The Pleasure Palace

by Caroline Swift

  Vasa nodded with relish.

  The senior overseer released Marina from the rack, rolled her off the slab and, summoning Lalaniere and the squint-eyed Roscoff had her dragged bodily towards the door. Then Marina began to yell. “Please, Master, I didn’t mean to disobey... I only wanted to settle with her and... Oh, Master...”

  “Take the slut out of my sight before I have her nipples sliced off!” The Master could hardly contain his wrath; it was almost biblical, the quintessence of white fury. His jewel, his favourite, his apple-polisher had played him false. The bitch. How naive he had been.

  He withdrew into his inner sanctum with the slim, ominous Vasa to consider the punishment. They went into detail before deciding and then made arrangements for the precise date, time, duration and which guests should be invited, together with the attendance of sex slaves to service them. The invitations went out immediately by fax and coded e-mail.

  Long before the dark, limousines began to arrive and park in the castle forecourt

  The infamous Black Dungeon had been readied for the night’s session. In line with its name, the sinister, subterranean torture hall was swathed with sombre drapes around the viewing area reserved for the spectators. The stage, rising a little above the rest of the cellar, had been fastidiously prepared for the session of slave punishment that would last well into the small hours and even beyond.

  The racks of whips and instruments completed the array. Clearly the trestle and long chains were scheduled for use that night and all eyes were on them.

  And yet, as the side curtains were drawn aside, still another piece of apparatus came into view, a comparatively innocent-looking object which several of the more senior members of the Beaucastel circle had seen in use during a previous session organized to punish an equally guilty female some months before. Vasa had insisted with all her power of persuasion that the slave should experience the notorious Breast Plank. Indeed, Vasa derived untold pleasure from beating a pair of well-fleshed breasts painfully anchored to the thing. With some reluctance - Marina still attracted him - the Master finally acquiesced, convinced by his efficient overseer that, since the performance was to be taped, the cassette might well become a best seller. Thus the three items of correction stood in full view promising an interesting night.

  Of even greater, immediate significance was the iron-barred cage in which the night’s offering had been exposed throughout the day for inspection. Marina’s breathtaking nudity hung crucified, a taut X of oiled muscle and tendons, as was the custom, the cunt had been freshly depilated and ringed anew, like the nipples, through the existing flesh slots. The head beneath the leather hood had been shaved clean and Marina’s old number, 107, reinstated below the bulge of the left breast.

  In addition, the guests could see and appreciate from where they lounged waiting, that the vulva had been wrenched open, golden chains hauling both sets of labia apart to expose the vagina’s liquid-crimson oval sheath. The chains encircled the upper thighs and were clipped together beneath the rump. In addition, the engorged, purple teats and rigid clitoris were throbbing visibly and in pain - or, as always with Marina, with lubricity - held in steel torture-clamps screwed tight into the hypersensitive prominences of soft flesh. The pressure was specifically designed to heighten the slave’s erotic response to the whips and instruments to come.

  Promptly at midnight, to the low, distant background of his favourite Bach cantata, the robed Master entered and bowed gravely to the company of distinguished guests. As he took his seat in the great winged chair facing the stage, his private slave crouched before the splayed crotch, ready to fellate once the performance got under way.

  His curt command brought the three overseers from the wings into the dark red lighting of the stage. Their sudden appearance stilled the conversation among the spectators as the figures shed their scarlet cloaks of ceremony to reveal what were almost totally naked bodies - the thorax strapping, gauntlets and even the riding boots had been discarded, leaving only the face veils. Vasa, slim and looking particularly fiendish, had rouged her breast tips and carried a dark garnet jewel in her navel; her sex hair stood out, luxuriously combed, at least that which could seen of it, for she wore a robust black dildo strapped to her pubis and hips. Each of the two men presented a penis even more massive than the dildo, both shafts pounding in full erection, encircled with the usual bristle sleeves.

