Corruption Ch 01

1686. England.

The crypt of the ruined church was cold, and Eloise felt her nipples harden and ache as she stepped to one side of the stone altar, releasing the clasp of her cloak, and casting it aside. Two of the acolytes approached her; Thomas, a farm-hand from one of the estates, she knew, and Lisette, the scullery maid from the manor's kitchens. They wore simple, open-fronted robes, and were naked underneath, and she felt a tingling heat trickle deep within her as she lifted and spread her arms, in anticipation of the touch of their hands. The steady torch-light from the flaming branches held in brackets on the walls lit her flesh to gold as they stood before her, the tubs of ointment in their hands. She turned to face the altar.

Standing opposite her, on the other side of the stone table, was Darius, also naked and standing cruciform, his eyes closed. Neither were supposed to look at the other until the ceremony was completed, a bastardisation of the wedding rituals, she supposed, like so many other of the rituals the coven had claimed as traditional. It was nonsense, she thought, but useful nonsense to some.

He was a tall man, broad across the shoulders and deep through the chest, not as hirsute as the previous Hallowed Priest had been, although she was relieved by that, the sheer amount of body hair that had covered that man had been off-putting in some of the rituals. The thick cock that hung between Darius' legs was impressive when it was erect, and she felt another small shiver of anticipation slip along her nerve endings as the acolytes dipped their hands into the tubs and took their places to either side of her.

The ointment had been warmed and she allowed her lids to close as the hands of the young man and woman spread it thickly over her skin, feeling the tingling of the ingredients against the nerves almost immediately, almost but not quite as sensually powerful as the feel of their fingers, smoothing over her skin, caressing and exciting her.

It was not the flying ointment, which she'd used several times with heart-stopping success, this was a special blend of many of the same herbs, hemlock and wolfsbane, foxglove and belladonna and of course, the poppy, to lift her mind free and enhance the sensations in her body. Tonight she would open the way and give herself over to the Dark Lord, for all the power he could bestow on her.

Four hands rubbed the ointment over her skin, sliding intimately around her breasts, lifting and squeezing them, moving down the gentle curve of her stomach and between the plump cheeks of her round bottom. She inhaled sharply as the fingers spread the slowly-growing fire down her thighs, covering every inch of her sensitive flesh, and began their ascent, feeling the heated exhales on her calves as the acolytes knelt and rubbed it in and over her. She felt a light grip on her ankles and lifted her feet, widening the gap between her legs as the hands moved up, her head tipping back when they reached the bare, shaved mound of her sex, and slipped between the folds of skin, inflaming her as they probed deeper. Fingers slid into her cleft, the ointment pushed far into her, and a burst of heat filled her pelvis, making her shudder. Smaller, slimmer fingers slid up from behind, spreading her bottom and she trembled as they forced their way into her anus, igniting another conflagration there.

She was burning, burning inside and that was as it should be, she thought, pain for power, all power had to be paid for and she would burn gladly for hers.

Opening her eyes slightly, she saw Darius' body was glistening with the ointment, his cock fully erect and redly throbbing in front of his stomach as the young man behind him spread his buttocks and appeared to ensuring that the ointment was fully inserted, while the young woman in front of him slid her hand up and down his swollen cock and around his sac. His head was tipped back a little, his chest rising and falling quickly, the beat of his pulse visible in the hollow of his throat. It didn't take much to arouse the man, she knew, and he revelled in the touch of both sexes.

"Tempus est!" the old woman cried out and Eloise turned, her eyes still slitted as the great circle was lit on the stone floor below the altar's dais.

Around it, at each junction of the smaller circles it contained, a member of the coven stood, their faces and bodies hidden within voluminous black cloaks, their heads bowed. The spell-casting tonight required only the energy of two, and the blood of one, and in the shadows of the crypt's doorway, she could see two of the initiates, holding an unconscious form between them, all three cloaked and almost invisible in the darkness.

"Lucis eductor Domine inferis tibi sacrifícium offérimus sit tibi," Darius' light tenor pierced the silence of the room. "Urimur, et offer pro Domino sanguinem innocentem tenebrarum."

