Message-ID: <17498eli$9811230446@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Archived-At: From: perigryn.removethis@earthlink.net (Rosemerry) Subject: The House: Initiation - Part 1 - (F/everybody, orgy, sci fi) Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-Id: Those who are under legal age or likely to be offended, please don't read this. Copyrights remain with me. Archiving is okay, if no money is made, with no alterations including credit and statements. Feedback would be appreciated. ----------------------------------------- The House Initiation My feet stung as I ran through the streets. These weren't even cobbled, only rutted dirt, crusted in half-frozen filth and reeking. I grew up here, but I was class now. Except I didn't feel like class, grabbing my once-expensive skirts up around my knees with both hands and running as light and quick as I could manage without losing control of my breathing. Behind me, the dogs were barking that quick, excited, confident bay, the sound of hunting hounds on a strong trail. My trail. The shoes kept my feet from bleeding and making their job even easier, but the dogs were close enough that it didn't matter. Likewise, my brown hair, now smutched with mud and stringy, and my darkish coloring would have hidden me from view if my dress hadn't been a confection of light green silk. Supposedly it brought out the green in my eyes. I turned a corner, looking hopelessly for a moving carriage I could catch hold of, or a stream I could splash through to hide my scent in case I got a little more lead. I paused, aware of passing seconds bringing the fleet dogs nearer, trying to orient myself in the darkness. In this middle night, no oil lamps gleamed anywhere in the black streets; no coaches could be heard rattling along the lanes, not that a wheeled contrivance above the level of a wheelbarrow would be seen on this side of town. This is what comes of having a steady customer, I chided myself. Not that His Lordship Alan de Bastric was turning out to be so steady, though advanced age hadn't cut our association short, as I'd been expecting. My pursuers were his wife's gardeners, with his own dogs on the leash. If I'd kept to my previous short-term associations with draymen's windfalls and the rich sons of merchants, I might still be living on the wrong side of town, but I wouldn't be running through it in fear of my life. The pause for orientation cost me much. The baying of the dogs suddenly changed sharply as they were unleashed. The gardeners' voices, raised in rough encouragement and rougher humor, faded behind the eager clamor of the hounds. Fear leaped in me, sharper than anything I'd felt so far. I had only turned to face them when the first was leaping at me, and I was down under their teeth. My mind was still protesting that they couldn't really catch me, in the middle of the unbelievable noise. Pain savaged me from all sides. The dogs weren't mancatchers, but the de Bastric's personal hunting hounds, used to boar and deer. Their technique was to rush in all together, snap their jaws once and leap away, to return in twos and threes and tear at the wounded, still dangerous beast. For an instant they backed away, gauging my resistance. I was on my feet somehow, leaping up the nearest stair to a building, any building. This one towered at least three storeys overhead, much taller than most in this area, and its doorstep was a lofty four steps up from the muck of the road. This left the dogs room for only one or two at a time, running up the stairs. Between dogs I pounded on the door. My breathing was too harsh to cry out. Everything had narrowed to the simplicity of survival. When a dog humped itself up the steps I kicked it in the head and it rolled down again, yelping. They were gathering their courage for a larger rush, with the gardeners close behind. The door opened sweetly and silently inward, and I fell through it with a jarring crash. The dogs were locked outside. I lay there, not caring a whit for where I was, concerned only with the beautiful absence of danger. It was like waking up well for the first time after being ill for months. "What are you doing?" came in an urgent whisper-screech from my left. "Have you gone mad?" There was an accent I hadn't heard before, not from sailors nor from merchants. In similar distorted words, a calmer whisper responded, "Saving a life." Yes, I tried to say, and my enduring thanks, miladies--for these were female whispers. My voice wouldn't work. At that moment I became aware of a thousand pains, large and small, and my voice certainly worked well enough to give a strangled moan. "She's been hurt," the second voice said, and someone knelt over me. Fuzzily I saw her, a stunning beauty with that particular shade of honey-gold hair no one will ever get with henna, dressed very scantily in attire no self-respecting lady would wear even in her own front hallway. It was more expensive than what I was wearing. She was a lady of the profession, I knew. Not the clothes. It's something in the face. "Lil, you can't let anyone in, not now!" "You'd rather let her die in the street? Those were dogs out there." "It's worse than death in here," the first voice