  Deprived of sight, Marina sensed the overseers’ ominous presence and guessed they differed from their usual appearance. They were set to enjoy the night just as the onlookers would and as their nude victim was meant to, insofar as she could bear it. Further, she knew her orgasms were not only permitted but encouraged. In whatever fashion her torturers were arrayed, she hoped against hope she would be able to take her punishment staunchly and that it would indeed trigger her orgasms as during her training and whipping sessions in the other cellars. At the prospect of climaxing, her breathing began to shallow and quicken. Apart from her masturbations, she had not come on a phallus or under a female slave’s tongue for at least twenty-four hours and needed sex.

  The ill-favoured, squint-eyed Roscoff flung open the gates of the cage and unchained her. Roughly he dragged her out on to the centre of the stage where she stood quivering with a mixture of blind fear and excitement - the same as when, in the past, she was led down to the cells or taken to a guest’s room for flagellation and sexual duties. Now on stage, naked, hooded and gagged, she tried to show off her body to its best advantage before it was blighted by the whips. The series of admiring comments rising from among the invisible spectators gave her a fleeting tingle of pleasure, knowing her resplendent curves were glinting under the lights as each visitor readied his or her attendant slave for service while she was prepared for whipping.

  Vasa, as senior flogger in charge, unscrewed the clit clamp and loosened the metal teeth crushing the teats. Marina staggered with the pain of the removal as the circulation took up again in the flesh nubs but at least she was accustomed to that, as she was to the display of her stretched cunt. If the nipple and clit clamps were gone, hopefully they would release her labial chain. But there she was mistaken. She was to remain sexually splayed throughout the session.

  Then the overseers began to work on her. What followed as her first ordeal was not only a terrifying shock but something that lay far beyond her range of experience and imagination. At least, she could not see the preparations or implements...

  She was hauled blind and naked towards the contraption some guests had already identified as the seldom used Breast Plank. There Vasa calmly passed a thong through the slave’s nipple rings to wrench the breasts up to the collarbones where she tied it off on the forward ring of the throat strap. The slave felt herself being forced to her knees before what seemed to her to be a crescent-shaped edge of a horizontal board; her thighs were then chained rigid to the metal uprights, the trembling arms stretched to hooks in the cellar’s vaulted ceiling. Sensing the three overseers’ hands on her and feeling the cocks slapping against her as she was chained, she froze in dread, her throat desiccated behind the gag. In the past, her trepidation became entwined with spirals of voluptuous, erotic longing to be whipped naked and fucked before connoisseurs. But what she was being prepared for now seemed very different.

  Once in position, unable to move more than her masked head, the sweating nude felt her breasts being released. As she lowered them, Vasa hooked her fingers through the rings and hauled hard; the umber cones and nipples elongated unbearably at the extremity of the distended, tube-like mammaries. Suddenly Vasa released the tension to let the flesh drag back on the surface of the board. With a ghastly jerk, the slave felt the undersides abruptly speared on a crop of small, angled spikes.

  It was only when her entire body lurched madly, almost tearing the bench from its floor bolts, the enveloped head flung back with a choked yell, did Marina realize in frenzied horror what was being don
e to her. Alive with minute steel barbs, slanting forward like claws, the board speared into her breasts mercilessly; each tug only embedded the slender tines deeper into her lymph. An explosion of white pain streaked through her reeling brain when Vasa crushed the flesh down on to the surface; Marina ceased to struggle, moaning into her gag, sweat crawling down her face behind the stifling hood. The chain splaying her cunt by the rings seemed to tighten hideously as if about to rip the labia. Then it eased.

  The old-timers in the cellar knew, better than she, that the curved spikes were honed needle-sharp, for they had seen the plank used before, with hallucinating effect, on nude females. This part of the evening alone justified the journey to Beaucastel and they watched with fascination, trusting the victim would already be leaking her preparatory discharge, as slaves put to the plank always did. Whether later in the session she would be fucked and allowed orgasm remained to be seen; in any event, she was now ready for the whip. For the guests it was flagellation that really counted. After verifying the victim’s position and satisfied with the grip of the myriad pin points, Vasa turned to the Master to receive the fatal nod.

