Hell's Mercy

by Katherine Wyvern

  Where she had taken off her boots, at the edge of the bed, lay both the strap and the tawse she had used on him that night. He sat up, feeling every mark she had left on him like a fiery afterglow.

  The gods don’t kiss lightly, he thought, still a little dazed by endorphins and adrenaline and oxytocin and the roseate radiance left in his mind by her unexpected words.

  He picked up the tawse to look closely at it. It was a testament to the strange tenderness she had for him that she didn’t snatch it from him and rap it on his knuckles, because she was more jealous of her instruments than of her own skin.

  It was a thing of simple beauty. It had been cut out of the silvery hide of a stone-crawler, one of Cydonia’s oldest native creatures, almost extinct at one time, but slowly recovering. The tawse incorporated somehow the eccentric antiquity of Earth-that-was and the real, living, starkly noble present of Cydonia. It was polished glass-smooth by excellent craftsmanship, and of course by being smacked countless times against living human skin. Like all her tools, it was branded with her H and J monogram, Helenay Janos. Lukan smiled thoughtfully, and used the hard, silvery leather to caress Hell’s thigh before putting it down and reaching forward to kiss her dark nipples, sucking briefly on each of them for a moment, before moving up to her throat.

  “I love you, too,” he whispered, as if a long time had not passed since her last words. It was the first time, perhaps, that he had said this in cool earnest and joyfully embraced it, rather than in flaming pain, as the only way out of agony. “I love you. The dark and the light of you. The pain and the pleasure. The hard and the soft. The male and the female. I need both. Of all those.”

  “I love that you need both,” she said stroking his hair. “Because I need to be both.”

  He nodded, and pressed his forehead on her breastbone a moment.

  “I must go,” he said finally, tearing himself away from her with such an effort that it might be the end of him. But he must not claim more of her time. Not at this time.

  “Yes, indeed,” she said. “I have a full night ahead, you know?”

  “No doubt,” he replied. “I don’t know how you do it,” he added earnestly. He got up, and walked across the room to retrieve his clothes, limping a little on his freshly flogged feet.

  “How are you doing, Lukan?” she asked softly, and he knew that she was not talking about his feet, or his ass, or his testicles. He loved her for the question.

  “I am fine. Just a little worried. All this craziness in town. I never thought I’d worry about the Carnival getting out of control. But I do, a little. It’s all going overboard now. I hope no harm comes of it.”

  Hell smiled, a curious smile, full of mischief and yet also tenderness.

  “I like it when you worry. It’s when you need me most, isn’t it?”

  “I need you always,” he said, levelly.

  She smiled again, and stretched like a cat on the silk covers, her mane of smooth black hair spreading like a river of darkness over the tumbled shimmery fabric.

  “Well. In any case, what can you do about it? It will have to run its course, this craziness as you call it. Pandora’s Box is open now.”

  “I know. I will be okay.”

  “I know you will. I will see to it.”

  ****

  Later, she walked him to the door, still gloriously, unashamedly naked. He was still limping a little, and was sore all over, stiff in his clothes, and she made a soft sound, half purr, half moan, which signified a thousand words, between them, tenderness, care, protection, all the things they so seldom spoke about.

  Promiscuous as he was, he was in fact, in his own way, obsessively faithful to her. He was hers alone, and in her own way, she was his.

  It had not always been the case. She had had other men (and women). It had been years before he had been certain that he was something else to her, something different from a regular customer, a chance lover, a friend with benefits, or just a sugar-daddy, God forbid. He did not begrudge her those years though. He had had his wild times, centuries of them. It was only right she’d have hers. He was humbly grateful that it had not been centuries.

  He paused to put on his coat, and frowned thoughtfully while she straightened the lapels, and brushed a fleck of dust from the black velvet of his sleeve.

  “I saw a very beautiful creature on the way here. A black-winged nike. She was very … tempting.”

  “Oh?” she said, with a rascally gleam in her eyes, and a predatory smile on her lips. “Find her. Bring her.”