groused incomprehensibly. I wasn't worried about being thrown out onto the street. The first woman's voice had that flustered insincerity to its griping, and she didn't make a move to stop me as Lil raised me to a sitting position and tilted my head back gently to see where I was hurt. I was in a hallway, as I'd guessed unawares. The sconces were brass, the woodwork was beautiful, and I was bleeding all over a carpet that could have bought and sold me three times. The doors proved to be ornately carven on the inside, although I didn't remember them being that way outside. Speaking of outside, the barking had receded. "Did anyone knock?" I tried to say. From the worried, uncomprehending glances they gave me, I didn't say it very well. "Is it already too late?" the beautiful one asked from very far away. I thought I heard the answer, in the affirmative, but I was out. There was a lot less pain when I came to. I was alone, bandaged and patched in an alarming number of places, naked in the strangest room I'd ever seen in my life. There was no bed. I was on some sort of pad, perhaps composed of numerous blankets and sheets, all in rich colors of blue and purple in the sunlight slanting through the high window. The entire assortment raised me no more than two inches from the carpeted floor. Everything that wasn't swirled with two colors or even three was embroidered heavily. The pillows, some of which were as small as my spread hand, some of which longer than my body, were edged in silk cord and tasseled. Pieces of furniture I didn't understand were cozily grouped, and there was a construction of glass and tubing in the corner that I couldn't figure out at all. It gave off a faint sweet odor. Sitting up showed me just how badly I'd been torn. There was a sensation of heat in my shoulder that turned into a tiny blossom of red on the pure white bandage. I tucked my feet under myself, propping up on my arm, and waited for things to settle down from their spin. There was nothing familiar in the room except for the utilitarian chest at the foot of the bed, with a pair of spider- silk stockings, shocking scarlet, draped across it. The door, a heavy thing of stone set almost invisibly into the stone wall (stone? in this end of town?), opened without a sound. A small redheaded woman padded in, her mouth pursed with her private thoughts. She nearly dropped the tray she was holding when she saw me sitting up, and said something scolding. I gathered it was scolding from her tone of voice. I couldn't understand a word. She set down the tray, her green dressing gown jingling as if jewelry or bells were hidden underneath. Pointing to the tray, she said something sternly, but the smells of toast and spice and some sort of meat were rising from it, more tempting than her words and far more understandable. I didn't even watch her leave. When I'd eaten, I felt momentarily horribly sick. My head pounded. Then it cleared up, and after a moment spent leaning against the stone wall behind the bedroll, I felt so much better I actually climbed to my feet. I debated with myself about the tray, but politeness and a vague desire to have an excuse to leave the room made me bend down and get it. I almost got dizzy again, but the spell passed. The corridor was worse than the room I'd awakened in; there was light from sources I couldn't put names to, fabric hangings with scenes most curious, and everything was stone. The walls were dry, too. The redhead turned the corner ahead, talking animatedly with Lil, the gorgeous blonde who'd brought me in. They broke off, startled, when they saw me. Lil was wearing even less than she had before, her attire now restricted to a gauzy, flowing skirt thing in silver that revealed at least as much as it hid. Her feet were bare, as was everything not covered by the skirt; and I had to stare. I'm not really attracted to women, although a girl in my position can't be too fussy about what a man asks her to do. But she could have aroused a fish. "You're awake," she said in that accent I couldn't place. The redhead added something businesslike and took the tray from me, not giving me so much as a friendly nod before turning and scampering back down the passageway and around the corner. "Where am I?" I asked Lil. "You're not well enough to get up. Please, come back to the room with me. Lie down." She curled her arm around my shoulder, jiggling as she supported me solicitously, and got me back into the bedroom from which I'd come. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, but refused to lie down. Lil sat beside me companionably, apparently entirely comfortable in her nakedness. When I was able to raise my eyes to hers, I felt my original assessment confirmed. She was a working girl. I'd never met one so exotic, gorgeous or well-to-do, though. She must dangle kings at her... ah... fingertips. Certainly those earrings were a princely gift. I began to wonder if she could give me pointers, if I promised to take them far away so as not to be competition. "Now," she said. "First, let me assure you, you're safe." Her face was more sober than reassuring. Bad news was to follow. "You must have questions." "Concubines," I blurted, realizing it. My heart sank. "You're concubines, aren't you? Probably the King's own." There would be no hints, then. I'd be lucky to get out alive, though I didn't consider myself pretty enough to threaten this woman's position. But--I had a vivid memory of splashing through muck and mud, of the dark black streets of the ugly side of town. No harem would be kept there. She was laughing. "No, of course not. You've already guessed we're prostitutes, I see it on your face." I didn't understand the word she used, but it had to translate into the profession. She'd seen what I was, as fast as I saw what she was. I nodded. "My name's Vichelle. The Virgin, they used to call me. I looked young for a long time. Now I'm twenty. I tried to get a steady, but his wife set the dogs on me." Lil nodded. "I'm Liliane," she answered. "And this is our House." My eyebrows lifted. Again, my perception of my future changed. I wasn't sure if I liked this one either. A House of Pleasure recruited constantly, as girls got too old or were bought as slaves by Lords, or died of illness or wounds received in the dangers of the profession. Knowing I was talent, they might find it very hard indeed to let me go without, shall we say, persuasion to stay and give them a percentage. Independent girls at least picked their own men, although they often picked badly. I had. "Before you say anything," Liliane continued coolly, "wipe that look off your face. We're a good House. You don't have to stay, although we're responsible for you now and I for one would hate to see you go, for your own sake." I ducked my head to show I apologized. What I really wanted was to prevent her seeing the sting of fearful anger I felt at that last. Don't have to stay, indeed. For my own sake! "If you do decide to remain with us," she said, going even more cool and distant as she evidently read my mind, "you don't have to work at the profession you're, um, accustomed to. We could use another dishwasher, for example." I had to laugh at that, although the tension stayed with me. She couldn't have known my mother was a dishwasher. Her hands looked like an old woman of forty by the time she was my age. I remember. Honest work wasn't for me, I'd decided at a tender age. So far, up until the unfortunate de Bastric episode, that had been an excellent choice. "At any rate," Liliane said, thawing a bit when I laughed, "you will certainly stay until you're on your feet. Properly, I mean." "Thank you," I said, finally getting the right thing out. Maybe it wasn't the right thing. It was Liliane's turn to duck her head, her wide blue eyes failing to meet mine. "Don't thank me," she said grimly. "You'll probably hate me before I'm done." I had been right, I thought dismally as I watched her leave. I was in a House that would do its best to keep me. There seemed nothing I could do about it then. My body demanded sleep, having eaten and taken to the privy, which was the usual pot, although it had its very own room and involved a washbasin as well as some towels I hesitated to use, on account of their beauty. So it must have been almost sixteen hours before I awoke and climbed painfully to my feet to look out the window. It was high, its sill coming to my shoulders. The walls of the building were stone all the way through, the glass of the window set some eight inches away from the inner wall. Outside.... I stared for a long time. The only thing I could think of was that I'd been hurt more than I realized by the dogs. Days had passed, unawares. Days in which they loaded me aboard some caravan, shipped me overseas, brought me from my native chill, mist and trees to this wilderness, this incomprehensible ocean of sand. Even as I thought this, I knew it was impossible. "Vichelle?" I'd forgotten how silently the doors here opened. I whirled, setting the stone wall at my back, baring my teeth. It was Liliane, looking at me with frightened concern. My heart beating rapidly, I stared at her as if she were holding a knife. "Where am I? Where have you taken me?" "Vichelle," she said, advancing a step toward me. Suddenly the most urgent thing in my life was to get away from whatever she had to tell me. I ran past her, limping and staggering, thinking illogically to get as high as I could and look out. Perhaps the town, the world I had known would be visible from a distance and I'd know which way to go to get back. The corridor was empty except for a small creature with a feather duster. It was nothing I'd ever seen before, being both taller and slenderer than a human being. It looked at me with intelligent pupilless eyes as I leaned dizzily on the wall. I'd caught it in the act of dusting one of the framed pictures in the hall. I dashed past without a word or a falter, barely noting the leather collar it wore over its simple garment. I must have died. Or the Good People had taken me to their mysterious lands. Or I was caught in a fever dream that never ended. Weeping, my weariness like a cloak of stone dragging at my shoulders, I fled through the place I did not understand. Everywhere I startled people in the midst of lazy, off-time activities. Well, some of them were people. Chess players in the corner; scrubbing being done in the kitchen; two