The torches shuddered together as an unseen breath filled the room, and Eloise felt a deep tremor fill her as she watched the initiates bringing the girl into the room. As they lay her in the circle, she walked to the altar, lifting herself onto its cold, flat surface. Darius turned toward her and walked around the table, stopping at the end, between her legs.

The timing was crucial, she knew. Agnes would have only seconds to spill the blood in the circle when the energy between them peaked. She hoped the old woman knew what an orgasm looked like.

She opened her eyes widely as his hands touched her breasts, squeezing them hard, pinching her nipples between his fingers. Every touch burned more deeply, plucking at her and sending fibrillating tremors through her muscles. The ointment was powerful and she felt a small flash of fear of what it would feel like inside of her, coated thickly as it was along the length of his cock.

He pushed her legs apart, and thrust his fingers into her, and she moaned at the flush of heat that filled her, his thumb flicking at her while the fingers of the other hand pushed deeper and deeper. She was wet, she knew it, but she couldn't feel it, could only feel how easily he invaded her, how much more she needed.

Around the walls, the torch flames were steady again. Agnes knelt beside the naked young woman lying in the circle, and the adepts began to chant, very softly at first, just a murmur bouncing from the hard stone walls, then more strongly, echo calling echo from the walls and ceiling and floor, from the tunnel and stair to one side. Along the walls, the acolytes and initiates watched in silence, faces hidden within the cowls of their robes.

Darius thrust his cock into the woman lying on the table before him, revelling in feeling of power that suffused him as he filled her tight cunt and a burning fire lit him up from anus to ribs in a curving, coruscating inferno with every sharp, deep penetration into her. He didn't think the Devil himself would rise and take him with the ritual, and the thought didn't bother him. He was fucking the Lady Eloise, Duchess of the manor and he couldn't keep his hands off her big, firm breasts, pulling and pinching at her nipples, her ladyship writhing under him like a cat in heat. The ointment magnified every single sensation and he could feel her muscles, clenching around his cock, sucking and pulling at him until he was driving into her hard, her body shaking with the impact.

Around the circle below them, the chanting was reaching a peak, an emotional furore that was making him throb in time with it, his body aching and glowing with the building crescendo in his groin. He looked down at Eloise's gleaming face, seeing her mouth open and panting, her hands opening and closing on the edges of the stone table and he smiled, moving his hands to her hips and holding her still as he pumped faster. He was going to come in seconds, he thought, his head tipping back as his balls filled and strained against the thin skin holding his seed.

Eloise arched up, her fingers and toes curling up tightly as the first vibrations shook through her. Her eyes flew open, staring at the man between her legs. Darius' head was thrown back, the cords of his neck standing out like wire. She cried out, hips bucking furiously against him, wave after wave of white-hot pleasure incinerating her from the inside as he seemed to grow bigger, stretching her out even more. He shouted, his thrusts reduced to fast, sharp jabs, and in the circle Agnes raised the long athame, the firelight flashing from the silver blade as it dropped, plunging into the abdomen of the unconscious woman, dragging it from one side of her torso to the other, blood spilling out and filling the channels cut into the stone floor, racing along them from junction to junction, the candles and bowls of offerings burning at those points extinguished as the rivulets of red touched them.

With that first stab, Darius felt a massive shaft of pain arc through him, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, his cock spurting repeatedly, driving hard into Eloise even as his balls emptied. The pain grew, a mesh of agony along the nerve endings in his body as the circle on the crypt's floor was redrawn in the blood flowing from the dying girl. His heart stuttered in his chest, fighting the pulsing beat that flowed in between his legs and he stared disbelievingly as his skin and muscle, tendon and bone began to twist, and melt, and change.

Lying on the table, Eloise screamed, the cock inside her writhing and twisting against the walls of her body, growing and burning as she was stretched wider and wider. Darius' face was twisted up in pain, popping and crackling noises coming from him as he lifted his arms and they seem to lengthen, thicken, muscle swelling under the skin, his chest expanding. He looked down at her for a moment and she saw his blue eyes had turned black, the irises so dark that she couldn't see a pupil at all.