  He smiled back because, if there was one thing in the world that he enjoyed almost as much as submitting body and soul to Helenay, it was to have someone else submitting to both of them together.

  Despite all it had gone through in the past hour, his cock stirred at the thought. “If you think you can make time, I will,” he said, pulling on his gloves and picking up his walking cane. He was ready.

  “I’ll make time,” she said, and kissed his cheek briefly.

  He nodded and walked out into the night, aching in his body, and light in his spirit. He tapped his cane briskly on the pavement.

  Two, three, four. Five, six, seven. Eight, nine, heaven.

  Neu Venedig was his city, his own web. He would certainly be able to trace down a girl with raven wings, and take her with him to Hell.

  The End

  You can read more about Hell, Lukan, Neu Venedig and much, much more in The Cydonian Tales (Black Carnival, White Sands, and Head-Shy), all published by Evernight Publishing. With some luck I will even manage the next installment of the saga, Scarlet Mask.

  www.katherinewyvern.blogspot.com

  Other Books by Katherine Wyvern:

  www.evernightpublishing.com/katherine-wyvern

  If you enjoyed this book, you may also like:

  A Cold Breath by Elizabeth Monvey

  His to Protect by Maia Dylan

  Angel’s Eye by Katerina Ross

  12 years earlier…

  BONUS SAMPLE CHAPTER

  BLACK CARNIVAL

  Katherine Wyvern

  Copyright © 2011

  Sample Chapter

  The text had appeared on my pocket-pad with a little mute buzz on a Monday morning, while I was, of all places, in Paul's office, at what I was pleased to call my part-time job. I was yawning. A scatter of printed garden plans was spread all over the large table with pencils, notes and plant catalogues scattered on top. Paul was drawing squiggles on one of the prints, which I knew represented, in his intentions, a rose bed.

  "Pink roses here. And here. And all the way to here," he said, squiggling diligently all over a vast stretch of what had been a harmless lawn until then.

  "You gotta be kidding me..." I said, surreptitiously reading my p-pad.

  "What's wrong with pink roses?" he asked with a little frown, without looking up.

  "Everything," I said in a moment of distraction; then I immediately recollected myself, slipped the p-pad into my pocket and turned back to our plans.

  "Pink roses, excellent," I said with brittle cheerfulness, and he finally looked up at me.

  "Are we having a communication problem here?" he asked.

  "No, not at all! Please go on, I 'm listening."

  Even if I was occasionally allowed to do some actual garden planning for particular customers, by far the bigger part of my job in Paul's firm was simply to translate his besquiggled print-outs into artsy, hand-drawn garden plans. These invariably sold his rather insipid projects to his befuddled customers, people who obviously had contrived to earn enough money to pay a landscape designer but were for some inexplicable reason unable to choose twenty plants on their own. Paul's business was pretty old-fashioned, his approach to garden planning cautious at best, and his clientele unimaginative in the extreme. Pink roses featured heavily in my life at that time.

  It was hardly a very rewarding job for a twice-graduated art student with a secret longing for darkness and greatness, but art did not seem to pay bills f
or unconnected painters right then, and I needed to take whatever job I could get to make ends meet. I had spent the last three years after leaving the Academy drawing gardens for Paul and illustrations for gardening magazines.

  I actually liked plants; they made good models which stayed put and did not complain of back-ache after posing for twenty minutes, but I was beginning to feel a certain obscure restlessness at the bottom of my soul. Paul wanted plain pastel drawings, claiming that his customers were intimidated by anything as artsy-fartsy as watercolors; the flower paintings had to be precise, unimaginative and rigorously, geometrically arranged on white backgrounds. It was hardly an artist’s life. The truth is that I was a true romantic at heart. What I wanted was a wilderness of free-flowing inspiration, untainted beauty, sublime, all-consuming passion. The whole Sturm und Drang program. Well, according to the text in my p-pad, all of that might be on the way for me.

  "Friend of friend needs artsy pics 4 book on Black Carnival. Interested?"