  When it came, her black quirt swung back, paused and hissed, thudding into the quivering breast flesh. Shlack!

  The breast meat rippled and flattened. Shlack! Again. Again. Then again she slashed, the tongues of leather reddening the pale flesh, each stroke driving the curved points deeper into the epidermis. Blue and white flashes seared through the slave as the gagged throat yelled and yelled until her lungs shrank within her. Yet, despite the crippling pain, some hidden instinct made Marina restrain her lunges. The slightest tug from the chest in desperation would only tear the underside of the flesh.

  She let the tiny spears sink in completely until her breasts seemed to became part of the plank. Marina knew that breast beating was part of a female slave’s predestination but surely, her spinning brain told her, not under such vicious torture... But then she was not merely a female slave. She was a condemned female slave with breasts.

  Varying her lashes, the overseer pounded harder into the masses and then struck the ringed areoles and teats jutting out beyond the margin of the board. Purple from the previous torment in the holding cage, the extremities swelled up as the overseer flayed them with professional exactness. Vasa then sashayed over to the instrument rack and returned with a thin bamboo rod to complete the task; with that she sliced down across the tips again, sending the rings pitching and tossing as though they no longer belonged to the body. Only when Marina had passed out, her head drooping, saliva trickling from under the hood, did Vasa receive the sign from the chair to desist.

  Lalaniere and his brusque colleague freed her in much the same manner as Vasa had jagged and blooded her - sadistically, enjoying her suffering. Vasa’s sex was leaking copiously down her inner thighs for all to see and the men’s blue-veined erections jolted, the slits oozing long filaments of bright sap.

  Her feet trailing behind her, the slave was dragged by the armpits over to the second apparatus, the hideous trestle, for her second instalment of retribution. As always, she too was awash with longing, despite the shock and pain she had just endured.

  Amid delicious groans of spending among them and their slaves, the guests sat back to be served refreshments. So far the evening was living up to the castle’s renown. And there was a great deal more still to be enjoyed.

  The hooded body was thrown backwards over the sharp crest of the trestle, the flat belly cinched with a broad strap while the legs were bent, raised and parted wide, the feet chained halfway up the joists, exposing the gaping, drenched sex still chain-splayed. Roscoff then bound the wrists to the lower rung at the rear of the timber pyramid. The two men then stood back to allow the onlookers to take in the sight; the entire room could clearly discern the stalk of clitoral gristle pulsating at the apex of the distended oval gash. Less visible were the scarred undersides of the breasts hanging behind towards the head.

  “Proceed.” The order was no more than a sibilant lisp as the Master depressed the head of the tireless slave down to the root of his cock.

  Revived with a bucket of water over her head, Marina felt the adrenaline pumping through her as she waited. What she could not see was Vasa selecting from the instrument rack the pair of flesh tongs destined for the cunt and Lalaniere taking hold of the notorious nipple wrench, the latter equipped with flat jaws. Both instruments were designed to lock on to, and wrench at the tender flesh sending a slave into sexual delirium.

  “Prepare her first, Roscoff.”

  The brute Roscoff, a consumate flogger of women, grinned at his colleagues. Now it was his turn. Only when he had brought the slave to a sufficient level of erotic pleasure through being whipped naked would the steel appliances be employed. He shook out the slender six-thong of knotted leather and took his stance over the dangling head. Loosening the hood and prizing out the gag, he jabbed his cock into Marina’s throat. Then he whipped down into the outspread fork of the thighs. Ten lashes sufficed to set the slave’s head jerking, sucking arduously on the penis as best she could. At the same time the body heaved with each stroke.

  Clearly, despite the pain, the slave was stimulated.