He reached out and gripped her shoulders, lifting her up, impaling her on his iron-hard member. She screamed again as it was forced deeper into her with her own weight, his hips jerking and the burning sensation rippling outwards from her pelvis through her entire body.

"Belial! Et venit!" shrieked Agnes from the circle and the man that had been Darius, farm manager of the Buchannon estates and well-known womaniser, turned slowly to face the room, the limp and twitching body of the woman held against him.

"Yes, I have come," the voice that issued from the labourer's throat was deep and guttural, neither timbre nor syntax remaining. "This is wrong. Wrong man. Bring me the priest."

The hooded figures surrounding the circle stared at the transforming man without moving and his lips drew back from his teeth suddenly, a forked tongue flicking out from between blackened teeth.

"Bring me the priest!" he roared, his hand outstretched toward them. Four of the adepts were flung back against the walls, the sharp cracks as they hit and the boneless way they fell to lie unmoving on the floor leaving none in any doubt of the power of the demon they'd raised.

"NOW!"

Eloise barely registered the scuffle of feet over the stone as the coven fled through the crypt's doorway. The cock inside her was monstrous, and rough, scraping against her flesh and ripping apart the muscles. She couldn't breathe from the pain, hardly noticing as she was lowered back to the table, unable to feel the spilling of her blood over her thighs and the table's surface through the insistent burning of the ointment covering her.

"In pain, yes," the demon said, leaning over her. "My servant in pain."

He pulled out and thrust sharply into her, and her eyes rolled back into her skull as she was ripped apart.

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All Hallows Convent

The convent stood, as it had for six hundred years, on a knobbled mount, two miles from the village, its weathered stone walls and towers wreathed in vegetation, only the bell tower visible from the valley floor.

In the stone-walled gardens, the women who had vowed their lives to God worked quietly, pruning and weeding and collecting the last of the bountiful harvest from the full beds. In a less than two weeks, the season would turn and the beds would be cleared, turned over and fertilised and rested for the winter, new beds for the winter vegetables prepared and sown.

Patience rocked back on her heels, wiping the perspiration from her brow. Within the walls, the sun was trapped and it was warm and still, like the last gentle breath of summer against her skin. In the basket on the ground beside her, cuttings of the herbs that could heal, provide comfort and ease, lay in bunches. Sister Amelia would transform them in the still room into decoctions and tonics, powders and lotions, for the convent's apothecary and to take to the village healer.

"Good morrow, Patience." The warm baritone voice was behind her, and she twisted around, looking up at the priest who stood there. Father Martin was the abbot of the convent and he bent now, crouching beside as he looked over the harvested herbs in the basket.

"Sister Amelia tells me you have a gift with the herbs," he continued, lifting his gaze to hers. "She also says that you have been most diligent in your studies."

"Yes, Father," Patience said, a little uncertainly. The priest was a kind man. His eyes, a deep, periwinkle blue, were always considerate and thoughtful, sometimes merry with laughter, although she'd never heard him laugh out loud. He was a large man, and in the plain black cassock or robes, sometimes intimidating. As a novice, she spent most of her time in study or meditation and prayer and she was still a little nervous of the convent's rules and conventions, wondering if this life was truly for her.

"I am always pleased to see someone using their mind," the priest said, getting to his feet and holding out his hand to help her up. "Our minds are the only things that differentiate us from the beasts of the woodland and fields, and that give us our ability to commune with God, child."

Ducking her head, Patience picked up her basket, unsure of what to say to that. "I enjoy the study, Father," she ventured, with a swift upward glance at him.

"Do you think this life is for you?"

"I -" she hesitated, turning with him to walk along the path. "I love the peace here," she said. "I love the prayers and the chance to learn more."

He smiled down at her. "That is not quite an answer to my question."

She caught her lip between her teeth. He was right. It wasn't an answer. She didn't know the answer to that question yet.

"It takes time to be sure of a commitment like this, child," Father Martin said when she didn't respond. "Time and a feeling, inside of your heart. No one would insist you live here if that feeling and your commitment is not fully given."