  Was I interested? Was I interested? As a matter of fact, I was so interested that in the haste to get down to business I stumbled on the doorstep and practically fell nose down in the cafe where Ray had invited me to meet his friend and his friend. Typically, my tightly packed portfolio broke open in the fall, scattering drawings all over the floor. Some of these were my best flower paintings, which I had brought to show off my technical prowess. Not the stiff illustrations I did for the magazine, but complex, multi-layered, softly lit paintings which I did for myself. Other drawings were of a different nature. When a helpful barman ran towards me to assist me in retrieving my scattered art-work, I blushed crimson and hastily stammered that no, I was perfectly all right, no need to bother, it would take me less than a minute to put everything back together. It was useless. In an untimely fit of chivalrous solicitude the barman, a young fellow with endearing puppy eyes, kneeled on the floor and began collecting sheets of paper from under tables and chairs. Then, excruciatingly, he slowed down, hesitated, stared and gasped. When finally he stood up to pass me the sheaf of papers that he had amassed, he was speechless and had a rather glassy expression in his eyes.

  "Thank you, sir," I said with all the coolness I was capable of, and hastily stuffing my drawings back into the treacherous folder, I made towards my friend's table, at the back of the cafe.

  "Spectacular entrance, Ivory! I am so proud of you!" Ray giggled idiotically and then proceeded to introduce me to his companions, named respectively Pierre and Angela. It was Angela that interested me.

  She was a rather tall, elegant woman, probably in her fifties, with nice, almost formal manners, very short blond hair and a curiously hesitating way of speaking, as if she was always a bit uncertain of where her sentences would end up. Everything about her, in truth, had this quality of slight indecision. She wore tall heels, but her dress was rather demure, some truly nice jewelry but no perfume. It was difficult to imagine her writing books about anything, let alone the Black Carnival.

  "So, my dear,” she said when I was settled, “I saw some of your work. Ray showed me. I like what I saw, or I would not be here, obviously. Did he tell you about my book, dear?" she asked, after Ray had strategically ordered me a stiff cocktail, at four in the afternoon.

  "Only very generally. But I brought these."

  I passed her my ruffled portfolio; Angela flipped over the flower pictures with barely a glance and concentrated on the other drawings.

  "Oh dear!" she said, going from sheet to sheet. "How delightful... elegant, and sensitive, yes... you do have a talent. Your eye for the lines of the human body is quite exquisite, yes, yes... these are very, uh, classical, of course. You will need to, how shall I put it? Have you ever been to NeuVenedig, dear?"

  I shook my head. How could anyone on a student budget travel to Cydonia, one of the farthest outposts of the Pan-Galactic Colonial Union? As a matter of fact, I had hardly ever travelled off-world at all. But I had seen pictures of course, both of the town and the Carnival, and I told her so.

  "Well, you cannot illustrate my work unless you see the Carnival first hand. This is a bit of a pet project of mine. You need to capture the atmosphere of the place, the spirit... Money is not an issue. I have contacts and friends. There is some interest behind this, you know, collectors. Can you travel, dear, like, basically... now?"

  I was taken aback. I had supposed that I would be asked to illustrate the book from photographs. Turning indifferent shots into nicely composed and rendered paintings was one of my favorite tricks. I could work with models, thanks to the years at the Academy, but it had not occurred to me that I would be requested to do so, or that I would be asked to travel to NeuVenedig in person.

  "Er... I could, theoretically," I said. Then I began calculating travel time in my head, and I blushed again. "You really mean travel to NeuVenedig during the carnival?"

  It was an idiotic question, but I suppose that my brain was momentarily whirring blankly in my head, lost in visions of... I swallowed and looked at Ray, pleading for help, wondering if this was a complicated joke of his.

  "Well, when else, dear?" asked Angela. "I am really sorry about the short notice... I will tell you honestly that I had agreements with a different illustrator, but there has been a, uh, accident. I can hardly wait for four years till the next Carnival… I really, really need an artist now, sweetie."

  "Listen," she said after a few seconds, "I need these illustrations to be something unique. I could have used photos, but anyone can do that nowadays. These..." she said, finally looking at some of the flower paintings. "I like the light of these the detail, the subtlety. I would love something like this, but, well, different subject of course..."

