Pleasure Island [The Chronicles of Lidir] by Aran Ashe

Anya through half-closed eyes. Her top lip curled to a twisted smile. Her tongue licked out and slowly stroked the furrow of the cut. Anya's heart was in her throat. Travix came close but did not speak to Anya. The toe of her velvet boot simply eased Anya's feet apart, one foot then the other. Then Travix took from her pocket a soft, brushed-velvet cloth. She looked into Anya's eyes. With a pounding in her throat and a delicious sinking in her belly, Anya felt her fleshpot being gathered in the cloth, then, through the cool soft velvet, her bare and swelling sex lips being stroked. It was coming again - the feeling. The fingertips tasted the slow pulse through the velvet. Anya watched the blue impassive eyes, the scarred cheek, the full and severed lip. And everything she felt deep in her belly was delicious. She closed her eyes. Travix whispered in her ear: 'Do not be jealous, my Princess, for I shall attune you to my requirements too.' Again she shivered; the fingertips caressed her through the velvet and the soft and severed lip brushed gently against her ear.
     
     
    [4]
    A Punishment by Proxy
     
    'A princess, you say, Ratchitt?' The voice was sneering; the eyes looking down at her were harsh. 'We don't get many princesses down here in the brig.'
     
    Anya was deep in the heart of the ship, below the water line, and she was terrified, for Ratchitt meant to leave her with this man. But she did not want to return the way she had come: even now, she could hear the boisterous laughter directly overhead.
     
    She had been taken down a broad flight of stairs, then a narrower one, with Ratchitt having to coax her all the way, as she kept stopping. At one point, they had passed before a large noisy open area full of hammocks. At the far end of this place were tables and on them she had glimpsed women, their naked bodies disported before a raucous crowd of drunken crewmen. Opposite, Ratchitt had pointed out the captain's cabin, with large panelled doors over which was a carving of the goblin. Dangling from a chain beside the entrance was a cage containing a human skull. It had made her shiver. The walls were covered with other terrifying trophies - cutlasses dripping long-dried, blackened blood; plaits of hair with skin attached and other things that looked like tiny wrinkled human heads. Then he had led her down again and along a narrow lamplit corridor. As they hurried through, the lamps had flickered in the draught and cast giant swaying shadows across the ceiling. Her heart had sunk lower and lower with every step she had been forced to take, until her heart was in her belly. It was as if she could feel the pressure of the sea all around, just waiting to burst in, snuff these feeble lamps, trap her in the cobwebbed rafters and drown her in its freezing murk.
     
    Yet even that might have been better than the fate that she had seen reflected in the hard, cruel eyes of the man who had met them and looked upon her so unsparingly as her frightened body shook.
     
    They had emerged into a large, almost circular area. Through the centre, the mainmast passed from ceiling to floor. Anya stood with her back to it. On three sides were doors, each embossed with ironwork and studded with nails and bearing a heavy iron bolt. On the fourth side was an embayment furnished after the manner of a small cabin - there was a chair, a table, some drawers, a dishevelled bed and even a small stove. She could smell hot metal and hear the soft sizzle of the coals. The man had walked casually away from them and over to the table, where a mug and a bottle of wine stood and the remains of a chicken rested. It reminded her that she hadn't eaten. He ignored the mug and drank directly from the bottle, then took a bite from the carcass of the chicken. Anya's eyes moved round, beyond the cosy arrangement, to see rings and chains in the wall behind. More frightening still was a heavy post projecting horizontally at waist height for about an arms-length from