitude. Now I only had to hope that Temuel’s seemingly innocuous message wasn’t some kind of code for “kill the guy who tells you this.” I tried to look Riprash in the eye to show him my sincerity, but I just couldn’t do it. All that exposed meat, and the chunk of ax still in there . . .
“I’m not from here,” I said, looking attentively at his massive feet. “I’m from . . . somewhere else. Do you know what I mean?”
Riprash made a low noise. “Could be,” he said at last. “Could be I don’t. Say what you got to say.”
“A friend asked me to find you and give you this message. He said, ‘You are not forgotten.’ That’s all. Just that.”
Nothing happened, or at least nothing that registered down in the area of Riprash’s size sixty-three tootsies. I looked up. Not all at once, but I did it.
He was crying.
I’m not joking. He was. A single glowing tear like a streamlet of lava had made its way down from his good eye across his cheek, and now dangled like maple sap from his chin. “All thanks,” he said, almost whispering. He sagged forward like an ancient redwood collapsing, and to my astonishment he landed on his knees, then lifted both massive arms above his head. “All thanks. I am lifted.”
You can guess what I made of this, which was nothing useful. Riprash stayed that way for a while as more tears dripped from his face and made bright little splashes on the floor before they cooled and faded. I was beginning to feel less terrified than embarrassed, he was so clearly in the grip of something deep and personal. Since he hadn’t smashed me into jelly over the message I’d just delivered, he was still the closest thing Gob and I had to an ally, so I sat tight as it went through him like a storm and made him shake all over. At last it was done. Riprash wiped his good eye with the back of a massive hand then climbed back onto the rock again.