  She shot me a significant look.

  I was caught half way between incredulous happiness and unease. The unease was partly due to a sudden appalling attack of shyness, which I hastily proceeded to drown in my cocktail, and partly to practical considerations. There was my ridiculous but reliable job with Paul to begin with. And also something else.

  "Um... I heard in the news that there is some unrest among those Sand Riders of theirs," I said.

  "Oh, they won't bother you, my dear. The unrest, as you call it, is merely diplomatic talks, meetings and negotiations. The city is perfectly safe. I should know. I have friends there. Friends who would welcome you and show you around. You will like it, you'll see. You are not, uh, how shall I put it...?"

  A moment of embarrassed silence followed until Ray smiled a dirty little smile and chortled.

  "She'll manage just fine, Angela,” he said. “Just fine. You’ll see."

  ****

  I landed on Cydonia exactly in the middle of the carnival festivities.

  I left the D-Terminal under a pitch black sky full of unknown stars and travelled by speed-train to the station of NeuVenedig. The train crossed the lagoon in a blaze of white light, and the air shouldered aside by its lightning-like passage carved sharp ripples on the dark waters, as if my arrival had stirred the very sea with a whisper of great things to come. I smiled, despite the fatigue and dull headache from the D-Passage.

  The station was packed with people travelling in from the Perimeter and clueless off-world tourists like me, all of us already masked but milling around, uncertain, like sumptuously decorated sheep.

  Here I had the first impression of the Carnival, which was first of all a mass of bodies packed so tight that even moving a step in any direction was a serious undertaking. I crawled away from the platform, first with a feeble exhibition of good manners and then with a more and more determined application of elbows, slowly making my way towards the open, trying not to lose my little luggage in the press. Finally, after being nearly squeezed, punched and trampled to death half a dozen times, I got out or, to be exact, I was ejected from the crowd inside the doors into the slightly less packed crowd outside.

  Under the unvarying dark sky, the old city was ablaze with light from millions of fire-bulbs, which tinged the ancient buildings with a flick
ering golden glow.

  Between the station and the Canal, a packed crowd of masked revelers was moving slowly towards the Ponte degli Scalzi; the canal-side was a dazzling, swirling maelstrom of beauty. I smiled enraptured at every mask, every feathery, lacy wig and diadem that passed under my lofty look out at the top of the steps of the station.

  I had hardly set foot into the city, and I was already drugged with the sensual beauty of the Carnival.

  All but the drunkest wore furs and velvets to keep out the cold wind and the pale sand blowing in from the desert. Under the heavy cloaks, the finest laces, beads and pearls twinkled, shone and glittered at every step. Every cut of dress, every shape of mask and hairstyle, every manner of costume was represented in this magnificent free-flowing parade of sartorial skill, but all the costumes had one thing in common: they all were black, their somberness relieved by silver, gold, glittering gems and glimpses of silky bodies, white powdered hair, sparkling eyes, laughing mouths. Long slashes in the rich skirts and sleeves showed skin and shapes, veiling, unveiling, revealing, suggesting. The real carnival fineries would be uncovered more boldly in the sheltered porches, arcades and patios and in the echoing grand halls of the palaces of the old city.

  The Grand Canal was a glittering river of reflected flames, a stream of liquid fire snaking across the town, carrying on its shimmering surface a harlequin flotilla of quiet power boats, gaudy lantern-dressed galleys, tiny sandolos, colorful racing caorlinas, fast, rakish viperas, heavy, slow barges full of luggage and merchandise, automated waterbuses packed with passengers. And, of course, shiny, black gondolas, with tall curvy prows and sterns, and nimble gondoliers who stood at their single oars waiting for passengers, or darted their long boats around with marvelous ability, turning in and out of narrow side-canals, cheerfully unconcerned by the throng of craft that crowded the water. The sharp steel figureheads of the gondolas often passed within an inch of the next boat, brushing but always avoiding by just a hairbreadth some disastrous collision.