He meant to be reassuring, she knew, but in some way it wasn't. Life outside of the convent was a marriage she didn't want and drudgery, tied to bearing child after child, to heartache and the loss of what she felt keenly was herself, to becoming her mother.

At the lych gate, Father Martin stopped and she looked up at him as he waited.

"There is real good and real evil in this world," he said quietly. "Each of us is obligated to choose what we do with our lives, to live them most closely to what we feel God has prepared us for. Do you understand?"

She shook her head.

"You will," he said, patting her shoulder gently. "It will become clear to you what path you will take."

"Yes, Father."

He turned away and walked down the path toward the main building, and Patience sighed with relief, taking the smaller, unpaved path toward the rear of the building. Choices were not always at the discretion of the chooser, she thought. It might be different for a man, who could choose to live his life in any way he thought fit. But it was not the same thing for a woman.

Here, she might not have the things she could barely admit to, those secret desires of her heart, but she would have tranquillity and a life not tied to a single man or place. Although, she considered, lifting the basket higher on her arm, perhaps she was mistaken about that. What was becoming a nun except to tie her to God and to His holy houses?

-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

In the warm, ruddy light of the fire and the candles that dripped their wax over the tables and shelves, Gage leaned back on the settle, shifting his position against the roughly plastered wall behind him and looking around the crowded, lively inn.

"Doesn't look so bad," he remarked to the man seated on the other side of the heavy, wooden table, picking up the ceramic jug of ale.

His companion, Webster, looked up from the sheaves of papers spread out over the table in front of him, glancing first at the relaxed sprawl of the tall, powerfully-built man with whom he'd worked for the past four years, then around the low-ceilinged, smoky room. It never failed to amaze him that Gage could fit into any environment, as comfortable and lazily dangerous as one of the big cats from the East, the indolent air the man cultivated masking reflexes as fast and as deadly as those same big cats, and skills and knowledge and intelligence he seemed to enjoy hiding behind a façade of simple soldier. The inn, he noted, watching one of the women who served the clientele lean close to a customer, her buxom assets spilling from her inadequate clothing, the man she served reaching out to pinch and fondle her brazenly, could easily be described as a den of iniquity and he could not bring himself to feel that same comfort in it.

"Our orders were clear," he said, shifting along the bench uneasily as another one of the inn's wenches brought a tray of steaming bowls and fragrantly freshly baked loaf and set it on their table, leaning close enough to him for her pale, gold hair to brush against his cheek.

"Your meal, sirs," she said, pink-cheeked with the warmth of the room.

Gage looked at the discomfort on Webster's face with amusement. The man, who topped his own height by another two or three inches, was somehow oblivious to the effect he had on the fair sex. Broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, a slightly lighter build but with a long, thick fall of chestnut hair, soulful hazel eyes and a dimpled chin, Webster's pious nature couldn't take advantage of those magnets, more often turning red and excusing himself when their work took them into such a place.

As the girl came around the end of the table to set his food in front of him, he reached out and pulled her onto his lap, wryly aware that a part of his enjoyment of her soft curves was the expression on his companion's face. He buried his face between her breasts, his hand sliding up her thigh under her skirts, and felt the particular jolt in his groin as she moaned, his fingers finding her moist heat and slipping into her.

"I'm working right now," she said breathlessly, wriggling and spreading her legs for him to push into her deeper.

He lifted his head, and looked into her face, round and pretty with big brown eyes that looked dazedly at him, nodding. "Maybe later?"

"Oh, yes," she giggled. "You've taken a room, then?"

"Oh, yes," he mimicked her, pulling his hand out as she wriggled off him and licking his fingers. She tasted of salt and sweetness and musk, and he was hard with the thought of tasting the rest of her.

He slapped her bottom lightly as she turned away, eliciting a small jump and another giggle and turned back to the table, pulling off a hunk of the loaf and dipping it into the thick stew.

"Is it essential that you bed every woman in every town we visit?" Webster asked, his nose wrinkling up.

"No," Gage told him, tucking his food into one cheek. "Not every one. I leave a few for you, but you seem to enjoy your self-inflicted torture."