  Suddenly the muscles tensed as the crotch reddened and bloated; Marina shuddered and went rigid, freeing herself of the fellation. And in a crescendo of yells she came stupendously as the whip thrashed across the clit. Roscoff thrust back into her gullet and emptied all he had stored up over the last hour. Then the gag was plugged back into the throat, choking and clogged with sperm, and brutally the man strapped the hood back.

  A ripple of applause, mingled with cries of other orgasms, reached the stage as the Master nodded to Vasa.

  The two overseers knew the slave was ready without his signal.

  Through the waves of her orgasm, the slave felt the chill grip of Lalaniere’s pincers close over each of her inflamed teats in turn; as her body froze stiff, the neck taut against the rung of the trestle, Marina knew it was her sex partner gripping the dark, purple grapes he had sucked and mauled so often in bed. She offered herself up to the thrilling pain with a strangled shriek of euphoria when suddenly Vasa’s steel entered her, snapping at the walls of the swollen vagina and then seizing the base of the clit. The twists sent the slave into three more successive spasms that startled even Vasa, the veteran, the specialist of work on the female genitals.

  It was the Master who restrained the enthusiasts. Marina sank back on to the trestle, consoled that the pain had turned so easily into pleasure. Yet she still had her two other orifices begging for penetration and, for that matter, her mouth again, if need be.

  From the couches and cushions in the cellar’s penumbra the sound of suction, groans and long drawn-out sobs of sexual relief filled the air.

  “Now, Vasa, if you please...” the voice of authority again, “Kindly string her up...”

  The slave girl was released. Staggering drunkenly to the centre of the stage, Roscoff’s scourge guiding her, Marina fell to her knees, her freed hands grasping her crotch and breasts. She was given little opportunity to soothe them as she heard the clatter of chains being run down from the upper extremities of the stage; desperate not to disgrace herself before her Master and the company, she struggled to her feet to have the chain hooks inserted through the rings in the wrist manacles. Slowly the slack was taken up on wall sprockets and drums until the still resplendent volume of nudity was stretched before the dazzled eyes of the spectators. As if crucified, not on the flogging cross Marina had experienced so often in her earlier days of slavery, but in a void, she undulated sensually between the tug of the long chains, astonished her ankles remained unpredictably free for her to waver in all her beauty. Her outstretched arms, offering the entire body to the whips, seemed to welcome the prospect. At last what she most desired had come.

  Instinctively, she sensed the two senior overseers discussing a
nd selecting their leathers before taking their stand. From the hushed remarks and heavy breathing, she had the presentiment that Vasa stood before her to the right, having attributed to herself the targets she was partial to - the breasts, belly, open sex and the thighs. Pierre Lalaniere, Marina knew, would want her back and slim buttocks as in the past. A feeling of relief quivered through her as she realized the repellent Roscoff with his strabismus was not summoned to participate. Presumably he had had his ration of pleasure; she still tasted his acrid spunk coating her teeth and throat.

  Marina readied her sleek nakedness for the flogging, but what ensued, at the Master’s guttural command, overpowered even Marina’s resilience. Each side of her elegant body received the fifty-five lashes ordained. Tottering forward, as far as the long chains would permit to dilute the shock of Lalaniere’s riding crop, she merely offered Vasa an even greater plenitude of breast and abdomen flesh to add to what the overseer had already devastated and it was the thrashing across the hollowed belly and elongated labia that ground down her stamina and drove her to the limit of her strength. The two overseers, obviously by dint of long partnership, had raised double flagellation to a fine art: the alternate lashes threw the body forward and then back. Marina shrieked and sobbed into the dank leather of her hood but by the thirtieth lash she gave in and let them slam into her body, swaying but rooted to the spot. Then suddenly pleasure welled up in her, breaking over her like a tidal wave as she felt her vagina clenching and then dilating as her orgasm became imminent and urgent. Her muffled cries changed into moans of craving. Had she been ungagged she would have yelled to them to lash directly into her clitoris...