creatures I didn't look at closely doing something I didn't want to know about near the ceiling of a dark room. In every case, they studiously ignored my distressed, stammering, running figure. On the rare occasions when someone actually met my eyes, they turned away again with every evidence of having decided I didn't exist. Much more of this, and I would begin to believe it myself. A hallway led to the kitchens, and the many stone doors opening off it appeared to be bedrooms. They weren't the working bedrooms. There were seven separate ones for that, and well equipped they were, too. Down a spiral staircase to the ground floor, there was a tavern. At least, it would have been a tavern in the places I'd been to. Here, I didn't know what to call it. By then I was walking very slowly, knowing I had only to wait until Lil caught up with me. The bar was of some variegated stone, richly green and brown in color, supported by the plain gray stone that formed the walls and doors of this extraordinary place. There was wood, invariably reddish in hue and heavily carved. The abundance of pillows, rolls of cloth for sitting on, and silk hangings was astonishing. There were no chairs. The tables were all very low. I didn't see any patrons. Evidently the place wasn't open yet. There was a second set of kitchens behind the bar. Two men worked there, ferociously chopping and smashing and stirring and sprinkling spices on everything. They looked at me and looked away again, paying no attention to the tears on my face and the lines of pain drawn there. Past the tavern entrance was a grand receiving hall. I began to realize I wasn't in a stone house, I was in a castle, albeit a small one. The front doors, carven stone inlaid with brass, were tall enough that someone could have stood upon my shoulders, upright, and not bumped their head going out. I pushed experimentally at one. It swung open a few inches, silently and easily; it had been meticulously weighted. "Vichelle," Liliane called from nearby, the relief evident in her voice. "Are you all right? I was worried about you!" I turned to face her, glad only to see someone who acknowledged my existence. "I'll live," I said. I didn't add that I might not want to. Later, my bandages changed and my body weighted with painkilling tisane, two blankets and a weariness I'd never come close to before, she sat beside me and tried to explain. "This isn't an ordinary House," she said. I tried to say I gathered as much, but I was too tired. "You asked where we were. The truth is that we don't know ourselves. But one thing I can tell you." She took my hand, looking at me soberly to see how I'd take it. "You won't ever get back to your home. None of us will." I looked up at her, waiting to understand why she'd say such a thing. Her big eyes, the blue of summer skies, seemed utterly sincere. "Liliane, that doesn't make sense." "I know. But it's true." She obviously believed what she was saying. Of course, that meant I had fallen among madmen. But I remembered the thing I'd seen dusting the hallway in happy bondage, remembered the oceans of sand outside, and my mind silenced itself. Liliane went on. "Look... in the short time you've been with us, I've come to know you a little bit. I think you're smart, I know you have a generous nature, and you haven't let the life wear you down. It's my opinion you can handle this." "Handle what?" "It happened to all of us, Vichelle. It takes some time to adjust, but it can be done. Did you... did you have any family?" "No family, but what are you talking about?" I almost shouted. "What happened to all of you? What do you mean, I can't go back?" "There's no back to go to, anymore," Liliane said firmly. "It's gone. The House... as far as anyone's been able to determine, it just gets tired of a place and moves to a new one. It changes too. You'll see. The important thing is to realize your old home is gone forever, and you're now a permanent resident of our House." "You're mad," I said with conviction. "You looked out the window." Liliane said. I couldn't answer. While I reeled, struggling to fight off the effects of the painkiller and too many shocks, she went on. The House was a house of pleasure, just as I'd seen at once. It had been to many worlds, most recently mine, before coming to this one. Soon it would move on. "Look," she said, pointing to the window. "The window moldings. Yesterday they were iron. Today, rubber. It's a small change, but it's a first sign. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, we'll find ourselves in a different place. But in a way, it'll still be the House we know and love." She nodded at the chest at the foot of the bedroll. "Sometimes it's an armoire, sometimes a canvas sack, sometimes a chest of drawers, sometimes I don't know what. One time I couldn't even figure out how to open it. But it's always got the same jewelry in it--my jewelry." I didn't understand half the words she used. What was rubber, for instance? But a more important question was plaguing me. "Lil... tell me why you're the only person who will talk to me." "What makes you think that?" I told her about my nightmare plunge through the lower two floors of the building. "People saw me, and some of the... the... stranger things saw me too. They ignored me. It was like I wasn't there." I found myself shaking. There could be no good news in that universal disregard. "Well," she said, smiling too brightly, "most likely they didn't want to upset you. It's clear you still have a lot of healing to do. And now I want you to get some sleep." She rose gracefully, her golden hair falling around her generous breasts with a silken hissing. "We'll talk more in the morning." Perhaps we would, I thought as I turned over and sought the only refuge left to me. But why was it that for the first time I felt she had lied to me? It wasn't morning when I awoke, but deep in middle night. I borrowed Lil's brush and walked across the room, brushing my hair before the view. The window, now a single sheet of unmolded glass, far too big to make sense to my eyes, still showed the desert it had yesterday. The stars glared down, a million diamonds tossed haphazard onto a sheet of velvet, over the sand sea. Hunger snagged its claws in my stomach, and I turned to the door. From the hallway, faint voices were heard, coming from the stairwell. I hesitated, torn between the kitchen, downstairs, and the unknown upstairs rooms. The voices rose in impassioned argument, incomprehensible at this distance, and decided me. I crept up the stairs, going slowly and holding to the brass handrail in belated recognition of my wounded state. Finally, the thickly carpeted floor of a single enormous room that stretched from side to side of the building. Each corner had a rounded area with yet another spiral staircase, this one of iron, perhaps leading up into the rounded towers I'd seen at each corner of the mini-castle. The walls were hung with silk and fabrics, like the rest of the House, in slightly more muted plum and mint colors. Another of those odd glass and tube constructions stood on a small table in an alcove. Otherwise it was all pillows, bedrolls, little tables with pitchers on them, and small chests. In the center of the room a great round fireplace of stone bricks glowed with heat and light, casting heavy shadow around the rest of the place, including me. Around the light were the forms, human and grotesque, of some thirty beings. Their own shadows crawled across the walls, but it was their discourse I listened to, in secret, flattening myself down against the stairs. I rested my elbows on the floor and let the rest of me trail awkwardly and somewhat painfully down the risers. It was a staff meeting. "Listen please," the patient voice of a woman was saying over the hubbub of chattering. "Listen." She had an accent stranger and more jarring than Liliane's. Her presence, though smaller than some of the stranger beasts and people there, was commanding. She had the lifeworn face and iron gray hair of a woman twenty years older than I, yet her figure was lithe and she rose from her crosslegged seat on the carpet without a hint of stiffness. As the voices around her died down and every pair or triplet of eyes looked to her, she nodded amiably. "Good," she said. "Now. We're about to move again, so I want everyone to pay attention. Keep your partner in sight as much as you can. Partners, if you've got to go outside the House for any reason, tell your partner. Better still, don't go." All this had the air of a well-rehearsed reminder. But one of the two tall, gray, chitinous creatures, like humans that had been coated in boiled leather and obscenely stretched, raised its skeletal hand. "Yes, Rigo," she said, calling on it as if it were a schoolchild. "We're all used to hearing that," the tall thing said in yet another accent. It had no need to stand up to let everyone see its face. Its two lidless eyes blinked soberly, deepest black. "But it's more important than anything else we do here. Stay in the House! Remember my partner Elisa." "None of us could forget Elisa," said the elderly lady sorrowfully. "She is missed." There was a murmur of agreement in many languages around her feet. "She just went out to pick up her hat from the clothiers," Rigo said, half to himself. He wrapped his long arms around his knees with the air of one whose pain is still fresh. There was a long moment of silent sadness around the circle. The madam--it had to be the madam--broke the quiet. Respectfully she nodded to Rigo, then firmly moved on. "Nobody else will be left behind," she said. "It's my responsibility, but it's also all of yours. Watch your partners! And now, we move on to the next matter at hand." Liliane spoke up from the far side of the circle. "Her name is Vichelle," she said with a slight hint of annoyance. In my dark stairwell I started, suddenly very glad I'd come here instead of to the kitchen. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Rosemerry perigryn@earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~perigryn/ As I lay me down to sleep, this I pray That you will hold me dear, though I'm far away I whisper your name into the sky And I will wake up happy... ---- Sophie B. Hawkins -- +----------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `--------------+ | | | | Archive site +----------------------+--------------------+ Newsgroup FAQ | ----